that which rolls

Sunday Morning I met up with my Aunt and Uncle and my mom for a bike ride at the canal park in Newark. My mom hadn’t been on her bike in a while but she wanted to give it a shot. After about 1/4 mile, she decided she needed more time to get back in the groove so she and my aunt took off for a tour of Newark parking lots and my uncle & I rode west on the canal path past wide waters and back.

We met up back at the canal park & hung out on the boat for a little while. My mom headed home and I took my aunt & uncle to show them my hill avoidance shortcut to Marbletown with a minor detour to the canal lock so that I could check out what I thought might be a new addition to the canal path heading toward Lyons. I’ll have to actually ride the trail sometime to find out where it really goes, there were no helpful signs. It may have just been a fishing access path.

By the time we got home I’d done 17.4 miles without really noticing.

I had meant to do a much longer ride on Sunday to prepare for tomorrow’s metric century on the Erie Canal. My distance preparation efforts have been minimal but I’m hoping that my regular riding habits will pay off. I’ll have all day, and if my 86 year old grandfather is going to do it, I’m hopeful that my 34 year old body will be able to at least keep up. Maybe they’ll let me take lots of breaks. If not, I can just lay down on the side of the road and wait for the vultures to come for me… or I can call for a ride. It’s supposed to be almost 90 degrees tomorrow. It will probably feel a lot like the 40 mile ride along Lake Ontario we did back in 2006.

My plan is to go slow and just have fun.

The Tour de France starts this Saturday. Last year I wrote a bunch of lame posts about it. You see… back then I wasn’t a completely bike obsessed nutter. I was only slightly bike obsessed. I was doing a lot more thinking about bike commuting than actual bike commuting. My blog was less than 5% bike related content and 95% random rants and reports on things I found in the woods.

Back then, I didn’t subscribe to a multitude of cyclist blogs. I really didn’t know enough to be able to write anything insightful about the TdF. I didn’t even know enough to know that I didn’t know enough to write something insightful about the TdF. I knew I was annoyed that people I was rooting for kept being vaporized by doping scandals. It’s very anticlimactic to have someone disappear 10 feet from the finish line and be replaced by someone you were not paying attention to at all. It’s like watching a television series and having one of the main actors replaced in the middle. I guess it works for James Bond & Dr. Who so maybe I shouldn’t complain.
Now, because I subscribe to the feeds of lots of cycling blogs, I know what entertaining TdF commentary looks like. Fat Cyclist has done a couple of great posts so far and there was also a good one on Bike Snob NYC recently.

• An Open Letter to ASO as They Make Final Preparations for the 2008 Tour de France (Fat Cyclist)
• An Open Letter to CyclingNews.com (Fat Cyclist)
• The Indelible Cleanliness of Riding: Drugs No, Tattoos Yes! (Bike Snob NYC)

Know your Audience

Of course, if you’re reading this because you are like me subscribing to a bunch of bike blogs, you’ve already read these.

And if you’re one of my friends and family who read my blog because you wonder what weirdness I’m up to, you’re not all that interested.

And if you’re someone I work with who’s just trying to figure out “what’s wrong with that person.” you’re really not interested.

So there was really no point in me adding these links at all. I already wrote this though, so there’s no point in me deleting this post and letting it go to waste.

I made it.

I arrived at the far-distant park and ride about 10 minutes before the bus. The shoulders on 31 are huge, as wide as an entire car lane, so for the most part it wasn’t really scary even though the traffic is fast and irritable. I only got honked at once and that was by teenagers. What do they know anyway?

Some of the hills were pretty big but the grade wasn’t so bad. Long slow ascents followed by long speedy descents. I felt so hot. Every time I was climbing and the wind would die down I felt like a hot coal being fanned. My skin felt like it was starting to glow white hot. I tried to drink lots of water but it just vaporised on contact with my tongue.

The ‘deadline’ made it into a little bit of a time trial. I really had to push myself to make that distance in that time. Without the deadline I would have probably taken another 15 minutes to get there. I could probably do this again any day as long as it isn’t in the 90’s and there isn’t an east wind.

This morning, new mystery-mongoose-bike was already on the rack when I got on the bus. Black-bmx-bike, which catches the bus after me wasn’t there this morning, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be there on the way home. That is kind of what happened yesterday, except that he tried to get on on that morning and he got stuck with no rack.
Because it wastes so much time for me to wait for the bus, only to find out that I can’t use it. I’m going to give plan b a shot. It will probably result in me riding all the way home but I can’t develop plan c until I explore the many flaws of plan b.

According to the bus schedule I have an hour and 17 minutes to make it to the stop where black-bmx-bike gets off (if I’m able to leave right on time and the bus arrives exactly when the schedule says it will.) It’s 13.8 miles from where I work. I will probably need to maintain an average speed of 12mph or higher… which might be difficult with all the hills. Basically I’m racing the bus. Hopefully I will win because I’d rather get home at 6:30 than at 7:30.
If it looks like I’m not going to make it and time is getting tight, I’ll try to stop and flag down the bus before black-bmx-bike’s stop with the hope that there will be available rack space. If there isn’t, at least I haven’t wasted ride time sitting around waiting for the bus.

I will find out how dumb this plan is very very soon. I think it’s probably pretty dumb, but I haven’t been able to think of anything better yet. I need to get some more training miles in before I do the 62 mile ride with my uber-fit family next week anyway, so unless I completely bonk, it will be an o.k. situation either way.

I need a plan B.

Just in case.

It finally happened on the way home. The bus pulled up at the park and ride and there were two bikes on the bus. I walked up the the door and the driver just shut it on me. He just wanted to leave. I got him to open the door and I said… “so am I stuck?” he said “yup” and slammed the door shut.

I probably could have ridden all the way home. But it was 25 miles & I was wearing work clothes and it was already 5:45. I think I was just surprised that it had finally happened. I ended up calling Brian and didn’t even realize until we were driving home that I probably could have called my aunt and uncle who were most likely at a marina just 7 miles away. I could have hung out there instead of on a grassy knoll in the park & ride.

I guess I’m going to ride again tomorrow. Maybe the new mystery cyclist was just doing it for one day. If not will I start riding 28 miles home every day? Is that even reasonable? If I didn’t waste all that time waiting for the bus and just rode, I would have made it home by 7:30, the same time I made it home after calling for a ride. I guess I would lose weight all that much faster… but it would take me at least 2.5 hours to get home.
Hmmmmmm. What is plan B? At what point should I activate plan B? Maybe plan B is for me to meet Brian at an ice cream stand if I get stuck.  Maybe plan B is, I just start riding home and the bus will just stop when it passes me if there’s room.

Every year Parks & Trails New York does a week long Erie Canal bike tour from Buffalo to Albany. My grandpa loves to ride his bike. This year he and my aunt are planning to do this eight day, 400 mile, bike trip. I’m not really into doing the whole thing, but two of my cousins and I are planning on riding with them unofficially on one day of the trip. That day is 62 miles. That will the the longest distance I have biked in a day. I know I can do it but I’m sure I’ll be a broken shadow of my former self at the end. I’ll be crying and begging for mercy while the rest of my family just pedals happily away. (They’re all in very good shape. I am 50lbs overweight… wait no, I’m down to 45lbs overweight.)

It had been a while since I’d been out on my bike in a purely recreational capacity so on Saturday afternoon I headed out to tackle the ride titled “Mormon Country” in my Backroad Bicycling in the Finger Lakes Region guide book. The route was only about 3 miles from my house so it seemed like a good choice. My alternate plan was to ride to the Geneva Bicycle Center and look at bikes that I’m not ready to buy and bug the bike store people with questions whose answers I could probably find on line.

It was sunny when I decided to go, sprinkling when I got on the bike, and pouring by the time I got to the first stop sign. It was really really pouring… like standing under a waterfall. It was actually quite pleasant since the alternative was ‘hot with oppressive humidity’. By the time I was almost in to town it was raining so hard that I was having a little trouble seeing. I took most of the hill descents pretty slowly, because I didn’t really want to find out if you can hydroplane on a bike or find any hidden potholes in puddles.

Then I found myself in new territory. I kinda-sorta had the route in my head but not solidly enough that I knew whether to turn left or right at any of the turns. I just knew the road names. It was raining too hard for me to consult the book. This would be a much better story if I’d actually taken a wrong turn, but somehow I managed to get all the way to route 21 without mishap. By then the sun was out and it was hot again.

Route 21 is NOT a friendly road to ride on. The traffic is fast if somewhat intermittent. There’s no shoulder & you’re riding against a guard rail half the time without the opportunity to choose to crash in to the trees or ride into a ravine to avoid a stupid motorist. Often when I’m on a scary road I comfort myself with the thought that I could ride off the road to avoid disaster (I know I’m just lying to myself). With the guard rail there, my mind conjures up gory visuals of my legs being sandwiched between a car and the rail and the bike. I think the book only chose to spend any time on Rt. 21 was so that it would take you past Hill Cummorah.
The route went past Hill Cumorah, the Joseph Smith Farm, & the Martin Harris farm. I didn’t actually stop at any of these places. The only spot I actually stopped to look around was the Fox Sister’s House. Really it’s just the foundation of the house now. It’s supposed to be the birthplace of Modern Spiritualism. When I was a ‘kid’ we used to drive out to the site of the house at night, which was all grown over with weeds. We’d get out of the car with the intention of exploring but someone would get freaked out and start screaming and run back to the car, which usually resulted in everyone else running screaming back to the car. Now they’ve built a building over the foundation, with windows all around so you can see into it… but you can’t actually go inside. I think they moved all the cool stuff to Lily Dale (which is like the Rennaisance fair but with psyichics).

I was pretty excited that I did 34 miles with lots of hills and wasn’t really all that tired at the end of the ride. This is a good thing because I am potentially going to be doing my longest ride of the season next week. More on that later.

Brian had a cool idea to make stir-fry on the grill the other day. He says the burners on our stove-top don’t really get hot enough to make great stir-fry in the wok.

I was watching the preview show for the Tour de France on VS last night and saw this Autozone Commercial.

A kid is riding his bike down a dirt road and sees a car with a sign in the window that says “if you fix it you can have it.” The kid rides his bike back & forth between the car and the autozone buying part after part and the commercial ends with a voice over from the kid saying “And I don’t know how many times I needed to go to Autozone. At least now when I go, it’s not on my bike.”

I know not everyone is a cyclist, but the Tour de France preview show seems like a weird place to play an ad targeted at people who don’t like to ride bikes.

My cousin bought a unicycle. He can actually ride it too. I gave it a shot but I didn’t have much time to get the hang of it. My grandma was serving dessert and we were being called. I shouldn’t have taken so much time trying to get up the nerve.

Jason actually riding the unicycle.

My dad, giving it a shot.

Me, laughing myself to death. Moments earlier, I had one arm around the tree and one on Brian while I tried to get on the thing. This shot is mid-fail. Moments later I got on the thing and balanced and maybe even cranked the pedals around about 300 degrees (while holding on to Brian), then it flew out from under me again.