Tag: bikes

Top Ten for 2023

Once again it’s time to take stock in stuff that happened over the last 12 months. Here we go in no particular order.

  1. The Boy Comes Home – After four years, our son came home from Thailand for a visit. We rode bikes and went to baseball games and hung out. During his travels, he also managed to see West Virginia, Indiana, Chicago, Montana, New York City, and Romania. Go figure. It seems impossible that he is 32 and living on the other side of the world. If you ever want to learn to scuba dive in Thailand, he’s your man.
  2. Cold, Rain, Hills, Smoke, Mud – Bike Tour 2023 – I’ve never ridden in Maine but I’ve been to Oklahoma. Okay, I’ve never ridden in Oklahoma either, but the line worked for Hoyt Axton. After the southern half of the Adventure Cycling Atlantic Coast Route by riding from DC to Key West in 2017, I decided to finish the route by riding from DC to Bar Harbor, Maine. Rather than re-trace my steps down the coast, I made a big loop from DC to Bar Harbor to Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls to Erie, PA to Pittsburgh to DC. The first month was cold and wet and brutally hilly. I managed to avoid the smoke from Canadian wildfires until Erie, PA where I rode in Code Purple air with an N95 mask on. No problem. I rode in a foreign country for the first time, riding along the Niagara River in stormy Ontario. The final push on the C&O, which was supposed to be the easy part, featured slogging through miles and miles of thick mud and a brutal hike over a mountain to bypass the closed Paw Paw tunnel.
  3. Bike Events – I rode five bike events this year. The Washington Area Bicyclists Association changed the name of its May ride from the Spring Fling to the Bike How You Like Ride. I rode the Spring Fling a few years ago and it was brutal. I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Fool that I am, I learned the morning of the ride that the BHYLR was the same course. Oof. Somehow it was easier this time. In September, I rode the 50 States Ride for the 15th time with a splendid posse. The route took us all over DC clockwise for the first time but we still had to contend with a brutal climb through the Palisades to Cathedral Heights. In October, I rode the Great Pumpkin Ride in the Virginia Piedmont for the umpteenth time. This time I brought my own snacks and rode it solo nonstop. The weather was perfect and avoiding long lines at the pit stops cut my time by nearly two hours. In November, I rode the Cider Ride with most of my 50 States posse. On this year’s ride one member of the posse rode all 60 miles on little more than water, a slice of apple pie, and a stalk of celery. Incroyable! Later that month I rode the Bike for Your Life event. The point of the ride was to raise awareness of the problem of traffic violence in our area. We passed four ghost bikes (indicating where a driver killed a cyclist) before ending at the ghost bike of a five-year old girl.
  4. Big Nellie Hits 50,000 Miles – It’s been over 20 years but persistence paid off as Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent, finally broke the 50,000 mile barrier. (This does not count the hundreds of miles ridden on the bike indoors during the winter months.)
  5. Little Nellie and The Tank Re-born – I had all but stopped riding Little Nellie, my Bike Friday New World Tourist, because of the intense lower back pain I experienced after even short rides. I decided to swap out the drop handlebars for more upright H bars. It made a world of difference and I ended up riding the bike over 2,000 miles this year. In late December I was ready to get rid of The Tank, my Surly CrossCheck. Riding it gave me weeks of intense nerve pain in my back, arms, shoulders, and neck. Then I made seemingly minor adjustments to the seat and handlebar height. The bike now goes considerably faster with less effort and my nerve problems have all but disappeared. With a few twists of an allen key and some headset spacers, I saved a bike and avoided the medical merry-go-round for the winter.
  6. 50th High School Reunion – I attended my 50th high school reunion. My high school classmates are so old! During the trip, I visited with family and did a bike ride with my brother Jim on the new rail trail that runs from the Hudson River to the village of Voorheesville west of Albany. I also managed to check out the Walkway over the Hudson in Poughkeepsie, the home of Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park, the graves of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in Hyde Park and of Chester A. Arthur near Albany, and my parents’ and my brother Mike’s graves. I also found the weathered tombstone of my great grandfather Sylvester.
  7. King Lear at Shakespeare Theater – My wife, daughter, and I saw a mind blowing performance of Patrick Page as King Lear, He stole the show when we saw him as Iago in Othello many years ago but his Lear was next level stuff. From the second he stepped onto the stage we were gobsmacked. It helped that we were in the second row.
  8. The Mule Gets Some TLC – I took The Mule into the bike doctor for a physical and found out that, among many other things, the rims had multiple cracks in them. The new rims were right as rain after my summer bike tour. Later in the year, after years of frustration over rear brake rubbing issues, I finally forked over the big bucks and had an expensive brake installed. It works great.
  9. Crowded House – My favorite band from the Antipodes was supposed to play DC in September 2022 but the drummer injured his back. I can relate. The concert was rescheduled for March and was worth the wait. Liam Finn, a band member, opened the night with a frenetic solo performance. The main event was terrific, marred only by two drunken idiots who sat in the row behind us and talked loudly through most of the songs.
  10. Museum of African American History – I finally got to see this amazing new Smithsonian museum. We spent hours in the place and only saw half the exhibits, mostly about slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights. I need to go back to see the rest, most of which is likely to be more upbeat.
  11. And one more for Nigel Tufnel: In January I became a lifetime member of the Adventure Cycling Association. Without ACA maps and advice, I’d never have done so much touring or had so much fun. I should have done this years ago (and saved 20 years worth of annual membership fees) but I didn’t think I’d ever do this much touring.

Pictures of the Year 2023

The Celery…oops…Cider Ride Crew in Greenbelt, Maryland
I did it again. 15 times and with a terrific posse
Bike Tour 2023: It was a code purple air quality day in Erie PA. I rode with an N95 mask on and hardly noticed.
Bike Tour 2023: At the top of one of three wikkid climbs on my way across New England.
Bike Tour 2023: Looking down from one of the towers on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine
Bike Tour 2023: Her name was Mary Anne.
Bike Tour 2023: Finally rode in a foreign country. For 35 very wet miles.
The flowers never disappoint at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. (Photo was not touched up.)
Bike Tour 2023: On the penultimate day of my bike tour, I ran into Kevin in Shepherdstown, WV.
Maybe Beth is right. Maybe I should change my bike’s name from Big Nellie to Old Nellie after all.
Bike Tour 2023: Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls from the rear in Canada
Drop bars were causing me so much back pain that I almost sold Little Nellie. Then I put H-bars on and liked them so much I rode over 2,000 miles on it.

The Mule had taken quite a beating over the last couple of years. Here’s one of the rims. Bikes at Vienna did a ton of work on the bike last winter and it rolled like a champ all year long.
I attended a book signing at Bards Alley in Vienna, Virginia. David Goodrich rode the Underground Railroad. It was unexpectedly good preparation for my bike tour on which I passed several stops on the railroad in upstate New York.

75,000 Miles, 3 Bikes

I keep track of things. I have been recording my running and cycling miles for 30 odd years. It started with running. I would log my daily miles. Then I added a note to indicate which shoes I was wearing. I did this because running shoes wear out from the midsoles first. It’s the midsoles that cushion your feet.

For some reason I didn’t do this sort of thing with my rides. For a long time I didn’t have a car so I used my trusty old Raleigh Grand Prix. It was a faithful steed, until the front right fork blade fell off on hill on the Custis Trail near Rosslyn, Va. It had shifters that were no longer manufactured and eventually I had to part ways with it. I did get 13 years out of that bike, abusing the heck out of it riding around Providence in the winter time.

I bought a Trek 1200 and used it more for running. I had hurt my knees and I needed to find a replacement for running between 50 and 70 miles per week. I’d get home and ride my ass off or, in the winter, put it on a wind trainer indoors and ride until pools of sweat accumulated. A few years after I bought it, I ruptured a disk in my back. After my surgery, I could feel every bump in the road when I rode the Trek. It was also pretty useless for commuting.

Between the two bikes, I guess I put on 15,-000 miles. I have no way of telling though. Back then I probably ran more than I rode.

So I bought a Specialized Sequoia around 20 years ago. It’s had many names but lately I am calling it The Mule. It’s original odometer died. I didn’t know you could re-enter the old mileage, but I had over 6,000 miles on it. Since then The Mule had carried me over 34,450 miles.

I was beating The Mule up by riding it in all kinds of weather so I needed a back up. Eleven years ago I bought my Easy Racers Tour Easy recumbent. I rode Big Nellie almost exclusively for 6 or 7 years, including many winter nights on my wind trainer. As of today, it has 34,350 miles on it.

About six years ago, I bought Little Nellie, my Bike Friday New World Tourist. It’s a folding travel bike. Although I spec’ed it to have the same geometry as The Mule, it’s little wheels make it hard on my back. Pain be damned it now has 10,200 miles on it.

Add them up. Sometime on Saturday or Sunday, I broke 75,000 miles on my three bikes. I really wish now that I had kept track of the miles on the Trek and the Raleigh. I sound a little like Mickey Mantle in his dying days when he said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

Bikes don’t last forever. Pretty soon I will have to figure out what to replace my fleet with. Buying cars is pretty easy. I’ve been buying cars since 1978. VW Golf, Saturn Wagon, Mazda MPV, Mitsubishi Lancer, and three Honda Accords. What I’ve learned is that when I need a new car, I’ll buy an Accord. Repeat every 10-13 years. (I’m good until 2010.)

Buying bikes is hard. I’ve never owned a mountain bike. Or a touring bike with 26 inch wheels. Or a short wheel base recumbent. Or a tadpole trike. Which one do I want? The answer, of course, is “Yes.”

If I’m going to ride another 75,000 miles, I’d better get to the bike shop and start test riding. Something tells me my three steeds will die from exhaustion before I do.