a couple of rides this weekend

 

I can't believe I got a complaint from a reader that I haven't posted in a while... it's been a couple of weeks, but I had no idea that anybody followed at all closely. 

Well, I did get a couple of rides in this weekend. Yesterday (August 9), I went along with The Excellent Wife (TEW); that's she smiling at you in the pic at the top of the post. A coupla-three years ago (Four? Five, maybe?), she did the Flemington Jewish Community Center Farmland ride, and was smitten with the route, so we saved it, and she does it once or twice a year (or maybe more). I agree it's a nice route, and I think she does it as much to complain about the hills as to look at the views and whatnot.

But the route goes up Yard Road, one of my favorite cycling roads.

We adjusted the route after Lower Creek Road was destroyed by whatever storm it was that destroyed Lower Creek Road, and the adjusted route goes right by the Covered Bridge Bagels in Sergeantsville. We stopped there, partly because the Carousel in Ringoes closed. (There's a deli a bit farther up, but the toilet there is behind the counter, and TEW says that it's pretty gnarly, barely better than a porta-potty.)

The ride page shows that I did the 32-mile, 1800-foot-climb route at an average of 11.5mph, because we were more interested in the social aspect than the speed. I can tell you that the slow speed did not make the experience appreciably less demanding than doing it at the somewhat-faster pace I'd have fallen into if I'd been alone. I'd like to say it's hard work riding at a slower pace than one is used to, but I'd probably be engaging in mendacity to exaggerate both my fitness and my friendliness.

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Today was one of my no-pace rides. I had six. Some of the bikes:

Laura OLPH's "Beaker", above.

 

Above and below, one of Tony G's stable of gorgeous bikes. He's got almost two dozen.

Above, Stacey Perkowski's bike - the other one has a substantial crack in the carbon of the seat tube, apparently.

 I do these rides so that people who don't want pressure to keep up can come out on a club ride. Sometimes, the group doesn't connect that well, and sometimes it's a congenial social experience. Today's ride was one of the latter. We stayed together, and chatted with each other, and enjoyed the day. (I used to ride with a guy who'd say, "If you're on a ride and you can chit-chat, you're not riding hard enough." This is not the ride for him!).

We stopped at the McCaffreys on Southfield.

 

In the picture above, TEW is actually talking to someone, but I've agreed with that person not to include a picture without active, enthusiastic consent.

Ride page. I had a long nap after this one. Maybe I just need to plan on a nap after a ride.

co-leader on a group ride

Tom H approached me a few weeks ago with the idea of co-leading a club ride, with him leading the faster group and me coming along with the slower group after, to pick up any of his that may have dropped. There's at least one other team in the club that does that, and they've been quite successful and have a substantial following. And, especially with my spotty prowess, it sounded like a good idea to be able to go a bit slower, but also (perhaps) to see some of the folks I used to ride with.

We set one for yesterday. Tom came up with a 42-mile route, starting at Village Park in Cranbury, and with a stop in Allentown.

Cranbury's a popular start location for the club; I think there were four rides going out within half an hour of each other.

 I rode in from home. It took a while to warm up, but I figured I'd be riding stronger after I had a few miles in.

Tom took off with the faster riders. I had one who stayed behind with me... and I was grateful for it, because I never really warmed up on this ride. Near the stop, I asked if the other rider wanted to cut it a bit short and head straight to the stop. I was a little disappointed when he declined, and we took the "assigned" route to Woody's in Allentown.

Tom hadn't named the stop during the speech at the start of the ride; he'd only said it was about at mile 22. It turned out he had three riders off the front, and, when they didn't see the stop at mile 22 (it was a bit short of that; they'd already passed Woody's), they just continued at their pace back to the start.

Tom and his crew stopped at Woody's; the two of us rolled in some time after.

 The east wind yesterday was stronger than I expected, and it felt like after the stop, we did nothing except ride into that strong headwind. My co-rider and I took turns taking pulls. I did the second half of the ride noticeably slower than the first.

When we got to the start, all but one or two of the riders in the faster group had left. I still had the five-mile ride home, so I fortified myself with a root-beer float from Gil & Bert's in Cranbury... and then rode home at a pace such that I would have been passed by a funeral procession.

Some days are better than others. 

breaking a spoke, and repercussions

 

On Wednesday, at the suggestion of The Excellent Wife (TEW), I went out on Al P's Wednesday Allentown ride, with a neighbor, David G, who lives in the same over-55 community that I do.

 

He did a route to Emery's Farm (see it on the ride page). It's a good route, and it was a good day... but something was off for me about the ride; the Yellow Maserati, my titanium bike, just didn't feel right to me. 

When we stopped at Emery's, I found out what the problem was: I'd broken a spoke on my rear wheel, and the wheel had gone enough out of true that it was binding on the caliper brake on every rotation. I'd built this wheel years ago, and had to rebuild it when there was a problem with the rim, so I wasn't either terribly surprised or terribly upset about it.

Technical stuff you can skip: On a rear wheel for a bike that uses caliper brakes, the right spokes are much shorter and tighter than the ones on the left because of the presence of the cassette, where for the corresponding front wheel, the spokes are of the same length and tightness on each side, if the wheel is assembled correctly. (With disk brakes, the front wheel has a similar issue, but the left spokes are tighter, due to the presence of the rotor; the issue with the rear wheel with a disk brake is similar to the issue with the caliper-brake wheel, but less pronounced, having an allowance for the cassette on the right and a lesser one for the rotor on the left.)

More technical stuff you can skip: when I built these wheels, I was taken with a rim that was surprisingly light for a rim of its class. It turned out that the lightness was achieved at the cost of rigidity. I built the wheels three-cross on both sides (that is, each spoke crosses three others on the way from the hub to the rim), and I found every time I put power down (like on a climb), I had the most annoying creaking from the rear wheel. No amount of tightening of the spokes eliminated it, and I ruined another rim trying to get them tight enough to stop creaking. I finally re-strung the left side of the wheel so that the spokes on that side did NOT cross, and that eliminated the problem. But the excessive tightening had affected the rim, so I noticed some cracks when I removed the wheel, and the changes in spoke tension probably ultimately caused the broken spoke.

So there I was at Emery's, with the gang making noises like it was time to depart. I could have tried to true the wheel enough so it would go through the brake (yes, I have spoke wrenches on my bike for that; they're in my multi-tool, and I have used them on a fellow rider's bike)... but that would take time, so I decided just to undo the cable on the rear brake, and use just the front brake on the ride back to the car. (I teach the class in Basic Bicycle Maintenance for Princeton Adult School, and have a unit where I talk about how the front brake does most of the braking, so I was confident I could do this.)

At one point, we had a stop at the bottom of a downhill, and if I'd started braking a second later, we might have had another insurance claim... but I stopped in time, and rode with more braking distance after that. The bike went well with no brake interference in the back!

After arriving home, I popped on another wheel from my supply (it will surprise no one who knows me that I have extra wheels), did the necessary adjustments, and the Yellow Maserati is ready to take on more rides!

(Yet MORE technical stuff you can ignore: the maximum tire size I could get on the Yellow Maserati was 25mm wide, because of the limited clearance at the back brake bridge. The rear wheel I'm using now is wider, and may allow for a 28mm tire, and I would like the ride-quality benefits of a wider tire. I have a 28mm-wide tire on order, and even if it doesn't fit the Maserati, I can use it on my wife's bike, which has much more sensible tolerances.) 

song parody that got me fired

 When I was doing substance-abuse treatment, all those years ago, I had a certain number of clients how had histories of physical abuse with partners. All but one of the women were the recipients. I hated dealing with abused women, because, first, at the time, the folks on the referral lines (for emotional support, for shelter) always presumed that, as a man calling in, I was lying about being a counselor and having a referral, and instead wanted to find their location so that I could bring havoc down upon them, and second, because (in my experience anyway) the women always went back to the abuser. (I at least had some success in getting my alcohol and drug clients into recovery!)

Some of the men seemed to see the error of their ways... but most of 'em claimed that "she knew what she did; she made me hit her." I got so sick of hearing that refrain, that I came up with the following song parody:

You made me hit you,
I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it.
You made me hit you,
And all the time you knew it. You really put me through it.
You made me happy, sometimes, you made me sad,
And there were times when,
You made me get so mad.

You made me hit you,
I didn't wanna tell ya, you oughta go to hell ya,
I lost control, it's true (yes, it's true, yes, it's really really true).

I won't do that again, and that'll be my promise,
Until I do and you go sleepin' at your mama's,
You know you made me hit you.

(instrumental, because, of course...)

When the cops come we'll be runnin' helter-skelter,
I'll go to jail and you'll go to the women's shelter,
Because you made me hit you.

I sang it on a break at a state meeting, and was overheard by both my supervisor and department director. They were horrified that anyone in the counseling field could think such a thing was funny. Although it didn't actually come up in the termination, I'm sure this was part of the reason I got fired ten years ago.

It's good to be retired. 

better than expected

Tom H sent out an email to a number of his regulars that he was leading a not-quite-metric-century (100km is about 62 miles, for those who don't speak road bike, so this was gonna be 59 miles). I was not sure I wanted to do it, because I haven't been in great shape... but these are friends of mine, and they've been agitating for me to come along. I signed up late, and I was in the car, all packed up for the ride, and a couple miles from home before I was really sure I was going to do it.

 Tom had ten. I took a position near the back, and we rolled out, first over the Kinkora trail, and then onto roads in Columbus.

I was wearing a Poland jersey with a distinctive graphic, and wasn't really ready when a car rolled up beside with the window down, and a couple of Eastern European faces were calling out the window, "Dzein dobry! Dzein dobry!", with great big smiles on. I called back "Dzein dobry!" ("Good day") to the Polish occupants of the car. The smattering of Polish I had for the recent trip has already come in handy.

We kept up a pretty fast pace on this flat ride. I was surprised to see average speeds of 15.4mph, then 15.8, then 16.0. That's far faster than I've ridden recently, especially on my own (but there are more hills on my 23-mile training route than there were in this whole 59-mile ride). I even attacked on one of those long, shallow hills, the way I used to be able to do a few years ago.

We had a water stop at the Brendan Byrne Forest.

 And then on to the stop at Nixon's, in Tabernacle. All the way, we kept up that fast (for me) pace.

 At Nixon's, we met a number of riders training for the Spellbound Century in two weeks... including two riders who looked to be about thirteen years old, on small road bikes built around 650b wheels, smaller than the 700c wheels common on road bikes. (No pics of them, to reduce the chance of weirdness around pics of minors.)

And back. I did well with the continued fast pace... until about mile 50, when I started to flag. The group had split into a fast group and a slow group, and a few of the slower riders, slowed further to keep me company for the last few miles.

Still, the ride page shows I completed the ride, with my average speed 15.8mph. 

I don't think I want to do another 60-mile ride soon; 45-50 is probably good enough. And I'm far better on the flat rides than on hills. But it's reassuring that I finished, with as good a showing as I had. 

old & in the way

Hank Green is just the most recent example, but it's recently become inescapable to me that there are people younger than I who are smarter, better-spoken, or more accomplished than I, or all three.

 I live in an over-55 community, and its not true with the people I meet here... but whenever I gather with people outside this community, I'm among the oldest in the group. And there are always people with knowledge I don't have, attitudes and ideas I haven't thought of, stuff I haven't done (and may never be able to do).

I don't always like the way the world is going, but it's no longer the world of my generation. It's time to let it go. It's time for something new. And whether it will work out or not... will be the results of not only my generation's activity, but (primarily) the results of people younger than I am. I'll do my bit (like actively resisting the devolution of the US into fascism), and we'll just have to see what comes along. (I have faith that people will work it out. It may take time, it may be painful and bloody, but it will work out. The kids are all right.)

(The post title is a reference to what Jerry Garcia was doing before that other band he was in.) 

along for the ride

 

I usually lead rides on Sundays, but I could not get it together to list anything for today. Partly it was having the All-Paces ride to lead on July 4; partly it was not having a route in mind (the favorite stop on one of my routes has closed on Sundays; another is longer than I think I'm able to go this year, although some of my ability seems to be returning). Partly it's depression and anxiety, generally. As some others of us are, I'm having a hard time.

Whatever. Al P and Joe M were leading a ride this morning out of Byron Johnson Park in Allentown. When I first looked at it, it had five registrants; by the time I actually signed up, there were fifteen... and when I looked this morning, it was capped at sixteen; Al probably looked at the registrations and decided enough is enough... so I got in just in time. (But there were fourteen when we departed.)

 

Four or five of 'em disappeared off the front fairly early on. The rest of us got spread out, and I fed my caretaking (and probably paternalistic) desires by rolling in the back and making sure we were all keeping up, kinda. 

 

Personal note of hope: I used to be good at ascending long, not-too-steep hills. Some of that ability came back today. I have had too inconsistent abilities lately to say that it's back for good... but on this day, this septuagenarian was riding OK. Even towards the end of the ride.

We stopped at that Charleston Coffee and the associated bagel shop.

 Al's decided on a more sensible way to make that left turn onto Pinehurst than trying to come out of the driveway across traffic; instead, he takes the left out of the other driveway onto Lakehurst, rolls up to the traffic light, and turns left onto Pinehurst from there. I'm planning to adopt that plan in the future.

And back to the park. You can see the ride page here. 

Most were faster than I, although I had more strength today than I showed, hanging out in the back. It was a good ride, on a not-too-hot day. 

On some days, doing a ride, with people you like, is the right thing to do to resist the evil and the crazy.