Another Beatiful Day, Another Awesome Ride

Another beautiful day; another awesome bike ride. It was in the high 50's here today. My friend Eric and I went out after work and did the same flat ride (with a small extension of climbing) that we did last Friday. I managed to negotiate the railroad tracks without incident this time.

Eric and I have been riding, running, and swimming together for almost ten years. There was a short hiatus when he spent two years in Taiwan. Eric was one of the people responsible for getting me into triathlons.

When I first arrived at Corning, I was looking for a group to run with. I started running with the group including Eric and others. They were also triathlon training, so they were swimming and biking as well. They said, "Hey Karl, you should come swimming with us." or " Hey Karl, you should come biking with us. I have a bike you can borrow." Growing up near the ocean, I cannot remember not being able to swim, so I thought, "Sure, I am a strong swimmer. I'll be there." I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that swimming laps in a pool is much different from negotiating waves in the ocean.

It was early Spring that first year I was training with the group, when they were planning to go up to Albany for a sprint triathlon. I wasn't ready to commit to competing, because I lacked confidence. However, one by one, each of the training partners backed out, due to injuries, other commitments, ..., until Eric was the only one left. He was lamenting to me about having to go up to Albany all by himself or back out. I decided that I would go and compete in the masters class (usually, more competitive than the open class, but what the heck; It was in Albany, nobody would know me there!).

It was a great trip; the bike leg of that trip is really what got me hooked on biking. I had been training on a older heavy steel bike (compliments of Eric), but for the race a friend had loaned me a real road bike. I came out of the water and started the bike leg, which began with a small climb out of the lake's basin, when it felt like the bike was shooting out from under me. It was a tremendous feeling. Later in the race, when I was cooking along, I saw a group of riders up ahead of me passing each other in something that looked like drafting (not allowed in triathlons). I blew by them and none of them could stay in contact. Another thing that made me want to get a bike like that. A few months later, while visiting Bill and Carolyn, I visited Mike's shop, at the time thinking I would just get advice on what to look for in buying a bike, when I ended up shipping a beautiful aluminum Specialized Allez back home. I have been loving it (the bike and biking itself) ever since.

First Ride: Blood on the Tracks

It was 61 degrees F today. My friend Eric and I went out near the end of the day on one of our training rides from work. It is a flat ~16 mile ride that we usually take out and back. It is on a back road with not too much traffic. It has rained a few times this Spring, so most of the roads are clear, except for the shoulders. It rained yesterday, but the heavy fog we got this morning is a sure indication that it will be a clear sunny day.

This was our first time riding outside this year. It felt great to be cruising down the road with my good friend. We were catching up on things and chatting away when we came to a railroad crossing. The road rises up to the rail bed, then drops back down on the other side. The tracks are at an angle, so it is always prudent to be careful crossing over them. I was under the impression, with the warm sunny day, that it wasn't going to be a problem, but there was a thin film of mud on the train tracks that caused my front wheel to slide out along the steel rail. It happened so quickly that I didn't really have a chance to tighten up or prepare for the impact, so I just kind fell on my hip, rolled over my shoulder, then flipped over and slid about 15 feet or so. I think I was going about 15-18 MPH, full of enthusiasm for being out riding. I cracked my helmet and tore a small hole in my jacket, and, other than a couple of road rashes, was otherwise unscathed. After a few minutes, to make sure everything was okay, we got back on our bikes and finished the rest of the ride.

I didn't feel anything until the end of the ride when the salt from a little sweat made the raspberries on my hip and shoulder sting a little. I should have paid a little more attention to the tracks; I did on the return. It could have been worse, I suppose. I am not phased by it, and can't wait to get out riding again. I'll go shopping for a new helmet tomorrow.

Coming from the Chapel of Love

It has been quite a while since I last posted. I have been enjoying everyone's posts, so I thought I should muster up something for everyone. Recently, my Uncle Mark sent me some old pictures and I am posting one that I cannot remember seeing previously. It is my mother and father emerging from their wedding chapel with the bridesmaid Kathy (my mother's best friend) and best-man, my Uncle Robert (he is obscured a little, so it is hard to tell it's him, but I know it is).

It was September 1959 in New Jersey. They both look happy.

Like my father, my best man was my younger brother. Cindy's "person of honor" was her father. I just finished looking through a pile of photographs from our wedding; Cindy and I are not what one thinks of as photogenic. However, here is a photo from the ring portion of the ceremony. It was December 1989 in New York. We are both smiling at the trouble I was having sliding the ring onto her finger.

Interestingly, we were married about 30 years after my parents. This year will be our 20th anniversary! Time flies when you are having fun.

Thoughts at a Time of Thanks

We are having a wonderful time here in Washington, DC with Cindy's family. With encouragement from Bill, I am posting a thought for the day that my manager at work sent out to us before we left for the Thanksgiving weekend. Enjoy, with hopes that your thanksgivings are full of things to be thankful for!

Thought for the day: Everything travels at lightspeed through spacetime. Light travels only through space, not at all through time, so photons don't age. To them everything happens at once! Be happy you are not a photon. Rocks and similar stuff travel only through time, pretty much not at all through space. Be happy you are not a rock.
The rest of us travel mostly through time and a little bit through space, the latter usually more on Thanksgiving than at other times. Our travel is timelike and we mostly age. Be happy for the spacetime you can savor.

Finished Building My New Rear Wheel

Two years ago, I built a front wheel for my bike. I got a hub, spokes, nipples, and a rim and put them together into a wheel. It was fun to learn how the spokes, which are in tension, put the rim into compression, which is a structurally more stable configuration. Then the way the spokes from either side of the hub pull the rim in the transverse direction and when tightened from both sides of the hub they can change the radial displacement of the rim.

This past winter (2007) I started to build a rear wheel. It is slightly more complicated, since the cassette - the sprockets on the rear wheel - offset the spokes on that side of the wheel and make them asymmetric compared with the spokes on the other side. I have built the wheels in the basement shop of my friend Robert from work (same Robert as from previous posts). He was very helpful in guiding me through the process and for giving me access to the shop 24/7.

I laced the spokes in a 3X pattern, which means each spoke crosses over three other spokes as it goes from the hub to the rim. There are also 2X, 1X and radial spoke patterns, but since I am so heavy, I went with the 3X design to optimize strength.

I have 9 sprockets in the cassette, which is referred to as a 9-speed bike, though I have two chain rings in the front, which gives me 18 gear combinations. The largest three sprockets in the cassette are made of titanium, which is why they look a little duller than the others. The six other sprockets are made of steel.

I will break the new wheel in on the roller trainer I picked up from a garage sale recently. It is getting too cold to ride outside lately, though I got in a short ride with Charlene and Robert today.

More about the ordeals with the trainer in a future post.

Another Awesome Weekend Finger Lakes Ride

The weather has warmed up for the weekend, so in anticipation of it getting colder and rainier, I went for another nice ride with Robert and Charlene. We drove up to Lodi, on the east coast of Seneca Lake and took a nice tour that brought us to the west coast of Cayuga Lake and through the Finger Lakes National Forest (see map below or follow this link), picking up some local honey and goat cheese along the way - nice presents to bring home to Cindy who was hosting 5 girls (plus Erik and Inga) in a pre-homecoming party. (Presently, they are all --- except Cindy --- at the homecoming dance). We had lunch on the shore of Seneca Lake. The lake was amazingly calm and placid. We watched a couple launch a pair of kayaks - it seemed like a perfect day for that. We ate curried tuna sandwiches, cherry tomatoes, chips, grapes, chocolate-chip cookies, a pear, and a coke.

On this week's ride we only managed ~3300 vertical feet of climbing, this along with not having any particularly steep climbs, which last week pushed me into the red zone, enabled me to complete the entire ride without cramping up.

It was a particularly spectacular ride; the sky was a beautiful blue, the trees were in fantastic form, the temperatures were in the low 70's, and the humidity was low (at least by East coast standards). Throughout the ride I kept saying, "This is so awesome." It reminded me of Hope's recent catch phrase, because I kept saying it, to the point of not realizing that I kept saying it. It was an awesome ride.

Naples - Honeoye & Canadice Lake Bike Loop

(Charlene and Robert before departure from the Naples High School parking lot)

Yesterday, two friends from work and I took a nice bike ride from Naples, New York. You can see the route by clicking on this link. If you do follow the link, be sure to click on the jagged arrow next to the printer icon to display the height profile of the ride (give it a few seconds to generate the profile). (Note added after post: I was able to paste in an interactive map of the ride at the bottom of the post). We managed 4600 feet of climbing in the 47-mile ride. I love riding my road bike, but there are so many more opportunities in our area for riding trail or mountain bikes, that I am starting to love riding my mountain bike just as much.

It was a cool partially cloudy day when we started riding just after 11 AM. About 2 miles into the ride, I was sure I had forgotten to lock the van, so we rode back to the start of our ride to discover that I had indeed locked it. Not sure why I was feeling so neurotic.

There were a couple steep climbs along the ride. One in particular that was especially satisfying started at mile 25 and went up Jersey Hill, climbing out of Honeoye Lake's basin. When we got to the top, we made a quick left then right turn and started up another hill. A person getting out of their car and heading into their house asked us, "Did you just come up that hill?" I replied "Yes, Jersey Hill." to which he replied "Awesome."

Near the top of that hill, my cassette (the collection of sprockets on the back wheel) seemed to be binding up. We all dismounted and began to investigate. Robert noticed that the cassette was not turning as it should. A small, plastic guard between the cassette and the spokes had somehow become damaged and was binding the cassette. We decided to excise the plastic guard, first with a screw driver from the small wrench set I carry, then with a cheese knife in Charlene's pack, only to discover that this piece of plastic was nearly indestructible. Charlene went up to a nearby house and the owner lent us pliers, diagonal cutters, channel locks, and a large screw driver, with which we were finally able to remove the plastic ring. It is ironic how the failure of this small plastic piece was sufficient to make the bike unridable. Fortunately, the bike was ridable without the small plastic piece.

(Mountain bike in the kitchen, before the plastic ring excision. It's an aluminum-frame Trek with a shock on the front wheel. Nothing too serious, as you can see by the kickstand.)

The ride past Canadice Lake was beautiful. It and Hemlock Lake to the west are part of the water supply for Rochester, NY, about 30 miles to the north. As such, there is no development in the surrounding area, so it is almost like a nature preserve. The lakes allow kayaks, canoes and row boats, but no motorized vehicles. So, it is especially tranquil. We stopped to look at the map and I considered taking a photograph, but when I went to cross the small wooded area between the road and the lake shore, I could see lots of poison ivy, which discouraged me from getting close enough for a nice shot.

From examining the map, we identified a challenging gravel hill headed out of the lake's basin. This is about mile 30 on the map. While the climb was short, it was particularly steep (I had to concentrate on keeping the front wheel on the ground, since each time I pushed on the pedal, the bike wanted to do a wheelie) and the loose gravel made balancing and traction challenging. I had to stop at one point and walked for 10 yards or so, until the incline became shallower and I could get back on and ride.

After that climb, we traveled south along a contour for a short while, then turned onto Luckenbach Hill Road to climb over the crest between Canadice and Honeoye Lakes. It was not a particularly steep climb, but I was starting to cramp up before the climb, so much so that when I was about halfway up, I had stop. I got off the bike, but could not find a comfortable way to stand, so I ended up sitting in the road for a few minutes until it seemed to go away.

After that, I sort of took it easy and slowly recovered to the point where I could just keep up with Charlene and Robert, but only just. The picture above shows the dirt road we came up, bringing us to the top of the ridge between the lakes. We rested a little there and some Fig Newtons were just the right nourishment to allow me to finish the ride.

Robert on the left examining the map. Charlene on the right with the critical Fig Newton nourishment. There was a picture of me too, but it was so unflattering that I refuse to post it. At this point in the ride the clouds were breaking up and it was mostly sunny, though after we descended from this ridge, the sun was behind it, so we were in the cool shadow. As Hope mentioned recently in her blog: when the sun is out, you warm up quickly even at 60 degrees, but as soon a cloud roles by or you go into the shade, it cools right off. Unfortunately, this may be the last such ride of the season. The cooler temperatures and shorter days make it difficult to spend the day riding.

Near the end of the ride, just south of Naples we came upon a view of a ridge containing a number of wind turbines. The turbines are quite controversial in the area. Some argue that the machines destroy the natural beauty of the area, others find them oddly alien and interesting and appreciate the renewable energy they generate.

(You may have to click on the image for a larger picture in order to see the wind turbines running across the ridge in the photo).