Tag: foothills trails

Up the Wazoo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
It’s always happy trails on the Blue Wazoo.

DeeCee being a rather long slog via Subaru, I decided I’d settle for a short mood-altering run on the neighborhood trails yesterday.

I won’t travel by air, as you know. And if I did, the airline probably wouldn’t let me take my torch and pitchfork, even as checked baggage.

Anyway, what do I know about taxidermy? Sure, I could collect a few souvenir heads in our nation’s capital with my handy-dandy Gomboy folding saw, but then what? The TSA says you can board a plane with fresh meat, but they may decide to add a cautionary note about “the severed heads of Supreme Court justices” after running your lumpy carry-on through the scanner twice because they didn’t believe what they saw on the first pass.

And if you do manage to make it home without incident, preserving and mounting your prizes for display in the den is not a chore you want to hand off to anyone who doesn’t owe you a really big favor.

Shucks, even a six-pack of ears pinned to a cork board in the garage can make for some pointed conversations you’d rather not have, even if you explain that the fuckers never used them for listening, only to keep their trifocals from falling into their black robes or onto the bench, and anyway, with the fat stacks of attaboys they get from their rich pals they can have a new pair grafted on before you can say, “Case dismissed.”

So, yeah. Herself and I went for a nice trail run in the sunshine, and afterward I decided I was still not in the mood to update myself on the latest news, so I changed costumes and took the Voodoo Wazoo for an enjoyable 90 minutes of light gnar-shredding in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Today I see the courtroom drama has shifted back to Manhattan. Time for another run. I can’t remember where I put that saw.

Salty dog

~ 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.