Month: November 2024

Weather Gone Bung – November 2024

The month began with more rainless days. The streak continued for over 35 days. There were wildfires in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. At the very end of the month, the weather switched to wintery. Brrr. Climate change will be the death of us.

The election results shocked me. I can’t believe that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote against the most flawed opponent in history. As I recall Biden won by only tens of thousands of votes in the swing states. In a tight race, misogyny and racism exceeds incompetence and corruption. The next four years are going to be painful. As for me, I am turning off the TV and skipping the alarmist articles in the newspaper about what is going to happen. Worry is like carrying an umbrella on a sunny day.

Bicycling

The quest for 10,000 miles carries on. I hit 9,000 miles on November 7 and finished the 865-mile month with 9,623 miles.

I did two event rides. The 60-mile Cider Ride featured a posse of six. We had good time and the pizza and beer afterwards were delicious. The Ride for Your Life was a more somber affair. The ride was 8 miles from Bethesda to the Lincoln Memorial. The event raises awareness about traffic violence in the U.S. Getting to the start was a 21-mile ride in itself, making for a 43.5 mile day.

My back woes were really getting to be unbearable in October. I went to a wedding and the pain was tough to take. I also had neuropathy (pain and tingling in my right hand and arm) that seemed to worsen by the day. After riding my recumbent upon my return, I could barely stand up. I had been researching platform pedals for a while when I kept hearing that when using them you need to move the saddle forward. So, on a whim, I moved the saddle on the CrossCheck forward a few millimeters. My comfort on and off the bike was immediately improved.

I bought some MKS Lambda platform pedals and put them on the Tank. It was the first time in 40 years that I had ridden without toe clips and straps. I found I needed to raise the saddle a tad but the resulting position served me well. Even better, the pedals work great with my overboots and with my hiking boots.

Unfortunately my neuropathy returned. Earlier in the year I developed trigger finger on the middle finger of my right hand. (The finger will randomly lock in a crooked posture like a claw. Eek.) A hand surgeon gave me a shot of cortisone. Time will tell if sets me right. He also tested me for carpal tunnel syndrome. I passed! So I have a medical BOGO and, as a bonus, a pinched nerve in my neck.

A couple of week later I went for a deep tissue massage. It was pretty painful but the therapist concurred with the surgeon about the pinched nerve. She pulled me this way and that. She pressed one knotted muscle after another. I hurt all over. But two days later I felt much improved.

Reading

The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto tells the mostly overlooked story of New Netherland with a focus on New Amsterdam. My wife gave it to me for my birthday and I thought it was going to be a snoozer but it turned out to be very interesting. (I am from Albany, New York which plays a role in the story so I have a heightened personal interest.) New Amsterdam, like “old” Amsterdam was a mixture of melting pot and wild, wild west. The town was an outpost of the Dutch West India Company which specialized in privateering, raiding non-Dutch vessels and stealing their goods. New Amsterdam was on the threshold of becoming a sort of proto-US when the Brits showed up with their warships and took over. God save the king and all that nonsense.

The Hunter by Tana French. This grand thriller is a sequel to French’s The Searcher. Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago cop living in rural northwestern Ireland. He’s an outsider and a distrusted guarda (cop) to the locals who make living in a small town something out of a Sartre play. A couple of grifters come to town in search of gold. Crosses and double crosses, plot twists and turns, and that’s all before the murder. And then the Dublin police show up. Eek.

Watching

Endurance is a National Geographic documentary about the 2022 search for the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship at the bottom of the sea near Antarctica. The film interweaves the story of the Endurance expedition of 1914 to 1917 and the search for the wreckage nearly 10,000 feet below sea level in 2022. I’d already read two books on the Endurance so I knew the story of the expedition but I found the documentary interesting nonetheless.

Mat Ryder’s Great Divide Mountain Bike ride – After watching the video series of his ride across the US by road, I decided to check out his ride from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route last year. Steep climbs, scary descents, wildlife (grizzly bears, elk, bison, rattlesnakes, llamas, free range cattle, hawks, vultures, and more), rain, impassable mud, hurricane- remnant winds, blistering sun, high altitude, and more. There was also amazing scenery, appalling meals, and incredibly friendly people. He crossed the routes of my 2018, 2019, and 2022 tours in several places. This video series comes in roughly half hour installments (beginning here) or in one edited three-hour movie.

Beatles ’64. This is a documentary that trots out film and interviews about the Beatles first trip to the U.S. There’s nothing new to be seen, of course. I watched it while I was doing laundry. The performances benefited from new techniques that clean up the sound and isolate the band from the screaming crowds. It’s interesting to hear parts of their first U. S. concert in a boxing ring at the Washington Colosseum, now home to an REI store. I was one of the 70+million viewers who saw them on Ed Sullivan and didn’t “get” them. They were very different from what I was used to. I was a little too young and wasn’t into music yet.

New Bike Stuff

I recently acquired some new bike toys that hopefully will solve some nagging little bugaboos in my bike life.

The Click-Stand, the Silca Tattico hand pump, and the Var tire levers

The Click-Stand: The Mule doesn’t have a kickstand which can be annoying when parking when a wall isn’t around. Enter the Click-Stand. I first saw one in use on my 2019 bike trip. Corey had one and used it often. He liked it a lot (until he bent it on our 2022 tour. Derp.). I figured it was worth a try. It’s basically a collapsible tent pole with a cradle on top. Two straps hold the brakes tight to stabilize the bike.

So far the reviews are mixed. My friend Chris used his Click-Stand at a stop on the Cider Ride. It didn’t hold and his bike fell over. Hmmm. Also, there are little rubber band thingies that you use to squeeze the brakes levers to keep the bike stable. Because I use bar end shifters, I had to assemble the thingies myself. One assembled (it’s really just a plastic clasp on the ends of a rubber cord) without incident. The other failed and I can’t get it to work. I guess I’ll be using a velcro strap instead.

VAR tire levers: I ride on Schwable and Panaracer tires. Both brands make tires that are super hard to mount onto the rim. You can get one bead over the rim easily. You can get 90 percent of the opposite bead over the rim then you cry. If you try to use conventional tire levers to get the remaining bead over, you’ll succeed but you’ll puncture the tube in the process. More tears. Without levers you’ll tear the skin off your thumbs. What to do?

Beth at Bikes at Vienna convinced me to try a clever combination tire lever/tire jack. There are three arms to this arrangement. One arm is a stand-alone, conventional tire lever. The other marries a tire lever with a second arm, the jack part. You plant one end on the rim and use the opposite end to hook the bead on the opposite side of the rim. Then you use leverage to pull the bead over the rim. Beth uses it in the shop. I tried it at home. It works. The skin on my thumbs is happy. No more tears.

The Silca Tattico minipump: I have been very frustrated with portable bike pumps. For many years I relied on a Zefal frame pump. This pump lasted about 20 years until it wore out. It worked great but, lacking a hose, it could be prone to damaging the tire valve during the last bit of pumping. Mounted under the top tube, the Zefal got in the way when I needed to heft my bike and carry it.

I switched to Top Peak Road Morph pumps. A foot pad flips out of the bottom allowing this pump to convert from a small size into a mini floor pump. It’s a clever design but small parts of the pump (such as the lever securing the pump head to the tire valve) fall off from time to time. And after a couple of years the pump seals start to fail. This isn’t a problem if you only want 30 pounds per square inch of air in your tire but that’s not enough for me. So I tried a Lezyne micro floor pump. It’s a little bigger and operates similarly to the Top Peak. It doesn’t have the problem with parts falling off but it has a handle that digs into your hand as you use the pump. More problematic, the chuck threads onto the valve stem. It’s a very secure connection except it can be too secure; the chuck can pull the valve stem out of the valve. This can ruin your whole day. Ugh. (I am told that the valve that I have was redesigned to avoid this problem. Let’s hope so.)

I found a video comparing the Lezyne and a hand pump made by Silca. Like the Top Peak and the Lezyne, the Silca Tattico pump has a hose to keep the valve stem from being damaged while pumping. It lacks the foot peg that turns the other pumps into a mini floor pump. But, according to the video, it works. It takes a while but it does the job. Time will tell.

MKS Lambda pedals: I am a die-hard user of flat pedals with toe clips. (I’ve tried clipless of various designs and hated them.) These work great but they have two limitations. First, when riding in winter, I often use booties over my bike shoes. Getting my booted feet in and out of the toe clips is an ergonomic mess. I could take the toe clips off but then I’d have a short pedal that my feet would slip off of. Second, in the summer, I can’t ride with sandals because the toe clips are designed for a closed-toe shoe.

My requirements are a solid, non-slippery surface and a wide platform for my wide feet. I have been asking people including YouTubers what they use. Mat Ryder used platforms with pins on some short tours but he found that if the pedal hit his calf it would cut into his skin. The whole blood on his calf thing just didn’t work for him. For his Great Divide Mountain Bike Ride and his TransAmerica Ride he used MKS Lambda pedals. They look weird but are kind of long and have nubby bits to keep your feet stable. Mat never mentioned his pedals after over 6,000 miles of use, on road and off. That’s as good a recommendation as you can hope for so I picked up a pair at Bikes at Vienna. I’ll put install them soon and we’ll see how I like them.

MKS Lambda pedals

Mat Ryder’s Epic Adventure

For the last several weeks I’ve been anxiously waiting the next installment on YouTube of Welshman Mat Ryder’s ride across the United States. He began in Astoria Oregon and followed the Adventure Cycling TransAmerica Trail as far as Dubois, Wyoming. There the TransAm dips south through Colorado and Kansas. Frustrated with traffic, Mat took a more direct route, called the Bike NonStop, east across Nebraska. He ended up riding about the same number of miles (4,344) as the TransAm.

Making the YouTube videos brought him some pleasant surprises in the form of viewers meeting him and helping him with routing, shelter, food, and beer.

As I have said before, this series of videos is the very best account of a cross country ride I’ve seen in that it gives the viewer a sense of what each day is like from waking up to bedtime. Mat endured wildfire smoke, rain, headwinds, tedious climbs, traffic, saddle sores, and fatigue but he also encountered tailwinds, sunny days, epic downhills, car-free trails, and innumerable instances of kindness from strangers and, as I mentioned, viewers. From nearly abandoned towns in the plains to the chaos of Times Square, he saw it all.

Mat had zero flats (as did I), was chased by only a couple of dogs (he didn’t ride through Kentucky), not a single crash, and barely any mechanical problems.

Check it out from the start.

Time Back and Time Off

Yesterday was the annual Cider Ride, an event staged by the Washington Area Bicyclists Association. As usual there were three ride options. The ten-mile option is for families or others who don’t want to ride all day. The 30-mile ride is for sane people. The 60-mile ride is the one I do every year.

Usually I ride with about ten people but for a variety of reasons we had six people this year. Chris and Kevin returned for the umpteenth time. Neena and her father Richard came along after they were not scared off by the 50 States Ride in September. Brian, whom I had never met, joined us at the start.

I led the group through the streets of Northeast DC before Chris – who was navigating with a GPS – took us up the Anacostia River trails to the first pit stop at Proteus Bicycles (looks like a terrific shop by the way) in College Park, Maryland. We had ridden 16 miles and Chris set a fast pace so we did our best to fuel up on donuts and hot apple cider.

We headed out for the road portion of the ride, north into the Greenbelt USDA agricultural preserve. Beyond that we rode up Powder Mill Road to the Pawtuxent Wildlife Refuge which graciously allowed us to use their restrooms. We determined that Richard had the longest arms so he took a team selfie.

Kevin, Neena, Brian, me, Chris, and Richard

We retraced our way down Powder Mill Road. It is a very smooth, slightly downhill roll so I let The Mule fly for a couple of miles. We were both pretty tired afterwards. The route took us through a residential neighborhood near Beltsville before we crossed the agricultural reserve toward Greenbelt. The crossing involved the only really serious climb of the route, a climb that is complicated by a gate across the road. You get extra bonus points for pedaling through the gap at the side of the gate. The Mule failed.

In Greenbelt we stopped at pit stop number two in Buddy Attick Park for apple pie and cider. Normally, this stop involves a bazillion bees but this year they weren’t so bad.

The route returns to the Anacostia Trails with a short diversion through Riverdale and Hyattsville. Next it was back to the trails as I lagged a few hundred yards behind the group. We hit the final pit stop at mile 47 in Bladensburg Waterfront Park for another donut. The next seven miles or so took us down the Anacostia River Trail to the 11th Street Bridge. We crossed the river and rode back up the ART on the west side of the river to RFK Stadium, a multiuse stadium that is now all but abandoned.

From RFK we rode the C Street cycle track to Capitol Hill then danced with city buses past Union Station. The First Street cycletrack took us to the Metropolitan Branch Trail for the last mile to the finish at Metrobar.

At Metrobar we refueled on last time on the USDA approved pizza and beer.

Recovery food

The ride really did me in this year. When Chris wasn’t putting the hurt on me, Kevin and Neena were. It felt like we were going much faster than last year but Chris says his Strava reported that we were actually five minutes slower. Maybe, just maybe, I would have done better if I had ridden over 500 miles since mid-October with only one day off.

Our group was pretty mellow this time. We missed Michael (dislocated shoulder), Domitille (torn ligament in her arm) and Sara (deployed by FEMA to help in southwestern Virginia). Michael brings his stunt riding (he did 50 States on bikeshare bikes). Domitille brings self deprecating humor and snark (not to mention celery). Sara’s boundless enthusiasm keeps our spirits up.

Today I took the day off from riding. I ordered prescriptions, did laundry, reset the time on my bike computers (a total PITA), and experimented with quieting the annoying buzz from my bike rack. I learned afterwards that the solution may be as simple as twisting the straps that connect the rack to the car.

When resetting the time, I take a picture of the odometers

Tomorrow, I return to the 10,000-mile quest. Only 1,151 miles to go!

October 2024 – Rain?

Biking

I started the month by taking four days completely off my bike, and a 7-and-half-mile day that was a ride home from an auto body shop. (The short ride was courtesy of my neighbor who backed his humongous pickup truck into my parked car.)

The month featured over four weeks without rain. And mostly warm temperatures. It was in the 80s on Halloween, quite normal for Orlando. Great riding weather. The Tank hit 31,000 miles. The Mule hit 77,000. I did a couple of hundred miles on Big Nellie as well.

The Tank
The Mule

I did squeeze in three longish rides. One was a one-way, downhill jaunt from Purcellville to home via the Washington and Old Dominion Trail. Another ride was the Great Pumpkin Ride in the Virginia Piedmont outside Warrenton. The last was a 48-mile bikeabout in DC.

The total mileage for the month was low, owing to the days off, but I consider 812 miles a victory.

In September I decided not to do the Natchez Trace ride this month. It was a good thing too. The price for the same van-supported (you don’t carry your gear) tour was cut by about $1,000 for 2025. Also, the direct driving route to Nashville from DC was torn apart by flooding from a hurricane. Then there was the matter of my car being in the body shop for two weeks. I’ll reconsider doing the Trace in the spring.

The Tank hit 31,000 miles only to be topped by The Mule hitting 77,000 a week later.

My year-to-date mileage stands at 8,757 miles, 424 miles ahead of 10,000-mile pace. Barring a crash or other interruption, I should bad another 10,000-mile year by Christmas.

Reading

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. This is Rooney’s fourth novel. I thought her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You was awful. This one was much better. The story involves two Irish (of course) brothers who must sort out their interpersonal and romantic relationships after the death of their father. I found it hard to get into Rooney’s writing style at first, perhaps because my reading was interrupted by beaucoup baseball playoff games. Still, a definitely welcome rebound.

Watching

The VP Debate – I did not watch this. I heard some of it on the radio in the car. J D Vance performed way better than my expectations and Walz worse. I doubt it matters unless the debater is utterly incoherent (see Biden, Joe).

The Rick Rubin Interview with Rick Beato. Rick Rubin is a record producer who has worked with a crazy array of musical artists including Run DMC and Aerosmith, a 16-year-old LL Cool Jay, Tom Petty, Slasher, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and an aged Johnny Cash. He started producing when he was an undergraduate at NYU. He founder Def Jam Records and used his dorm address as his business address. It’s fascinating to hear how he went from a music fanatic to learning how to make amazingly good records.

Baseball – The Nationals season ended. May the 2024 Nats memory be a blessing. Watching the playoff teams tells me that the Nats have a long way to go. Maybe they’ll be a playoff team by 2026. Maybe. Meanwhile the playoff games kept me glued to the TV. The Dodgers dominated the Yankees for three games in the World Series. The Yanks came back with a monster game four only to fall utterly apart in the fifth game. Shohei got his ring. Freddie was Freddie and Kike did a decent imitation of Reggie Jackson.

Bicycling Videos -I was hoping to actually meet Mat Ryder when he rode through DC but his videos lag his riding by about a week so I missed him. As it turns out he spent four nights at a home a couple of miles from my house! His series is the best tutorial on cross country solo bike touring that I’ve ever seen. Watching it episode by episode is time consuming but watching the whole series helps convey the enormity of his task. (I imagine he’ll create a single, condensed video of the entire trip at some point.) Congrats to Mat.

I also started watching Sheelagh Daly‘s videos about bike touring and nutrition. For her first bike tour, a solo one at that, she flew to Scotland and rode alone to Croatia. (I suspect that the English Channel was a bit of wet slog.) I can’t even. Sheelagh has loads of videos on the ins and outs of bike touring so she’s a great resource for someone planning a tour.