Tag: summer

Reverse Winter

I grew up in the northestern US. I lived there for 28 years. Every winter we’d have a “cold snap”. If you lived away from the coast this meant that for two weeks the temperature would drop below 0 and the wind chill factor would make it feel like 10 – 20 below.

Frostbite in Albany

Over Christmas one year, my brother Joe and I got cabin fever while visiting my parents. We decided to bundle up and go for a run in sub-zero wind chill weather. We picked the 3-mile loop road at what was then called the State University of New York at Albany. I was running marathons in those days and Joe was not. We were doing about 9 minutes a mile when I put my hand up to scratch my ear. Joe slapped my hand down. “Don’t touch it. It’s frozen. We’d better get back to the car.”

I was a more than a little freaked out. I looked over at him and said, “Bye” and dropped the hammer. I guess I did the last 1 1/2 miles in about 9 minutes. No lie. I balled the jack. It took a few hours for my ears to thaw out. The Scotch I drank back at my parents’ house didn’t help much.

Heat Exhaustion in DC

Ever since I have had a healthy adversion to frostbite. Then there is the opposite situation.

Around the same time, I spent the summer in DC. At the time, it turned out to be the hottest summer on record. (It has since fallen to second place.) Like a whole bunch of other government interns I lived in a dorm in Foggy Bottom on the urban campus of George Washington University. I’d go out for runs after work and drop five pounds in sweat.

One Sunday I decided to jump on my ten-speed Raleigh and go exploring. I rode to a bank in Capitol Hill to use an ATM. (Yes, it was THAT long ago. ATMs were a new thing and ten-speeds was the most you could get on a bike.)

After my errand I reversed course and rode over to the C&O Canal. I rode out the canal about 20 or 25 miles. I had brought with me one 12-ounce water bottle because that’s all I ever used when I rode in Providence. By the time I had doubled back 10 miles to Great Falls Park I was wobbling all over the place.

I stopped and bought a (glass!) bottle of Coke at a refreshment stand. Drank it. Then I refilled it over and over and over again with water from a fountain.

Feeling a little better, I jumped on my bike and headed back to GW, a distance of about 16 miles. I honestly did not know if I would make it, but I did. Before going into my dorm, I bought three bottles of ice-cold Gatorade

In my room, I chugged the Gatorade, took a shower, then collapsed on my bed. For 16 hours.

The next day I went to work. I had to do some things at the old Interstate Commerce Commission on Constitution Avenue. In lieu of air conditioning, the ICC used huge fans. After about an hour I became nauseous. I found a pay phone (lord, this was a long time ago) and called the office to tell them I was going home.

Back at the dorm I drank all that I could and fell asleep again for another 12 hours.

In 2007 the 50- States Ride in DC was held in August. It was sweltering. I fell in with three people two of whom looked like they were at death’s door when we arrived in Rock Creek Park at about the 50-mile mark. One of our group decided she had “things to do” and took off. After my experience with heat exhaustion, there was no way I was going to leave the other two alone. One of them dropped out about three miles later as he neared his apartment. The other made it to the finish. As it turns out she was okay with the heat, but her back was killing her.

Reverse Winter

It’s because of these experiences, that I refer to summer in DC as reverse winter. When winter flexes its muscles in the north, you crank the heat up and hunker down with a book and some hot tea, In summer in DC, you crank the AC up and hunker down with a good book and some iced tea.

As I type this, it is 99 degrees here in DC. The heat index is 111. I rode 33 miles in the relative cool this morning. (It was well over 80 degrees when I left the house.) I ain’t going out there. No way. No how. Time to hunker down.

Summer Solstice Bike Commute

I left home an hour early today, not because it is the summer solstice but because I needed to get home early. The weather could not have been better: warm with a touch of humidity. I didn’t see any of my regulars; I was traveling too early for that.

When I passed beneath the Woodrow Wilson Bridge I noticed that the sun was on the north side of the bridge. Big Nellie thought this was odd too. (I’ll bet you didn’t know that bikes have thoughts. They do. It’s some kind of two wheeled woo woo thing.) It made me think of the short days of winter. I hate winter. I should get a summer home in New Zealand or Australia or Argentina.

I often see Chris, Kathy, Dave, Shawn, or lawyer Mike during my bike commutes. Although they also bike commute along part of my route, I hardly ever see Paul, Emilia, or Flogini. I half expected to see one of them today, because of my early departure from home. No dice. Maybe they lie about bike commuting and carpool together. Maybe they see me coming and hide. I would if I were them.

I took a picture of a man fishing on his boat in the Potomac River with the Washington Monument in the background. Fishing must be an introverts delight. I’d probably get into it if I didn’t think fish and bait and unhooking a fish were gross. The picture was taken from the Humpback Bridge. I love that name. It was named after Ronald Humpback, the recently expired bridge superintendent for the Department of the Interior. Or not.

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You can see the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. Also, you can just make out the Smithsonian Construction Crane exhibit. Would I lie about such a thing?

 

 

It’s Clinchmas!

  • Tonight, if the Mets lose and the Nats win, the Nationals win their division and qualify for the playoffs. YAY! This has been a foregone conclusion for a couple of weeks but longtime Red Sox sufferers like me know that nothing in baseball is to be taken for granted. You could look it up. Of google “Bucky Fucking Dent” or “Bill Buckner and Mookie Wilson.”
  • Baseball quiz: who scored the winning run on the Buckner/Wilson play? Answer: Ray Knight, the Nats announcer.
  • Summer is officially over. In the last week, I’ve seen two bicyclists fall on the Mount Vernon Trail. That’s why I prefer the word “autumn” to “fall”
  • Felkerino once told me it is bad luck to refer to terrain as “flat” during a bike ride. It’s a four-letter f-word. Use “level” instead.
  • I am nearly recovered from riding the Backroads Century on Sunday. It had a lot of hills. My body was not happy this week. First, my back gave me a spasm on Tuesday morning. It lasted only a second and I managed to avoid turning into Quasimodo for a week. My legs have been dead for a few days. This morning they sprang to life. I hit 18 mph on the MVT. Must have been a tailwind.
  • The last two days I woke up at 5 am. I waited for daybreak (around 7) yesterday before heading to work. Today I left in the dark, with lights on my helmet and wearing a reflective vest. I am experimenting with strapping my battery to my helmet. I wouldn’t want to do this for hours at a time but it seems to be better than having a battery shoved down the back of my shorts. Note to Light and Motion, make me a Stella lamp with a shorter cord please.
  • It wasn’t until I was practically at work that I thought of going to Friday Coffee Club. I would have had to backtrack four miles. Not gonna happen.
  • One thing that never ceases to amuse me is how I know dozens of bike commuters but rarely see anybody I know. The person I see the most often, Chris M., is somebody I seem pathologically unable to recognize. Weird. Every once in a while somebody says hello as they go by. I typically respond “Blerfg.” I’m either half asleep or in a trance.
  • I signed up for another autumn ride: the Great Pumpkin Ride. I’ll probably be doing it with Ultrarunnergirl.
  • A friend of a friend runs several web-enabled freelance businesses. I can’t quite sort them all out but she is obviously a fan of yoga/mindfulness. When she lapses into yoga lingo on her business videos she says, “Sorry, went a little ‘woo woo’ there.” I have been looking for a word to describe this jargon and now I have it. People who are into yoga and mindfulness will henceforth be the Woowoos on this blog.
  • It’s suppposed to be a perfect weekend. All I want to do is let my body recover. So my plan is:
    • Mow the lawn
    • Swab the deck
    • Do a very gentle and short bit of cycling
    • Read my book about genetics. It is cleverly entitled The Gene.
    • Watch the Nationals clinch on TV!

It’s Like January in Providence

I used to live in Providence. The weather in January was unbearable. It was cold and wet and the streets inevitably turned into glaciers. Going outside was an exercise in misery.

DC is like that. Sort of. In August. It’s hot and muggy and the bugs are biting. I did a 50 mile bike ride yesterday. At 20 miles I stopped to take a meditative moment and enjoy the view of Belmont Bay from the back of the ranger offices in Mason Neck State Park. I took off my helmet, settled into a rocking chair, and admired the few. For about a minute. Then the bugs starting feasting on my lower legs. ACK!

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The View before I Went Off My Rocker

I hopped on the bike and rode on, the breeze dissipating some of the heat and humidity. I decided to cut through Fort Belvoir on the way back. A guard at the Kingman Road check point had other ideas.  After 9/11 Fort Belvoir became part of DC’s security theater and was closed to people without a military id. A few years later without publicizing it, access was reopened to people with photo id. I could finally go onto the base and enjoy low traffic, roads that were fun to ride on. Now it is closed again. I realize the military has a job to but Fort Belvoir has become a shitty neighbor. Closing the base to local cyclists is the equivalent of giving stop sign tickets to bicycle commuters on the empty streets of Old Town on weekday mornings. The prime accomplishment is to piss people off. It doesn’t make anybody safer.

Screed over.

The ride home was uneventful. As usual I didn’t drink enough water and I arrived home zonked. So today, rather than grind out miles in the heat, I am staying inside and watching the Nats on TV. You can’t do that when its cold and wet and icy outside.

Random Sunday

  • I rode to the Nationals game after work Friday night. It was suffocatingly hot. The Nats lost to the lowly Braves. I went alone. I had a great time.
  • An usher ejected  a fan for heckling the Braves left fielder. The fan got his money’s worth. He certainly gave me a few laughs. Well played, dude.
  • An Atlanta player hit a home run that landed about four seats away from me in the row behind mine. It bounced off a fan and the rebound went to a guy in my row about six seats away.
  • A mom brought three kids to the game. They were sitting in the row in front of me. She went to the concession stand. When she came back and found out that a home run landed two seats behind her she couldn’t believe her bad luck. The kids thought it was pretty funny though.
  • I had the seat at the end of the row. Home run guy and his buddies wore me out with their pee runs. Never buy seat 1 or seat 20.
  • Another home run landed in the seats a section to my left. The fan caught it on the fly. Barehanded.
  • I almost caught a t-shirt during the t-shirt toss promotion but another fan got two hands on it just as it was about to hit my hand. She paid for the shirt: her chest hit the railing in the middle of the aisle. Ow.
  • The ride home was aided by post-game fireworks. Less car traffic means better biking. Boom!
  • The ride through Old Town Alexandria at 11:30 pm was scary. The sidewalks were full of loud, drunken idiots. I assumed that drivers were similarly inebriated. I was extremely careful and am thankful that I made it through in one piece. Of course, the Alexandria police (who spend their time ticketing early morning bike commuters) were nowhere to be found.
  • I have decided to call the Cross Check Deets. After Joshua Deets, the scout for the Lonesome Dove cattle drive. He is described by Capt Augustus McCrae as “Cheerful in all weathers. Never shirked a task. Splendid behavior.” I hope my Deets is as noble.
  • After a year of light riding, I will be using Deets for commuting starting tomorrow. The rack has bigger tubes than the racks on my other three bikes so I had to adjust the hardware on my panniers. I test rode the bike with panniers for the first time. My heels had plenty of clearance so tomorrow’s commute should be sweet.
  • This morning I went for a short ride down to Woodlawn by way of Mount Vernon on Deets. Every time I stopped the oppressive heat and humidity sucked the sweat out of every pore in my skin. It was gross. There will be better days for weekend excursions. Maybe a hike next weekend. It’s been too long.

Sticky, Wet, and Grumpy

This morning was a rude re-introduction to biking to work in DC. It was incredibly muggy. I was sweating before I pedaled once. Ick.

I rode Big Nellie to ease my way back into reality. It was a smooth fast ride to work. A fellow bike commuter passed me without warning with inches to spare near Porto Vecchio just south of Old Town. I yelled at him to give a warning. He passed a man walking a dog again without warning. I rang my bell and passed the man who proceeded to yell at me for not giving a warning. I said I gave a warning and rang my bell again. “You have to do it louder!”

I can’t win.

I miss the peaceful riding with logging trucks going past at 60 miles per hour.

At the north end of Old Town, a resident had parked his car completely obstructing the sidewalk. Did you know that Alexandria’s city motto is “Where pedestrians come last.”?

I managed to avoid any more unpleasantness until the evening commute.27782018774_13c91636c0_m

My co-workers started warning me about a very nasty storm approaching from the west at about 3:30. (I had the radar on my screen already.) I timed it too tightly and managed to find myself a mile from work or shelter in a downpour. The tailwind was nice but the visibility was almost nonexistent so I pulled over beneath the 14th Street bridge to wait it out.

After 15 minutes the rain abated and I headed out. Within a mile the rain began anew so I pulled over under the National Airport access bridge near Crystal City. I had some company including a dad and his toddler son in a Bakfiets. The boy was upset, not because of the rain but because he had lost his bottle.

The r27782018834_bec4af58b7_mains abated again, this time for good so I headed home. Of course, old difficulties came in Old Town. Three cars pulled u-turns in front of me (two were in intersections) without signaling. A car was parked across the bike lane on North Union Street. Rather than take a picture and report it, I gave the house the finger as I rolled by. Going in the opposite direction was an Alexandria police cruiser. They didn’t bother to stop and ticket the car. They never do. It is days like today that I really believe that the League of American Bicyclists should rescind Alexandria’s bicycle friendly city status.

South of the Beltway the Mount Vernon Trail was strewn with branches and other tree debris. I managed to get through without a problem.

Tomorrow I get to do this again. The day after I may have my head examined.

 

Bittersweet End of Summer

When I go out to get the paper, it’s dark out. I take this personally.

It’s also unseasonably cool. It feels like September.

I want it warm. I want it light. I want it to stay that way. Do I have to move to Argentina or something? Oh wait, a friend already has that covered. I could move to Australia. Oh wait, my daughter has that covered. Maybe I should visit her.

In the meantime, I’ll take a picture of the sunrise over Dyke Marsh.

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Have a great weekend, y’all.