Author Archives: Andrew

This is Not a Dream

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Before we get started, I’d like to alert you to a new term.  I created it in honour – it’s clearly an honour to have me bestow a term in reference to your actions – of a former co-worker and ardent cyclist who’s stretchy pants and stiff-soled shoes provided some level of juvenile amusement to the rest of us.

Ever since Best Wife surprised me with a Birthdayish celebration and gifted me a new set of MEC Roubaix stretchy pants, I’ve been anxious to try them out.  Unfortunately the weather has been unseasonably hot though I’m not in any way complaining.  Fortunately for me, fall is now officially upon us and Mother Nature has kindly delivered the required morning temperatures to make donning the stretchy pants appropriate.

Wednesday was my first ride and you know what?  I like them.  No really, I do.  It’s hard to put my finger right on it but the difference is nice.  How nice?    I might step up to stretchy shorts next summer and leave the cargo shorts and my modesty at home.  They feel…sleeker, like there’s less stuff going on.  I wouldn’t have guessed there was anything going on before but its absence is noticeable.  There’s less friction between my legs and the seat now, again – I wouldn’t have said there was any until it wasn’t there.  Subtle little things.  I need to adjust my seat again now – it’s no longer positioned just right with my new slippery pants.  I’d said to nobody in particular that I planned continue riding in my cargo and other non-stretchy shorts in pseudo defiance of the cyclistas who would proclaim my non-conforming attire an indicator of my ability and I would ride them off my wheel when I found them.  This has not happened.  To date, I’ve only been dropped almost exclusively by cargo wearers so perhaps the I can outride you in my work clothes while riding my grandfather’s cast-iron bike is way over-done anyway.  The stretchy thing is good – really it is.

Of course the overarching benefit of my great new stretchy pants is that they make me look good.  No, the real benefit is keeping my knees warm.  The last couple of 5°C rides were not entirely uncomfortable but caused me some level of concern just the same.  Given the importance of my knees in day to day life what was that?  uhm no…that’s not what I meant <ahem>.  Considering how dependant we are on functional knees, I am keenly aware of keeping them healthy and happy.  And warm.   So now I have nice warm knees, even when the temperature hits the (literal) freezing mark as it did this morning.

I didn’t think to bring along my cargos for the journey home so, as I did yesterday I rode home with my stretchy pants in the 18°C sunshine.  I would say this exceeds the comfortable temperature for these pants if you’re putting any effort into your ride.  By kilometre three I was debating whether I should doff them and go in my supposed-to-be-under-your-cargos chamois-equipped stretchy shorts – finish the ride in my shiny grey padded underwear.  In the end I opted not to traumatize fellow path users that way and rode home too hot.

This morning however I arrived to find work in full swing already and before I could get out of my stretchy pants and sweaty shirt I was on the phone and answering emails.  Or was I meeting with my team in an emergency huddle tackling some tough issues.  Maybe I was sitting with my feet on the desk talking to a co-worker about riding.  Regardless I was clearly very busy, too busy to follow the cardinal rule of chamois shorts – don’t stew in your sweaty pants.  Half an hour later I finally opened my clothing stash drawer and had one of those moments.  Hey…uhm…wait…ohhhhh…aw crap…and I have an off-site meeting…<sigh>.  I’d been Thomas’d!  You ever had one of those dreams where you show up at work and realize you aren’t wearing any pants?  It was like that only I wasn’t dreaming.  The drawer was as bare as a roadie’s calves save for a lone t-shirt – I’d forgotten my pants.

Go forth and spread the good word – when you arrive at work with nothing but stretchy pants (or their length-challenged brethren stretchy shorts) to wear, consider yourself Thomas’d.

PS – no, I did not subject my fellow meeting participants to the wonders of my stretchy pants, I did what any man would do – I asked Best Wife to rescue me.  Her Bestness knows no bounds.

 

Conehead

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As noted previously, I tend to ride alone.  Not like my daily rides are anything to share anyway – a short commute to work and home again along some fairly innocuous bike paths.  The stuff of legend I know.  One result of riding alone all the time is developing your own habits that may not be compatible with those I will respectfully refer to as my fellow commuters.  I say respectfully as I’ve been dropped hard by more than one of them in the past and I’m sure I will again.

Yesterday as I approached Edmonton Trail, preparing mentally for the climb up to Centre, there was a rider already stopped at the light.  Things, for me, got strange immediately as his stopped position was too far away from the intersection though he was clearly intending to cross it.  I do it one of two ways – in heavy traffic I wait at the crosswalk as it puts me ahead of most of the traffic so I have a clearer view of the intersection and nobody is trying to run me down making their right turn.  Or – if traffic is lighter I’ll ride up to the front of the empty right lane, but on the inside of it.  This rider was back a few feet from anywhere I’d normally stop, so without really thinking about it, I passed him and stopped in front.  I realized too late how it must look and it was admittedly rude but I don’t run into other riders at this light when it’s red.  Ever.  I didn’t really know how to approach it.  I commented on the wind and as the light went green he continued to chat about the state of the bike path.  This is all together new to me – stranger / cyclist chatting.  This too presents a conflict with my established habits.

As a new rider, a new, aging rider watching “the big four-oh” coming at him full speed, a new, aging, 40-ish rider with asthma and a not-that-long-ago tobacco habit, any departure from level ground to a positive angle – meaning uphill – is noted immediately and tends to be a challenge.  My normal course of action had until recently been to simply stand up and mash away while trying not to slow too badly.  As an experiment I’ve been staying in the saddle and dropping into the middle ring (the bottom of the middle ring if I’m honest) and pedaling furiously and while the results have been not all together bad, there are times when standing just seems to be the right thing to do.  Like this section of my ride.

So here we are stranger-chatting as we approach the first bit of incline, him on my right and me wondering if I’m capable of making this little hump while I’m still in the saddle without getting run over by the cyclist that suddenly appeared behind us.  I’m not sure if I earned it with all this headwind riding or if he opted to play nice but by the time we’d made it to the first false flat, he’d stopped chatting and slowly dropped behind.  Before we made it to the next intersection, he was far enough behind me that my habits were no longer his concern.  I rolled through the stop sign and continued to pedal up the gentle slope past the Handi-bus barn to 1st street.  He gained ground behind me and I figured here was where he was going to drop me.  Heading south onto 1st, it turns into a short, steep climb of perhaps 10 meters over 70.  Having ridden the previous 25 minutes home in a headwind, it was nice to have the wind at my back but I was a bit knackered so I stood up and mashed away pushing myself up the hill without so much as a Fred-mirror glance.  Again I was conscious of how it might have looked – me trying to drop my new chatting friend but I didn’t stop.

The truth is though, I wasn’t looking for him, no longer paying him any attention and I hadn’t noticed the 3rd rider since we hit the first slope.  I don’t know if he followed me south on his own route or headed north instead.  I was tired, near the end of my ride and wanted to finish it my way.  I rounded the bend onto 34th and made the climb up to Centre with everything I had and found Centre empty, so I crossed it and went home a sweaty, mushy, happy rider.

9 times or more out of 10, I ride my commute like a man possessed, pushing my mental limits, pushing my legs and lungs.  I like to ride like that, I enjoy that suffering, pushing the boundaries for more growth.

While I am absolutely helpless against chasing down a rabbit, or trying to run away as one myself, it’s  only me I’m competing against.  If I manage to chase down a rabbit, I’ve earned that pass.  I know I’ve been travelling faster for however long it’s taken me to catch them and I can continue that pace (probably).  Passing the rabbit is not a conehead move.  Likewise, being passed while I’m riding hard means they earned it – nothing coneheaded about that.  Pulling in front of another rider at a stoplight and then racing away on the green – it might look like I’m trying to drop them but –honest – they’ve just wandered onto my private track.

A Confidence Apogee

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I tend to be an all-or-nothing guy which has been both an unrecognized blessing and a curse.  While sober today, the all-or-nothing frame of mind was hard at work when I was a teenager.  I was that guy that took the cap off the bottle and threw it away ‘cause I knew I wasn’t going to need it again.  On the other hand, knowing I didn’t have the necessary financial resources for a thorough and properly executed cycle kept me from dancing down steroid alley in my gym heyday.  Considering the “all” side of that avenue is frightening to think about – a 300 pound meat puppet that can’t comb his own hair but no longer needs to thanks to the juice-induced baldness.

That attitude carried over into my automotive obsessions with a million projects never started, a thousand upgrades never performed and countless small victories never enjoyed.  Even today I look at the car and think “I should repair that little thing.  You know, the right way to do it is not to replace the little piece that needs to be replaced but to rebuild the entire suspension into a neck-snapping, spine-crushing ride that is worth more than the car and makes it no fun to drive anymore”.  It’s only focused attention that gets the cars repaired at all.   It’s had two different sets of wheels on it (yes, on the same side) for the better part of a year now.  I have a proper set but that would require a bunch of work, some new front tires, some attention paid to the front end and you know I might as well replace everything with new parts and if I’m going to do that I should address the inherent weak points in the suspension design because I know more than BMW’s engineer’s did in 1987 when they built my car because I once worked around engineers…you see how quickly this gets out of control?

I have worked hard not to become an obsessed cyclist, though I appear to be a firmly addicted one (this point is up for debate after my decision to drive to work rather than cycle against the 40km/h head/crosswind this morning).  I have not embraced roadie culture by shaving my legs, abandoning all pretense of an upper body mass or spending the monsters’ education fund on a bicycle that will surely be eclipsed by the technology released 3 weeks after I purchase it.  I have not  jumped headlong into mountain biking, touring, downhill engineless motorbike coasting, freestyle, dirt jump, endurance, urban…  Perhaps I fall into the commuter category but that word is uttered with such disdain by those who feel themselves to be true cyclists that I don’t dare admit to such a thing.  Besides, I have no panniers nor business-casual Lycra and I’m pretty sure that wearing pants on a bicycle is a fashion statement that must be bludgeoned out with a club.  Unless they’re torn Levi’s paired with a sleeveless lumberjack jacket and a beer box strapped to the bars like a basket.  It is mandatory to wear aviators and smoke while cycling like this.

No – I’ve done the bare minimum to get into riding.  I bought a pawnshop bike after breaking my dime-store one.  I wore my summer BBQ attire for riding until, at the end of a 50km ride various tender bits threatened to burst into friction-induced flames.  I own precisely one pair of riding tights (thanks babe!), one wind-stopper riding jacket (thanks babe!) and still ride in a ratty old pair of running shoes.  This is about as close to nothing-yet-functional as I can get.

However…riding my poor rescue bike – that’s where the all comes out.  Every time I think about getting on that saddle I get excited, my heart starts pumping a little faster, I get butterflies in my stomach and I wonder how the performance will go this time round.  I suit up, start the Strava ride timer and start pedaling.  If the wind is pushing back, the goal becomes to suffer harder, for longer, to endure the mental games that play out, to ignore the aching legs and just keep pedaling.  On the other hand, if the wind is non-existent or perhaps even favourable, the game is on and there is but one goal – set my fastest time.  This leads to the inevitable spittle and drool flying out of a giant fly-catching grin as I pedal like a man possessed.

I’d had a couple of incidents on the path during my bonzai runs that left me with the conclusion that I need to start acknowledging the path is not my personal track.   I’d been pursuing a fully-kitted roadie out of Max Bell towards Memorial and was steadily gaining ground but was certain he would disappear once he’d cleared the overpass and was back on flat path.  This was a mistake.  He casually made his way around the bends as I raced down the pedestrian ramp and cut the corner.    I’ve talked about this particular route a number of times, but what I’ve not mentioned is that it is humped and that off-road grass hump blocks your view of the path until you’ve crested the hump and have perhaps one second to take in the path traffic.  As I came over the top, he was perhaps 2 feet in front of me but travelling much, much slower.  Have I mentioned that I put road tires on the bike?  You know how well road slicks grip the dirt path?  Precisely….they don’t.   I narrowly avoided plowing through his stick-figure build and crushing his dainty little bike though I don’t think he liked me skidding through the grass to his right.  If you’re going to dress like a pro cyclist, don’t dawdle okay?  I rode home thinking this was the most serious of a series of recent events suggesting I might want to slow down some.   I didn’t.

All or nothing baby.  It’s so on.  I’m pedaling in full flight, coming down the hill along Fox Hollow.  In top gear, I’m spinning (quite literally) as fast as I can and building some serious steam as I head for the train gate.  I’m on the thin edge of control as my pedaling is starting to bounce me up and down on the saddle but the rush of speed is too much to ignore.   The path curves hard to the right, beyond 90 degrees as it snakes over to the tracks and there’s unusually high traffic on it this fateful morning.  Thinking only of the speed, of setting a new record, of setting the best time, I ignored that little voice suggesting this was about to be one of those scenes that I could avoid if I slowed down.  This was not nearly enough deterrent and I forged on, a heady 50km/h as I approached the corner.  I coasted for just a moment, passing one on-coming cyclist before throwing the bike hard to the right,  praying that it would hold traction somehow and carve through the corner.  Then I pedaled.

In hindsight, this was the crowning achievement on my Things I could have done Better on this Commute list.  Pedaling of course brought the inside pedal much lower than it had been and, into contact with the pavement.  This very kindly functioned as a pivot point and unloaded the tires enough to send bike and rider skittering across the path, narrowly missing two on-coming riders.  I skilfully used my shin to protect the crank from further contact with the paved path and called upon the inside of my arm to act as an energy converter, turning our forward skidding kinetic energy into heat which it did quite well.  Pavement rash does indeed burn.

Lesson learned?  We’ll see…are you riding all?  Or nothing?

PS (apologies to the Fat Cyclist commentor from whom I poached the “Confidence Apogee” event term)

PPS I had pictures of the fun and the aftermath but technical difficulties are preventing their presence…