Three years in a row. And very nearly four but for some nasty blood clots in my lungs in December 2017.
It was mentally much harder to do this without a tour or rides with a purpose. From 2017 to 2019 I’ve done 9,000 miles on tours. Riding to Friday Coffee Club is worth about 1,000 miles a year. And Nationals games are another 900 miles or so. In 2017, when I missed 10,000 miles by 89 miles, I did 3,912 miles just riding to and from work.
I’m not done yet. I am chasing one more milestone in this godforsaken year.
With today’s storm in the mid-Atlantic bicycling outside was out of the question. I took advantage of the foul weather to change the rear tire on The Mule. The screw (likely a drywall screw) that caused the flat had a sharp point on one end and was about 1.5 inches long. I am surprised the tube didn’t explode. It had a ragged hole in it a bit smaller than a dime. The screw put a nice precision hole in my tire too. I actually had to use a screwdriver to get it out. It was in pristine condition. My tire not so much.
I tossed the tire and tube in the trash bin and installed a new Schwalbe Mondial tire. I was expecting to spend a half hour getting it on as Schwalbe tires are notorious for mounting difficulty.
To my surprise the Mondial went on without much fuss at all. I did change my technique a bit. I started mounting the tire from the valve end. (I usually start it opposite the valve.) When I got to the frustrating part where the last bit of the tire bead wouldn’t go over the rim, I let air out of the tube and pushed the valve end of the tire against my thighs. This created plenty of slack and the bead popped over the rim.
Of course, once I had it mounted the tire I realized it had a directional tread. And, you guessed it, I put it on backward. So I re-installed it. It took about a minute.
Tomorrow, after allowing for the roads to be safe, I’ll take The Mule out and see how it rolls.
Yesterday I said that the last 200 miles of my quest for 10,000 in 2020 would be harder.
About 2 1/2 miles into today’s ride, The Mule got screwed in the rear. Tire, that is. (Sorry. Couldn’t help myself. I’ve been watching Fleabag.)
It’s been an odd year for punctures. From 2015 to 2019, I toured with 40 pounds on my bike for 10,000 miles without a single flat thanks to my Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires. This year, despite using the same brand of tires and carrying lighter loads, I’ve had at least four flats.
Today’s flat happened after I rode through some debris in the roadway. I know my rear tire hit something because there was a metallic sound and the back of my bike deflected to the right. A half mile later I started hearing a loud click with every revolution of my wheels. Then the rear end started moving sideways. I hopped off the bike and saw that my rear tire was flat. I initially thought the culprit was a roofing nail. On closer inspection I realized it was a screw of some sort. I’m pretty sure that it gradually worked its way through the tread. I suspect that the tire is kaput. I put it on 3,500 miles ago.
In late summer I bought a Schwalbe Mondial tire. It’s lighter weight but not as puncture resistant as the Marathon Plus. With tomorrow’s storm I’ll have plenty of time to install it.
After getting a lift back home from my wife, I took my CrossCheck out to continue my ride. I rode an additional 32 miles. The only time I felt remotely uncomfortable was when the sun started to set and the temperature dropped.
In marathon running, the race is 26.2 miles long. The half way point is at 20 miles. That’s when the bear jumps on your back.
Riding 10,000 miles in a year has some resemblance. It seems the last 200 miles are going to have some challenges.
A New Route
We had terrific weather over the last three days so I banged out 111 miles. I discovered a new 41-mile out-and back ride that has lots to offer. It follows the Potomac Heritage Trail to Fort Washington National Park.
I ride 5 miles to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Then I go over the bridge and down a fun spiral ramp that takes me further down to a cove near National Harbor. Just before the harbor, I turn east through a corrugated steel tunnel and climb a half mile past the MGN casino complex and up Oxon Hill.
At the top, I bang a right on Oxon Hill Road and ride through three roundabouts. They do a good job of calming traffic and they make you feel like a little kid for some reason. Whee! There is an bike lane, sometimes protected, often with glass and other debris. (Not the greatest design but at least a B+ for effort.) After my rotary service, I take a right on Fort Foote Road for three miles of rolling suburb. This takes me back to Oxon Hill Road. A right turn begins a fast descent off the hill to Livingston Road where I take a right. This road isn’t very pleasant but I’m only on it for a mile or so when I take a another right onto Fort Washington Road. A half mile later the PHT turns right on Riverview Road for a tour of a pretty fine suburban neighborhood. Many of the homes face the Potomac River. (There are a few big houses down long access drives. I think they are safe houses or owned by mobsters. Feel free to check this out on your own.) I go past a marina and over Swan Creek.
Next it’s time for some golf. The PHT winds through a golf-based development for another mile or so before returning to Fort Washington Road where two short but challenging climbs bring me to the gates of Fort Washington Park. I ride to the fort and, if I am in the mood, take some time to check out the view of the river. (Fort Washington is directly across the river from Fort Hunt. Riders on the Mount Vernon Trail can get a good look at it.)
After reaching the fort, I retrace my steps. There are only a couple of nasty hills, one leaving the park, and one going back up Oxon Hill.
Beware the MVT
On Sunday I did my 35-mile route up to the Arlington Triangle, and back. About 26 miles of this ride are on trails. The 60-degree weather brought out all kinds of people making the ride truly annoying. Twice I came to a dead stop because traffic backed up behind a slow mover. Then there were the people who stopped and chatted on the trail. (Lovely day. Look at all the bikes. Those riders look upset. Can’t imagine why.) Must not kill. And there was the one guy walking his dog with a friend. He decided to do a crazy Ivan (a quick, no-look turn around into oncoming traffic). Something told me to be ready. Good thing I had my hands on my brakes.
I have come to expect that trail users who are chatting as they go filter out audible warnings from passing riders. That’s what happened in this case. I just missed taking Ivan out. He said he was sorry. Would have been a lot sorrier if I hadn’t been paying attention.
In Rosslyn I passed the site of a hotel implosion earlier in the day. It was an immense pile of rubble. I pulled over to the left to take a picture from the side of the trail. A pathlete zoomed by me without warning. I yelled “Passing on your left!” sarcastically.
Later the ride included getting stuck behind seven riders going at a crawl. (Try passing seven bikes at the same time.) During the delay we came to a cluster of people blocking the trail. It was a group of seven walkers. Three were blocking the left lane. Four had just crossed a busy road to our right. One of the four, a toddler, decided that now was a good time to flop on the ground and whine. With mom and dad distracted, their six year old was darting back and forth across the trail.
Once I cleared all this humanity, I found my self speeding along with a tail wind. The ride home was not half bad, except for the running of the tourists in Old Town Alexandria. The passage under the Woodrow Wilson Bridge just south of tourist central was scenic relief. (This picture was taken at the same time of day on Friday.)
Fed up with trail chaos, I left the trail and climbed the Park Terrace hill. This beast is exactly 20 yards higher than my legs will go. I stood and pounded away at the pedals. My thighs felt like they were on fire. All I had to do was to get past the parked Volvo at the top. Not gonna happen. I had to sit and use my granny. Dang.
The End of the Line
Today featured cold rain. We’re back to December. The last 100 miles will be tough. Tomorrow I’ll ride in 40- degree weather. I don’t wanna! Then we expect snow for Wednesday. After that I’ll pick and choose my last three days of cold riding. Temps will top out around 40 for the remainder of the week. Nothing like having a polar bear on your back.
Barring a catastrophe (don’t laugh, it happened three years ago), I should be at 10,000 miles by Sunday or Monday. On Saturday, I am joining the indefatigable Judd Lumberjack who is organizing volunteer work crews to do maintenance on the Mount Vernon Trail. Our assignment is to clean and nail down boards on infamous Bridge No. 1. I crashed on this bridge about 30 years ago. I cut my arm to the bone, dislocated my left knee, and nearly destroyed my bike. Vengeance will be mine.
Next up, on December 23, I am going to the Bloodmobile down the street to donate blood. Maybe I can throw them a clot or two. In all seriousness, I am ashamed to say that I’ve never donated before. I picked a good time to donate because I think they give a covid antibody test to all donors. Can bears get covid? Seems only fair.
About a mile and a half into my ride today I came upon a full grown fox. He was just ambling along in someone’s yard. No worries. Never even turned his head in my direction as I rode past.
Fast forward about 12 miles. I am riding south along the Dyke Marsh area on the Mount Vernon Trail. The area to my left is filled with trees along the edge of the marsh. I hear a barking sound. Another fox. It’s off a ways. I can’t see it, but I can hear it clear as day. As I ride the sound follows along. It gets louder. I am half expecting the fox to pop out from behind a tree. After a half mile, the barking stops and I pedal onward.
I continue south on the trail. I am about 3/4ths of a mile from the trailhead at Mount Vernon when there is a burst of activity immediately to my left. It’s a bunch of vultures, perhaps 8 or 10, packed together. I startled them and several of the beasts flew up into the air, two directly in front of me.
Not wanting to crash and become dessert, I focused on keeping on the trail and never did discover what the vultures were eating. My guess from the number of birds is that it was a deer. Ew.
I did a little research. It’s a good thing I didn’t stop to further investigate the wake (that’s what you call a group of vultures eating together) because vultures have been known to puke on people who upset them.
I managed to make it a week into December before running out of gas. I woke up tired and with dead legs. I was expecting some snow to give me an excuse to take the day off from riding but alas the snow stayed to our south. Still with temperatures in the high 30s for most of the morning I gave myself permission to slag off for the day.
The day was not without it’s productive bits. I got some Christmas shopping and a load of laundry done. During the former I walked about a mile in Old Town Alexandria. There was some stenosis discomfort initially but it faded as I kept moving and I managed to walk a nice loop through Covided streets. Covided streets are nearly empty of people and full of odd tents outside restaurants. I felt bad for the lonely waiters. Not much lunch being served today.
I went to Old Town to shop at Old Town Books, a new independent book shop. There are only a couple of types of stores that I enjoy browsing in and bookshops are one of them. Amazon nearly killed the small bookstores off. Oddly, Old Town Books is located across the alley from the location of Olssen’s, a bookstore that Amazon killed ten or so years ago. I loved Olssen’s so I am going out of my way to give Old Town Books as much of my business as possible.
In addition to being tired, I have been famished all day. I think the brain confuses fatigue with hunger at times. Naps are like fuel for the system. I have become quite good at napping during the pandemic. Whenever tis nonsense ends, I am wondering how I will be able to bike tour without a nap.
I’ve also taken to reading obituaries over breakfast. I suppose it’s a way to thumb my nose at the fates over Cheerios and coffee. Anyway, there was an obituary of a local man who was down in Florida. He was on his bike, waiting at a red light. He was hit by a motor vehicle and killed. He and his bike were on the sidewalk at the time. It brought to mind the death of my friend Dave who was killed in a similar fashion about 18 months ago.
Gruesome coincidence aside, the Florida victim was a 77-year-old retiree who led week-long bicycle tours. I’m out there everyday grinding away in my mid-60s complaining about fatigue, sore knees, and headwinds and this guy was a decade older leading bike tours! There’s hope for me yet.
When I am not biking, I am either reading or watching TV with the fam, as they say. My book du jour is Daphne de Maurier’s Rebecca. I am reading it so the family can sit down and watch the original movie and the recent remake.
On weekends, my wife, daughter, and I have been watching three shows. The Crown raises the interesting question: with only fraction of the US population, how does the UK produce so many great character actors? If you watch enough episodes you may catch yourself saying things like: “One never knows, does one?” and “Extraordinary”.
We’ve also become big fans of The Child, known in most circles as Baby Yoda. The series is called The Mandalorian. It could easily be called “Have Ray Gun, Will Travel”, because it’s really just a space version of a western with a mysterious hero travelling around and righting wrongs every week. I half expect him to say “Hi Yo, Silver! Away!” at the end of every episode. The vibe is the thing.
The third series is Luther, a police procedural set in London. It stars Idris Elba as the titular Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, a sort of hulking, black Sherlock Holmes. Luther has all kinds of personal and ethical quirks which encumber and sometimes facilitate finding the bad guy. He wears the same clothes in every episode and investigates crime scenes with his hands in his coat pockets. He doesn’t carry a gun, preferring to talk suspects into submission, which doesn’t always work out particularly well. Oftentimes, he makes a Holmesian observation from seemingly innocuous evidence at the crime scene. “Our killer was in the service.” He has yet to say “The games afoot!” though.
This pandemic riding is getting old. I went around in circles for another 855 miles in November, riding 26 of 30 days. I managed one event, the WABA Cider Ride which was 55 1/2 miles long. All the rest of my rides began and ended at my house. I long for the day when I can point my bike in a direction and not end up where I started.
Riding around aimlessly may be somewhat boring but the effort keeps the demon depression at bay. I have to say that riding long solo tours has really been a godsend for my longer term mental health, especially in the world of social distancing. I miss my friends but solitude can be a comfort if you learn to let it be.
Another aspect about these pandemic rides is the occasional odd memory that pops into my head. I recall camping in a town park in Illinois with two men my age. We went out to dinner at the town family restaurant (a diner without the stools). They were headed east and I was going west.
From time to time I’ll remember a place that I can’t, well, place. Where was that? What state? Nothing remarkable happened but the experience of being there was stored in some recess of my mind. Circle, Montana. Salem, North Dakota. A trailer park in the north woods of Wisconsin. Ducks waking me on the Erie Canal in west central New York, Lord, knows so many dusty near-ghost towns in Kansas.
9,510 miles down, 490 miles to go to reach 10,000. Because I am not getting up at before dawn to ride to work, I am not acclimated to cold weather. The coming week with daytime highs in the 40s will test my resolve to get out and ride with layers on. Time to break out the wind pants, the holey wool sweater, and shoe coverings. It’s really not so bad once you warm up. Self delusion is my middle name.
Sunday was the sixth Cider Ride, an event put on annually by the Washington Area Bicyclists Association. The first two Cider Rides were in December. This proved to be rather unpleasant, especially the second which was held in a cold (and I mean cold) rain. I’ve ridden all six rides but DNFed on the second. My friend Reba broke her chain. We stood in the cold rain for 20 minutes trying to fix it to no avail. I took the sag wagon back with her.
The Cider Ride has three lengths, the Candy Apple (10 miles), the McIntosh (30 miles) and the Honeycrisp (55 miles). Normally, these rides are held on the same day, but this year the shorter rides were held on Saturday to allow for social distancing. I rode the Honeycrisp.
I checked in at the Dew Drop Inn registration desk where I picked up a cue sheet and a Cider Ride tin cup. The cup has a carabiner built into its handle. I attached the cup to my saddle bag so that it could clank as I hit the bumps along the route.
Before setting off on The Mule, I made sure to partake in my favorite fall energy snack: warm apple cider and a doughnut. Having shocked my pancreas, I followed the route along neighborhood streets through Northeast DC and into Mount Rainier Maryland. Here, the route switched over to trails along the Anacostia River and its tributaries up into College Park Maryland.
Lake Artemesia
At about 13 miles, I hit the first pit stop at Proteus Bicycles in Hollywood. I had another cup of warm cider but, mindful of my health, I resisted the urge to snarf another doughnut and ate a banana instead.
Back on the bike, the ride followed roads and entered the USDA’s agricultural research facility. The research area was nearly traffic-free through fields and woods along Beaver Dam Road. You know you’re in nerd heaven when you cross Soil Conservation Road.
After a mile on Springfield Road it’s on to Powder Mill Road. This road is a two-lane highway, but has wide, smooth, paved shoulders. The Mule and I were cruising along with robust celerity thanks to my amazing fitness and a strong tailwind. A turn into the Patuxent Research Refuge began a three-mile bit of wooded Zen on winding Scarlet Tanager Loop Road.
After the loop, my pace slackened as I backtracked into the wind on Powder Mill Road. So much for Zen. We continued past Springfield Road until we hung a looey onto Research Road.
Research Road climbs over a ridge into Greenbelt. The half-mile-long hill was manageable. The headwind was not a particularly welcome addition to the festivites, however.
In Greenbelt I passed a socially distanced outdoor church service before hitting pit stop number 2 staffed by WABA’s Colin Browne. Few riders had come through so there was an abundance of cider and doughnuts. I did my best to remedy the situation. Burp.
After another mile or so on the roads, I followed the route back onto a trail. Here I encountered a chain link fence with a big, open gateway through which the trail passes. Bounding along the side of the trail were two deer. They saw me and flinched at cutting in front of me to use the gateway. I slowed in case the deer bolted across my line of travel which could have made for a rather unpleasant collision.
Free of the deer, I made my way down the trail then onto some residential streets into beautiful downtown Hyattsville Maryland. This town is loaded with shops and restaurants and watering holes. Many of these are located on route along the Trolley Trail. I was sorely tempted to stop at a trailside open air eatery for a beer and a hot dog. With profound inner strength I pedaled onward.
I followed the route to return to the Anacostia River about a mile later. From here I crossed over the river to Bladensburg Waterfront Park, and pit stop number 3, staffed by WABA’s Jeff Wetzel. Jeff and his volunteers were sitting facing downriver into the wind. They too had abundant supplies of doughnuts and cider. Having survived the caloric temptations of the Trolley Trail, I succumbed to my dietary fate and washed a doughnut down with a cup of cider.
Back on The Mule, I put my 10-page cue sheet away. From here I rode the Anacostia River Trail downriver eight miles into a headwind before taking the 11th Street Bridge across to the west side of the river. Next, we followed the west bank ART upriver past RFK Stadium. A left turn took us around the stadium and through Capitol Hill to the First Street Cycletrack at Union Station. A mile later we picked the Metropolitan Branch Trail. A tailwind pushed The Mule and me all the way back to the start where more cider and doughnuts awaited us.
I had my hair cut in February. Then the pandemic hit. I decided after a few months to let it grow until the election and then cut it off. Then I decided to wait a few more days. It’s the longest my hair has been since college. Maybe longer
Before and After
It’s an obvious improvement, but it’s the closest I’ve been to people outside my bubble in months. I hope my mask (and that of the barber) did it’s job.
And just for historical reference a shot from when I was 19. The glasses were provided by the Massachusetts DMV.
A Few Spokes Shy of a Wheel 