Posts Tagged ‘bike riding’
Energy Fade
Today is one month away from my 67th birthday in June. Everyone ages differently, but my experience is that my level of energy has dropped noticeably in my mid-sixties. That’s not necessarily problematic for me. I really enjoy lounging around. I had a wonderfully luxurious day in the most fabulous lake weather yesterday, enhanced by some great conversation with Steve’s guests from Sweden, Eva and her daughter, Matilde. I also checked in on Cyndie, who was threading beads to create Morse coded bracelets.
Looking at some of the shiny beads in her collection, I was fascinated by the reflection of the red umbrella overhead. She was working at the table on the deck. When I leaned over to take a photo, my phone camera obscured the view of the umbrella, but that added some mystery about what was going on in the image.
As the afternoon advanced and people with weekday responsibilities departed for their homes, I rallied my resources and hopped on the bike to do some light-effort pedaling. I’d spent much of the day recovering from my extended workout on the bicycle the day before, but in the hope of building more stamina using the same muscle groups, I thought it pertinent to ride again on consecutive days.
It took me a long time to warm up my legs, and just when I started to feel myself hitting stride, I noticed the residual fatigue was making sure I was still aware of it. It wasn’t going to be a long-distance outing even if I’d wanted it to be. Luckily, I was within a few miles of Wildwood when all this was happening. I had been using the electric assist the whole time to baby my rubbery legs, and the thing that became clear to me was that the effort to ride at my usual pace of around 12 mph without the electronics helping ends up being remarkably similar to the effort to keep the pedals spinning at a battery-assisted 18 mph.
It’s a function of being a high-cadence rider. The motor helps, but it is no cure for not having the strength to spin the pedals.
The hour-long cruise on the paved country roads was perfect for my goals and left me with plenty of time to resume luxuriating afterward in the cool breeze off the lake on a warm, sunny day. Then, I stayed up too late watching another overtime hockey game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
I think spectator sports are going to become more entertaining for me as my advancing age continues to reduce my energy resources. Tensing my muscles as the action in the game gets exciting and then relaxing when the whistle blows provides an added bonus of processing the lactic acid buildup in my legs. For now, I’m getting benefits from both participating in a sport and watching professional athletes ply their trades.
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Biking Progress
A search of the area behind the cabin where Cyndie had previously seen the fawn turned up no signs of it. It may have lain down in a tiny curled ball, but since we didn’t see or hear from it the entire rest of the day, we prefer to imagine its mother returned and they wandered off to live happily ever after. The walk through the woods turned up some rewarding scenery in consolation.
The trillium is putting on a pretty good show for us. My second favorite adornment of the forests up here is the ferns. They are coming on strong this weekend.
The surprise we least expected to find was methodically pecking away on the shady side of a tree. It took some hunting to find it by honing in on the most likely direction the sounds were coming from and then staring long enough to catch a glimpse of the movement.
That’s a Pileated Woodpecker way up in the tree. They are the largest woodpeckers we have in North America, but they are a somewhat rare sighting. That makes it doubly special whenever we have one pay a visit.
I was able to take advantage of good weather yesterday afternoon and get out for a 39-mile loop riding my bike. My derailleur recalibration worked well, and I pushed my mileage to more than double my previous rides this season. My new gravel tires worked well, too, allowing me to confidently ride a road I didn’t know would be gravel. That portion offered me the chance to witness the smallest fawn I have ever seen in person. Compared to the one that was bleating outside our sunroom, this one was practically a quarter of the size.
It looked like it could have been born only a few hours earlier. I came up over a rise in the road and found the mamma and baby staring directly at me from the middle of the gravel road. As I approached them, I spoke a few words, which triggered the doe to leap off into the sparse growth beside the road. The matchstick-like legs of the fawn wobbled their way to follow the mom.
Steve arrived yesterday with guests who are friends from Sweden. We enjoyed a big feast for a late dinner after offering tours of the house and surroundings, and visiting with several neighbors for happy hour on the deck next to our place. I was feeling pretty self-satisfied about the distance I had traveled on my bike ride earlier in the afternoon, but my pride was taken down a notch when I learned a couple next door biked 55 miles, 20 or 25 of which were unplanned. They missed a turn and rode much farther south than they had intended.
My leg muscles were on the verge of cramping after my effort. I don’t want to think about the pain of riding that many unplanned miles.
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Dandelion Seeds
’Tis the season of dandelions gone to seed. In the soaking wet of morning dew, the wispy white remains crowning the tall stalks of old dandelions cling to our shoes in massive amounts.
The story in pictures:
Today, we are finishing preparations to be away from home for a long weekend. I have a small portion of mowing to complete. Cyndie is organizing things to ease the work of our house/animal sitter who will be staying here while we are gone.
Before leaving town, we have a date with friends in Hudson for the “Taste of the Valley” food and beverage event at Lakefront Park. I see 25 different providers listed for a dynamic selection of “all-you-can-enjoy” artisan foods. We plan to leave directly from there to head to the lake.
I’m bringing my bike along to take advantage of riding the less hilly roads through the forests of northern Wisconsin’s lake country. I will not lie about looking forward to having the option to linger in bed in the mornings for as long as my body desires, since we won’t have a dog to walk or horses to be fed for a few days.
If I still have an appetite over the weekend after tonight’s food extravaganza in Hudson, both Cyndie and I are looking forward to some pizza from our fav, Coop’s Pizza, and ice cream from West’s Dairy.
So, basically, I am going to the lake to eat and sleep in, and possibly do some bike riding. Any other adventures that present themselves will be icing on the cake.
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Sunrise Ride
Watching 13 stages of the Tour de France provided ample inspiration for me on a beautiful morning bike ride over the hills and past the cornfields of my neighborhood in the driftless region of Wisconsin.
The low angle of the sun created shadows that proved irresistible for me to pull out my phone while riding, which I am VERY reluctant to do. The odds of my dropping it are extremely high, but I got away with it this time.
I was probably feeling a little cockier than usual because I had chosen to ride in the opposite direction of one of my usual routes, which put me immediately into several big climbs, and I found myself pulling it off without feeling noticeably abused. Maybe all the miles I trod back and forth on our hilly property are keeping my cycling abilities fit.
Since I had failed to test my bike since I picked it up from the shop almost a month ago, I was also energized to find my pedaling was as quiet as ever. It would have been a massive disappointment had it been otherwise.
By riding first thing in the morning, so that I could get back to feed the horses at their usual hour, I still had the whole day open to take on whatever chore I wanted. The one that seemed to offer the greatest return for the effort involved cranking up the diesel New Holland with the brush cutter to knock down the uncut areas along the edges and corners of the hay field that the hay mower couldn’t negotiate.
That is an exercise that takes only a few minutes, but it serves as a precursor to moving into the back pasture to trim the weeds before they go to seed, which takes more than three hours.
After giving my legs an early workout, the extended tractor time may appear to be a more forgiving endeavor, but hour upon hour of pushing the clutch pedal, then the brake pedal, while spinning the steering wheel around and back on every turn, was almost as exhausting as conquering Pierce County hills on my bike.
I had closed the gates to keep the horses out of the back pasture, but they were free to graze in the recently mowed hay field. I always love seeing them out on the grass instead of standing in a stupor under the overhang, which tends to be their preference much of the time. That’s Mia all by herself in the image.
This morning, I’m riding bikes vicariously through the pros racing Stage 14 of the Tour. They are a great inspiration.
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Valuable Miles
Saturday afternoon was darn near perfect for our World Labyrinth Day walk for peace. We had 8 people join us, which isn’t the smallest number of folks we’ve hosted for this annual event. They were all precious individuals, but the one person who was a particularly pleasant surprise was a neighbor we’d never met who dropped in after seeing an invite I posted on the Nextdoor app.
If anybody is wondering, my annual measurement of the trunk of the transplanted maple tree in the center of the labyrinth revealed a 3/16ths of an inch increase in circumference since my initial reading a year ago.
Yesterday, I took the day off from chores and went for a bike ride with Rich Gordon, one of my special friends from the annual bike ride in June. He was kind enough to drive all the way to Beldenville to join me in a loop of country roads over hills and through valleys of the driftless region around our home.
We are always looking for opportunities to season our butts against our bike saddles in preparation for days of long mileage in June on The Tour of Minnesota.
The Rush River valley offers some beautiful scenery after ten miles of farm fields.
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I was pointing out the top of the ridge visible through the trees that will soon be obscured by leaves. Climbing out of that valley was probably the most daunting of the many climbs we pedaled up, as may be discernible in the graphic above showing the elevations we traversed. We weren’t even halfway into the loop, so that effort made the rest of the route seem a little more taxing on our now-tired legs. When we reached the top, we paused for a snack break in the shade and quickly made friends with one of the residents who lived at that address.
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The second biggest climb came when we departed from El Paso. Rich made it look easy.
Compared to the biggest beast of a hill, it was a little bit easier. There was also the psychological boost of knowing we were that much closer to our finish line, and none of the remaining hills would be as long.
I’m encouraged by the fact that I was able to accomplish all the climbing without needing to rely on an assist from the battery I was lugging along in the frame of my Trek Domane e-bike. Having a friend along on the ride was a morale boost that prevented my usual lack of determination to push myself quite as hard.
My body will likely offer up some complaints today in the form of muscle stiffness, but I’ve got plenty of my usual physical activities on tap, tending to things around the ranch to keep me moving.
I’ll probably wait another day or two before my next conditioning ride of any substantial miles. Maybe I’ll opt for a nice flat trail ride to complement yesterday’s hilly terrain.
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Thinking Things
I hope you don’t mind that I haven’t asked you, dear readers, for money, and I haven’t splashed advertisements all over this virtual space, either. It’s not what I do. I consider myself lucky that I can get away with that. Obviously, asking for money is a reasonable thing to do when you have no other source of funding.
These thoughts have been triggered by two things. First, the multitude of activist organizations that are bombarding my inbox with messages emphatically spelling out all the atrocities occurring in our country that need to be stopped.
“Send us $9 monthly.”
“Donate now.”
It’s hard to argue with the craftily written paragraphs that imply the money I give will stymie all the threats to our democratic freedoms unfolding over the last three months. Alas, they are undone by the repetition of requests and the absolute nothing that happens to stop the horrors piling up by the day.
The second thing that has been irking me is the massively intrusive advertisements that a certain weekly documentary series mashes into its podcast format with overdone hype. I am grateful that this person is traveling far and wide to gather stories and employing a crew of staff to record sound and video, which costs a lot of money, I’m certain, but there must be other ways to finance the project.
The current method they use is making it hard to listen to their otherwise very interesting story.
I had a very interesting –read that “chilly”– bike ride yesterday afternoon. When I finished mucking about with various small projects, I was warm, and the air temperature was almost 60°F. I figured the exercise of cycling would naturally heat me up, so I didn’t put on long sleeves.
From our wonderfully nestled property, I did not perceive much in the way of wind. I also didn’t notice that the brief clearing in the sky we had been enjoying was over, and thick clouds were blocking the warm sunshine.
I soon discovered it was closer to 50 than 60°F and felt more like 30 when creating my own wind chill effect during rapid spurts down hills.
The route I selected was a short square that ended up putting me into a stiff headwind for the last miles to our driveway at a time when my arms were already uncomfortably cold.
Checking the wind speed when I got home verified why the neighbor’s flag was stiffly blowing straight at me as I passed. My weather app indicated a steady 15mph directly out of the north. Yeah, brrr.
I’m thinking I should have worn long sleeves.
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Impact Crater
Just a few days after someone alerted me to a local site of an impact crater, I got out for my first bike ride of this year and explored a route that traveled nearly through the center according to the maps.
I was exploring roads that I was unfamiliar with and ended up riding on an unpaved road for a while. It meandered through a beautiful forested area that felt far removed from the many open farm fields that dominated much of my views.
There were so many undulations on almost every road, I never got any sense of the actual geological structure of the crater that was created by the hypervelocity impact some 450-433 million years ago.
It being my inaugural ride of the season, I relied on the electric assist almost the entire time. Without the marvel of the heavy battery and motor, I would never have been able to complete over 37 miles of such hilly terrain. And at just under three hours, my butt was wishing I’d have chosen a much less arduous distance and route.
The motor was particularly appreciated when I turned into the west wind which seemed to keep increasing with the climbing afternoon temperatures. When I got home, our thermometer indicated 74°F.
It didn’t feel that warm to me, but I blame the wind. By bedtime last night, my face felt windburn and my arms and legs felt like they had been taxed to their limits. Excellent indications I had enjoyed a great adventure.
So great, I’m going to give myself a day off today from taxing my muscles any more than what it takes to accomplish some dog walking and manure management. Maybe I’ll read more about the Rock Elm Disturbance.
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More Trillium
While exploring our woods away from the trails in search of tree-choking vines, we came upon two beautiful trillium blossoms that were not transplanted here by us. Making the moment even more exciting for us was the fact they each had a hint of purple coloring on the petals.
I don’t know if we will ever succeed in creating a large grove of trillium in our woods by way of our annual transfer of small batches from the lake place, but it doesn’t feel as essential that we do, now that we are finding more occasions where the flowers are sprouting naturally.
Yesterday morning, I claimed a couple of hours for a bike ride that took me down into the Rush River valley, and among the many gorgeous views, I spotted several large groups of trillium growing wild.
That was much more fun to come upon than the two times a dog ran a great distance to threaten me as I pedaled past their territory. The second one was a large German Shepherd that paid little heed to my stern commands to “Stop!” and “No!” Fortunately, it didn’t demonstrate much in the way of endurance and gave up quickly as I continued my pedaling pace beyond the farm.
While I worked on transporting water to our newly transplanted saplings in the afternoon, Cyndie took our cat, Pequenita, to the vet for a diagnosis that might explain her runaway appetite, oddly loud gut sounds, and surprising weight loss lately. She really didn’t have much weight to lose.
The vet suspects hyperthyroidism and ordered a blood chemistry panel for confirmation. We hope to learn the results later today.
At this point, we anticipate there will be medication prescribed for the rest of her life. Oy.
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Now This
Last night, I received notification that the single organized group-bike-tour that I participate in every June has been canceled for 2020 due to some virus pandemic. The Tour of Minnesota will take this summer off. My intuition tells me there is a good chance my pedals and spokes won’t get much of a workout this year.
That tour was the incentive to get me spinning those wheels as early as possible every spring, oftentimes against my preference to rather not.
“I’m too tired today.”
“There are too many other chores I should be doing.”
“The weather isn’t ideal.”
“I don’t feel like riding right now.”
Despite those and other excuses, whenever I overcome the resistance and get myself out on the bike, I am always incredibly happy to be riding.
Without the incentive of the impending week-long trip of high daily mileage to drive my actions, I fear my endless collection of excuses will override my pleasure of gliding along country roads, especially during times of social distancing. Riding alone is nowhere near as fun as riding with a group.
On the bright side, now I won’t be thinking about a risk of becoming symptomatic with a virus that compromises lungs while needing to pedal for multiple 70-mile days and sleep overnights on the ground in a tent.
I picture myself choosing some less-taxing adventures close to home in the months ahead. For some reason, I keep seeing tree-shaded hammocks swinging in this vision.
That must mean Cyndie will be doing the lawn mowing.
“Don’t forget to wear a mask, hon!”
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Wetter Today
There is nothing quite like the ripping of rain-soaked air by the high heat energy of a lightning strike that explodes in close proximity. That ever so brief searing tear of the atmospheric fabric, then accented by a concussive BOOM! that startles even though it is obviously about to happen, is the stuff of my childhood terrors.
Even some of the kabooms from farther away that don’t trigger a panic reaction are powerful enough that the walls of our house creak and windows flex. And, yes, it makes our dog bark in a faux bravery attempt to shout down the perceived threat.
We knew this stormy weather was coming. A whole weekend of it. The future predictors (meteorologists) told us about it, right down to the hours when it would be intense.
I lucked out yesterday, as the partially cloudy day stayed dry in our area, though radar indicated it was rainy just to our south. It allowed me to get the already too long grass mowed in the nick of time, and then squeak in my very first bike ride of the season.
No pressure or anything, but I did register for another week of biking and camping in June, so conditioning my butt to tolerate extended hours on the saddle is once again on my to-do list.
There are worse burdens in this world.
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Getting back out on the open road, seeing an endless ribbon of pavement rolled out before me, breathing (panting) the fresh country air, having close encounters with protective old farm dogs, waving at folks gawking at the silly human pedaling for conveyance, is both physical exercise and mental refreshment.
Feeling the wind pushing against your face, as well as from behind, since I chose to ride in a big square of all four directions, connects with the elements in a way that car travel completely eliminates.
In my current living situation, claiming hours for pedaling along idly doesn’t happen without a bigger reason to force it, so the bike trip becomes something of a cause and effect. It’s not like the old days when I would ride my bike for miles, to and from work every day. Back then, by the time June came around, I was more than prepared for day-long rides.
I am grateful that I was able to launch my road bike for its season opener on a dry day yesterday. If I am to follow that up with a second ride this weekend, it’s going to be much wetter.
Just like those future-tellers predicted.
Hopefully, I can time it so as to avoid the lightning and thunder.
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Relative Something 