Category: Bike stuff

Heat it and eat it

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
If there’s any rain in ’em, it’s not for us.

Don’t let the clouds fool you. It ain’t even cool around here.

Yesterday we roasted another record with 102°, the old mark of 98° having stood since 1952, two years before this old dawg was whelped.

Naturally, being an eejit, I was out for a ride. Nothing strenuous — not quite 30 miles, a couple of hours in the saddle, a couple thou’ of vertical gain.

Getting big air over I-25 (with the help of a bike-ped bridge).

But I confess I felt a tad toasted by the time I got home. I’m glad I didn’t go for the extra-credit mileage I’d been contemplating. I’d be a rank smear of B.O. and bad ideas in the valley some’eres. Even the coyotes would give me a miss.

“Sheeyit, homes, smells like sunscreen and chamois cream ladled over old scars and regrets. Let’s hit the Dumpster behind Golden Pride.”

Speaking of eats, it should go without saying that I’ve been rooting through my archives for recipes that require a minimum of cookery in this heat.

For breakfast, oatmeal is out, fruit smoothies are in. Lunch is something equally light, either sandwiches or leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.

Last night’s dinner was Martha Rose Shulman’s pasta with cherry tomatoes and arugula. I don’t object to boiling water for pasta; it helps humidify the house.

Night before last we had Melissa Clark’s shrimp salad, layering the shrimp and its sauce over a bed of arugula, red cabbage, red leaf lettuce, sliced grape tomatoes in a variety of hues, and various another crunchables from the fridge and pantry. I foreswore the diced red onion (Herself hates raw onion), but snuck in a few thin slices of scallion when she wasn’t looking.

Hetty Lui McKinnon’s tacos de papa require a little stove time, but not enough to have you sweating into your skillet, especially if there are some leftover taters on hand.

We’ll be revisiting Martha’s recipe this evening, with a side salad. Today’s record high of 100°, set in 1910, might be a goner, too, because by 3 p.m. it was already 100° at the airport.

Walking on the moon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Comanche Launch Facility.

Never fear. We’re still earthworms. It’s just that The Duck! City landscape looks a bit lunar in spots, especially at the eastern end of Comanche Road NE, which tilts up and turns to dirt just short of Foothills Trail 365.

During our nine years here a few eastbound motorists have failed to notice that Comanche just sort of, oh, I don’t know, ends at its intersection with Camino de la Sierra NE. Their vehicles take flight, briefly, then return to earth, their only laurels being the remains of the wire fence marking the end of Comanche and the beginning of the Sandia Mountains. Resale value and driving privileges suffer. Lunacy of a different sort entirely.

Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.

Anyway, it’s not hot enough around here to be the moon, which enjoys highs of 260° Fahrenheit in full sunlight. It just feels that way lately.

Herself and I got a late start on our weekly bike ride this morning, and it was getting right toasty as we climbed Big Horn Ridge Drive toward a couple of whoop-de-doos that are more fun when done from the other direction.

Bunnies we had seen, but no quail, and I was thinking we were going to get skunked (har de har har) until a lone adult quail ran across the road just ahead of us, saw us, and pulled a U, scurrying back down into the gully.

We stopped to have a peek over the side, and wowser, there were at least three pairs of adults and a whole mob of juveniles puttering around down there, wishing we would quit gawking and be on our way, like the two e-bikers who zip-zapped past without a word.

It pays to keep your eyes peeled around here. You never know what you might see, even if it’s only a windshield full of wire and the Sandias coming up fast.

Going Fourth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Incoming! No, that’s outgoing. And not very far, either. Them’s the rules.

The cul-de-sac was rockin’ last night.

Grandpa Doug was in charge of the boom-boom. We got a courtesy call from the fire marshals. And the crowd — well, you could actually call it a crowd. Lots of folks, not all of them residents of the cul-de-sac. Young and old, men and women, right and left, brown, black, white. Your basic melting pot.

Old Glory, catching some rays.

We stayed up a little later than is our practice, and I slept a little later than is practical for a Fourth of July with a heat advisory in effect.

So by the time we’d broken fast, handled our morning chores, and just kinda-sorta gotten our poop more or less in a group, the menu of exercise options had shrunk like a spider on a hotplate.

We settled on a short road ride, which inexplicably saw me roll off without a water bottle. Duh. So we had to circle back after a couple miles to collect that, after which I decided we might as well keep on heading south since that was where the wind was coming from.

For old times’ sake we noodled on over to have a look at Herself the Elder’s first residence here in The Duck! City, now a private home rather than an assisted-living residence.

Then we got a little random, hopping onto and off of a couple bike paths linking various suburban streets, before agreeing that it was just about as hot as we cared to have it and rolling back to the rancheroo for some light refreshment.

By noon the temperature was 93° if you believe our little weather widget, and 88° if you don’t. And the weather wizards say we ain’t seen nothing yet.

When the high temp matches my average heart rate on a road ride I sometimes think about getting back in the pool, churning out the laps in the cool, chlorinated fluids, where the distracted drivers and earbudded pedestrians mostly aren’t.

But I don’t know that I want to be the 69-year-old dude in the banana hammock trying to relive his glory years (Mitchell High School swim team, 1969 South Central League champs). Aren’t the bib shorts and Lycra jersey bad enough?

Muchas gracias, El Niño

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Hot plate, señor. No, not the one on the table; the one in your head.

Hotter, drier, and windier — that’s the prediction as regards monsoon season from the National Weather Service Forecast Office here in The Duck! City.

A heat advisory is in our immediate future, as in tomorrow, the actual Fourth of July, which this year seemed to start sometime around last Thursday and will end … well, who knows? Not me, Skeezix.

There are a few fires going, prescribed and otherwise, the largest being the Pass Fire in the Gila National Forest. Nothing like what’s been going on in Canada; not yet, anyway.

Yesterday I rolled out for a little 30-miler with 1,200 feet of vertical gain — the lion’s share of it coming in the final grind from I-25 to The County Line barbecue joint — and it got a little toasty there toward the end. The brain was not quite at a rolling boil but even a brisk simmer gets your attention a couple hours into what should be a two-bottle ride.

Today it seemed wise to skip the Monday spin with the ould fellahs and instead go for a half-hour trail jog with Herself. Early. Before Tōnatiuh fired up His comal.

Tonight brings the cul-de-sac’s Fourth fiesta, featuring non-explosive, ground-based “fireworks” of the type that would have caused my younger self to use descriptive language that would get the 69-year-old me canceled in a heartbeat if anyone paid any attention at all to what I thought, said, or wrote. Which mostly they don’t, lucky for me.

Neighbors to the east have two kids, neighbors to the west have three grandkids, and the couple on the northeast corner have a toddler, so there will be sprouts of various sizes gamboling around and about, shrieking at the pips, pops, and poots as the Buck supermoon rises.

If we’re lucky the skeeters will take the night off. It’s too bloody hot to don the Levi’s body armor, and I don’t have a sword small enough to behead the little bastards.

Shakedown Trail

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Don’t tell the industry, but a fella can still ride a 28-year-old MTB
if he wants to.

I’m not quite certain what (or if) I was thinking yesterday.

The bike docs at Two Wheel Drive had rung me up Tuesday afternoon to say my 1995 DBR Axis TT was out of headset surgery and doing nicely, but I couldn’t get down there to collect it before closing time.

TWD doesn’t open until 10 a.m., so I thought I’d go for a 45-minute trail run Wednesday morning before motoring down to fetch the bike. Sweat a little rather than a lot, don’t you know.

The scene of the crime … er, the morning trail run.

These things I did, then had a medium-heavy bite of lunch.

Sensible so far, yeah?

Don’t worry. It never lasts.

Weather conditions be damned, I just can’t not ride a new/recently repaired bike.

So I kitted up and rolled out to the Elena Gallegos for a short shakedown cruise that wound up being about 90 minutes.

It was toasty out there — just shy of 90 degrees — but bearable. And anyway, I barely noticed because I was having so much fun riding this 28-year-old mountain bike.

Don’t tell The Industry, but you can still mine a few giggles from a made-in-USA titanium MTB with a Tange steel fork, triple crank, eight-speed XT, V-brakes, flat bar, Grip Shift twisties, 26-inch wheels with 2.0 rubber, and a creaky old 1954 MeatSack® motor that couldn’t pass an emissions check in Mexico City no matter how much mordida you paid.

It’s frisky and maneuverable and weighs just under 24 pounds with a saddlebag holding two spare tubes, tire irons, and a minitool. The flat bar, V-brakes and plumpish tires let me roll over a few items I have to dodge on a drop-bar ’cross bike with cantis and 32mm knobbies. And the smaller wheels put me a little closer to the ground for purposes of falling off onto sharp rocks and spiky foliage.

I managed to keep the greasy side down yesterday through an abundance of caution and the avoidance of all truly technical sections, though I sampled a few rocky bits in the name of Science.

Mostly I was just noodling along, enjoying my little trip down Memory Lane, recalling the Good Old Days® when a rigid 26-incher with an eight-speed triple and 2.0 tires was as good as it got.

• Editor’s note: “Shakedown Street” is, of course, a tune and an album by the Grateful Dead, produced by Lowell “Little Feat” George. My favorite underground cartoonist — Gilbert Shelton (“Wonder Wart-Hog,” “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”) — did the album cover art.  Last, but not least, a resounding “Damn The Man!” goes out to the Save the Elena Gallegos rebels, who gave a righteous beatdown to an ill-considered plan to install an unnecessary and unwanted “visitors center” — the thin edge of a development wedge — in our little piece of paradise. Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart.