I evolve as a mountainbiker

We don't really have "mountains" in the Twin Cities, but last weekend, I joined some friends for a couple laps around the low-key single-track course of Salem Hills. I rode my 1983 Stumpjumper with rack and fenders, which was kind of a contrast to the dual-suspension bikes that most everybody else was riding. There were other non-suspension bikes in the group, including one fixed-gear, ridden by an extraordinarily loose motherfucker.

Today I asked my favorite bicycle mechanic to remove the fenders and rack, to make the Stumpjumper into more of a pure trail bike. I'm looking forward to hitting the trails again without all the rattling noise.

Anyway, we had the place to ourselves, and with the setting sun over the prairie flowers, there were some great photographic opportunities:




It was a fun time, and I can't wait to get out there again.

riding with finesse

It's recently come to my attention that not every cyclist rides in a smooth, fluid way. It's also become apparent that the herky-jerky, balls-to-the wall, always-torquing-a-high-gear-out-of-the-saddle, hard-accellerating-hard-braking, pick-a-good-line-be-damned riding style is a primary cause of premature bicycle part failures. Premature part failures are often thought to be related to part quality, as in, if I upgrade from Deore to XT, I won't have this problem. But people who ride like this tend to have a lot of bike problems that other cyclists never experience, regardless of what parts they use.

I've ridden with some cyclists who appear to always be exerting themselves. Part of it is probably a carryover from the burst-like exertions necessary in other sports, like weightlifting or football, and part of it is just that sort of high-energy, spastic personality type that refuses to sit down and spin an easy gear. Whatever the cause, they are always out of the saddle, jerking the bike from side to side, flexing the frame and wheels, and stressing the drive-train at odd angles. Then when it's time to stop, they mash the brakes and decelerate from 25 mph to zero in the shortest possible time. Contrast with the finesse riders who always appear to be taking it easy, yet they finish 600k brevets in under 20 hours, and get 15,000+ miles out of a chain.

A small percentage of the rough-riders keep up on bike maintenance, and often question why bottom brackets seem to last less than 1000 miles, why chainring and cog teeth break off, why the pawls in a freehub shatter, and why their wheels always seem to be loose and grossly out-of-true. The rest just ignore all the grinding, clicking, and creaking noises until the bike is actually unrideable.

Winona Riders 2009

Back in 2007 a couple loose motherfuckers and I went to Winona, MN on a train and rode back to Minneapolis in a single day. In 2008, we tried again, but flooding forced the cancellation of train service. This year, the train was on-time, and 8 of us found ourselves in Winona at 11 AM on a Sunday with nothing to do but ride home on our bicycles.

My biggest pre-ride challenge was trying to figure out which bike to ride. The Goodrich is dialed in, and very comfortable, but a bit heavy for fast road riding. The Atlantis is a known quantity, being my most-ridden bicycle, and my default distance-machine, with generator lighting, fenders, and do-anything 33 mm tires. But the forecast called for sun, and the 23-lb pink bike with skinny tires and no fenders seemed like an exciting choice.

Problem is that I'd only ridden Pinky about 20 miles (total), and the new Brooks B17 Narrow wasn't exactly "broken in". In contemplation of this possibility, I took Pinky for a 30-mile ride on Friday. The bike was fine, but my right knee twinged a bit toward the end of the ride. I lowered the saddle a quarter-inch, and kept my options open. Finally, Saturday afternoon found me outfitting Pinky for a really long ride, including charging batteries for the lights I'd be using.


I pre-mapped the route for this ride, and tried to spice it up by using some unfamiliar back-roads rather than busier highways. This mostly worked, and we generally enjoyed quiet country roads all the way.

Our first few miles out of Winona was up a long hill, with the midday sun beating down on us. I was starting to have some doubts about whether the back-road route was a good idea.

I knew very little about some of the roads, and it turned out, for various reasons, that some gravel roads were on the agenda:

I'm not accustomed to 25 mm tires or 100+ psi under even optimal circumstances, and initially the gravel was pretty unpleasant for me. But once I found my stride, the pink Univega handled the gravel just fine. It definitely takes more skill and conscious effort to ride skinny tires in gravel, but it is doable. Little did I know that conditions would eventually get much worse.

Being a Sunday on a holiday weekend in rural Minnesota, we didn't pass up chances to eat or fill our bottles. We simply couldn't count on finding open restaurants in the next town. Our first meal was frozen pizza in a dive in otherwise lovely Elba. Not ideal, but it was enough to carry us on to Plainview, where the group split up temporarily, some to Subway, some to DQ.

Back on the road, we pressed through the big hills on the way to Lake City. By now the group was starting to spread out. We regrouped under a shade tree after a big climb, and rested until everybody was ready to press on. More rolling hills to one of the best descents in Minnesota: CR-4 into Lake City. The pavement on the 2-mile-long grade is smooth, and the view is spectacular. I keep meaning to take a photo of some of the views, but it's hard to do at 35+ mph.

At Lake City, we ate Subway again, and voted to brave the traffic on Highway 61 to Red Wing, rather than take on more hills and gravel along the back roads. We hauled ass. During most of that stretch, my speedometer was clocked somewhere around 20 mph. We regrouped again in Red Wing before heading down the Cannon Valley Trail to Welch. By now, it was getting dark, and we were closing in on 100 miles since leaving Winona. One of our group split off to head home a bit earlier than planned. The remaining seven continued to follow my experimental route-selection. As we climbed an unfamiliar gravelly bluff road in the pitch dark, I started to think about all the bad things that could happen. What if somebody crashed? Or made a wrong turn? Or if we got chased by a mean dog? Luckily, we were soon back on pavement, and I saw some landmarks of the small outpost of Miesville. In no time, we were on the usual route to Hastings.

By the time we got to Hastings, it was past midnight, and no restaurants were open. As we were all starving, we needed food, and fast. We found a 24-hr grocery store and had a strange picnic out in the parking lot. I purchased: a 6-pack of 3-day old custard-filled long johns, a bottle of chocolate milk, and a pack of smoked string cheese. Others bought ham, water, fruit, etc. We camped out on the concrete and had a potluck. More than one of us remarked that the concrete seemed like a good place for a nap.

From Hastings, exhaustion set in, and things got weird. I pointed out something of interest to one of my companions, but he didn't seem to register what I was telling him. Finally, after the fourth time I told him what I'd said, he replied in a dreamy voice, "that's nice." He was mentally asleep, but still pedaling as well as ever. We stopped on the shoulder of the road to regroup, and a couple of my companions fell asleep in the gravel. To liven things up, we discussed the finer points of trimming our ass hair, and pressed on.

In Eagan, we turned onto a road that on the map looked like a nice little shortcut. One of the other guys warned that it was gravel, but he shot ahead anyway as he said, "but it's short." It turned out to be a difficult place to ride. It was a mix of loose gravel and sinusoidal washboard bumps of maybe 3-inch amplitude. It was thoroughly unpleasant and seemed to go on for a long time. Finally we were back on the paved road. My memories after that are a blur, but we seemed to quickly arrive back at HC (around 3:30 AM), and we scattered to our respective homes, etc.

In the end, the mileage consensus was about 145 miles, including riding to the train station at 6 AM. It was a long, sometimes challenging ride, but the company and weather were great.

It was my sixth century of the year. I've done centuries this year on three different bikes. Pinky is a great bike. I was comfortable all day, and the new Brooks saddle turned out to be a non-issue. Before the ride, I was considering selling the pink bike because I'm not a road bike type, but now I think I'll keep it in the stable for rides like this.

fireworks

Must be a sign of a slow economy. I've heard very few fireworks this year as I try to sleep in the wee hours, and the ones I have heard sounded more like homemade pipe bombs.

stinking up the post office

One temporary cultural preference that has arisen out of the age of cheap and easy energy consumption is our obsession with avoiding the experience of human aroma. This obsession was on display for me today, when I ventured out of the warm cocoon of the bicycle business to the post office. The PO is a great place to observe segments of humanity that I don't regularly encounter at work (this applies to both the customers and the employees of the PO).

As I entered the building, I held the door for a sweaty, sickly, wheezing, grotesquely obese man who was leaving the PO. Upon my entry into the customer service area, I noticed the lingering essence of this man. It was a mix of halitosis, musty sweat, festering crevices, and perhaps some not inconsiderable amount of urine/feces residue. At first, my natural reaction was revulsion, but when I considered this reaction objectively in the context of seeing my own cultural bias, I admitted that the smell wasn't really all that bad. Not that it was good, but I've smelled worse in various industrial settings, college chemistry labs, when food goes bad in the fridge, and other day-to-day experiences that are generally unremarkable.

Anyway, the front-line employees of the PO were clearly in distress, and were running around chaotically like so many freshly beheaded chickens, while the 3 or 4 of us waiting in line were more or less ignored. Finally, another PO employee emerged from the back room, and ordered us all to stand back from the counter, as he, in a split-second, produced some industrial-looking white and blue spray can, and proceeded to fumigate the room with the contents of the can. My smell sense was quickly assaulted with a sickeningly-sweet synthetic-floral fragrance that was more intense, and probably more unhealthy to ingest than the former smell of fat-guy body-odor. It covered up a mildly unpleasant smell with a smell that was unpleasant in a completely different way. To lighten the sour and agitated mood of the place, I said, "usually you guys wait until after I leave to do that!". I saw some of the other customers chuckle. But the PO employees tend to be beyond humor, and they shot me nasty looks as one of them said, "well, at least you took a shower today!".

bicycle friendly communities

Just reading over at Ecovelo about Davis, CA, which is deemed to be a Platinum-level Bicycle Friendly Community by people who purport to know about such things. I was a little curious about the standing of my own city of residence, and I quickly found the master list. Minneapolis isn't a platinum-level bike town, nor is it, to my surprise, a gold town. It's down in the silver level, with the various university towns (e.g. Ann Arbor, Austin, Gainesville) and high-end tourist havens (e.g. Steamboat Springs) of the country.

I don't really know (or care) about the specifics of these rankings, but I suspect that a lot of the relative rankings sort not just by objective measures of actual bike-friendliness, but also by which communities have taken the time to fill out the application in a way that sells the community as a bike-friendly place (Minneapolis apparently got on the silver list just last year). I've ridden in Portland a bit, and admired their bike boxes, covered bike parking, and bike boulevard system. But despite these infrastructural accommodations, I still had a close call or two with motorists (nothing serious) and spent plenty of time dodging potholes. This Spring, I spent two days riding in Indianapolis, which didn't make the list at all and is generally regarded as bike-unfriendly, and found some neat trails, quiet streets, some interesting semi-underground bike culture, and extraordinarily courteous drivers. A couple weeks later, I was riding all over San Diego County, California (also not on the list, except for the city of Oceanside, which is bronze), and was delighted to observe that just about every thru-street of any size has a wide bike lane. Even with a limited understanding of the local geography, I was able to ride anywhere, reasonably confident that I wouldn't get marooned in some cars-only ghetto.

My Platinum-level Portland bicycling experience was excellent, and I hope to go back there sooner than later, but the other places were great fun, too, and shouldn't be written off. These ranking lists are probably fine for general comparisons in the broadest sense, but my experiences suggest that bike friendliness has more to do with the individual cyclist's willingness to get out there and find it than it does with the efforts of city hall.

so you want to go on a bike trip

The recent bicycle trip I did with some of my friends was wonderful, and it's understandable that some have expressed a desire to do something similar, or to be included in future trips that my friends and I might do. But I sincerely hope that nobody is waiting for an invite from me, because I'm pretty busy and will surely forget to include some names on the tour roster, and then there will be hard feelings. Instead of all that, why not just round up a few friends and go out and do it? Here's the route that we followed, minus about 40 miles of detours. It was a nice route, but I have no doubt that equally nice routes exist elsewhere. The internet makes it easy to find these routes. Start with google maps, and try to connect points of interest using as many back roads and minor highways as possible. I should point out that after day 1, I had little or no first-hand knowledge of the roads on our tour route.

I learned a valuable lesson from Kevin, when he told me that my original tour plan was too ambitious. Originally I planned to ride 60-80 miles everyday. With this itinerary, there wouldn't have been much time for sitting around cafes, roadside parks, and tourist attractions, and the trip wouldn't have been as much fun. And, more importantly, I'd have been hard-pressed to find energy at the end of the day to creep out the local female-types!

Before the trip I worried a little about finding camping/lodging. I envisioned rolling into campgrounds after dark, strung-out from a long day, and finding no vacancy. On the other hand, I worried about trying to honor reservations for a campground when a change of plans might have been a more appealing course. In the end, we made no formal plans, and no reservations, and, being midweek, it all worked out. The shorter mileage days gave us time to look around a bit and some flexibility.

In summary, this trip came together based on a route that was sketched out in 10 minutes on gmaps-pedometer with little foreknowledge, and then executed with no formal planning. It was sort of like a college road trip, except on bikes, and without sinister motives.

Last week's 6-day ride

I spent last week on a bicycle tour on SW Wisconsin and SE Minnesota. I'm not going to list the details, because some of my companions have covered the subject adequately (here, here, here). Some of my photos from the trip can be seen here.


Some things I learned/confirmed:
1. Most rural roads are bike friendly, and most rural drivers are polite.
2. Go easy on the dried fruit, or suffer INTENSE gastrointestinal distress, and undeniable flatulence.
3. Minnesota is not necessarily flat.
4. Bike fitting procedures, even the fancy ones that use computers and charts, are, at best, compromised approximations and gross simplifications of reality. All the "science" goes out the window when the road gets hillier, the wind is in the face, or after sitting on the bike for many hours/days. (my red bike was as perfect as possible for the conditions of this trip, by the way)
5. I overpacked on spare parts and tools. I was prepared for all manner of roadside repairs, but had probably 10 lbs of gear that was never necessary. Planning for the "worst-case-scenario" may not be the best strategy. I know a guy who has done many, many extended tours (think miles in the hundreds of thousands), and he doesn't even carry a pump, allegedly. I doubt I'll ever leave the pump home, but I could easily streamline my repair kit.
6. I also overpacked on food. I intended to go light on food, but packing food has a way of snowballing beyond my best intentions. I returned home still carrying a lot of the same food I packed a week earlier. Better to get food on the road, and take it 1-2 days at a time.
7. For the kind of riding I prefer, 30-50 miles/day is a reasonable target. Eighty-plus-mile days are doable, but the mileage requirements can become a burden under any but the most ideal scenarios.

one fine day

I'm marking May 24, 2009 as the best cycling day of my life. We started with about 16 riders, but quickly split into factions. A few riders didn't share my zeal for gravelly bluffs, and others couldn't keep up with the core group's ambitious eating schedule. In short order, I found myself riding with six others who shared both my love of adventure, and my insatiable appetite for pastry.

We started by rolling out en masse from Red Wing, MN, crossing the bridge over the Mississippi River, associated ponds, and what not.


After the bridge, we lost three riders who wanted nothing to do with unknown back roads, which was sensible. Within minutes of getting onto a nice side road, I experienced self-doubt. I turned off, and we were quickly back on hwy 35, which we were trying to avoid. The highway isn't bad, so we rode on, and up the infamous Bay City Hill:

It's not terribly steep, but the climbing goes on for more than 2 miles. I realized at this point that my saddle was too high. Aha, I'm wearing different shoes! I made it to the top and lowered the saddle 7/33", more or less, and felt instantly better.

From there it was on to Maiden Rock, and pie. Some heretics have been claiming that the Smiling Pelican pie is nothing special. I'm no connoisseur, but the pie works for me, and their outdoor garden/patio is delightful. I didn't take any photos of the pie or the garden this time. Despite pie competition not far down the road, the Smiling Pelican will continue to be one of my regular stops. After Maiden Rock we turned off the beaten path again, for one of Wisconsin's "Rustic Roads".

This is a rugged climb that crosses 3-4 flowing streams. No bridges, just pedal like hell. At the top of the bluff, we find gently rolling farmland.

The pavement starts again, and the road plunges down into Stockholm in a most exhilarating fashion. More pie in Stockholm. I had a chocolate pecan concoction, which was delish, but may have pushed me past the point of contentedness. Fuck it, this is living.

We stopped in Nelson for, guess what, lunch! Then we crossed into Minnesota and the charming town of Wabasha. Here we crossed Highway 61 and began climbing out of the valley at county road 10. The climb was substantial. Estimates varied from 3 miles to 10 miles, but the pavement was smooth and the countryside beautiful, and I loved every minute of the exertion. At the top, we were surprised by a quick glimpse of Lake Pepin, and most of us got photographed with that backdrop. Here's an ugly mug:


Not many more pictures thereafter, but the roads just got better and better. We rode maybe a mile total on 61, and avoided virtually all of the motorcycle traffic. On the home stretch, some of us got a little excited and rode too fast. We stopped to wait for our more sensible companions, but they didn't arrive. I rode back several miles, and didn't find them. I met another cyclist who hadn't seen them. We later concluded that they turned off somewhere, which turned out to be a good idea. The rest of us rode further, and turned off down the road. This added several miles and a killer climb to the route. It was a sweet moment when we realized that we were on the final descent into Red Wing. Everybody else was faster than our group, but only because we ate more and rode more. Several of the group completed their first centuries and other personal bests.

evolution of a fatalist

Over the years, I've experimented with various reactions to stories like this.

Dennis Dumm commuted by bike every day and followed the rules of the road, his girlfriend said. The driver won't be cited.

In a number of ways, I can relate to Dennis Dumm. He was the same age as me, interested in bicycle commuting, getting free of his car, a photography enthusiast, etc. In the old days, I would have expressed my reaction to this tragic incident with a mix of surprise/dismay and trumped-up outrage. I may have joined some of the more reactionary types on local forums in calling for the truck driver's head.

But now I look at this story with a more jaded eye. The truck driver wasn't cited for his likeliest violation of traffic statute, failure to yield, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody who follows stories of this type. I would submit that the truck driver will have to deal with his own sense of guilt, which is a larger penalty than some trivial traffic citation. But blame can also be heaped on city policymakers and street engineers for creating a bicycling facility that is commonly described by people who use it as "treacherous". Perhaps, also, Dumm could have selected a safer route or been more cognizant of the heavily loaded truck that was turning into his lane. Frankly, I'm done with the blame game. Without assigning blame, I can concoct any number of scenarios that would have changed the factors in play just slightly, and would result in a different outcome. Sort of a butterfly effect kind of logic. Why blame a truck driver, city engineers, or the cyclist's technique, when we can chalk up the unfortunate convergence to meteorology, how long the driver in front of the dump truck spent eating breakfast, or the inflation pressure of Dumm's bicycle tires? Add or subtract 5 seconds, and it might all be different, and Dumm would have lived to ride again, unaware of how close he was to being dead.

Rather than trying to identify a singular villain, who can conveniently be held to account for this irreversible tragedy, I take this story as a constructive learning experience. I'm lucky to have learned the lesson of big trucks turning into my lane through a close call or two, but the Dennis Dumm story really drives the point home. Be aware, ride conservatively, maintain escape routes in traffic, etc. Beyond this detail of cycling in traffic is a greater lesson. As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously noted, in the long run, we're all dead. Whether we get hit by a truck, contract an inexplicable terminal cancer, or live to 100 in fine health before dying peacefully in our sleep, there are no guarantees, and no entitlements. Being alive exposes us to all manner of risks to life and limb, and none of us are getting out alive.