Rules of the Road

If you are going to ride the Capital Crescent, you must take and pass this test before you utilize the trail. Failure to do so will result in a punishment worse than death, e.g. UN Sanctions.

1. If you are a roller blader and riding down the Capital Crescent Trail and hear "bike back," what do you do?

a) Stop skating forward, and coast, legs spread as wide as you can get them.
b) Swerve into the left (passing lane).
c) Shoot the bicyclist a nasty look. How dare he...
d) All of the above.

2. You're a well endowed hot chick. You like to jog. You like to use the Trail, but you know lots of bicyclists will be out. What do you do?

a) Go jogging in a spandex top, no bra, thereby distracting the cyclists dangerously.
b) Wear the tiny bra, with the tank top with the string straps, thereby distracting the cyclists dangerously.
c) Don't jog, but stand next to the trail, doing some impossible stretches that strain even the lycra in your shorts, thereby distracting the cyclists dangerously.
d) It's all good... all of the above.

3. You're a hairy legged dude on a bike. Three or four guys who race and sort of seem to know each other ease on by in a paceline, chatting. What do you do?

a) Latch onto the paceline without asking.
b) Pull to the side after your pull, but then barge your way into the second position in the paceline.
c) Ride the fat racer on a fixed gear into the gutter
d) All of the above, because you're ignorant.

4. You come to Bethesda. The new trail intersection is completely buggered. You need to cross the five way intersection and get onto the Georgetown Branch. What do you do?

a) Bomb across the intersection, messenger style.
b) Flip off the guy in the Lincoln Town Car who nearly hits you.
c) Elbow a guy on a recumbent out of the way, taking the lead going into the tunnel under Wisconsin Ave.
d) All of the above.

5. You're a perspiring/aspiring triathlete. What do you do?

a) Fit your bike with aerobars, then bomb down the trail at the busiest time of day, barely under control, with your head down, eyes on the front wheel, pedaling for dear life.
b) Buy a banana hammock, pull out the '70's vintage reflective sunglasses, Burt Reynolds Model, strap on the Pumas, slip into the toe clips, put a little BTO in the I-Pod, and rock out down the trail.
c) Shoot nasty looks at guys in club jerseys, which actually have sleeves, and suffer from the nagging suspsicion that even though you can ride relatively quickly, they look down on you and don't consider you a real bike racer.
d) All of the above, and then some.

6. You've finished your 15 mile commute. You are hungry, but have no money on you for a quick snack. Uh-oh... what's the solution?

a) Search the cracks in the seat of your '92 Ford Ranger for crumbs, some of them dating back to 1991, aka Model year 1992.
b) Search the trailhead for crumbs and discarded packets of Gu, chewed gum, anything man, anything.
c) Pull your dress shirt out of your bag, and check for any crumbs left over from lunch that you may have missed.
d) All of the above.

If you answered "d" to each question, you are qualified to commute on the Capital Crescent Trail. Next week's test: Commuting on the W&OD Trail. Sneak Preview:

1. You come to an intersection with a heavily trafficked public road. What do you do?
a) Bomb it, and get hit by a car.
b) Bomb it, hook handlebars with a triathlete across the way, crash, and suffer debilitating injuries.
c) Tip over, hitting your helmetless head on the ground, causing further debilitating injuries.
d) All of the above...

And finally some good news. It looks like they recovered one of my favorite paintings, Munch's The Scream. There's nothing to say about that, except:

Coppi Lives!

By popular demand, a picture of Coppi Cat, the red headed stepchild of my house:



In this picture, he is engaging in "rest." Chris Carmichael notes, "rest is really important, and most cyclists don't do enough of it. You can't win if you don't rest, even if your name is Coppi."

Okay, Carmichael didn't say that, but he is a big booster of rest, and Coppi Cat is one of the best rest-ers I've ever seen.

Water Bottles 9: The Name of This Band is Water Bottles

- I apologize in advance for stealing something that my excellent coach and excellent racer Bill Gros wrote in his race report for the Chantilly Crit on Saturday, where he finished ~3d. It sums up an awesome leadout he got from Chris Regan, and sums up Bill's approach to racing, as well as encapsulating the racing ethos better than anything I've read recently:

200 meters from the last turn, Chris just keeps going and absolutely buries it into the turn! I’m thinking it’s either going to work, or we’re laying these bikes on the deck.

That's some good squishy, no?

- Headline: "Buffalo Bills Name Quarterback." Interesting. I didn't know that one had been born yet. Yeah, you laugh, but have you witnessed the Bills crash, burn, repeat routine for the last few years? I wish I was joking about how bad the Bills' QB's have been. Even the optimists are predicting a 6-10 season, if the Bills get all the breaks. Could be rough.

- In a variation on a children's tongue twister:

How many bugs could a fat fuck suck,
If a fat fuck could suck bugs?
A fat fuck would suck
What a fat fuck could suck,
If that fat fuck could suck bugs.

That's my grotesquely profane way of saying there were vast, dense clouds of gnats and mosquitos and deer flies on the Capital Crescent tonight on my way home. Sucking wind like I was caused me to eat a path through them the way a Blue Whale sucks down krill. It was not nice. They are a little too bitter to be tasty, to the point where even a liberal dose of sugar couldn't improve the taste. If you think there's an excessive amount of cursing in the above block quote, good thing you weren't riding with me tonight. Your ears might have fallen off.

- Law prof blogger Ann Althouse has a picture of a horror film bike on her website here. I'd post the photo but I think she owns the rights to it, and she's a lawyer, no telling what she'd do to me if I did that.

- Hill ride tomorrow AM. Nighty-night, all.

Signs of a Good Ride

Q: How do you know you had a really good training ride?

A: When your wife walks in on you just as you hop into the shower after the ride, and says, "the water running out of your hair is cloudy... hey, that's salt water! Eeeeeewww."

Such is the Coppi Sunday team ride on a warm day. Not the longest ride, not the hilliest or flattest. Just my favorite.

Avg Hr: 141. High Hr: 203. (Yikes). Miles: 50. Time: 2:40. Avg Speed: ~20. 106 ounces of sports drink. One Clif Bar. 100 smiles.

I'm a sick, sick man...

I'm thinking about leaving my current bike club*, and going over to join this club. What, with my record of wrecked bikes, endless snark, insensitivity and bad attitude, I should fit right in.

Ahh, what the heck. Bike racing is nice and all, but what I really like, are grisly stories about fetus in fetu. Especially when they are accompanied by grisly video of pregnant dudes.

While I'm on News of the Wierd... as they note in the story on fetus in fetu, the guy suffering from the condition was really embarassed by fellow Indian villagers joking about his enormous gut. But that's nothing. This guy was caught in a much worse situation. He was stuck at an airport security screening checkpoint, with his mother on one side, and a female screener on the other. She had just pulled a funny looking rubber object out of his luggage, and wanted to know what it was. His choice: loudly and proudly admit that that oddball device the female screener pulled out of his luggage was a p3nis pump; or face terrorism charges. What would you do?

So anyways, he's going to spend up to three years in prison. The upshot was, the guy was so mortified, he croaked out "pump," he had an accent and the screener heard a word that sounded like "bomb," and I've already told you how it ends. Not that I have one of these devices, but I'm not sure I'd have done any better than this guy did under the circumstances. The motto of the story: if you are going to roll this way, you need to leave your mother home. Though maybe, if this is just how you roll, maybe you are the kind of guy who always travels with mom, and both mom and the mechanical sex aids are mandatory at all times. But what do I know.


*Just kidding, Amici. I trust you realize that. I'd never leave Squadra Coppi for a team filled with guys who set bicycles on fire and ride them through public parks. Hey, that gives me an idea... think we could get MABRA to sanction a burning bike race? Just a thought...

Water Bottles 8: I'm an Idiot... But You Knew That

* First off, apologies for all those who left comments that went unmoderated. I was on vacation. Honest... I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD. Okay, fine, I was on vacation. I won't do it again.

* It's time to start getting geared up for cross season. Anybody here know anything about Single Speed 'cross racing? I sure don't. Guess it will be an eye opener. I've found one short essay on the topic, here. His hot tip?

If you have a sadistic jungle cross race promoter in your area, he is your friend. Nothing can even the odds in a race more than lots and lots of run ups and single track descents that prevent pedaling. Especially if they start up hill. Especially if people use the word insane to describe the course. Hilly courses that have lots of up-and-down and barriers are also your friend. . . . Rain, mud and unbelievably crappy weather make your job easy. All you need to do is put your head down and churn, and then get off and run when it becomes to hard to churn

Oh, joy. The worse it is, the better I'll do. Great. Just great. What have I gotten myself into? Oh well. Can't be worse than the Wednesday Hill Ride when Butts, Quijano, and Brewer decide to throw down. (Theme song: Ain't No Mountain High Enough.) Guess I'll be praying for cold, wet, muddy, nasty weather.

* Hey, are you as pumped about the Vuelta as I am? I.e., not at all?

*Can I just say, it's evident from the very start of this video, that this little bike ride isn't going to end well?

* That's all I got. Any advice on single speed cross racing, or cross racing generally, leave it in comments or email me.

"We Walk With Dynamite."

[Londres wrote this piece during the 1924 Tour de France. He details the abandonment of the Pelissier brothers, who quit the Tour when organizer DesGranges pursued a vendetta against them. Henri Pelissier had been disqualified in prior stages and years for violating the Tour rules that riders had to finish with everything they started with – he had jettisoned a shirt on one occasion, and on another occasion had left a flat tire by the side of the road after replacing it. (This explains why old pictures of TdF riders *always* show riders with a tire wrapped over their shoulders). Londres piece became famous for the short interview at the end, and for the term, “Prisoners of the Road,” which Londres, a famous prison reform journalist, coined in this essay. The riders reminded him of a chain gang working on the highway, hence the term. Please pardon my sketchy translation of this amazingly interesting essay.]



Prisoners of the Road:
The Abandonment of the Pélissier Brothers
Albert Londres

The brothers Pélissier and their comrade Ville give up
Beeckman gains the third stage
Coutances, France, June 27, 1924.


This morning, we went ahead of the peloton.

We were in Granville and the bells rang six hours. Runners suddenly reveled. At once the crowd, sure of its business, shouted:

“Henri!”

“Francis!”

Henri and Francis, however, were not in the lead group. We waited. The two categories passed, the rear brought up by the dark ones, the last ones. The “dark ones” are the bus drivers of bicycle racing, courageous small urchins, not from the rich house of bicycles with its fat belly; they ride with heart instead.

Neither Henri nor Francis appeared.

The news came: Pélissier gave up. We got into the Renault and, without showing any mercy on the tires, went up to Cherbourg. The Pélissier brothers are well worth a set of tires…

We arrive in Coutances. A company of kids discusses this twist of fate.

“Did you see Pélissier?”

“Even as I touched them,” answers a snot-nosed kid.

“You know where they are?”

“In the café in the Station. Everyone is there.”

Everyone was there! It was necessary to elbow one’s way into the “bar”. This crowd was quiet. Nobody said anything, but all were still, facing the end of the room. Three jerseys were visible in front of three bowls of chocolates. It was Henri [Pelissier], Francis [Pellisier], and the third is Ville, who finished second in Le Havre and Cherbourg.

“A head cold?”

“No,” said Henri. “I am not a dog, that’s all.”

“What happened?”

“It was a question of boots rather than a question of shirts! This morning, in Cherbourg, a police chief approaches me and, without anything to say to me, raises my shirt. He made sure that I did not have two shirts. What would you say, if I raised your jacket to see whether you have a white shirt? I do not like these manners.”

“What could have made him think that you have two shirts?”

“I could have fifteen of them, but I do not have the right to leave with two and to arrive with one.”

“Why?”

“It is the rules. Apparently, one should not only ride like a hobo, but also freeze and sweat like one too. That appears to be part of this sport. When I went to find Desgrange, I asked, ‘Can I not throw away my shirt on the road?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘You cannot throw away houseclothes.’ I told him, ‘It is not houseclothes, it’s my clothing’ and told him that I refused to discuss it further with him in the street. He said that if I didn’t want to talk about it in the street, he was going to go to get some sleep. So I arranged to take off the shirt and pass it in Brest, hand to hand. I would pass it along… and I did pass it along.”

“And your brother?”

“Francis is a true brother, is he not? “

And they are embraced over their chocolate.

Francis made room for me. I joined the group and said: “Come, Francis! Let’s sit and talk.” He said,

“When I fell, it was like fresh butter on a slice of bread, because I hadn’t felt well this morning with a bad stomach, but I was relaxed.”

“And you, City?”

“Me?”, Ville, the rider known as "City" answers, laughing like a good baby, "they found me in distress on the road. I have ‘the knees of the dead’.”

The Pélissier brothers do not have a problem with the legs. They have heads, and in their heads, passed judgment.

Henri said, “You do not have idea of what the Tour de France is like. It is martyrdom. And even the Way of the Cross had only fourteen stations, while we have fifteen stages. We suffer from start to finish. Do you want to see how we walk? Here. Hold this.”

He held out a bag with flasks in it.

“That, it is cocaine for the eyes, that it is chloroform for the gums…”

Emptying his sack, City said “that is pomade, meant to heat my knees. And the pills? Do you want to see the pills? Here. Hold the pills.”

Each one handed me three boxes of pills.

Francis said, “In short, we walk with dynamite.”

Henri began again:

“You did not see us before we bathed upon arrival. When we scrape the mud off, we are white like shrouds, the diarrhea drains us, we shed tears. In the evening, in bed in our rooms, we dance a jig like Saint Guy, instead of sleeping. Look at our laces, they are made of leather. Eh, well. They never hold, they always break, and it is tanned leather that bleeds when wet. Think of what that does to our skin? When we are thrown from the machine, the shock passes through our socks, through our breaches, and nothing protects our bodies.

Francis then said, “the meat falls off our skeletons.”

Henri added, “and as for my nails, I lost six out of ten. They die gradually in each stage.” “But they grow back for the next year,” said Francis.

And, again, the two brothers embraced over the chocolates.

Henri then discoursed.

“Eh well! all that - and you haven’t seen anything yet. Wait for the Pyrenees, it is like ploughing; you couldn’t make a mule do what we do. We are not lazy, but by God, we are annoyed. We accept the torment, but we do not want unnecessary vexations! I am called Pélissier and not Azor!. I ride with a newspaper covering my belly. If I left with it [in the cold] it is necessary that I arrive with [at the end of the stage]. If I throw it, I’m penalized. When we burst with thirst, before filling our can with water from a stream, we must make sure that it is not pumped by somebody else 50 meters up the road before we tighten the lid on our water can. Otherwise: penalty. For drinking, it is necessary to pump one’s own water! One day will come where somebody will mandate lead in our pockets, based on a finding that God made man too light. If the sport continues sliding down this slope, soon there will only be hobos and more artists. This sport is becoming insane at a furious pace.”

“Yes,” said Ville. “Insane, furious!”

A kid approached:

“What do you want, my boy,” asked Henri.

“Mr Pélissier, since you do not want to go any longer, who will win now?”


More on the TdF in that era here.

The New Bike! The New Bike! The New Bike!

I took delivery of the Giant TCR Comp 2 I was telling y'all about the other week. It is a sweet, sweet ride, to say it in brief. Today was the break in ride, 50 miles of rolling terrain in Southern Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Mmmmm... what a nice bike. Some impressions:

- The new Ultegra gruppo - shifters, derailers, rear cog - is pretty much indistinguishable from the Dura Ace gruppo, at least to my ham hands. Click, snick, go.

- The TCR Comp (carbon) frame just eats up road vibration and those square edged bumps that are brutal on an aluminum frame. This makes riding less fatiguing. I spend more time just pedaling, and lest time with a stiff, achy back and increasingly sore shoulders. Even though the geometry is pure road race, the fit is comfortable, and the lack of jarring bumps makes this more comfortable than my old "sport road geometry" road bike.

- The frame is unbelievably compliant over bumps, but unbelievably stiff and efficient when climbing and accellerating. It has a lively feel on the pedals - it jumps when you stomp on the pedals.

- I was trying to go slow today - zone 1 / low zone 2. I averaged 18 MPH in rolling terrain, even though I spent a half hour teetering on the edge of bonk-land. (I got so disoriented, I had to stop and ask for directions two miles from my house... yeah, should have brought the Clif bar...). This is spectacular, about 1.5 MPH faster than my normal speed for a similar low key fun ride over the same time. Can't wait to *try* to go fast.

- I'm running with Velocity Fusion wheels, built up 36 spoke, cross 4, on Ultegra hubs. They aren't light, but shoud be pretty durable and pretty low drag when I'm up to speed, as they are semi-aero. I'll let you know how they hold up over time. I'm saving the Mavic Aksium's for next season, for race wheels.

- The bike carves lines in the turns. It is an absolute stiletto in the corners, and descends like a dream, very agile. It is very nimble and responsive, with a short wheelbase. I wouldn't take my hands off the bars during a fast descent, but it's not squirrelly at all, in spite of its agility.

- Weaknesses? I haven't found any yet. I'm not a good enough rider to take this bike to its limits. It's a better piece of equipment than I am.

- Best of all, It Shore is Purty...

Water Bottles 7: The Vicious Cycle

- I picked up the new Giant TCR Composite 2 today. It's the racy carbon fiber Giant frame (as opposed to the tourist-y OCR frame) with all Ultegra, save the brakes. I didn't get to ride it today but intend to take it out for a flog tomorrow. I'll let you know how the Vicious Cycle handles. For right now, it's in the hallway, basking in my, and Coppi Cat's attention.

- Coppi is maturing nicely. He's a combative yet affectionate cat, never backs down from a fight with the bigger and older cat, and has a gift for napping pretty much anywhere, anytime. I'll post pictures later in the week. I love that damned orange cat.

- During the last week or so on vacation, so-called (so-called because we've been ferrying guests from Olde Blighty around the countryside, and my mom had a heart attack, triple bypass surgery and a hospital stay, necessitating many hospital bedside visits and little riding) I manged to ride the fixed gear bike a bit up around Syracuse. Either I've gotten fatter, or the routes were hilly-er than the ones I used to ride. On the plus side, I can tell that riding hills on a 66 gear inch fixie for a week (think the Arlington climbs like 26th street) will make you stronger. On the downside, they'll also make your knees hurt more. On the upside, you also get quizzical looks from the natives who notice your lack of complicated drive train. I was tempted to pull a Dave Stoller and explain, complete with Italian accent, that my family was poor but had integrity, so even though we could have stolen a nice Campy Chorus gruppo, we spent the welfare check on a single cog and all rode fixed gear. Except the family pervert, who sometimes used a freewheel.

- A fixie has to be the ultimate ride-along road bike. Just sling it on the back of the car, and don't worry about the mud, the hot weather, a little frame rub on the rack, or thieves. (The thief is the guy on the ground 20 feet from your car at the Thruway rest stop, crying, holding his left rib cage with his right hand, the way only a guy with a broken collarbone can do). Oh yeah, don't worry about enjoying any climbs on it, either. You may climb, but you won't enjoy it.

- For the guy who rides the Capitol Crescent Trail in the tiny, tiny jogging shorts, Puma sneakers, an old ten speed, expensive shades and nothing else... Dude! Please! Banana hammocks are for people who live in Rio not for people who ride bikes. I almost yakked. And for God's sake, please, trim the body hair. You look like Sasquatch with better optometric benefits. Not a pleasant sight, especially if one encounters you while riding in the drops.

- Niagra Falls are still spectacular. You can see them a hundred times, maybe a thousand, and never get tired of them. Quite the opposite of this crushed opossum on Waugh Chapel Road, which has been petrifying in the West bound bike lane for over 6 weeks now. I'm quite tired of that, and I've only seen it a dozen or two times. Oh well. At least it smells better than it used to.

- Can't wait for cyclocross season. Isn't that stupid? I've never ridden 'cross before, am a fat 39 year old rookie racer guy, who will be racing on a single speed, 26 pound (and I'm being generous here) Surly Cross Check. Looking forward to this is like looking forward to getting your ass kicked by some guy you owe money to. And if we're going to bet on it, assuming my first C race will be 45 minutes, I think the over/under on me barfing should be 19 minutes. Any takers on either side?

- Snakes on a Plane. To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's ultimatum, "I've 'bout had it, with these mother****in people, talkin' 'bout these mother****in snakes, on a mother****in plane." I love bad movies. I watched Tremors maybe 50 times, and still can't pass by a Tremors marathon weekend on TNT without watching it one, one and a half times, and that's when I'm sober. So I'm the target audience for SOAP. In other words, a slack jawed moron. But the movie has been badly over-hyped. It's going to be bad, I know it, I can't wait to see it... so don't try to make it into something it isn't. I'm willing to pay $10 for a sow's ear, don't try and give me none of that mother****in' silk purse jive, as Samuel L. Jackson might say were he dorky like me.

- Can't wait to ride with my fellow Coppis. I may ride the Hill Ride this week, otherwise it's the Muffin Ride for me. It's been two or three weeks, and I miss my dogs. You're my dogs, dogs!

See You in a Week or Two

I'll be out of the loop for a week or so. So don't bother checking for updates here. Matter of fact, the weather's beautiful. Shouldn't you be out riding?

See you next week.

Water Bottles 6 - All Your Base Are Belong to Us Edition

o How are you, Spambot? All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive. Make your time. Ha ha ha. A recent bit of comment spam indicates I've gotten onto some spambot mailing list. In other words, somebody set up us the bomb. So I've enabled Turing Word check and comment moderation, to make sure the spambots can't get in and bother all us humanoids. But don't worry, I've opened up comments to everybody, not just blogger members, by way of compensation Y'know. For Great Justice.

o Hills. They are the place where hairy legged commuters wearing Team Discovery jerseys and Maillots Jaune go to die, usually right after they pass a fat dude on a fixed gear bike and give him the hairy eyeball. I’m not a very good climber, but if you’re going to pass me and glare like you just accomplished something, and you want to race the hill for pink slips, as I'm sitting there on a flat spinning out on a fixed gear... well, if you do this right before a long hill and throw down the challenge, you’d better make it stick, Fred. Otherwise that bumping noise from my tires... that's your ego I'm riding over. And I'm fat. It will hurt your ego to get run over by me and I will do it repeatedly because I need to practice my bike handling before cross season. I'm a lousy climber - so what does that make you, Fred? I'm not braggin' here, I'm just sayin'. Ps. I liked the involuntary snot thing, Fred. That's authentic suffering. I totally approve of that part of the routine. See you on the commute tomorrow. Tell Elvis I said hello when you see him again.

o It seems that cows have trouble scratching their backs. That's why powerlines running through fields are handy. The poles/towers give cows something to rub on, and to scratch their backs on. I noticed this while riding last weeked. Funny, the things you notice during a long zone 2 ride. Any of you ever notice random crap like that?

o Like snakes. I notice snakes all the time because my usual loops take me through three or four local swamps. A dead snake in the road is just as scary when you come up on it at 22 MPH, as a live snake. You can’t tell if it's alive or dead until you are right on top of it. On the plus side, as long as you aren't trudging uphill, you are probably going fast enough so that the snake can't bite you. On the downside, with your heart beating at 165 BPM, that poison will be in your bloodstream in no time, and you'll have trouble getting help because everybody will think your blood poisoned rambling about "snakebite" had to do with you being upset about a flat tire or something earlier in the ride.

o “I keep a bottle of whiskey handy, just in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.”
- W.C. Fields.

o There are jerks in sports other than cycling. Sometimes, even the fans are jerks. One of today’s lead NFL stories is that the Cincinatti Bengals have started operating a hotline for fans, so that anybody in the stands can drop a dime on another fan who is being a jerk. But what in the hell does "being a jerk" mean in the context of NFL stadium bleachers? “He’s rooting for the Jets, the jerk… I think I’ll call the warden.” "His face is painted, and you know what that means... yeah, that's right. A Jerk." “He booed the home team… time to jack him up, the jerk.” This can’t end well. Besides, given what the Bengals have been up to, with five players arrested in two months, one player arrested four times since New Years, shouldn’t the Bengals have a hotline for fans to report jerk players instead? I’d pay the $4.95 a minute to make that call.

Thus endeth this Special Edition of Water Bottles. All your base are belong to us.

Water Bottles 5

o Congrats to the Coppi Squad for various excellent performances at the RFK Crit, esp. Bill Gros and Chris Regan for a great sprint and a greater leadout, respectively. Congrats to Eric Governo for learning what the great Zen Guru, the Yogi Berra, taught us: It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings.

o I'm talking with some folks at the excellent Racing Union about getting together a mid-September fixed gear poker run / charity pub crawl. The basic plan is to charge minimal cover, launch it from somewhere in downtown D.C., ride to 5 pubs/restaurants in D.C. and North Arlington, and have a good time raising money for charity. On a poker run, you draw a card at each stop then at the end you compare hands, best poker hand wins. We're still finalizing details. If you're interested, let me know in comments. We'll probably shotgun an announcement to the D-20 list, once we get things firmed up. We may allow geared bikes... at a cost.

o Floyd Landis is upset. He says that the World Anti-Doping Agency has an agenda. Unfortunately for Floyd, the agenda involves ridding sports of cheaters who use performance-enhancing drugs.

o The Giant TCR2 Composite is supposed to get here Wednesday or Thursday. I can't wait. I think I'm going to christen it the "Vicious Cycle." Seems to fit the times, and my riding style.

You Think You Got it Bad...

This guy rode the Wilderness 101, a 100+mile MTB endurance race on basically zero training, single speed. Highlight: "I found out you can stagger on the bike... I got on the bike and crept off (yeah, I found out you can do that on a bike too)."

Water Bottles 4

0 Ever heard of a dance called "The Dirty Bird?" My understanding is, this is how you do it. Carrion not included.

0 Test rode my buddy Jonathan's personal Giant TCR2 Composite Team Issue, a Healthnet Replica. Man, that thing is nice. I thought my rock steady aluminum frame was nice, but this all carbon piece of art positively jumps when you pedal. It's also got a lot of room in the cockpit, in spite of being the same size frame as my old OCR. We'll see how it is on the Muffin Ride tomorrow. I think I'll be buying one, if it keeps performing the same way. The sensation of riding it is just sublime.

0 Dura Ace brakes. Is it just me, or do they rip more faces off than Freddy and Jason combined?

0 Yeah, Dura Ace brakes are da bomb. But you want to see a real pair of bicycle brakes? Check these out:

How bad@55 are these M5 brakes? So bad@55 that Excel Sports warns prospective purchasers: "The M5 brakes are all power so choose them for the strongest brakes on the market, but take a pass if you are more interested in modulation." So let's see. I try the Dura Ace brakes for the first time tonight, and nearly go over the bars. And these M5 thingys are not only just 30% of the weight of Dura Ace brakes, but their power is... well... "take a pass."

In other words... OUT OF THE POOL WEAKLING BRAKE CALIPERS! IT'S THE 15 MINUTE ADULT SWIM!


0 And while I'm posting bike brake porn, might as well show the beloved Zero Gravity Brake Calipers, h/c Colorado Cyclist.



Those M5 brakes - they are the Seven of Nine* of the road bike caliper world. The Zero Gravity brakes - they are the Eva Longoria. You can't go wrong either way.


*The Jeri Ryan character on Star Trek Enterprise who played Borg Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One.

Requiem for an Old Friend

After the Hell of the North (Arlington) ride this morning, aka the Weekly Great Coppi Hill Rep Massacre, I noticed a crack in the top tube on my Giant OCR. After my epic 30+ MPH crash at the Baker Park Crit, there had been a slight crease in the joint between the seat tube and the top tube. The crease was on one side. Now it has spread, and is growing longer, and deeper. There are parallel cracks on both sides, probably the result of hard climbing, or hard descending this morning.

I am deeply bummed about this. I can't say that I owe my life to this bike. An inanimate object never saves one's life. One saves one's own self, and the objects are the mere instrumentalities by which one exerts willpower, to shape reality. (Deep, dude. Deep. Now pass the Dutchy...) But we develop a certain fondness for things that served as vessels of our will, which helped us achieve major goals and accomplish surprising things.

Sometimes we kid ourselves and say "that bike saved my life," things like that. I believe we do so because the notion of controlling our own destiny is scary, and if we were to emphasize the fact that most things that happen to us in life are causally related to our own actions, for better or for worse, the constant drumbeat of responsibility and accountability might be too much to bear. So we kid ourselves, and blame our failure on a faulty derailer, on gravel in the corner, on a client that is impossible. We also tend to blame our success on things too. In one way, this is foolishness. "Man, that new Dura Ace group helped me win the race." We love to take credit for our own success, but at the same time doing so ernestly brings with it the corollary that if we cause our own success, that we probably cause our own failure too. So most of the righteous pride we should feel, often gets turned into empty bragadoccio, which we know others won't take too seriously. This allows us to take some credit, but at the same time to not be taken too seriously as the architects of our own success. In turn, this avoids the possibility, the unbearable conclusion, that we might later be blamed for being the architect of our own failure.

In this way, material things, like bikes, aren't just vessels of our will. A good material thing is a crutch, something that helps us avoid having to deal with some of the ugliest truths in life, one of the ugliest being that we ourselves are usually to blame both for our success and our failure.

This brings to mind something that Mike Magnuson said in the excellent bike book, Heft on Wheels. He noted that a bicycle is just something that carries a weight.

Think about that. It carries weight in the literal sense. But it also carries a lot of weight that we aren't comfortable carrying. It does so gracefully and quickly. And maybe that's how we can come to love bikes as a friend. If we let them, they will help us. My bike helped me lose 65 pounds or so. It helped turn me into a racer. It's so amazing - other folks in my office describe me to strangers as "our lawyer who is a bike racer." That's a nice identity that I thought I'd never have. Non-racers call me "thin" - though I'm really nowhere near thin. My blood pressure is way down, my resting heartrate is around 51. I'm buying new pants. The bike has also helped me make friends, to see really beautiful sights near my house I'd have missed in a car, and it has given my personal life, my interior life, a lot of direction it had lacked for a few years. Did the bike do all this? No, of course not. But I can only stop and admit that the changes in my life are my own responsibility (and therefore the foulups are my problem too) every so often. Nobody wants to go around carrying that kind of responsibility for themselves at all times; it would be hard to just live and have fun.

The bike, my Giant, carried that load for me for over a year. It carried a weight. It saved my life.

Anyhow, here's an artist's rendition of the scene this morning when I discovered my bike is fatallly wounded:


So where to go from here? I'm thinking in the short term I may spring for a new Giant, a TCR Composite, all carbon and nifty bits, mostly Ultegra. I will look at the tier that has the Ksyrium wheelset, because they are cheaper if you get them with a bike package than buying them along for $600. Over the winter, I'm going to get a nice Flyte, probably the SRS 2, an aluminum frame with carbon chain and seat stays; or the all aluminum SRS 3. They are good quality inexpensive bikes to begin with, and if you are a public sector employee or in the military, you can get a *huge* discount on them through Leonidas Adventures. Joe R. with whom I race, absolutely loves his, and they also sell frame insurance to replace your frame if you wreck it, which is a certainty if you race enough crits. The new Giant will become my road racing and nice weather training and century bike, the Flyte - a beautiful but much cheaper ride, will become my criterium and bad weather training bike, because I can afford to wreck a $350 frame every season, but not a $1500 frame. Here's what the Giant I'm eyeballing looks like:


Finally, here's an artist's impression of how I looked, when I realized what this new bike was going to cost me:


Okay, so it's not going to be that bad at all. In fact, the Giant has an amazing bang-for-the-buck quotient. And my man Jonathan at Family Bikes is going to hook me up on the deal - end of season is a great time to order a bike. But still, it's a lot of money, and I have to be honest, this bike has some big shoes to fill.

Okay, that's being more than honest, that's being a Metaphor Butcher. But you know what I mean. I'm going to miss the old OCR, and I'm hoping this TCR is as spectacular as they say.