Phantoms, Part 3

My tires crunch on the gravel, spitting out rocky shrapnel when I stand and accelerate. The path follows the Hennepin Feeder Canal out of Rock Falls, Illinois, a tiny waterway originally designed for barge traffic. The track, once worn bare by mules pulling loaded barges, has been turned over to the park district as a recreational area and buried in white sandstone to create a trail. It is the only off-road riding within range for a kid still working on a driver’s license, my first opportunity to take my new mountain bike into its element. The canal is on my left. On my right, a thin strip of trees separates my ride from the strip malls, hotels, and restaurants of Rock Falls. The illusion works; under the canopy of overhanging branches, I can convince myself that I am alone, that I no longer follow Dad’s wheel.

After a quarter mile of flat gravel riding, the real trail begins. A worn dirt path breaks away from the canal into the woods, cut by renegade motorcycles, kept open by kids on BMX bikes. I veer into the trees and climb the ridge that separates canal from city. The riding is frantic silence, rubber tires on dry earth, trees passing like telephone poles on the interstate. The branches close in, no wider than my handlebars, leaves brushing my knuckles. My pulse presses out on the foam shell of my helmet. Lines of dusty sweat creep down my cheeks. The trail begins to roll, its rise and fall like slow breathing under my tires. Each downhill slope loads my momentum, carrying me over the next rise, picking up speed with each trip across the trail’s wavelength.

My front wheel strikes the knob of a half-buried root, knocking the handlebars from my hands. For an exhilarating instant, I lose control. The wheel chatters out of its line. I grab for the bars, but the distraction is too much on such a narrow trail. A branch snags the bar and rips it from my hands. The front wheel turns sharply off the trail into the brush. I have no choice but to follow, slapped by branches. The bike finally strikes a tree, tossing me over the handlebars head first.

When I reach up to wipe the grit from my forehead, half my helmet is missing. On impact against the tree, the foam has split in a jagged arc across the top of my head. The rear stays in place, held by nylon straps, but the front swings open like a door. The helmet comes apart in my hands when I release the straps and take it off. I sit in the dirt -- dizzy, aching, with a hemisphere of helmet in each hand -- and laugh, because I am sixteen and don’t know any better.

Jason Nunemaker
Des Moines, IA

I'm not a Cyclist, I'm a Bicycle Rider

I rode a lot last year, a WHOLE lot, for me anyway. While most of that was for transportation, a significant portion of it involved long-distance recreational riding. And the use of the term "recreational" seems, well, a little confusing at times.

I started riding longer distances in order to train for a big charity ride. I got involved with some really nice folks who do long-distance riding on a regular basis, for fun. I practiced my form. I got a little bit faster (attaining a cruising speed of almost 12 mph). I got stronger. I completed three populaires (rides of 100km, or 62.5 miles) last year and dreamed of riding longer distances, growing ever stronger and more invincible. Randonneuring really woke up the sleeping Walter Mitty inside me. And I did achieve some things I'd never thought possible on a bike. At the end of last year, I had racked up over 2,700 miles. I had completed three metric centuries and successfully completed 141 out of a possible 210 miles on that three-day charity ride. I made some new friends through my involvement in the local randonneuring club. And I began to plan my 2008 riding season. Among my great plans for 2008 were more populaires (those metric centuries) and an attempt at a brevet of 200km.

This spring, my riding plans have been repeatedly stalled; my drive and desire for athletic greatness diminished.

So what happened?

Well, LIFE happened. My partner lost her teaching job last fall and became "underemployed"; and I needed to work more hours to help make up some of the shortage. Important time spent with family and friends took priority over some of my planned rides. The cold, wet winter and early spring made it difficult to go long on the weekends. A series of cold and allergy distresses forced me indoors more often and made it hard for me to ride longer than my typical morning commute (indeed, even my commutes were hard and I wound up tossing my bike on transit more often during the winter). I had a Crohn's flare-up over the winter that kept me off my bike for nearly two weeks. In short, I made plans and other stuff happened that got in the way.

So how am I working with it now?

Well, the 200km is out for the year. I simply cannot set aside enough time to prepare for that distance safely and effectively; and I am not angry or sad about it at all. It's just life. As for the populaires, I had hoped to enter an early one in March but the weather and my colds combined to keep me out of it. The next organized group populaire I can hope to find time for isn't until early November. (I could sign up to do one by myself but there hardly seems any point in that; the truth is I'd rather just go out for a 25- to 35-mile ride with friends and have a nice lunch somewhere along the way. If I could do this two out of four weekends a month I'd be pretty darned happy.) I am doing another charity ride, a shorter one-day event that's close enough to home for me to take public transit to and from the start. If I complete this ride -- and I'm pretty sure I will -- it will likely be, at something like 70 miles, the longest distance I ride in one day this year.

And something else has happened. I have not felt the least bit stressed about how things have turned out. I still ride my bike nearly every day. When I'm tired I take the bus part of the way. When I feel an extra burst of energy in the evening (especially since daylight sticks around till 8 pm now), I'll ride a longer, more "scenic" route home. And as I read ride reports by some of my new randonneuring buddies, I find that their descriptions of literally suffering through a particularly challenging stretch of a ride no longer hold the same allure for me. I feel as though I've found my limits, and I am turning them into my groove.

It's natural to want positive reinforcement simply for being the people we are. When I look around for that reinforcement, encouragement for the bicycle rider I am, I have to look a little harder. It's not found in the popular bicycle literature, in the magazines and articles found at most bike shops. It's not found in the popular media, who still equate Most Things Bicycle with Lance Armstrong. And it's not even found in most mainstream advertising for bicycles and bicycle-related product. Pick up any major bicycle catalog and the first thing you will see is someone who is young, sleek and ferociously fit, most likely a guy, clad in lycra and pounding his way up the mountainside with a determined grim on his tanned face. One must look and dress the part in order to Be A Cyclist.

I'm not so much a Cyclist as I am a Bicycle Rider. And I find that reinforcement by looking at my family and friends, at my co-workers who ride every day, and at regular folks who are just going from place to place on a bicycle, wearing whatever clothes they grabbed off the top of the clean clothes pile, ferrying their groceries or nothing at all while they pedal and smile and enjoy the ride. They are becoming my model of choice more and more, every single day.

That doesn't mean I've given up on riding those longer distances. I get a sense of accomplishment from doing those rides that's hard to explain, and they give me a chance to ride out in the country where it's quieter and there's more wildlife to see and hear. I love those longer rides and plan to do more of them, for as long as I'm able. But they are not the majority of the riding I do, and that is totally okay. Most of my rides are five miles or less each, and they are often as enjoyable as the country rides are. Because the point isn't speed or distance, it's simply that I get to ride my bike.

Any day I get to ride my bike is a good day.

Is it Spring for You?

I'm riding with bare knees. Enough of Spring is here for me to ride that way. The fig and pear trees aren't showing any fruit yet, the grape vines haven't leafed out. So Spring really isn't here.

Spring will really be here for me when I have my first Hawaiian shirt day. On that day I’ll ride in a billowing silky colorful shirt and be really comfortable. It's as close to being naked on the bike as I get.

What's your "it's Spring!" ride moment? Has it arrived this year?

Where Else?

I work in a secure facility. This means there's guard shacks in the driveway and employees need to show their corporate ID to get into the parking lot. Today as I rolled up I noted there was a new guard on duty. I slowed down a little extra, he wasn't going to recognize me. Held out the ID and he waved me on.

"Where's your car?"
"Where it belongs."

Home in the driveway.

Coupleafewthings Monday

Go go go go go:
ok, well don't go, the image is gone, torn from the internets like a $1 off burrito coupon from the student paper. Stupid internets...
(was once an image of a guy riding a bike on a line of soda bottles)
Next:

My race bike racked for the ride home.

I have been waiting years to do this well. A decade ago I occasionally carried frames on my back to customers when I worked at a small frame builder. Many a times I have steered another full bike down the road, one hand on the stem, whilst riding another. But I think I this is the apogee of swellegant bike on bike hauling. That was 9 miles and 800 feet elevation change each way to get to the race.

Lots of reasons to hate pro cycling right now, here is a reason to start watching again:

click for source
Go read this nice fluff article on Taylor Phinney and family over on Sports Illustrated. If you don't know who he is or who his parents are, go read it.

Taylor is 17 and one of the top five pursuit cyclists in the world and will be representing the US in Beijing this summer in the Olympics. He rides for the Slipstream Chipotle team and with any luck, will be doing one day races in Europe flying the plaid colors and possibly a tacky mustache within a few years.

Addicted to darkness

Ever since my Down Low Glow lights arrived, I've become completely addicted to nighttime cruising. I've always been a night person, and I love being outside at night, particularly on nights like tonight, when the air is like silk and the stars are out clearly, even in the city.

Night riding is completely different from daytime riding, and not just because it's dark. You see things in the city at night that you can't see when the sun is out. It's been my experience that most cities have two populations -- the folks who inhabit the office buildings by day and retreat to their pockets of suburban safety during the night, and the people for whom the city isn't even open until about 9 or 10 p.m. That's a broad-brush statement, of course, so please don't take offense.

I recently moved to Albany, NY, a small city with fewer than 100,000 people. Despite its size, the center of the city and the neighborhoods immediately around it resemble similar spots in most of the larger cities I've lived in. Folks sit out on stoops in the warm night breeze, relaxing with a drink and grilling mouth-watering food on small hibachis or on grills much too large for their porches. Professionals, many still dressed in their work clothes, walk dogs of all sizes, many of whom bark in what I believe to be admiration as my brightly lit bike passes.

Tonight I rode to Buckingham Lake, a small pocket of countryside right in the heart of Albany. Nestled at the end of several city streets, Buckingham Lake (which is really a small pond) has been a relaxing oasis for Albany residents since the colonial era. I went there for the first time the other day. In the sunshine, the lake was filled with ducks and geese. Mountain bikers rode around the one-mile trail that surrounds the lake, and families of all sizes and kinds walked along the shore or played at the playground.

At night, it was very different.

For one thing, it wasn't as dark as I'd hoped. There were quite a few lights on tall lamp posts around the edge of the lake, and the streets on both sides were lit up, too. I hopped on the gravel trail and passed two high-school-age couples walking the trail and -- to judge by the smell -- smoking pot. A businessman stood on the playground in front of an expensive car, talking on his cell phone. One picnic table was occupied by four or five people talking and laughing. Around the first bend in the trail, the light poles stopped and I got a bit of darkness. The far side of the pond was the brightest area, and then the trail dropped down a few feet to kiss the water. Here I actually needed my headlight to see well enough to avoid a late-night swim.

Leaving the lake, I rode around the circular roadway the surrounds New York State's Harriman Office Complex, and then headed over to cruise around the University of Albany. Given the gorgeous weather, the campus was surprisingly quiet. Maybe everyone was studying for finals. I did pass one large group waiting for the bus, and heard several comments about my glowing Xtracycle. ("That's sweet!" "That's f***king hot!" "Cool bike!" "You're going the wrong way!" That last one turned out to be true, but only for a few hundred feet.)

On the way back to my house I passed three young guys crossing West Lawrence. "That's a hot bike," one of them said to his friend. "I like your bike, man!" the friend yelled, raising one fist in the air. I thanked him and headed home.

I'm not a cool guy. Despite having several careers that people might consider cool -- including salsa and funk musician, radio DJ, foreign correspondent and hip hop label producer -- those cool vibes have never really rubbed off on me. I just got my first tattoo (a chainwheel with a peace sign in the middle), but I still look more like the Pillsbury Doughboy than a rebel without a cause. But at night, on the Xtracycle with the Down Low Glow, even I get a little taste of the hip life. And I'm not gonna lie, I dig it. I mean c'mon -- who wouldn't like to ride around with people actually cheering for your bicycle?

So I highly recommend some nighttime cruising on your bicycle. Just make sure you've got a lot of lights, and choose your route well. And be careful -- once you get out there at night a few times, you'll become addicted, too.

Jason Crane is a union organizer, jazz broadcaster and action dad. Find him online at RocBike.com and The Jazz Session.

Commuter God

"You're a commuter god," was what the email said.

A fellow north-Texan saw a photo of my favorite bike recently submitted to the Fixed Gear Gallery. He emailed me that he believed that we'd met briefly before. Turns out, yep, it was me he flagged down in Denton several weeks ago. After mentioning that I'd ridden the bike in the photo to work in Denton on that day, he must have considered the distance, the fixed gear drive train, and weather conditions that day (a 20+ mph headwind with gusts to 35 mph) before he offered the kind, but greatly exaggerated, compliment.

I enjoy compliments as much as anyone, but I am not a commuter god. I am not a finely-tuned athlete and do not have a love for discomfort. Thanks in large part to stories and encouragement from many of the authors of this blog, I have begun to identify selected days to commute by bike. As so many of these authors have said, one can greatly expand his understanding of what is possible.

I've now commuted to work several times at distances I once thought were impractical. My job involves professional attire and numerous out-of-office appointments from 30 to 50 miles away, so days with no appointments work best. I've learned-by-doing how to strike a balance between carrying stuff and staying prepared by keeping stuff in my office when a commuting opportunity arrives. By simply trying, one might learn what was once thought to be impractical, can actually be preferable. My commute by bike takes me three times as long as driving. But being good for the environment, good for the community, good for the body, and good for the spirit, it is a preferable way to use time.

I'd like to encourage those who might be considering riding the bike for utility purposes. It is a simple way to transform the mundane into the delightful. Whether it be commuting to work, running errands, or social activities, give it a try. Does it take anything like "a commuter god" or special powers? Hardly...just someone who likes to ride a bike.