a midway bikelog

I’ve had a bad head cold this week. Not bad enough to miss work, and normally i’d just ride through these things, but when it’s first cold and rainy, then just bloody cold, i’m not as inclined to ride when my head is full of snot. TOTAL WUSS. i know.

The winter bike is coming together though, now with front AND rear brakes, and a set of used steel fenders that could take out a deer without getting dented. I just need to switch tires and re-adjust the rear fender clearance, and i’ll be back on the road. Pix later.

Like many families with young kids and cycling parents, it’s hard for us to make time to get out for a bike ride that’s just fun; ie., not also a run to the grocery store with full panniers and Burley in tow. It’s been years since my wife and i rode our mountain bikes, which is natural, given that singletrack isn’t Burley-friendly and baby sitting ain’t free. It’s also a bit ironic since many of our early dates were bike rides out in the woods and we’ve both done some mountain bike racing.

Finally this fall, we’ve been getting out in the dirt again, and it’s been really fun. This weekend, for example, is the first in months, literally months, that we haven’t had a pre-scheduled commitment of some sort, so we made a riding time swap. On Saturday, i joined up with the Hiawatha Cyclery regular Saturday ride, which turned out to be their monthly dirt ride down along the river bottoms. I had the usual great time riding with Jim & Kevin and some of the usual suspects (Ray, Bob, John) and some new to me. On Sunday, Autumn did an extended version of the same ride with Malte and some of the Wheelmen.

Autumn and I have largely converted to being road bikers (though not Roadies) since having kids out of necessity and choice (doing most of our errands and commuting by bike), but it sure is fun to ride in the dirt once in a while.

C race, 8/65 overall, 7th C1 – 2nd best finish of the season

Malte WON! first place in the C race. He led the field from the 2nd lap on (out of 5 (6?) laps total). He’s the Cyclocross rider of the year, and now state champion for the C race. Excellent season for him!

30° and breezy, a really cold day. I wore my usual (for this season) longsleeve wool shirt, wool jersey, lightweight longjohns and the Gopher shorts + wool socks and warm gloves. I hit the start ok, probably top 15 or so heading up the hill, but ran out of steam a little by the first barriers. It was the cold, it really took me about 2 laps to warm up properly (despite a preview lap and some general riding around), then made good progress after that.

This course was tougher than last year, with more hairpin turns than last year (that seems to be a popular course design feature this season), but the C racers didn’t have to do the creek crossing (A & B did), so we missed out on a little slop and one natural barrier there. It did feature the usual loose gravel and the Very Long staircase runup that i always at least part-walked, but i generally regained any lost places pretty quickly after that. There were two semi-sketchy descents – I hit a 30mph max speed, probably on the big downhill out of the woods. It’s a rough course, especially through the grassy stretches and lots of washboard on the road, though the washboard really smoothed out during the race. That’s one thing the B & A races had a bit easier. Had my first dropped chain of the year, on lap 2, at the double barrier. Luckily, i was able to get it back on the ring and back on the bike without losing a place – it probably too 5 seconds, but seemed like a solid minute.

The general race setup was nice, with a couple of tents set up at the top of the hill, music playing, and some good food; chili, coffee and beer. The only real gripe (and it was aggravating at the time) is that nobody knew when they were giving out medals. The officials did a great job of getting the results posted, and since a couple of people said they would be awarding medals as soon as the results were official, we hung out for a while. Well, 45 minutes after the results were official, no medals, and i couldn’t get an answer on it, so we bailed, freezing our tails off. Happily, Benita stayed a bit longer and picked up Malte’s medal, which was incredibly nice. I just wish the race announcer or somebody would tell people when awards were happening. It’s just not cool to have people hanging out in the cold with no information, bad for the racers, bad for spectators who are with the racers.

Anyway, by way of end-of-the-year CX wrapup, i was very happy with my race season this year. My barriers were better, but i need to practice high speed remounts. My fitness was better than last year, and i felt strong through the end of almost every race (minor bonk on the last lap at Powderhorn) – if anything, i could have pushed harder than i did.

I LOVE racing on the Surly. After the first (maybe second?) race, i switched it to a single chainring 8-speed setup as i’d originally planned. That worked out great. I had only one dropped chain all year (today), but i do want to try singlespeed racing next year. If anything, i noticed that i rarely shift to more than 3 different gears during a race, and then pretty much only the lowest 3 cogs. Singlespeeding would probably mean some runups where i’m riding up now, but i do need to get some running miles in for next year, and it would mean a lighter bike and no chain drops.

I had fun! Can’t wait until next year.

A current article on the The New Yorker website talks about the extremes of bicycling advocates (pro/con) in NYC. To me, the crux of the article is that there are more bicyclists on the streets there, and less space for them to ride. The perspective of the 90-year-old woman is telling, as she watched the automobile take over the streets to the exclusion of cyclists and pedestrians both.

Sidewalks are really not great places to ride a bike, and i doubt that most cyclists would choose to ride on a sidewalk if they had safe space to ride in the street. I’ve heard the arguments against bike lanes, but that’s really an argument for experienced cyclists who can handle cycling in traffic. It’s the casual cyclists who tend to use sidewalks because they don’t feel safe on the street, or they feel like they’d have to ride faster than they want to on the street. If there’s safe space to cycle at a reasonable personal pace on the street, it’s a safer bet for cars and pedestrians too. Cycling for the streets, walking for the sidewalk.

Local gas price on evening of November 6, 2006: $2.09
Local gas price on evening of November 7, 2006: $2.25

I wonder, did prices go up first thing on election day, or did they gradually ramp up as the exit polling came in?

C race, 5/43 overall, 3rd C1 (!) Best CX finish ever.

After a cold spell, it warmed up nicely today, just in time for a perfect race day. Despite an early start, we managed to lose enough time changing and waiting on the portapotty to miss pre-riding the course.

As it turned out, the course was mostly flat, some singletrack but nothing too technical. Two places had loose sand, one was about a 50-foot sandpit after a barrier, for a short run. Overall, a flat open course with good stretches for recovery and speed – 24.6mph max today. This was more one for the roadies.

I started toward the front, and after the first 1/4 lap was at the tail end of the lead group, around 12th. This let me get a good look at the course ahead, and i was feeling pretty strong off the start. I had a pretty solid next couple of laps, passing a couple of people on each lap and keeping a pretty steady pace. By lap 4, i found myself mostly alone, about 150 yards behind the small lead group and maybe 60 yards ahead of the next pack behind me. I hit it hard the last 1.5 laps and was able to catch the very end of the lead group at the finish line, just passing an unfortuate guy who lost a seat during the race.

Malte had a strong start, and was running 2nd when he suffered a broken chain on the first lap at the short & rideable runup. The chain was only about 4 months old, but he apparently went in to it with too big a gear. When the chain broke he went down and got a bad scrape on the back of his knee. He ran the rest of the lap and the pit support put it back together for him, so he finished riding, but a lap down. Probably 2nd or 3rd in his group.

(Update: Malte went to the Northfield CX race the next day and finished 2nd!)

I love reading Kottke. But somebody please burn my webserver if i start analyzing my own blog posts to this extreme.

Tag frequency and popularity acceleration kottke.org

This is a local blog, for local people! We’ll have no trouble here!

Yes, this is SO 1999 to those in the BBC-viewing audience, but i’ve just recently discovered the League of Gentlemen.

Not to be confused with the shabby film “The League of Extraordianary Gentlemen”, the League of Gentlemen is a BBC2 TV series from 1999-2002, and is (as Autumn put it) a sort of comedy version of Twin Peaks. It’s essentially a horror show set in the isolated village of Royston Vasey, but the characters are so wacky and the writing so funny that we’ve been totally hooked. There are enough running gags and plot threads that it’s hard to not watch the whole set in a sitting. We’ve just finished season 2, Blockbuster online has the DVDs, probably other places too. Good stuff, highly recommended.

Peter Miller – Magnetic Yellow Card
(via Kent)

An interesting take on bike/car relations. A yellow magnetic card with this text on it:

“This magnet was tossed onto your car by a cyclist who felt that you might have been driving in a way that could have endangered their life.

They chose to toss this magnetic note because it can neither damage your automobile, nor affix itself to rubber or glass and will therefore not affect your driving. It serves to warn you.

With thoughtful contemplation and reverence for humanity, we can adjust our behavior to allow for all people to live life.

This is a yellow card, let’s please not let things get to Red.”

How would the driver feel? What are the odds they would spend any time thinking about it?