Fifty For Father’s Day

Friday was my birthday and today was Father’s Day, so my kids and I got together yesterday as a compromise to both occasions. That left me free to ride my bike today. I banged out 50 miles in 3 hours to complete my first 200-mile week of 2022. I hope to repeat that performance in the week to come, as the weather forecast is very much to my liking.

At Long Last: 1,000 Miles In 2022

Cold weather was NOT a problem on today's 44-mile ride!

Today I reached 1,000 outdoor cycling miles, year-to-date. That’s very late for me, and the trend isn’t good. Here are the dates on which I have reached that milestone:

2022-06-14

2021-05-26

2020-05-22

2019-05-18

2018-05-07

2017-04-28

2016-04-24

2015-04-11

2014-05-08

2013-05-13

2012-04-14

2011-05-16

2010-04-29

2009-05-12

2008-05-22

2007-05-28

2006-06-14

2005-06-22

2004-09-04

Now that I have Zwift, there’s very little incentive to ride in cold weather. I think April 11 has a firm grip on my personal record.

Bye-Bye, Red Bull

News doesn’t have to be surprising to be disappointing. For months it was clear that the UCI was going to drop Red Bull.tv in favor of another broadcaster for its Mountain Bike World Cup series. The official announcement is now out, and you have to love the irony of not even being able to see the self-congratulatory video from Eurosport:

Red Bull.tv has provided excellent coverage of the series, reaching a worldwide audience with broadcasts in multiple languages … for free. Now the series is going to be yet another subscriber-only deal. There’s almost no free-to-view cycling anymore and it’s getting much harder to beat geographic restrictions. Meanwhile, the biggest sport in the world, soccer, is available for free every weekend to Americans who have 3 hours to blow on a 0-0 tie. Meanwhile, the biggest sport in America, NFL and college football, is available for free around the clock every autumn.

With each new broadcasting deal, the UCI says it is growing its market. Nonsense. You don’t make a sport more popular by making it harder to access. The only thing the UCI is growing is its bank account.

A May Of Many Activities

Today is the last day of May and I didn’t come close to any cycling records this month. I did, however, finish the month with a 27-mile ride to bring my year-to-date total to an even 700. That’s 365 miles behind last year’s pace, but it’s not the end of the world. I can make up the deficit. Summer is almost here and it won’t be long until I’m cranking out 200-mile weeks.

Today’s ride completed a nice streak: I walked or rode outside every day this month. Since I started using Garmin Connect in March 2013, this was the first time I filled up the calendar:

That’s 16 walks and 15 rides. Not included on the calendar are 11 upper body strength training workouts, which I don’t track with Garmin Connect. The eight Garmin Connect badges I earned in May were all for walking or cycling:

I expect to complete seven more badges in June, including one specifically for hiking.

Doing a variety of activities is great, but don’t be misled: my big goal for June is to run up my cycling mileage. I am still very much in a base-building phase, trying to increase fitness and decrease belly fat to prepare for racing later this year. I’m interested in cyclocross, of course, but there are a couple of WEMS races and other events that could be tempting if I can whip myself into shape.

The 2022 WCA Cyclocross Calendar

Am I Gross?

Yesterday, one of the Korean cyclists I follow on YouTube posted a video of her very detailed helmet cleaning routine. When I became interested in Korean culture a couple of years ago, I noticed an attention to cleanliness that seems to be an essential part of the Korean personality and not just a good show while the video camera is running. No doubt, some of this extreme dedication to being tidy comes from living in dense urban areas like Seoul and Busan. For many Koreans, there simply isn’t enough room to permit a mess. Living quarters are small but efficient, tasteful, and neat as a pin. For the Korean cyclists I follow, neatness naturally extends to the bike, and it’s something of a social media sensation when a ride on a wet day turns a normally pristine machine into a muddy embarrassment. Schmutz that you or I would wipe away with a trace amount of spit and one stroke of a forefinger merits entire videos or Instagram photo collages in Korea. There seems to be almost a sense of disbelief that dirt could attach itself so readily to a bike that is maintained so meticulously.

The helmet cleaning, though … it got me thinking. And maybe it’s a wonder that I still can think, given all the filth that must surround my noggin on every ride. Perhaps the only thing that has saved me is my skullcap, which I never ride without. The skullcap has always been my defense against sunburn on a head that a more merciful God would have left covered with hair, and it’s generally effective against sweat running into my eyes. Actually, I have a few skullcaps, enough to have a fresh one for each ride. They get laundered, but the helmet itself gets only occasional and cursory cleaning. If it becomes spotted with mud, then I wipe it off. If the straps turn white from salty perspiration, then I clean them with a Clorox wipe. Disassembling the helmet to restore it to factory freshness never occurred to me.

Training partner Jeff Wren says that he takes his helmet into the shower. I’ve never actually witnessed that and I don’t want to, but I’m sure he’s telling the truth. So, that’s at least three different approaches to helmet hygiene, all of which seem satisfactory. If you have a better method, then post it in the comments below.

Get A Grip!

After 8 years and almost 25,000 miles, the right-side brake/shifter hood on my BMC road bike finally wore out. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure; it was gradual but irreversible. What began as a small tear grew into a fissure large enough that the hood was no longer stable. I could feel it moving beneath my hand. Not comfortable. Not safe. After yesterday’s ride, I couldn’t live with it anymore.

Today I installed the new one. It’s an easy do-it-yourself job, but one that I had never done before on any bike. And it’s a job that a lot of people have screwed up. It’s not impossible to tear a new hood, and then you’re right back where you started but with less money and more anger. So, I pass on to you the lessons I learned from others:

• Make sure the hoods are warm and malleable. You have to stretch them over the braking/shifting mechanism. Trying to stretch them when they are cold is likely to cause a tear.
• Use a generous amount of rubbing alcohol as a lubricant. It will quickly and cleanly evaporate, but in the meantime it will help the rubber hood to glide.

I got the new hood seated without any difficulty. It looks as good as new. And it should: it’s a genuine SRAM replacement part. But trust me when I say you don’t want to get this wrong. Sold in pairs, these are a little pricey. I paid almost $37 and now I have a spare left-side hood that I might never need. Oh, well. It’s hard to be dissatisfied.

West Bend’s Warmest May 12

It was a record-breaking day in West Bend: 90° for the first time ever on May 12, topping the 88° we reached on May 12, 1900. The average high on this date is only 65° and we’ll see temperatures like that again early next week. For now, I’m enjoying the warmth. After coming close on Tuesday, today was our first 90° day since last August 28. In some calendar years we don’t reach 90° even once. I know I’m in the minority, but I hope this is the first of many in 2022.

Warmer weather is having a good effect on my cycling season. April was dismal: I rode outside on only 6 occasions for a total of 142 miles. Today’s ride was my 6th so far in May. I have covered 203 miles this month, bringing my year-to-date mileage to 449. By the end of May 2021, I was approaching 1,100 miles, year-to-date. I’ll need a small miracle to challenge that number this year. It’s probably not something that should worry me. But as I have said here many times, I ride better as I ride more, and each season I don’t really hit my stride until I have about 1,000 miles in my legs.

Cheesehead Roubaix XI

The ride already had split into several groups before the first gravel sector: Lovers Lane.

In some ways, Cheesehead Roubaix XI was a bad end to a bad April. We have had incredibly poor weather this month and today was no exception. The air temperature at 9 a.m. was about 45° but strong winds from the east put the wind chill in the low 30s. Things were even colder at the mid-ride rest stop in Belgium: just 40° before factoring in the wind and the now steady rain. Conditions were miserable all day long. But the forecast proved correct. About 50 riders left Fireman’s Park in Newburg and none of them can say that the rotten weather was a surprise. The event had attracted a lot of attention online, but much of that interest faded as the “chance” of rain became a certainty. On a historically average final day of April, 61° is the afternoon high. We eventually hit 50° this afternoon but the wind continued to make things feel much colder. And if I had tried to postpone Cheesehead Roubaix for one week? Well, we might not be back in the 60s by then either. The first week of May promises more of the same.

But by no means was this year’s Cheesehead Roubaix a doom-and-gloom affair. The turnout was understandably small but—somewhat less understandably—enthusiastic. Some of the enthusiasm came simply from being able to participate in the event again after two years lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. People like this event. They like the route, they like the support (thanks to Cedar Creek Outdoors for offering mechanical help and for hosting the rest stop), and, let’s be honest, they like getting a ride of this caliber for free. I encourage, but I don’t require, donations to Newburg’s volunteer fire department. Today we raised about $500 at the park and a few people have indicated they will be making donations later by mail, so it won’t be a bad payday for NFD when all is said and done.

So, yes, today’s weather sucked. But the people were great! And the people who do Cheesehead Roubaix are always going to be great. And the weather isn’t always going to suck. Even I know that. We’ll do Cheesehead Roubaix again next year and we’ll take whatever comes. And if karma is real, then we’ll prosper … because it owes us one.

A Design So Good, It’s Scary

Svengoolie

One of my guilty pleasures is watching old horror / monster / sci-fi movies. And I mean really old: anything newer than the 1970s need not apply. Watching these films is a very conscious exercise in nostalgia. For a couple of hours I return to childhood, a time of carefree sleepovers when my friends and I stayed up long after our parents had gone to bed. When I was a kid I didn’t know just how bad most of these movies are, and now that I’m an adult I choose not to care. The feelings they reproduce are so seductive that I happily suppress any real criticism.

Movies of this sort used to come to me from UHF broadcast channels. Despite modern technology that makes them available at any time and in many formats, I still get my fix over the air. The Movies! network (Channel 63.3 in Milwaukee) has a classic horror / monster / sci-fi lineup on Fridays, and on Saturday nights I try never to miss Svengoolie on the MeTV network (Channel 58.2 in Milwaukee).

Last Saturday, Svengoolie showed “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” from 1943. It’s very weird to think that this movie was only about 30 years old when I saw it for the first time. It seemed ancient. For contrast, “Ghostbusters” was released 38 years ago but it feels like yesterday. Anyway, last Saturday I noticed something in “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” that didn’t make any impression on me when I was a kid:

The policeman on the right is using a floor pump to inflate the rear tire of his bicycle. It’s a curious detail, one with no bearing on the plot of the movie. The policeman on the left is reading a newspaper, so perhaps this little scene was intended to show an unremarkable moment before the police station and the community it served were disturbed by the supernatural.

What made the scene remarkable to me was the unchanged nature of pumping up a bike tire. Here’s a pump from the 1940s alongside a new model:

Tiny CO₂ inflators have mostly replaced frame pumps when we’re on the go, but no one has “built a better mousetrap” to challenge the floor pump in the garage. Modern pumps are lighter than the brass-and-wood pumps of yesteryear and they have convenient built-in pressure gauges. The heart of the design, though, is the same.

No one seems to know exactly when the tire pump was invented or by whom. The best guess is that its invention must have coincided with the invention of the pneumatic tire in the late 1880s. The tire pump appeared just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone. Now, imagine Bell magically reappearing in 2022 and trying to understand a modern telephone: tiny, wireless, feature-rich … capable of so much more than he could have envisioned. Things would be otherwise with the inventor of the tire pump. More than 100 years on, the inventor would immediately and fully understand a new model. Amazing.