Category: Bike stuff

Wide world of sports

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Plenty of sporting propositions this weekend, ladies and germs. First we have the Elefinks and Donks playing pocket pool with people’s lives, then we have Paris-Roubaix, where I’m gonna go out on a limb and say George Hincapie will not win again.

If I were to cross the water to watch a bike race, it would either be cyclo-cross worlds or the Hell of the North. Paris-Roubaix is like the original heavyweight championship of the world, when there was only the one sanctioning organization. The guy who can take it and dish it out is the guy who gets to stand with his fist in the air at the end of this slugfest.

I do not, however, care to journey to DeeCee to watch white millionaires in dark suits fart higher than their fat asses. A country of smart people with a lower tolerance for bullshit would have stormed this Bastille long ago, taken their heads, stuck them on pikes and paraded them around the National Mall.

But even voting is too wearisome for our flabby body politic, which spends its time at another mall altogether, in the food court. “Yeh, gimme a double-cheese Republican, extra bacon and Freedom Fries. Drink? Tea, a’course.”

Gasoholics

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 43 Comments
The Jamis Aurora Elite
The Jamis Aurora Elite: It's less expensive than 17 SUV tanks of gas and your ass will be less expansive as a consequence of taking it places.

In the spring a young American journalist’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of  … gas prices.

Every year about this time, as gas prices rise — as they will — the hacks trot out their woeful tales of the long-suffering American motoring public to celebrate the impending summer road-rage season. This one is from The Washington Post, and it is superior to the usual vacuous drivel in that it mentions the bicycle. Once.

Not as a tool for actually taking that road trip, mind you, but for scooting around the vicinity of your motel once you’ve parked the 12-mpg family battlewagon.

Sigh.

Famous alien spokescreature and marketing Machiavelli Gregg Bagni has posited that we may see some drift away from four wheels toward two once gas prices hit four smacks per gallon, which is just a few klicks down the turnpike. We paid about $4.30 per gallon in Hawaii in March, and nationwide the average has topped $3.50.

So, yeah. Should be interesting. Meanwhile, for $1,700 — about the price of 17 tanks of gas in the old Cadoo Escapade — a guy can buy himself a touring bike like the Jamis Aurora Elite* and hit the road under his own power.

You can’t take the family along, of course. But some might consider that a feature rather than a bug.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I’m test-riding an Aurora Elite as we speak and will review it for Adventure Cyclist magazine.

Of Flanders and fences

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

No ride for Your Humble Narrator today. See Tour of Flanders. Damn’ fine race. I was able to watch the last 40km live via streaming video courtesy of Eurosport, with almost-English-language commentary from Sean Kelly, and it was a nail-biter right to the finish.

When I wasn’t posting words or pictures I was wrestling with our backyard fence, which is somewhat the worse for wear after one too many windy springs. A couple uprights have gone rotten underground and the bugger flaps like Glenn Beck’s blubbery lips when the wind is from the right quarter, and last night it was a howler. Beat the living snot out of downtown and kept us awake most of the night. It was so bad that a neighbor wondered whether a plane was plummeting to earth somewhere nearby.

Anyway, the fence is a wreck, I hate fence work, and the dude we usually hire to do things I hate has hurt his back and thus is unavailable to make my cushy life even easier. So today I braced the sonofabitch with a couple of 2x3s and then guy-wired it down, using some 14-gauge looped around the uprights and thence to tent pegs pounded into the turf. That ought to keep it in the neighborhood for as long as it takes for our guy to heal up.

Meanwhile, after record-breaking heat yesterday it’s presently snowing sideways from about six different directions at once, yet things remain on fire. Springtime in the Rockies.

Hot times in the old town (for now)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Bibleburg popped a 4-year-old record today, hitting 78 degrees. And the springlike weather had all the eejits  out and about, believe you me.

First, I nearly got right-hooked by an inattentive motorist at a stoplight on the outbound leg of today’s ride; happily, being a lifelong paranoid, I saw her coming. On the homestretch I avoided T-boning a couple of dipshit mountain bikers on a fast descent through Palmer Park. They rolled casually from a parking lot into the road, right in front of me, screened by a phalanx of parked vehicles. Once again, I was lucky to have seen them long before they saw me. Disc brakes helped, too.

There is a particular class of narcissistic nitwit at large these days whose members believe that nothing they do can ever be wrong. It’s thinking on a par with Tricky Dicky’s “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Then again, calling it “thinking” is a bit extravagant. I saw the faces of both motorist and mountain bikers, and they resembled nothing so much as the vacuous mugs of feedlot cows, contentedly chewing their own cuds.

The temptation is to lock up the binders, gesticulate and in general make a spectacle of yourself, offering up loud, detailed and specific instruction delivered mostly in words containing only four letters.  But what kind of crazy bastard shouts at cattle on a beautiful spring day?

No, really …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Palmer Lake on April Fool's Day 2011
This minor metropolis is a pleasant, slightly uphill, nearly auto-free 25 miles from Dog Central.

This is not an April Fool’s joke, no matter what you may have seen over at VeloNews.com: I not only had nothing to do with this year’s April Foolery, I spent the day riding my Nobilette ’cross bike from Chez Dog to Palmer Lake and back.

I developed delusions of grandeur on the outbound leg and nearly rode to the Greenland Open Space trailhead, but the restrooms along the way were still closed and their water fountains shut off, so I turned my little comedy act around at Palmer Lake lest I dry up and blow away.

And a good thing, too, ’cause I found myself chewing on a headwind all the way home.

All in all, I wound up with 50 miles on the day, which ain’t bad for an old man riding a steel bike off-road. But Lord, was I slow. I won’t tell you how slow. You might defect to some other blog. Let’s just say that last year I covered the distance 15 minutes quicker than I did today.

Of course, that was on June 1, not April 1. And I had a tailwind for the homebound leg last year, plus 2,000 miles in my legs. This year, not so much. Plus the Republicans have control of the House, which slows everything up, including me.