The woods are still there

Last fall, Dario, Salem and I had an appointment in Berlin. We rode there by way of Cedar Mountain. While in the spooky woods, we encounter a woman who was sad that all the trees were being cut down to make way for a subdivision. That didn't sound good, though it did explain the orange bands on lots and lots of trees. However, it did seem strange that any would want to build a subdivision in this economy.

I haven't been back in the woods since the end of December and when I rode through there it was evident that something with big tires had been through. It hasn't really taken down any trees, so I don't know what the big-wheel thing was doing in there. Bulldozer off roading?

Today, I rode over there in the romantic sleet and the trees were all still present. The spooky woods are still standing and hopefully will be forever. Read more!

Still winter

But in a good way!

After work, I decided to see if I could go ride on the East Hartford boardwalk. I couldn't, too much snow. I meandered around for awhile and found a vase on the sidewalk by the highway behind the Morgan Street garage. Then, I rode down to Wethersfield to find that the snow was all gone from the Cove, but the ice was still thick. So, I rode out on it.

I highly recommend this.




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Bikes outside: the realm of possibility

I've never written a bike outside, so I'll probably break a rule or two.

Pictured here is Dario's Wicked Fat Chance. He got it a long time ago and I didn't know him then. Since he got it, it has shed derailers and is a single, dingle or fixed gear. Next to this snow bank, it's fixed and has fenders. The brakes are original and it has a weird bottom bracket with press-in bearings. If ridden through the Connecticut River, it starts creaking. It's also set up with one of cool fixed/free ENO eccentric hubs (thus all the aforementioned options). Like my Colnago it has a hole in the stem instead of a cable hanger. Some people think that's cool.

It was ridden in the Reservoir, early in the Reservoir's history of people riding in it. I've seen it carried up and down Constitution Plaza, bounce through both of the meadows and lumber through tracts of snowy powerlines. It's a nice bike and unlike other Fat Chances of the internet, it's not a bike shrine.


In other news I went for my longest ride of the year so far. You're perfectly allowed to make fun of me, but it's not exactly been easy to get out there. This, however, was a very pleasant ride with Salem & Peter to points east and south.

New bike attire!

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Day time snow

As a reprise to Wednesday's snow escapades, we met up with another famous Glastonbury mountain biker, Al, headed to the part of the Meshomasic on the eastern part of rt. 2 and its gas line. It was warmer and the sun was shining, we busted through the snow more. But, there were still awesome moments of riding on mogul-type stuff. It makes mountain biking a lot more like skateboarding or BMX or maybe surfing. Instead of riding for an hour without putting a foot down or pausing, it's ride for two minutes, punch through the snow, pull your bike out and try to go some more. Salem had a particular intense crash and broke his seatpost. The next two days don't look great for this type of riding because it's supposed to be warm. Read more!

The most unique of snow

The snow is in a unique state right now. It's deep, but it has a really strong crust. It's so strong that you can ride on top of it, despite being two feet deep. It's also crusty and not icy, so there's traction. For these reasons, Salem and I decided to ride the powerlines down to Portland. It was pretty awesome, like a pump track going on for miles. Although, unlike a pump track, the ground occasionally would eat one of your wheels. If that wheel was the front, an endo would ensue (for me). None the less, it was pretty awesome. Wide tires at low psi are recommended. Salem wore a full-face helmet, because he was worried about hurting his face. He also endoed way less, but he's also way better at riding a bike than me.

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The sporting life

Dreary!

If you're a sporting enthusiast, times are difficult. The snow is sharp, slippery and painful and covering basketball courts, singly tracks, baseball diamonds, shuffle puck stadiums, xc country skiing routes and the roads are narrow and angry. Despite these difficulties and the 32 degree rainy weather, I met Salem for a ride today. He believed that trains plowed and compacted the snow, so we should ride on train tracks. This may sound dangerous and stupid, because it is. But, trains are loud and have those whistles. We didn't die and his theory was mostly correct. We rode from near Governors Blvd in East Hartford to the South Windsor line and rarely punched through. It was pretty cool. Then we milled around for a bit and road some East Hartford sidewalk singletrack along Forbes road up to the Glastonbury line. We parted ways and I went home over the Charter Oak Bridge; thinking that it'd be impassable, but someone plowed it!

Snowblowing the roof on to another part of the roof

Plowed bridge

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Weekend outing

As you may have heard, the D2R2 now has a more formidable little brother, the Green Mountain Double. It's 205 miles long has 25,000 feet of climbing (4,912,578 meters). 80% of it is on dirt. Sandy sent some pictures (including one of a place called Swearing Hill, that has a 62% grade and swears at you when you on it) and intimidating words ("a double century in miles only, it rides like a sextuple") of it to fellow snails. Unlike the D2R2, one must qualify to ride it by doing a 300k brevet, double beforehand or something to prove you're awesome.

I have no idea if I'd actually be able to complete this ride. The longest I've ever ridden in a day is about 120 miles. I'm pretty sure that I can do a double and plan to try in the spring. This, however, falls into the category of ultracycling (I mean, it's on their website) and I doubt that I'm an ultracyclist.

Nonetheless, I have begun training. Johanna and I went up to the mountainous green state this weekend. I rode! On snow! Up hill both ways! With studded tires! for 16 miles... It was very pretty, though. I have no idea how people do 100 mile races or 350 for that matter (1100??). Actually, I could probably manage a 100 mile race with checkpoints.

So, anyway, perhaps I'll take a weekend in June to ride Sandy's new impossible ride.

Swearing Hill, I can't wait. Photo credit to someone (I didn't take this picture.)

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Comes to an end

So, it would seem that my days of awesome xc skiing will be coming to an end due the bizarre ice crap falling from the sky. It was so great I've converted Johanna into a cross country skier.

But, once again I was to attract to awkward stares of pedestrian, drivers and bus stop waiters astride my incomprehensibly awesome snow commuting machine. I'm told this falling ice crap is going to turn to water crap in the afternoon, so I'm preparing myself for the grossest commute home of all time. Grosser than this. Or this.

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Nature's fury!

As you might expect, I'm really going after this thing cross country skiing whole hog.

Yesterday evening, the Snails ventured forth into the woods without bikes, but with skis! It was so intense that Dario's ski exploded.


Today, I took a solitary journey into the land of King Phillip. I saw some hawks and I saw a mutilated deer. It was intense. Things are generally intense for me. Skiing down the Metacomet was a lot of fun because the foot traffic had made a nice little track and I got moving pretty good. Steady improvement in my skills!

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The niche for fixed gear mountain bikes

Fixed gear mountain biking is like regular mountain biking, but harder. It greatly expands one's likelihood of hitting feet on rocks, roots, etc. and greatly reduces one's ability to reposition weight on the bicycle because one has to keep the pedals moving. Don't get me wrong it's fun, but it's harder.

I've opined about this before, so I won't blather on anymore. However, I did want to lend my support behind the superiority of fixed gear mountain bikes when commuting in the snow. Sheldon Brown knew what he was talking about. 32:19 might be a crappy gear for bike commuting in general because of all the spinning out, but it's great in the snow. Braking without braking is great!

In other news, I wonder how it'll be until mountain biking is possible again.

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Bike Raquiem

The bike rack in the parking lot at the corner of Ann and Pearl Streets was a nice, albeit poorly installed, one. The "Wave" or "u-n" configuration is one of the more useful forms a bike rack can take, and it was even a nice shade of green. The half-assed and ham-fisted manner in which it had been bolted to the ground made it loose and wobbly, but it was large enough that I felt secure leaving the Yuba there for hours. It was also visible from the office of my employer for added peace of mind. Here it is this past autumn with the Yuba and some selfish asshat's obnoxiously-parked BMW:

For the past week or so, the rack was concealed by a giant mound of plowed snow. I locked my bike to a signpost across the street and grumbled at how inconsiderate it was to completely bury the only bike rack in a section of downtown that is disproportionally over-devoted to car parking. As the warmer weather melted the snow, however, it was revealed that the plow-hack had in fact destroyed the rack as well.

The person or persons responsible for plowing this lot should replace this bike rack at once. Failing to notice an 8 foot long bike rack, or any fixture on your customer's property is inexcusably unprofessional and incompetent.

Also, can the BMW drivers please give it a rest and park within the lines? The owner of this X3 is fully deserving of the term Masshole.

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2666

I bought beatbikeblog.com (hosted here) last week, so the beat bike blog will be around for at least another two years even if no one writes anything. Actually, I guess blogger never kicks you off.

But, anyway, I don't really have anything to write about, but I wanted to remind you that we'll be around for another year.

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Places with no snow

So, I guess Hartford isn't the only place that suffers from a lack of snow.

I was reading Jill Homer's blog, where she's giving some play by play on the Alaska Ultrasport (Iditarod for bikes), and she's describing the lack of snow in a section of this year's race. While global warming is obvious a hoax (just kidding!), that image gives a skeptic pause.

It's also weird to read that a lack of snow makes the race even more difficult (See Feb. 27).

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Bikes Outside: Snow Goose

This morning's Bikes Outside features a Mongoose MGX locked up in front of an apartment building across the street from the Broad Street Community Garden. It was just accumulating snow last Tuesday, but the owner could have been having all sorts of fun riding around a snowy park instead. I have a hardtail Mongoose mountain bike frame that I started making into a ghetto 96er snow bike for that very purpose, but it has been a low priority. That has already been named Snowgoose, but mine is an open nomenclature and I'm willing to share.

Mongoose is a brand that lost their way the past decade or two. There was something solid and straightforward about them back in the day, but more recent models seem to be all about flash and hype. There seems to be a lot of stuff written on this bounce bike's frame--perhaps a bit more than the world needs to know. It's like the bike equivalent of tuner-style cars with Eibach, Toyo,"powered by Honda," et cetera plastered all over. Part of me wants to replace the "Powered by SRAM" decal with "Powered by legs" or some other admittedly prosaic but more accurate slogan. With tubing this large, I suppose designers felt compelled to fill up some of the space, but they could have gone in more interesting directions. How about a series of photos? Perhaps Haiku...

I spent the first half of yesterday at the Dudley bike swap meet sharing a table with Erik. The booth next to us specialized in vintage BMX bikes, so in among the Hutches, GTs and Thrusters were a few of the looptail Mongoose frames I would have liked to own as a kid (not as much as I wanted a "Tri-Power" Thruster, mind you, but neat bikes just the same)

Here's my brilliant marketing idea for the day: I think that if Mongoose, or any of the 1980's BMX superpowers started selling reasonably well-made 26" bikes that were essentially scaled-up vintage 20" BMX bikes, they would sell like hotcakes. The nostalgic force is strong with the thirtysomething demographic, and people have done far more ridiculous things to harken to their youth. A 130% sized BMX bike sounds ridiculous, because, well, it is, but I still kind of want one now.


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Snow Tracks

Above: pigeon, dog, shoe and bike tracks this afternoon in Bushnell Park. I took a short ride today at lunchtime, passing through the park twice. The snow of the uncleared areas made for much cleaner (and prettier) riding than the slushy streets. I had a great ride yesterday afternoon in the greater Newington metro area with El Prez, Brendan, Salem, Erik, and Ken. The curb-found Diamond Back was still filthy from the muddier portions of that ride, so I figured the snow might help clean it some. I saw one young sledder and a few people with their dogs in the otherwise quiet park. I stopped to play with a friendly brown Newfie that may have outweighed me. He had a really giant head.


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When you should not ride a bike

It's a beautiful day today; happy Valentine's Day!

Yesterday, Salem and I rode up to Congamond to spectate the NEMBA ice race thingy. My right knee has been bothering me with increasing intensity and frequency lately. I think it's because I smashed it into a root and rock about a month ago. Some think it's because I have new shoes and the cleats aren't lined up perfectly. I lean towards the smashing, because I've never had cleat or float problems affect me while walking and this has started hurting me while I walk. Maybe that whole "shoes ruse" thing is correct, but I'm still blaming the root and rock. I almost didn't go yesterday because of my knee, but I shift my cleat a bit and I seemed ok riding to Constitution Plaza. So, we journeyed up and back. It was very nice. My knee started complaining a bit, but then when kinda numb and everything seemed ok.

This morning, there was a mountain bike ride at Meshomasic State Forest that Salem to which alerted me. My knee started to hurt me last night a bit, but I hoped I could either sleep it off or scare the pain with whiskey.


I woke and it was ok, but the more I used it the worse it felt. I debated going some more and sort of took my time getting ready, perhaps to erode my resolve. The bike still went in the car and was driven over to Glastonbury. Taking my time brought me there about ten minutes after the 9:30am start time of the ride, but I made out only one set of tire tracks, so I thought I might be able to catch up. That very quickly became an impossible proposition because my knee hurt so bad that I was only able curse at myself for getting out of bed. None the less, I followed the tire tracks for a good four miles before eventually giving up at riding back to my car. Ugh.

So, the lesson, I think, is that you should not ride if it hurts. Read more!

Beer run

Sometimes when it snows, you decide not to ride your bike and instead stalk a herd of deer through the woods around Cedar Hill Cemetery on your way to the liquor store. Read more!

Ice floes

Ice floes are awesome. They really elicit that feeling of it being the end of your life and you're being cast out to sea (even if that's some kind of racist myth). Since it's been really, really cold, the Connecticut River is full of them right now. Salem and I regarded them with awe on a recent jaunt down along the river.


We also contended with the excitement of pushing our bikes along the ice! Not river ice, but close to it-- not the kind of thing that your mother would encourage you to do.

I wasn't tough enough to go on the beard icicle ride the next day. Read more!