Old Cycles

Yesterday after my ride I thought–but did not have time to post:

This is the first day I’ve tried to push it a little bit, being aggressive on hills and hammering the flats.  It felt great while I was out there, but now I am really whipped.  I’m wondering if I’m more out of shape than usual, just low on the right kind of energy reserves, or what.  I’m afraid I am going to fall asleep in class tonight, and I’m teaching the class.  I better think up some interesting stuff to say to keep myself awake.

This morning on the way out to do errands I casually inspected my bike as I walked past it in the garage.  The left rear brake pad was on the rim!  Well, that explains a lot about my feeling of exhaustion.  It sets me a challenge, though, as a would-be zen mechanic.  I am supposed to be at one with the machine.  Why did I not perceive the source of the drag?  Why was I so focused on a possible malfunction of my own inner mechanics that I never considered the mechanical systems of the bike?  I need a sensibility tuneup.

I am finding the wind trainer more and more mesmerizing.  Today never hit 40˚ so I just stayed in and rode it.  I like the steely click and whir the machine makes as the pedals revolve about 80 times a minute as they drive the chainring gears.  When it’s in high power mode (the biggest ring), that’s 52 teeth clicking into chain slots every revolution, or 4160 little clicks a minute.  The way the TV strobes fast-moving objects, it looks from directly above the chainring gear as if the chain is standing still when you’re pedaling at just the right speed.  The rear derailleur sings a similar metallic song as it guides the chain over the rear cogs at just the right tension.  Thanks to all this gearing, a point on the surface of one of the tires is traveling at about 18 or 19 mph, and the air being sliced by all the wheel spokes adds a sigh to the music.  If we were rolling on the road, the highly inflated treadless “slick” tires would be making their own hollow echoes.

In 2003, the year that Lance Armstrong won his fifth Tour de France, the European techno-pop group Kraftwerk released the album Tour de France.  The rhythms and sounds of each track perfectly express that particular light, rapid mechanical rhythm of the bicycle, complementing and supplementing the equally rapid and insistent rhythms of the breath and the heartbeat, the muscular tension and relaxation, of the cyclist.  I’d never wear earbuds on a ride, but the music’s so much in my head that I don’t have to.  One of my favorite tracks is “Aéro Dynamik,” which has a series of evocative rhyming phrases.  I love the multilingual play of the album lyrics, the characteristically Germanic mechanical precision of the rhythms and sounds of the group, and of course especially the German accent and spelling applied to the French words in this song.   So this music reflects and adds to the various sound components of my bike’s own techno-pop song.

Cycling itself seems to require the fusion of the machine and the human, technology and passion, head and heart, classic and romantic.  Robert M. Pirsig talks about some of these same things in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that’s another story.

NOTE:  There are several YouTube performances of “Aéro Dynamik,” including this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQKMChV1YqY

Winter reveals her charms reluctantly, preferring a stone-cold and stone-hard demeanor.  She gives you a glimpse of comforting solar radiation—strong even around the solstice—and then pulls it back behind the glum neutrality of cold front clouds.  A day or two of thaw, and then back into the deep freeze.  I was thinking on my Saturday ride that the January landscape exemplifies what “earth tones” means: various shades of mud, from charcoal through light beige, and permeating not just the earth but the tree bark, the dead grasses, the plumage of Juncos and the fur of squirrels.  Maybe I should switch back to my red sunglass lenses from my winter gray ones just to introduce a little color into the scene.

Worse is when the sky’s gray brings cold rain or ice.  If there’s anything more uncomfortable than riding on a cloudy, cold day, it’s not being able to ride on a cloudy, cold, rainy day, like Sunday.  It’s only a minor compensation that I can instead ride the mag trainer while watching the Tour riders sweating up some Alpine pass with snow on the high peaks beyond.  The warm air is palpable, and my much less intense suffering almost ennobled, by the virtual presence of these great cyclists laying it all on the line.  It’s especially real for me when they climb Mont Ventoux, which we did by car about three years ago.  Beautiful, barren, capriciously hot or cold, and bloody steep.  When I see the DVD, I am riding in the lead group right along with Lance, Ullrich, Beloki, and the rest.  Esperance!  Vitesse!

When it is raining, I confess that part of me frequently has an adult reaction equivalent to that of a kid waking up to a snowstorm: “great, no workout today!”  What is this enemy within, undermining motivation?  Then I remember that I’ll be riding inside, which is even more likely to be unmotivating than a cold day’s ride.  Once I do it I am always glad, but there’s something enticing in the scenario of being curled up with a cup of coffee and a good book, something mellow on the iPod shuffle, while it’s freezing or raining out there.  But this treat can come after the workout.  Esperance!  Vitesse!

A week of Jamaican lassitude behind me, figuratively and probably literally on my behind, I’m on the starting line.  Today begins my 2010 cycling season.  There’s no use in even thinking about the upcoming year until after our January getaway.  Yes, I fought a good rear-guard action between Christmas and New Year’s, and even between New Year’s and our departure.  But now I’m back for good, and determined to lose the “winter weight” as well as regain top-level (for me) conditioning.

“Winter weight” is a basic cold-climate phenomenon, apparently.  We humans are biologically inclined to fatten up a bit before the hardships of winter destroy our physical reserves.  Granted we are no longer living in hovels constructed from the ribs and tusks of mastodons and the skins of furred animals, but we retain the instinct to lay on a bit of extra body fat just in case.  We also exercise less.  It’s a rare athlete who can work up as much intensity and focus for as long a time on machines as he or she can outdoors.  And regardless of that, indoor exercise on gym machines does not do the same job as outdoor work with the same equipment and context as the sport itself requires.

Right now I have about 12-14 pounds of winter weight to lose.  I will ditch about 1/3 of that in the next week—those are the easy pounds, the ones I put on while eating and drinking to glorious excess in the tropical sun.  After that, it’s harder going, but I am going to do it.

The trick is not to do too much too fast.  It’s a matter of a steady, gradual buildup of conditioning, to strengthen the body and not injure it by going too hard too soon.  So consistency is the name of the game.  I will ride outdoors any time I can, and work indoors the rest of the time.  Let’s hope the blizzard of December ’09 is behind us, and we won’t get another crippling storm that will keep me inside for a couple of weeks in a row.

So today I took the Trek out for a modest ride over a familiar route, a total of 23.5 miles to Herndon and back, mostly on the W&OD trail, but also up Hunter Station Road’s big hill and two or three more miles back to the trail.  I had not ridden in eight days, and stiffness and atrophy were settling in.  Air at 50˚ and no wind is like spring compared to 35˚ with wind, so I went along at a steady pace and didn’t try to push it.  No strain and no pain were what I wanted.  Except that I always want to ride as hard as I can on my bike.  I can sense about how much energy I can squander over any one-mile stretch, based on my destination and the elements.  And today I felt surprisingly good—strong, with some stamina.  That stamina waned over the last three miles or so, but I figured it pretty close.  So I did push it (bring on the strain, pain, and gain), and I did test my (somewhat weakened) conditioning.  It’s so easy not to ease up.  Especially when one of my thrills in cycling is (in highly technical terms) going fast.  But now I am ready to bring it up another notch.  Except I think it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so all my work will be on my indoor equipment.  Yet a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and today was my first step of many.

We athletes are usually hypochondriacs to some degree.  I modestly include myself in the august group of “athletes” in the broadest possible sense as a person who regularly performs a physical exercise.  We’re acutely sensitive to the conditions of our own bodies, partly because the success and enjoyment of physical exercise depends on such a sensitivity.  We’ve always been told to “listen to what our bodies are telling us.”  So is it our fault if we sometimes think our body is shouting when it is only whispering?

Today my body seemed to be shouting “are you freaking nuts?  It’s freezing out here!”  Having waited for days for the high temperature to rise above freezing without an accompanying deeply negative wind chill, I ventured out into the bright sun of early afternoon to take my first outside ride of the year.  But not without following the universal advice of moms and weather forecasters: “bundle up.”  One thing that discourages cold-weather riding is the sheer enormity of the dressing ritual.  Today called for a nearly max effort, beginning with padded cycling shorts and a heavy t-shirt, followed by a long-sleeved cotton base layer and winter-weight bib tights, and then my lightweight but astoundingly warm Gore-tex jacket.  There were also warm sox, a turtle-neck neck warmer, and a skull cap.  In the garage I added bike shoes, a safety helmet, and my warmest gloves.  Bundled up indeed.

Out on the road, I was astonishingly comfortable.  The icy air froze my face a bit, and my eyes watered in my speed-generated wind chill, but otherwise I was good.  I rode a route that left me always within a couple of miles of home, just in case things did get painfully uncomfortable.  But that wasn’t the case, even with the coldest part of my body—my fingers!  When you stop to think of it, they’re really out there in the wind all the time.  Bundling them up doesn’t work very well, because a rider needs a modicum of manual dexterity to control the brakes and shifters.  So my fingers just get cold on days like this.  First they feel icy, then they lose feeling totally.  I can still move them at will, but I can barely tell if they’re touching anything.  After 90 minutes or so of that, all of my body is ready to pack it in.  Today I couldn’t undo my helmet strap for about five minutes, until a bit of feeling returned.

Oddly enough, my basic body feeling on the bike is always incredibly positive.  If I have a hypochondriac fear, it’s that I might get so euphoric that I will miss some danger signal.  So I consciously run a “body check” every ten minutes or so when it’s cold like this.  All systems were “go.”  And as with every other ride I’ve ever taken, all I could think afterwards was “wow! That was great!”

Indoor riding allows for special concentration on technique and form, because one does not have to concentrate simultaneously on navigation, terrain, other vehicles, weather, rules of the road, rollerbladers, walkers, dogs, children, and other objects that make cycling complicated.  It’s just the machine, the TV and/or iPod Shuffle, and me.

Just now I am working on the positioning of my knees and the movement of my feet.   Both of these technical issues seem predetermined by the fact that my feet are always on the pedals and when I push the pedals with them my knees just follow along.  But it turns out that the closer my knees come to the top bar of the bike (within reason) the better.  Not only is it more aerodynamic, but also this position delivers the maximum force to the pedals with least effort, since the knees stay directly in line with the pedals.  Keeping them there requires something of a knock-kneed pose, which fortunately is my natural disposition.  My heels remain just slightly outboard of my toes when my feet are on the pedals.  In fact, if the knees are too far away from the top bar, it probably means that the saddle height is insufficient, like a grownup riding a child’s tricycle.

As for circles: it’s all about the pedaling motion.  Most novices stomp on their pedals on the downstroke.   But serious riders have had clipless pedals since the mid-eighties, and toe clips before that.  The purpose of these devices is to attach the rider’s shoes to his or her pedals.  That means that when one foot pushes down on a pedal, and the other pedal moves upward, the upward moving foot, attached to the pedal, can “pull” the pedal up, just as the downward moving foot can push the pedal down.  Thus the ideal pedal motion is not to “stomp” on the downward pedal, but to pedal perfect circles with both feet, neither stomping down on the forestroke nor letting up on the backstroke.   Just apply equal pressure with both feet as the  pedals rotate in perfect circles.  The increase of power in relation to effort is enormous.  On an outdoor bike it involves having judgment, knowing the “feel’ of your feet, and not trying to force the issue in training.

Deceptively simple.

I am a sports fan.  As a kid in Boston I rooted for the Braves, the Red Sox, the Bruins, and even the Celtics.  I’ve had my heroes, but always for what they have done in competition—Bobby Orr, greatest of hockey players; Bob Cousy, best of the old-time basketball guards (or “gahds” in New England); Ted Williams, “the greatest hitter who ever lived.”  Superlatives.

When I got into cycling I also followed the supreme achievers.  Greg LeMond, first American to win the Tour de France.  Johan Museew, the “Lion of Flanders” in the spring classics.  Andy Hampsten, American son of two English professors and winner of the Giro d’Italia.  Americans were just getting into European racing in the ‘80s.  It was a trip for them.  American-sponsored racing teams, first 7-Eleven and then Motorola, ran in an environment that was much more intense than any stateside racing.  They built the base of American professional cycling, though concurrently LeMond raced for European teams, the only ones strong enough to assure his victory in important races.

In the early ‘90s LeMond was on the wane, victim in part of a hunting accident that left his system weakened and septic.  That’s when Armstrong came along.  A brash young Texan, champion junior triathlete and overachiever, Lance could rub you the wrong way. His intensity was (and is) amazing—no offseason Mexican food diets and ice cream for him.  He trained daily for several hours 48 weeks a year.  And he had some success, including victory in the World Championship race in 1993.

After a crippling bout with testicular cancer in 1996-97, he almost literally came back from the dead to rise to the pinnacle of bike racing, winning the Tour de France for seven straight years between 1999 and 2005.  But even after all those years and all his success, allegations about doping dogged him, especially after the cancer.  Not once in his career did he ever test positive despite being the most tested professional rider, so either he was a the cleverest doper ever, or he’s been slandered.   As I watch him on his 2009 comeback via DVD, he looks to me not like a doper but like a superb athlete in great condition and with uniquely intent focus.

In 1927 Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season.  That record lasted almost 40 years.  But what is so stunning is the degree to which Ruth exceeded the skills of his peers.  In the record year the second most home runs hit were 47, by Lou Gehrig; the third most were 18, by Tony Lazzeri (all three were Yankees).  No other entire team hit as many homers as Ruth alone; the Philadelphia Athletics were second best at 56.  In short, Ruth’s skills simply towered above his peers; it’s well known that his “training” focused on booze and broads, neither of which has ever been a proven performance enhancer.  Lance, in contrast, is the epitome of focus and form.  But like Ruth, I would argue, his skills simply tower over those of his stage-racing peers.  Superlative.

The grand delusion of the New Year is that the slight shift of the calendar will produce a seismic revamping of habitual behavior. A year ago, launching into a new cycle of life, I also launched a blog about cycling, one of my life passions. As a skeptical relative pointed out, however, the test of a blog is whether it has any staying power. And mine, apparently, did not. It lasted three or four months, and underwent one aborted revival, the results of which remain on this blogsite.

But I still have many things I want to write about cycling and related aspects of human experience, so I reactivate this blog at the most trite time of all, the first of the year. I do this in the face of frail failed Resolutions, as a personal challenge. Writing today is especially ironic in some respects, because it is very windy and frigid (for this part of the world), with wind chills in the single digits. I blogged last year about the difficulty of riding in wind, and adding this degree of cold makes riding impossible. The question is whether frostbite or lungburn would get me first.

Anticipating such difficulty, I have set up a mag trainer indoors. I already have an exercise bike, but I wanted an experience closer to real cycling in matters of position, stress, and “feel.” To simulate a bike ride convincingly, what you’re sitting on needs to have a real saddle and real pedals. So I am using my Jamis Coda click on “Specs” above for details), with a somewhat worn tire on the rear wheel and mounting a more comprehensive bike computer to go with my heart monitor (one nice feature of the exercise bike is its comprehensive computer monitoring). The trainer itself supports the bike’s rear axle and applies a magnetically controlled pressure on the bike’s rear wheel in the form of a smooth steel cylinder. The bike wheel rolls against the cylinder’s resistance.

Now I can work on some specific metrics—such as spinning, knee position, cadence, and saddle position—rather than acquiring the bad habits the e-bike can seduce one into. Christmas has provided me with some new DVD bike racing material to watch as I ride, and motivation is high. So let’s see where the stationary bike leads until we can be on real, rather than virtual, roads again. The Muse tells me that writing regularly creates the addiction to more reading, thinking, and writing, so allons-nous.

Yesterday was the first day this summer I have had to set out really early to avoid the heat.  Even then I took more of “my time” than I should have.  I rode Rosebike, and because it is “aggressively geared,” as my stepson Andrew puts it, I ride it pretty much on the bike trail and level road routes, where climbs like Hunter Station Road will not occur.  The idea yesterday was a quick trip to Herndon and back, around 22 miles.  I had forgotten how humid, though cool, it is on these indolent summer mornings, and how shady now that August is with us and the sun stays at a lower angle for longer.  Starting at 8:00 (should have been 7:30), I still had shade along the northwest/southeast oriented Trail on the way home in most places.  At the end, I was pouring sweat, had lost 4 pounds of mostly water weight, and could savor a job well done at 9:40 am.

Average speed: 16.5 mph!  Yes, this is still my fastest bike, despite the presence of the nice Trek 2.1 in the garage.  The Squadra is a bit lighter than the 2.1, maybe by 1.5 pounds, and it’s got a steel frame, which gives it a bit of flex but not much shock absorption power.  Compared to any bike with carbon forks, this one makes you feel all of the road, bumps and everything else.  It has downtube shifters, which add to the intimate relationship among rider, machine, and road.  The crankset is a 52/39, so it’s aggressive all right, and “faster” than I am by far.  The difference between it and the Trek is the 52-tooth big gear, as opposed to the 50 on the Trek.  When you’re hammering, that’s a discernible difference.  Hot pink frame, hot machine, hot day.

Fifteen days ago–can’t believe it was that long–I went on a bike tour in Pennsylvania, the River-to-River Ride in Bucks and Montgomery counties.  It’s a roll through the historic and picturesque rolling hills of Mennonite farm country, with options to ride 50 miles mid-route to one river or the other and back, or to do both rivers for a century ride.  I’ve always chosen the 50 mile option, not being quite ready for the rigors of a longer ride than I’ve yet done, in the usual late-July heat to boot.  Whichever ride starts in the morning is the one I want to do, and this year it was through Montgomery County to the Schuylkill River.

I was there to start at 8:00, knowing I am not the swiftest of riders, and wanting to be done before the heat got fully cranked up.  Typically of this summer, the heat wasn’t too intense and the humidity was not too high, the sun was shining bright, and the adventure was very promising.  I remembered the basics of the route from several years ago, when I lost some time by misreading the cue sheet (route guide) and then ended up with a flat tire and an ignominious ride home in the broom wagon.

Our friends John and Linda, local residents, always help with the ride, and Jane was working the afternoon hospitality shift with Linda, so I drove the 10 miles to the start point in Souderton, registered, set up my bike, and was on my way.  Took the Jamis Coda Comp, wanting the 28mm width of the tires in case the roads got rough, and feeling just a hair more comfortable with it because of its longer familiarity than the Trek 2.1.  I was feeling great, the air was cool, the pace was fairly fast.   But there were a couple of glitches in the cue sheet again, more easily addressed nowadays with the cell phone in hand.  I ended up having to reclimb a very long, steep hill, and was one of the last riders to reach the rest area by the Schuylkill Canal.

Still, the day was yet young and the ride back challenging but not crushing (the road blazes said “HC” for Heritage Conservancy, but I could have sworn they were referring to the pitch of the road in places–French “HC” stands for “hors catagorie,” the most difficult climbs).  The detours cost me 10 miles, so when I got to the refreshments that were 10 miles from the end, I’d already done my 50.  I chugged in at 60.01 miles, thrilled to see that they had not closed down the Free Lunch line yet.  I could have drunk 6 or 7 of those mini-bottles of water, and did!  Sandwiches and fruit were great too.

Felt very proud, loved every minute of it, even those last 10 miles, and will do it again next summer in Bucks County, which will make Linda and John happy, since they love their county.