Ride Bikes
real bike tales from someone not even trying to be a pro
Tagged with fixie …
2010 North American Cycle Courier Championships
Everything you need to know about the
2010 North American Cycle Courier Championships weekend full of events is at
THIS SITE
Participate!
Flip Hate
By now you have no doubt seen the video of a rider pulling a backflip on a fixed gear that was going around all day causing people to puddle in their pants. No doubt it is an extraordinary feat…a move I could only dream of doing.
The thing is though, doing flips on bikes, atvs, and motorcycles is the line where riding stops being stylish and starts being circus.
There I said it…again. I hate flips.
Fixed Gear Freestyle? I am all for it…have been since the get go…but flips…uh, no thanks.
sorry folks.
BONUS LEVEL: I hate that stupid “Big Air” ramp on X-Games also.
The Keiran @ Dick Lane Velodrome 5/8/2010
Saturday evening Graham said “come to DLV and get yourself in a better mood”, so I packed up a cooler full of cold ones and headed that way. The final rounds of their first pro racing series were due to start about 6ish. Waaaay rad poster for the events this year:
The weather was fairly cool which made it a great evening to take in some racing. Bonus level: hottie NPR interview babe-tron Graham was recorded by last time was spacing around again with her headphones on. I love her so much.
The racing was great! We got there in time to catch some of the young riders from Bicycle Little League doing their thing. Those kids really have the spirit and it is great to see people that young already into the racing scene. My only other experience seeing young riders like that was BMX racing at Oregon Ridge Park in Baltimore circa like 1983 or something.
The adult riders were caning it proper. I took my camera but for some reason the only shots I got of any racing were on the iPhone:
Speeds were HIGH and there were a few spills. Track racing is just freakin sick when you are there in person to witness it. My favorite rider of the day was this dude Spiderman, who was all kitted out as the web slinger. He might have gotten discounted for the novelty gear and considered an also-ran if he would have just brought up the rear every race, but he was riding fairly aggressively which made the wacky kit seem all the more wicked.
The whole evening (and I suppose a bunch of qualifying earlier in the day but I could be wrong) lead up to a really kick ass final. Here is a little vid of the final laps:
Please excuse my vertically oriented iPhone vid quality, I did the best I could. What I really want you to see if the energy of the crowd. People were hanging over the rail banging on the boards cheering on the riders…the whole mess coming to a huge crescendo with the that song from ROCKY running in the background.
While I was spacing around I grabbed a couple of snaps of this really interesting vehicle, which is used to motor pace the starts of the Kieran races.
Can’t help but wonder if it came with the Rock Shox or if someone did a little -upgrade-. I noticed that the driver was pedaling the entire time even though the motor seemed to be delivering the power. You think you can push a gear this tall?
One other thing I noticed was that the speed this thing would travel at seemed remarkable consistent. It may be diferent when you are actually on the thing, but from the bleachers it looked like there was almost no variation in speed once it got going, which is probably important when leading out a pace line of bikes that cannot stop or slow down quickly.
All in all it was huge fun, and Graham was right…it did get me into a better mood.
add me on twitter @RobertAshton 
roadtrip.2010 pre-launch
About to head up to Baltimore for my annual roadtrip. I couldn’t decide which bike to take so I decided to take bothe Ye Olde Talera and the Pooj.
The Talera will be super practical with the road tires, plus I am taking some knobbies because there is a potential ride at Lake Redman in PA that might happen with a buddy I haven’t seen in a zillion years. I just find it funny that I will even take the Talera off roading at all…that thing is a freakin chopper it has so much fork rake. Of course I am taking the fixed gear because I just freakin love it, and I am thinking that I may do a good bit of random cruising around my old neighborhoods and such.
I may hit a trail in Baltimore called Gwynn Falls Trail, although it appears that it starts in kind of a sketch zone.
Check out the crank arms on this 1889 Singer Tandem…you can adjust the length of the crank arm by adjusting where the pedal shaft connects.
Old school heads will recognize that a similar function was availabale on the elusive Shimano DX BMX crankset (see pic below, courtesy of Singapore BMX)
half century tale
I’m pretty stoked to be at 600+ miles for the year so far. I know a lot of folks ride a lot more, but for me that is a pretty good haul.
I did a half century on the fixed gear. It was at Big Creek Greenway…a series of out and backs. I like calling it a half century instead of just saying “50 miles”…for some reason it seems bigger that way. It wasn’t pretty. For some reason i did not eat hardly anything beforehand and at mile 36, as far away from the car as I could get, I hit the wall. big time. I don’t know if what I experienced was what they call bonking, or if I was suffering from some sort of low blood sugar type thing, but it was brutal. I felt like I was going to pass out and had nop strength at all. All I could do was lay on the bench in agony. If I tried to get up, I just got lightheaded and sort of fell over, so I stayed laying down for a long time. To complicate the matter, it had become apparent around mile 25 that I had to take a major dump.
It was so bad that I actually mulled over calling for help. At this point I was only 1/2 mile from the Bethelview road trailhead, but going there would be pretty much no help. I had to get back to the car. It took some doing, but I mustered up enough strength to get the one gel pack I had out of my underseat bag and choked it down with some water. Just doing that sapped my energy so much that I just had to lay back down for about 15 minutes. Mentally i knew I had just ate enough to probably get me back to the cfar, but physically all the gel did was make me have to crap even harder. Ugh it was so bad.
So I developed a strategy. Just try to make it to the next bench. The benches are about 1/2 mile apart approximately. I got on and started and the cool air seemed kind of helpful, but sitting on the seat was almost impossible. Eventually I made it to the next bench and layed back down for about 20 minutes. The gels effect on my system was getting worse. Now I had integrated looking for a place to dook into my plan. There was no place possible to do it at this bench, so I gathered myself up slowly. climbed on, and headed to the next bench.
It seemed like forever before the next stopping point. When I got to the bench, I just collapsed onto it, practically doubled over in pain. It took about 15 minutes for me to get it together enough to scan the area and realize that there was a pretty decent clip of trees right across from me. I knew it wasn’t going to be fun, but it was time to get rid of the waste products, because if I didn’t do it soon, it was going to come out whether I liked it or not. So I dragged to the bike back into the trees, which was a huge effort with no strength. When I got far enough back that no one could see my bike from the trail, I left the bike there and kept walking until I could barely see it. I figured this was far enough.
What happened next could only be described as one of the top three dooks of my life. Sweet sweet releaf, but not only that, it was goddamn thing of beauty. The sheer volume would have scared you, and the way it coiled around into a perfectly symmetrical pyramid was high art. I couldn’t have sculpted a more perfect pile of shit. I actually -almost- took a picture of it I was so proud, but I was still in panic mode about having no energy and fearing not making it back to the car, so I stuck to business and moved forward w/o getting the shot. I know you are wondering…did I wipe? No. It was a clean pinch, a perfect 10…I didn’t even need to.
Mentally this was a huge success. I had now solved one of my problems, so now I could focus entirely conserving energy but making progress. The next 4 miles were absolutely brutal. I continued my program of going from bench to bench with lengthy rests at each stop. There are mile markers every 10th of a mile which helped greatly…”just one more tenth man, just one more and you’ll be that much closer”.
It took a hellishly long time but I eventually made it back to the McFarland Rd trailhead, and loaded the bike on the car. My original plan was to celebrate my big fifty with a nice dinner at Tim Drum , but that plan had changed to getting to the nearest available food source and getting something in me as fast as possible. My bike computer read just over 42 miles. I felt pretty defeated, but at least I felt safety was within reach.
The closest food joint was an Arbys, which is less than 1/2 mile from the trailhead. I got couople of jr roast beefs and drank a non diet pepsi, thinking that if what happened to me was a sugar issue, the non diet stuff might better to get back to normal. I’m not real knowlwdgeable about how all that stuff works. One thing I did know though…this whole feeling of almost passing out and losing all my strength has happened to me before, and when it did, about 15 minutes after eating something i felt fine. I was thinking “You know, I bet I am going to eat and then on the drive home I am going to start to feel fine and then I’ll be pissed that I didn’t finish the ride”.
Sure enough, before I even left the Arbys, I was feeling much better. So much so that i decided I would go back to the trail and -try- to finish my 50. My plan was to just ride out a mile from the car, then ride back, and repeat until I had logged the mileage I needed…that way if I started to feel ill again I wouldn’t be stuck far away from the car again. As soon as I got under way I knew I wouldn’t have to do one mile out and back though…every pedal stroke I felt better. I ended up going out to the second road crossing which is at about 4 miles, but WISELY decided that even though I felt fine noiw, I wasn’t going to try and go all the way to Bethelview, which was another 2.8 away. Turning back at the second road crossing allowed me to log just over 50 for the day.
Lately I have been setting the bike computer on “timer” so I can watch how long I have been riding instead of how far i have gone. But for the last few miles of this ride I switched to to “distance” so I could watch it roll up to my goal. It was a very satisfying feeling and I am so happy that I went back and finished.
What did I learn?
1. Even though part of the reason I am biking is to try and lose weight, if I am going to go on a ride this long I have to prepare better nutritionally. I can fart around with creating calorie deficits and losing weight on my shorter rides…
2. Next time I do this kind of distance I think I will use one of my geared bikes. It would have been nice to be able to pedal a little easier gear when I did get into my -emergency situation-.
3. Next tiome I try to do a big mileage day, I won’t try and do the whole thing at Big Creek Greenway. Too much boardwalk. I am sure that spending all day riding on boardwalk helped rattle that megaq sized turd into the launch position.
4. Always carry a stash of toilet paper.
Now I have started ramping down the mileage and ramping up the amount of climbing and doing intervals. I am hoping to get more results out of shorter distances by making the workload a little tougher.
Death Pedal 2 Atlanta
You probably already heard about this over at Prollys or maybe even the Death Pedal site, but in case you didn’t, heres the deal:
Another little interesting tidbit that was posted along with the flyer…
“This is gonna be a good one. I mean, you know… we got Fat Tire hooking it up with multiple kegs, TONNNS of prizes from our sponsors with Eighth Inch hooking up a bike to win. What could be better? Also trying to drum up some funds for the North American Courier Cycle Championships of which Atlanta is the host city this year.“
North American Courier Cycle Championships? In Atlanta? Wow thats pretty rad!
Anyway, save the date for Death Pedal, it looks to be a real hootenanny.
Handlebar Tape before and after
The time had come for the yearly handlebar re-taping. I got some of this fancy looking (IMO) perforated bar tape from Overpriced Cyclist, which arrived last week, so today it was time to make the leap. Ordinarily wrapping bars would be no big issue, but I have my ghetto style brake cable routing and low budget bullhorn applicable brake lever to deal with, which complicates the matter considerably.
The before pics:
…and the after pics
A good look at the crazy cable routing puzzle.
Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I had to wrap and re-wrap around the brake lever/cable without the adhesive exposed about a zillion times before I came up with a way to situate it that I was satisfied with. Glad I only have to wrap these once a year.
Also, I have to say, I would have had a hard time wrapping a “non-flop and chop” full drop bar with the amount of tape they supplied. There was barely enough for the non brake lever side. After getting it done I took a little cruise up and down the driveway to see how it felt. My first impression is that it is a very -thin- feeling but sticky tape. I will reserve an actual review until I have actually done a whole ride. I do like the sort of classic look that the perforations give. The stitching in the tape sort of reminds me of a baseball glove for some reason.
Forsyth Big Creek
Friday the weather was unusually great for January in Georgia, so I headed out to a trail I had not yet ridden, which my boss told me about. It is the Forsyth section of the Big Creek paved/board multi-use trail, which has a length of 6.8miles. Eventually this trail will connect with the more southernly section of Big Creek trail, which I have not ridden, but have seen when riding Big Crek mountain bike trails. When the whole trail system connects it is going to be absolutely wicked.
The Forsyth section trailhead I started at is just off McFarland Rd / and 400, east of the exit about half a mile. There are no signs, just a gravel parking lot. The trail is about 1/2 paved and 1/2 elevated board walk with two road crossings and several bridges. There are no climbs but the grade does change enough to keep you pedalling most of the way in both directions.
I loved this path so much I did it twice in a row out and back, which came up to about 27.5miles. This path is going to be absolutely stunning when spring comes. One thing I did notice though, was that there seemed to be a lot of path newbies who did not know to keep to the right when they heard a bike bell.
In other news, I had considered getting a KNOG N.E.R.D bike computer, but now I am rethinking that strategy due to seeing some negative reviews going around.
Onward to 2010
Celebrated the new year by going for a ride, since it was actually decent but windy weather today. Looking back, 2009 is the most rainy year on record since I have been in Georgia, so when the sun comes out these days I don’t fart around, I get out and hustle some miles.
I don’t have any “resolutions’, but I do have some goals.
1. ride more and better
2. post here more frequently
3. actually do some mountain biking this year…I did almost none in 09 (although equipment problems were a factor)
During the tail end of 09 I managed to drop a nice bit of weight, but seem to have hit a plateau, so the mileage is going to have to go up and the consumables is going to have to go down. Nothing crazy though. I’m not going to go on some nutso diet and I am not going to try doubling my mileage straight away. I’m adding a mile here and there to my regular rides. Building up a little at a time. One thing I have been doing is walking a lot more. 2009 was my first year with a desk job, and the lack of movement made the weight situation bad for the first part of the year. So now I walk whenever I can…for example, I just park at the far end of the parking lot pretty much everywhere I go instead of trying to park as close to the door of the place as possible. Also, if I am going two places in a shopping center, I am not going to get in the car and move it from one end to the other if the shops are at opposite ends. This may sound like a no brainer, but up until a few months ago I would actually move the car. Now it seems ridiculous! The idea is to have all those short walks add up. Don’t laugh cause it seems to be working.
Gear wise there are two major projects I’d like to see through:
1. create or purchase a single speed MTB
2. get tubular cro-mo bmx cranks for my fixed gear.
I hope you have a great year of riding ahead in the oh-ten.
