cycling

Just riding along setting up the cameras to film some riding in traffic for a bike education video, when...

Who are you honking at? from Keri Caffrey on Vimeo.

 

There are things in life you love. There are things in life you hate. There are things in life you really don't care one way or the other. The most frustrating things, though, are the ones that you love so much, you keep using them even though you hate them.

This saddle is one of those things. When I first rode it, I was in love. It was so amazingly comfortable. Roadies — perhaps with affection, but perhaps with utter disdain — call their saddles "ass hatchets." It only takes one moderately long day in the saddle to understand why. In comparison, this device is an ass hammock — no pressure points at all. I really can't sum up the positives of this device any better. It's just phenomenal to ride on. It completely disappears beneath me.

But, as I'm sure you can tell, there are downsides. Downsides so severe that last fall I fired my Titanico.

First... where Brooks saddles apparently come equipped with a locknut for the tension adjuster, no such creature exists on the Titanico (Titanic???? That should be a hint...). But, this time around, I installed my own locknut. Should avoid that sensation of riding on the saddle frame instead of the ass hammock and realizing that I was, in fact, riding on the saddle frame since the tension screw had gone completely slack.

Second... During break-in, failure to keep tension high enough results in the inner sides of the slot chewing on your bits (the "taint" in my case) with each pedal stroke. Unfortunately, installation of my locknut made adding a bit of tension mid-ride impossible. May need to improve on the locknut design...

Third... incessant squeaks. The company website maintains the line "we can't reproduce this problem." I call BS. Everyone I've met with this saddle first says, "Nice saddle. I love mine." Then they follow with, "So... have you been able to make yours stop squeaking?"

And fourth... the saddle rails are made from fine French cheese. The manufacturer stands behind their titanium rails and will replace saddles with bent rails under warranty. I think there are two problems. First, the rails could stand to be a bit thicker. Secondly, they could be a bit shorter. What's the point of extra-long rails when the manufacturer's FAQ recommends keeping the saddle at the middle of the rails to avoid bending rails... Or maybe just make them out of steel? I suppose at least with the Ti rails they can be easily (easily is such a strong word) re-set cold.

Despite all the faults, though, it's an absolute joy to ride lots of miles with no pain. I'll be riding it until I can't stand it anymore... And then I suspect I'll forgive it again...

 

I don't suppose when Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again there's even the remotest chance he was talking about the shower in my folks' house. But, as far as showers go... it's reason enough.

To be honest, I can be certain he wasn't talking about that shower since the house wasn't constructed for another decade after he wrote the book... And I'm pretty sure it was yet another decade before the shower in question was added when the basement was finished. And it was a fine shower for years. The hot water tank was fifteen feet away, so hot water was plentiful and right at hand. None of that long warm-up time. But it was dark and rather, shall we say... compact.

I can be even more certain he wasn't referring to the shower at my in-laws' house, since it wasn't built until late in the 1970's. Not to be the sort to complain, but water pressure is just not its strong suit.

Normal people go off to college and are bothered by the communal showers. I, on the other hand, was thrilled. Lots of room. LOTS of water. No one complained if I took an extra shower during the day.

Then I got my first apartment. My very own place. My very own shower! Oodles of hot water. Bright white tile on the walls. The next apartment had a horrible bathroom. But the shower worked well. And the same with the next apartment. It was an OK shower. Nothing to write home about, though.

I knew when it came time to buy our house that choosing the right shower would be crucial. It would be a costly mistake to choose poorly. We wound up with a great choice. A shower stall separate from the tub. The shower head is plenty high so that I don't bump my head on it. There's a wait for the hot water, but once it flows there's plenty.

I know I really appreciated my shower last night. I was rudely reminded the difference between a ride and a workout on the rollers. I'd had the bicycle on the rollers a few times over the winter — mostly verifying that I was in condition to ride after the motorcycle accident. I figured it was far safer to discover a lack of strength in my shoulder indoors with a wall to fall against than on the road.

Last night, however, it was workout time. I programmed the intervals into the Garmin. I queued up the workout music on iTunes. I cranked up the volume. I pulled on my bibs. I tightened the straps on my shoes. I hopped on and rode. Seventy minutes later when it was time to start my cool down, I learned that I had made a little mistake. You see... Having learned this lesson before, I have a collection of workout mixes of varying length... So if it's an 80 minute workout, I've got 70 minutes of GO music and 10 minutes of cool down music. But, due to a computer crash, I wasn't quite sure where I'd put the collections. So, I decided to let the iTunes Genius™ feature take a stab at it. I picked Tom Sawyer, clicked on Start Genius and hoped for the best. Which was fine until cool-down time rolled up on the clock, and I hear the familiar strains of "Take the Money and Run." Right. Like I can ease off for that. The next track was Guns 'n Roses' "Mr. Brownstone" which let me down enough that I was able to walk to the aforementioned shower. Whew. I know where my playlists are now. And I won't lose them again.

But throughout the trauma of the extra song's worth of pain, I knew that my shower was waiting for me. There's a lot of me that has become a Texan. But when I find myself back home in North Carolina, the thing in Texas that I miss most is my shower...

Maybe Wolfe had a time machine...

It's been ten years since it's been properly cold in Dallas. That's what the weatherman said... It's only stories like this one from Toronto that make me feel like it's better to be here right now.

The forecast has been exaggerated a bit in the past, so I was hoping they were being pessimists again this time. I suppose they just can't risk not telling us how bad it could have been. We have to protect people from the evil weather and all. It turns out they were not exaggerating. Temps never made it out of the 20's on Thursday and Friday and barely topped freezing on Saturday.

And yet, for some reason, I rode my bicycle Saturday morning. It was a short ride by Saturday standards, but 32 miles is 32 miles. I can't tell you how unhappy I was to see the three other guys had actually showed up when I rolled into the parking lot at the appointed time of 10:00 am. I would have been happy to have ridden the four miles up from the house, turned around to go home and called it a day. But the four of us — Brent, Marty, The Stud and me — had a great ride north through Craig Ranch into McKinney where it was really nice to stop in and see TT-Bob and Mrs. Bob for cocoa and cookies. Somehow, it was colder on the way back south from McKinney, though... Must have been the changing wind. I made a gross tactical error and opted for the "easier" option on the return leg up Rollins hill by taking the multi-use trail which is not as steep, but slightly longer. I now know that it is also completely shaded and subject to water run-off. 700x23 tires don't stand a chance on ice. Someday my brain may let me replay that moment and I'll understand how I didn't fall.

Since we'd met for breakfast and I'd gotten to pick up my heated jacket liner for the motorcycle, I installed said liner on the motorcycle before I took my post-ride shower. Then I suited up and headed off for a little ride through the countryside. I had to return home for an adjustment, but eventually wound up spending a few hours out enjoying the countryside inside the solitude of my helmet before darkness and dinnertime were both closing in. In the process I got to deal with some demons — the intersection of FM 982 and FM 546 at Lake Lavon is horrendous and looked really scary, but I found a nice straight line to ride and rolled across it without a problem. Not to say I'll ride across that mess again on purpose... But I handled it well.

There may have been some wine involved, but somewhere along the line I committed to an 8:00 departure for the Sunday ride. Now, I'm the first to admit I like to ride at 8:00 — or earlier once daylight cooperates. It's nice to get the ride done and have plenty of day left to do other things — whether it's honey-dos (thanks for keeping those to a minimum, Sweetie!!!) or blasts through the countryside on the VFR. When I made that commitment, the forecast was calling for 23 degrees at 8:00. My thermometer said 15° at 7:00. This was not looking promising... Funny thing about water... is that it tends to freeze at or near 32°.

In any case, 7:58 did roll around, and I was making the corner into the parking lot at Big Lots while trying my best to not see the temperature at the bank (14°). La la la la. I can't hear you. I had been anxiously checking my iPhone for those "Sorry, we're bailing" messages since 6:00. No luck. As I rolled around the side of the store, there were four figures astride their bikes. Brent and The Stud again. No Marty, but The Swiss had come out to play. This was bad. All three of these guys are probably faster than me at the best of times. Not quite two months after breaking an ankle and a shoulder blade with the accompanying lack of riding put me in danger.

"No problem," said the little voice in my head... "When you pop, just sit on the cold ground, and that'll numb the pain until Amanda comes to get you."

As it turned out, even after pushing myself yesterday, I was able to keep up most of the day with only a few cries of "Uncle!" Brent did his best to keep us amused by displaying his useless, ice filled "water" bottles. I did my best to remind him of his miscalculation by commenting with regularity on how delicious my Orange Cytomax slushy was (I got lucky... the slushy got really thick right before temps started to properly rise around 10:30, just before we got home).

We encountered our first excitement heading west on Midbury when we saw the line of ice between us and the intersection. The light mercifully turned red and allowed us to plan our attack. I think it would have been safer to roll it with some speed, but we all managed to walk across it and escape without a fall. We found a few more patches heading south — including a couple ridiculously over-sized patches of ice and slush from folks sprinkling their lawns in sub-20° temperatures. The last ice we saw was crossing Walnut Hill on Ferndale. We had planned on a right turn to Walnut Hill, but the ice told us we'd just be going straight, "Thank you very much..."

We capped the ride off with a bit of communion — a celebratory blast from The Holy Shine in my alley way before going our separate ways. It sounded like Brent was off for the club 1:00 ride.

I took advantage of the early finish time and called Bean to meet for lunch as he'd expressed some displeasure that I was holding out on the location of a newly discovered burger joint. He and his young'un picked me up and we sampled the goodness that is Twisted Root.

Not much later, I learned why we never heard back from our neighbors and fellow cyclists, Warren and Audre, on the dinner invite last night... The space next to their business is apparently vacant... and apparently in Dallas where it only gets cold once every 10 years... they don't drain the pipes in vacant spaces... Oops! Sounds like damage is minimal, but a weekend spent drying office equipment is a weekend lost...

I've long known that a falling piece of toast can land only one way... jam side down. And, most likely, on one of the many clumps of Fiona hair that no vacuum cleaner in the world can quite overtake.

Last night, I made another incredible discovery. It would have merited further experimentation, but I was going to run out of socks... You see... I discovered that dropping a rolled up pair of socks from any point in my master bathroom results in said pair of socks landing in a water dish.

I was, given this discovery, further surprised to learn that their are only three water dishes in the master bathroom and that one of them was on the counter. And it's not a small bathroom by any stretch. Including the closet, you could fit a large portion of my parents' first home into our bathroom. In the end, it all just meant that I had to run a load of laundry to get a clean, dry pair of socks.

This phenomenon concerns me, though. You see... I have an amazing ability to encounter localized pockets of enhanced gravity. That's a euphemism for "When I go mountain biking, I tend to encounter the ground with some frequency," or even, I suppose, "Given the opportunity, I'll probably fall down." Fortunately, dirt is soft, and my most serious bicycling injury to date involves a painful bruise on my breast bone.

However, given my new knowledge that gravity doesn't always pull straight down — that is, that there might be more prominent nearby gravitational bodies than this Earth we wander around on — I'm concerned that I might encounter something more dangerous in the woods this spring. What if, for example, a localized pocket of enhanced gravity formed in the middle of a tree. Come to think of it, I may have witnessed just such an occurrence a few weeks ago when TT-Bob came flying off his bike near SMU... There must have been a gravity pocket in that light pole overhead! That really does explain a lot.

I'd prefer to continue falling down, though.

We year-round cyclists have a way of rationalizing really cold days. Once the mercury starts to dip below 50, we "ride the thermometer." 45 degrees? 45 miles.

Last night at dinner we were discussing what/where to ride today. At the time, I wasn't really keen on another ride downtown, but I knew it was the prudent choice. One of the mysteries of living near a big city is that said big city is largely unoccupied on Sunday mornings. With the multi-lane roads, it makes for a safe place to take a ride on a cold, overcast day. Since temps weren't likely to clear 35 degrees until mid-morning, we settled on an 11:00 start time.

This morning, I rounded the corner to Big Lots and found Cayla, Martin and Big Dave waiting for me. It was overcast, but not really dreary, so I was willing to try something different, but the response to my "where do you guys wanna go" was a quiet "I wanna go downtown," from Cayla. Girl votes count more, so it was decided. Twenty minutes later, I was delighted by the choice.

There's a certain relationship one develops with his road bike. There's something in the stiffness of the frame, the narrowness of the wheels — the utter absurdity of this gossamer contraption beneath you — but it tells you without words about each inch of road as it flows beneath. You can feel the ripples in the concrete, the texture rolled on to it, the bits of aggregate. You can feel grains of sand left over from the Great Dallas Chirstmas Eve Snow of 2009™. And then there's the magic that happens when you talk back. When pushing on the pedals and you sense the power as it moves from your leg through your shoe, and the crank turns, and the chain is pulled forward, and the chain pulls the cog and the wheel turns. When the bond is strong, you can even feel the rubber on the tire deform and maybe even slips the tiniest bit as you accelerate up a short climb.

I've really come to enjoy the Sunday Rides™ and going somewhere a little different. Perhaps it's not the best cycling route in terms of long steady efforts on the pedals or efficient movement, but if measured by stress relief, it's hard to beat. I'm looking forward to temps coming up a bit and extending the Sunday morning route through White Rock and Garland for an even fifty miles later on.

But, today, we rode the temperature. Thirty eight degrees. Thirty eight miles. There's another thirty eight floating about out there... Can't quite place it... Right on the tip of my tongue... Well... Happy birthday, Amanda!

Yesterday was the first day of 2010. So, of course, it was the first bike ride of 2010. I stayed with the group for about 6 miles before getting scared off by shaky riders and a very unsettled pace. We seemed to speed up on the ascents and slow down on the descents.

In the end, I had a great 46 miles of riding through Allen, McKinney and Frisco with only one wrong turn as I blew south on Ohio past Legacy and remembered, "Oh, yeah! I'm parked on Legacy!" A few minutes later I was enjoying a piping hot bowl of blackeyed peas and a slice of cornbread. Thanks, Sassykat!

An hour later, the group showed up and we socialized a bit. Maggie was going nuts with the camera, but I was able to get my best side to the camera after the ride. Apparently, my "friends" were kind enough to agree that it was, in fact, my best side... It's so good to have friends.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn later in the afternoon that I still remember how to ride the motorcycle. Didn't really go anywhere, but had a nice stroll.

We capped off the evening with a trip to the Fillmore Pub in Plano. It's great to spend an evening with friends. Which, of course, leads me to the point for today...

Whether intended or not, we all seek balance in our lives. It's crucial and unavoidable. As we move through life, there are new discoveries every day, and we tuck them into their neat little piles on the scales to maintain balance. The things we like. The things we hate. The people we like. The people who push all our wrong buttons. Perhaps the hardest thing to file away are those in our overlapping circles of friends that fall in our own "like" side of the scales, but balance to the other side for another friend. It's a chaotic place that sets our own scales swinging madly from stop to stop in search of that crucial balance. It's painful and disharmonic when our friends collide.

Perhaps what it comes down to is that, sadly, there are times when the only way to maintain the balance is to just take another lick of ice cream from the cone.

Arm warmers and a sleeveless jersey. A timeless combo.

There are a few drawbacks to riding a bicycle 12-14 hours a week. Of course... right now, I'd gladly accept them all. None of them are quite as frustrating as being trapped by the dull ache accented by the occasional stabs of roaring pain in my right ankle.

When you spend a lot of that bike time riding with other people, it can get even worse. They tend to take pictures. Incriminating photos. But photos taken by friends don't even begin to compare to the indignity of professional photos taken at rallies and races...

At first, I thought the idea of getting my picture taken during an event was pretty cool. But then I saw the results. I'm invariably making a horrible face, crusted in salty sweat and usually being passed by a dying turtle. That is not the way I wish to be preserved.

Aside from the photos, there's the lycra. Yes... it is a godsend. Riding a bicycle has probably never been more comfortable. The fabric stretches and conforms so that it doesn't get in the way. No seams under sensitive bits to chafe. No secondary rubbing as your leg moves past the saddle. But whoa be unto the children who are forced to see us when we stop at convenience stores for refills and discharges...

Heaven forbid, by the way, the temperature drops below 40 degrees. Then it's time to put on the balaclava. For a good laugh, pull off your helmet, but leave the balaclava on before going in to buy a Snickers at the store... Or, better yet... make a quick trip into the bank! Other problems begin to surface when the temps drop, as well. The nose begins to trickle non-stop. Masters of the snot rocket have an advantage here... No one will ride within 50 feet of them... The chronic snuffler will likely be covered in fine strings of spider webs by the end of a ride as bits of nasal drip have seeped out and been thrown in the wind. The glove blower will have shiny stripes along his tights — be sure not to shake his hand after the ride...

And then there are the days where you push just a little too hard and a little too long.

"Sure," you'll say. "I'd be happy to join you for a coffee." But you can't manage to swing one leg off the couch. Standing up is completely out of the question.

Amanda shared a little tip the other week. Instead of just collapsing on the floor when you can't walk any more, try a yoga pose like downward dog. It reduces the chances you'll need to kill someone nearby when he asks, "Hey... are you OK?"

Hell, no... I'm not OK... I'm a cyclist.

Iris in fused glass.

I woke up this morning around 5:30. It was dark. Very dark. I hesitated to even check the time on my phone. But, I did. I somehow managed to get back to sleep and managed to stay in bed until nearly 8:00! We managed to not be the first downstairs. That's a lot harder than it used to be. Now that there aren't any "family" horses in the barn, Fitzallen no longer hits the floor at 5:00 every morning. It's odd. I usually sleep in during the work week, stay up late on projects that require others to be asleep and reserve "early mornings" for weekends and vacation. It seems so backwards.

We spent the morning visiting Fire & Light Studios in Otto, North Carolina, where Fitzallen and her friend Pat have been creating some incredible glass pieces. They were picking up some pieces that had finished firing and picking out glass for their next round of creative expression. I can't wait to see what comes out next! Fitz says we have to let our Dallas friends know that her plates and bowls are for sale...

It's now week six since the motorcycle/truck collision. Amanda and I brought the mountain bikes to keep our options open for some activity to counteract the food. After a quick visit with my mom, Amanda took the dogs out for a walk around Buchanan Loop while I set out for a bike ride around it the other direction.

I figured that way Amanda could keep an eye on me. It was by far the toughest ride I've had since the accident - and, quite possibly, the toughest ride I've had in 10 years. The cold, my loss of fitness, and occasional bursts of pain from my ankle all conspired to make it a rough trip. That... and the occasional slip and slide when I found some snow. It was a real relief to make it back to the house and stand under the hot water of the shower. Weather tomorrow looks similar to today... 22 in the morning and a mid-40's high in the late afternoon. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a little more heat in the air on Wednesday, but then it turns cold and damp again...

Shortly before dinner, we had a little scare. Fitz and Blaine's dog, Maggie (please note the frightening similarity to our late cat), had a seizure. At 6:00, she was running around in the yard. Thirty minutes later, she was standing by the kitchen door and started seizing. Fitz and Amanda ran off to the vet to see if they could find anything. Apparently, this was a repeat from May, so the vet passed along a bit of medication in case she happens into it again. We'll hope she goes a long time before it does... It really upset the other dogs... and her family!

Over $100,000 in 3 days. Team Fatty rules. Elden is the master fundraiser. Hopefully he doesn't crash out the entire Team Shack on the training ride on Sunday. Here's how this all started.