Off-road Randonneur

And but so I've just woken up from an unplanned and ill-timed five hour nap after dinner.  My sleep schedule is gonna be turned upside down for days, I've got a crick in my neck from resting my head wrong on the decorative pillow on the couch, and I'm still wearing the dank riding clothes I've been in for most of the past twenty-four hours now.

Man, I feel great.

Yesterday my boy Austin and I went on yet another one of our epic off-road randonneur rides, which I'm pretty sure is French for "I don't know when to turn around."  Last year, at the end of the season, we decided to spend a day riding to the suburban Palos trails, the only real network of mtb trails in the Chicago area, a trail system that every local mountain biker has ridden because of its proximity to the city.  Neither Austin or I have a car, so we decided to take our 'cross bikes there, tear around in the dirt, and ride back home.  Starting from the West Side of town, we wound our way down Ogden Ave, which was part of old Route 66 as it left Chicago, seeing sights we were never privy to in the dozens of previous car rides to south suburban Palos.  We cut through the employee parking lot of the ginormous UPS sorting center, a building which looked big enough to house the Hadron Supercollider.  We rolled past the Wonder Bread factory, which was only slightly smaller than the UPS facility and smelled nothing like a bakery, by the way.  Best of all, we discovered a shortcut away from the industrial sprawl of shoulder-less streets filled with roaring big-rig trucks: ducking behind a row of jersey barriers, we found ourselves on an abandoned, elevated access road that ran through the middle of Thornton Quarry.  We got off our bikes and took in the view, perched on the edge of a vast, unseen canyon located twenty minutes' drive from the Loop.  We also realized we were trespassing and quickly jumped back on our bikes and made our way to the trailhead after only a few wrong turns.  Riding the old familiar trails felt new on bikes equipped with skinny tires, rigid forks, and drop bars.  It was too much fun.  Quite literally.  I forgot to account for our long ride home and ran out of food and energy a good ten miles from home, which necessitated my staggering to a stop outside a crowded gas station in Cicero.  In my full kit and helmet, I wandered past groups of high school kids (it was mid-afternoon and school had just let out), grabbed a couple packages of frosted Honey Buns, dropped some crumpled, sweaty bills on the counter with shaking hands, and went back outside to share my bounty with Austin.  All in all, a great day.

So this time Austin and I decided to replicate that day, minus the energy bonk, by taking the Metra commuter train out to Palos, thus saving up the strength to ride trail and then ride back.  Unfortunately, the Metra website's schedule lied to us and we found ourselves in the Great Hall at Union Station a few minutes after the train had left.  Not wanting to spend another couple of hours waiting for the next departure, we opted for Plan B: the DesPlaines River trail, which follows its namesake northward, flowing up from Oak Park all the way up to Wisconsin, though I was determined to turn around before then.  Though not nearly as technical (read: fun) as Palos, it was still riding in the dirt, and far-flung, and away from the city.  And yet, paradoxically, its trailhead was only a couple miles away from a CTA stop.  So we threw our bikes on the el and took the Green line to the end of the line, and started another all-day adventure.  Austin's internal compass led us through the Norman Rockwell streets of Oak Park directly to the parking lot trailhead, so we set our knobby tires on dirt, rode twenty feet around a dirt embankment, and abruptly stopped.  The trail led straight into a wide, deep pond.  The river had filled the floodplain, and we were forced to take the first of more than a few detours onto the very busy River road, as well as an ill-advised abortive shortcut through a golf course (my bad), but eventually the trail rose up and we we able to ride undeterred, past expanses of prairie and groves of trees and the odd string of power lines.  Whereas the roots and rock gardens of Palos are only just ridable on 'cross bikes, the DesPlaines trail was perfectly suited for our bikes.  The dirt was smooth enough to ramp up to a good speed, and grippy enough to roost turns: yet another great day on the bike.  True to form, we rode out just a bit too far again, even though we turned off the trail at Wheeling, not Wisconsin - but this time I'd packed enough food to make it back without incident.  The only casualty was my common sense when at my insistence we pulled into the neighborhood market a few blocks from my house and I emerged with a bag of tortilla chips, some cheap Polish beer, and two half-gallons of ice cream, most of which was consumed in our recovery from the ride.

Oh, and one more thing: there's no way I could have done these rides on anything but a cyclocross bike.  They really are the most versatile bikes, period.  Fast enough to ride on the streets, durable enough to ride any manner of dirt track, and efficient enough to ride both for long distances.  I love my Surly CrossCheck because I built it up to do anything and it hasn't let me down yet.  Alright, here's a pic:

Songs to sprint to

When the lactic acid is boiling your quads, bury your head and drop the hammer and sing: "Whoa-ho-HO! Whoa-ho-HO! Whoa-ho-HO-HO-HO!"

Ladies and gentlemen, Chicago's own, Naked Raygun.

Rest Day

At least that's what I'm calling it.  Made plans the night before to join the morning shop ride and had every intention of going, but I made the mistake of peeking at the weather forecast, which predicted snow.  I knew right then I wasn't gonna make it out the next day. 

So I slept in.  Had my coffee in bed, reading Charles P. Pierce's 'Idiot America', with twenty-odd pounds of snoring pug pressing down on my chest.  There's worse ways to spend a Saturday morning, I guess.  Eventually, though, I had to get up and do something at least vaguely productive.  So I went downstairs to the makeshift weight room in the basement of our building and benched.  (By the way, don't worry - I won't bore you with the details of my workout.  No recounting of maxes and reps and sets.  I hate when people do that.  Kinda like when someone you don't even know very well tells you in great detail about the really strange dream they had last night.  I'm sorry, but I will never be able to vicariously experience anything that personal and specific to you.  I am willing to nod at the appropriate times, however.)  Bench presses being a series of exercises, by the way, which is as useful to a cyclist as a set of tits on a bull.  But I guess I did them as a means to exorcise the self-loathing I had for wussing out on the morning's ride.

It didn't take.

I should have gone out.  And I will forthwith.  Because there's a race three weeks from now that I've got my eye on.  And I've got to get some miles in these legs.

If I love my commuter bike so much, why do I treat it so bad?

A few years ago an older couple came into the shop and asked to see some mountain bikes.  Though they were both retirees, they wanted the highest-end xc hardtails we carried.  Not beginner bikes, or upright do-it-all (badly) mountain hybrid rides, but race-ready hardtails.  They'd done their research, and they knew what they wanted: the lightest, most nimble mountain bikes available.  Both of them were so agreeable and enthusiastic about getting their dream bike that it was actually fun for me to send them out on their various test rides and hear them marvel at how light the aluminum frames were, or how plush the suspension forks felt, and how responsive the disc brakes grabbed.  They ended up leaving with a matching pair of Giant XTC's and as the husband wheeled his bike out the door, he thanked me for my help, shook my hand, and asked me if I wanted to have his old bike.

"It used to be a pretty nice ride," he said.  "I loved that bike.  It's unrideable now, but if you can fix it up you can have it.  I'll bring it by tomorrow for you." 

I thanked him, figuring we could cobble a shop ride beater out of it.  But when he came by the next day, I knew it was mine all mine.  He and his wife were snowbirds, fleeing the winter in their RV for warmer climes, where they loved to ride rail-to-trails and country dirt roads, so they always had mountain bikes with them, hitched to the back of their rig.  Last month, they'd gotten rear-ended by a semi, and his wife's bike was on the outside of the bike rack, so it took the brunt of the damage - her frame snapped.  His bike looked bad, as well.  The front wheel was pretzeled, the stem was folded back towards the saddle, and both ends of his handlebar were pointed in the same direction.

The frame itself, however - a fillet brazed Ritchey TimberWolf - looked fine.  In fact, it looked like the rolling work of art that it is.  Tom Ritchey himself probably did a few of the welds on that frame.  I swallowed hard and told him he could probably still fix it up by replacing a few parts and she'd ride like new.  But he told me he'd moved on, that he was happy to spend the insurance money on new bikes for him and the missus, and that I was welcome to fix it up myself as a fun project.  With that, he kissed his fingertips, lightly laid his hand on the bike's top tube in farewell, and left.

I scavenged enough parts to ride her home as a present to my girl, but after a few rides, we decided that the bike was a bit too big for her.  So the Ritchey sat dormant until I concluded that after years of riding in the city, I deserved a purpose-built commuter.  I installed the best thumb-shifters I could find, as well as full fenders and front and rear racks.  I was going to take off the front derailleur and 1x9 her for simplicity's sake, but I saw the little deer's head embossed on it (Shimano was way more whimsical in the '80's) and left it on.

And I ride the living piss outta that thing.  I mean it.  I flog it to within an inch of its life.  I've bungeed a 25 lb bag of dog food to the front rack and a 40 lb sack of cat litter to the rear one and wobbled home.  I've gone grocery shopping while hungry and come back with the bike so laden down with provisions I could feed a family of four for a week.  I've ridden her hard through rainstorms and blizzards and put her away wet.  This bike does it all and takes it all, with little to no maintenance.  By far, the Ritchey is the most overworked and underappreciated bike in my stable.

So if I love her so much, why do I treat it so bad?  It really is a piece of history.  I should strip all the parts off the frame and hang it on a wall, or sell it to an enthusiast so it can be properly restored.  But I think I'd rather just keep on beating it to death.  After all, I think that's what it was built for - and I think Tom Ritchey himself would agree with me.

Songs to sprint to

If you want the perfect cadence to pull away from the pack, try to keep up with Bob Mould's ringing guitar on this one:

And for your finishing kick, just sing along: "Divide and conquer! Divide and conquer!"

That's right, fixie kid. I'm better than you...

...at trackstanding.  I know you didn't think that when you rolled up from behind me at this here red light.  You peered out from underneath your flat-brimmed Yankee cap and saw the bright flashing taillight, the grocery panniers stuffed to capacity hanging off the rear rack, the beat-down Ritchey mountain bike I've flogged through two winters, and me perched atop it all like Granny from 'The Beverly Hillbillies' in the back of the jalopy cruising down Rodeo Drive, with my pedals leveled, and my front wheel canted slightly as I incrementally roll it back and forth between the two imaginary quarters located immediately before and behind the tire patch which I envision as the best trick yet to keep my feet up for the duration of a traffic light.  I get it.  You thought I was just another hapless floundering commuter, which was why you thought you had the right to roll up past me and take your rightful place a bike-length-and-a-half in front of me to show me how it was done.  Except my feet are still on my pedals, aren't they?  And I can see your shoulders starting to hunch up underneath your carefully painted Chrome bag because you're tensing up your arms and forgetting to breathe as you're beginning to wonder how long this goddamned light is gonna BE, man?  Well, I can tell you that this intersection's red lasts for about twenty-five seconds and I'm not literally going to say it to you, but lemme just ease forward here and pull up alongside you as though I was so I can show you something else: I'm still up on my pedals.  And you've just shrugged and dropped one foot to the ground.

And while I realize that in the grand scheme of things losing an impromptu trackstand comp is quite an insignificant thing, here's the greater lesson: don't be a dick.  Pass another cyclist when you're both in motion.  Don't just roll up in front like you've got the right to do so, because you don't.  Ain't anybody ever issued a go-to-the-head-of-the-line pass.  It's just rude, and - aw, hell.  There you go.  Knew you were gonna do that.  Saw you put one foot back on the pedal, head swiveling around, looking for a gap in traffic.  Red's only gonna last six more clicks, fool!  But no, out you go, found your shot and you're clear, but you didn't see that oncoming car have to tap its brakes to let you through, didn't see the driver shaking his head in disgust at yet another 'damn biker', didn't see me doing the same.

Good job, my man.  Putting your foot down made you look bad.  Putting your foot back on made us all look bad.  It's more than just trackstands, son - I am better than you.

Spring is here

I awoke this morning to bright sunlight filtering through the still-bare branches of the tree outside my window.  When I took my pug George out for a walk a few minutes later I realized that for the first time this year I didn't need to wear the jacket I layered over my t shirt, and I decided right then and there that I was gonna ride the lakefront path.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that every cyclist in Chicago - from Cat 1 pros on an early morning training ride to moms on beach cruisers towing a kid's trailer - has ridden the lakefront path at least once.  And who can blame them?  It's the longest stretch of uninterrupted paved path in the city, it's protected from car traffic, and it's a perfectly stunning ride.  On one side is the great lake, and on the other are postcard-quality views of the city, including iconic sites such as the South Michigan Wall, Buckingham Fountain, the Museum Campus, and Promontory Point.  Unbelievable.  It's almost a pity to ride yourself cross-eyed past all this, which of course I did.  I had to.  What else are you gonna do when draped in team kit - in fact, I'm pretty sure that's why anyone wears a matching bibs and jersey.  Batman doesn't put on his cowl and cape to step out and run some errands, he gets it on to go punch some bad guys in the face.  In the same vein, if you put on a kit, you better go flat-out (or at least look completely spent from just having done so) or else that joker lurking behind you is gonna buzz right past in a primal attempt to re-establish the current pecking order.  And guess what he's wearing?

Anyways, it was an amazing couple of hours.  The conditions were perfect, with a steady headwind south that allowed you to feel that you'd earned the right to push an extra gear harder once you'd turned around back home.  I love feeling slightly faster than I am.  I love days like this.

Songs to sprint to

Because it sometimes helps to have a soundtrack in your head when you're busy burying yourself:

The song starts fast and never slows - hopefully the same goes for your cranks.

Group ride musings...

So after the "I am mountain biker, hear me roar" proclamation of my last post, I'm here today to talk about road riding.  I went on my first group ride of the year this morning.  Which isn't exactly true, because I headed out with a couple of guys from the shop a few weeks ago.  But there was still snow on the ground, and I was really tentative from an icy fall I took this winter that left me with a sore knee (again with the knee!) and a really skittish disposition on wet streets.  If that first ride was a nature show, then I was one of those unfortunate impalas nervously perched on the bank of a crocodile-infested river, while all the other braver bucks were gleefully splashing through.  And we all know which ones end up in the jaws of death.

Today the roads were bone-dry, though, and if I'm gonna count it as my first ride, then today was my first group ride with gears, as well.  Allow me to explain: as I said before, I got into this whole cycling thing through mountain biking, and my bikes have always reflected that.  I built up two full-suspension mountain bikes before I cobbled together my first bike with skinny tires, a ratted-out Raliegh Technium singlespeed whose two-tone bar tape job I was inordinately proud of.  She was a great bike for getting around the city, and when I decided I wanted to partake in the shop's early-morning group rides down the lakefront, I thought that the ridiculously high 53x16 gearing might let me hang with the pack.  Unfortunately, more often than not, I would be forced to watch everybody else's rear wheels slowly recede in the distance as I churned my only gear in slower and slower circles.

Tired of bringing a knife to a gun fight, I showed up today with, well, a two-shot derringer pistol.  I forgot what nice rides everyone else had.  I mean really really sick rides.  But I was determined to use all nine gears I had on my cross bike if that's what it took to hang, and every click of my bar-end shifter would seem like a gift from above.

And it was a great ride.  I never realized how much fun it is to actually have a conversation with someone when you're riding fast, and how spinning the right gear when you're in the draft feels as effortless as gliding.  My mind, freed from constant worry about whether I was pedaling the right cadence or not, was even able to note some minor observations:

"Some of these houses in Evanston are only slightly smaller than Downton Abbey."

"Did he even get the words 'Man I feel tired and slow' out of his mouth before he accelerated away from me?"

"There's probably smaller potholes on the surface of the moon."

"I love when the lake and the sky are the same shade of grey and you can't see the horizon."

"Small marmalade sandwiches are easier to eat on the bike than gels, I swear."

"Ooooh, there really is a fourth hand position on the end of the drops."

Which isn't to say that I didn't get my ass handed to me, because I surely did.  My only pull led us onto the short, sharp upwards burst right before the turnaround point, and halfway up the tiny hill I gave out.  Small consolation that I was able to winch my way up in a tiny baby gear instead of a great painful one, but at least I was able to catch up and latch back on to the group.  Moral victories, ya know?

This is ME!

And so for my first post I thought I'd write about my first bike.  No, not the Morrie Mages Sporting Goods banana-seat special that I learned to ride on, nor the Huffy bmx bike upon which I charged, baby teeth gritted in determination, at makeshift plywood ramps propped up by milk crates and half-full paint cans, in a futile attempt to launch myself into the air like my hero Evel Knievel.  Unfortunately, I discovered that while I couldn't quite fly like him, I sure could land like Evel.  Which is to say, in a heap.  Minus some of the aforementioned baby teeth.

No, I want to write about my first 'real bike', which I'm sure we all agree can be defined as 'the first bike you actually pay for yourself.'  I was living in that real hotbed of American cycling, Bloomington IN, the home of Little 500 and the Cutters, and the site of the canonical bike movie about both, 'Breaking Away'.  The town had changed appreciably little since the movie was filmed, all tree-lined streets with wooden clapboard houses and a picturesque college campus complete with limestone buildings and an estuary of excellence (I'm not making that up, that's really what it's called) burbling contentedly through it.  And bikes were a big part of that burg.  Co-eds cruised to class.  Group rides flicked through the streets like schools of fish.  Basketball was godhead there, of course - I moved there the year Coach Knight got removed from his post, and I believe I actually saw people rending their clothes in mourning - but that was a winter sport, and come spring people got outside and got on bikes.

Except me.  I just walked everywhere.  And I walked far, man.  I'm talking three miles each way to work, five days a week, rain or shine, all year-round.  Typing this now, I have to marvel at WHY exactly I didn't ride, why I didn't think to cut down my commute from a fifty-minute death march to an easy fifteen-minute cruise.  I guess I'm just that special kind of stupid (recurring theme ALERT!) but buying a bike never even occurred to me, even though I walked past two bike shops on the way to work.

After a number of years in a pedestrian haze, I finally tired of small-town life and, like a reddening salmon, I wanted to move back to the grimy city that spawned me.  I had some money saved up (you can live pretty cheaply in a small town so long as you don't die of boredom first - just ask the Coug', John Cougar Mellencamp, Bloomington's other celeb) and decided to pull up stakes and move back to Chicago in the summer.  So I packed up my life and waited for moving day to arrive, and a month before my friends were gonna come by with their truck and spirit me away, they told me that they'd made plans for a special trip.  A mountain bike trip.  And they were leaving next week.

I have to say, there's nothing quite like quitting a job early to go on a vacation.  And so I took some of that money I'd saved up, walked into the shops I'd previously sauntered past, kicked some tires, went on a few test rides, bought some bike mags and devoured them, along with the myriad catalogs from the shops, and finally made my decision: a Trek 4900.  Jett elastomer fork, triple chainring, plastic toeclips and straps, shorty bar-ends on riser bars, oh yeah.  I loved that bike if only 'cause she was all mine.  I bought a pair of baggy ZOIC shorts and the nicest helmet I could afford, and for a week straight I rode all over town.  Then in a fit of bravado I went and ordered a pair of clipless pedals and Shimano shoes, rode ten feet down my gravel-lined alley, and promptly fell over, still clipped in.  It didn't matter: my friends were picking me up tomorrow!  I was going to Colorado!

A buncha city dudes, three SUV's, two big-ass tents, and a mess of hardtails:  thus equipped, we were going mountain biking in actual mountains.  In lung-busting Crested Butte, to be specific.  None of us knew what the blue hell we were doing, and we were having the best time doing it.  I should cringe when I recollect what I looked like back then, almost ten years ago: white (!) Nike Dri-Fit t-shirt, those same baggy shorts (I think I only thought to bring the one pair - you can guess how that worked out by the end of the week), fanny pack containing the requisite rations, seat bag hanging from the saddle holding a tube and a multi-tool I didn't know how to use, two water bottles in cages, with a mini-pump tucked discreetly behind one of them.  And let's not forget about the bar-ends perched on the riser bars: I can't stress those enough.  So, yeah, I should cringe when I think of it now, but all I could remember was having the goddamned time of my life.

Crested Butte really is one of the more amazing corners of the world, and it really is best seen on a bike.  Trails snake through valleys of wildflowers, alongside rushing mountain rivers, and lead over ridges straight out of 'The Sound of Music'.  You half-expect to see the VonTrapp family cheerfully marching across the sun-dappled fields, away from those nasty Nazis.  And overhead, like  a cathedral ceiling, all blue sky and white peaks.  On the first ride, I found myself way out in front of everybody, zigzagging along the edge of the timberline, when I heard a loud splintering crash and right out from behind my left ear a startled deer leapt out from the brush.  I looked over, disbelieving, still pedalling, as the deer bounded alongside me - once, twice, in time with my cranks - then veered off silently back into the trees.  It was about the best thing that ever happened to me.

As it turned out, though, that was the second best thing that happened on that trip.  On the last day, we were gonna go out with a bang, planning to ride the longest, most technical trail we could handle.  The Dyke Trail was daunting, with steep ups and downs, culminating in a long, uninterrupted downhill run to the trail's end.  I was stoked.  I couldn't wait.  And on the first descent, just over a mile into the six mile trail, I washed out my front wheel and pitched over the bars at speed.  I ducked my shoulder and rolled through the fall well enough, but as my body cartwheeled back over I was suddenly stopped short by a worn tree stump making swift, arresting contact with my right knee.  Once I got the screaming-in-pain part over with and wiped off the dust mask that had adhered to the spit and blood on my face, I screwed up the courage to survey the real damage.  My knee throbbed and was swelling visibly.  I tried to stand and couldn't support my weight without pain.  Gathering around me, my friends watched me hobble about and declined to say what I already knew: that I was well and truly fucked.

But I didn't want to ride back to camp.  It was all uphill, anyway.  One of the guys generously offered to ride back with me, but that was even worse: two of us would miss out on the last day's ride.  It appeared clear to me that the only solution was to finish the goddamned trail.  To ride it out.  My leg couldn't really support me, but I was mountain biking, not hiking, right?  I couldn't really rotate my foot too well, but once I clipped in, the pedal tracks straight on its own.  The swollen knee didn't really want to bend too far, but I thought that if I wrapped it tightly enough, this wouldn't be a real problem.  So we emptied out our fanny packs and seat bags and I ended up swathing my knee with a roll of athletic tape, covered by an Ace bandage, all tied down by a short bungee cord for good measure.

And I finished the ride.  Which was as great as I had hoped, with the final descent an endless bobsled run that turned the serene white aspens into a holy screaming blur, and the grin on my face at the end of the ride stayed there for about three or four hours straight.  By then, I realized that my knee wasn't gonna get better by ice and Advil alone, and that a severe limp was prominent in my immediate future.

But it didn't matter:  I was a mountain biker.  I haven't stopped riding since.