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.

The Baddest Assed Thing I've Ever Owned

I just finished up mounting a set of Vittoria XGs on the Enve wheelset.  The sight of big, knobby tires on a carbon aero rim deserves a Keatsesque ode; a Brownsian sonnet.  Pick them up and feel the shocking absence of mass and rise to epic.

The question is whether I line up at Green Mountain as Achilles or Patroclus.  Or perhaps I just need a better ventilated workshop.  Is grandiosity a symptom of huffing too much mastic?

I'll post a photo when I'm confident that the glue job will hold through the weekend.

Things I Saw

Yesterday's ride was the Urban Dirt Loop:  Emerald Necklace into Boston and then follow the Charles River back home.  At times the dirt is a narrow grove along the pavement and at others the dirt is disappears completely.  Mostly there's cinder, gravel or dirt paths.  And I can make a short detour to the shop from Watertown, which I did yesterday.

I saw a lot of stuff.  The most interesting was this flat ball python along Quinobequin Road in Newton.  Escaped?  Released?  On it's way to the Charles?  There was an alligator in a canal in Lowell yesterday.  Apparently there was a lion outside London.  No one managed to photograph the lion.  Here's the alligator:

I like my shot of the python better, but the alligator is alive.  And it was found by someone walking, not biking.

Start of CX

Two days, four races, one win, one place;  not a bad start to the cyclocross season.  I applied the new knowledge that a less-than-spectacular start is not a deal breaker (thank you Christian Heule).  I learned that KT Tape makes a huge difference with "cross back".  I got to race my very experienced team mate's bike (after a flat and a loooong run to the pit) and learned both how little I trust my glue jobs and how much I over inflate my tires.  And, of course, I had a boatload of fun.

Saturday was Monson:  a relatively hilly course that skewed toward power and away from technical.  That's were I got the win and flatted in the second race.  Sunday was Blunt Park:  pancake flat with enough tape mazes that I didn't get it all down pat until the end of the second race.  The legs above are from Blunt Park - which must have been a flood plain long ago:  lots of loose, black loam.

Way back in March, I was worried that road racing would not be as much fun as cyclocross.  Going into this weekend, I was worried that cross wouldn't be as much fun when the expectations are higher.  I guess I worry too much.

So here's to back to school, the onset of fall and the return of cyclocross.  Bon Appetite!

Randy Rocks

The NYT's Ethicist column hasn't been the same since Randy Cohen left.  I didn't read his op-ed piece when it was published last week despite the headline:  "If Kant Were a New York Cyclist".  I was busy rushing off to Wells Ave and then to Cranes Beach, but would have made time if I caught the byline.

Anyway, who knew Ethical Mr. Cohen was a cyclist?  And more importantly, who knew he rides exactly like me?  I mean exactly.  I would cop to riding exactly like him, except that I suspect I do it more and have been doing it longer - as if that counts for something.

Furthermore, I don't know if I'm passing this along to justify my law-breaking ways or to fan the flames of cycling revolution.  No matter - just check it out.

Tireless...

The new wheels before I gummed them all up.  It's amazing how carefully adding a half tube of rubber cement, just the way it's meant to be done; an interim step in the life of every tubular rim, can be so aesthetically alarming.

Of course, that's nothing compared to seating the glued up tire on the glued up rim:  a physical conundrum as opposed an intellectual issue.  It seems to me that anyone who rides enough to benefit from tubular wheels can't possibly have the upper body strength required to seat a new [freshly stretched] tire.  I had to enlist my sixteen year old son to help get it in place and we still struggled.  On the up side, I'm a lot less worried about rolling it in a race.

Vacation

Vacation.  It takes a good week to get everything in place to go away and then it takes another good week to recover and do all the things that got pre-empted by the preparations.  And then the kid's activities start...

I am very thankful to have gotten daily rides in throughout.  Much like my lawn, the unusual bits of life that flash by a speeding bicycle do not take a vacation.  Here are some from the last month:

• the well dressed young man keeping watch over a wallet placed in a Roxbury crosswalk on a bright Sunday morning.
• the extreme flatness of New Jersey's Pine Barrens
• the expression on a rotund Costco sample wrangler as I clicked past in full kit and an armful of bananas.
• paper flat snakes and chipmunks and nearly flat turtles in the roadway.
• the dump truck driver who slowed and waved me across Main Street in Acton after I had sat and watched an endless stream of traffic pass.
• the return of giant black beetles and wooly catapillars that have to cross the road.
• the fully loaded lumber truck that I drafted from Eastham to Wellfleet on Cape Cod.
• tiny frogs that would fit on your thumbnail.

Rubber Gone

Tuesday Night Worlds is the sort of unbridled ride that no legally accountable organization wants to own.  The riding occasionally strays into reckless, rude or illegal territory.  Incidental poor judgement is not what defines the ride.  Enthusiasm and race-like intensity makes it popular; the other stuff is just good shorthand for the vibe.

So about that tire...  the group had just come back together after chasing down a hilltop flyer.  The road was typical New England:  pockets of development, stone walls, ponds and a little narrow.  It followed the land's contours so that there is rarely a straight and nary a hard turn.  The curve ahead was shallow enough to negotiate without a thought.  But the trees had filled in and there was enough arc to hide oncoming traffic.  Or a big delivery truck attempting a three point turn, which is exactly what lay in wait.

I was repeating a question to a buddy and so was a couple of milliseconds late to react.  The delay led to an overlapped wheel.  The overlapped wheel led to some crazy body english and a locked up brake.  Observant readers will note the rubber missing from the photo above is not exactly centered on the tire.  It indicates the extent to which I slid sideways.  I didn't notice at the time because I was furiously trying to keep  my front wheel from leaning hard against the rear wheel it had overlapped.  My front tire was touching the left side of rear tire and I threw my weight left while skidding my rear wheel right to remain upright.  I fully expected to be rammed from behind, but the cycling gods were smiling upon us.  Everyone stayed upright.  The GPS says we barely slowed down.

Brief bout with terror aside, the ride was a complete blast.  The adrenaline rush came from burning the proverbial matches without a thought to what's left in the pack. This time of year, there are lots of matches and boy do they burn bright.  The recklessness is an unfortunate side effect.

Rubber Porn

There is something absolutely wonderful about new tires.  It makes me wish I were a better photographer because the magic is there but I can't capture it.  No luck with my phone and a real camera only improved the focus.  I want to see the soft depth of the rubber contrasted against the gun metal of the rim.

It's not just the contrast.  New tires hug the rim; tubulars doubly so.  Even just stretching on an old rim, tubulars have a lower profile.  That first photo was too tight.  The context of a worn out OpenPro rim and a Campy hub with about fifty thousand miles is completely lost.   Here's the the wider view:

Of course, it looks just like an ordinary old bicycle wheel.  It's not.  Photography is clearly not my medium.  Even I can't find the spark that I see as I hold the wheel here in my hands.

New rubber has such perfection:  no nicks, no wear.  I stopped myself from posting a photo a while back after inflating a new Conti Force.  The tubulars were just too much.  The other tire is stretching on a old Bontrager rim.  The tire has it going on but the rim is missing the eclat of the OpenPro/Campy combo.

For the record, I don't have a secret cache of tire photos.  I know a dog that is crazy for latex.  She'll eat gloves, bandaids, anything made of latex.  There's no creepy fetish or compulsion here.  My day involves a regular parade of handy work.  It is rare that I stop and admire a finished project, especially one where 99.9% of the craftsmanship happened somewhere else.  But I always stop to bask in the warmth good, newly mounted tires.

The Jury's Out

I was scheduled for Jury Duty today in Quincy.  But my better half is traveling for work this week and my smaller thirds are not.  My commitment to civic duty engaged in mortal combat with my distaste for being the person who has to explain to the judge why they can't be seated on a jury.  It lasted about six hours before I deferred until CX season.

Instead of spending the day in a warm, dry jury pool, I layered up, embrocated down and headed out the door.  And brought along a bug courtesy of a generous team mate.  I'm not sure about the choice of light rain, moderate winds and steady temps around fifty over bureaucratic comfort and the slightest chance of empanelment.  Nor am I sure about the wisdom of digitally recording my workouts and posting them online.  One might say that the jury is out.

Guardian satellites watching over me yielded some excellent data and some less than excellent data.  The little heart shaped loop on the far right represents a loop around the neighborhood trying to decide how bad the weather was.  The red line from 95 to Framingham is the hour I spent warming up along 135.  Most of 135 has enough paved shoulder to feel safe in the rain.  The loop next to Sherborn is the workout:  one test lap and three hard runs up Glen Street and easy back down Farm Street.  The rest of the red line is my warmdown.  It involved some very cold and uncooperative fingers.

On the upside, the HR data was much better than I normally get.  The GPS missed the start of one of my efforts, so I had to back out the HR, speed and splits.  My altimeter registered fifty percent more climbing than the GPS.  I thought atmospheric changes might have artificially boosted my climbing until I looked at the GPS elevation profile.  The four identical, concurrent laps I rode showed up as a vague rise and three hills, each one smaller than the one before.  I guess climbing data is a downside.

The big question is what to make of my warmup being the sixth fastest recorded segment along 135 but my all out effort coming in 44th on Glen Street.  I'm pretty clear on the reasons behind the rankings, but I'm a lot murkier on the wisdom.  I'll sleep on that for now.

The Fix

For as long as I've been riding and driving, it's bothered me to drive to the shop when I have a spoke, hub or rim issue.  Not that I dislike driving; I just like riding a lot more.  I may have carried a wheel once by hand, but other than that it's been next to me in the passenger seat.

After breaking a spoke at the end of yesterday's workout, I dutifully wrote down all the information on my rim and rode over to the shop.  There was a box of miscellaneous black Ksyrium spokes, a box of miscellaneous silver Ksyrium spokes and a bag of unmarked spokes that looked like Ksyrium spokes.  None were marked with anything that might match the info on my wheel.  Tomorrow morning's sprint workout was looking mighty unlikely.

So I rode home to take another look at the third wheel on a bike problem.  I thought my frame might be big enough that a wheel could be zip-tied in the main triangle.  A 60cm frame should be able to accommodate a 70cm wheel.  Right?  Wrong.  The extra 10cm is more like 15cm with tires and there's just no way to make it fit.

So I rested the wheel on my handlebars to think a bit and voila!  A heavy duty zip tie by the stem held it tight and the hoods supported the weight.  Once I got over the urge to chase down Klingons, it worked beautifully.  I did pass a guy riding a bike with a canoe paddle.  He couldn't take his eyes off the wheel.  I think I completely ruined his ride.

The Blast from the Past

My years of home engineering have taught me a couple things about doing the laundry.  Some are of marginal importance:  the inside of dryers are mostly metal; the inside of washers are mostly plastic.  Some are critical:  laundry done right is completely invisible; mess something up and everyone complains.  Most importantly, laundry is best undertaken with the lowest expectations.

My daughter did a ten mile charity ride this weekend with her buddies.  I got up early and made sure the tires were inflated, brakes adjusted and chains lubed.  Finding myself with a couple of extra minutes and nothing left to do, I dug up the smallest jersey I own, an assortment of GU packets and carefully laid them out by her seat.

The morning's plan was aggressive:  since the ride HQ was on the way from our house to Wells Ave and it takes me seven minutes to get to Wells if I backpedal, I should be able to escort Sonja to her ride, go sign up for the A race at Wells, return to the charity ride and pedal along until my embarrassed thirteen year old starts to ignore me, and then scoot back to Wells for a forty lap crit.  I had about an hour between leaving the house and roll off.  Much to my surprise, Sonja threw on the jersey and stuffed the pockets with GU.

At this point, you might expect a heart warming tale of the abandoned race and the new found father-daughter bond.  Or the madcap adventure chock full of misunderstandings, close calls and moments of triumph.  I hope this won't disappoint:  the morning unfolded just as I had planned.  I was home for lunch with dead legs and a pocket full of primes.  Sonja arrived just before me with dead legs and a pocket full of empty GU wrappers.  I don't know who was happier.

But while doing the laundry this afternoon, I held up the jersey and had a flashback.  It's a XXL Mercatone Uno that I bought as a gift for my father.  It must have been right after Pantani's 1998 TdF win.  At the time, I didn't own a bike and didn't know Il Pirata from Il Pinata; I probably hadn't been inside a bike shop in fifteen years.  The XXL tag is either a mistake or an insider's joke. In any case, I tried the jersey on to see if it would fit him.  I don't remember how I found International Bicycle Center or what other gifts I thought my dad might like.  What I remember is pulling on the jersey and looking in the mirror and wishing I could race bicycles.

The Mercatone Uno was my dad's first real cycling jersey.  He had ran and rode for as long as I can remember, but didn't wear anything more technical than a pair of knit gloves.  Eventually, he developed a preference for club cut jerseys and gave the Mercatone Uno back to me.  By that time, I was sporting team kit.  The Mercatone Uno got worn on roller days in the basement and lately had worked its way to the bottom of the drawer.

Pantani's gone.  My dad's still in the saddle, but doesn't do the Wednesday night shop ride anymore.  He keeps the miles short and sweet.  Back in 1998, I could only imagine riding a bicycle again and the things I might stuff in those three pockets.  Three generations filling the exact same pockets was completely beyond me - nearly as unlikely as something interesting turning up in the laundry.

What I'd like to be writing...

This turned up in the NYT opinion page today:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/fear-and-cycling/?ref=opinion (along with the Marcus Nyblom graphic).  I'm relieved that panic attacks rarely keep me up at night; between two and three in the morning, I'm usually planning the day's menu and how to arrange housework around my ride.  But the wee hours sharing is just a setup.  Mr. Kreider's observations on riding are  the point.  He does a nice job with the mental absorption that makes cycling so engaging.

I'd like to make the satisfying experience of cycling as accessible.  I suspect that we are generally more willing to relate to fear than ambition.  And while fear drives some of the clarity in my riding experiences, ambition gets the lion's share.  I tend to back off from fear.  Perhaps I'm lucky to be a suburban rider or maybe I haven't given fear enough honest consideration.  I would ride in Boston more often, but it's not very good training.  I'll have to settle for more thinking and more writing.

Climb to the Clouds

If the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, then the threat of Wachusett is the minuscule cassette.  It was just damp on Mile Hill Road, but the newly paved exit road was super foggy.  It was super smooth, too.  The Fitchburg time trial is going to be a barn burner.

Tour of the Battenkill - The Click

It would be near impossible to arrive in Cambridge, NY for a first Tour of the Battenkill without a boatload of expectations.  Its reputation so pervades New England competitive cycling that I had a pretty complete picture of the race without actually having spoken to anyone about it directly.  Once registered, I did some research, sought some sage advice and got some random warnings.  So I was surprised to be completely unprepared for what makes this race so exceptionally good.

The course is great:  unusual, challenging and genuinely picturesque.  The reputation is clearly well deserved.  But the course and the reputation are only go so far in making a beautiful race.  In fact, the course and reputation may just be the means for getting the magic to arrive in Cambridge.  The magic is the field.  The Masters 40+ field was stacked with an X factor that doesn’t show up on rankings or resumes.  It had an unusual concentration of aficionados. And once critical mass of aficionados is attained, the race just sings.

 

Spotting the true aficionados in a group of otherwise hardcore cyclists is not a simple task.  It’s a lot like pornography:  strict definitions fail, but you know it when you see it.  Sudden change in line?  The rider back manages a tight evasive shift combined with a lean that just oozes control - and no complaints.  Sketchy turn from pavement to dirt?  He nails it like the wide turns in an office park crit.  Even sketchier patch of gravel in the dirt?  The aficionado doesn’t miss a beat, pedals through and holds his line; maybe even accelerates.  But it’s not just bike handling.  It’s stunning power and respect, both for the course, the other racers and themselves.  All of which creates a fine balance of camaraderie and competition.   From where I was riding, the wattage approached Nationals quality and the vibe was like the local hammer fest. 

Over a decade of racing, I’ve accumulated a handful of moments that define what I want out of cycling.  I would have imagined these moments to be personal events:  hands held high on a podium or at a finish.  A few are.  But it’s not the winning moment that is memorable.  It’s the flow experience when everything came together.  When a win was involved, it was gravy; a positive externality.  More often, the moment comes when a group clicks.  I can’t describe the click further without resorting to zennish clichés. I can say that it evaporates as the finish line approaches, but its glow has some hangtime. More importantly, I can say that Battenkill had click to spare.

Tour of the Battenkill - The Process

It’s amazing that The Tour of the Battenkill has developed such a storied reputation in just eight years.  There are other road races that mix pavement and dirt or include a covered bridge or are just as long and hilly, but they just don’t have the reputation of Battenkill.  Battenkill:  it has kill in the name.

So when a team mate made it easy for me to race Battenkill for the first time this year, I knew there would be some unusual preparations.  First question was what bike:  road or cyclocross.  Then which wheels, what tires, what size tires…  Is a dirt road really dirt or is it gravel or sand?  Even the usual questions presented problems.  Google Street View doesn’t cover most of the course; 62 miles of elevation profile completely misses some climbs; and I was signed up for the 30+ race and waitlisted for the 40+ race, resulting in 300 racers to research.  And yes, I usually show up for races with a detailed spreadsheet printout.

As it happens, I got an easy introduction.  My team mate guided me to an excellent equipment setup.  He also noted the crucial sections of the course with psychic accuracy.  The weather was perfect:  sunny, 60s and really dry.  I even got into the 40+ race.  The overall effect was manageable dirt and mellow climbs.  Which is not to say that a little rain wouldn’t make the whole thing a wicked mess; it would.

Here’s what I rode:  the normal team road bike (Specialized Tarmac Pro SL), my usual wheels (Mavic Ksyriums SL) and Continental Gatorskin tires, 23mm in the front and 25mm in the back, pumped up to 100psi.  I brought along an extra water bottle full of Gatorade spiked with protein powder and left the extra tube and inflator in the car.   I should have left the second bottle in the car, too.

Here’s how I rode:  the plan was to be at the front but out of the wind for as much of the race as possible; the idea being that I could respond to any serious attacks and avoid the accordion effect inevitable with the dirt and climbs.  I adhered to said plan except for the short climb on Juniper Swamp Road, wherein I put myself in to what little wind one finds while climbing.  The exercise confirmed that no attack was likely to get away until very late in the game.  At the second feed zone, I forced a selection and brought along four other riders.  Three of my breakaway companions turned out to be outlandishly strong.  The fourth was simply a fair match.  I was very happy with fifth place.  Tactically, a couple of better decisions might have improved my finish. But then again, I was in excellent company nearly a minute ahead of the field.

Catching back on...

Ok, I'm starting to recover from the Easter, Passover, Battenkill, School Vacation week juggernaut.  Too many good things is still too many things.

The Thousand Word Picture

My Orbea Orca.  Felled by a squirrel just weeks after taking me to my first win.  A bicycle wheel sporting a broken pair of front tines would make a perfect prompt for a creative writing workshop.  Consider the variety of stories that might end with a wheel spinning up the road like the last spasms of a severed limb.

Society for Wheelchair Accessable Single Track

SWAST is gathering steam.  And I've attained at a new level of blogging:  the rant.

Before venting, it seems appropriate to set a baseline.  I ride trails on a CX bike.  I dislike suspension forks and hate rear suspension.  It's entirely possible that I've never ridden a properly tuned bike, but I enjoy climbing and love the feedback of a stiff frame.  I've been hitting the local trails year 'round for about a decade and have learned to live with the rocks and roots and logs and the annual rhythm.  Ride fast in the summer when the paths are clear.  Pick your way through the leaves in the fall.  Feel damn lucky that you can get out at all in the winter.  Stay out of the mud in the spring.  My definition of a great ride is staying clipped in for the entirety of various climbs.  Until this year.

In this winter of my mild discontent, leaves disappeared from the local trails.  At first, sections were swept.  Then holes appeared where rocks once lay.  Someone was pulling rocks out of eskers.  You might as well pull words out of sentences.  New England without rocks is Kansas.  And logs that could be moved were; logs that couldn't were built up with sticks.  In some spots (see above), borders were added.  The photo above is of a trail that was regarded locally as technical, although it looks more like a garden path now.  The log in the distance was ridable, but now it's a rollicking speed bump.  And the path is four times the width of the old trail.

Who would do such a thing?  Only bike riders build up logs.  But what bike rider widens a path and adds borders?  To my way of thinking, the time it took to build borders would have been better spent learning to clear a log.  The changes have been going on all winter long and over a pretty wide range of trails.  And I never see anyone actually doing the work.

I really don't like what's been going on, but I've accepted it as legitimate and well intentioned.  I'm not about to undo anyone's efforts.  What has been difficult to accept is my own reactions.  Have I become such a curmudgeon that I get all worked up about a couple changes?  Have I developed that awful dismissive attitude that there's nothing worse than a newbie?

Truth be told, the trails in question are literally across the street from a large neighborhood full of kids - less than two minutes of coasting downhill from my house.  That's a detail that only a complete curmudgeon could overlook.  I'm not ready to thank the people of SWAST for stealing rocks and widening trails.  But in a world where every kid has a mountain bike that barely leaves the sidewalk, I will find the SWASTies and shake their dirty hands if I start seeing kids riding bikes in the woods.

Guardian Angels

I was impressed by Chip's ride through NTF last week.  My preference off road is trails that are ridable in both directions.  NTF is littered with one-way drops and rocky carries.  It's not big, but I always get lost and always have to carry the bike when the trail goes hiker.  It messes with my flow.  So it's good to know I'm not alone.

But that's not what made the impression.  Riding with someone who shares their expertise and enthusiasm impressed me.  I'm buoyed by the number of talented cyclists who shepherd someone.  I had an awesome season of cross primarily because someone took the time to invite me along to races, let me shadow them warming up, shared the little tricks that made me a better rider, entertained my dumb questions and challenged me to use all the those advantages to race better.  It was a private cyclocross graduate seminar.

There are riders that always have a good word and share what they know.  That's very cool.  I keep a mental list of those folks and do my best to be them.  But circling back to break down how to clear a ledge, step by step, is another level.  That's the Guardian Angel; the Counselor who makes sure you get your Log Riding merit badge; the Big Brother who shows you how to get backstage.  They might get something out of it, a partner in crime or a platform to preen, but it's no where near what they give.  And from what I've seen, what they get is the satisfaction of sharing something good and seeing it make a difference.

Chip and I have been anointed.  It's nobody's fault but our own if we're not rocking ledges, logs and barriers, soft fleshy parts not withstanding.  Long term, the trick won't be Macaskillian mastery.  It will be identifying the next guy who's ready to be anointed and taking the time to see that it happens.

Saturday's Ride

It certainly felt that the tires were particularly awesome.  Brand new, tacky, slick Pro4s in black.  New equipment always gets more credit that several weeks of training on a heavier bike, or a thoroughly cleaned drivetrain, or a crazy schedule with exactly the right sized window of open time for a good ride or even an unusual eating day.

What ever the reason, the bike surged ahead at the slighted provocation.  The wheels spun up to speed and stayed there with suspicious lack of effort.  Explanations veered far afield of possibility:  hit by a truck and instantly killed, the transition to heavenly reward was seamless; tire diameter had been reset on the cyclometer; a fierce but unfelt tailwind had developed; wings?

Stopped by the shop and despite being very busy, everyone said hi.  Returned to my bike to find two guys with Euro accents admiring it.  Perhaps it would be best to call home for a ride and make every effort to conserve the high.  It might last until tomorrow's training race...

Or not.  Apparently, when the cycling gods reach down and caress one's thighs, the appropriate response it is to ride until the touch fades.  Bask in the glow and pray for more divine intervention.

Dancing on the Pedals

This may sound strange, but I often envision riding a bike as dancing.  Perhaps it has to do with listening to music while riding.  As a teen, I would ride with a radio on a touring handlebar basket.  It wasn't really a basket, but a boxy, red cordura thing, very technical at the time, with a vinyl sleeve on top for maps.  I would flip the top back and position a large transistor radio for optimal listening on long rides.  I had gotten the idea that pedal stroke was key to quality riding and the music made for a smooth, fast cadence.  Incredibly, I'm still concerned with my pedal stroke, but now I have an iPod.

On the road, it's mostly about cadence and I'm drawn to latin music.  I think it has to do with latin dance beats or the precision I associate with latin dances.  But I'm not ready to rule out a subconscious conflation of Spanish climbers and Phil Liggett's description of "dancing on the pedals".  In any case, I don't have enough latin music to fill a typical road workout, so I fall back on music with groove.  M,M&W, Galactic, Fatboy Slim and the Stone Roses all have groove.  The trainer lead to an uncharacteristic taste for electronic/dance, such as The Chemical Brothers, BT, Moog Cookbook, and Moby.  I guess the regularity of electronic lends itself to the tedium of the trainer.  On the trails, I've been digging funky, jazzy stuff, like Robert Walter, Diplo, Flow Dynamics or Deela.

On the road and trainer, music provides a groove; it's all about forward momentum.  The trail is where riding really feels like dance.  There's more manipulation of the bike and more interaction with the trail.  The lifting, leaning, balance and rhythm combine to become a very personal interpretation of how to negotiate each section.  The dance is maintaining balance and rhythm while committing to various lifts, leans and turns.  I guess real dancing would be riding on a level field and using music to dictate the rhythm, leans and lifts.  In my mind, the terrain is the music.  The iPod mostly provides audible adrenalin.

Hope Springs Eternal

True to form, March is coming in like a lion.  The wind has been strong and wily in its ability to present against me in all situations.  Truth be told, I can't remember my last windless ride.  Temperatures and precipitation have not followed the annual script.  Two weeks ago, I was momentarily disoriented by a sugarbush in Weston.  Confused by how I could have missed so many buckets left past the sugaring season, I thought leaves must have obscured the view the last time I passed.  I was on to the next stretch of road when it occurred to me that the freezing nights and warm days had started sap running.

And today!  Today I caught a strong whiff of hyacinths.  It brought to mind the last weeks of August, when the sticky, sweet smell of Concord grapes appear out of nowhere.  Hyacinths seem extraordinarily unlikely, as crocuses have yet to emerge and the earliest daffodils, nestled in the southern pocket of stone walls, are only two or three inches up.  Still, it was a bold visitation of Easter before the oily pall of Fasching has completely cleared the kitchen.

The spring classics may be very fast this year.  Or at the very crowded.

Cross Training for the Road

One of the appealing aspects of cyclocross is that it is completely different from road racing.  The racing is different, the training is different, the brakes & tires are different and the vibe is different.  So I'm surprised to be doing a cyclocross workout to prepare for the road season.

Sandpits are a staple of cyclocross courses.  After being terrorized by one with a dog leg turn, I started brainstorming ways to ride sand better.  I searched for volley ball courts, schemed to get onto golf courses and pondered the damage that salt water would inflict on my bike.  It took me a couple weeks to realize that I had been riding by the answer on a regular basis.  Local ponds (as in a twenty minute warm up ride away) have beautiful, fresh water beaches that are completely open and deserted in the fall.

So off to the beach to mystify dog walkers with my antics.  I figured out how to shift my weight and manage turns while staying upright and moving.  At times it felt like stick racing, apparently better known as bat spin racing.  And it didn't take long to figure out that it's incredibly exhausting.  Even after you are able to relax the death grip, it just sucks the energy out of the lower back and hips.

I'm a big proponent of periodization.  In the early spring, I mostly do low cadence / high torque workouts.  This involves a lot of one-legged pedaling or tension intervals, and it gets kind of boring.  Riding sand works  very similar muscle groups as my spring workouts, only a lot faster and it's a nice change.  I skip the turns and just try to make it all the way across the beach.  Once I start falling, I recover on the trails the lead to the next beach.  Here's what it looks like.  By the way,  the playground segment has nothing to do with periodization or road racing.  I was just having some fun after I couldn't get across the beach anymore.

Glaciers Rock

Nothing reveals topography like a bicycle.  You can walk a stretch of road a hundred times and not notice a grade that is immediately clear after one ride.  And in my neck of the woods, nothing has created topography like the Laurentide ice sheet.  The weight of a full mile of ice smoothed the north-west side of bedrock outcrops leaving deep grooves; the south-east side left jagged.  Ten to twenty thousand times the several car loads of leaves I take to the dump each year could not cover the scarred rock.

The bedrock outcrops make for a good class trip, but all the loose rock worn smooth on the trip down from Vermont and New Hampshire make for a good ride.  It's tempting to imagine the ice sheet over Boston as a blue-white expanse of Arctic snow.  At least part of it was more like what you find piled at the edges of a mall parking lot in spring:  an abrasive mix of ice, rock and dirt.

It's also tempting to imagine the retreating glacier disappearing like a heavy snow in spring.  A mile thick of ice and debris melts in some spots and stays stubbornly frozen in others.  It creates rivers and vast lakes both on its surface and deep below.  The channels sweep enormous boulders clear in some places and fill the river bottom with layers of rounded stones in others.

The channel beds and lake bottoms that remained after the glacier's retreat became the eskers and drumlins that make such good riding and the sand fields that separate them.  An esker is the inverted bed of debris left by a stream or crevasse.  Drumlins are similar, forming mounds instead of elongated hillocks.

When I first moved to the Boston area, I thought the long, tall piles of rock and dirt were somehow a result of the highway on one side or the reservoir on the other.  It seemed impossible that the long ridges of debris with sides too steep to climb at places could be natural formations.  And it seemed equally implausible that they were connected to the great reed flats flanking the Charles River.  After hiking and then riding the trails that climb the ridges and skirt the ponds, it was thrilling to learn that this landscape was all created by a glacier.  It's sort of like finding a fossil in your backyard covered with miles of technical, swoopy trails.

Spring Has Sprung!

Today was the official start of spring training:  Individual Leg Training and six minute threshold intervals.  I cobbled together my old Serotta for the occasion.  I can't stand the thought of a carbon frame in a trainer and hate putting training miles on the race bike.

Here's the crazy thing:  for most of the winter, I can barely average above 16mph for a training ride.  I've thought it might be the resistance of heavy, winter pants, or that cold air is denser than warm air, or that Gatorskin tires just roll slow.  As soon as the spring training starts, I can spin along at twenty.  It was like magic today:  in between efforts, a head wind felt like a tail wind.  Same clothes, same tires and a heavier bike.  Go figure.

Editing camera footage and learning software is still taking up a lot of my disposable me time.  I'll be traveling next week for School Vacation Week, so I'm optimizing the schedule for saddle time this week and looking forward to more substantial writing soon.

Bar Cam or ER Cam?

Among the unexpected joys of cyclocross, I found race videos and compilations of professional footage absolutely fascinating.  It started as a way to recon upcoming races.  Watching the first lap of someone else's race felt a lot like train spotting.  But as I tried to get a feel for the course, I started noticing details and cheering riders on.  Next I was searching for footage of races I had done.  Finally, I was watching highlights and montages of European races.  And re-watching it all over and over.

It was all compelling, but there seemed to be a gap between barely edited bar cams and TV outtakes.  My sense was that mixing a couple different camera mounts with some careful editing might capture the excitement of racing or just riding.  I could see the shots in my head.  I imagined Warren Miller voice overs...

Hence the set up pictured above.  The first thing I found was that a camera encourages some sketchy riding. Documenting a broken collar bone was not what I had in mind.  Second thing was that my PC is not optimized for graphics and the software that came with the camera was less than bare bones.  So I've gone from learning about mounts, dismounts, call ups and gluing tubulars to ins, outs, cuts, trims and codecs.

This is going to take some time.  It took a whole season of hopping off and on the bike to before I realized that I needed to maintain momentum to make the whole thing work.  It took a half season of gluing tubulars and rolling tires before I got a set to stay put.  Keeping that in mind, I should have some half decent videos just in time for jungle cross.

I see everything twice

A favorite truism of mine is that races in April and May are won in January and February.  Most NE winters, that means a fair amount of indoor riding.  This winter has been so dry and mild that I haven't even set up the trainer yet.  But when I do, I find it easier to break the ride into two.  Morning on the trainer & afternoon on rollers for hard days and two roller sessions for easy days.

This week, mid-day responsibilities and good weather had me doing doubles outside.  All well and good, except that getting off an indoor bike is as pleasurable as staying on an outdoor one.  This became apparent yesterday when I lingered on the morning ride, stretched out the afternoon ride, and then had to eat an early dinner and collapsed early into bed.  To be clear, this is an observation and should not be confused with a complaint.  I'll save the complaints for Binder & Binder commercials, The General, and anything mention of mesothelioma, structured settlements or diabetes.

Looks like I'll be doubling up again today.  Wet snow and temps right on the edge of freezing leads to fingers that can't shift, can't remove soaked clothes and then ache and burn for twenty minutes while they warm up.  That's about the only argument I can make in favor of daytime TV.

Hey Gisele - I own your wheels!

Jason Gay defense of Gisele Bundchen in today’s WSJ reminded me of a brush with greatness.

 

A couple years back, I bought a cyclocross bike at the LBS.  The purchase killed several birds with a single credit card swipe:  an opportunity to try CX, a recovery from a late season set of broken ribs and test of the SRAM group.  And being a large, discontinued frameset, it was a great deal.  The negotiations involved a number of visits and ultimately, a wheel upgrade.  The offered wheels had been sitting around the shop, much like the frame, since they were special ordered for a special customer. 

Granted, it took a series of increasingly explicit comments to clue me on to the provenance of said wheels.  I guess I don’t spend enough time at the intersection of Patriots Football and Brazilian Supermodels.  Anyway, Ms. Brady was shopping for a bike and couldn’t decide whether to go comfort or hybrid (which was a top end CX frame).  The guys at the shop built up one of each especially for her.  I really can’t blame them.  Actually I should thank them.  She chose comfort and I got the hybrid wheels.  I think that’s the appropriate level of closeness for me and the Brazilian Supermodel.

The wheels were Brontager X-Lites.  I wore away the braking surface of the rear wheel after a sloppy winter.  But I took the front wheel out for a tour of the MWRA aquaducts today.  Rode from the Wellesley dump all the way to Framingham with minimal blacktop.

Hello

That grainy photo in the header is me and my first racing bike.  By racing bike, I mean that it shared the same stickers as the pro’s bikes and didn’t come from a department store.  By me, I mean the kid whose elbows, hips, shoulders and shins have yet to meet pavement in any meaningful way.

The photo is a good thirty years old.   I hadn’t seen it for a long time, or really looked at it in the decade since I started racing bicycles.  Can it possibly be that my legs were bigger and my arms were skinnier?  Maybe it’s an illusion of the shadows and the cut-offs.  But I can see my back peeking out over the inside shoulder; some things don’t change.

Middle age is when most men notice some changes.  I notice a lot.  Not all changes and certainly not all colored by the hardening lenses of middle age.   Which brings me to blogging:  the lot I notice seems unusual.  Not terribly unusual, but just enough to be interesting.  I hope.

I ride almost every day.  Racing well involves more time in the saddle than I care to admit.  But it’s genuinely enjoyable and satisfying on a number of different levels.  It’s a trip – both literally and figuratively.  In blogging, I hope to figure out whether the trippiness is an endorphine soaked, oxygen debt induced hallucination or something more enduring.

On a more concrete level, I plan to blog about riding and racing.  For me, that’s masters bicycle racing in New England.  This is perhaps a hopelessly thin slice of sub-sub culture.  Everyone should have a slice of sub culture to call their own.  We'll see what I can wring from mine.