Posts Tagged ‘bike riding’
Leaving Early
I am departing at dawn this morning to dash home early from the “Golf Weekend” in order to then drive more than an hour west for Cyndie’s 50th high school reunion. They are starting with a boat cruise on Lake Minnetonka, then coming back to Eden Prairie for an “after party.”
The plan seems a little dizzying to me after my last two whirlwind days of activity and conversation with the regular crew of the annual weekend that Cyndie’s brothers host at the lake place.
Yesterday started a little rainy, but that didn’t stop the golfers.
I waited until late afternoon to head out on the bike with two other riders. We got dripped on a little bit, but returned to the house before it rained hard enough to get things wet. Nobody crashed, so that was a win.
Dinner was grilled meats, corn on the cob, and a few sides. Since they realized I would be leaving and would miss the big fish dinner tonight, they thawed a little fresh-caught Alaskan Salmon for me that Ben’s son, Beck, brought from his recent fishing trip.
More delicious food, keeping up a trend of good eats I’ve been feasting on lately. I’m not confident that I’ve done enough pedaling to justify my higher-than-normal calorie consumption of late.
I made a few more adjustments to my gear in a search to quiet my noisy bike. Putting the battery back on appears to have ended the annoying click I was experiencing in the vicinity of the bottom bracket, but that just made what seem like new squeaks extra irritating. I rode yesterday without my seat bag of road repair gear to see if that was adding to the squeakiness. It may have been better, but it wasn’t silent yet. My right shoe was doing some squeaking, so I’ve got a little tweaking to do there.
I think the problems might be a moving target that I’ll just have to learn to live with.
We ended the evening with a card game that involved dealing only one card to each individual. You just have to beat one other person, with the lowest card being the loser. Each guy started with three chips. The first person to lose three times and run out of chips gets to return to the game with one chip when play drops down to just three people left.
Last night, the person who earned that dubious honor came back to win the whole thing. It was highly entertaining.
The camaraderie is something I will miss, but I’m heading to a big night of visiting at Cyndie’s 50th reunion this afternoon and evening that I expect will fill the void nicely.
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Directionally Challenged
For all of the effort I have put into striving for optimal health, mind-body-spirit, there remains one frailty that I have yet to address. I am prone to getting turned around so that I don’t know which way to go when faced with a decision about direction. This was demonstrated anew yesterday while out on a bike ride that I intended to be a simple loop.
I started at the red dot in the image above and rode with the wind due east on Twin Lake Road. That took me to County Road A, where I turned right and rode south to Chief River Road. After a right turn there, I pedaled west until I reached Tiger Cat Road. Another right turn there and I looped around to McClaine Road. That should have led to a right turn again to bring me back to Twin Lake Road, but I confidently made a left turn and rode south in the opposite direction from what I thought I was doing.
A couple of things clued me in to the situation playing out. It was taking longer than I thought it should to get back to Twin Lake Rd, and then the road made those two right-angle turns that I thought were wrong. When I came to the intersection with the south end of Tiger Cat Road, I knew I’d made a mistake, but I still couldn’t shake the perception that I was looking north.
I tried using my shadow to clarify, but the sun was too high, and the shadow was not helping to confirm my suspicion. I pulled out my phone to look at the map to reorient my brain. From the spot where I had stopped, I could have continued south to County Road B, but I really didn’t want to ride that more heavily trafficked road. Instead, I turned around and backtracked to get back to where I intended to be and then finished my ride, thoroughly resigned to having freshly confirmed my tendency for my sense of direction getting flipped.
It bothers me that I didn’t hesitate for a second when I made that wrong turn to the south. It felt completely correct to me.
Right up until it didn’t.
A guy could get a reputation for repeatedly doing things like that, and deservedly so.
The moral of this story? If you are ever on a bike ride with me (or a car trip, or walking indoors somewhere and coming back out again), don’t let me lead unless you enjoy putting on extra miles.
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Active Day
Yesterday started a little earlier than usual for us because the farrier was coming to trim the horses at 7:30. Asher was confused by us getting out the door so close to sunrise. We wanted the horses to be finished eating their servings of feed to avoid any unnecessary distractions by the time they were supposed to be cooperating with the farrier.
After I cleaned up all the manure (equine fecal relocation), I took Asher back to the house for his breakfast and ended up missing the entire trim appointment. Cyndie said that Light was very cooperative. That makes us really happy, because it hasn’t always been a sure thing with her. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been seeing a positive trend of willingness from Light in the last year.
Cyndie supported my decision to take my bike for a spin before heading up to the lake for a few days of her two brothers’ annual golf weekend. I’ve concluded that my bike is still noisy and now my new shoes squeak, too. That clicking is an issue that I’m tired of battling, so I may end up living with it. There are still one or two things I plan to test, so a tiny glimmer of hope remains.
The route I chose for my short romp ended up bringing me to a monster of a hill climb that had me in serious oxygen debt. It was so bad that I never fully recovered for the remainder of the ride. It didn’t help that the temperature was reaching the uncomfortably hot levels at the same time. When I finally reached home again, I was thoroughly pooped. I grabbed the pulse oximeter to see what my numbers were. Yikes! That explained why I felt so lousy.
The highlight of our day came at dinnertime. We picked up our neighbors on the north edge of Pierce County, Ann (Herzog) and David Drewiske, and headed to LoLo American Kitchen & Craft Bar in Hudson. David gave us a wonderful tour of back roads to avoid traffic caused by ongoing road construction. The menu at LoLo is laudable for the quality of every offering. I recommend it highly.
I ordered the Miso-Glazed Coho Salmon and Cyndie had the Grassfed Bavette Steak Frites. Yum!
We didn’t linger long after eating because I was about to make the drive north with my bike stowed safely in the back of my car.
I made it through dusk and into darkness without incident, arriving at the lake house a few minutes before 10 p.m.
The sky views transitioned from the orange setting sun to the orange rising moon over the duration of my drive, allowing me to wake up this morning at my favorite destination.
I plan to go for a little bike ride before all the golfers begin to arrive this afternoon. Tradition has it that we congregate at Angler’s Bar in Hayward for dinner Thursday. Hopefully, I’ll ride myself up a worthy appetite.
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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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Relative Something 