Riding the storm out

January 10, 2026January 10, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

Purple Haze, all in my brain … lately things just don’t seem the same. …

Ridin’ the storm out, waitin’ for the thaw-out
On a full-moon night in the Rocky Mountain winter
My wine bottle’s low, watching for the snow
I’ve been thinking lately of what I’m missing in the city — Gary Richrath, REO Speedwagon

Rolling out of bed this morning after dreaming of bicycles I fell right into the old spin cycle, rolling down Memory Lane.

While inhaling my first cuppa I browsed over to Rivendell where Grant Petersen was musing about a well-used Centurion Accordo he saw recently, parked at a BART station. He made it for a 1985 model, priced in the low-$300s, which set me to recalling my own Centurion, the bike that put me back in the game in 1984.

Mine was a $320 Le Mans 12, red and silver, at 60cm just a skosh too tall for me. Didn’t care. I was an old Schwinn guy trying to quit smoking cigarettes and snorting cocaine, dial back my gargling of the tonsil polish, and in the process maybe shed a few elbees. I weighed 184 at the time, and sometimes — depending upon how many bumps and beers I’d had the night(s) before — it felt more like kilos than pounds.

I was already swimming laps in the overwarm pool at the Pueblo YMCA, and lifting weights. But the scenery never changes in the pool or the gym. So getting back on the bike seemed just the ticket.

And it was! It just took more than one bike, and more than a few years.

• • •

Moving on from Centurions (and their resemblance to his own A. Homer Hilsens) Grant went on to extol the virtues of SunTour components, in particular the Cyclone group, which did battle with the more expensive Shimano 600 group. He writes:

Shimano’s derailers were fine, too, but [in terms of] purely beauty and strength and value, nothing could beat SunTour’s Cyclone derailers. SunTour’s Cyclone went head to head against Shimano 600 (later, Ultegra) and I remember Bridgestone engineers explaining to me in great detail how much better it was … metallurgically, polish, design, and value (it sold for about 20 percent less than Shimano 600). That was SunTour’s strategy to fight Shimano’s better indexing, but partly because the Cyclone stuff was cheaper, people thought it was worse.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? My next bike, a 1985 Trek 560, was equipped with SunTour New Cyclone-S, and I certainly didn’t think it was worse than whatever was on that old Centurion. Sleek and smooth, or so it seemed to me. As for the frameset, its main triangle was double-butted Reynolds 501, the stays True Temper cro-mo, and the fork Tange Mangalloy CCL. This was the bike that got me riding centuries and, eventually, racing.

Racing was good. I wasn’t, but trying to be helped me keep my nose clean (har de har har). And instead of pissing away money on expensive and illegal drugs, I pissed it away on equally expensive but completely legal bicycles and related gear, apparel, and aftermarket “upgrades.”

Like everyone else I left steel, SunTour, and friction shifting behind for aluminum, carbon, and Shimano STI. The old Trek was demoted to a bad-weather/wind-trainer bike, and eventually went away altogether, drifting off the back as technology drove relentlessly forward, Your Humble Narrator clinging to the wheel.

But the Great Wheel also spins, and I eventually found my way back to the idea of that bike.

• • •

We got a bit of winter this week that kept me off the saddle and in something of a mood. Trying to fill the frosty void I spent a little time swapping handlebars on my red Steelman Eurocross. I’d been muttering about getting rid of its deep-drop, long-reach Deda 215 road bar for a while, and with an assist from Old Man Winter I finally got ’er done, swapping it out for a Soma Hwy One bar just like the one on my other Eurocross.

Big Red with its new bar (Cinelli cork bar tape not included).

The red Steelman, like my old Trek, is a blend of Reynolds and True Temper. No classy SunTour jewelry, alas; just clunky, scuffed Shimano ST-R500 Flight Deck brifters running Shimano 600/Ultegra derailleurs and Spooky cantis. I thought, briefly, about going to bar-end shifters, maybe nine-speed; new cassette with more teefers on the fat side, new rear derailleur, new chain, new brake levers and … and maybe not.

Frankly, it felt just a little bit too much like work. Skill set and personal preference dictate that I ride these things rather than wrench on them. Maybe some other time, on some other bleakly cold snow day.

And I couldn’t have gone back to downtube shifters even if I wanted to. There’s a set in the garage, awaiting the callup, but the Eurocross routes its cables along the top tube. No shifter bosses on the downtube. Maybe some bridges are better off burned.

Great minds

December 30, 2025December 30, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Rooting around the Innertubes for some New Year’s recipes I was congratulating myself on picking a couple of winners, both from The New York Times Cooking section, which by itself is worth the price of a subscription.

One was a simple Hoppin’ John recipe from Bill Neal of Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C., as adapted by Craig Claiborne in 1985. The other was a jalapeño cheddar cornbread from Melissa Clark, the franchise player on my pro cooking squad.

But when I crowed about this to Herself I found she’d beaten me to the punch. She’d already found her own recipe and acquired the ingredients for it, too.

Good thing I shot off my big bazoo before heading for the grocery. We’d have been eating Hoppin’ John and cornbread from New Year’s right through St. Patrick’s Day.

Meanwhile, I had to quickly re-establish my primacy as tenzo of this zendo. Facing an economy of scarcity — a lack of fresh red grapes, which I dice up for the morning oatmeal — I displayed my resourcefulness in the kitchen, or “skillful means,” as defined by the late poet-gourmand and Zen student Jim Harrison, by locating a wrinkled honeycrisp apple in the crisper and chopping that up instead. In your face! as the sage Dogen has taught us.

Jimbo hated oatmeal. But he’s dead and didn’t have to eat any of it.

Garbage miles

December 11, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

The ever-readable Mike Ferrentino has a meditation on “garbage miles” in his “Beggars Would Ride” column over at NSMB.com.

No spoilers. Pop over and have a squint. I will say only that his thoughts on the topic have evolved over the decades, because he is mos def one of the higher primates.

This photo was taken three days before my 36th birthday. I was single, I had a job, and yes, that is a ponytail you see peeking out of the back of my helmet.
*Photo by Larry Beckner | The New Mexican*

I first encountered the concept of garbage miles back in the Eighties, while racing bikes out of Fanta Se. Logging a ton of miles I was, and getting ruthlessly flogged on race day by people doing half my weekly average, or less.

“The fuck?” I inquired.

“Too many junk miles,” they replied.

Junk miles, garbage miles, all samey same. Unfocused and thus unworthy. Or so they said, the rotten, podium-hogging sonsabitches.

But not me. Because whenever I was in the saddle spinning I was not parked at the The New Mexican‘s copy desk, where I had to log many junk miles indeed to underwrite my cycling habit. Many, many of them.

At least the bike miles, like crucifixion, got me out in the open air.

Once we moved to Bibleburg in fall 1991 I kept it up. The Sept. 15 entry in my training journal after a 157.5-mile week was: “A few respectable miles. Nice to not work — nothing like a job for fucking up your training.”

The fabled 115 ride from B-burg to Penrose and back, circa 1995 or thereabouts.

“Training,” he calls it. This is the hee, and also the haw. Oh, I was riding on road and off, first with Rainbow Racing, then later with the Mad Dogs. And I was running regularly, even doing a little inline skating and snowshoeing because I was freelancing pieces to a sports-and-fitness outfit in Boulder between my chores for VeloNews (see, I was actually trying to work and earn, kinda, sorta).

But at my first few Colorado cyclocrosses I was either OTB or DFL, eventually settling into a fairly reliable fourth-place kind of fella, out of the money yet very much in the way. Seventh of 11 finishers at the state championships at Chatfield State Park that year, after which I called it a season.

Too many junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.

Oh, I got better. Or maybe they got worse, as one of the fast guys mused in my presence after I finally managed to finish a race in front of him. In any case, by the mid-Nineties I could podium at a ’cross every now and then, even win, rarely, if the weather got truly evil and the fast guys stayed home.

This could’ve been because I actually trained for cyclocross, which by this time was the only cycling discipline I really cared about.

I worked on technique, ran a ton to counter my lack of snap in the saddle, and even built my own course at altitude (at the base of our 43-acre plot at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe in CrustyTucky).

During the seven years we lived there I rode a ’cross bike just about everywhere, because pavement was miles away and when I finally got to it I didn’t want to be herding the old mountain bike with its 26-inch knobbies and boingy fork. Though I missed its 24-tooth granny ring while cursing my way up the long dirt mile back to the house, 430 feet up from the washboarded county road.

Not a lot of junk miles in CrustyTucky.

In those years I logged my junk miles behind the wheel of a Toyota pickup, with my bikes in the bed. Our Mad Dog cyclocrosses were in B-burg, a 150-mile round trip from home base. The bulk of the state race series meant an even longer slog up the Front Strange, to Littleton, Denver, Franktown, Boulder, Mead, and Fort Collins. The weather was frequently wintry, masters were always first to race, and more than once to make the start I had to hit town the day before, overnighting in some low-rent motel.

Talk about your junk miles.

After a few years of that my training logs crumbled into random entries followed by none at all. It was starting to feel a whole lot like work — which was also suffering in part because the cycling community in CrustyTucky consisted of me, myself and I. It felt like being sentenced to Stationary Trainer Without Parole. I was taking all the pulls and yet going nowhere. In terms of fiscal and mental health it seemed prudent to seek out a few voices that weren’t coming from inside my head.

Dennis the Menace and Dr. Schenkenstein take the long view atop Bear Creek East, a once-active cyclo-cross venue.

In those first years back in Bibleburg I had a good crew. Quite a few of the Mad Dogs owned the clocks we punched and could rearrange at least one business day a week to log junk miles and devise solutions to the various crises facing the world (you’re welcome). Big Bill “Shut Up and Ride” McBeef and his bro Other Bill. Usuk and The Geek. Dr. Schenkstein and Dennis the Menace. The Old Town Bike Shop crew. And the rest of you lot; you know who you are. So in 2002 we went back there.

Took me right back to my riding roots it did. I no longer felt as though everything was uphill and into the wind in all directions. A couple years later I quit racing because I didn’t need it anymore. I had my junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.

Some dogs just gotta tip over that trash can.

Fall back

November 1, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Halloween 2025 is dead and buried, but the boogeymen remain very much among us.

And now it’s time — well, nearly so, anyway — to fall back.

This is fine, for as far as it goes, which is not very. It’s 8:45 a.m. as I write this, the temperature is a brisk 42°, and the sun has yet to pop round from behind the Sandias. So tomorrow, once Daylight Saving Time ends, it will be 7:45 a.m. and I’ll have an extra hour to dither over whether I’ll need arm and knee warmers for the day’s ride or can just let it all hang out.

Well, not all, as in everything. One must consider the neighbors. Also, the police.

In any event, getting back one measly hour isn’t going to cut it. Not this year. I want to go all the way back to Nov. 5, 2024, this time to see a different result in that year’s pestilential erection, with the Republican candidate headed for the Big House instead of the White House.

Perhaps the day of reckoning would only be postponed, not eliminated. So be it. All I know for sure is that this timeline ain’t working for me. And I’m not alone. Hell, I’ll bet a bicycle or two that a critical number of people who actually voted for this mess would like to have a do-over, and pronto.

Where’s H.G. Wells when we need him? Lost in the dim mists of Time, more’s the pity.

He I know — for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.

One bodhisattva for Katmandu, please

October 28, 2025October 28, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

The body may be at rest, but the mind wanders as it will.

Two songs have been getting heavy play on my cranial jukebox: “Katmandu,” by Bob Seger, and “Bodhisattva,” from Steely Dan.

The first, from 1975, ostensibly about salvation via relocation, is actually what Seger described as “an exasperated song” written near the end of a decade-long stretch “where I was going nowhere fast. … I still had some of that defeatist mentality and you can hear it in there.”

The second is a 1973 critique of cookie-cutter spiritualism and its related divestiture of worldly goods that co-writer Donald Fagen once summarized as: “Lure of East. Hubris of hippies. Quick fix.”

Thomas McGuane was scouting that territory even earlier, in his 1971 novel “The Bushwhacked Piano,” in which the peripatetic Nick Payne’s father tells his wayward son: “I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. … My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure.”

That these musical and literary ingredients are suddenly bubbling to the top of my consciousness, such as it is, may be a consequence of having just finished McGuane’s latest story collection, “A Wooded Shore,” in which a selection of the damned find themselves adrift in various fashions and locations, Dante’s Sea of Excrement being among the hot spots. “I’m a realist, you see,” says that particular voyager.

“Sure rings a bell these days,” as McGuane told The New York Times. On the mark as usual, Tommy me boyo.

Or perhaps it’s that I’m rocking a streak of vivid dreams about bicycling in outlandish circumstances, perhaps as a reaction to getting myself locked into a small selection of predictable 20-milers, your basic hamster-wheel loops, for no good reason that I can think of beyond sloth and convenience. An assist from Rand McNally is not required for this sort of tour de meh. Trying to break the chain I recently took two rarely ridden bikes on short outings, one of them involving a few miles of singletrack I hadn’t ridden since January. I dabbed frequently and shamelessly.

I suppose it could just be that fall is upon us, and with it our local elections and the fabled “fall back,” slated for Sunday, Nov. 2. Oh, good, an extra hour of nightmares.

When swimming the Sea of Excrement, I recommend the backstroke.