random cycling thread

Gorgeous weather here.. temp in the 60s-70s, low humidity, a slight breeze, nearly perfect for cycling.

I went out with my cycling bud Jay this morning for a little more than 37 miles, average speed of 15.6 mph, which would make me a Class S (signifying Slooooow!) cyclist if cyclists as slow as I am were rated. A moderately flat course, some hills, but I was pleasantly surprised that I mostly kept up with Jay on the hills.. I'm an awful hill climber.. overweight, under-oxygenated, under-powered, and, well.. did I mention 'slow'?

Admittedly, he is having sinus problems and operating at maybe 75%, but Ah takes mah victories where I can find them.

I've never asked, but I'm guessing that Jay rides between 5K and 10K miles each year.. I'm stuck at the low end of the scale, more like 2K to 3.5K.. just too difficult to find an opportunity to get away from the desk most days. For a while I commuted to work by bike .. 18.5 miles one-way. I was faster then. [stage direction: dryly] But that's roughly 70 min, plus half an hour setup and half an hour cleanup - each way! I could have sustained that only by making cycling the center of my life. Amazingly, some of the cyclists I paired up with along the way had one-way commutes of 25 miles.

Jay rides a whizzy Ultra-Super-Fast Ultra-Light-Weight Swoosh Silver Charger road bike costing probably $500K and change. I think it weighs about 3 oz. He has to tie weights to it when he dismounts so that it doesn't float off into the sky. I ride an enriched uranium Slug, something like 500 pounds without me on it, probably 800 on a good day when I'm loaded. Hmm, that didn't come out quite right. I meant "when bike and I are fully equipped". (Well, OK, so I'm not being entirely serious here.)

(Update: sorry, obviously I meant depleted uranium. I do not have a nuclear power plant in my scrap pile.)

Yesterday I rode solo, a fairly hilly course, 35 miles, and racked up an average of 14.4 mph with a peak speed of 39.5 mph. Rather slower than usual (the average, I mean), but: hilly, and if you don't get miles in on a regular basis, you lose conditioning quickly. C'est moi. For the first time in recent memory, I didn't push it, just rode to keep below lactate threshold. Very pleasant.

I generally ride with cyclists stronger than I am, which is a Good Thing for all concerned. Me, because I get to draft and delude myself that I'm keeping up; them, because every now and again they need a slow day. uh, and because someone has to be slowest. Being without shame, I'm happy to be that someone, and of course each of them is happy for that person to be me, or more precisely: not them. (Not to put too fine a point on it, I have little choice about the matter..) And riding with a group, or even with one other rider, is a lot more fun than riding solo.

Safer too.. I can't speak for serious cyclists, but I find it all too easy to drift off into an almost hypnotic daze. This morning Jay almost rode thru a red light into an active intersection.. I saw that he wasn't slowing for the light and yelled, and he pulled up short just as cars went through the intersection. We've been through that intersection together a dozen times if we've been through it once. I did something similar riding solo a couple of years ago.. spinning down a long downhill grade, for some reason had it in my head that there was one light towards the bottom of the grade, not two.. and went right through the first (red) light without even noticing until I was in the intersection.

I see that FDL is encouraging bike commuting to work. I tried to register to comment, but none of firefox, ie7, and safari would display the captcha. I assumed it was an FDL problem - I've never had a problem with captchas before, and stuff that breaks all three browsers is usually (in my experience) a server problem.. but then it occurred to me that what must be happening is that the captcha is coming from a different server than the web page - in at least some versions of firefox, you can disallow images that come from other than the web page server.

I didn't remember setting that preference in ff, much less in ie or safari, but..

and damn.. now that I look at it, it appears that I didn't set that preference.

Instead it looks to be the case that my whizzy iptables firewall is blocking outgoing port 80 accesses to the captcha server. Or to something, but the ipaddr that's being denied is a google ipaddr, which shouldn't be happening AFAIK. grrrr.

Very surprising. Outgoing port 80 accesses shouldn't be disallowed unless there's a rule specifying that ipaddr. [stage direction: sighs] Stay tuned for Another Exciting Adventure with Linux. [stage directions: cue music from Twilight Zone]

goddam PCs.. can't work with 'em, can't work without 'em. [disgustedly] As the saying goes, "to err is human, but if you want to screw things up really bad, get a computer."

(Update: Well, it wasn't my firewall. I'm not sure yet whether the problem was linux-firefox or firefox or what. More about that later.)

(Yet Later Update: Never mind. [stage direction: looks at ceiling, whistles tunelessly] It was the FDL server.)

In the meantime, this is amusing:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rAOHhV1EFe4

I think it's funny, anyway.

uh, and speaking of safety, some overly testosteroned driver cut a zippy right turn into his driveway a few feet in front of me this morning. Had he cut it a second closer, I'd have been embedded in the side of his car. The vid notwithstanding, it's not always the cyclist who causes problems. A friend of a friend went thru several rounds of dental & facial surgery after a car turned right in front of her some years back. I don't know the details, but understand that his insurance paid her med bills.. but she had the surgery.

Every cyclist has a story. Mine is the soccer mom who cut in front of me as I was struggling up a really steep hill. Not close enough that I ran into her, but think about it: what happens when you're going uphill and you have to come to an abrupt halt.. talk about a clown show..