Ironman

I saw not one, but two of these on Sunday:The occasion was that I was volunteering for the Ironman race here in town, as a kayak paddler, to help ensure that all the swimmers got where they were going without mishap. I did my part--chased down a few folks who were veering off course, allowed one swimmer to rest by hanging onto the front end of my boat for a few seconds, and paddled beside one slower swimmer who was going to just make the time deadline.

There was talk of a shuttle for getting our boats back to where we put in, but it seemed like more fun to propel myself back without adding to the gasoline usage.

I was thus also able to see a need for my help breaking down and packing the stuff Ironman brings to the event so they could haul it to the next event. I had something to do before lunch time that way.

After lunch, Jenn and I moved down to the bike/run transition area, and helped there for a little while before going to her scheduled shift helping racers at the end of their event. The finish line at the Ironman is a phalanx of folks that the racer must navigate--health care folks, the team that removes racers' chips (timing system), the guys who take pictures of happy finishers, those who distribute t-shirts and hats to finishers--before being released to the care of either family members or providers of more intense health care. That was pretty cool. While I hadn't signed up for doing so, I decided to give it a shot, as it was something that needed doing.

I mentioned to Jenn that it would be cool to "catch" one of the frequent customers of Bluegrass Bicycle. I saw a couple of our folks come through, but was not in a position to help them at the time. However, one racer I helped had, indeed, been a customer. He came to town a month prior to the race to familiarize himself with the bike course, and during his ride had had a wheel failure. I sold him a new wheel that he could use for training the rest of the year, and suggested that he take his broken wheel to his home shop and try for a warranty fix. He reported that his wheel was replaced under warranty, and was glad to see me to tell me so.

Another racer I helped expressed great surprise that Ironman would be able to find so many volunteers who knew what was going on. She reported that many small running races where she lives have trouble finding any volunteers who know where basic needs can be met, yet every volunteer she encountered at this event knew what she'd need and how to get it to her or her to it.

That makes me feel good about the local volunteer community. Y'all Rock!

Tandem Tweaking

Here I am, two whole days into owning a tandem I've wanted for over fifteen years, and I haven't even ridden it. Much.

Jenn had to work late tonight, so I spent some time sorting out the steering adjustments for the forward cockpit. Larry (who had last ridden the captain's position on this bike) had a very different idea of best position for things. He never got really comfortable with the "gerbil steer" nature of the RANS design.

In the process of sorting the steering, I rode the bike a couple blocks. It's interesting how this bike differs from Bill's bike in subtle ways--this one handles better solo, surprisingly. The Aerospoke rear wheel has a different freehub sound than the Shimano hub on Bill's bike. I was a bit disconcerted to feel the front tire wandering a bit at low speeds--something I've not experienced with Bill's bike--so I'll have to examine that tire for faults and perhaps replace it. I have a spare--bought in preparation for RAIN--so I can try it to see if it's simply a faulty tire (that I can get replaced by Schwalbe should it be defective).

I have computers coming (a matched set), along with taillights. We have enough front "be seen" lights at the store that I can get one from stock. I'm fine with the pedals that are on the bike, although Jenn may opt for double-entry pedals instead of dual-use pedals for the stoker position.

The bike came to us with Mirricle mirrors mounted at each end of the handlebar. I have no real use for these, as I prefer a helmet-mounted mirror, so they will be coming off soon. I don't know whether Jenn will want them mounted on the tops of my seat, as I did with some other Screamers, but that is one option. I will likely get a helmet to dedicate to use with this bike, as is my habit, and that will have a helmet-mounted mirror.

In July, I bought a TerraCycle Fastback piece so that I could carry a two-liter water bladder. I couldn't find my Camelbak bladder before RAIN, so I kept the FastBack for when this bike is mine. My Camelbak bladder is probably in a box in a closet, and is thus inaccessible for the time being, just because there are too many boxes in FRONT of the closet at the moment. I'll dig it out soon enough, I'm sure.

Tomorrow, it will be Jenn's turn to do some adjusting. We'll get her seat in the right place and at the correct angle. We'll adjust the third brake lever to suit her. We'll mount the computers and taillights.

We might even get to ride it more than a block or two.

We are now tandem owners

I've been wanting to own a recumbent tandem for something like fifteen years--ever since I first saw pictures of a Ryan Duplex (or was it still called the Fleetwood then?). The idea of riding WITH someone instead of at the same time as that person has long appealed to me.

Fortunately, Jenn also enjoys being on the tandem, as we've found over the last couple years.

After about a year of long-term loan of Bill's Screamer, that bike went home yesterday, so that we would have room in the garage for our own Screamer, purchased from Nita yesterday evening.

We had agreed to buy the bike a couple months ago. However, Nita had suffered a shoulder injury, and wanted to keep the bike for a bit so that she could ride without hampering her healing process. Then we had to coordinate a few other things before we could bring it home.

We woke up this morning wondering why we haven't taken time to ride it yet. By the time we got home, we were thinking about getting ready for Monday stuff, and simply put the bike in its parking slot for the night. We might find time to enjoy a trip around the neighborhood this evening, but it's unlikely we'll go far as it has no lights and it'll almost certainly be dark when I get back from the New Rider clinic.

Speaking of the New Rider Clinic, tonight will be Test Night. I have a couple people who will take the test next week due to work conflicts, but most will earn their certificates this evening. The total number of certificate earners for the summer will be close to thirty--more than three times the number we had last year. I may offer the TS101 class through the store in October, as there is some interest, but we'll see.

Rainy morning ride

This getting rained on during a Saturday bike ride is getting old.

A line of storms went by shortly before I left the house. Figuring that my window of opportunity was open, I got on the Raleigh and pedaled away. Jenn called me while I was climbing Houston Lane's little riser to Mount Mercy Drive, but I was more intent on getting toward the end of my ride than answering the phone. I got onto LaGrange Road, and was about half a mile from Crestwood proper when she called again. As there was traffic around me and the rain was intensifying, I kept going rather than stop to spend time on the phone that I could spend getting to shelter.

I stopped at the Dairy Queen for a bit and called Jenn back to assure her that I was fine, almost to work, and that she need not come get me. Yeah, she knows how much I like riding in rain, but it was almost over for the morning and quicker for me to ride it out than for her to come get me.

Besides, she's coming to get me after work. There is a party we are going to attend this afternoon.

Musings

In the "Let's catch up with my writing by tossing random thoughts out there" category:

The ever-thought-provoking Mikael at Copenhagenize offered some discussion on automotive design and marketing recently. He spoke at a conference on design, and while waiting his turn, listened to Chris Bangle, former head of design for BMW.

The point Bangle made, and that Mikael works with in the linked essay, is that cars are part of what Bangle dubbed, "Personal Emotional Mobility." More on that in a moment.

Bangle went on record as noting that Americans between sixteen and eighteen, an important-to-them demographic group, are increasingly "not bothering to get their drivers' licenses. These folks just don't care to drive, for whatever reason (or perhaps they figure on driving without their licenses...).

I mean, what is the matter with these kids? Don't they know that driving is as important as breathing? Oh, you mean it ISN'T?
/sarcasm

Anyway, Bangle's contention is that the automotive industry must, "...hook them back to the car."

As stunning as Mikael found that statement (and I have to agree), it is, after all, part of the marketing steamroller that is the auto industry. They are fearful of losing even a fraction of a percentage of their market for newer, fancier more expensive machinery with which our inattentive motoring public can continue to wreak havoc on society.

As for "Personal Emotional Mobility," well, yes, many of us are emotionally attached to our modes of transportation. I see evidence of this from time to time, when motorists rather emotionally express their displeasure with my slower-than-theirs mode of transport because I've seemingly cost them hours of their time in transit (knowing, as do most who read this, that it's mere seconds, and those angry motorists will just as easily make up that lost time by going even further above the speed limit in effort to reach their destinations before anyone else). I admit to being somewhat emotional about my choice of transit modes--I LIKE riding a bike. I feel happier about life when I ride instead of drive.

Yeah, Personal Emotional Mobility works for cycling as well as, if not better than for, motoring.


On another note, I enjoyed hearing Jenn the other day, as she struggled to rationalize driving to work instead of cycling. It's a sign that she really does prefer riding at some level. I suspect that she could have seen herself reaching this point in that hypothetical three-or-four-years-ago conversation (the "if someone told you four years ago that you would prefer to ride a bicycle to work instead of driving, what would you say?"), at least far more likely so than if the same conversation told her about riding RAIN in 2010. Still, it's somewhat unlike much of society, and is worth celebrating. Car-free-light, here we come!


Yesterday was the LBC Picnic. Associated with this event were a trio of rides of various distances, as is the norm. I took my Strada this time, as Jenn had some work-related reading she needed to do. It made for a weekend that accounts for about eighty miles on the Strada, which is almost a third of its miles for 2010. That bike is a lot of fun to ride--it's certainly a fast mount and is the fastest bike I've ever owned. That I've not been riding it as much reflects a couple of things: a) that I'm not doing as much club riding as I once did (I have about a thousand club miles for the year at this date), b) most of my club riding is on other bikes (at least a quarter of my club miles this year have been on the Vanguard and the Raleigh since I use those bikes for the New Rider Classes, and I often do club rides with Jenn on the Screamer). It was fun to ride some different roads, even though the small group with whom I was riding opted to re-route our return to Farnsley-Moreman a bit.

The next-to-last meeting of the New Rider Clinics for 2010 is tonight. Next week will be road/written test night. I might do some make-up work with a couple of students the following week, but that will be pretty mild stuff. Summer as we know it is almost over--although you wouldn't know it based on the temperature readings of the last week.

As of yesterday's return home from work, I now have three thousand bicycle miles for 2010.

It's a nice milestone, but it really doesn't mean that much in the overall scheme of things.

It does mean that I've ridden to work instead of driving over half the time in the last eight months. It does mean that I've done a fair bit of my errand-running by bike instead of by car. I've driven to work a few times in the last couple months, but not a lot. In April, I rode to work instead of driving, and got rides home from work (in the car) twice--once to look at houses, once because it was raining VERY hard.

May wasn't so car-free, and of course June went crazy what with my RAAM work and moving (which also affected my July riding). Now that we are officially out of the old house, the moving stuff is reduced to sorting through what's in the house and hauling stuff we no longer want to places like Goodwill or a garage sale of some sort--much of which can be done by bike.

To change my ride a bit, I rode to work via LaGrange Road yesterday morning instead of my typical trip on Westport Road. I use a couple side streets to avoid particular stretches of LaGrange Road, most notably the stretch between I-265 (a.k.a. the Jefferson Freeway, or if one insists on calling it by it's now-better-known name, the Shameless Political Hack, er, Snyder Freeway) and Pewee Valley.

On the way to work, LaGrange Road has some other challenges. I often follow Houston Lane to Mount Mercy Drive, and that end of Mount Mercy is legally inaccessable from LaGrange Road (the crossing is marked one-way). I wound up riding on LaGrange Road the length of Mount Mercy Drive--a bit more nervy than I'd like, but something I can do once in a while.

On the way home, though, it's a little better. I can use Mount Mercy for its entire length easily enough. When I got past Hurstbourne Parkway, I stopped to call Jenn and see where she was in her day. She was still at work, so I diverted a couple blocks from my route and met her so that we could ride home together--something I enjoy doing. Her route uses New LaGrange Road from Whipps Mill to Lyndon Lane, while I tend to use Old LaGrange for that stretch, despite the detour. The detour is due to some construction to repair a drainage ditch a few hundred yards from the Lyndon Post Office. It's a couple hundred foot walk for me, but it's a nice change of pace once in a while compared to my Westport Road route.


Much noise has been made on blogs I watch over comments made by a candidate for Governor in Colorado. Apparently, he believes that being a bike-friendly community is part of a United Nations plot to somehow harm some ephemeral essence of who Americans really are, or some such nonsense. I'm not sure but what the guy needs to have his tinfoil hat recalibrated.

Miles-o-matic

According to mycyclinglog.com, on which I've been logging my miles since the first of this year, I'm about seventy miles short of three thousand for the year. That's a bit more than three days of riding to and from work. If I work the rest of the week, including Saturday, it's a cinch that I'll break three thousand for the year by Saturday afternoon.

Wow. That's a lot more than I've done in prior years, although I may have done close to that by this time last year, riding to work in N'Awb'ny as I was at the time (I noted a couple weeks ago, although I didn't mention it here, that I was one year out from having worked as a property manager, and that I'm quite happy that such a position is in my past).

Almost fifteen hundred of that is on the Vanguard. A bit more than six hundred of it is on the Raleigh. Given that those are my two primary utility bikes, that's more than two thousand miles of utility cycling, not counting what utility cycling has been done on other bikes (I've ridden the tandem to work a couple times with Jenn, and I've ridden the Bacchettas to work a couple times each). I've done some club miles on the Raleigh and on the Vanguard, almost entirely within the new rider clinic format, although I've ridden the Raleigh on a couple of club rides just to be different.

At this rate, I'll probably log a bit over five thousand miles this year, and roughly a fifteen hundred of that in "club miles." Surprisingly, I've logged a bit more than a thousand club miles so far this year. I really haven't done much in the way of club riding, what with my work schedule and the various other projects in which I've been immersed this riding season--I usually manage about twenty-five hundred club miles a year.

I've been losing weight. Not much--only twenty or thirty pounds in the last eight months--but some. Even better, I've changed my body composition a bit--trading body fat percentage for muscle mass to some degree. I feel good. The regular commuting and general "not-using-a-car" to do stuff is paying off in how I feel, how I feel about myself, and to a lesser degree in how my wallet feels (the house purchase taking care of any perceived excess money...). I've not done the calorie-counting thing, nor really worried about my dietary intake all that much. The biggest change has been riding more, drinking water instead of tea while at work, and a couple fewer beers a week.

Did I mention that we are fostering a couple of cats? Yep, we have five cats in the house right now. Aside from the occasional hissy fit, it's gone well. There is not a lot of fighting (good thing), and most of the time the family cats and the foster cats ignore each other. All five are affectionate cats in their own ways. The foster cats are here because their human moved to Hawaii, and that state has strict guidelines keeping rabies off their islands. I don't know how well either of these cats would do with the plane ride to Hawaii, so we may be finding a new home or homes for these two cats.

Meow.

First of August

Cycling-wise, the last week of July didn't turn out as I'd hoped. I didn't break 800 miles for the month--fell short by less than twenty-five miles. I got to ride to work one day this week--Tuesday--and rode another ten miles or so proctoring a road test for the New Rider Clinic my friend David taught at Iroquois Park.

Oh, well, it gives me a goal for some other month. I'll just have to remember to ride a few centuries that month.

On the other hand, by driving I saved a paltry few minutes that allowed me to work a bit more on the former house. Our lease on the house we were renting in St Matthews expired at the end of July, and getting our stuff out of there came down to the last minute.

But we now have (almost) all of our stuff out of there. There are a couple things outside that I'll sneak back to fetch in the coming week or so, but if I don't get them, I won't worry too much.

I had to work, so Jenn did the walk-through with the agent. It turned out to be a pretty cursory inspection--we aren't sure but what the guy expected to find things a certain way given the sort of tenants we'd been, saw it looked close to that and didn't look any closer, or if they really aren't worried about wear and tear on the house.

Our house, on the other hand, is over-full of stuff. Boxes and boxes of stuff. Piles of stuff. FAR more stuff than we need, or particularly want, let alone want to maneuver around in the course of doing what we do at home. I can't just get a bike out of the garage--I have to move a few things first, and put them sort-of back before I close the garage door.

I've always heard that folks use a move to cull stuff from their personal inventories. We wanted to do this, but the last four months have been packed with other time-taking tasks and we had little time to reduce the amount of stuff we had. Now that we are in our house, we have extra incentive for getting rid of some of the things we don't use enough to justify keeping.

I have some black-and-white photography gear that is about twenty years into obsolescence. I have a few old computer towers that will be missing their hard drives but will be going to a recycling place (along with a few CRT monitors). I'll probably donate some of the clothing I no longer wear (like most of the blue jeans and other long trousers I own...).

Adding to the confusion in the house, a friend who moved out of state needed a foster home for her two cats. She had been trying to find someone who would help her, but could not--other than us. We now have five cats in our house. There is the usual occasional hissing discussion, but no real fighting so far.

Oh, and my stepdaughter arrived home from her father's house last night. I briefly got to meet her half-sister, but there was not enough interaction to give me any impression of who she is as a person. I don't feel compelled to know her--she has more importance to my stepdaughters than to me.

Overall, I'm enjoying the interactions with my stepdaughters. I've told each of them that my goal is to have a positive relationship with each of them and both of them, however our mutual definition of that evolves over time. I'm not so worried about whether they like me--I cannot control that. I figure that if I am myself, and am consistent in who I am and how I treat them as people, things will work out okay. So far, that seems to be working.