Month: February 2010

Winter Games

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
A bit of pink tinges Pikes Peak just past sunup.
A bit of pink tinges Pikes Peak just past sunup.

Another blisteringly cold day. Yesterday neither Herself nor I left the house. But today she bundled up and toddled off to work. I spent the morning processing pixels, then slipped out for a short run around noon after things warmed up a bit.

I probably should’ve ridden — after all, I’m not going to be running around southern Arizona next month — but I like to run, and besides it can’t hurt to mix things up a bit. Yesterday my legs felt like giant sausages full of botulism after three consecutive days of riding hills in the cold, and spending all Sunday sitting at the iMac, posting copy and photos to VeloNews.com, didn’t exactly meet my admittedly loose definition of “active rest.”

Speaking of high technology, we’ve finally debugged our Rube Goldberg TV hookup (streaming video via laptop, Blu-ray player, rabbit ears) and have been watching bits of the Winter Olympics. My God, how does anyone get through an evening of American television without the skull exploding like a Pfalzgraff piggy bank zotzed by a .40-caliber hollow-point? The drug ads provide some amusing irony, and there’s no denying the improved sports coverage possible with digital video, but still, damn.

It’s not enough that an athlete kicks ass. No, he or she has to have a touching backstory: grew up living in the trunk of a Chevy Caprice in the Appalachian hills; has a one-eyed half-brother with the yaws and 13 toes: plays the uilleann pipes professionally when not doing something insane involving ice and/or snow.

Speaking of which, it’s gonna be cold again tomorrow. Tonight’s low should bottom out around 11, and NOAA says we’re looking at a high in the mid-30s tomorrow. But a man must ride, and so I’ll be out there, me and my three long-sleeved jerseys, the neoprene leg warmers and pretty much everything else in the kit kloset.

And maybe — just maybe — with my just-completed Nobilette cyclo-cross bike, too. Stand by for fresh bike porn.

Head for the hills

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
Your roving reporter captures a shot of a socialist deer dining for free upon a taxpayer's shrubbery.
Your roving reporter captures a shot of a socialist deer dining for free upon a taxpayer's shrubbery.

It hasn’t exactly been cycling weather around Bibleburg of late — nevertheless, I sucked it up yesterday, pulled on about half the clothes in my closet and got out for two and a half hours of hills.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Despite sitting in the shadow of Pikes Peak, the road riding around Bibleburg is less than stellar, and the one long, sustained paved climb into the high country — Highway 24 west — is just plain dangerous, going up and coming down.

So a guy has to improvise. Though I was going to be mostly on pavement, I broke out my red Steelman Eurocross (fatter rubber, lower gearing) and rode west through a moderately gooey Monument Valley Park to Mesa Road, then started climbing.

Mesa is a nice warmup, a steady-state ascent that dumps you out on North 30th Street by the Garden of the Gods. From there I hung a right on Garden of the Gods Road and descended to Centennial Boulevard for another short climb to Fillmore Street, then hung a right and returned to Mesa.

I was thinking about doing laps of this short circuit to minimize my exposure to a nasty south wind, then said screw it and headed north on 30th to Flying W Ranch Road (hey, if you have a tailwind, why not take advantage of it?). Flying W is a steeper climb than Mesa, and a short 40-mph descent dumps you out at Centennial and Vindicator Drive for the pièce de résistance, the ascent of Centennial Boulevard/West Woodmen Road.

Centennial-Woodmen is steeper than any of its predecessors and something of a challenge for the average fat bastard. It’s one of those pain-in-the-ass climbs that flattens out every now and then, even throws in a couple of short descents, just to fuck with your head. It’s why I rode the Steelman with its low gear of 34×28.

Anyway, I made it up without throwing a rod or blowing a seal, and on the way down the other side I saw this pretty little buck with a couple of his cousins, so I stopped to take a snap with the iPhone. It reminded me of living outside Weirdcliffe, where we always had a few mule deer camping out under our deck. We used to say that they were so dumb you could hunt them with a Twinkie and a ball-peen hammer.

But we never saw one stupid enough to be riding a ’cross bike on the roads in the dead of winter.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Bathtub

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Bibleburg has become a laboratory for neotard Grover Frankenquist’s dream experiment — shrinking government to the point where it can be drowned in a Hilton bathtub by a skinny chickenhawk — and wouldn’t you know it? That darned left-wing commniss media has done took notice.

Naturally, the story in the local cage-liner is about the darned left-wing commniss media taking notice rather than the appalling state of the local body politic, which seems to think that one digs potatoes from gravy and that God will water the parks, if He’s not too dehydrated from pissing on the fags.

This dim viewpoint may have its roots in our economic base, an unholy trinity of the industrial Christian, military and tourism complexes. As another Gaslight story notes, while we enjoy a low cost of living — 7.7 percent below the national average in 2009 — we also make shit for wages, a realization that first drove me out of town in the late Seventies:

“Colorado Springs may seem like a bargain area in which to live, but we are no better off living here because our average wages are 8 to 10 percent below the national average,” said Fred Crowley, senior economist for the Southern Colorado Economic Forum. “There is no prize for this race to the bottom.”

Aw, c’mon, Fred — haven’t you ever heard of the lanterne rouge?

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
It's not as cold as it looks. It's colder.
It's not as cold as it looks. It's colder.

Feh. Again with the cold and snow. What is this, February in Colorado?

This is soup weather, for sure, and we’ve been through quite a few of my favorite recipes lately, among them a posole from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook and a Spanish vegetable soup from Martha Rose Shulman, who runs the “Recipes for Health” shop over at The New York Times. We’ve had her vegetable soup for dinner the past two nights and it’s definitely a keeper. A guy could beef it up some with the addition of dead-animal parts, maybe some moderately spicy sausage links sliced into half-inch rounds and sauteéd in olive oil, but it’s fine as is.

Here’s another posole from the Santa Fe folks. I haven’t tried this one before, but it’s early yet and all I need is the chicken thighs. Looks like a visit to the Whole Paycheck is in order. Oboy, my favorite, an icy slide to the corner of Collision and Contusion so I can transfer a century note from my pocket to John Mackey’s.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether I should go for a mountain bike ride — I still have a few fingers yet to dislocate — or choose the better part of valor and ride the trainer. Maybe I’ll split the difference and go for a run.

A super Sunday indeed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

In honor of Super Sunday, I decided to get my inner Belgian on.

It had been snowing feebly all day — zero accumulation, just cold, wet, gray and dreary. I thought briefly about riding the trainer, but after watching today’s Superprestige cyclo-cross online, indoor cycling seemed sissified.

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for cyclo-cross, either, though. ’Cross means filth, and Herself is opposed to same, having logged many hours this weekend doing loads of laundry without end and putting a sparkling shine on the palatial manse. If I were to prance in from the cold sporting a thick coat of goo like a retarded Irish setter, she’d blow me back into it with my own .357.

Thus the flat-bar Voodoo with fenders seemed just the thing. I pulled on wool socks, neoprene leg warmers and bibs, two long-sleeved polypro undershirts, one long-sleeved jersey and a winter jacket, tugged neoprene booties over the Sidis, donned tuque, balaclava, cycling cap and helmet, slipped on the winter gloves and rode off into a brisk north wind.

I had to take five under a bridge to loosen the helmet straps, ’cause the ol’ chrome dome was so heavily swaddled it felt like my lid was screwed down a few turns too tight. Then I gnawed on the wind and snow for about a half hour until I got good and cold and turned around to enjoy a bit of tailwind.

The comparative warmth almost lulled me into a false sense of my own sturdiness. “Hell, I suppose I could stay out a couple hours, log a few more miles,” I thought. And then the wind shifted a bit, firing a warning shot of sleet across my bow. Nope.

So home I went, and quickly too, thinking of hot toddies brimming with Bushmills and humming a bit of Irish doggerel:

Musha rig um du rum da, / Whack fol the daddy O,

Whack fol the daddy O, / There’s whiskey in the jar.

Hey, we can’t all be Belgians.