Mind the ruts

September 5, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Is it all downhill from here? Yes and no. …

Things have been a little “Groundhog Day”-ish around here lately. On a loop, dully predictable, like customer-service hold music or the hourly news.

Thinking I might derive some mental-health benefits from taking a little road trip somewhere, I had the Subaru serviced. But then it struck me that I couldn’t think of anyplace a reasonable drive away in a 20-year-old car that would be a step up from where I already was.

Anyway, long stretches of the calendar had already been spoken for. A plumber was to diagnose and treat a leaky toilet. Herself blocked off a five-day visit to Aspen. Labor Day reared its capitalist head.

And finally, in-laws were inbound — Herself’s two sisters, the only survivors of a much larger expedition that, like Your Humble Narrator, just couldn’t seem to get buckled up and backed out of the garage.

Thus, lacking opportunity and inspiration, I’ve been trying to shake some of the dust off my local cycling routine, which over the long, hot summer took a two-wheel drift into a 20-mile rut.

It went like this: Get up early, have coffee, then some more coffee with toast, then a serious breakfast, and finally dash out for a 20-mile romp through the foothills before Tonatiuh started cooking.

This is fine, as far as it goes, which is not very; about 20 miles per sitting, according to my cyclometer(s). But after a while this sort of repetition devolves from joy into work. Exercise. Basically, gym class, which I always hated.

No wonder people get fat. Bor-ing.

So lately, with Tonatiuh having stepped away from the stove for a spell, I’ve been trying to mix it up a bit.

Last Saturday I joined a few other riders for a bit of paceline practice, zooming down Tramway to the North Valley and then drilling it out to Bernalillo and back. All told it was good for about twice my usual mileage.

On Tuesday I cranked out a solo 42-miler, likewise down in the valley, but this time south on the Paseo del Bosque trail to just past Interstate 40 and back. I hadn’t ridden the bosque since March; half a year later the trees are starting to show hints of fall color, so I need to get back down there soon.

Yesterday I grabbed a Steelman Eurocross and did a quick hour on the trails in the Elena Gallegos Open Space. Hadn’t done that since mid-August.

Grunting up a few steepish rocky pitches reminded me that I needed to replace the bike’s chainrings, chain, and cassette. Not just from wear and tear, though there’s plenty of that, but mostly due to the mileage on its 1954 engine. Down with the 48/36T chainrings, up with the 46/34T! And the cassette will get four extra teeth at the fat end. Death to the 36x28T — long live the 34x32T!

Today various crucial segments of Your Humble Narrator were complaining bitterly about working conditions and threatening to go on strike, so I decided to take a lazy jog along our shortest foothills loop as a change of pace.

I’d been neglecting my ground-pounding, and thought I’d top it off with a little light weightlifting, likewise neglected. Must preserve the muscle mass, if only for speed-scrolling past news items like “Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice.”

What? Hit the back button. Doritos? See-through mice? Holy hell.

Is this for real? A lactic-acid flashback? Or maybe the WaPo’s A.I. just filed the serial numbers off an abandoned Monty Python script to make the Limey boss-fella blow his breakfast gin out his snout.

Whatever. I think I just got a great idea for a Halloween costume.

Definitely challenged, but no record

August 28, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

With any luck at all the unseemly heat has broken. For the moment, anyway.

Come morning we don’t have to worry that the air conditioning will click on if we throw the doors and windows open to admit a listless 80° breeze that frankly falls miles short of refreshing. But 68°? That’s more like it.

Now and then we’ve gotten a soupçon of rain overnight. Better and better.

As a consequence the cycling has been excellent. It’ll be a while before we have to start thinking about arm and knee warmers, but the other day I packed a jacket and rode a bike with fenders just to ensure that there would be no rain while I was out and about.

Your Humble Narrator, failing to distinguish himself in a time trial at Alamosa sometime in the Nineties. *Photo: Casey B. Gibson*

Despite the heat I’ve been logging 100-120 miles a week since mid-June, plus occasional short trail runs and even some light weightlifting. Exactly why remains a mystery. The only possible justification is the faint hope that all this sweaty nonsense will help me continue smiling down at the daisies instead of scowling up at the roots.

The other day I found myself afflicted with the impulse to resurrect my old Steelman time-trial bike. Must’ve been some distant, pain-wracked memory of the Record Challenge Time Trial at Moriarty trying to crawl out of its coffin.

The best ride I ever had there was in 1991, when I turned a 56:43 for 40km despite being mired in the move from Fanta Se to Bibleburg. I was logging most of my mileage in the ’83 Toyota longbed but still managed a PR that was only about 10 minutes slower than Kent Bostick’s best time on the course (he didn’t even race that year and still beat me).

Imagine my surprise when a casual check of the Innertubes found that the Paula Higgins Memorial Record Challenge Time Trial is on for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

Hmm. Now that I’m a geezer I’d be racing the 20km. The way I’ve been training, who knows? I might even be able to break the hour.

Home on the range

August 17, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Where the skies are not cloudy all day (lately, anyway).

On Thursday the lads at Reincarnation had a look at Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster and told me she required no heroic lifesaving measures at this time. It’s a red-letter day when a geezer on a fixed income with an equally ancient rice grinder can escape a mechanic’s clutches for under a hundy.

Plus I managed 30 cycling miles — 15 after dropping the old gal off downtown and then cycling back home, and another 15 picking her back up. Though the mileage is identical in both directions, the first leg feels the longest, with 1,150 feet of vertical gain. There’s less than 200 feet of vertical on the return trip, most of it in the first mile.

There are still a few hurdles to clear, though. The people whose “home” is the weedy industrial area alongside the North Diversion Channel Trail huddle together in what shade they can find come the heat of the afternoon, usually on the west side of the bicycle path’s underpasses, south of I-25/Pan American.

Many wear dark clothing and are hard to spot in the shade, if you’re new around here and don’t expect to roll up on a small crowd sprawled in a blind corner. Here’s a guy who looks like the Feral Kid from “Road Warrior,” with a dog instead of a boomerang. There’s a pensive young woman who seems to be revisiting her life choices as the temperature creeps into the mid-90s.

We were all on the same path, but not really. I was riding a bicycle that’s worth more than the car I was going to pick up. I was wearing sunscreen and about half a G’s worth of cycling kit, with an iPhone in one jersey pocket, wallet full of cash, credit cards, and health insurance in another. I knew where I was going to sleep that night, even if the Subie didn’t start (I was riding a bicycle, remember). The place has food, drink, beds, toilets, showers, doors and windows that lock, climate control, and a lid on all of it.

Cycling past the street people I always feel like a tourist gawping at the wildlife in some squalid national park. Possibly because I am one, and always have been, never more so than when I was pretending to be a hippie, hitchhiking, panhandling, and taking all those gosh-darned drugs that were so much fun.

Maybe the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed me around one dark night, way back when. Or maybe I just wised up to all that unearned middle-class-white-boy privilege I was wearing like a Superman costume under my hippie garb. Because I never had the balls or the bad luck to take anything that might leave me sprawled under a bridge on a searing August afternoon, as some bastard on a bicycle breezes by.

Cats and flats

August 12, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Miss Mia Sopaipilla gets a bit of sack time.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla and I have been enjoying a respite from wall-to-wall politics, with the Donks seemingly in a joyful state of mind along the old campaign trail and the press, or what remains of it, finally noticing in the absence of Joe Biden that it’s the other candidate who is a psycho, serial fabulist, and senile old fool, with one foot in the grave and the other in the nuthouse.

The shit monsoon will resume eventually, of course, once the Cult remembers where it left its copy of the Necronomicon (Classic Comics edition, with a foreword by Lee Atwater):

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Jesus Hitler Mar-a-Lago wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

In the meantime, the cycling has been excellent, albeit a bit toasty with the occasional deluge and explosive decompression to keep us on our toes.

I had a back-tire blowout at speed yesterday — hit a scattering of roadside debris that was deeper and chunkier than it looked, with heavy traffic in the lane and thus no way to dodge it. In an instant I was riding the rim and thought I might take a tumble, but managed to wobble to a stop without bloodshed.

It has been a month of flats, on both Steelman Eurocrosses, the Nobilette, and finally the DBR Prevail TT. That last was the worst, because it rolls on 26mm rubber, which is as fat as the rear triangle can handle. Not much in the way of a rim to ride, is what. I’m lucky it wasn’t the front that went boom or I’d have done likewise immediately afterward.

Could be worse, though. A couple folks got swept down the arroyos during Friday’s flash flood, and one of them didn’t land on his feet.

And now, from our Good News Department: The Ethan Allen dealer at Montgomery and Tramway has been replaced by (wait for it …) a Goodwill store, right behind the Filiberto’s without a sign. Economic development, Duck! City style.

Nothing but blue skies

August 4, 2024August 4, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

The North Diversion Channel Trail, just below the Osuna-Bear Arroyo connection.

Too bloody much going on lately. Trying to corral my thoughts, if any, has been like chasing jackrabbits through a funhouse with a lacrosse stick, wearing clown shoes and oven mitts. In a word: unproductive.

I won’t bore you with the details. We’re talking First World problems here:

The Soma Double Cross at Elena Gallegos.

Buffing the rough edges out of El Rancho Pendejo in preparation for a houseguest. Stalking the elusive turnip for a promised dish (Whole Foods and Sprouts, nyet; Albertsons, da). Learning that I had failed to acquire the ingredients for another anticipated dish, the promise of which I had not been made aware, and the subsequent acquiring of same. Yet another round of flat-fixing, this time in the garage.

My favorite annoyance was an appointment at the local Apple Store’s Genius Bar, where I expected to be advised in fairly short order to hand over my elderly 15-inch MacBook Pro for a vigorous wash and brushup to resolve its “Apocalypse Now/Ride of the Valkyries” fans issue. There’s either some demonic technical haint in residence or enough hair in the case to build an entirely new cat to keep Miss Mia company. Whichever it is, I ain’t going in there looking for it. That’s what we pay Geniuses for.

But no. What I got was straight out of “Nothing but Blue Skies,” by Thomas McGuane. The scene where Frank Copenhaver and his estranged wife, Gracie, visit a Deadrock restaurant for conversation and something to eat. Conversation they get (Gracie insists). But eats, not so much, as waiters glide past without a glance in their direction, the thundering lunch herd slowly thins, and Frank comes to a rolling boil.

After the place empties out Frank finally takes the bull by the horns, flags down a table-wiping waiter, says they’d like to order.

“I’m sorry, but we’re closed,” replies the waiter.

The Apple Store wasn’t closed. But apparently upon my arrival I had not been properly logged in for my 3:30 appointment, which I did not learn until 4:15, when I was ’bout yay far from knocking over chairs and chasing a Genius through his kitchen.

And now I have another appointment on Tuesday.

So, yeah. That’s the scenic route toward explaining the lack of postage around here lately.

Speaking of scenic routes, the pix are from the rides I’ve been taking lately to keep my blood pressure on simmer as I await service.