Bike Month is all but here

Bike Month, Bike to Work Week and Bike to Work Day are fast approaching!

They aren't so much about folks like myself, as I already bike instead of driving a car much of the time. They are about encouraging folks to try riding instead of driving. Lots of seasoned riders are happy to brainstorm with new riders to find solutions for challenges that keep those new riders from using a bike instead of the car. Here is an article from someone who is finding out just how encouraging the cycling community can be.

On a local scale, the folks at Bike Louisville, Bicycling for Louisville and the Louisville Bicycle Club are having some friendly competition to see who can do the most by bike. It involves tracking your bike use through Green Light Ride, but registration is easy and free. Go for it! Win the COVETED Gilded Handlebars!

Rainy ride to work

Decisions, decisions.

Jenn had a doctor appointment this morning. It was raining, and she knows I don't like riding in the rain. She was willing to haul my bike and me to work then drive to her appointment, but by the time we could have hit the road, there would not have been near enough time for her to get to Crestwood then to her appointment near the Gardiner Lane Post Office. She was willing to be late, but I saw no need for her to throw off her doctor's schedule for the morning and affect other patients over a little water falling from the sky. I've ridden in worse.

Despite my general dislike for riding in wet weather, I'm more willing to do so this year than in prior years. I'm not sure how to attribute this change. Maybe I'm getting (more) stubborn or something.

Yeah, we've had more than a little water fall from the sky. The river is well above flood stage, meaning that I will probably have to move the first meeting or two of the New Rider Clinics to higher ground.

"Do you know how dangerous this is?"

The above question was asked of me Thursday evening, as Jenn and I rode the tandem out to Mom's for a visit. As we were climbing out of the valley at Floyd's Fork on Aiken Road (always a butt-kicking hill, despite its short duration), a motorist passed us, but as he pulled alongside, he ran his passenger window down and (I think) asked the title question. I think he meant that what I was doing was dangerous, and I really don't think he had any idea of the level of irony in his asking while he occupied the wrong side of the road in an area with a double-yellow center line (and on a blind hill, at that). I, on the other hand, knew quite well what I was doing, and that where I was riding was the best place on the roadway for the situation. I've read the manual, you see, and I probably have a better grasp of the rules of the road than that driver, based on that short display of his sense of danger. I also would be willing to bet a fair bit of money that I have more bicycle miles this month than he does.

In other riding updates, I've really been enjoying the Ergon grips on the Vienna. I noted a while back--here or on facebook--that they feel better without gloves than with any of the gloves I now own, so unless it's cool enough that gloves make sense, I ride bare-handed. I haven't heard a timeline on getting my Ergon gloves to try them with the grips--they are claimed to be designed to complement the grips--but I'm looking forward to seeing how they do. I have been told to expect my pedals late in May. No word on the backpack, yet, sad to say.

I can't fuss. I don't have to pay money for this stuff. I would like to be able to write about it, though, since that is my part of the Ergon Commuter Team deal.

I haven't crowed about numbers in a few days, so here goes: Total bike miles, YTD: 2376. Total CO2 miles, YTD (as in, instead of driving a car), 2007. Yes, that's two thousand seven miles instead of driving a car so far this year. That's a bit more than nineteen percent of the Louisville Bicycle Club's 10311 logged CO2 miles YTD. With only 590 miles for April so far, I probably won't break last month's 806 miles, but that's okay. There were four months in 2010 that saw me go more than six hundred miles, and I'll best two of those months (April and September of last year) by the end of this month.

The 1978th anniversary of the First Zombie Uprising!

To quote P.Z. Myers:

Y'all remember what many of our neighbors are commemorating this weekend: the first Zombie Uprising of 33AD.

⁵¹ At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split ⁵² and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. ⁵³ They came out of the tombs after Jesus' resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

It's funny how this amazing awesome story didn't make it into any other historical accounts. Somebody ought to turn it into a novel — you'll have both the evangelical Christian audience and the graphic horror audience at the same time! Think how much fun the book signings would be!

 Yeah, I have been accused of being an iconoclast. So sue me. Just don't try to eat my brain...

Stormy

We weathered the weather events without harm. There was a CATV wire or two across my driveway this morning, and I'm sure I'll find a few extra twigs scattered about the yard when I look more carefully, but the house is intact, as are our trees.

The next-door neighbor was not so lucky. There is an apartment building next door to me, with four or five units. A tree near my garage lost a branch about a foot in diameter, and it landed on the windscreen of one of the tenants' cars. I'm not sure how much damage was done (I didn't get in and poke around enough), but I don't think it would be a total loss.

Lots of folks in the path of this storm had no electricity, at least for a while. I figure I'm fortunate, and I'll accept that good fortune.

The bike ride to work this morning was uneventful, aside from a bit of crosswind that sometimes made for interesting traffic interactions.

Now that such comments are out of the way, I'll get to the over-the-weekend stuff I've been meaning to put down--I've spent much of the last two days busy with after-weekend follow-up stuff and the assorted fire drills at the store, and haven't had time to put my thoughts in order for this blog (not that they are in any order now...).

Jenn and I drove to Lexington Friday afternoon for her League Cycling Instructor seminar. I went along as an assistant to the instructor, and to soak up some newer ideas for my own teaching. It's a long weekend of class work and parking lot drills, with not much riding otherwise (I had accumulated about twenty miles over two days). However, the candidates learned quite a bit about themselves as teachers and about teaching their eventual students. We met some new friends in the bargain, so it will be a good thing overall.

The League of American Bicyclists has made some subtle changes in their programming, in that candidates who complete the seminar are not fully considered to be League Cycling Instructors until after they have helped teach a few classes post-seminar.

And, yes, Jenn will soon have her full LCI status.

Road Diets

Several years ago, I happened on a bumper sticker that read something like: "Adding roads to reduce traffic congestion is like getting a longer belt to deal with obesity!" With this in mind, and for all the reasons one can find on the CART site, I am going to be at the School for the Blind in support of changing the way Brownsboro Road is used in the Clifton area.

I've been surprised at the lack of vitriol seen in the comments sections of a couple of articles on this in the CeeJ. Usually some car-obsessed clown will insist that "roads are made for cars" (never mind that this road opened long before cars were common) or some such drivel supporting his presumed right to go forty-five or faster in a thirty-five zone. I fully expect some of that sort of nonsense will rear its ugly head before it's all said and done.

I also saw a comment below this post in the Commute Orlando blog (itself a worthy read) saying that someone in California had found his average car speed to be seventeen miles per hour of use. That Commute Orlando post describes how energy is used in this country, based on a study done by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It's pretty appalling to think that we as a society are happy to waste that much energy in just getting from point a to point b.

Are they serious?

A woman stepped out to get her mail, and was hit by a car. According to the CeeJ, the motorist will not have charges filed against him.

Seriously? No charges filed? Really? The law won't do anything to this driver for ignoring the fact that people may reach out for their mail on their residential streets?

The driver even admitted to having looked away from his path, for crying out loud! It's HIS FREAKIN' FAULT!! He was probably going too dratted fast, too!

I get sick of folks using my neighborhood as a speedy cut-through. I realize that it's a short-cut from Washburn to Lyndon Lanes, and is useful in that way. I don't much like it, but I can't change that. However, that folks go through here at speeds over forty miles an hour (listening to their engines, I can tell they are going pretty fast) is criminal. Kids play in this neighborhood. People are backing out of driveways.

I suspect that part of the reason that charges won't be filed is that there is a gaping hole in our law. Police are not able to charge a motorist appropriately when the motorist's behavior is so egregious. There was a push for a bill a couple years ago that would have helped correct this, but it fell short. Maybe we can dust it off and push for it again.

A day early

Okay, so my predictions were off by a day.

I broke the two thousand bike miles mark on my way to a friend's house this evening. About two miles later, I broke the 1700 "miles instead of driving" mark.As I type this, the Louisville Bicycle Club's CO2 miles are at 8550. I have twenty percent of those miles. It's almost embarrassing.

Today's riding: I had a meeting scheduled with Rolf Eisinger and Andy Dyson, to discuss education programs for the upcoming season. Since I was going by, I dropped off some fliers at Parkside Bicycle and Bardstown Road Bicycle shops, then went downtown for the meetings.

After the meetings, I rode to Santa Fe Cafe at Third and Haywood for lunch (always a good lunch there!!), then to the UofL campus to be on hand for my older stepdaughter's receiving an award for her excellent scholarship in her French classes. Since I had time, I then rode to Clarksville Schwinn to drop off some fliers, then home.

The fliers in question are paper versions of this schedule of classes that the Louisville Bicycle Club will be teaching this summer. I'll be teaching a fair bit on Mondays, with help from several other League Cycling Instructors, and David Wittry will be teaching the Wednesday evening classes once again.

Once home, I changed clothes, changed bikes, loaded some tools and a repair stand in a trailer, and rode to a friend's house to do some work on her bike. She is doing the Redbud Ride next weekend, and had been told her bike needed attention. I won't be at that ride, as I'll be at the LCI seminar in Lexington.

On my way to her house, I crossed the milestones mentioned above.

I just keep on logging the miles. Eventually, I'll get somewhere.

At current rates, I'll break the two-thousand-bike-miles mark Friday. I have at least twenty miles' worth of errand-running to do Thursday, which puts my two-thousand-mile point somewhere along my homeward route Friday evening. I may have to do the math and be watching my odometer that trip.

I opted for my Anchorage route getting home last night--it's a little calmer, traffic-wise, and has better wind protection than going home on Westport Road. I take Altawood Court to get off a stretch of LaGrange Road that is just unpleasant. As I cruised through Altawood, I startled some deer. I saw at least seven or eight of them, jumping a fence to get TO the road where I was approaching, then rushing off in all directions (some re-crossing the road a time or two, just to run more, I suppose). Two or three rushed off to my right, and four stopped in the yard to my left and stood to watch me pass by them. I guess since I was no longer moving toward them, they figured they could afford to see what I was going to do rather than keep running. A couple of them were small--as if they were not fully mature but were old enough to have lost their spots. I passed within about thirty feet of one of them, and the farthest of the four was no more than forty feet away from the road.

I like seeing deer--they are pretty. It's also true that I have mixed feelings about being that close to them--whether or not I'm on a bicycle. I don't want them to feel so threatened by me that they kick me, nor do I want one to not see me and jump into my path at the wrong moment. I usually don't have to worry about that, as they are pretty wary critters.

However, I came closer to one a dozen years ago. I was on my way to work, riding on Aiken Road near its bridge crossing Floyd's Fork. Two deer were running parallel to the roadway, but opted to cross the road to get into woody cover. They crossed ahead of me, but one forgot about the wire fence she had to jump, and ran into it twice, bouncing off and down the embankment so that her rump was within a few feet of me as I passed on the road. Had I crowded the fog line, I could have slapped her rump as I passed (and would likely have been kicked across the road for doing so--unwelcome hand-to-body contact between males and females is never a good idea).

Wind-ed, and another "gripping" tale

As much as I try to not gripe about weather, I'm going to gripe about weather a bit.

I'm tired of wind for the moment. It seems that I often have a headwind on my way to work, AND it turns around to give me extra challenges on the way home.

To be fair, it's probably coming from the north enough that it slows me in parts of each trip. Still, a 15-knot wind gusting to 25 or 30kts from varying directions is a bit more than I would say I enjoy.

At least the heavy rain yesterday hit while I was at work instead of on my bike. I didn't have to hole up in a store or something until the worst passed--which took a while.

Yesterday's ride to work was on the Globe, with the Ergon grips. The more I ride those grips, the more I like them on that bike. The differences between them and the stock grips are subtle at first, but become more significant with time. The Ergon grips are much stiffer than the Specialized ones, giving me better support (helpful for one who weighs over 220 pounds). They also stay where I put them, whereas the Specialized ones were twisting on me at times (maybe I'm putting too much weight on my bars?).

Since I had the Globe at the store yesterday, I got to show off the grips to a customer who had his bike in for its 90-day checkup (always a free service with any new bike sale). He got intrigued at the idea, and wanted to see what other grips Ergon offered. I showed him the ones I could get through Quality Bicycle Products, and he opted to have me order a pair for his Rockhopper.

I know full well that being part of the Commuter Team means I try to sell the product line. It was cool to see how it works as a bike shop guy--again. I often get to sell stuff to customers because I use that product myself--the "knowledgeable authority" advertising bit at its best, personal level.

It's back on the road!

After something like six months out of service, I have finally gotten around to reworking the Bacchetta Strada so that I can ride the thing instead of having it sit in the garage all the time.

In September of last year, I was almost home from work, having commuted on the Strada for a change of pace, when the right shifter broke. Since I was within sight of my house, I wasn't too upset--the same part of that shifter had broken before, and I knew what was going to be involved in fixing it. Since most of my club rides get done on the tandem with Jenn, anyway, I didn't feel rushed to get the repair done.

Some years ago, I pondered the idea of converting it from the B-Pivot steering system to the rigid riser found on the Corsa model. I got a blemished fork from Bacchetta at that time, and opted to save it for future use. Somewhere along the way, a friend gave me a Bacchetta handlebar he had bought for one of his projects that got canceled before the bar got used. Using these parts meant switching from the Ergo levers that were part of my Strada from the concept stage to bar-end shifters much like those used by triathletes (and similar to those on our Vanguards). Campy bar-end shifters are not inexpensive, of course, and not always available. I got a set a month or two ago, though, and a set of brake levers that are similar to those found on the Corsa bikes from Bacchetta.

Then it was a matter of carving out the time to do the work. I knew roughly how long it would take me to install all the parts, all the cables, the new cycle computer (the old one being integrated with the shifters), and tune it, and wanted to do most of it in one session. As it turned out, when I started doing actual work, I didn't have all the stuff I needed, so it became three sessions instead.

The first session was installation of the fork and BFT (Bacchetta Fine Tune--their headset pre-load system). Second session was installation of the controls on the new handlebar and cable work on the derailleur systems, as the brake cables I had were right for the old levers not the new ones. I found myself with some extra time on Sunday (see the post about finding the dog's home), so I took advantage of that time and finished with the cockpit work on the Strada.

Then I got to take it out for a ride--its first in over six months. The bike felt GREAT under me.

I also have been firmly reminded that I don't use my quads as much on other bikes as I do on the Strada. I was much slower than I normally would be on that bike. Still, though, it handled well. I like the new control arrangement. It's going to be a fun bike again!

best possible outcome, a few days later

I mentioned the other day that Jenn had found an apparently stray dog. The beagle or beagle mix female has a name--Cloe--and she belongs to a woman a few doors down the street from us.

One of Jenn's daughters had the dogs out for a walk, literally two hours before our appointment to take the stray to the Humane Society for them to find her home instead of us. A neighbor approached her and said something along the lines of, "That's my daughter's dog!! I'm so glad to see her!"

I have been walking Cisco in this neighborhood for eight or nine months, now, and had never seen this dog. However, now we know where to take her if she shows up again.

NEW GRIPS! and end of March mileage numbers

 As noted, I have had a chance to ride my new Ergon grips a bit. I put thirty-five miles or so on them Wednesday, and a round trip to work yesterday. In short, I'm quite pleased. The stock grips on my Vienna were not bad--they certainly look like someone learned from the same school as got Ergon going--but they lacked some support on the "wing." The stock grips tended to spin on the bar just enough to be problematic over longer rides, too. The Ergon grips have a built-in clamp that prevents such spin, and a firmer "wing" to better support the heel of my hand. The subtle reshaping closer to the thumb also makes a difference in my hand comfort.

I went ahead and ordered a pair of the BioKork grips for the Raleigh. My least favorite thing about the Raleigh is the mountain bike grips that are on it now--they have never been but so tolerable, especially over any distance. The BioKork have an assortment of features that appeal to me--the raw materials are more carefully selected than what is in most grips, and of course they are Ergon grips, thus more comfortable than most if not all others out there.

Now to find the old headlight brackets for that bike, as the CygoLite I was using on it is now on the Vienna. I can't justify buying a new dyno-powered light for that bike just yet, even though the Dynohub on the bike puts out the same voltage and wattage as many of the newer dyno-powered lights are designed to take. Maybe soon, though--I like the idea of lights with no battery recharging issues. The long-range plan for the Vienna (and for Jenn's Live) may eventually include dyno hubs and lights.

And now for the numbers:

Total bike miles 2011 YTD: 1785
Total bike miles that might have been car miles: 1547.
Total March miles: 806 (second highest number since I started recording over a year ago--highest number was July 2010 with 812 or so)

Yeah, I almost went out for a fifteen-mile ride after I got home last night. I figured I had another goal for next March this way, though.

Total miles for 2010, January through the end of May: 1838. I'm about two months ahead of where I was last year. We plan on doing a fair number of club rides and other preparation for things like Bike Virginia and RAIN, so I'll be putting out some pedaling in the coming weeks.