Training - Blues Ranger

To continue an unlikely trend, I rode outside again, on November 6.

This time it was with two old time ex-teammates, riders that I hung out with mainly in the 90s. One bought the bike from my one and only "pursue and recover" incident, where I chased a thief for a bit and got back a bike he'd stolen from the shop. I'll call him Ranger.

The other guy is a musician first. He's since moved about 4.5 hours away, and, yes, he made the drive just to do this ride. I'll call him Blues.

Ranger, to my delight and astonishment, showed up with the theft recovery bike. I quickly snapped a picture of it in all its glory. It's virtually unchanged since back in the day.

The bike I recovered from a would-be-thief in a different life.

Other than a change in tires I think the bike is pretty much original.

While we got ready it was raining a bit, a cold, windy, damp, grim, grey, day.

A perfect day for a Belgian style ride.

What's interesting, and we all commented on it after the ride, is that none of us ever suggested just skipping the ride and catching up over coffee at the local breakfast place, a favorite in the area which Junior refers to as "The Waffle Place". Instead we set about dressing for what seemed to be a pretty grim ride on the bike, each of us putting on differing amount of gear.

With the temperature just about 50 degrees, a chilly wind, and the drizzle, I had on knickers, booties, a short sleeve jersey, a thick long sleeve jersey, a wind vest, and my winter gloves and hat. My helmet of course, and shoes.

My bike, this time with a saddle bag, rear light, a pump in my pocket, bottles.

Blues had on everything, tights to jacket, and looked to be the most prepared of the trio.

Ranger, true to his hard man style, opted for shorts and just two t-shirts. With his toe clips and straps, sneakers, and non-lycra gear, he was by far the least pretentious of the group.

Start

Our motley crew headed out. It was so cold I started getting a massive headache because of the cold and a slightly tight helmet (I loosened it later when I realized it was too tight). I could feel the wind blowing through my jersey arms, my shoulders and upper arms feeling the piercing chill. My glasses got wet from the misty rain, the tires looked slick as ice, and I found myself wondering how long I could keep this up.

I figured both Blues and Ranger had driven quite a bit to ride with me. Blues had initially arranged to meet up by me so I could take a short break from looking after my dad. Since my dad passed that wasn't a concern anymore but still, they made the drive here. At any rate I figured they both had too much vested into the ride to quit after 15 or 20 minutes.

I had to keep going.

So I plodded along, trying to shift my helmet around to get my cold-induced headache to a minimum.

Then, as we moved along, the clouds started breaking up, the sun peeked through, and things got a bit better.

We tried not to go too fast so our pace heading out was, shall we say, "conservative".

Along the path

Let me go on a tangent here for a bit.

Along the Canals

In the book "The Dog In The Hat" that spoke to my core in some absolute and indescribable way, Joe Parkin talks about how a lot of riders train by riding along canal bike paths. These paths are meant just for bikes, they don't have motorized traffic on them, and it allowed a group of riders to pound out the hours without getting too distracted by cars and such.

I realized that here, along this "Multi Use Path" (MUP), we were riding along our version of the "canal paths". In a different life, perhaps a future one, I thought it possible that I'd be rolling along these paths, maybe in the off hours, doing base work.

For now though, it was just for fun.

Turn Around

We generally stayed together although Blues went ahead when someone passed us. Even on easy ride it's easy to get pulled into little informal competitions. However, after about an hour, with Blues ahead maybe 20 or 30 seconds ahead, Range admitted he was done. Blues was still in sight over these flat and straight trails. I told Ranger to turn around (it was an out-and-back ride) and that I'd catch Blues and we'd turn around and catch up.

I did a little effort to bridge the gap and quickly realized I was blowing up. I looked down and saw 26.7 mph.

Yeah. Not very impressive.

I eased because, um, there were some people walking a dog. That's it, people walking on the trail. Actually, there were people walking, I eased to pass them without scaring them (smiles and waves all around), and then, with 20 seconds of recovery, quickly bridged the remaining bit to Blues. I told him Ranger had turned around and that we'd catch up to him.

We looped around, passed the people walking (more smiles and waves), and then I started pushing a bit. Normally I think going sort of fast on these trails is really bad, but that's in the summer with lots of people and such. When there's no one around, in dreary conditions, 20-22 mph seems pretty reasonable.

The Chase

I was leading much of the time as Blues was on an off day. At the beginning of one of the many long straights I realized that Ranger was totally out of sight. Like absolutely totally out of sight.

"I think Ranger dropped the hammer when he turned around."
"No, he was hammered already."
"Well, he's pretty far ahead."

We went on for another 15 minutes, not a glimpse of him. Finally, at the end of a really, really long straight, I spotted him just disappearing out of sight. After a minute or two along the straight, the end of said straight still off in the distance, Blues admitted that, wow, Ranger had a big gap on us.

I started making calculations. We'd been chasing "hard" for about 15-17 minutes and he was at least 4-5 minutes ahead of us. I couldn't go much faster and we might have closed a minute on him, based on previous straights. At this rate it'd be an hour before we caught him, meaning we'd only see him back at the cars.

I started pushing as hard as I dared, Blues clinging to my wheel.

Unbeknownst to us Ranger had pushed super hard until the end of that exact straight and then blew sky high. Just 7 or 8 minutes later we caught him. He had a big grin on his face. He'd tried to pull one on us but had shattered himself in the process.

We slowed down a bit then, with the three of us sort of working together, we upped the pace slightly.

The only incident of note happened when we were clearing yet another set of gates meant to keep cars and trucks off the path. Blues clipped the gate with his bars, got flung to the side, and basically karate chopped through two of the three poles of a wood fence. He was fine though, as the wood was totally rotted.

He got up and we got going again. Our little incident blocked the path for a minute or two, holding up a few riders. I saw them, called it, and we got into line. I was pleasantly surprised by our ragtag group's fluency. Everyone got in line, we were in tight formation, all that, no fuss, no muss. I pulled at a reasonable pace for a bit, I asked if the riders were still back there, and Ranger and Blues replied that they were gone.

We got back okay and then headed to the Waffle House (aka Harvest Cafe) for lunch. We, meaning the family and myself, hadn't been there after 8 AM for a number of years, so I went in thinking they just served breakfast all day Sunday. When the manager (a funny character) walked by I asked him if they were serving lunch because the lunch menu was in our breakfast menus.

"Yeah, we serve lunch. Why?"
"I thought you only served breakfast on Sundays."
"Well that changed, I don't know, like TWO years ago," he grinned.
"Oh. I guess we haven't been here for lunch in forever."

I realized later that we hadn't been there for lunch since long before Junior was born, so a solid 4-5 years ago.

After

I got home and felt absolutely wiped out. I realized that riding outside, especially when it was chilly out, made the riding a lot more fatiguing. Probably burned more calories also.

My epiphany that the MUP was sort of like the local version of the "canal paths" also came as pleasant surprise. I could see myself going out there and doing some steady work, maybe even on my mountain bike. I need more than anything else to do some uninterrupted, high-steady work, and the MUPs are perfect for that, a semi-long effort separating the road crossings. If I rode them at night, or maybe early in the morning, I imagine there'd be little or no traffic.

And finally...  When I drove by the broken fence the other day I noticed that the remaining log in the fence was moved to the middle spot, which makes sense. High enough to keep people from spilling out onto the road, low enough to keep kids and dogs from breezing through the posts.

Training - Family MUP Ride

This has been the summer of bike racing discontent. With what seems like an infinite number of @TuesdayTheRents canceled due to rain/storms/thunder/lightning, one of the worse Spring Series (on the bike), and various hop scotch races (meaning the ones that give me something to look forward to, instead of a vast period of no racing) getting canceled, it's been a not-so-great year of racing.

Even when the race isn't canceled and the weather isn't bad I still have a hard time pulling a decent ride out of my admittedly undertrained legs.

Combined with non-race related stuff my racing has been not so great.

Therefore when a couple of the guys on the team said they'd be doing a weekend ride starting just a couple miles away from the house I thought it'd be a great break from the trainer, from the preparing to race but then getting on the trainer, and from moving stuff around to get to the trainer.

I've only done one team group ride, and it ended in quasi disaster when I hit the deck. Generally speaking the rides are on the other side of the river, just after/during rush hour, and with questionable form at best it's hard to justify figuring out a way to ditch Junior so I can get in the car and go somewhere.

This planned ride had none of the excuses. It was so close that I could ride there (although, due to the planned after ride activities, I drove). It took place on Saturday so the Missus could hang out with the slightly-under-the-weather Junior (teething, again).

And the pace would be moderate at best.

The plan was for the two teammates to pilot each of their tandems with a daughter in the stoker seat and another daughter on a trail-a-bike. That's six riders on two bikes, meaning two bikes with steering/brakes/shifting controls.

Another, the only boy of the group and the oldest of the lot at eight years old, would be on his own bike.

The two significant others would be on their own bikes.

I showed up solo, a semi-guide since I'd ridden the Rails To Trails before. The Missus asked what I'd do on the ride. I told her I figured I'd be shadowing a miscellaneous kid that was on his/her own bike, acting as an extra set of eyes for teammate Joe (three kids). Dennis has two kids and they'd both be on the tandem train rig thing.

With the expected pace a maximum of 11 mph I decided that it would be a perfect ride for the mountain bike. I last used it when I rode from the storage bay back to the house after parking the Expedition. 

Even in the month or two between then and now the tires were basically flat (I pumped them up to 60 psi). The rest of the bike isn't in much better shape - the rear wheel is missing a spoke so the rear brake is open quite a bit (I trued the wheel just enough so the tire doesn't rub the frame), the shock fork has totally collapsed (I replaced most of the MCU "springs" with solid spacers), the middle chainring is so bent that the chain won't stay on it (but who uses anything but the big ring while riding on the road?).

Importantly the bike fits me, it rolls, it stops, and just like driving a beat up truck can be fun this bike is just fun to ride. It's my SUV of bikes - I roll over everything and everything.

Except poison ivy.

But we'll get to that in a second.

The mountain bike cockpit.

The other thing about the bike is that it has no computer on it. I'd removed the lights (charged and in the car but I didn't put them on), it's never had a computer, and it felt a bit refreshing to ride 'sans electronics'.

Of course I very conscientiously charged my phone and Strava'ed the ride. And I used the helmet cam (all the pictures are stills from the cam footage).

So much for escaping technology.

The roll out. Joe driving his tandem with Sam between us.

With just one kid on a single bike I knew exactly what I'd need to do - look after him. Sam is 8 years old, has his own geared and hand-braked bike, and rode really well. His shoulders reminded me of Junior's and I realized that if/when Junior rides this will be part of my life.

He had plenty of zip at the beginning of the ride, bridging gaps, attacking, stuff like that.

Dennis driving his train. Sam in front of me, again.

As soon as we got off the most heavily traveled and maintained part of the trail I realized that poison ivy bordered virtually all of the trail. If it wasn't in the bushes and growing up the trees it was poking out from between fence slat and spreading along the grass. Even at the first main intersection, where we had to wait for a Walk signal, I spotted poison ivy directly next to the trail.

My mantra became that of the saucier from Apocalypse Now, modified just a bit.

"Don't leave the trail."

Or, in the movie, "Never get off the boat." (warning: language)

I'm pretty sure I was telling every to stay on the trail every time we slowed down. Annoying, I suppose, but not as much as having poison ivy everywhere. If Sam has some illogical fear of poison ivy that's why, because every time he veered to the side I reminded him to stay on the trail.

Sam about to thread the needle, going about 5-8 mph faster than the tandem rigs.

Sam enjoyed the whole outing, from what I could tell. He'd maneuver around the larger, less agile tandem rigs, at one point threading the needle as he launched a big move. Other times he'd start flagging a bit then rally hard to bridge back to whatever tandem rig loomed ahead.

After that "threading the needle" move I hit 28 mph bridging up to Sam. Strava claims I did 32 mph at one point at the end; although Sam was riding fast here and there we never hit those speeds. I'm pretty sure that Sam could hit 22-24 mph though, so that's pretty good.

Approaching the end.

With the sun getting low on the horizon we got close to our start point. At some point I was to lead out the tandems for their final race (the girls were the instigators, for real), but my sense of duty looking after Sam kept me at his side. The tandems had to race on their own and apparently finished so close it was impossible to tell who won.

Riding with Sam was quite the rewarding experience. I started thinking about the whole "protect the kid with your body" thing - when we crossed streets I entered the road first and then he'd cross under my watchful eye. There's a whole post there because the same idea of "blocking" for Sam applies to drafting, to covering moves in a pack, playing Go, and even to playing baseball. I'll leave it alone for now, let it simmer, and do a post at some other time.

For now, though, this ride was a preview of what to expect. Maybe not in the sense of the exact experience, but the idea of looking after a human being that is self-mobile, understands mechanical gadgets, knows some more complex rules, stuff like that. 

After the ride we all had a bite to eat. The kids were pretty hungry after a two hour ride, and Sam had faded hard in the last mile and change. I thought I faded hard but it took him about 50 meters to go from "keep trying" to "exhausted". At the table I saw mannerisms in him that reminded me of Junior, while at the same time Sam was much more developed, being over six years older. I came home after Junior had fallen asleep so I didn't get an immediate compare-and-contrast experience, but I'm looking forward to all that stuff. I can't imagine Junior doing that stuff - it's beyond me - but I know logically that he'll be like that, talking, thinking of what he wants to do, thinking of the rules. He does some of that now but not at Sam's level.

I also learned that when a family heads out for a ride you need to bring everything. I rode a bit risky - I had no spare tube, no pump, no nothing. It meant that I didn't have things like a 15 mm wrench (adjusting the chain on the trail-a-bike), bug repellent (requested when we stopped), or even some allen wrenches (adjusting chain on the remote cranks for the stokers). I picked up some CamelBaks at the last Interbike I attended and they'll come in handy for our future family outings. With the Missus expressing interest in joining in next time, with me hauling Junior, I hope that we get to do a family ride soon.

For me the ride was a nice change from the trainer grind. More smiles per mile, that's for sure. Here's to the next ride!