Strava Sprinter Van Saves the Day

Thanks to Ride Studio Cafe and Strava for an awesome ride today!  I didn't get word about the inaugural run of the Strava van until yesterday but a century out of Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington up to Wachusett and back sounded like a capital idea.  I knew most of the route, but had never strung the bits and pieces together  for a single ride.  The plan was to turn around at the top of Wachusett, but it only occurred to me this morning that the Access Road would still be snowed in.  Or that the many, many miles that I put in this week should be considered before embarking on a hundred mile odyssey involving well over a mile of climbing.

 True to form, fools rush in where angels dare tread.  If I hadn't downed a Coke and grabbed CLIF Bloks and a bar from the Strava Van at 40 miles, I would have passed out somewhere around where JM's tire failed.  For the record, first Coke in years.

Bottom line:  I over committed on the climbs and paid on the way back.  We had about 20 in the group with two distinct camps on long rides, but I couldn't have enjoyed it more - unless I had eaten more and ridden faster.  My guess is that's a wide spread issue.

Look out for the Strava Sprinter Van.  Bright orange, full of swag and totally on your wavelength. How often do a carload of Californians click with a bunch of New Englander?

A Little Reach and A Lot of Tire Pressure

Since winter reasserted itself, I've been sticking with the cyclocross bike on roads.  The woods have been too crusty with snow or too muddy with melt to be good riding.  Without hope of hitting the trails, I let the knobby Mud2 tires wear down smooth at the center.  At 40psi they provide a comfy cushion for wrecked roads and plenty of traction on grit trails.  Quite honestly, I was totally digging the ride.  A great aluminum frame and 32mm tires seemed like THE combo.  I couldn't get excited about the high torque/low cadence intervals that make up my usual prep for racing.  But each day I'd look forward to getting outside and pushing the fatties around Boston.

Today I got the road bike out for the first time in months.  A little extra reach in the cockpit and a lot of extra pressure in the tires seemed to have an out-sized impact.  There's the speed, but that's not so obvious in the moment.  The feel of cornering is crazy different.  Given a little thought, the frame geometry, tires and technique are not at all alike.  I'm just surprised how something could look so similar and feel so different.  And how about this:  in past years, the switch was all about getting off rolley tires and bad brakes.  None of that this year.  This year I get to revel in two completely different and completely exciting styles of cornering.    If I have the energy later in the week, I'll see if I can nail down the hows and whys.

For now, I'm just really happy with the long and fast return of the road bike.

The End is Nigh

Wells Avenue has been postponed three times, Punxsutawney Phil has been indicted and I have yet to do a structured workout.  The sugaring buckets have come and gone, but I saw real signs of spring on today's ride.  The first daffodils tips poking up were in Weston but didn't think to snap a photo.  The next spouts were in Lincoln:

But the crocuses turned up in Needham.  Bottom line:  if I'm laying down the bike to snap photos of sprouts, spring is overdue.

Tuesday's Ride

Cobblestone Man:  it's not clear from the picture, but a strategically placed stone indicates that this is indeed male.  He turned up after the abandoned rail spur and the longest gas line run ever.  I'd ridden by the rail spur for years and never noticed it.  The gas line took about eight minutes, but it must be the jewel of some third party gas line maintenance company - two miles of straightaway root and rock free dirt.  Get in a groove and it's like a greased rail.

Since my competitive racing season came to a violent and costly end at Gloucester, I've been regrouping around quality rides.  Tuesday's ride was a spin down I-have-no memory lane:  Cold War ruins.  It's hard to believe that Boston was ringed with missiles sites - crazy looking weapons on launchers out in the open air:

Even stranger, I recognized a site in the Blue Hills Reservation from the Google maps satellite photo. Dirt berms surrounded the fueling area necessitating a distinctive concrete pathway for moving the missiles.  This particular facility is more intact than the site in Needham, which I live near.   The launch area feels like an abandoned parking lot.  The missile maintenance building is still standing.  The start of the concrete pathway leads right in the foreground of the photo below.

Finding a destination and then figuring out how much off-road I can squeeze into the loop is the goal.  Some spots don't turn out to be accessible; sometimes I get lost or distracted by other interesting features. This ride worked out pretty well.  See the whole thing  on Strava.

Overgrown Silo?  Nikes didn't launch from silos, this probably held rocket fuel.

Way point number two was Horse Bridge.  I'm sure there's more of a story than a $4.6 million dollar bridge primarily for horses to cross Route 24.   Strange enough to find a brief section of paved roadway and a spanking new bridge that connects to dirt trails on either side.  Unfortunately, I had to break the law to ride it.

Very honestly, I rarely ride where there's posted exclusions.  This felt like civil disobedience.  It's not clear to me why horses and bikes can't coexist.  I suspect that spots that exclude bikes in favor of horses are a byproduct of organized constituents.  In any case, the absent horses create excellent mud - the sort of stuff that turns up on race courses but no where else.  It was too straight to be really fun, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Way point number one was an abandoned rail spur.  It seems to have connected the New York, New Haven and Hartford RR to the Boston & Providence RR but is now mostly paved and completely abandoned.  I found it on Google Maps (like the Nike site).  Despite running from downtown Dedham to the high school/middle school, the initial section was too over grown to ride.  No photos, but I picked it up after the school and rode it until the Hyde Park switching yard.

Hyde Park to the gas line was passes an interesting Civil War encampment (not part of this ride).  I picked up the trail just over the Neponset.  A nearly perfectly straight shot to 95 and the semi-completed unused side of the highway interchange.  Apparently, the permanently temporary exchange between 95 and 128/93 is an artifact of Governor Sargent's decision to cancel 95's route into Boston.   Cobblestone Man can be found on the abandoned northbound on ramp.

I rode an excluded section of the Skyline Trail to avoid Royall Street. I can't imagine why bikes are not allowed on this section of trail. Bikes are probably not allowed on the Houghton Pond beaches either, but I rode there too.  The sand was too packed to be really fun, but I enjoyed it just the same.

So there was mud, sand and dirt.  The rocks kicked in between Horse Bridge and the State Police Barracks.  I pride myself on being able to thread rocky trails on fragile 32mm tires with no suspension.  This was out of hand - my hips were rocking more than Elvis and I bottomed out constantly.  At the Police Barracks/TTOR headquarters, I found a Blue Hills Reservation map and a bonus off road section.  I could cross the reservation by following yellow arrows on a trail that would challenge an "advanced mountain biker".  It was awesome and dumped me out by the Blue Hills Access Road.

I couldn't resist riding the Access Road.  A very rocky lap around the weather station and a ride down Sonya set me up for a straight shot home.

Sixty Four Minutes, Twenty Eight Seconds

In reality, I have absolutely nothing to complain about...  but reality is a just a bump in the road this week.  Which brings me to today's ride.  How is it that the only sixty four minutes and twenty eight seconds of rain and dropped temperatures today are the exact same sixty four minutes and twenty eight seconds that I chose to ride.  I had a new route, several hours of podcasts and a clean drive train.  Now I have numb fingertips, wet shoes to pack for tonight's drive and I'm spooked from riding behind an elderly driver who should not have been behind the wheel.

TD Bank Mayor's Cup

Late season crits are a tall order.  I think the mental rigors are more draining than the physical expenditure.  The physical demands are not remarkably different from cyclocross.  Most of yesterday's race felt to me like a cyclocross start strung out over twenty miles:  constant jostling for position at thirty miles per hour.

But what a scene!  Racing around Government Center with crowds, cowbells and Frankie Andreu announcing was very exciting.  Early on, I nearly overcooked the turn onto Congress while pushing the pace off the front - that bordered on too exciting.  There were a couple of iron grates on that turn that I couldn't shake out of my head and I thought I was going into the metal barriers for sure.  Later, it looked like I had gotten away with two other riders.  I was the only one with team mates in the mix, so it was a long shot and got shut down pretty quickly.  With one lap to go, I got pushed into the barriers and had to brake going into the hill on Court Street.  Between being a little spooked by the pack and all the lost momentum, I was looking to finish upright from there on in.

I haven't seen the final results yet, but I definitely made the fun podium.  The place podium, not so much.

Ready to Ride

It will be tough, but I'm going to wait for the grass to dry out before hopping on this Truckload of Awesome.  

When I demo'd the wheels, the first thing I noticed was the handling - I expected great spin, but sharp cornering carried the day.  This week I glued up three wheels at once, the third being an old and beloved Mavic GP.  The weight difference between the Mavic and the Enves is shocking.  Or it's shocking that I was so blinded by the Enve's handling that I hadn't really thought about the weight dividend.