Smelly Sunscreen

Why, I asks, do they put fragrance in sunscreen? Who could think that's a good idea? Smear it on your face, under your nose, and smell flowery stink the rest of the day. Wonderful.

Poll

While I'm taking polls, there's a real poll (well, sort of real) at the bottom of the page (way down there). Go take it. Let me know you're out there. Free tickets to Cedar Point.

The Urban Biker

I'm taking a poll here: Who thinks I should invite our friend Chris (well, my friend; Jon's brother-in-law) to contribute to the blog? Chris would add the unique perspective of the New York City biker, and not a neoprene clad carbon frame ride the palisades on Saturday. No no, Chris rides his vintage Raleigh with its cottered cranks (ick!) to and from his studio and downtown. (He lives on the upper west side.) Right in the street, down the avenues, dodging car doors, lunatic taxis, and out of control bike messengers. He's even gotten a ticket for riding on the sidewalk. Used to ride a girl's bike, until it got stolen.

Fatties

Why is it that there are so many fattish people in pictures of hobby bikers and touring bikers? Perhaps because we think that exercise is a substitute for eating less, which it isn't. Biking isn't even that much exercise, unless you average 35 mph or so.

I've certainly fallen into that trap: I ride 40 miles then stuff my face because I figure I've burned off more calories than I'm consuming. There's a reason I didn't lose any weight last summer, despite riding 200 miles per week. I told myself it was because I was gaining so many nice dense muscles. Wrong, said my doctor.

As usual, I was eating too much. Gotta stop that. Note to Jon: We're eating nothing but celery on our bike trip this summer.

Guest Blog by Jon

Well, this is the aforementioned Jon again. I see Bruce has been talking about me. That's OK. I crave fame.

Took my bike out yesterday and rode for the first time in two months. It had been warm the day before, so I expected warmth again. But this is Wisconsin, and it was probably about 20 degrees, with a sharp little wind. I made it to work, felt good, then came out at midnight to ride home -- and it was sleeting. This is Wisconsin, as I say. Damn the luck. I had my wind pants and raincoat, so I got home without much injury, except to my humor.

I had put little generator light on the bike, but the @#$#@! thing only flickered weakly. The sidewalls of my tire are smooth and I think the little generator top didn't turn very well. So today I'll tinker with it. You know, for me, riding in bad weather is one thing, but when the friggin' equipment doesn't work, that really pisses me off.

See you again!

My Safety Experiment

So I took the Trek out for a 20-mile night ride on Saturday. With my nice lights and reflectors, I felt pretty safe. But I tried one extra thing that could revolutionize safe riding in traffic:

I bought a driveway marker, a large red reflector on a thin fiberglass pole, and fastened it to my back basket. But to enhance safety, I had the reflector stick out straight to the left three feet, or about six inches beyond my handlebars. (I trimmed it so that the rod didn't stick out to the right.)

Here's my thinking. Cars think that they and you can fit in a lane if there's oncoming traffic. But if there's something sticking out into "their" space, they'll be skittish about trying to squeeze by. Also, because it looks so bizarre, they'll attend extra well as they go by. Also, because the rider is clearly a dork and a weirdo, they don't trust him not to do something wacky like swerve far to the left. So it's three psychological safety phenomena in one. Finally, for night riding it must be helpful to have a large round reflector sticking far out to one side (in addition to a taillight in the normal place). That should get drivers' attention.

Cars did seem to be passing me nice and wide, or waiting to pass with oncoming traffic or blind curves.

The problem is, it's just SO dorky. What price safety? Perhaps on tour I'll use it, when I'm already looking odd.

Helmets

Here's one that I never thought I'd agree with:

Perhaps the need for bike helmets is bogus. (You'll never convince me that there's no need for motorcycle helmets, so don't bother trying.)

I've been reading various articles on bicycle helmets, and several things caught my attention.

1. After crashes involving head impacts, when bike helmets are inspected, often (almost always?) the foam in the helmet is not compressed, even though that's how helmets are supposed to protect heads. That means that the skull was compressed, instead. And children's skulls are softer, and thus more compressible, than adult ones. That's not to say that I wouldn't prefer to slam my head into a hard piece of foam rather than a hard piece of concrete. There's incompressible and incompressible.

2. The statistics for head injuries by bicyclists are no worse than those for pedestrians. So why don't we wear helmets while we walk? (And mirrors: I've often been tempted to hook my mirror to my cap visor when I walk. My wife won't let me.)

And then I started thinking about all the falls I've had in 40 years of biking. In all that time, with easily a dozen falls in which I ended up sprawled on the ground, I have never once, not a single time, hit my head, whether it was in a helmet or not. That includes all the times I've gone over my handlebars or wiped out on ice. The only time my helmet has suffered an impact was when the car stopped in it after I fell. (The helmet was tied to my panniers.)

And, of course, there's the issue of the goofy aero helmets that don't protect the back of the head. Why is that desirable? And the issue of people who wear their helmets incorrectly (which is, like, everybody).

Am I going to stop wearing a helmet? I guess not, although, really, when you're riding a fully loaded touring bike going 12 mph, what are the chances of a head injury? But I am going to stop worrying about my 16 year old son who doesn't wear one.

Anybody There?

Jon, are you out there? If so, send me an email.

Anybody else out there? If so, make a donation to The Central Asia Institute in my name (Bruce).

Getting Old

I've been visiting randonneuring sites, reading narratives by participants in the extreme events (you know: 10,000K in 24 hours), and feeling old. Some of their exploits are truly heroic.

Now that I'm old, I've slowed down and lowered my sights. I take it easy, enjoy the scenery, smell the flowers, never race. Now, if I'm going more than 200 miles in a day, I try not to average more than 25 mph, in part by using my 52/17 granny gear even when I don't really feel like babying myself.

Here in Michigan, we have lots of hills that are 10 miles (or more!) of 40% or so grade. Used to be, I'd stay in my 60/11 cruising gear and just power up. No more. Of course, on the downhills, I still hate to use my brakes, so I sometimes get going 70-80 mph. Don't tell my wife! ; )

Gone are the days when I could average 35 mph over a 350 mile stretch. No more racing (good naturedly, of course) with my pals, when we'd go 50 mph for 10 miles before collapsing with a chuckle and some good natured ribbing for the loser. (Of course, that was at the end of a long 500 mile day. When we were just doing sprints on a Saturday, we'd have some serious velocity.)

At the beginning of one of our big rides, I used to have for breakfast two pounds bacon, three dozen eggs, one coffee cake, and then I'd have something really awful: four kippered herring on a waffle. . . .

Now, I need to watch my waistline and try to keep my blood pressure from creeping above 80 over 30.

Growing old is hell.

Do I Need Therapy?

I won't quote all parties involved in the conversation at the dinner table last night, but the basic core of the discussion was that perhaps my obsession with bikes is a bit . . . unhealthy. No threats of divorce, no pleas to "get help", no tears, but still, the question of my aberrant bikeophilia was raised.

I labored mightily to find equivalent obsessive behavior in my wife, but it was a losing battle. She gently pointed out that two out of three of my sentences have the word "bike" in them, all day long, dawn to dusk. I spend an inordinate amount of time tinkering with my bikes. Now that Jon and I are planning a trip, I get to spend even more time studying maps, figuring out optimal routes. And let's not even mention all the online orders for bike stuff I place. (I just got a new stem from Rivendell; it really helps the slush mobile. More later.)

My argument was that lots of people have hobbies. My wife kept getting back to the 2-out-of-3 statistic. It's not a mere hobby if you can't stop talking about it. EVER. I believe the clinical term is "addiction". Maybe that's reserved for substance abuse. No, you can be a sex addict, too. I suppose over-eating can be a kind of addiction.

OK. It's an addiction. My name is Bruce and I'm a bikeaholic.

But is that so bad? I wake up in the morning, stumble out of bed, and think, well, what do I have to look forward to today? The answer ALWAYS is bikes. I can have a miserable day ahead of me at work, too much to do, too many unpleasant people to deal with, but I know I can always escape to my "special bike place." I can be fretting about my own mortality, conjuring up psychosomatic illnesses (I've had some doozies), worrying about my kids, but I know that I can calm myself by visiting rivbike.com, or installing a new basket on my bike, or spending a few minutes poring over a map.

Escapism? Sure. But the beauty of it is that I love riding bikes. So I may be obsessive, but I'm also healthy. And it's probably unhealthy--mentally--to want to ride 30 miles a day in summer, but it's got to be healthy, physically. (My wife thinks it's unhealthy to the point of insane to want to ride from Lansing to Empire--240 miles or so--in 24 hours. I say it's my Paris-Brest-Paris equivalent, give or take a few hundred miles. I have good lights. I figure traffic will be light at 3:00 am, so I can ride on more direct roads. I'll do a few more centuries first, in preparation.)

But all you need to do is roam the internet a bit, read some bike discussion boards, visit the web sites of randonneuring groups, to realize that there are lots of us nuts out there, some even nuttier--much much nuttier--than I am. Although I obsess about bikes, I don't get into online arguments about which derailer is better, nor do I irrationally take the reflectors off my pedals to save weight (at least, not since I was 16), nor do I have the desire to own every bike ever made. (Well, I may have the desire, but I'm able to resist the urge.)

And talk about unhealthy obsessions: How about all those summers I spent looking at the sky, looking at the trees, wondering when the wind would be perfect for windsurfing? Do I go now? Or wait? How long? What happens if the wind is perfect now and I don't go? How will I live with myself for making the wrong decision? Now, I get up, I schedule the day's ride, and go about my business. (I windsurf, too, but I don't obsess quite so much about it.)

But still, why the bike thing? What is it about a beautiful bike that turns me on so? Why does the thought of spending the day sweating away in the hot sun to go exactly nowhere (in the end) excite me?

The fact that bikes can make me so happy just means that I'm an unhappy person, I guess.

Hybrid Shmybrid

The White Pine Trail (now the "Fred Meijer White Pine Trail") literature describes it as being perfect for "hybrid" bikes.

What do they mean by that? Simply that tires should be at least 35mm? Surely it doesn't matter what kind of handlebars you have. On a converted rail bed, it doesn't even matter what gears you have, since it's all flat.

So why not just say "35mm or wider tires"? Why the "hybrid" label (which makes people with non-"hybrids" feel like they can't ride it)? Because we love labels, and because we deal in extremes. "Road" bikes have teeny tiny skinny little 21mm tires, and "mountain" bikes have big fat knobby 50mm tires. Therefore, a bike with 35mm tires must be called something else. Hence the term "hybrid". OK, a hybrid has 700c wheels. (Unless it has 650B wheels, which most--other than Rivendell's--don't.)

It makes "hybrids" seem like oddball bikes, not quite this and not quite that, unable to make up their minds what they're good for. Bikes for amateurs.

But if you hang out around Grant Peterson (or his site or catalogs) long enough, you realize that a bike that can only take 21 or 23mm tires is ridiculous. A decent, useful bike should be able to take 35mm tires, as all hybrids do.

But doesn't hybrid also mean not-quite-straight handlebars? Well, sure, but any bike can have any handlebars, so that's a largely meaningless distinction. A bike is a frame and components. The components are completely interchangeable. (Well, mostly interchangeable, depending on how the frame is set up and what braze-ons it has.)

What else does hybrid mean? Maybe a slightly longer frame, or maybe not. It's never discussed as a feature (even though longer frames are more comfortable to ride). Probably nice low gears, but all bikes should have nice low gears. That's swap-outable, too.

It should be easy to turn any bike into a "hybrid" by putting on 35 or 37mm tires and upright handlebars, perhaps a 24 tooth small chain wheel. Put on 28mm tires and drop bars, and it becomes a "road" bike. Of course, there's no reason not to have drop bars on a hybrid. (Or, to be complete, upright bars on a "road" bike.)

But I get annoyed by labels. Either your frame will take 35mm tires or it won't. Either it has beefy tubes, or it doesn't. Either it has long chain stays, or it doesn't. Either it's big enough (allowing sanely high handlebars), or it isn't. Seems like those are the differences, the unchangeables, in a bike. Everything else is details.

OK, OK. Overall frame geometry differs, but that's not necessarily a hybrid vs. road thing. The package of components on a "hybrid" is usually pretty useful. So the idea is right: a bike that is comfortable to ride and usable under a variety of conditions. I have trouble with that being considered the exception, a "hybrid" of two "real" bikes that are, in fact, of only limited usefulness.

Enough. No one cared in the first place. But my next bike is going to be a mixte (low top bar) with Albatross (swept back upright) bars and 37mm tires. Hybrid? Hoo-boy, you betcha.

More About Sidewalks

Fairly unpleasant ride in the cold rain today. Not miserable, just unpleasant. Actually, more uncomfortable than unpleasant.

The thing about riding on sidewalks is that it's fun. It's like being a kid again, going on "bike rides". When I was ten or so, my parents said I could ride anywhere within an area of about four square miles: Stadium Blvd (on the west) to Liberty St (on the north) to Main St (on the east) to Stadium Blvd (which curved around to the south). We'd pack a lunch and set out, exploring every neighborhood, every street, every parking lot, every park, riding the whole time on the sidewalks. Those bike rides are among my fondest childhood memories. With whom did I ride? I don't quite remember. There are several possibilities. Not Jon.

Anyway, riding on the sidewalk is fun. It's like trail riding. Add a little snow and ice, and it's downright exciting. Road riding is more proper, more vehicular, but it's a little more boring.

When I first started commuting by bike (ten years ago?), riding on the sidewalk was what made me want to do it every day. It didn't feel like work (mostly).

I took an alternate route for part of today's ride, one that took me on the (wide) shoulder of a very busy two-lane highway. It was not fun. The road was smoother, and I was able to keep up a nice steady pedal cadence, but it felt a little hectic and, well, dangerous.

I rode the sidwalk home.

Jon vs. The Law

In the last post I accused Jon of conscientiously obeying traffic laws. Perhaps he does, now that he's pushing 50. But I remember a time in southern California when he not only flouted traffic laws, but boasted about it to the police.

We were on the last day of our West Coast ride, riding from Newport Beach to San Diego. A long day, but doable after a month on the road. In fact, we were without our packs because of a little interruption that involved Jon being sliced open and taken to the hospital. My parents came and got us and our packs, but left our bikes locked up at the hospital. So on this last day, we were driven back to the hospital for our bikes, and we set off.

Parenthetically, I still remember how much harder the bikes were to ride without their packs. I think we expected to be able to average 25 mph, so we rode fast fast fast, much faster than we would have tried to do with 50 lbs of panniers on the back. As a result, we burned out fairly early on the ride.

Also parenthetically, that day involved riding across Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. That was an interesting experience.

Anyway, there we were, humming along south of L.A. when we got to a red light that we didn't like. So we ran it. Blatantly, willfully, defiantly.

When the police car pulled us over, we had this conversation:

"Where you boys coming from?"
"Seattle." Did he believe us? Without packs? But we must have looked pretty road seasoned by then, so perhaps he did buy it.
"Did you run red lights the whole way?"
And this is where Jon's charm and honesty shone through: "Yes, when there was no one coming."

I could have killed him.

Sometimes honesty is the best policy. The answer seemed to stump the policeman. He was briefly silent, and finally said, "Well, you'd better not do it around here any more."

And away we went.

Sidewalks?

Here's an interesting question, one that I think Jon and I have argued about:

Is it OK for me to ride on the sidewalk on my way to work? The only convenient route is a four-lane state highway with heavy car traffic going 45 mph. Curbs? You betcha! No shoulder, no way. Because of a river that winds its way to campus, there are few roads to choose from that cross the river and head west. Basically, it's M-43 or another four-lane road with curbs and no shoulder.

I see that in Wisconsin (or at least Milwaukee), it's ILLEGAL for adults to ride on the sidewalk. So I would just boldly ride out into traffic and smile at the honks. Yikes.

It is true that riding on the sidewalk is dangerous due to cars cutting you off, and in winter the sidewalks are sometimes nearly impassible. But still. Compete with cars going 45? At night? Even with lots of lights?

I'd be perfectly willing to obey all traffic laws and stop at all traffic signals if I thought I would be accepted on M-43, but I know I wouldn't be. Would I? I should convene a traffic forum just to find out if I would be run off the road, cursed at, threatened, or otherwise made unhappy.

I don't know if Jon and I have argued about this. He lives in Wisconsin and probably very conscientiously follows the traffic laws. I don't disagree that I "should" ride in the street, and if there were a state law that required it (and if cars knew about it), I'd be happy to. I'd be even happier if the idiot county road commission would put in bike lanes when they do a major resurfacing, which they did about ten years ago. (But no bike lanes.)

For now, I'm going to ride on the sidewalk.