Preparing for a 3,100-mile tour

 Some people really get out there and do it, and it is my privilege to do what I can to support them. I mean, I get paid, but the stakes seem higher when the rider is going for weeks, especially without a support vehicle.

Back in the 1990s I got to do some work for Roff Smith before he rode around -- and I do mean around -- Australia. We gave him shop water bottles with our logo, but I don't think they made it into any of the National Geographic photos.

Roff was experienced enough to be able to do a lot of his own work. And his bike had bar-end shifters, no index-only brifter nonsense. These are two helpful attributes for anyone who wants to experience the full freedom of bicycling.

Our current customer's Adventure Cycling Southern Tier Route of roughly 3,100 miles falls well short of Smith's 10,000 mile circuit around the smallest continent, but it's hardly trivial. Although the ride is a few months away, he wants some preventive work done on his Surly Disc Trucker. Chain. Cassette. Shift cables. Spare spokes. I suggested he have disc brake pads with him rather than hoping he finds them when or if he needs them. His brakes take a common shape, but you can't count on finding the exact jigsaw puzzle piece you need anywhere you stop.

This bike also has brifters. With only a 9-speed cassette, the shifting isn't as temperamental as with ten and higher, but it still depends on precise adjustment of cable tension and cable movement to line up with each gear. As I have stated tiresomely often, in a mechanical system operated by cables, the best option is to use 5mm housing and 1.1mm slick stainless cables. Shimano's stock cables are 1.2, and come with one of two types of coating: the brown stuff that turns into a lint clog, or the green stuff that breaks up into bits of sand. These are always fitted through 4mm cable housing, which is like deliberately constricting your tendons. Quite often, the ferrules on the ends of the housing have rubber seals or long nozzles on the end of them, ostensibly to eliminate dirt. These add even more friction than the fat cable in the undersized housing already provided. The return springs of the derailleurs have to overcome all the drag of those supposed advantages in order to arrive under the cog of your choice.

Because he was getting new handlebar tape, this was our opportunity to strip out the stock 4mm housing that runs under the tape. In checking the rest of the shifting system, I noticed that the stock derailleur had developed some slop. If he was only riding locally I would have let it go, but I questioned whether it would hold up through the rest of his training and then the tour itself. The Shimano Alivio RD-M3100 derailleur has a lot of plastic parts. The pivots in the main body look like aluminum rivets, but even the ostensibly softer metal wears quickly on the plastic, so the derailleur develops increasing play. The shifters have to pull all that together before the cable can move the derailleur to the next gear. Because the industry keeps trying to pull more money out of its addicts, they keep adding gears to the cassette and messing with compatibility, so that older systems, or systems that hang onto lower cog counts, get stuck with cheaper and cheaper parts. I don't mean affordable quality. I mean plastic junk that wears out rapidly. This is supposed to encourage consumers to buy the fabulously expensive, top of the line new junk, which also wears out rapidly, but is way more fashionable.

We had a different Alivio derailleur in stock that matched the parameters of his drivetrain and had more metal in it, but the specs say that it is compatible with Shimano mountain shifters, not road. It has also been discontinued since we brought it into inventory a couple of years ago. This led to some research and anxiety, because sometimes you can ignore the specs, and sometimes you can't. With ten speeds and up, more often you can't. With nine...maybe. The specs for the OEM derailleur said that it wasn't compatible with road shifters either, and yet there it was, on the other end of the cable from Sora brifters. Details matter: the OEM derailleur had the cable leading straight into it through a short piece of housing on the chainstay, whereas the new one led the cable around to the back of the derailleur. If the new derailleur turned out not to work with these shifters, do we order a new plastic crappy one that will wear out sooner but at least be starting fresh, or try to dig up a better one, leaving the rider either without his bike or cutting the housing to the old derailleur, meaning that we would have to replace both cable and housing as soon as a new, better derailleur came in?

Fortunately, the derailleur we had worked with his brifters. It didn't settle right in, though. I had to find the sweet zone for cable tension to get the full range. All index shifting needs to be dialed in, but some always seems to hover at the edge of neurotic collapse.

The answer as always is friction shifting. Learn the ancient ways, and you can stuff any wheel in there that fits. It demands more and more precision if you're trying to shift manually across a crowded cassette of 12 sheet metal cogs, but in friction you won't need to play any of their drive train games. Go back to ten, nine, eight. Get a chain with a little more metal in it, that lasts longer. Get a front derailleur again, and a double or triple crank. Rediscover why those were actually good. When you shift by feel rather than by click, you're less likely to cut your chain by jamming a front shift, which was a major complaint among ham-fisted and gimmick-dependent consumers nurtured by an industry high on its own cleverness.

Note: none of this freedom applies to the world of racing or to technical mountain biking, in which the very style of the activity demands that you buy and destroy whatever gear is necessary to stay in the game. But these are also not the highest and best uses of bicycle technology. 

While we're on this digression, remember that racers will race on whatever they have. If none of this current crap existed, racer personalities would push their limits on simpler gear. Powerful forces far from the bikes themselves drive the competition in more expensive directions. It's entertainment. It's corporate marketing. Big Race is big business, and it needs flash and excitement.

Surly touring bikes used to come with an XT derailleur, when you could get a 9-speed XT derailleur. That was solid stuff, with little or no plastic in it. Now your choices in index-compatible 9-speed are very limited, and none are as nicely made as the old XT. However, shifting in friction, you can use an older derailleur for 8-speed or a newer derailleur intended for ten, and just shift it to where you need it, clickless. Fewer than 8 speeds might not have the total swing to cover an eight-speed cassette. You might as well have eight, since all the freehub bodies are wide enough to accommodate it, and the rear wheel is dished for it. When 8-speed first came out, there was debate about whether the wheel being dished more would make it less stable. Rims with offset spoke holes came out to address this, but there was no massive epidemic of collapsing rear wheels whether offset rims were used or not.

Disc brakes add a new twist to wheel building. Formerly, front wheels generally had the same spoke length on both sides of the hub, while rear wheels had slightly shorter spokes on the drive side. Sizing spare spokes for this customer, I discovered that the rear wheel has the same spoke length on both sides, because the flanges of the hub are set inward to fit the freehub body on one side and the brake rotor on the other. The front wheel has two different spoke lengths, because the brake rotor on the left takes up space. The flanges on both wheels are set much closer together than on wheels from the last century, or early parts of this one. To minimize the effect, rear axle widths have gone from 130 road and 135 mountain to 142, 148, and up. Through-axles dominate the hub market, fixing the rear wheel position where they tell you is best. Another piece of freedom lost to their claimed efficiency.

Any off-the-rack bike you buy now will have parts from what is currently available OEM new. Thus, Surly had to settle for a plastic facsimile of the solid old XT in order to retain the reliable, durable 9-speed chain and conventional drivetrain they wanted on a reliable, durable touring bike.

Microshift offers some 9-speed derailleur options with more metal in them, but I don't fully trust their quality and function. I would rather find some old Shimano or Suntour, or even Campy, and adapt it. As derailleurs in general get really weird to match the current obsession with huge gear ranges in the back, it's hard to find any new, well made options for someone who wants to refuse that technology. Front derailleurs also become more weird and scarce as an industry dealing with declining revenues weds itself to a particular style that they hope will bait in at least a few new users as well as enticing the old ones.

I'm wicked old, and they haven't enticed me with a damn thing in about 20 years.

Just as in the 1970s people rode across the country on their clunky Schwinns and entry-level ten-speeds from Britain, Europe, and Japan, so do riders today make their journeys on the tailored offerings of the modern industry, with all of its shortcomings. Bike categories are more defined -- I hesitate to say  better defined -- than they were in the 1970s, so "touring" bikes are automatically a step up from the true entry level. Their problems are more intentional than the mere quality control and weight problems that afflicted mass-produced affordable bikes back then.

I'd say you can make up your own mind about any and all of what is marketed to you these days, except that the realities of mass production mean that a lot of it is forced down your throat if you don't choose quickly enough and stock up on things you like while the industry still finds it economical to make them. It's hard to get an industry to back up and start over, resuming large-scale production of things it has grown bored with, and trained consumers to reject.

Every generation looks for improvement in the things that appeal to it. Every generation bases its sense of progress on what it noticed when it first started paying attention. A baby born today won't automatically come with a full understanding of what went before. That's highly inefficient for progress as a species, but it's the reality of our limited perception. We need people to fully understand history at the same time that we keep hyperactively making more of it. 

Buttery smooth

 

Buttery smooth. Those words kept forming in my mind as I rode this bike on its shakedown, on the grueling and not altogether enjoyable Gilford run after dropping my car off for spring service. The route is tediously familiar, with its hills and its tight, narrow stretches shoulder to fender with drivers indifferent to your survival, but it's also peaceful and beautiful for quite long portions. And, being so familiar, it was a perfect proving ground to test out this bike.

I figured it would be great, because the frame is a version of  the Surly Cross Check. If I could only own one bike, it would be a Surly Cross Check. Agile on pavement, but sure-footed on dirt, built of reliable steel and configured so that it can be adapted to many options, it's not a bike to take out with the local hammerheads on a take-no-prisoners road ride, but it will definitely get you most places you want to go if there's a mapped public right of way to get there. I built my first one to make the dirt variations of my commuting route more pleasant. It has evolved into a practical beast, with generator lighting. In the process it became a little hefty. Surly bikes aren't for weight weenies anyway. Add a few pounds of practical accessories and the package bulks up even more. 

The Traveler's Check frame on which today's bike was built has S&S couplers so that the bike can be taken apart and fit into a checkable standard size piece of luggage. I bought it when I had delusions of traveling. The first build was kind of slapped together: hence that saddle. That thing came off the bike as soon as I got home. Blue Version 1 was a fixed gear, the simplest to take apart and reassemble in a train station or airline terminal for short hops around a destination city. But that never happened, and now it won't. So I had a frame ready to build up without some of the heavy add-ons that encumber my daily commuter, to recapture some of the comfortable nimbleness of the original 'Check.

Buttery smooth. The bike rode like an extension of my body. I shouldn't be surprised, since I had built it to the same dimensions as its older sibling, but I had set the bars a little higher by leaving the fork a little longer. I was looking ahead to its touring configuration, where I might want to sit up just a little more, to take in the scenery. Fortunately, it's not so high that it kills the handling. In fact, the stem attaches higher, but drops more than on the other bike, so the bar height nets out about the same.

The first thing I noticed was that the bike seemed twitchier. But twitchier soon settled down to "more responsive." The commuter has a heavy dynamo front wheel. The SRAM dyno hub wasn't the slickest on the market to begin with, and now it's probably pushing ten years old. If I could scrape up the coin for a Schmidt I would. A generator hub has some rolling resistance all the time from the magnets. This increases slightly when the lights are switched on. You get used to that, but notice the difference on a bike that doesn't have it. Hence the impression of twitchiness on the bike with the plain front hub.

I use the lights in daylight in certain situations to enhance visibility in a few intersections where the sight lines make it worthwhile. Not having them felt like a bit of a loss. I had blinky lights for front and rear, but I like being able to pair those up with a full-size, solid beam headlight to present a more vehicular impression as I bomb into a crossroads or shoot a stretch of town traffic where drivers like to pop out of parking lot exits when they don't think anyone who can hurt them is coming. So maybe I get a more aggressive battery light for the handlebars of Blue 2.0.

I feel my age. I'm in some kind of pain most of the time. That made the performance of Blue 2.0 all the more impressive. I felt pretty crappy, but still peppy because the geometry and setup of the bike supported me so well.

The gearing is mostly the same between the two bikes. On the commuter -- code named Green now -- I have 30-36-48 for chainrings and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette of 13-15-17-19-21-24-27-30. On Blue it's 28-36-48 in the front and a Frankencogged 8-speed cassette with the same cogs from 13 to 24, leading up to a 28 and a 32. I anticipated riding with a touring load, which could still happen. So the mid-range cruising gears were the same. Shift points didn't change, cadence wasn't thrown off. I might re-gear Green a little bit, though maybe not exactly the same. The great thing about friction shifting and separate cogs is that you can really customize your gearing to your specific physical and riding conditions. This adaptability has been largely eliminated by the industry. Many technolemmings have never experienced it.

The car is taking longer than planned. I'm living without it for a couple of days. That's not as casual an undertaking as it was, but you do what you have to do. I wish I still believed in pain relievers. Today's ride is Green, the fully lighted commuter, because -- hopefully -- I'll be heading out on the hell run to Gilford after work, and the sun could be setting by the time I get to the garage to retrieve my motor vehicle.

Stuff I like

Our customer building up a fleet of Surly bikes added a Troll to the lineup this summer. Building a Surly is always a welcome relief from the crustaceans of the Carboniferous Period. I could do it all day, every day, with a big smile. So whenever I get to, it's a treat.

What the customer has requested is a more formal and premeditated version of the commuter I built from my old mountain bike. The frame has all the Surly amenities for versatility, but the underlying concept is the same as my conversion.

Our customer is not a large man. He's a good match for a frame designed around 26-inch wheels. As a gentleman tourist, he appreciates the practicality of fenders.

The bikepacking movement has led to some intriguing options in handlebars. I might even try a set of these on my commuter. Maybe after the customer has had a chance to get the tires good and dirty I'll take the bike for a test cruise. The sweep of the bars puts the control setup definitely more in the touring than the sport category.

The color of the Troll reminds me of my first car. It looks sort of brown in some light, and a warm orange when the sun hits it.

For comparison, here's my knocked-together rig, built on an old Gary Fisher Aquila. There are thousands like it on the roads and trails.

For the bikepacking market, the Troll comes with ample braze-ons for accessory attachment. A conscientious assembly includes greasing the threads for all these accessory attachment points. A normal bike will have anywhere from two to maybe 6. The Troll has thirty. Eighteen of them are on the fork.

Here I am, playing a quick 18 holes after lunch:

The Troll has disc brakes, but Surly provides the posts for rim brakes if desired. With dual-cable levers, a rider could run both! And I would be really tempted to have mysterious little electrical connectors dangling off of any accessory bolts I wasn't using for something else.

This customer has only ridden drop-bar bikes. He has not developed techniques and reflexes for a bike based on the traditional mountain bike. In addition to the usual adjustments on a new bike, we'll have to do a little orientation. The sensations of powering and steering a bike in the dirt have become so automatic for me that I don't think about them. But I notice the difference. He'll catch on quickly. I do want to see how different the handling is with those swept bars. Particularly in quick, tight turns -- such as one must do when crossing the rails on the Cotton Valley Trail -- I wonder if the bike won't feel as nimble as mine.

People ride the CVT on all sorts of sluggish junk. I'm just fussy. And this customer does not live very near Wolfeboro, so he will do most of his trail riding on a path that does not have to dance around over active rail lines.

A Tool in Tamworth

Big G has retired from the bike game. Working in the business was interfering with his riding. He also has a private pilot's license, and the demands of shop life were really cutting into his time for that.

He put the knobbies back on his Cross Check so he could explore the many unpaved roads around here. Today he instigated a trip in Tamworth, starting at Chocorua Lake, just off of Route 16.

Mount Chocorua is a beautiful, craggy peak, frequently photographed from the shore of Chocorua Lake.

Chocorua Lake Road used to be called Fowler's Mill Road all the way from Route 16 to Route 113A. Now it's Chocorua Lake Road from the Route 16 end and Fowler's Mill Road from the other end. Must be a 911 thing. It's dirt, and some of it is not maintained in winter, which can mean it's pretty rough. We're a couple of months out of winter now. Everything was pretty firm.

My own Cross Check is set up for commuting. I didn't want to risk slicing a tire on a sharp stone when I have to ride it to work the next day, so I brought the trusty mountain bike. It has commuting conversions as well, but it also has some nice old gnarly Continental mountain bike tires.

Almost the entire route was unpaved, so I figured I wouldn't get dropped. Besides, we were out to enjoy the nice weather and spring scenery.

Fowler's Mill/Chocorua Lake Road climbs steadily, and then steeply, to a plateau with enhanced views where land has been cleared.

You get another angle on Chocorua, across this field full of big, honkin' rocks.

Looking down the road, you can see Whiteface and Passaconaway, two more peaks in the Eastern Sandwich Range. Those are both on the 4000-footer list, for you peak baggers. Poor little Chocorua isn't even on the Hundred Highest list.

What goes up gets to come down. Continuing westward, the road dropped off the plateau and we dropped off with it. Where it levels out, the road to the Liberty Trail parking cuts off to the northward. This also provides access to the Brook Trail, another route up the mountain, and the Bolles Trail, which ascends to a saddle west of Chocorua, and descends to the Kancamagus Highway.

After a side jaunt to check out the trail head we resumed our meander on Fowler's Mill Road. That brought us to Route 113A for a few yards to pick up the Old Mail Road.

Old Mail Road to Gardner Hill Road. Gardner Hill Road to Route 113 (as distinct from 113A). Route 113 to Philbrook Neighborhood Road (depicted simply as Philbrick Road on this map). Then we were supposed to take Loring Road, but we stayed on Philbrook all the way back to Fowler's Mill Road instead.

Down near Chocorua Lake are some classic New England summer homes. Tucked among large trees, they evoke the era when families with the means to do so would go to their summer retreat, to rough it, canoeing and hiking in the wholesome atmosphere of the mountains. Generations carried on the tradition, but I wonder now how many can maintain a place, or would be satisfied with such simple pleasures. I know the practice is dwindling, just as the real rural life of year-round inhabitants has mutated with time, technology, population pressures, and the rolling waves of the economy.

It's a relief to disappear on a back road and think about geological time, surrounded by surviving scenes of slower times.

Sometimes the old days really were good

A couple of bike tourists have left me their Sevens to reconfigure with 9-speed cassettes, triple cranks and barcon shifters. This is after a few years riding with the carbon compact cranks, 10-speed cassettes, and SRAM Double Tap shifters originally installed.

They came in originally because one of the shifter paddles had snapped off on one of those SRAM Double Tap shifters, they way they are prone to do. SRAM offers the shifter paddle as a replacement part, but only below the point at which they always snap off.

Any of my regular readers will know how I scoff at the brifter concept for anyone but a dedicated racer. The fact that spell check produces the word "grifter" when it flags brifter as a misspelling seems highly appropriate. Oh boy! More expensive crap to break! And don't even think about fixing it yourself.

Accustomed to vehicles that can't be repaired and that use mysterious assemblies that function perfectly until they suddenly don't function at all, modern riders have been well trained to avoid doing much of their own maintenance and repair. You can still change a tire, dial in your index shifting, and lube a chain, but don't mess with anything else.

As part of the design process, I pored over gear charts to come up with cassettes that would offer helpful gear intervals int he ranges these riders will actually use. I came up with a good range on a 9-speed 13-36, with 26-36-48 chainrings, that had no duplicates (one, actually, but not in a combination one should use) and gave closer spacing in the low range than the high range. Unfortunately, we would have to buy at least four cassettes, plus eight or ten Miche cogs, to get two cassettes with the desired cog sizes.

Here's where the olden days were better than nowadays: When cassettes were introduced by Shimano around 1980, they offered a rider complete flexibility to spec and assemble gear ranges suited to individual need or desire. This could still be true, but some bean counter figured out that it was cheaper for the company to offer specific cassettes with unchangeable ranges. The free-range cog has nearly vanished.

Miche offers complete custom capability, but only from 11 to 29 teeth.

My customers could use some sort of dinky crank with a tiny BCD, but 64-104 or 110-74 are widely available in case of a breakdown in the boonier parts of the world. So topping out at 29 is not the best option.

Having discovered that the cogs for my ideal cassettes will be expensive to collect, I'll dig back into the gear charts and figure out how to make the best of what the industry forces on us. With the War on Front Derailleurs, some crazy wide-range cassettes are showing up. I sketched out a few ideas for an 18-speed cassette, just to try to get ahead of the trend by a year or two. Maybe out of all the horseshit and chaos I'll find something off the shelf that does most of what I had put together in my original design.

Crankwise, the workhorse Deore triple seems like the best choice. I like the old reliable Sugino XD 600, but I wonder when the square tapered bottom bracket axle will finally disappear. I should start stockpiling.

It's the time of year when the weather can change radically from one day to the next. It snowed all day today, only netting a couple of inches. The National Weather Service outlook for December sets up parameters that could bring snow, but their three-month outlook inclines toward more drought or possibly rain. Attempts to park and ride or park and ski fail because no one plows out places to park. The trip to work becomes all or nothing.

For the past several years I have put studded tires on my path commuter, and then either had bare ground or deep snow to deal with. Installing them is still the signal that winter is really here.

Recreation Nation

I can only take my best guess what the human species will need - aside from mass sterilization -- to enjoy life in  *The Future*. I gave it my best shot, focusing on non-motorized recreation, because we were a recreation nation, for all our protestations of industrious work addiction. People worked hard to play hard. Buy a speedboat, a jet ski, an RV, a dirt bike. Get tickets to a professional sports event.

The alternative energy folks and the neo-agriculturalists offer lifestyle solutions that do not directly attack the motor mentality. You can kill cyclists on the road just as effectively with a hybrid or full electric vehicle, and still have a modest carbon footprint. Indeed, kill enough people with your electric vehicle and you will be carbon-negative, because you've reduced the population while avoiding your own fossil fuel use.

All motorized transportation and entertainment can be greened up. Electricity is the rage right now. It still has to be generated, but we'll get that tidied up, too. Try an electric speedboat!

I have a feeling that recreation may be at the top of a declining slope. In fact, it has probably started down it. I see fewer people at play at the theme park I think of as Wolfe Disney World. It's not just traffic in our store. The surges are shorter and smaller in every activity.

Even the annual herd migration known as Motorcycle Week seems to have been shrinking steadily. This year, most of the participants I saw made me think, "born to be wild...a looooong time ago." Now their tune is "Born to be Wide."

We could never have maintained the pace we set in the 1980s and '90s. I rode that wave, but it scared me then, because I knew it had to crash on the shore eventually. The lifestyle I envisioned when I was inexperienced enough to believe society's problems were not only soluble, but on the way to being solved, used pedal power extensively. Pedal to work. Pedal on errands. Pedal on vacation. A few years of it showed me how much nearly everyone else hated that idea, and hated people like me for being out there in the way. But maybe its time will come. More likely we'll go straight from the explosive end of the machine age right back into the stone age, but I'll be out there riding in any case.

I have a lot of trouble getting myself just to play. The commute serves multiple purposes: exercise, recreation of a sort, and cheap transportation. Meanwhile, my livelihood depends on other people recreating, since that makes up the vast majority of bike use, and all cross-country skiing.

Memory of meals missed

One afternoon, in the redwood forest, my traveling companion and I had set up our tent in the bargain campsite provided by the California parks department and gone for a little wander among the enormous trunks soaring up to a canopy you could sort of forget about as you examined the vivid green undergrowth in the filtered light. Trees that big seem more like topographical than botanical features.

We returned to find other campers setting up. One was a German woman with a blonde crew cut, riding a touring bike. The others were a couple of hitchhikers, a man in his 20s and a woman who appeared barely old enough to qualify for the description. The road of summer is full of travelers trying their wings for better or for worse.

The young man had just finished a summer stint cooking at an inn in Vermont. He and his companion had traveled across the country swiftly enough to arrive in the redwoods in early September. Still summer, but only technically, the time just after Labor Day is a great one for traveling.

While my own companion and I had given up on culinary gumption and opted for a big skillet full of scrambled eggs, we soon regretted our haste as we watched the young chef whip up something that looked and smelled far more elaborate over the same fire pit.

To make matters worse, he could play guitar and sing. This he demonstrated after supper. We had been joined by a soft-spoken woman with long, straight hair, who asked if anyone minded if she did some background vocals. My own companion, a guitarist and singer herself, stayed in the music circle. I, possessed of only grunts and croaks, wandered the periphery of the firelight, still in awe of the immense forest. The music drifted over me with the flickers of firelight as I tripped over unseen obstacles and got up again, still in the trance of that random convergence of talents in this enchanted place.

Yeah, at the time I also felt like a boring, miserable toad with nothing to contribute. But I was taking it all in anyway.

The next morning, my companion and I had to move on. We had a deadline in Eugene, Oregon, and a few hundred more miles to cover. The chef was making blueberry pancakes.

Several days later, in Oregon, under steady rain, we converged with the crewcut German woman again. I liked her because her watchword was "coffee." "Coffee? Coffee?" she would ask. Even a big jar of instant looked fine to a caffeine freak pushing a loaded bike over wet roads and bunking down in a wet tent each night.

Her name was Marianne. She told us that she had stayed two more days in the redwoods with the chef and his girlfriend, emerging only to go to the little grocery store nearby to get ingredients for the chef's next creation. She said she finally tore herself away because she realized her bike shorts were getting tight, and she was in danger of just settling in there for the winter. We traveled together for a couple of days, eating our own miserable fare, as she described the chef's creations, to give our imaginations a taste of that little bubble of feasting and conviviality.

She left us to rendezvous with other travelers. We rode onward in the rain, a little hungry.

Give me a reason

Right out of college I imagined I would take many long bike tours. First I wanted to ride across the United States. Then: up here, down there, wherever, I just wanted to ramble.

Plans for The Big One kept falling apart, but I did manage a three-week tour from just south of San Francisco to Eugene, Oregon. I've never taken another long tour, for various reasons, but I did come away from that one believing that three weeks is a great length. For the first few days you're getting settled in. In that middle week, you feel like you've been on the road forever and you see no end. It is your whole life. In the last week, the destination comes closer. You want to get there. You whittle the distance down. But still you have all that time behind you to give you strength and confidence.

At the moment, the shop schedule gives me three days off in a row. I do notice the loss of income, but I still wouldn't trade the three-day span. The middle day is a lot like that middle week. It has a timeless peace no two-day weekend can provide.

Thinking about the three-day span got me thinking about the three-week tour. That's when I realized that my one long tour was actually transportational. The other rider was doing an exchange year at the University of Oregon during her undergraduate career at Rutgers. Neither of us had the time or the budget to ride from New Jersey to Oregon, but she came up with the idea of riding from San Francisco. I was thinking about staying out there, so we were both relocating, not taking a mere vacation trip. It was point-to-point. Granted we could have done it faster and more cheaply by Greyhound. But we did want to get a tour out of it.

I never got around to riding another tour largely because I needed a better reason than just because I wanted to have done it. Maybe that will become a good enough reason before I'm too infirm to pull one off. Maybe I'll include a bike segment in my final crawl into the wilderness.

Riding in general, I need a reason. A cyclist has to interact with other road users, all of whom have an opinion about whether any sweaty mouth breather ought to be out there in the way. As much as I enjoy cycling, no ride is pure carefree fun because every ride brings the possibility of unpleasant interaction. It may be a low probability, but the chances are never ZERO. They're seldom even close to zero. So I calculate the value of a given ride against the cost of going without it.

This constant exposure to hostile opinion was a strong motive for taking up backpacking for my recreational journeys. I'll take natural hazards over human moods swings any day. But the bike is too good to give up completely.

When I toyed with racing I still commuted by bike. Mistakenly, I thought other road users would respect an athlete in training, which would excuse my long rambles in the countryside, and would respect a working man going to make his contribution to the economy, which would excuse my commuting. Turns out no one really picks up on those nuances. They just see some idiot slowing people down.

Racing was easy to give up. Commuting not so much. I'll defend that turf because everyone should have the right to try to live without being shackled to a motor vehicle. Racers have a right to the road, too, but their activity is consumerist. Touring is actually less consumerist because it blends with all sorts of transportation, education and cultural possibilities.

Shimano temporarily made a good touring shoe (maybe)

Someone sent me a link to what seemed to him like a good touring shoe by Giro. It looked okay, but on the same page I saw something that was as close to a real old-style touring shoe as you're going to find these days.

Meet the Shimano SH-UT70. Closeouts are all over the world of e-commerce. 

You're not going to find a walkable shoe without a place for SPD cleats. The cover for this one at least looks firmly secured.

I'm always afraid to point out when Shimano makes a good product because then they'll notice and kill it. It's like in King Lear (Act III Scene VII) where Gloucester's loyal servant points out that he still has one eye left. Cornwall takes care of that in a hurry. "Out, vile jelly!"

Yeah, I was a friggin' English major. Certainly explains a lot about my financial struggles.

Go to Shimano's consumer site and they've never heard of it, because it's not in the lineup for 2015, but apparently it was out there for a couple of years. The Duke of Cornwall has already squished it.

A really good toeclip-friendly touring shoe needs a tapered toe without bulky bumpers. It needs a sole without a thick rand coming up around the sides of the shoe. It needs a stiff sole, but not a thick sole. It should have laces rather than a rail yard of Velcro or ratchet straps. The UT70 has all of that. It looks a lot like really old-school leather cycling shoes that died out in the early 1980s with the rise of step-in road pedals.

My brother, who has one weird leg, found he could not use this pair of old Dettos I gave him back when they weren't that old. He returned them to me. I might glue some rubber strips to the sole to improve walking traction and use them for summer day tours on the classic steel road steed.

Some day I will have to do a weight comparison between a light leather shoe like this, or one of its mesh-upper heirs with an alloy-cage pedal and a toe strap, and a reinforced shoe for step-in pedals along with a mid-grade step-in pedal. By now, of course, exotic materials have brought the weight down on the step-in systems. But I bet there was a time in the middle of the evolution of shoes and pedals when there was no weight advantage at all with the step-in system.

In racing the two times toes straps were inconvenient were at the start of a race when a whole peloton was trying to clip in at once, and just before an attack, when racers would check to make sure their straps were tight. Nowadays they check to make sure their shoes are tight. And nothing warns them if their cleats are a bit run down and are going to pop out under the explosive load of a sprint. Woo Hoo! We goin' DOWN! SMACK! SCRAAAAAPE! Human crayon. Massive pileup. And a whole peloton fishing around for the cleat interface isn't a whole lot smoother than a whole bunch trying to flip up their toeclips and snug the straps. The step-in is slightly more convenient because it's hands-free, but no one talks about the other costs. It's another thing that isolates The Cyclist from regular people who ride bikes and want to blend efficiency with off-bike functionality.

If you choose to use a toothy pedal cage and no strap system you will want a thicker shoe sole made of material soft enough to allow the pedal cage to bite in, but not so soft that the cage chews the sole away too quickly. All this has been covered extensively by far more revered experts well before my humble observations. I mention it because I like to cover a topic thoroughly.

Take away the strap and you no longer have to shun bulky rands and toe bumpers. That does not mean such details are really useful, only that they are no longer an inconvenience. Personally, I don't believe that every casual shoe has to look like some kind of hiking boot.

Slow Ride

My older brother visited over Labor Day Weekend. He's the guy who got me into cycling (beyond normal "kid cycling") in the mid 1970s. His pursuit of varied interests has had him in and out of cycling ever since. So he knows what he's missing when he's missing it, but he's not always in peak form to pursue an opportunity when he gets it.

He showed up with his thrift store Raleigh road bike. I made a few modifications to it at his request a couple of years ago. It's a nice lugged frame road bike from the mid 1980s: simple, reliable and sporty. Unfortunately, his busy work schedule has had a bad effect on his power to weight ratio.

For our first ride we did a 15-mile loop in the late afternoon on Monday. We'd been thinking we'd go out earlier, but the night before he'd pulled a sweet little ukulele out of his sleeve. Not only did we stay up stupidly late plinking and dinking on the uke' and my mandolin, I also promoted the idea that he grab a quick lesson with expert ukulelist Shana Aisenberg, who lives nearby. Aisenberg literally wrote the book on ukulele -- co-wrote A book, anyway.

My brother is into all sorts of musical esoterica, and Shana earns her living at it. They hit it off, so the lesson went way overtime. Even though I could have taken him out for back-to-back days of long tongue-draggers over hilly but beautiful rural roads, he had a great time at Shana's and got some good stuff to work on in the coming months.

So there we were, heading out into the golden glory that precedes a September sunset.

Ordinarily I can cruise the Loon Lake Loop in under an hour. I'm not obsessed with average speed, but we weren't riding our bikes with full lighting, so sunset mattered. We did beat it, but I kept dropping him. I even COAST faster. What's up with that? He's got about 40 pounds on me. I don't have some kind of miracle bearings in my hubs.

The next day we got out earlier on a longer route around Effingham, to deliver some concert flyers for the cellist's gig in September. She's doing a program with a violinist and a pianist as part of a fundraising concert series to support the preservation of a local historic building.  The building is the Lord's Hill Meeting House. Our route took us up Lord's Hill. It's only moderate by local standards, but pretty stiff for a guy from the Washington, D.C., area especially when he hasn't been riding much. And on the way we did a lot of smaller climbs, which gave me plenty of time to compare the experience of riding painlessly slowly as opposed to my typical more assertive pace.

Launching off one dropoff into a steep descent I know well, I reflected on how often this same brother had seen me get squeegeed up when things didn't go well on a hurtling descent, starting when I was eight years old. Perhaps the fact that I continued to ride after that indicated that I did suffer brain damage.

It can't have been that bad. I never lost my sense of self preservaton. Sporty fast is one thing. Crazy fast is another.

"Remember, kids! Brain damage causes downhill mountain biking!"

Twenty-one miles took us almost two hours. This was beyond LSD. I felt antsy, but I also felt how nice it was to meander. To amble. To take in the sights.

Too often I feel pressed by my fellow road users to keep up the pace. Also, in commuter time trials or squeezing a ride into a full day's schedule I speed up to a half-fast pace neither full race nor relaxing. When I trained with a bit of knowledgeable guidance, my mentor warned against exactly that. He explained the value and the difference between hard days and easy days, and the various kinds of interval workout. But when one is not training, to be tested by fellow trainers at competitive events, it's easy to fall into slightly breathless haste most of the time.

No one hassled us riding slowly. Maybe we were fortunate in our route and the motorists who happened to pass. Different paces attract different types of criticism. Some occupants of motor vehicles may feel extroverted contempt when they see someone doodling along at a casual pace. Others may find a faster cyclist much more irritating because the motorist has to speed up so much more to complete the pass. Heavier motor traffic on more of a main road will breed more impatience.

I seldom ride slowly unless I'm with someone who forces me to do so. But any change of pace can be instructive. Maybe when I was 20 years younger I would have felt just as well rested doing the route at 18 mph instead of 11. But left to pick my pace I would have pushed for 20 back then.

I did notice years ago the difference between riding a pushy pace and an easy one. But my easy one seemed to attract more bullies than my faster one. I didn't have time to slow down even more to see if I could find a peaceful zone down there. I would invariably speed up to gain whatever respect I could. But I wondered at the time what my riding would be like when I could no longer speed up enough to get into the faster groove. On some roads it doesn't matter much. On others you really see the difference.

Going into the commuting week I resumed my normal pace. I don't ride impressively fast, it's just that the rides with my brother had been impressively slow. I'll be thinking about them for a long time.

Dreams deferred

I was going to say my bike had been across the country more times than I had, but that's not true. However, it did make one transcontinental journey unaccompanied. And in its four crossings (two round trips) I was not propelling it. It traveled by airplane, bus and freight truck.

Back in 1979, my best buddy and I were planning our transcon bike tour. The idea was still fairly novel, only three years after Bikecentennial. Prior to 1976, modern bike boomers were already knocking off The Big One, but it was still considered a pretty cool thing.

By the summer of 1979 in Annapolis I was acquiring the bike, some of the parts and saving some money at a menial job that would be easy to leave. My friend, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia, was doing the same. We had found the frames for our bikes in the shop in Alexandria where we would both later work another menial job that would be easy to leave. We set our sights on the following summer.

Late in the fall my buddy developed a sudden, inconvenient interest in higher education. He had busted out of the school system in his early teens to pursue his wide-ranging curiosity in the real world. His temperament did not mesh well with institutions. But now he felt the powerful need to go back and finish up with some institutional credentials.

I had a bachelors degree and had been unimpressed with its performance as an income enhancer but I couldn't talk him out of it.

The girlfriend I stumbled into in January of 1980 was a bike tourist, but she was also still entangled in the university system. The best we could manage was a 700-mile jaunt from San Francisco to Eugene, Oregon in September that year. So my bike flew to the west coast and rode the bus back east from Eugene when we kinda sorta broke up a little. We'd had a good trip, but she needed to get through the rest of college unburdened by a serious relationship. We maintained the fiction of connection, and that led to my bike's second west coast visit in April 1981. I was going to go out for a little early season training and some lovey dovin'. I'd sent the bike by UPS and was about to purchase the ticket when I got The Call, late at night Eastern Standard Time, that our lovey dovin' was over.

"Send my bike when it arrives," I requested. Then I hopped in the tub to shave my legs. I would train on my old bike until the well-traveled Eisentraut returned.

My best buddy, meanwhile, was still battling with the demons of community college. I started planning for a solo trip. Then I developed knee trouble from misaligned cleats I'd been using on my cyclocross-configured spare bike, so there went 1981. I also wanted to save more money, so I got another menial job that would be easy to leave, and looked toward 1982.

Racing had been good training in 1980 for the west coast tour. The 1982 season started out particularly well, since I was feeling suicidally bold. Then I got seriously smashed up in July. There went 1982. And July would have been late to start anyway.

One rational, sensible decision at a time the window closed for youthful quests like a transcon bike tour. To do it right I would want to take no less than two months, preferably closer to three. Why ride it like a record attempt? Take some time, see some stuff. You can't have the fetters of responsible adulthood on you for that.

In the fall of 1980, when my buddy and I were working in that bike shop in Alexandria, a family came in. Mom, Dad and lad had ridden from Oregon all together, taking the kid out of school for the year so they could have an unbeatable family bonding experience. That's one way to take the fetters with you. I forget what they'd done with their home base in Oregon, but they'd made arrangements. However, it took commitment by all of them. And with the best of intentions not everyone can make a commitment like that. Nor should they be scorned for a decision to forgo it.

Best buddy completed his education and started on a career of non-menial jobs he did not want to leave. Or when he did it was for another non-menial job. He married. They reproduced. They divorced. He followed various dreams and adventures, none of them pedal-powered.

A time or two since the early 1980s he has mentioned the transcon. I had one window in the mid 1990s when it could have gone well. I don't recall exactly where he was at the time, but I had no super incentive to chuck everything and go a-wandering by myself. I simply could have, with the right inducement. And then the window slid shut.

So here it is, the waning days of 2013 and best buddy sends me a message saying he's looking at 2014 to do the transcon. I inferred he would welcome my participation, but he did not say it directly. He has occasionally communicated to report things he was enjoying that I was obviously in no position to share, usually because I was hundreds of miles away. But assuming for the sake of argument that he was implicitly recruiting me, it has a piquant irony.

The cellist is a bike tourist, but her job and the commute to reach it preclude a lot of serious training. Also, her release and return dates from school bracket the touring season pretty tightly. So if I went I would be going separately. Do I really want to spend a couple of months away from home during the season she has the most time available? No.

The money. I have enough saved to do the trip in a style that would have been luxurious when I was in my 20s and was going to get on my bike at my doorstep on the east coast, ride to the west coast and probably ride back. When I was in my 20s I was nearly homeless already, although I could avoid seeming like a total vagrant by listing my parents' address as my home of record. I was also not above sleeping in a culvert or a cleft in a cliff. Nowadays I would pass on the culvert, although the cliff cleft is still a viable option. But I own a home, and it needs me when it needs me. As my colleague George -- a world traveler -- pointed out, whatever might be thinking about breaking will do so when you're a thousand miles away. He took his own major journeys when he and his wife were both unencumbered enough to take a motorcycle around Europe for a couple of months and other such getaways.

When you're getting away from it all you have to calculate how much "it all" you have and how far you want to get away from it. It's a whole lot easier when the answer to the first part is "not much" and to the second part is "it doesn't matter."

Initially intrigued by my buddy's idea, when I started putting practical logistics around the mid-trip fantasy scenarios it started getting unacceptably cumbersome.

When riding across the United States was going to be the first of many epic journeys it had practical aspects for all of its blatant impracticality. If I was really going to take wild trips and share them with a reading public, a transcon was a fine launching pad. But bad strategic decisions thwarted the vaguely-visualized plan to be such a traveler, aided in large part by the fact that I'm a wussy sociophobe who would have trouble asking for a tourniquet if I'd just severed an artery. At least I was. My imaginary cojones were always greater than my actual ones, as was my imaginary wit. After receiving a few gory gashes in public places I have learned to speak up quickly when first aid was slow or incompetent. But I still prefer to avoid people for the most part.

Actually, cojonically speaking, I do take risks. I even get back on the horse, so to speak, after a risk doesn't work out. Sometimes it takes longer than others. But it takes a lot to get me to talk to strangers outside of a known context like selling outdoor equipment or explaining myself to the arresting officer. And come to think of it, selling things and getting pulled over can both be uncomfortable contexts.

By the time I was 30 I could have traveled alone, and I've only gotten more comfortable alone since then. But by then it was too late. Or so it seemed, but belief makes it so. Everything has its price. This price needs to be fully calculated, not just approximated. What could possibly go wrong? And how would you feel if it did?

I do not say I'll get to it some day. I do not say I will never get to it. But I don't think 2014 is the year.

Mind you, best buddy has dangled the transcon carrot a time or two in the years  since the early 1980s and then tossed away, so I wait to see what transpires anyway. I've been putting together the kit to gear up the Traveler's Check for loaded touring already. I have only to accelerate the process a little. Initially I was going to transfer the multi-gear parts from the Cross Check, but now I think I would only transfer the dynamo front wheel. So the TC needs a front rack, a light set and that's about it. I have a crank, derailleurs and a rear brake and fenders. I need primary brake levers and I wouldn't mind getting a full set of Ortlieb paniers for front and rear. Odds and ends, really. Without the lights I could get it into a rideable configuration now. I might even have primary brake levers kicking around the bins somewhere.

I don't plan to go nowhere. I just don't know where.

Beyond statistics

A comment on this thread at People for Bikes stated that overtaking motorists strike cyclists in only about 10 percent of recorded collisions. The debate was about protected bike lanes. Should they be called that? Are they really protected? Are they really desirable? Every rider has an opinion.

Statistics provide no comfort on a real street. Overtaking crashes may be rare, but harsh and threatening expressions of opinion from overtaking motorists are all too common. They may be verbal or nonverbal. Nonverbal threats other than the car horn include close passing, extended objects, thrown objects, even car doors opened on moving vehicles, depending on local fashion. Also, seeing a motorist make a dangerous pass, crossing into oncoming traffic because they didn't want to wait, is an additional source of stress. Even a veteran traffic-herder loses control of the mob from time to time.

The worst case scenario in any human interaction is simply a bloodbath. We've proven time and again how bad we can get. So you can only plan for an expected statistical average of bad behavior and operator error. You hope you're somewhere else the day the dookie really hits the propeller. For many riders and potential riders that "somewhere else" is a path or lane designated as their sanctuary.

I can't find the other thought-provoking comment I read on a cycling site in which the commenter stated that bicyclists "aren't taken seriously" as part of the traffic mix. This was cited as a reason infractions against cyclists are not prosecuted vigorously in most cases, if they're prosecuted at all.

The debate over what to call a protected bike lane and the lack of support from law enforcement both stem from the vague legal status of bicycle riders. And that stems from the fact that people can start riding bikes shortly after they're old enough to walk and continue to do so until they are old and feeble.

I was riding my bicycle on the streets, transporting myself to school and friends' houses, from about age 7. I rode with the traffic flow. Within a few years I learned how to make the proper hand signals, although some of them felt dorky to me. But because the bike could go places cars couldn't I felt fully justified in riding through those spaces as well. Sometimes it included the sidewalk, though I never felt right there. And riding the wrong way on a one-way street just felt like asking for trouble. But cutting through a field, a park, a yard or parking lot, or riding down a path or alley just made sense. And it didn't just make sense to me. Adults did not usually raise a fuss unless they saw child riders too close to dangerous equipment or in areas posted as hazardous. Good thing no one saw me the day I discovered I could fit underneath the tractor-trailer parked behind the IGA in Thomaston, Maine.

Moving forward to the surge of bicycling in the 1970s, the Baby Boomers brought their youthful habits into their teens and early twenties. We rode across school and college campuses, down streets and alleys much as we did in grade school. Even though awareness was growing of the bicycle's potential for adventure travel and competitive recreation, the majority of riders just rode.

As the Baby Boom set precedents in everything else, so it was with traffic cycling. It had been a long time since that many people wanted to ride bikes as adults on the public rights of way in this country. It might even have been since the 19th Century, when bicyclists got the hoop rolling to have more roads paved to a decent standard at all.

In Europe and Great Britain bicycles had persisted as transportation. For a long time they were naturally incorporated into the heterogeneous flow. The devastation of the Second World War probably helped keep the bicycle a viable option because for many in the aftermath it was considered a step up even to have that. The United States, its prosperity virtually unchecked by the war, hit the gas and rolled onto highways increasingly tailored to motor vehicle needs.

Bicycling was what children did until they could get a license and a car. So the progression of Baby Boomer bicyclists from schoolkids to young adult cycle tourists, commuters and racers did not figure in transportation planning any more than long hair and bell bottoms did. I'm sure a lot of transportation authorities hoped it was all just a phase, like rebellion and pot smoking and that awful music. No need to plan for the future of something that has no future. Just wait for it to go away.

In other words, bicyclists weren't taken seriously. That has been the basis of bike-related policy ever since. Sure, things are changing now, but from a mindset that views the adult cyclist as frivolous, voluntarily choosing a more vulnerable, less practical (in their view) mode of transportation. Even the tourist and racer must figure into the transportation mix just as much as the motorhome, the boat trailer, the motorcycle and any other vehicle whose trip is not directly related to earning income or moving products.

What sets the cyclist apart from the other non-essential road users is the neglect under which we operate. Crackdowns by law enforcement on illegal and dangerous cycling behavior are rare enough to draw the attention of bloggers and cycling journalists. They are often motivated by retribution for large numbers of complaints lodged by motorists, alleging multiple infractions by the annoying pedalers, rather than by any institutional desire to see cycling go better for both cyclists and non-cyclists alike. The rest of the time a rider can do practically anything in front of law enforcement and barely elicit a yawn. We're just not worth the trouble. We're not serious.

Riders operate in such a gray area even their supporters don't know what to call it. Bike lane? Bike path? Cycle track? Separated? Protected? Protected how? And what do we do at intersections?

As a rural cyclist I see all the attention lavished on urban and suburban areas and wonder what anyone will do about us hicks in the sticks. Do you know how many lane miles of shoulderless, hilly, curvy, narrow roads there are in this country? They're all some of us have. Having seen the behavior of some drivers "from away" when they encounter a local rider, and dealt with the indigenous rednecks who cherish and refine their predatory instincts and have no patience with some idiot who chooses to wobble along on some bicycle, I wonder how much thought (and expense) anyone will have left to clean up our gray area after making the cities and towns safe for the short-haul riders.

Sabotage

Strong and skillful athletes who lack mechanical knowledge risk losing their investment in time, effort and money when they are unable to diagnose and repair what may be only minor problems with their equipment. If they reach a high enough level a support staff will be provided. But the rest of them have to depend on luck and the benevolence of strangers.

I do work for one triathlete who is a great person and a fierce competitor, but not well-versed in the mechanical side of things. As long as transportation is as simple as putting the bike on a rack and driving to the race site, preparing the bike is fairly simple. But she just went to St. Croix, which involved air transport. The bike had to be put in a travel case, which required some disassembly. It was a serious test of my shifter noodle arrangement for the cable housings going into the head tube cable stops.

My friend texted me the morning before the race to say she was not able to get her lowest gear. The problem could have been any number of things as a result of the removal and replacement of the handlebars and the resulting disruption of the cables, even though they were not disconnected from the derailleurs. Or it could have been an issue with the change from daily wheels to race day wheels, although we had tried to iron that out. If anything was going to go from ironed to wrinkled it was bound to happen when she was thousands of miles away on some island, right?

The last message she sent me said that she had found tech support and gotten the gears satisfactorily adjusted. That was still the day before the race. Then I heard nothing.

The fact that she didn't contact me right away after the race indicated she did not have triumphant news. When she did finally call, she told me that for some weird reason she had been unable to shift into the big chainring during the race itself, even though the bike seemed to be working fine the afternoon before.  I told her to get it to me immediately.

My nightmare was that somehow my unorthodox cable arrangement had not been as brilliant as it had looked to me and that its collapse had kept her from being able to shift into the big meat once she got to the top of the nasty climb that had made her focus on the lowest gear.

When I finally got a look at the bike the cables were oddly tangled at the head tube, but that turned out to be an illusion because the housings had been pulled, tucked and gathered in all the bike's travels in a way that was easily smoothed back into its intended configuration. But when I pulled the front shifter it would not move at all.

I looked for kinks or places the cable could be snagged. There were none. I tried to move the front derailleur cage by hand. It would not move at all. When I disconnected the cable the cage still would not move. It wasn't jammed on the chainring, as would happen if it had slipped down the seat tube. It was correctly aligned and not bent.

Someone had screwed the limit screws all the way in, blocking out the big ring. This cannot happen by accident. She would not have done it in a misguided attempt to fix the shifting. It had to have been done while the bike was racked in the first transition area.

When I told her she had been sabotaged she said, "Oh, yeah. That stuff happens all the time. Some of these people are really serious about this."

I did a web search on it. In the first page of results I found a forum thread about all the bad practical jokes and sleazy tricks triathletes had experienced at the hands of their fellow competitors. I didn't bother to look further. The information I found confirmed that it's a fairly common phenomenon. Apparently, competition  brings out the worst in a few people. The things they do to each other's equipment in transition areas must seem really clever to them. Basically, whoever did this to my friend stole the money she spent on air fare, accommodations and entry fees and robbed her of the irreplaceable time she put into training. They must be very proud.

Personally I avoid competitive events for a host of reasons, but I won't discourage people who feel they still want to try them. I like to do things in my own time, at my own pace, without a lot of other people's personalty problems involved. When someone's sleazery can totally nullify all your best efforts, whether it's by hooking you into a parking meter in a crit or slashing your tires or having teammates block you when you have no allies of your own you have to ask what the whole event is worth in time and aggravation. I really enjoy my utilitarian cycling and aimless rambles, going fast when the mood strikes and enjoying the scenery the rest of the time. But I'm a classic underachiever. The fact that I might underachieve for six hours in the saddle and rack up a hundred miles in the process doesn't alter the utterly frivolous basis of the endeavor.

I'm a big advocate of that kind of frivolity. I keep hoping a large number of people will suddenly notice the small number of us who are out there having fun not hurting anybody, and think it looks like something they want to do, too. Any number can play.

Some people have a lot of trouble absorbing mechanical concepts. They have other strengths to share. My friend might never be able to get herself out of a jam. There are a lot of little variables, so no one can memorize each separate solution. And I don't think the ability to analyze a mechanical problem can be taught to any- and everyone. It seems to elude some people forever. As I said, they have other strengths.

I'll go to races as tech support if anyone wants to pay my way.

Exotic cross-breeds and lovable mutts

When I started paying closer attention to bicycles in 1975 a bicycle was a means of personal expression. At least it seemed that way to me, because of the people around me when I got into it.

My older brother built his touring bike from a frame with the help of Diane, who lived in the neighborhood and went to the same high school I did. She had grown up in the family machine shop, so no piece of machinery was untouchable. In high school she could build a bike from all its separate components. In less than ten years after that she could build a bike starting with unconnected tubes and lugs.

Componentry came from an international buffet of enticing offerings, limited only by your budget and whatever nationalistic threading on your frame could not be changed. In the hands of Diane, even the paint job could acquire many custom details. She specialized for a while in painting frames to match the rider's favorite beer cans. When a proud mechanic at Dade Cycle got a Strawberry she dug out an old junker and painted it up as a Blueberry.

The notion of a bicycle as a collection of parts has stuck with me forever. Ideally the total will be greater than the sum of the parts, but everything was open to tweaking, regardless of your budget. A complete-gruppo bike looked boring. Okay, all Campy Record was nice, but we're talking the old days of Record, Nuovo Record and Super Record. Their stuff is nice now, but the exotic shifting systems and carbon fiber have added extra technological headaches to what used to be a simple process of buying something beautiful for the one you love.

It's hard to find that kind of individualistic quirkiness in a lot of commercial bike shops. The industry has invested a lot in making the machinery mysterious and astounding. Thirty speeds! Frame made out of resin-impregnated hummingbird eyelashes!

With boring regularity someone will look at a price tag and say, "for that kind of money, I want a MOTOR! Haw haw haw!"

Sadly, the product that intrigues consumers the most HAS a motor, as electric bicycles are hailed as the next big thing. That's right: the smokeless moped is luring some customers back to cycling after they'd given it up, or convincing them to try it for the first time because now you don't have to face the world alone. Your helpful electron friends are waiting to lend their power so you can zip along the bike path or lane without panting, sweating or a license.

Batteries weigh the same amount charged or flat. How about rocket-assist bikes? Oh wait, it's been done. But we haven't seen a production version yet. That will keep the drivers off your ass.

I've really digressed here. I started thinking about what I value about bikes and bicycling because I think a lot about what I would have in a shop of my own. Into this mix went the newest Surly offering, the 29-er Krampus. I thought about all the bikes I own and all the bikes I could own if I had the funds. And then with a sound like a needle being snatched off a record, which to my generation signifies the abrupt end of a thought or action, my minimalist side kicks in. Skrrrrrit! Hold it!

I know what bike I would have if I had one bike. I'd keep the Traveler's Check, built up with my commuting/light touring parts. But the human engine can be fitted to many vehicles. Each one of my bikes fills a niche. Each can be modified easily to conform to changing needs within that niche.  I have given up ultra-light weight and exotic materials with no regrets at all for the sake of appropriate weight and versatility. That's what I would sell. Rather than chase the fashions and ride the breaking wave of changing technology, I offer lasting value.

Hardly a recipe for riches. Perhaps not even a recipe for much business at all. We'll see if it ever gets tested. But the other day someone drove from Albany, NY, to buy a Surly Long Haul Trucker from me. No one has ever driven a distance like that to buy any other brand of bike. Maybe we just don't carry trendy enough shit. But I'll put my money on reliable bikes for practical riders. And I'll put practical riders on reliable bikes as long as I can get them to come here. Or to wherever I happen to be operating.

Cross Training Sucks

With the arrival of an unusable but significant amount of snow, followed by a deep freeze, it has become Nothing Season. Roads are icy while cross-country ski trails don't have enough base depth for the groomer to till the icy coating into skiable granules. This forces the working cyclist into creative training strategies.

Because the kind of weather we're having doesn't encourage anyone to come into our shop we have long hours in which to pursue other activities. Employees and our rare visitors track in a lot of sand and salt from the parking lot and walkways, so I decided to take a few minutes to vacuum it up.

The vacuum cleaner seemed suspiciously heavy. When I extracted the bag it felt like something you could pile on top of the levee to divert flood waters. When I searched for a replacement I found an empty package. Apparently one can't just nip down to the hardware store to get new bags for this model. Even though it was obviously full to capacity I would have to use it anyway. I did extract the big hair and lint wad hanging from the inlet before placing the sand bag back into the vacuum.

When I finished the bag weighed 12 pounds. I would have thought it was heavier. The floor is somewhat cleaner. On the plus side, I burned more calories and got a bit of an upper body workout maneuvering the overweight vacuum around the sales floor.

Late last week, temperatures plunged below zero for two nights. It was so chilly in the shop that I wore my Bob Cratchit gloves while doing inventory. The heat seems to operate by its own rules. Some days are chilly, regardless of whether the day outside is particularly frigid. Other days it pays to dress in layers you can easily shed. This does not seem to correspond to solar input or the compressors operating in the basement. Sometimes the wind direction seems to make things colder, but the same wind direction does not always have the same effect.

Who really cares?

Over the holiday weekend the place was so dead I was running up and down the back stairs. Then I was walking up and down the back stairs. Then I had to stretch my legs to keep from cramping. My colleague George wants to set up a trainer we can ride when things are quiet. That's starting to sound good. Usually I listen to motivating tunes through headphones but I might work up a good spin by pretending I can get away from the "easy listening" station that gets pumped through here all the doodah day. Sirius makes the computer get stupid and the CD player is busted. We can't get really sweaty, though.

I did order another light set from Peter White. For the moment I can install it on any bike that will take the dynamo wheel I already have. Later I can build the 26" version to get the trail commuter fully operational. I'm really starting to groove heavily on the racks, lights and fenders thing. It does raise the stakes in case of theft. That bothers me as it would bother anyone who was making beater car levels of investment in what is far from a beater bike. Theft is not a huge issue around here, but I do think globally while acting locally.

Inspiration and encouragement

My brother gave me two books by Jan Heine this Christmas. The Golden Age of Handbuilt Bicycles and The Competition Bicycle, a Photographic History are luscious picture books of fascinating machines.

The hand built bicycles draw mostly from the world of randonneurs. The bikes are sturdy and capable but many are surprisingly light, as are some of the "primitive" competition bikes from the 1920s and '30s. My long commute has always had more elements of a day tour than a race anyway. As I add equipment for bad weather and darkness I appreciate the technology used by riders going long distances without support.

I rode my first and only double century with a support car. I had never envisioned it as a supported ride but when I finally did it I needed to document it as efficiently as possible because I hoped to sell magazine articles about it. I needed the income because I was unemployed after the magazine I was working for as a staff writer was unable to produce a paycheck I could actually cash. I came up with a route and a concept that seemed like it would sell. It did, though never for enough to make a significant dent in my expenses.

On my second double century attempt, a companion and I got dropped off in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and set out for Effingham by a route we hoped would come out to 200 miles. I had measured on the only maps I had. We only rode 180 that day, but we did not feel like going after the other 20 when our shortfall became obvious as we came down from Crawford Notch. The important thing to us was that we did it without support, even dealing with one or two minor mechanical issues.

The rider who came with me on the Sherbrooke ride came with me on a number of other rides longer than 100 miles, all but one of them completely unsupported. We would start at my house or his and end up back there, hours later. On one ride we finished in Bridgton, Maine, where someone met us with a car. It was prearranged that way, not a result of rider or machine breakdown.

We had a racing mentality and racing bicycles. Some of the discomforts we endured would have been less of a problem if we had equipped our bikes with lights and fenders. My road bike is comfortable for long days, because it's vintage steel and not excruciatingly tight and steep like modern racing steeds, but it's still a racing bike. With the 700X28 tires on it, there's no room for fenders. It does not have rack eyelets the way my old Eisentraut Limited did. The Eisentraut was only a little tighter than the Cross Check. The 'Traut doesn't have the tire clearance that the Cross Check does, but it certainly had all-day comfort. Of the original frame, the chain stays and seat tube have each been replaced once and it's on its third fork. A split in the underside of the lower head lug has been filled with brass. I got the 1975 frame used in 1979 and rode it a lot until 1995. My torch wizard recommended after the last repair that I retire it to ceremonial use only. She provided the Tim Isaac Trek that now wears my motley assortment of heirloom components.

The constructeur bikes in the Heine volume take the concept of proprietary products farther than Shimano ever dreamed, yet somehow it's nowhere near as offensive. The bikes were unabashedly pricey. On the other hand, the builders did not turn around and try to yank more and more big money out of their customers with short warranties on fragile crap and constant changes to drive trains that made repair expensive and difficult. The bikes were built for endurance. The riders who bought them planned to own them for a long time and ride them long distances.

As my colleague George and I turned the pages of the book devoted to competitive bicycles he noticed what I had, that the bikes seemed less and less interesting as we approached the most recent examples. The art was replaced by an industrial feel, as if the engineering, the cold, hard numbers had taken the humanity out of the bikes. They are something to clip yourself into with mechanical latches and switch on a machinelike part of yourself to push them and yourself to your physical limit. It's glorious, but  -- in the execution -- joyless.

Even as I write that I recall exultation in a strong racing performance. Much of the time, though, it only feels really good after you stop. Then it feels better and better in recollection. When you're actually hammering there's a lot of re-swallowing puke and trying to control fear in tight corners in a large field or swooping down a steep descent with a bunch of suicidal maniacs.

The rando and camping bikes provide a lot of ideas for the budget-conscious rider to add to a practical bike built on a mass-produced frame. Options include vintage bikes from the 1970s and early 1980s, expensive and affordable steel frames from custom and production builders today and current examples from constructeurs working today. One approach to economy is to buy something truly first-class and take great care of it, like a man I know in Maine who bought a diesel Mercedes in 1974 and still has it.

I can't say how much endurance riding I'll get to do beyond my commute. For various reasons I can't even predict how much I'll be able to do my commute. I certainly  hope to, but you really never know what's going to happen to you next. The perspective of middle age has killed off the ignorant optimism of young adulthood. You can train and plan and say what you hope to do, but the resolve, however strong, may not be the strongest force in your life when the actual time comes.

In the meantime, the beautiful bikes of builders who cared about every detail reassure me that such people exist and they value some of the same things I do. The bikes are also just nice to look at.

It's Brilliant!

After nine months with the dynamo hub, I still love it. It adds weight and resistance that a removable battery light wouldn't, but you would have to remove the battery light to save the weight. So that just leaves resistance.

A transportation bike is going to weigh more than a sport or competition bike. Even mountain bikes are using exotic materials and evolved designs to reduce their weight compared to bikes with similar features from a decade or more ago. But the transportation category includes cargo bikes and heavy tourers, so we quit worrying excessively about every gram when we started down that path. Or road.

In 1980, when I worked at my first bike shop job and thought it was a temporary thing while I got a more illustrious career in order, our tribal elder and wise man -- he was 32 -- told us that a generator adds about a gear's worth of resistance when it is operating. He said this as he was installing the classic Union bottle generator onto the Motobecane he was configuring as a fixed-gear commuter with racks and fenders. We were all assembling different forms of the same thing. Most of us, with limited budgets and more of a focus on racing, used completely inadequate lights.

When I got a better job (relatively speaking) the following year, I invested in my own Union generator, and later acquired a Sanyo that drove off the tread face of the rear tire, rather than the sidewall. The increase in resistance never seemed as clear-cut as "a gear's worth." Does that mean a one-tooth jump or a larger increment? Even in the days of anemic incandescent bulbs it was great to have a fairly steady light. With Union's battery pack accessory it would even stay lit when the bike stopped. Any resistance it might have added was never enough to discourage me from flipping the lever to activate the light.

The specter of resistance still haunted me. When I moved to my present home and faced a 14- to 15-mile hilly ride each way for my commute I carried as little as possible on the bike or myself. The season of darkness ended my riding each year.

When powerful battery lights emerged as mountain bikers pushed into the darkness, they offered amazing illumination compared to any battery or generator light I had previously encountered. But then the problem of battery life became more important. When your light is already pretty feeble, its dimming seems less dramatic than when you start out with something that lets you read a newspaper at 50 yards when it's fresh, but leaves you groping in its dying glow when the charge runs out.

Rechargeable batteries needed careful handling to avoid over-discharging them and over charging them. As battery and charger technology evolved, we were told that running the batteries out was no longer a problem. So-called smart chargers eliminated the problem of frying the batteries if you left them baking too long as well. After using some of them I remain unconvinced, especially about the chargers.

At best, rechargeable batteries have a finite life anyway. They can only survive a certain number of charging cycles. So you go through a period of diminishing efficiency as the battery nears the end of its functional life.

Cold temperatures also diminish the power of many batteries. When I used my mountain biking light as a headlamp for night skiing I had to tuck the battery inside my clothing. When I took cold rides with the battery mounted to the bike it would suffer from the exposure. The battery lights I have on my helmet now don't work as well in sub-freezing temperatures. But then, who does?

The SRAM iLight hub dynamo I chose had very few reviews on the Internet compared to the Shimano, Sanyo and Schmidt hubs. Schmidt is the gold standard: expensive but excellent. Shimano is often rated as the next best choice. Shimano has prospered for decades making the second best item in many categories, bringing them to market at a price significantly lower than the top brand. Now they are recognized as a leader by many. Love 'em or loathe 'em, they do put out a lot of useful items along with container ship loads of technofascist whizbang garbage. I try to avoid them when I can because of that, but they're so huge that they end up providing things their major competitors won't.

Shimano made my job easier when choosing a hub because they did not offer a 36-hole hub that was not set up for disc brakes. SRAM did. So did Schmidt, but I work in a bike shop. I'm not pulling in Schmidt money. We have an account with Peter White, importer and distributor, but even with that it's an investment.

The SRAM seemed like it was a bit better than the Sanyo for comparable money. In particular it seemed to have lower drag with the light off. That resistance is the price you pay for unlimited light.

A 36-hole hub is probably overkill for my commuting routine. I went with something that strong in case I take a heavily loaded tour. Since I can imagine putting dynamo lighting on almost every bike I own now, I could see building on hubs with lower spoke counts for some of them.

Because I have not ridden with the Schmidt or Shimano hubs, I can't say if I would find them easier to push. The Schmidt certainly has impressive numbers, especially with the light turned off. However, I don't go without the advantages of the dynamo hub just because I could not afford the very best.

If you have a frame with a dynamo bracket already built onto the stays or fork, you can mount a sidewall generator like the Busch and Muller Dymotec 6 I used initially. I had problems maintaining alignment because of the tires I use and the way the add-on mounting bracket clamps the seat stay. Rather than continue to put a hurt on the frame tubing I went to the hub. With the sidewall generator you have zero resistance with the lights off. The downside is that you have to make specific arrangements to improve performance in wet weather. The wire-brush roller for wet conditions can mess up a tire pretty quickly if you don't have it lined up right. Also, most tires do not have a real dynamo track molded into the sidewall. German brands are more likely to, because of Germany's lighting requirements for transportation bikes. It's not a feature most tire makers highlight in their product descriptions in North America.

If you go with a dynamo instead of battery system you can get accessories to charge and power your small electronic devices so the electricity you produce during daylight won't go to waste. Some lights also come with daytime running lights now.

I have noticed that motorists show more respect when I run the big light. Something about its power seems to put me on a more equal footing. Fewer oncoming drivers leave their high beams on when I have a light that makes a bigger impact on them. It's aimed down where I need it, so it does not blind anyone driving toward me, but it clearly gets their attention even when I'm not running flashing lights on the handlebar to enhance visibility.

The wide Toplight Line Plus tail light probably helps for overtaking vehicles, but I never ride on the road without my full array of flashing tail lights as well. The Planet Bike Superflash pounds out a sharp warning that commands respect even when the sun is up. As the centerpiece of a night array with two flanking flashers it probably makes me look like an official vehicle. The bluish tint to the Beamers in flashing mode on the front of the bike may subliminally suggest police lights to drivers who chronically have a guilty conscience anyway.