The Winter Sigh

It has been a long while since I last got a good ride in on my bike. Once Gabe came out the chute there just wasn't time to do everything in a day. Mostly it was losing my ride home from work. While I could mange the 18 miles to work, signing up for 36 a day was beyond my energy level with the nights being full of interrupted sleep.

I can only hope that when the ground thaws I'll have the time and motivation to start back up again.

MS Ride the Vineyard 2008 - May 3rd

The past several years the ride on the Vineyard the first Saturday in May has been beautiful. This year it was anything but beautiful. The forecast was for a cool, clear, and overcast ride. What we actually had was rain, cold, and wind. Though to be fair it didn't actually start raining until we were all out on the road, and up until that point I thought wearing just shorts was a fine plan. In any case I started the ride in high spirits, and planned to enjoy my first 100k on my road bike after suffering through it last year on the mountain bike.


By the end of the ride I was well soaked through. My knees, wrists, hands, and fingers were all numb. My legs were a marvelous shade of purple, and my energy was completely sapped. I completed the ride in 4 1/2 hours with stops, though I found after the first two stops that I really couldn't afford to waste anytime standing around. Every stop meant I wasn't moving, and my core temp would plummet. I think part of the reason I finished as fast as I did is I was pretty much just moving as fast as I could to keep warm for the last half of the ride. Many of the 100k riders dropped out, and I don't blame them. It was a really hard ride, and I feel I earned every last penny in the donations I received from Turbine and individual sponsors.


Once I had some food in me post ride I started to feel a little more human again, and I really enjoyed the rest of the trip. We camped out with the whole Folks on Spokes crew at May and Wally's yet again, and it was like a little family reunion. The trip as a whole is really a highlight every spring. The grilling team really outdid themselves this year. The post ride meal was just awesome, made even more awesome by the post ride nap just before.


Unfortunately I've been down and out the last two weeks with a horrible cold. I hate to blame the ride, but it really sapped me and I think it left an opening for the virus to get in and cause some real damage. My cough is still racking and deep. Hopefully it'll take its leave this weekend.

The Spring Thaw

It has been spring for a while up here in Massachusetts, but the way the weather has been you could have fooled me. I've done the important yearly maintenance to my bike to get it in shape for the coming season. Including new road shoes and pedals to replace my mountain bike shoes and pedals. They were causing circulation issues on really long rides, so I'm hoping the new shoes will clear that up. To further complicate issues with finding time to ride I've been doing a mountain of work in my garden, which means when there is nice weather I have a tough choice as to what to do with my time. Since the garden has some tight deadlines over the next month for when beds need to be prepared for planting it has largely won out. Come early may, however, the heavy work in the garden should be largely complete and I should be able to get more riding in.

If the weather improves next week I'm hoping to be able to start riding my bike into work, though I know that's going to kick the crap out of me the first couple of times I do so. I ended up going out for a rather chilly 16.4 mile ride this afternoon. It let me know that I could make it into work if I wanted to give it a go. The hills were wicked, and really drove home how much work I have left to do before I'm back in shape again. Though I'm not exhausted the ride did drive home that I need to get some serious mileage in if I'm going to do the 100k MS Tour of the Vineyard on the 3rd of May.

The Time of Cold

I've been on a number of short 5-10 mile rides on weekends over the past month, but my riding time has definitely decreased. It doesn't mean I'm not already looking forward to next spring though! I often find myself dreaming of rides as I slip off to sleep, and I'm already doing some preparing for keeping in shape this winter. I probably won't spend much time on an indoor trainer, at least until January or February. Instead I've taken my rowing machine out of the mothballs and started cranking out workouts on the ergometer.

I think rowing can have many similarities to cycling in terms of workouts when you're actually on the water, but on the erg it couldn't be more different. Where you can easily spend three hours on a hard training ride just a half hour on the erg can leave you completely destroyed. Even during my peak rowing crew in college anything much over an hour would leave me in a state of exhaustion so complete that I've rarely been there since. I think the only time in recent memory I've felt similar was after the 100k Tour of the Vineyard I did this spring on my mountain bike.

In any case it looks to be a long cold winter, but the promise of spring already has me excited to be back on the bike.

Knocked out by a Cold

It was pretty amazing, the poison ivy and then a wicked head cold that has run me down over the last three weeks pretty much ended my riding season. Now that I'm finally starting to feel better a part of me wants to get back out on the road for October before the rough weather sets in but I'm not sure if I'm going too. The TMI version is cycling cooks the family jewels, and if you're looking to start a family it helps to try with uncooked goods.

If I do get out and about on the bike more this year I'll write about it, but only time will tell. In bike maintenance news I removed my wife's clipless pedals and put on her old iron blocks so she can hop and whenever she wants to with her street shoes. It took a little more force than I was expecting and it was plenty greasy, but all together a pretty easy task.

Aside from riding my last big chore of the fall will be to give the bike a good cleaning and fresh set of lube before I store it for the winter, but that's a greasy story for another time. Until then, cheers.

Surreal Ride

Surreal, that's how I would describe today's ride. I haven't been on the bike since the last Landry's group ride thanks to a combo of poison ivy, allergies, and a cold. I felt like I was floating over the bike for most of the ride, and just watching a bike cruise along the road. The air was cool and crisp, and the sun was bright but not overbearing.

The only thing that kept bringing me back down to earth was the amount of glass I had to avoid. The evil side of me would love to force people who throw glass bottle onto the road to pick it up by walking over it with their bare feet. The lawful side of me would love to see them out there with brooms sweeping up the side of the road for all the many miles they've covered in glass shards. The good side of me is depressed that people would do something so maliciously idiotic.

I only went six miles today as a sort of test run to see if everything was still working before riding in to work tomorrow. I'm already certain that it'll be a hard ride, but if I'm going to survive the 110 mile Tour de Landry's on Columbus day then I need to get back out there and get some miles under my belt.

Pit Stop

I woke up before the sun came up this morning at 5:45am to give myself time to bandage up my arms before heading down to Norwood for the Landry's group ride. The ride itself showed me just how much having the massive reaction to the Poison Ivy has taken out of me. The whole ride I felt sluggish, and just couldn't get my muscles to go when I needed them too. It was only on the hills that I was able to make up any ground, and I would quickly lose it again once we hit the flats. In other words I spent most of the ride hanging onto the wheel in front of me.

That lead to my first flat during a group ride. Hugging the wheel of the guy in front of you means you can't see much except wheel, ass, and back. You have to trust the people in front of you to tell you if something looks odd, unfortunately for me no one pointed out the big metal lined hole in the pavement that my tire struck square. After the initial jarring blow from hitting the hole I swore, and then about three seconds later I heard the hiss of a blown tire. This was my first pinch flat, the tube tore at the stem. Before I could call out flat the guy next to me did and the ride slowed to a stop ahead and a group of five riders gathered around my bike and went into full on Pit Stop mode. I popped off the tire and handed it to an older gentleman whose name escapes me at the moment, but I think it was Jim. I pulled out my tire levers and handed them to him while getting out the tube and CO2 tire inflater. In all of about five minutes the tire was inflated and we were back on the road.

Still with no spare in my kit and the jar fresh in my mind I spent most of the rest of the ride getting my confidence back so I could draft effectively. If I hadn't been so exhausted I think I would have just hung back and left a gap, but I couldn't afford to. In the end we did 36 miles at a 19.2 mph average. At least according to two different computers in the group. A good workout, and a great way to start the long weekend.

My poison ivy is still weeping, but it doesn't itch much anymore. It only woke me up a couple times last night. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep through the entire night soon.