Salty dog

January 18, 2024January 18, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

The Soma Double Cross wearing its winter kit.

Seasonable weather may have returned for the moment, but The Duck! City remains a sandy, salty, gooey mess, and thus the Soma Double Cross now sports mudguards because hey: Sometimes a fella doesn’t feel like taking his exercise on a 32-pound touring bike just because it has fenders.

The DC is another of those absurdly versatile sport-utility bikes, suitable for cyclocross, light touring, or simply trying to keep the muscle memory alive in January, when its lesser poundage — just under 26 elbees with a saddlebag and handlebar bell — makes a real difference on the hills.

I used it for a three-day credit-card tour of central Colorado in 2012, and it’s logged plenty of hours on roads and trails in New Mexico, too.

The DC is just a little small for me, which is fine, especially if you suddenly happen to straddle it on some sketchy stretch of singletrack. When I first got back into cycling in the mid-Eighties I started with a 60cm bike, then downsized to 58, and again to 56, before finally inching back up to 58 for pretty much everything save the cyclocross bikes.

The Steelman Eurocrosses, Bianchi Zurigo Disc, and Soma DC are all 55cm, while the Voodoo Wazoo is a 56cm. I should turn the Wazoo back into a drop-bar bike one of these days, but I kind of like it as a flat-bar, single-ring deal. It’s also less welcoming to fenders and a rear rack, should I want them.

Ordinarily when the weather goes sideways I turn to trail running. But we’ve had enough moisture lately to turn crucial segments of the foothills trails into skating rinks, peat bogs, and tar pits, which makes running nearly as much of an exercise in staying upright as cycling.

“Well, at least the motorists can’t nail you on the trail,” you quip. Ho ho, etc. Wrong-o, sport. Lately they’ve been hitting everything from traffic-light stanchions to tattoo parlors, restaurants, and private homes. Stationary objects, easy to avoid, unless you’re ripped to the tits on your reality-management substance of choice.

The wiseguys used to say that you’re taking your life in your hands just by getting out of bed in the morning. Now you can wake up to find yourself sharing the old king-size with a Ford Expedition.

Not even fenders will keep the road grime off your ass then.

Up the old Wazoo

January 11, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Anyone watch the Debate to Determine the First Loser last night?

Of course you didn’t. Because you already know that life, like the GOP pestilential campaign, is nasty, brutish, and short.

I haven’t read any of the coverage and don’t intend to because see previous graf.

In other news, Chris Christie finally conceded that he’s not enough of an asshole to out-trump You Know Who, but just enough of one to hot-mic’ his rivals for the roses in what has been a one-horse’s-ass race since the starter’s pistol fired. All the other entrants are basically carousel ponies, going up and down, and around in circles, and winding up right back where they started, a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S. Thompson has taught us. Better yet, get someone else to buy your ticket. That way you don’t wind up a few hundred million in the red and sitting atop a suitcase on the curb in front of what used to be your home.

Elsewhere, one of You Know Who’s judges decided he didn’t want to hear “Mein Kampf” as filtered through a damp XXXL set of gold-lamé Depends in YKW’s civil-fraud trial and thus we are spared “a closing argument” that would have made the Delta House charter hearing in “Animal House” sound like “Inherit the Wind.”

Finally, here in The Duck! City the weather is fixing to take a turn for the worse, so yesterday I decided to slip out for a short ride on the Tramway bike path.

While motoring around on errands I had noticed that while the roads were still covered in red salt and sand, the bike path was clean as a whistle, so I opted for a quick spin to the County Line BBQ and back, just to keep the muscle memory from toppling over into dementia.

Today is looking more like a run type of situation, as the wizards are calling for plummeting temps, gusty winds, and plenty of the old suckee-suckee. Cycling was cold enough yesterday; no point in adding to whatever wind chill Itztlacoliuhqui has queued up. Coals to Newcastle, that is.

Happily, I’m not running for anything. Not even Christie’s people are dim enough to chuck good money down my little pasatiempo.

Runday

January 7, 2024January 7, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, they say.

But when life gives you snow — what then? Make snowcones? Snowballs? Snowpersons?

Nah. Just go for a run.

I thought I was underdressed yesterday when I headed out for 5K on the trails. Lately I’ve been wearing Darn Tough wool socks, some toasty old Head tights and this long-sleeved Gore cycling jersey over an ancient Patagonia Capilene base layer because it has pockets for the phone and any bits I might feel compelled to remove or add, like the Smartwool gloves or Sugoi tuque, as conditions dictate.

But I wasn’t taking anything off yesterday. I only felt overdressed at the outset because I had the wind to my back. Once I turned around into it at the Menaul trailhead I tugged the tuque down over my ears and the Gore’s zipper up over my Adam’s apple. The wind caused my right eye to tear up behind the Rudy Project shades, making me seem to be half crying, like I wasn’t really all that worked up about whatever was bothering me.

All in all, a good day for a run, though. Not many people out and those that were seemed to feel that we were all members of some open-air private club for the genially insane.

The trails were pretty crunchy; a bit of mud where the sun had shone, icy in the shade. But I managed to not fall down and/or roll an ankle, so, winning, etc. ’Ray for me.

This morning I’m getting a loaf of bread started while I try to talk myself into a bike ride. But I think it’s gonna be another run. We’re talking 33°, feels like 25°, wind from the south at 10-15 mph, and if there’s any blue in the sky I’m having trouble making it out.

Then again, tomorrow looks worse. Maybe a short ride on a fendered bike? Thank Itztlacoliuhqui we have one more meal’s worth of green chile stew waiting patiently in the fridge. Also, there is a sack of pintos that needs cooking, and it will be a frosty day in The Bad Place when I don’t have the ingredients for some variety of south-of-the-border rice, either rojo or verde.

Now that I think of it, if I just had some shredded chicken and some corn tortillas, I could make enchiladas.

Shit, I better get outside pronto. I can feel myself dollaring up like something a fella might use in a stew.

‘Anti-fat-bastard cream there is none’

May 19, 2023May 19, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Almost a quarter-inch of rain in the past 48 hours! We’ll happily take this little gift from the gods, especially since there’s a chance the Rio will run dry again this year thanks to (a) dust on snow and (2) no storage for the early snowmelt.

The day dawned gray and gloomy, but by noontime Tlaloc had shut off the water works, and I was feeling a tad cabin-feverish and a bit peckish all simultaneous-like.

“Should we go for a jiggety-jog or segue straight into lunch?” I asked Herself.

“A jiggety-jog it is. And keep up, you fat bastard,” she replied, having just learned that “The Full Monty” is getting a 25-years-later reboot as an eight-episode Disney+ TV miniseries.

Herself didn’t actually address Your Humble Narrator in this disrespectful fashion, of course.

The “fat bastard” line is from “The Full Monty” and spoken by the slender Gaz, who is taunting portly Dave during a run as they try to get in shape for a one-off gig as bargain-basement Chippendales.

The original flick also contains a memorable line from Dave: “Anti-wrinkle cream there may be, but anti-fat-bastard cream there is none.”

Truer words, etc.

Sweet 16?

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

I was not expecting to see 16° on the old weather widget when I stumbled into the kitchen this morning.

Six-fuggin’-teen? On April 5? Was Dante right? Hell is cold? Can we crank up the heat a smidgen, please, Beelzebub, you old devil? I know, I know, I’ve been bad, but shit, if I wanted to freeze my huevos off before coffee I’d still be doing my sinning in that hillside hacienda outside Weirdcliffe, where I had a stove, ax, and woodpile.

Still, could be worse. I spoke with Consigliere Pelkey yesterday and he said that I-80 was closed between Laramie and Cheyenne due to vile weather, th’owin’ a hitch inta his gitalong as regards a doctor’s appointment in the capital city.

My old Bicycle Retailer comrade Steve Frothingham checked in from the People’s Republic of Boul-Daire to report that it was “puking snow” in his neck of the Woke Woods.

We passed a few pleasant moments discussing jurisprudence and journalism in Manhattan and agreed that if a courtroom artist were required we wanted Ralph Steadman, since S. Clay Wilson is unavailable, being dead.

Today, meanwhile, rather than skulk around indoors and risk absorbing some news, I decided to motor around and about The Duck! City, scratch a few chores off the to-do list, wait for the desert to assert itself.

By midafternoon, the temperature finally inched into the low 40s, and I finally ventured out for a leisurely 5K on the trails, though asthma and allergies (juniper, poplar, elm, etc.) had me sounding like a secondhand accordion in the mitts of an unruly middle-schooler with a tin ear.

Tonight the wizards are calling for another hard freeze. I didn’t hear them calling yesterday, but I’ve heard them this time and unplugged the two hoses I use to water the trees.

“These temperatures are cold enough to kill most early season vegetation,” says the National Weather Service.

Good. Maybe they’ll croak the junipers, poplars, and elms. A man needs some breathing room.