cycling

cycling / Friday / IU / photo / podcast — Comments Off on Why have one when you can have two
10
Apr 20

Why have one when you can have two

Here we are on a nice, hard, slow, windy ride.

Or, for at least my part of it, it was slow. There was nothing to the route. It was one of our most standard courses. I just couldn’t build anything up today. Three days of legs and my legs, I told myself, were exhausted. And before I get too far into this story …

Dr. Joel Wong is the chair of the counseling and educational psychology department in IU’s School of Education. We had a delightful conversation on gratitude, and things to try to keep yourself in good spirits and keep the morale up on the home front.

It’s an interview I wish I could have recorded three weeks ago, but it’s one valuable in all seasons. So give it a listen. And head on over to your favorite podcast provider and subscribe to “On Topic with IU.” You can now find the show on Apple, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn and Anchor.

Back to the bike: it was kinda breezy. It wasn’t a headwind-in-every-direction day, but it was a headwind-from-several-nonsensical-directions sort of day. And, look! Here is today’s barn by bike:

We ride by there frequently. The sun is almost always in that same spot behind the building. I should ride by, on some far off day when it gets warm here, in the morning, just to see a little more detail on the east-facing side of the barn. It’s in a nice location. The gentle fields in front and back are always just grass. It never seems like much of a pasture. There are houses close by on both sides. I wonder what they use the outbuilding for.

We pedaled down to the lake, and there’s a turnaround down there, which meant I finally saw The Yankee again, since she was well ahead of me, because I was moving slow. She met me going the other direction and she met me much sooner than I’d hoped. I am sure it showed in my body language. She didn’t go all the way to the lake, she said, but turned short of it at another prominent spot. So I continued on, and I decided to make the trip the whole way down. This meant riding past a colleague’s house, and so I call out his name as I do every time I go by, just to amuse myself. And then there’s the last big left hand curve and you get to the turnaround.

I turned around, and in that same big curve away from it, my bike started wobbling. So I stopped in a safe spot — right in the turn — to check things out. Oh, my back tire is getting low. I carry a small hand pump for just such an occasion! Pump it up a bit, send a note that I’ll be noodling, even slower, on the way back in (on account of my tire) and set out once more.

And I made it about 250 yards or so. Bike wobbles again. Tire completely flat.

So there I am, in the cold and not-quite-dying light, standing in some nice people’s yard, hoping they don’t come out to ask too many questions of me as I change the tube. I had just one extra tube in my little bike bag. So, lever off the tire, pull out the old tube, pump it a bit to see if the tube has any chance of being nursed back to the house. It does not. On goes the new tube.

And now a word about tube sizes. I normally ride a 700 x 23-25 tube. Standard stuff. The 700 is a notation about the wheel’s diameter. The second number has to do with the width of the tube, in millimeters. My extra was a 700 by 18, for some reason. Now, that’s just five or six millimeters, you say. And, sure enough, you’re basically correct! But that’s also reducing the size by about a third! So this is going to be small, inside the wheel’s rim and the tire. Why did I even buy a tube that size? The other issue is that my hand pump doesn’t generate enough pressure to really fill it. So I’m going to be riding on a too-small tube for some reason, at a drastically reduced PSI. But it’ll get the job done, which is the point. I’ll go slow, not a problem today. First I just have to get out of these people’s yard with enough daylight to steer by.

There was plenty of light. I just happened to be standing beneath a tree line. And it was chilly. Here’s my “I can’t believe I’m still wearing jackets in mid-April” shadow self-portrait to prove it:

I’m not wearing those sleeves because it’s such a breathable piece of kit.

The next issue I’m considering while also appreciating the art and the majesty of vulcanized rubber on industrialized aluminum: topography. There’s one significant little hill to get down on my route back to the house, which is about 5.6 miles away from my tube change. It requires speed or braking, or both, because at the perfect bottom of the hill there is a 135-degree turn back to the right. It’s easily manageable when your bike is behaving up to par, and only a concern if there’s a lot of traffic. Traffic isn’t a problem lately, but this tire and tube thing means I won’t be riding at full ability just now.

So I must plan a different route. One with no hills because I, for a change, want to avoid any zippy little descents. Only there’s no such direct, and flat, route of which I am aware. So I went an indirect way, negotiated one little downhill (easily, as it turns out, with some help with the USPS guy who patiently held a few cars behind him without knowing the sort of favor he did for me) and added a few extra miles, which is fine. I need the miles anyway. Grateful for those. Miles are miles, but I’d prefer them under ideal circumstance and not, as I later learned, at 40 PSI on my back tire. I usually ride my tires at 110 PSI. So that’s why it wobbled constantly, I was floating on spongey, foamy rubber and not riding a rock hard ridge.

I know it was 40 PSI because I inflated the tube with a floor pump that has a gauge on it. I went back out to ride the neighborhood road to see if that solved the floaty, bumpy sensation I’d been feeling or if I’d inadvertently damaged the wheel. And that second tube promptly exploded. POP! A crisp firecracker going off a few feet from your ear.

So I’ll go buy more tubes tomorrow. That’s something I’ll be grateful for, too, Dr. Wong.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram. There are more On Topic with IU podcasts. There’s a website for it, too, and you can follow it on Twitter and Facebook. For my slightly more hobbyist shows, head on over to Podbean.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Hills and hills and hills and hills
8
Apr 20

Hills and hills and hills and hills

Today, she said, she was going to do hill repeats. I don’t have to do them, and I don’t get judged when I beg off of something, but she asked her coach to give her some hill repeats and it was a warm day and it was time for a ride.

A hill repeat is just that. You find a hill and ride up it over and over again. Or, in today’s case, you do it 10 times. Ten times up one hill. Except the hill she wanted to climb was flooded. I’ll wait for you here to figure out how that particular topography works.

So we went up another hill, which featured ascents of 10 to 13 degrees, which is not unsubstantial. We climbed up two minutes, turned around, descended, and climbed back up two minutes again. Happily, the place where I turned around was the same spot each time. So I didn’t get more tired on the seventh, eighth or ninth repetition. I was just slow on each of them.

We had 10 hills to climb, and I felt that I could climb that joker the ninth time, keep on going, finish the rest of the hill and call it 10. But that is not what we did.

We turned around, went by that barn and made our escape by climb up an even steeper hill. There was a section with a 15-degree ascent and the hardest parts continued burning my tired legs for about half a mile. After that it was just a regular little road, and we were finally going fast-ish. When the road joined another, which was our route home, we ran across a cyclist we know. Maarten is a national-caliber triathlete and we decided we would try to catch him. We cut into his lead, but we were going from a dead stop, joining his road and he was already underway and, this part is important, he’s a national-caliber triathlete.

Later in the evening we learned that our hill repeats and all those very steep inclines might have been ambitious. The Yankee’s coach says he had something else in mind, really. He knows the roads, of course, and can see the data. He was thinking more like that road where we tried to chase down Maarten. I just looked at the profile for that segment. It tops out at 5.7 percent which, after six miles uphill felt like a launch pad.

Oh well, next time then.

This evening’s storms brought a lot of rain and wind. At one point the power browned out, came back, browned out, came back and then it finally just gave up. My solar lights experiment got their first real trial!

I picked up a few of these at the hardware store for about five bucks a few months back. I keep them on a windowsill. The days are so long now that they store a fair amount of light, even like that. And, if the power goes out and we need light most of the day and some of the night is already over anyway. These should provide enough light to wrap something up, go upstairs, whatever.

Tonight, we used them to find our flashlights, or as I like to think of them, the metal cases holding our dead batteries. So we loaded up fresh batteries in all of the flashlights by the bright LEDs of the solar lamps.

And just as we finished that chore the power came back on. Soon after the storms moved on and our power stayed stable. Our trip on the Oregon Trail, then, was a short one tonight. But we were fortunate. Some people have been out for a good long while now.

Because they needed a new kind of challenge, I guess. My challenge this evening was simply getting up the stairs. Those hills …

cycling / Instagram / Monday / photo / running — Comments Off on Look at my pretty pictures
6
Apr 20

Look at my pretty pictures

How was your weekend? You just had one. Did you notice that? I notice my weekend by three things. Friday as afternoon turns into the evening I have a little ceremony and close my email. Then, that same night, I have an even better ceremony which culminates me in turning off the alarm so it doesn’t go off on Saturday morning. That’s how I know the weekend is here. For lunch on Saturday we go get Chic-fil-A. These days it is strictly a drive thru affair. Three weekends ago we sat in the restaurant, and it was almost empty and odd. The change was coming, and we all knew we were in the midst of it, even if we weren’t quite yet sure what that might be.

Now the young people are standing in the drive thru wearing gloves and hanging out near hand sanitizer and it is certainly different. But at least they are still able to work, and at least we are able to get a sandwich, and at least it is one indicator of the weekend.

So how was yours?

Let’s check in on the cats. Phoebe found herself a new spot on which to sit:

And since we’ve had a bit of sun lately we’re opening more curtains and she’s finding more spots.

Poseidon … I must give him this. When he knocks things over, he owns it.

I wasn’t even in the room when he decided the cup that was on the kitchen island should be on the kitchen floor. I thought The Yankee had come downstairs and had dropped something, so I wasn’t in a big hurry to go check out the sound. When I got into the kitchen a few moments later, he was patiently waiting to be found out.

More flowering trees I saw on my Saturday run:

It was five miles, but the run itself was nothing special. I slowed down, I told myself, to enjoy the sunshine and the warm day. And the budding trees:

And there was a fast ride this evening, which was of the Monday variety, I think.

I even threw in a nice long sprint just at the end, to finally pass her. (She didn’t know we were racing, which has a lot to do with why I won the spring.

More on Twitter and check me out on Instagram as well.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off on Ride and ride faster
3
Apr 20

Ride and ride faster

After work today — and I did work today, there were meetings and emails and planning and executing some things, even if it was not at a pace one is accustomed to — it was time for a …

… time trial? We found a route just outside of town, parked at the local winery, which is closed and empty, and did four loops on a flat course where all the roads looked like this, for the entirety of the 27 miles. We were riding on frontage roads on either side of the highway, but I think I was passed by four cars. For the sake of comparison, one other cyclist passed me.

But it all looked like this, empty and quiet, which is why I was taking one-handed photos at about 25 miles per hour.

Which is where I was riding in that particular area of the course. It was the fastest mile on the course for me and, having noticed that the first three times through, I knew that’s where I was taking my picture, just so I could actually suggest I was fast, on this one part of the full course.

It’s a good course. I suspect we’ll be back a few times this year, just to chart our progress.

The gardens at the winery are quite lovely. And since no one was there, and we were outside and it was a joy to do it, we took about 10 minutes of indulgent photographs before loading the bikes back on the car.

I like to imagine these are ruins, and not just lawn decorations:

So … big weekend plans?

adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Still a few leftover pictures
31
Mar 20

Still a few leftover pictures

We’re going back to our roots!

When I took that photo I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of roots. But, somehow, it seems like less now. Maybe that’s a compression of the whole scene into a computer monitor rather than the several square feet of ground the tree’s lateral branches. Maybe I was just impressed by being outside.

This was a sad sight.

In the background you can see a field where, in happier times, soccer and football and whatever else is played by the little kids. It’s a nice park floating just above the nearby middle school, surrounded by a quiet walking path. But there can be no swinging, and no monkeying around on the monkey bars. The climbing parts have been fenced in. There were still a few kids playing in that field, however.

This was from our bike ride yesterday, which was a nice and easy ride.

I don’t know why some days are nice and easy, and others feel like the most inept demonstration of human ability possible. But in that little ride, I established four new PRs on various segments and felt about as strong as seems likely, so it was the former.

You would think the sport, at the professional levels at least, would have caught up to science on this, but no. We are left to acknowledge that, sometimes, we have good legs. And then, other times, we resign ourselves to realizing we don’t have good legs, we merely have meatsicles that just hang there and feet that pedal squares. Sometimes it is a demonstration of physical grace and power and ease. Other times that fish that doesn’t need a bicycle could do it better than you. And that’s always the day when you see people you know out on a ride of their own.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →