Herself’s Soma Double Cross, ready for its 2024 debut.
The surest sign that spring has sprung is Herself telling me to grease up her old two-wheeler ’cause she’s ready to ride.
That this announcement coincides with temperatures in the upper 70s is not, well, a coincidence.
Herself rides a Soma Double Cross. I bought the frameset back in 2006, and Old Town Bike Shop in Bibleburg tricked it out smartly with bits of this and that, some of them mine, some of them theirs. The drivetrain is a mix of Sugino, FSA, and Shimano 105/LX, yielding a low end of 34×32, which probably should be 34×34, or even 30×34, but I haven’t gone there yet.
Not on her bike, anyway. I love me some 30×34 on my New Albion Privateer and Soma Saga (the disc-brake version).
But then I’m a señor citizen, not some spry young tomato like Herself. She can tough it out. I’ll wheelsuck her and provide helpful hints from her slipstream.
Seasonal prep this year was pretty basic. I checked that everything shifted (105 brifters) and braked (Suntour cantis) as it should, lubed the chain, and replaced the 700×32 Vittoria Randonneur Cross Pros with a pair of Schwalbe Little Big Bens. Run those 38mm fatties down around 35-40 psi and they buff some of the rough spots off The Duck! City roads. I’ve got ’em on both Sagas and they appear to have eternal life. They’re easy on, easy off, too, which is handy in goathead country.
She could use some new handlebar tape, but that can wait, as can a spit-shine for her brass Crane bell, which she rarely uses. That thing could wake the dead. Even the self-deafened AirPlodders dive for the ditches when they hear it tolling for them.
I’ve been giving a little love to neglected bikes this week — the Rivendell Sam Hillborne and DBR Axis TT have both gotten out in the fresh air — but tomorrow I’ll be riding my own Soma Double Cross. Now, you wanna talk about a low low end? How’s 24×34 sound to you? Gimme a tailwind and I can climb a telephone pole.
Don’t tell Herself. If she senses the slightest weakness she’ll put me in The Home.
The turnaround point, just south of Interstate 40 along the Paseo del Bosque trail.
It was a bit premature, but I rode my age yesterday and then some.
The final tally was 44.6 miles, or 71.8 kilometers; I only needed 43.5 miles to make 70km, but I figure the additional mile and change constituted a punishment tax for being a wuss and riding my age in kilometers instead of miles.
My 70th birthday isn’t until Wednesday, but the forecast was not promising and yesterday’s weather looked (and was) superb, so I took a cue from Janis Joplin and got it while I could.
I’ve been in something of a rut lately, literally as well as figuratively. The drill has been to break out a cyclocross bike and ride a mix of roads and trails, the latter slashed into tire-grabbing ribbons by fatheads who shred (or stir) the gnar-gnar after a wet spell. The ruts they leave behind don’t pose a problem for anyone piloting a double-squishy with plenty of travel and 3-inch tires, but can be a tad jarring on a rigid drop-bar bike with 33mm rubber.
Still, it beats working, especially if I pick a day and hour when the usual suspects are likely to be hoeing a row in the cube farm. I managed 24 miles of that sort of thing on Thursday. But doubling up on that, on a Friday, sounded like a punishment tour, not a birthday celebration. Also, too much of the same-ol’, same-ol’.
What to do; what to do. …
Temps looked to be headed for the 60s, with wind from the west. Coasting down to the bosque would force me to commit to some proper distance while giving me plenty of options in case advancing age or some other wrinkled catastrophe reared its ill-considered comb-over in midride. Off I went.
It’s mostly off-street bike path (Arroyo del Oso) and downhill from the intersection of Tramway and Manitoba to the bike-ped bridge over I-25, barring a short, unpleasant stretch of Osuna between the western end of the Arroyo del Oso golf course and Brentwood.
But once I’m on the bridge it’s all bike path, all the time, depending upon how I choose to head home.
I’m prone to overdo and bad at math, so after following the North Diversion Channel Trail and the Paseo del Norte Trail to the Paseo del Bosque, I refused to be lulled into complacency by the early greenery, stifled various miles-enhancing impulses — Hang a right at I-40 and climb to 98th? Hang a left at Mountain and cruise past Old Town back to the NDCT? Continue south to Rio Bravo? — and pulled a U at Mountain, heading back to the NDCT the way I’d come.
I thought I’d get more vertical than this, but that bosque trail is flatter than a Republican’s head.
The wind was mostly with me, so it felt like the right call, not least because it was all uphill back to El Rancho Pendejo. The question was: Which way back?
Arroyo del Oso is kind of a slog if ridden up from NDCT, with lots of stop and go plus a couple-three evil multiple-lane, median-divided, high-speed baby-highway crossings to negotiate with pale, failing, nearly-70-year-old legs. And my limited math skills seemed to indicate the mileage — kilometerage? — wouldn’t make the nut.
So I hung a left where the Paseo trail met the NDCT and headed northeast through Balloon Fiesta Park, where a few didoes through an underused office/light industrial ghetto connect to the Pan American Freeway, which in turn leads to the climb up Tramway — if you don’t mind riding a short stretch of shoulder alongside Pan American against high-speed, one-way traffic, which I kind of do. There’s been talk for years about extending the NDCT north to Roy, which would spare cyclists this game of chicken, but no action as of yet.
A quick digression: As I was rolling through the balloon park en route to doing battle with Pan American I saw a dude on what looked to be a gravel bike who’d left the official trail to drop down into La Cueva channel, a drainage like NDCT only without a bike path along the edge.
It made me wonder if, rather than risking the short against-traffic dash to Tramway from Balloon Fiesta Parkway, a savvy cyclist might be able to ride La Cueva channel underneath Pan American and I-25 all the way to Louisiana, then climb out somehow and head north to Elena, a less harrowing alternative to the 50-mph traffic of Tramway. Never saw the other dude again, so, maybe? To be continued. …
I took my chances on the Pan American shoulder, cautiously skirting two parked vehicles that may have had some unfortunate interaction — one car, one 18-wheeler — and started the half-hour ascent of Tramway to The County Line Bar-B-Q.
This is where the age thing manifested itself. A couple skinny young pups on them plastic-fantastic whirligigs with the disco brakes and what have you passed me so fast I had to stop to check my pulse, see if I still had one.
Nevertheless, I persisted, and upon hitting the stop sign at the barbecue joint it was clear that if I headed straight home I was going to wind up a couple klicks short of the full megillah. Thus I had to add a couple curlicues, flourishes, and do-si-dos to my little dance party before I could leave the floor and collapse into a medium-heavy lunch.
The official high was 69°, four degrees above normal. If that’s my birthday present, I’ll take it.
• Postscript: Lest anyone consider this even marginally impressive, my man the M-Dogg out in California reports having covered 9,000 feet of vertical and 166 miles in four days, none of which was his birthday.
I think we can all agree that some who have held the office do not deserve a Day, unless that day is in court, wherein a judge intones:
“Will the defendant please rise?”
Still, setting dreams aside for the moment, there once was a time when Presidents’ Day was less about presidents, good, bad, or indifferent, or even our first president, than it was about (wait for it …) bicycles.
According to a 2015 story by Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic, Americans once honored George Washington on Feb. 22 through feats of cycling.
When the date became a federal holiday in 1885, Appelbaum wrote, the nation “was deep in the grip of the bicycle craze.”
“In Boston, cyclists used the public holiday to hold bicycle races before cheering throngs. Local bike stores opened their doors to entice the race-day crowds, bringing them in off the snowy streets to preview the pleasures of spring. February 22 soon marked the start of the season, the day on which bicycle retailers held open houses to show off their latest models to eager crowds.”
—The Atlantic
As with quality in the nation’s highest office, this glorious state of velo-affairs could not last, of course. As the appeal of the humble two-wheeler began to wane in the early 1900s, the automobile rose up to take its place on the national stage, and the seasonal advertising campaigns shifted gears, from vehicles powered by living people to ones that ran on dead dinosaurs.
This will not stand, y’know? This aggression will not stand, man. So, today, turn a pedal for Liberty! Leave the dino-burner in the driveway! Take your bicycle for a red-white-and-blue spin!
“Where the weather at?” I queried myself just before turning around and catching it right in the face.
The wizards have been predicting all manner of vile conditions, from skin-peeling wind to rain, snow, wintry mix, travel “impacts,” plague of toads (i.e., congressional nub-tugging), IBS, incipient fascism, the heartbreak of psoriasis, GOPee pestilential hopefuls getting flogged by “None of the above,” etc.
This uncertainty makes it hard to select the day’s workout, so I usually step outdoors to see if there are any MAGA hats flogging their diesel brooms across the blackening sky before naming my poison. This morning brought only the wintry mix, which I took smack in the gob as I turned around after shooting the pic up top.
Yesterday I ran, which was probably the wrong call. It was decent enough for cycling, but I didn’t feel like submitting to all the rituals — finding clean kit, checking the Fleet for a vessel that didn’t need chain lube, tire-pumping, flat repair, derailleur/brake adjustments, whatevs. Running is quick. Shirt, pants and socks, lace up the shoes, off you go.
Anyway, time was short and there were other items on the to-do list. Grocery shopping, for starters. Some “feets ball” extravaganza is apparently on tap this weekend, and I didn’t want to hit the store late in the week when the slavering mobs will be stripping shelves like hyenas wiping out a Chick-fil-A. An hour and a couple hundred dollars later our larder was stocked for the apocalypse.
Also, an old scribbler pal had tugged on my coat, asking could he borrow a cup of old Fat Guy cartoon to illustrate one of his excellent observations about the hallowed wintertime practice of stockpiling a few extra kilos around the waistline to keep the frostbite off your kidneys and, not incidentally, serve as a distracting amuse-bouche one can slice off with the Leatherman and toss to the wolves if they start circling while one field-repairs a puncture, snapped shifter cable, or broken chain.
If you are not already reading Mike Ferrentino you should be, and right now, too. Don’t make me stop this blog and come back there. Dude has been there and done that and he will go there and do that, too, because he likes it. And he is extremely good at it, which is not a handicap. One of the very few people I will drop everything to read. His joint these days is “Beggars Would Ride” at NSMB.com.
Anyway, for Mike’s ’toon hunt I had to snuffle like a truffle pig through the Archives, which are scattered around and about in various hard drives, mostly inside of or attached to a 1999 G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac that has more white hair in its ears than I do. This motley collection badly needs cataloging by a professional librarian; alas, the only one conversant with my workflow was otherwise occupied, earning our living.
I found a couple possibilities from way Back in the Day®, but the Fat Guy was mostly a roadie and Mike was hoping for something dirty. So finally I surrendered to the inevitable, broke out the utensils, and drew him up a whole new ’toon.
This was not a hassle. It was a blessing, because I hadn’t drawn a line since I parted ways with the Outside Hyperactive Currency Furnace back in January 2022. It may have been my longest hiatus from drawing since I was in diapers, working with my own boogers on the walls of various rental properties in Maryland and Virginia. They’re probably on the National Register of Historic Places now.
In the end, Mike ended up running with one of the old ’toons. Turns out he was under that deadline pressure I used to love so much, and it seems I’m not as quick on the “draw” as I used to be, yuk yuk yuk. I told him he could keep the new one for relighting the funny-pages fire. Thanks to him, you may see the occasional scribble here, too.
The first cartoon I’ve drawn in more than two years. Thanks to Mike Ferrentino for the inspiration.
The Wolf Moon, peeking through the clouds over the Sandias.
I was a little late to moonrise last night, but managed to catch a glimpse of the Wolf Moon despite the heavy cloud cover.
The Duck! City has been gray and damp the past few days, with 0.13 inch of precip’ in the past 48 hours. On Wednesday I just beat a short downpour home as I wrapped up a run, and yesterday I caught a little sleet in the chops while cycling through the foothills.
Climbing into the Elena Gallegos Open Space I saw a couple of Albuquerque Police Department vehicles in the parking lot. The officers waved at me, and I waved back. If they thought I must have been drunk to be cycling in January — rain jacket, tuque, tights, winter shoes — they didn’t oblige me to perform the Stupid Human Tricks or empty the wallet I wasn’t carrying. (I had a $20 in the Ziploc bag that keeps my phone dry, but shh, that’s top secret.)
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