Recently in roadie Category

i was going to post saturday afternoon about how awesome i was for starting off the new year very athletically, but instead i'll post about how dumb i am.

here's the setup: i have a century to ride next month. i haven't biked more than 40 miles at a time in a year, maybe a year and a half. i hadn't biked at all since mid december. so naturally i went for 50 miles yesterday, including a couple of hills that i don't really like.

and today, my knee ligament -- the very one that tells me i've ridden too hard too soon -- is hurting. it will go away, like it always does, i'm sure. but like any good injury it's now set back my training. so nice job, me. way to use the brain.

anyhow, even though that's a bummer, it seems to be healing pretty quickly. i'm going to blast it with some anti-inflammatories this evening. and since i've started playing dark souls just this morning, i'll have plenty of motivation to rest.

but now i get to worry about finishing the century. not because i will still be injured then, but because i'm so terribly undertrained for it.

meh, i'll get by. sigh.

remember this?

I do.

Way back when, I said I wanted to:

1) become knowledgeable in bicycle repair
2) buy a road bike since that's really what i should have gotten 7 years ago when i got my mountain bike what what i only ride on roads
3) make room indoors to keep my bike on account of our crummy garage here is no place to keep a bike and neither is my patio on account of things rust out there and there's no room on account of the tomato plant
4) become knowledgeable in bicycle repair

Hot damn if I didn't go and achieve all four! Hooray for me and accomplishing goals.

I love my bike, and my bike loves me. My bike's name is Rosie, and she and I were introduced shortly after the abortive bike ride documented above.

Several times since then I've been tempted to get a fancier bike. After all, I'm clearly a road bike enthusiast, and clearly I have $X in my bank account, so why not spend $X on a new road bike? I'll use it, sure!

But then there's Rosie. I don't Rosie to end up like Sherman, my poor, sad, neglected touring bike. Rosie isn't like Sherman, she gets lots of attention. And she doesn't need to be replaced, no sir, because there's nothing wrong with her. Even an all-carbon frame and Dura-Ace shifters would just be wasted on me. I'll take my aluminium frame and my Ultegra components, thank you, and leave the $10,000 road bike to the guy with the shaved legs and no ass that I just left behind on the hill.

I love road biking but I love my road bike just as much. I've bought a lot of crap over the years. A lot of that crap I don't use any more, because I lost interest in a hobby, or the crap turned out to be imperfect in some way, or I bought in at the bottom of the crap ladder and ended up with low-quality crap, and maybe the better quality crap is too pricey to line up with my interest, so I just ignore the bad purchase and pretend it will go away. Not so with Rosie.

As good as the day I bought her. No, better. I know how to fix almost anything that can go wrong with Rosie, and I've actually fixed many of those things personally. I know how to ride effectively, I know where to get quality parts and accessories, and I know where to ride around here. I have attained some small level of mastery in the local cycling arts.

I am extremely grateful that a stroke of craptasticness way back at the start of 2008 led me, unknowingly and by chance, into a wonderful sport that I may not be any good at, but which at least brings me a lot of happiness. And I'm lucky that I had the wisdom then to choose a mighty steed that still loves me nearly 4 years later.

i can have everything i want in life, as long as everything i want in life is to wake up next to my beautiful loving wife and go for a wonderful run in the mind-blowingly excellent california weather.

what is steel, compared to the hand that wields it?

though physical activity has been the cornerstone of my life for a decade now, i still view it as a recent introduction, and am constantly amazed at the bliss i can generate just by moving quickly through my environment.

the sun and the movement of my feet are the cures to all that ails me.

i once again fit into my $150 bike pants. no longer must i suffer the pains and indignities of mere $90 bike shorts. no sirs and madames, now i can stuff my nether regions into $150's worth of pure, silky, cushiony comfort and laugh unfeelingly at every bump and pothole that once tormented my most sensitive bits.

i've lost 12lbs in 2 months.
i've got a saddle sore on my saddle sore.

after biking past them many times, today i pulled over by the apparent gold-panners apparently panning gold by the side of the road on crystal springs, right across the street from a $4 million dollar house that hops and i toured a couple months ago. i axed them what they were doing.

they immediately clarified that they weren't panning for gold. they're archeologists, sifting through dirt excavated about a mile away on el cerrito, where a new sewer or something is being put in. apparently they're looking for human remains, and if they find any, woe unto the construction project.

so far they've found "projectile points", some pottery crap, and a buried sewer pipe to nowhere that nobody, not even the city, knew about.

they said they're really enjoying the view of the hill, across the street. it has, after all, a tree.

to amuse myself, i completed the final half mile or so of my ride without pedaling. my last crank turn was to get over alameda de las pulgas at crystal springs. there's a steep downhill after that, and i conserved the momentum from that to traverse the 3 or 4 mostly flat remaining blocks (and intersections) to home.

there was more body jerking than usual, but i managed to do it without pissing off any drivers.

angry about the economy, the wind, the cold (it's august, when are we going to get a hot day around here?), work, lunch prospects, and my itchy back, i decided to take my anger out on... myself. so i abused myself on the bike.

i turned right and went up bunker hill, then down ticongeroga or whatever that is near the top of BH, back down to polhemus, up over horseshit bridge, cañada to edgewood, edgewood back to alameda, then up and over the alameda hill at ralston, down that, and then, just because i could still breathe, up hillsdale. some dude at the top said "tough hill huh" or something, to which i replied, "argheleabraaarrgh...". i managed to do all this not at high speed, but hardly at low speed, and certainly not in my granny gear.

hops and i were demotivated by the weather and didn't get out until well past 10am. we decided to do our sawyer camp out and back for quickness and ease, and because the signs had said it would only be "closed" until 10. but it turned out the TdP was still ongoing. so we went up the hill, and up sawyer camp, and at the top we agreed it'd be too dangerous to go back -- so we kept on with the TdPers and followed their route.

we ended up at an unmarked intersection with the choice of going into coyote point or bgame. we went to bgame and apparently lost the tour. still, it was loads of fun. i saw a dude with really nice carnacs and asked where he got them. alas, they were his dad's, and dad got them many, many years ago. the glory days of comfy carnacs are well behind us, i think.

(i wish bikely wasn't so worthless. i don't like mapmyride but ferchrissakes bikely won't even load!)

anyhow, i did a hilly ride today. from bay tree park up parrot, down de anza, up polhemus, down ralston av, up alameda, then back down parrot to the park.

mmr says that's just under 11 miles and claims i did 790 feet of climb, proving that mmr doesn't know wtf it's talking about.

as i was coming down alameda i realized that to make this ride into HYKY (major) i could go up hillsdale (ow!!) then down/up de anza (it's got a nice 10% climb for a quarter mile or so) and return to the park via crystal springs and the obstacle course.

that sounds like a plan for next week.

if i wanted to really HYKY, once i finished de anza i could climb bunker hill, and then... what? thanks to bridge construction, the easy route home is blocked until 2013, so that'd mean more climb to get to cañada, and then i guess up the ralston trail and back down polhemus/crystal springs/obstacle course -- or, of course, ascension back to parrot.

that's a hell of a lot more than 800 feet of climb.

the possibilities for torture are pretty near endless.