The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator

 Ski season has been on-and-off as the little bits of snow come and go, separated by lazy lobes of polar vortex flopping down onto New England to blend nastily with the native east coast humidity. Somehow, the inherent moistness makes mere single digit and barely subzero cold bite hard enough to make visiting Alaskans bundle up. And yet interior heated spaces parch like Death Valley, along with your skin and nasal membranes.

Into this dropped our shipment of Fuji closeout bikes. My colleague started putting together a Jari 1.5, but was interrupted by enough in-season business that he didn't get very far. It ended up on my stand. Poking at it I saw that it had a large-diameter bottom bracket shell, but a thread-together bottom bracket. Intrigued, I checked the spec on the Fuji site. The specs say "FSA T47 threaded."

The Quality Bicycle Products website lists 26 entries under "BB-frame interface." I'm not shocked. I knew it was getting up there. I'd seen stuff about T47 several years ago, but hadn't seen it as OEM spec, probably because of the price points at which we usually sell. It's also satisfying to see the bike industry slinking back toward threaded bottom brackets after trying so hard to make the press-in concept work.  However, it has put a massive amount of product in the hands of hapless consumers who will have to deal with the quirks of their particular bike when it needs something that is no longer the darling of the industry and the tech lords of fashion. You might say it separates the true devotees from the dabblers, but what it really separates is hostages from their ransom.

The bike industry is like a crowded refrigerator. Forget to look in there for a few days and you don't know what sort of unappetizing glop will be growing. Twenty-six bottom bracket entries from 24 companies. In the headset category, 11 SHIS upper diameters; 12 SHIS lower; seven SHIS stem fits; six crown race diameters. Thirteen rear axle sizes just listed on QBP.

Don't forget to synchronize your chain with your chainring teeth and derailleur pulleys!

The bike industry has always been a proving ground for weird shit and increasing complexity. At first: no pedals. Then: pedals attached to the front wheel. Scary! and you have to keep getting your legs past a taller and taller wheel to gear up. And so on. Chain drive had a cousin, shaft drive, but that branch of the family has yet to flourish the way the chain lineage has. And chain drive begat derailleurs, and derailleurs begat index shifting and still the tribe of cyclists was persecuted and driven into the wilderness. And the prophets saw that there must be suspension.

And 700c begat 29-inch, and the shorter riders did lament, for they experienced foot overlap and stand-over issues. And the industry granted them 27.5. And the ISO was 584. When we get to a bead seat diameter of 666, look out. That's a hell of a tall wheel. "The devil went down to Bentonville, he was lookin' for a trail to ride..."

I've slid from kitchen hygiene to theology here. My own mind is a lot like a crowded refrigerator full of dubious leftovers. And the biking world is a lot like a world of conflicting theologies, where simplicity battles complexity, and practicality wrestles with relentless obsolescence, some of it purposeful, some of it speculative. Some of it is downright frivolous. Caught in the churn are the customers themselves. Even the term customer is industry driven. The people themselves identify just as riders, trying to find their own way on these machines.

Heavy traffic on Route 28

 The joy of being in the motoring public continues. It struck me the other day that it only takes three cars to completely screw you on Route 28: one slow one in front of you and one coming the other way in each of the only two passing zones worth bothering with. There's a third passing zone, but that's just a pointless gesture most of the time.

I've documented before how drivers who amble along on the open road portion of the trip will speed up once the road narrows, with houses, driveways, people, and pets possibly popping in from the sides. Whipping around someone in the last passing zone before Wolfeboro won't usually get you enough of a gap to avoid being tailgated by the last idiot, who is now treating the road like a video game.

This morning was an exception. On impulse, I zipped past a floater in that last zone and dropped him like he was in reverse. I would have lost several minutes if I had stayed behind him.

There were more than three cars this morning. Oncoming traffic was fairly heavy for around here on a non-vacation winter weekday.

Every time I drive to work I think about how much smoother my trip would be on a bicycle. Not in winter, though. Ice and snow encroach, narrowing lanes. It takes half an hour to put on all of the clothing to make the ride, another 20 minutes to peel it off at work. Then a half hour to robe up for the return trip in the dark. And if anything happens to you, it only confirms the public impression that you had it coming.

There are workers who have been getting around on e-bikes all year round in this area. They mostly ride them like low-powered motorbikes. One of them hit a deer last winter. Others have come to various misfortunes. They choose it out of necessity, not principle.

The winter e-bikers mostly ride fat-tire versions. They pay a lot less overall than they would to have a car, but they have to pay something, whether it's their own time and a little bit of money to do their own work, a moderate sum to get a shop or other technician to do it, or the lump sum to replace a bike when they've finally thrashed it to death. They don't come into our shop much, but they might have other options in the subculture that's developing around their vehicles. They don't usually resort to us until the bike is completely fubar.

If I wanted to be enslaved completely to my fuel bill, I could drive to work all year. I would lose my mind. And the parking situation gets very competitive during the summer. It's bad enough when winter conditions are good, although who knows what will happen as the economy provides less and less disposable income down the pay scale? We might have fabulous conditions for winter playtime, and hardly anyone with the time and budget to play. We just passed Martin Luther King Day, the January three-day weekend, and took almost no calls to check on our ski conditions. Granted, conditions were pretty meager, but that's never stopped people from at least asking.

The second home crowd, many of whom have third and fourth homes as well, centers on the summer. We might see one or two of them between Labor Day and Memorial Day, but the lake in liquid form really drives the economy here. The peak is from the Fourth of July into about mid August. That has shrunk considerably since the 1990s.

The denser traffic and tight parking really make me glad to be on a bike during the busiest part of summer, but I'll already have been out of the car for at least a couple of months by then.

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

My love of winter is synthetic

 An ad popped up on some social media site I was perusing, that said, "Goodbye goosebumps, hello, merino," or something like that. I thought to myself, "Goodbye goosebumps, hello hives."

I've tried to be a wool guy. In 1980 I got a Protogs Superwash wool bike jersey and wore it with confidence in the itchless experience promised in the advertising. It was ...okay. I acquired a couple more over the years. But I also rejoiced when a sponsored US team rider I rode with occasionally said that he always wore a tee shirt under his wool jerseys, because it actually enhanced their efficiency. He might just have been playing the expert card to justify his own preference for a barrier layer, but it didn't do any harm to wear the tee shirt.

Protogs offered other garments in miraculous merino. One I bought for backpacking was long-sleeved with a three-button style variously referred to in advertising from different manufacturers as a Wallace Beery, a river driver, or a Henley. I actually tried using it without an undershirt on one trip. The weather was chilly, so I figured out how to ignore it, but as soon as I got back to civilization and had other options I peeled that thing off.

This morning's near-freezing temperatures at dawn got me thinking about winter clothing, and reaching for some of it for the morning bike ride to work.

In the early 1980s, surplus military wool pants were the standard trousers for cold weather adventuring. For cross-country skiers, wool knickers. Not the British knickers, mind you. I also inherited a nicely tailored true navy blue wool shirt from my father's old service kit, and a plaid Pendleton from my grandfather. Those things never got next to my skin.

Wool bike shorts didn't bother me, and I loved my Gianni wool tights. But I warmly embraced polypro and other synthetic long underwear, and each evolution of synthetic outerwear. Fleece pants, fleece vests, pile jackets, each added layering options no longer utterly dependent on a next-to-skin layer of protection, or somehow turning off all of the nerve endings in my skin.

Now, of course, we know that these comfy fabrics are completely evil, sprinkling the earth with nanofibers that are spreading from pole to pole. So now my comfort can be tinged with guilt.

For winter riding, I use a lot of clothing and accessories from cross-country skiing and winter mountain travel. My go-to pant is the Sport Hill XC Pant. It's a great balance of wind blocking and breathability. Wind-front tights make no accommodation for a frigid tailwind. The 3SP fabric in the Sport Hill pants provides uniform protection. The polypropylene fabric also repels water to some extent. The cut is close but not shrink-wrap. Zippered ankles help when layering socks.

I don't ride much in the winter, because I can't count on doing it consistently enough to stay acclimated to the saddle. Hiking and cross-country skiing provide better exercise. A bike is the best machine for translating human effort into forward motion on an appropriate surface like a road or a smooth trail. That's what makes it my preferred personal transportation option in-season. But I've said many times -- and still do -- that it isn't enough by itself. So I welcome the opportunity to explore by other methods in the winter, when I cede the roads to the motoring public. I might bust out for the odd fixed gear ride here and there, but it's fun to get out into places where a bike couldn't go.

I do see the tracks of bikes where bikes couldn't go. You pretty much have to hit a mid- or high-grade rock or ice climb if you want to be completely sure you won't meet up with a downhiller. But steeper hiking trails weed out all but the most foolhardy workaholics who grunt a bike up there somehow so they can launch it back down. The things we do to say we did...

Speaking of layering socks, I get a lot of use out of bread bags in cool to cold weather. I gave up on buying toe covers and overboots that cost a lot of money and wear out far too quickly. For toe warmers, I cut an appropriate size end of a bread bag to put over the front of my sock before putting my shoe on. For really cold rides, I wear a thin synthetic liner with a full bread bag over it, a wool outer sock, and a closed-toe shoe. Sometimes I even double bag, adding another bread bag over the outer sock. The inner vapor barrier keeps sweat from dampening the sock layers. Moisture increases heat loss through conduction and evaporation if it can get out far enough to evaporate. The vapor barrier turns your liner sock into a wetsuit for your foot. Don't waste your time on dreams of perfectly dry warmth. You won't find it.

Winter cycling is the hardest activity to dress for. Riders automatically produce their own wind chill. Exertion on a freewheel-equipped bike ranges from strenuous on a climb to nil on a descent, when wind chill can increase to more than 40 mph (64 kph). You will sweat. Moisture management is up to you.

Some people wear shell jackets. I never used to, preferring multiple fuzzy layers instead. The thickness of the front coverage took the edge off of the incoming frigidity, while moisture could move freely outward to evaporate from the surface, away from my skin. Then I got a Sugoi jacket that Sugoi, of course, stopped making. It had a nice balance of breathability and wind protection, and is a pleasant but visible yellow. It does trap more moisture than the all-fuzzy option did, but all of my fuzzy layers were in muted colors. I vastly prefer muted colors, but I bow to the reality that motorists need all the help they can get to notice and avoid a bike rider. There's a slight risk that a bright, target gives a bad actor a better aiming point, but inattention is more common than actual malice.

This isn't a complete list and discussion of all of the many variations in my wardrobe for cycling. I draw from at least five options just in gloves and mittens. Head covering also draws from a selection of fabrics and accessories. Well. I say accessories, but mostly I mean varying amounts of tape over the helmet vents, and a light mounted on the front of it.

The towel is thrown

The Wolfeboro Cross-country Ski Association picked a good year to institute snowmaking. But it wasn't a great year. Atmospheric conditions were so poor for snowmaking during December that we had nothing to offer during the Christmas vacation period, which is one of two major blocs of income for the ski business in the northeast US. Downhill areas fared somewhat better, particularly ones a bit farther north, with more elevation to augment the less than ideal temperature and humidity. And then we had record-setting rains in January that caused flood damage to trails for every winter activity.

By February we had the snowmaking loop up and running, but it hasn't survived the first week of March. Snowmaking isn't magic, and key sections of it lost cover in the warm weather that has dominated the winter. The trails are closed and the shop has gone to spring hours. Even if we get a late March blizzard, it will be falling onto bare, saturated ground in many areas.

In a strange twist, I had more opportunities to get out for a concentrated workout in prime time this winter because of the wretched conditions. I haven't come into a bike commuting season with this good a fitness base since we shut down the shop at Jackson Ski Touring in 2009. Up there, with trails right outside the door and a narrower scope of operations, it was much more convenient to rotate each of us out on many days to get that beneficial shot of conditioning. It enhanced our efficiency and kept our credentials fresh, while also providing a great launching pad for the next season's riding.

The ski/bike alternation changes muscle use in ways that help the cyclist more than a year-round cycling routine would. But in the transition from one to the other, you notice what you're missing. At the start of skiing I would have to build upper body strength and all of the steering and stability muscles that take the rest of the year off. At the other end, going back to the bike, I find myself in the lower portions of a hill climb with only my legs to propel the machine, carrying all of the muscles used to push the ski poles now providing mostly non-functional weight.

In addition to the ski sessions, I got out once or twice a week to climb the neighborhood mountain. The trail is listed in an old Appalachian Mountain Club guidebook as 1.4 miles to the summit. Elevation gain is 1,144 feet. The trail climbs gently for about the first third, and then steepens. A preliminary effort brings you to a traverse of a couple of hundred yards along a contour to reach the base of the most rugged section. Above that the grade lets up slightly on the way to a more or less level few yards approaching the summit. There's a fire tower that is not abandoned, but is usually unoccupied. During the winter there is never an observer. The trail is popular enough that the footway is reliably packed down. People do it in a variety of inappropriate footwear, but so far none of them have had to be evacuated by emergency responders. 

From the first hike in late January until the most recent one yesterday, the surface has been different each time. The first time it was a well packed snowshoe trail firm enough to go up without wearing the snowshoes. It's very rude to posthole a trail, stomping deep footprints into it because you don't bother to bring snowshoes. Going up it's easy to place your feet lightly and commit your weight gradually. I wore snowshoes to descend, because your body weight always arrives with more force as you step down. 

Snow fell before I got out on the second hike, but other hikers had a few days to pack it down before I got there. From that point on, no new snow was added. When the weather stayed somewhat cold, the trail changed only a little. I did see the tracks of one intrepid skier one day, and on another the unbelievable signs that someone had ridden a bike down it. I didn't see clear signs that they had ridden up it. And the tires didn't look super wide, almost like plus-size, 3-inch rather than full fat. Mixed in with tracks from snowshoes, hiking boots, and ice creepers were the prints of street shoes and sneakers. 

I was going to begin riding this week, but the forecast indicated that I won't be able to be consistent enough with it to make the initial discomfort worth it. I banged out one more tower hike instead. This is prime hypothermia season. Temperatures above freezing, ranging either side of 50°F (10°C) fool a lot of active people because we need very light layers while exerting, and may feel comfortably warm for a few minutes after stopping. The temperature on the summit that cloudy day was solidly mid 40s. I felt quite comfortable on arrival. I put on a fleece jacket because I knew I would want it soon. Indeed, with a fairly light but persistent breeze I soon felt like I wanted more clothing than the fleece. Rather than dig out the extra gear, I gathered up my stuff to head down. But I had the layers if I needed them.

Hypothermia gets you when you don't expect it. You get cold on a winter hike, it makes sense. We do hear about poorly prepared people who get into trouble and even die out there in the winter. But most people have some idea that they should bundle up a bit at the height of winter. It's in the transition time, into early spring, when acclimated outdoor types might overestimate the mildness. It happened to me one April day decades ago, on a cloudy afternoon with some showers in the forecast. I set out around the mountain on the fixed-gear, wearing sufficient clothing for the best of predicted conditions, but with nothing extra in case things deteriorated. They deteriorated. Sprinkles began before I has half a mile down the road. Those turned to a steady rain. I kept going. The route is all or nothing. There is no way to cut it off. Once you reach the halfway point on the far side of the mountain you need to keep going the rest of the way.

Theoretically I could have gone up to one of the sparsely distributed houses along the route and asked for shelter, but apparently I would literally rather die than bother anyone to bail me out for my stupid decision. I don't know what kind of shape I would have been in if my spouse at the time had not thought to go out and collect me. She correctly guessed my route and drove it the opposite direction to intercept me. These days I am alone most of the time, so I have to pay closer attention to the list of essentials any solo traveler should have.

The roads will now present the best venue for consistent activity for maybe as much as a couple of months. Back when mountain bikes were relatively cheap and definitely simple, we rode on found trails rather than courses designed and constructed at great and ongoing expense. We would charge out on the rotting ice of snow machine trails and woods roads, crashing into icy water, grunting though deep mud, and laughing about it. Not anymore, though. You don't put in hours of labor on loamers, or thousands of dollars on more elaborate trails and then go ride them when they're wet and soft! Horrors! And the bikes themselves demand such loving care to keep them ready to throw off of 9-foot drops that you don't want to crap them all up with a bunch of abrasive silt on mere dirt roads. The gravel demographic might be a tad more open to muddy roads. Fat bikers might try their flotation on some of them as well. My fixed-gear is still coated with adobe from my ride on New Year's Day, when the dirt part my favorite local loop was sloppy from the rain we'd gotten during Christmas week. Mud season has to come sometime, but I try to avoid having to do too much cleaning over and over again.

If I can get straight into commuting, I won't have to ride the muddy dirt roads or stick to the entirely paved options to get base miles before undertaking the more serious effort of lugging my tired old ass and my day's load of crap to work and back. My 30-mile daily commuting distance puts the day's effort into the realm of a real ride, even though it's split roughly evenly into 15 miles morning and evening. That work day in the middle keeps me on my feet. The rides are also in what passes for rush hour around here, so I'm dealing with hurrying drivers on all sections of the route. I need to be combat ready.

Fortunately, most motorists just want to get past a cyclist with the least delay. A honk, a yell, a thrown object -- these are impulsive acts not meant to delay overall progress. If a rider is careful to offer no greater offense than the mere audacity of claiming some space on the road, the vast majority of drivers just want to go by and get on with their lives. Only their fellow motorists inspire the urge to have a tank battle right then and there. But that's a story for another day.

A short little winter

 Back in the early 1990s we had a stretch of El Niño winters that really put a crimp in non-cycling winter activities. Non-cycling activities are very important to balanced fitness, because cycling is not complete exercise and does not help with bone density. They're also fun, if you're not obsessed with riding and actually enjoy the opportunities that a natural environment and four seasons present to you. So those of us who play outside in all weather felt severely deprived and grumpy. We hadn't seen anything yet.

Climate change hadn't hit the headlines as much as it does now that it's nearly too late to do anything about it. A few of us connected the dots, but didn't bother to discuss it with a public still happily in denial about "natural variations." And New England is notorious for variations. Our reputation is international. One November day a few years ago, I was helping out at a local half marathon that started and finished at the Castle in the Clouds, in Moultonboro, NH. The day was a typical gray, but mild. As I hung on in the back of a pickup truck cruising the course to pick up traffic cones and signage after the race, I remarked to the Chinese student helping out from a local prep school that the year before had been harshly cold on the same basic date.

"Well, that's New England," he said. Our reach is global.

The range of variation has reached the level of insanity. The flooding in the earlier part of the winter hit the national news. We finally picked up 6-12 inches of fluff on January 2, followed a couple of days later by snow so saturated with water that it landed as about five inches of slop. The fluff had packed down to an inch or two on trails. The slop destroyed some of it, and turned the rest to mush. Another storm right after that was even wetter. Then temperatures finally turned wintry before another five inches of light powder came in on January16. Nighttime temperatures flirted with 0 F for several nights, with daytime highs in the teens or 20s. That ends now, as the temperature climbs steeply to the useless range it occupied earlier. As if that wasn't enough, rain is coming in on Thursday and Friday to wreck the natural cover on cross-country ski trails.

Thanks, Corporate America!

Funny thing: because Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro have been favorite summer home areas for wealthy people for about a century, the beneficiaries of the political system that was bribed to ignore the environment and corrective regulation for decades has a well established colonial presence here. A certain family is sentimentally buying up local landmarks and attractions to preserve their theme park and maintain the servant population that they've grown accustomed to seeing. One contingent donated a good chunk to the cross-country ski association's fundraising drive to put in a little bitty snowmaking loop at staggering expense, to try to keep going in the face of the climate disaster made worse by their own oligarchic greed.

The climate countered by hitting us with really poor snowmaking conditions. These combined with the fact that the snowmaking crew is shared with the town's little downhill ski area. The downhill ski area took precedence, so the cross-country loop remained uncompleted until just this week.

As a person ages, deterioration proceeds unnoticed during periods of inactivity. You feel fine just toddling through the necessary activities of life, with maybe a twinge here or there when you lift something the wrong way. But as soon as you try to get back up to speed in things that were well within your capability, like a hike, or a ski tour, or bike commuting more than a couple of miles, you feel what you have lost.

I had to work on the best days of our mini winter. Up before the sun, off to work, stuck in the shop until after dark, days slip by. The leaping sunrises and lingering twilights warn that bike commuting season will arrive in a very short eternity. The light will be here long before the weather is nice. And even though first light to last faint gloom extends almost 12 hours already, sunrise to sunset is only about nine and a half hours. No matter what the weather does, the light travels at the same speed. The planet bows toward its partner the sun in the stately dance of seasons. It takes a long time, even at thousands of miles per hour. 

The temperature might shift back at times before we move into official spring, but the overall trend is warmer than average. I always wonder if the average is the ancestral average, or the new average, which creeps or leaps steadily higher. Our mini winter might be followed by one or more little repetitions. If we're lucky, one of them might coincide with the Massachusetts school vacation week, which is our biggest earning period of the winter. After that, numbers dwindle to the few who are already interested and an even smaller number of curious samplers.

Single gear seeks partner for committed relationship

 

The simplest form of the modern safety bicycle is the trusty fixed gear. On the velodrome, the bikes are pared down to the absolute essentials: no brakes, no amenities. Out in the wild, a wise rider chooses lower gearing, a front brake for a little extra security, and fenders for the crappy wet weather in which the simple vehicle excels. I also recommend a two-sided rear hub, to allow for at least two gear options. Your choices are limited by how many cogs you might securely stack on either side of the hub, and by the length of the dropout to accommodate the difference in chain length.

I see people referring to any single-speed bike as a fixed gear. A fixed gear is a single speed (even with multiple cogs you can't switch quickly), but not every single speed is a fixed gear. It's only fixed if it threads directly to the hub with no ratcheting freewheel mechanism. The difference is critical, because a single-speed freewheel is the worst of both worlds. You only have one gear, but you lose critical advantages of a fixed gear.

With a fixed gear, you can't stop pedaling. This commitment scares some riders. You can get thrown if you forget and stop your feet when you have reached a good cruising speed or you're wailing down a hill. You can get launched if you dive into a corner too tightly and really dig a pedal in. One time on a rainy training ride I had a good line in the corner, but didn't know that the puddle I was aiming to ride through had a pothole under it that was about six inches deep. The front tire dropped into that as the crank came around, driving the pedal into the chunked-up pavement. I hit the road several feet from the bike. I pulled my face up from another puddle in time to watch the rear tire crawl off of the tacoed rim, allowing the tube to bulge out and explode. Lesson learned: never dive into water if you don't know how deep it is and what might be under the surface. Swimmin' hole 101 applies to bike riding too.

That crash was before the Maryland/Delaware district championships that year. The time trial that nasty summer was run in 50-degree weather and a stiff wind, with light to moderate rain. Real nice. The 108-mile road race a week later started under cloudy skies that eventually gave way to another saturating downpour. My elbow was still bandaged from the pothole encounter. And I flatted out of the road race with a couple of laps left.

A couple of weeks after that I slammed an obstacle while bombing around on a warm July night and was out of work for 10 weeks. How does that relate? I actually tried riding on the fixed gear while my right arm was strapped to hold my collarbone onto the top of my shoulder joint and my left hand was in a cast, because I was an idiot who couldn't be inactive. I reasoned -- if you could call it that -- that I didn't need to be able to grab the brake strongly because I could control speed through the pedals. True as it was, I did start to feel like I might dump it and slow my recovery even further. I was also unable to bathe myself because of the combination of medical devices attached to my broken parts, so I didn't want to have to wear congealed sweat for another couple of months. No one available to give me a sponge bath fit the fantasies one might have of such ministrations.

Once I was cleared to return to training -- I mean work -- in September, the fixed gear provided steady pedaling to rehab the lungs and legs. The atrophied, twiglike arms required more carefully selected weights and exercises.

Another nice thing about the fixed gear was that the rear rim didn't have to be dead straight for a good braking surface. I just stomped it basically flat and re-tightened the spokes. I don't remember when I finally got around to rebuilding it, but it was probably years later.

Now here, 41 years after all that, my present fixed gear is not the same bike, but it has some of the same parts. From late 1979, I always had a fixed gear for commuting and bad weather training. Here in New Hampshire, winter and its fringes last longer than in Maryland. If the winter isn't snowy, that means I get out on the bike during those months as well as in late autumn and early spring. With short daylight and cold air, the fixed gear provides continuous pedaling, which helps you stay as warm as you can when you're generating your own 10-20 mph wind chill. Winter riding is one of the trickiest activities to dress for because of that wind chill aspect. I much prefer cross-country skiing for a fitness activity. I would use it for winter transportation if I could.

This fall has presented many obstacles to regular riding. The darkness and winding roads stop my commuting among bulky vehicles that blind each other with their ridiculous headlights, so I have to carve out time from my days off work, when I'm doing every other thing I can't do on a workday. At best I get three consecutive days of riding. Staving off the muscle loss of age, I have to watch how hard I push, but also how much I slack off in between. It seems like there's about a two-day window between good rest and the onset of incurable sloth. A few weeks ago, I blasted out on the fixed gear for twentyish miles, feeling pretty good. The next day I felt a little worn down, so I chose a multi-gear bike. It was the heavy commuter, but it felt heavier than usual. The next day was cold and showery, so I reverted to the fixed gear, expecting to feel even more sluggish. Instead, the direct drive and considerably lighter weight combined to help me drive the bike and the bike to drive me. And there is a critical advantage of the fixed gear: the bike drives the rider. On a freewheel bike, you have to push the crank around. Sure, one crank arm brings the other crank arm around, but only your legs are doing the work. On the fixed gear, the motion of the bike itself keeps the chain moving. The wheel brings the crank around even if the crank isn't bringing the wheel around.

I know the effect well. I wasn't being reminded of its existence when I enjoyed its effects that day. I was only reminded to share it again for anyone who hasn't experienced it. Even my lightweight road bike is more fatiguing to ride than a fixed gear when I'm already tired. If I can ride downhill with a tailwind, or on a route with no climbs and no adverse winds, the road bike is great because I don't have to pedal at all where the going is good. But wherever I have to put forth effort, particularly on a climb, the fixed gear can feel better because of the free lift that my off leg gets on its way back to the top of the pedal stroke.

Coasting on the fixed gear consists of loosening up the legs while maintaining a smooth, precise pedaling circle. You get smooth or you don't last. For a sustained descent, I will stop and flip the wheel to the high gear side. I also have the brake to help, although resistance pedaling and turning like a skier can help scrub speed while maintaining flow. You can't do skier turns with motorists or other riders around, but on an empty road it's a great way to control momentum while keeping a smooth pedaling rhythm. Riding the bike on freestanding rollers will teach you smoothness in a hurry. Just don't try to practice your turns there. If you even imagine turning while you're riding rollers you will end up on the floor.

Twenty (or so) years ago, after my younger colleague Ralph had been fixed gear riding for a while, he applied his analytical mind to it and reported his findings. I had said that you have four speeds: Sitting, standing, weaving, and walking. He observed that pushing back on the saddle and grinding at a low cadence could be a more effective way of climbing than standing on the pedals. While this technically falls under the category of sitting, it's different enough from staying in a more neutral saddle position and trying to keep a higher cadence that it qualifies as its own thing. And you can combine some of these, sitting and weaving, for instance, or even standing and weaving, to surmount steeper grades. As long as you can get the pedals around you're still moving forward. So fixed gear riding expands your power range, making you (possibly) less dependent on shifting as frequently on your multi-geared bike. This applies particularly to grunting in a low gear more than ultra-spin. Diving down a steep descent with a freewheeling system, just coast. 

Decades of riding take their toll. Cycling of any kind is not complete exercise. It does not build bone density, and it uses your legs in one plane and a limited range, regardless of the gear. I notice now as I get closer to 70 than 60, that my hips don't like too much high intensity cycling without mixing it up or at least taking more rest days to break up long stretches of riding. Way back in my 40s I noticed that the end of the commuting week left me feeling a bit ragged. And the arc of the whole season built nicely to a peak in July that felt like it would never end, but in late September I felt like a dragonfly, still fierce but now tattered from the constant flight. This effect has only become more pronounced with age. The continuous pedaling on the fixed gear allows no rest en route except for "fixed-gear coasting": relaxing the legs and letting the bike drive. That still requires a little input to keep everything aligned and smooth, compared to freewheel coasting, where you can actually backpedal a half revolution to drop your heel on one side and then the other, stretching the back of the leg.

Sometimes you just have to hop off and admire the view. Savor each ride.

Nosehair Update

Since my post on January 10, nosehair-freezing cold finally did put in a brief but dramatic appearance on February 3-4. It even spawned breathless news broadcasts and articles because the Mount Washington Weather Observatory recorded a record-setting wind chill factor.

Wind chill is not temperature. Block the wind and it goes away. If you are wearing sufficient insulating layers and a windproof shell, the effect nearly vanishes. I say nearly, because most of the time our bodies and our buildings are losing a little heat even when snugged up adequately for average conditions. Outside of the enclosure, a little thermal gradient fades out from us, reducing the rate of heat loss from where we want it. Wind whipping over this strips it away, removing the invisible insulation we gained from it.

Winter cyclists have to deal with wind chill all the time, because of how we generate our own, rolling along at whatever speed we're doing. Cold-weather cycling is one of the hardest activities to dress for, because the rider is generating heat through exertion while flying along through the cold atmosphere, cranking up hills and coasting down them, with an actual wind that may come from any angle, interacting with the apparent wind created by forward motion.

I don't know anyone who tried to go for a ride on Saturday, when the temperature started out around 12 to 15 degrees below zero F, with a wind gusting over 30 most of the time. In our shop, with the furnace cranked, we spent most of the day with an indoor temperature from 52 to 54 degrees F. We finally got almost to 60 by closing time. The building was constructed in the 1860s, I believe. The walls were thin, and insulation nonexistent. In a Nor'easter, we can feel the wind actually blowing through the back wall. On Saturday, the wind was westerly enough that it didn't come through directly, but it still stripped escaping heat away from the outside. Some insulation has been added in modern times, but the thin walls mean that there's not enough space for much.

The next day, the temperature climbed steadily to the upper 30s and only dropped to the 20s. Today it got even warmer, with a bit of sunshine. Winter reverted to the temperature range it had stayed in since the season began.

The cold stab did get Lake Winnipesaukee to freeze all the way over, but I would not recommend going out on the new ice. "Ice in" is merely a technicality.

The series of storms that finally brought enough snow to open the cross-country ski trails also brought rain and wet snow in a diabolical combination that produced a thick crust on top of loose snow underneath. The crust can't support a person on skis or snowshoes. It varies in thickness so that the way it breaks from one step to the next makes snowshoeing a laborious series of stumbles as the edges of the shoes catch on the crust. On skis, the crust still breaks, and neither the crust nor the loose snow offer any grip. In bare boots, a post-holer discovers that the snow is deeper than you might expect, with the meager accumulations and long warm spells. On the groomed trails, the cover is barely adequate. Grooming reduces the snow depth and steadily wears it away, while the thinned surface is more vulnerable to the sun heating the dark earth.

The roads don't exactly beckon, but they do offer a passable option for a pedaler who has not invested in a fat bike with studded tires. Some snow machine trails are probably firm enough for a regular mountain bike with studded tires. I prefer and recommend changing to weight-bearing exercise for part of the year, but even the less helpful exercise of pedaling is better than none at all.

I don't have time on a workday to fit a ride in at either end of it until commuting season, and my days off seem to get eaten up with all the things that I don't have time to do in the margins of a workday, so I'm just deteriorating steadily until the daylight gets long enough to start getting base mile rides. I salute all you people with the strength of character to ride a trainer on a regular basis. I do not envy you in the least, but I respect your gumption. That's a lot of sweat and bike abuse.

It ain't really winter 'til your nose hairs freeze

 Every time we get a weak winter, I compare it to my memories of 1990-'91 and 1991-'92, the two that stood out for late arrival of snow, little accumulation, and overall mildness. The winter of 2005-'06 was another disaster for winter-based industries in New England, in which I recall doing more riding than skiing or other winter-specific activities. But a check of the records shows that in all of those winters we had at least some short periods of usable winter, and a few nights of nose hair freezing cold.

Your results may vary, but I find that nose hairs begin to freeze as the temperature nears 0°F, and intensifies as the temperature continues to drop. For instance, someone misread our digital thermometer and told me that it was 17°F one morning, but I knew as soon as I walked out and breathed in that it was 1.7°. 

When I'm stacking firewood into the shed in the summer, I often think about what conditions will be like when I reach that part of the pile during the dark and frigid months. I can recall many images of shivering under the cold LED light in the shed, pulling down an armload of logs to keep the wood stoves cranking against the implacable cold of the universe, toward which our end of the planet is pointed during the northern hemisphere's turn to aim away from the sun. This winter, just about every trip to the woodshed has been more like late March, or even April, except for the sun angle and day length.

I could post this as a ski column on Explore Cross-Country, but there is no skiing, and there might never be. It should surprise no one that this is the warmest, wettest, least useful winter on record, at least until the next one. We're already getting calls about bike service, not from winter riders, but from people who want to get a jump on their spring tuneups. We still have demand for ski services, so we don't want to reconfigure the workshop for grease, but we may need the income soon. It's still too early for full bike shop efficiency, so the wise rider will wait until at least mid-March, but that could change if winter-specific demand dries up.

I did notice in my training diaries from the 1990s, that I took more opportunistic rides back then. The training diary is also my daily quick summary of weather conditions, which I started adding right around that time, to give my other activity entries more context. Now I find that I really miss the hour or so that I carve out for a ride or a hike, when I have so much other stuff to get done on a day off. From the perspective of age, it seems that the people who get things done are the ones who long ago sacrificed their health, and fitness to the priorities of work. It shouldn't have to be that way, but any better way takes too much thought and care for each other's well being, to make sure that anyone who wants it can have a balanced existence.

The other argument against too much riding is that a rider needs weight-bearing exercise for bone density, and to use the body in different ways that relieve the muscles and joints from the limited range of motion provided by pedaling. You can do weight training, and definitely should stretch in some way, but for the unscientific trainer it's easiest to go do something else. Yesterday, I hiked up the mountain behind my house. I probably won't do it again, because the logged areas are now choked with brambles and sweet fern, and the uncut swaths are filling in with bushy little saplings flourishing because so much sunlight can get in. With decent snow, the brambles and sweet fern are at least somewhat covered and separated by it. Yesterday, I was either wading through the thorns or pushing through the beech thickets to try to gain a few yards on the remnants of the old forest floor.

Because I started late, I did not gain a summit, only one of the intermediate steps that offered a view westerly. To the north I saw that Ossipee Lake is not fully frozen. That is not a deep lake. I know that the big lake, Winnipesaukee, isn't frozen shut, but it is deeper and much larger, requiring a longer, harder freeze. Even giant mud puddles like Province Lake had such thin ice that the ferocious winds of the storm on December 23 broke it all up and piled it on the leeward end, where it refroze into a surface useless for skating. I remember a hike in about 1997, on a small range just over the border in Maine, from which I saw the startling blue of Sebago Lake, unfrozen in a landscape of white. We did have some snow that winter, although as climate change really started to sink its claws into the region, the weird sight of open water provided a warning to the few who cared to acknowledge it.

A native of the area used to say that he hadn't noticed much change in the climate, even up to a couple of years ago, but he has been pretty quiet about it recently. I doubt if his nose hairs have frozen any more than mine have, even if he does live in one of the colder little valleys. And, as a logger, he knows darn well that the wetlands haven't firmed up to allow the normal amount of winter cutting.

No matter how much the temperature warms, the sun angle and day length won't change. There will be more losses than gains, from many economic sectors. People have already reported ticks. Various unpleasant insects are expanding their ranges. The purifying freeze, as hard as it might feel at the time, serves a purpose for the overall health of the ecosystem. Unfrozen lakes in winter warm sooner and reach higher temperatures, aiding things like cyanobacteria, which ruins summer recreation after a warm winter ruined that season's recreation. Cyanobacteria can kill your dog. And it's not that great for humans.

We're only at the beginning of winter's July. There's plenty ahead. Averages are made of highs and lows, so we could get slapped with a little cold snap. The longer it takes to get here, the harder it will bite, because we can't help instinctively feeling like spring when the temperature mimics it. As the sun launches more and more steeply up the morning sky, the first half of a mild day will make you forget how much winter still lies ahead, until the instant shift to late afternoon light reminds you. The sunset is getting noticeably later, but it darn sure isn't late.

Sliding into Winter

 One job is two jobs when you work for a shop with dual specialties. The cross-country ski business has been doomed in the Lower 48 states of the USA for decades, but a few of us keep on out of force of habit and our loyalty to our aging customer base. A trickle of younger participants comes in, but never in great enough numbers to bring us younger coworkers.

As with cycling, cross-country ski racers are somehow viewed as elite even though they will never be enough to support an industry and an economic sector. They are the most impressive athletic specimens, but their competition requires a level of commitment to physical abuse that is beyond healthy.

 Racing makes a beneficial activity pathological. That being said, racing equipment can be very fun to operate at a more survivable level of exertion. This may be more true of ski equipment, because there's less mechanical complexity to suck money out of you in repetitive repair and maintenance costs. And a full-on racing bike feels the most nimble and effective when the rider is in a position that is frankly painful over the long haul. The fact that racers grow accustomed to it does not make it less damaging to a rider who hasn't agreed to trade the physical abuse for the glory of victory, or even the mere consolation of participation. "Comfortable" is relative.

Transportation cycling offers plenty of opportunity for lung-hucking sprints and death-defying maneuvers in a tight field of ruthless adversaries. And you get to save lots of money and eat whatever you like. You don't have to drive yourself to a race venue and pay club memberships and entry fees. Just hop on outside your home and slide into the nonstop Madison flowing past on the streets.

The arrival of snow brings other options. When I lived in Annapolis, Maryland, snowstorms would bring the city to a halt. Cross-country skiers would appear among the other pedestrians enjoying the forced break from the daily churn. For a couple of days the city might be bright and friendly before plows and salt trucks turned the streets into rivers of grimy brine that splattered onto the neglected sidewalks as the citizenry climbed back into their capsules to pass each other with the usual indifference verging into hostility. Up here in New Hampshire, the scene is the same, only there's a snow-based tourist industry operating alongside the imperative to have the streets cleared for normal motor traffic. Cross-country skiers seldom get a chance to slide along unplowed streets, because the snow removal is so well organized and prompt. Residents on side and back roads roll their eyes a bit at this, but everyone gets cleared out within a couple of days.

Roads cleared for motor travel are not necessarily in the best shape for a cyclist. In a dry or warm winter, the edges might thaw back far enough to expose the shoulder, but in a normal or colder year the snowbanks narrow the road and cut off emergency bailouts. I'd rather use the snow for snow activities than fight it to remain on two wheels. Even in a bad snow year, lack of daylight combines with the winter stupor that afflicts many drivers, to limit riding opportunities.

Bad snow years have become the rule more than the exception in New England. The terrain creates variation across the region, so maybe the far north or the western half lie in the snow zone, while to the south and east we forget what winter ever looked like. It's easy to forget that about half of the United States lies to the south of most of Europe. Our north seems so far north to us and Canada is just three blocks south of the tundra.

The last ice age did tilt oddly toward northeastern North America. Weather and climate don't uniformly march across lines of latitude. Without human interference, the glaciers would have sent their ghostly reminders year after year to the areas once buried beneath thousands of feet of compacted snow and ice. Not so much anymore, though. Increasingly, we have to figure out what to do with months of slush, ice, and mud.

Good for nothing weather

 

 Wow! It's porn outside!

 Rain drummed on the roof. I heard the ice on the steep part shift as it moved closer to the edge. The temperature was 50 degrees (F), as it had been all night and for much of the previous day. The splashes in the driveway burst up almost on top of each other. What had been an almost unbroken layer of ice and compacted snow had turned to mud, except where it hadn't. As the temperature falls today, the remaining ice will set back up for the weekend. Within an hour, the sun had started to come out, but the air was still warm, and water flowed steadily from the roof.

This is Presidents' Day Weekend, the opening weekend of Massachusetts school vacation week. This is traditionally the biggest moneymaking period for New England ski areas if they didn't have a big Christmas week. Cross-country ski areas can't count on a big Christmas week the way downhill areas that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars -- or millions -- on snowmaking can. Our overhead is much lower, but we're at the mercy of the weather. In the past couple of decades, that weather has been increasingly merciless.

It all freezes up again this afternoon, but the damage is done. The trail system has been cut in too many places. The sections with usable snow are cut off by either bare ground or plates of ice that the tiller on the grooming machine can't reconstitute.

The fat bikers always pipe up about now to try to tell us that they are the answer. I will wearily dismantle that claim again as necessary. For instance: we might rent 30 or 40 sets of skis on a busy day. There is no way we could keep a fleet of 30 or 40 fat bikes. And our ski rental fleet is much larger than 30-40 sets. We have more than twice that many. The estimate of 30-40 pairs is a bit conservative. On a really crazy day we'll clear the rack and re-rent stuff wet to latecomers who are remarkably willing to put on boots that literally just came off of some stranger's sweaty feet.

The trail system can absorb far more skiers than bikers, as well. Skiers are much better equipped to slither past each other in a congested area, compared to rigid bicycles with 31-inch handlebars. So even if we flung the gates open wide and invited the bulbous crowd to cavort, it could look like the stampede scene from some movie about a cattle drive of longhorns.

Then there's cost: fat bikers who own their own will have shelled out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $2,000 for their mounts, assuming that about half of them picked up a used one from some other rider who realized that it was more of an encumbrance than an asset and cut their losses. You can pay a lot more. In contrast, a new ski touring outfit costs about $400.You'll pay $400 just for studded tires for your fat bike. Used stuff is almost as hard to find as new stuff with the ongoing pandemic disruptions, but if you do find something it could be quite cheap. And skis just lean quietly in a corner when you're not getting to use them. They take up little more room than a furled umbrella.

Snowshoeing remains an option, but the popular perception of snowshoeing is weird. A snowshoe is just a boat to float you on the snow. The size is calculated to keep you from slogging in your bare boots, anywhere from knee deep to waist deep. The addition of traction devices to the bottom is more recent, to make traversing hard frozen sections safer and more convenient. But once "snowshoeing" became a discrete activity performed for its own sake, rather than as part of the general category of winter hiking, people started using them on shallow snow and firm frozen trails that most of us with experience in winter hiking would see as just good footing without the encumbrance of snowshoes. Lots of rock and ice, and irregular ground, takes a toll on snowshoes. They're designed to be supported by a fairly uniform resistance from the snow beneath them.

In the "anything for a buck" mentality of winter rental, upper management will still say, "well, you can snowshoe," but anyone experienced already knows better. You will be better served to use Microspikes or a similar device. We don't rent those. Maybe we should.

Just on the basis of canceled reservations, we've lost hundreds of dollars. That may not seem like much in a world that considers an operation with 500 employees to be a "small business." but in the realm of really small businesses like ours, it's somebody's paycheck for a week. Along with that go retail sales we might have made from the group when they visited the shop to get their rentals or drop them off, and losses to other businesses in town if most of the prospective visitors decide not to come here at all. And we lose the walk-ins and same-day last minute reservation calls we typically get on a Saturday or Sunday morning. There aren't enough fat bikers in the world to equal that head count.

Indoor trainers laugh indulgently. They may not even look out a window from November to March. The super cool computerized systems feed them the virtual experience at whatever level they can afford to simulate. But indoor training depends on fantasy life. If you're like me, and have no fantasy life anymore, indoor training is just torment. All that ever propelled me through periods of indoor training were bright daydreams of the myriad ways I was going to use that fitness on pleasurable challenges.

I do look forward to commuting season. Driving sucks. But it's hard to maintain a lot of trainer enthusiasm just based on that. I can nip out for a few base mile rides when actual commuting season seems imminent, and be good to go. Maybe I'll get on the rollers a couple or three times for old times' sake before that.

'S no storm

 Yeah, so the big snowstorm didn't happen. I think of the shovel as a good luck charm, same as the shovel and brush in the car. If I have them, I won't need them. Put them away and change to summer tires, and we'll get hit with a load of classically slippery spring snow.

It's magical thinking. The weather doesn't care. But it's one of those superstitious observances that you might know is bullshit, but you do it anyway. And it worked this time. Some places got upwards of ten inches, but not around here.

An article on the New Hampshire Public Radio website, talking about young activists and climate change, stated that in the warming conditions, New Hampshire "will have shorter winters." Wrong. Winter will still be the same length, even if it is milder and generally more wet than white. Day length will not change. What tree species thrive will still lose their leaves for months. There will just be less to enjoy about the dreary trudge through the long nights. We'll still get plenty of raw, wet weather. It sounds a lot like what we just went through.

Decades ago I was in North Carolina at a week-long conservation seminar. We learned that the higher summits of the southern mountains had a climate like New England's. As you went up in elevation it was the equivalent of going hundreds of miles north. I don't remember the exact ratio, but it held true on up the Blue Ridge and northward until one reached the actual New England, where the alpine zone was like Baffin Island or something. Now the ecosystems are shifting, so that New England will end up like the Carolinas, and the southern highlands will end up as steamy rainforest with no treeline even on the highest summits.

Whatever happens, just try to dress for it as you set out on your bike.

Follow the bouncing temperature

 March came in like a nasty day in April, but immediately shifted to a harsh hit of January. The forecast as of Sunday afternoon showed the temperature dipping to a single-digit night on Monday, a frigid Tuesday, but then daytime highs well above freezing on the ensuing days, alternating with hard freezes at night. That has now shifted to a single bounce to the upper 30s on Wednesday, followed by a solid few days at or below freezing before the next wave of sustained thawing, but it still shows vestiges of the volatility that has become common.

With cross-country ski season in the immediate vicinity apparently tapering off, bike repairs have already stacked up. We've had three of them hanging around from the end of last season, held up by unavailable parts, and then suspended while the workshop shifted to things that don't mix well with grease. Then five more piled in, for people who are traveling south in the next couple of weeks.

Trainee Dave and I have been missing our bikes. He said that he wished it was bike season, so I set him onto what seemed like straightforward tuneups on a family fleet of four, preparing for a trip to Florida. The first one he picked was a Specialized Chisel 29er in a large frame size that looked like it might fit him. Go for the fun one first. He gave it minor cleaning, but it wasn't even very dirty.

A clean bike can be very bad news. Is it clean because it's had light use, or is it clean because it's been hosed? Based on chain wear, we both thought that this bike looked lightly used. Everything seemed pretty straight. The brake pads weren't very worn... Then Dave tried to run it through the gears.

Mountain biking has embraced the 1X concept because front derailleurs and ham fists don't mix. Riders who might have unbelievable finesse when airborne and rotating in balletic maneuvers off a jump put nowhere near the same delicacy into coaxing a chain between rings on a crankset. Road riders are similarly afflicted; front shifts are the biggest contributors to chain failure.

The chain takes abuse shifting up or down. Going up, the rider mashes the lever and forces the chain over against the side of the larger chainring, hoping that the specially engineered pins and ramps do their thing and slurp the chain over without hesitation. That might happen half the time. The rest of the time, a certain amount of chewing takes place. Going the other way, the return spring of the front derailleur gets its one chance when the shifter releases cable tension abruptly. The derailleur cage snaps over, hopefully dislodging the chain from the larger ring and depositing it onto the smaller one. It's like having someone direct you right or left by punching you in the face. If the chain goes out over the high side or drops to the inside, a rider can sometimes ride it back onto the chainrings by shifting the opposite way and continuing to pedal. If that maneuver doesn't work, it graunches the chain even more. We still try it.

With a single ring, front derailleur problems vanish completely. However, you now have to provide the whole gear range with the rear cassette. This led to low gear cogs of 36, then 40, then 42, and now 50 teeth. The rear derailleurs have had to evolve longer and longer cages to handle the chain, and still try to manage a reasonable gap between the upper pulley and the cogs on everything from an 11 (or the even more ridiculous 10) up to the 40, 42, or 50.

All the wide range systems that I have worked on have obvious trouble managing this range, particularly getting onto and off of that huge low gear. The bike that Dave was working on had a basic SRAM SX derailleur. We have no idea if it ever worked any better than  it does now, because the owner dropped it off with the usual statement, "It has no real problems, I just want to get it tuned up." He said the same thing about all the bikes, including one kid's 20-inch that was missing the axle nut on one side of the front wheel.

SRAM has spawned at least two different "B-gap adjustment tools" that are supposed to help a mechanic set the angle of the parallelogram to achieve optimal clearance between the upper pulley and the immense cog. However, this derailleur does not want to shift away from that gear once you're in it, no matter what the B-gap is. You take the cable completely off and shove it over there by hand and it settles in like it wants to live there forever, a tree-climbing single-speed.

Hosing could have led to corrosion and silt in the pivots. This would resist the return spring starting the derailleur back toward its released position. Under full cable tension, the parallelogram is folded quite tightly. If little detents had developed from wear, when it's all folded up it might stick. Clearly something is making it stick. I just have to figure out what. But right now, with ski season still nominally underway, it's hard to concentrate on all the variables of temperamental machinery.

I had one bike on my stand for several weeks. First we were waiting for parts. Then ski season got busy again after a lull while we had no snow. I was so far out of the flow of the repair that I couldn't say for sure that I had addressed all of its unique needs. The rider is not abusive, but he's relentless, and has already ridden three bikes into the ground. Indeed, when they dropped this one off the rider's father said, "Let us know if it's time to buy a new one again." And it's only been a couple of years, but between this rider's perpetual motion, and the industry's embrace of disposability, it's not ridiculous to consider having to replace your mid-price bike every two or three years. Well it is ridiculous, but it's become plausible enough to be accepted. I was going to say acceptable, but it should never be -- or have been -- acceptable. But a consumer public well trained by the ephemeral quality of everything else that they fork out good coin for is not surprised when their bike is made to the same exploitive standard.

With this foretaste of the mind-numbing and soul-destroying realities of servicing modern bikes, we both agreed that what we missed was riding our bikes. As much as commuting stresses me because I have to do my daily miles in what passes for rush hour, I have reached the point in driving season where I've turned into a complete asshole behind the wheel. I always hit a peak some time in February and shock myself into mellowing out a bit until I can get the hell out of the car and return to the more satisfying flow of biking.

In February I have to get to work earlier to rack the rental boots that had to sit out overnight to dry, and perhaps take the bandages off of elderly rental skis that I had to glue after the previous day because the bases were starting to delaminate. All of this has to be completed before opening the doors to the day's flood of renters, who will keep us in continuous motion until late afternoon. We're masked, they're masked, we're trying to keep everyone somewhat separated, and the whole slam dance usually obliterates a lunch break. Sometimes it ends with more OT doing service work like mounting bindings or waxing skis, that we couldn't do while immediate demands from the rental and sales counters called for all hands on deck. It no longer energizes me the way it did a couple of decades ago. Now it's just something to get through.

If the day isn't busy, it drags, because we can't get too deep into anything else in case it does get busy. Even if we know it's going to be quiet, because we're getting rain or something, converting the main workshop to bike work involves moving a lot of stuff that doesn't get along with grease, and cleaning the bench completely before moving it back again for the next wave of seasonally appropriate business.

If we had a bike-only shop, I would solicit winter overhauls and custom builds. But even those are less fun now that traditional skills have less value. It's only a rare old codger who wants me to build a set of wheels. I used to like the alternative activities. I still believe in using the season for what it offers, rather than fighting it. It's still reasonable to look forward -- as much as I look forward to anything these days -- to the more consistent rhythm of riding season, now that I can no longer count on a consistent rhythm of winter activities.

Lazy bikers

 Cyclists are essentially lazy. If we weren't lazy we'd be runners.

Admit it. Look at us as a whole. What's trending now? Ebikes. It's just the latest in a long timeline of putting humans on wheels. We can't even say "at least we don't have motors" anymore.

I know, I know: lots of us, myself included, refuse to take up power assistance. But plenty of people who feel perfectly pleased with themselves have choked it down and now parade it proudly. And, as I said, it's just the latest variation. From the wheeled "swift runner," down through every innovation in the development of pedals and drive trains, riders have looked to get more for their effort. In racing, every innovation started out as an unfair advantage, rapidly disseminated throughout the field and soon superseded by something even more clever. Performance enhancing drugs were just more of the same.

Just this year, after riding my commuting route from Effingham for 30 years, I finally noticed how the old route of 28 used to veer off before the height of land that it now climbs over, traveling a longer distance, but without the little nuisance knoll that marks the peak of the route. It's been bugging me ever since. The road used to go around a little wetland pond, through what look like picturesque stands of spruce and hardwood. A good chunk of that route is still public right of way. It now leads to a trailhead for Trask Mountain. But the continuation that would connect to the highway on the other side of the pond has been obliterated. Not only is it no longer there for an intrepid bushwhacker to reopen slightly for riders and walkers who might appreciate it, it's been dug away to let the wetland fill in. It was only a little shelf -- hardly a major loss of habitat. Further down the north slope you can see sections of overgrown blacktop. They didn't rip it all out.

The meander near a wetland was probably more prone to frost heaves, and did make the road that little bit longer, which is more to plow. Motorists just push a little harder on the gas pedal to surmount the crest. Cyclists do the equivalent, but we feel it when we dig further into the fuel tank and strain the engine.

Not to take anything away from the masochistic riders who seek out climbs and like to pound themselves to extinction on epic challenges. I've logged plenty of triple-digit rides, trained and raced in the rain, and ridden in the depths of winter, despite being a dilettante. The bike riding population is vast. But I'll bet that the majority prefers downhills to uphills and tailwinds to headwinds. I know my ride home would be vastly more enjoyable if I had the option at least to skip some elevation and cruise a nice woodsy flat stretch.

Now that it's park and ride season, I won't be pedaling that bit of 28 until daylight returns again in late winter or early spring. Weather determines when full commuting season finally starts.

Winter Frustration

On Wednesday I arrived to begin my work week and found a road bike clamped in the work stand. With the persistent lack of snow, its owner had decided to begin riding outdoors. His timing wasn't very good. Late Wednesday night, snow began. It changed to sleet and freezing mist not long after sunrise. This transitioned to more significant icing after nightfall on Thursday. But he's ready if winter falters again.

Winter has mostly faltered this year. It has managed to dish up a tasting menu of wintry tidbits, including some skating and ice boating, but not a lot of any one winter pleasure. The snow last year, though below average, was dense and durable. The cold, though not bitter, was persistent enough to put together longer stretches of wild skating, and keep the ski trails just holding on. For your cross-training outdoor athletes of any level it provided a seasonally-appropriate selection much of the time. This year has been much more frustrating.

I used to switch readily to riding when I was already doing more consistent training of all kinds. Since I am the absolute worst at indoor exercise, I hardly did any, but I could always find something to do outside. However, as I've gotten older, I really notice how cycling alone does not provide complete enough exercise. It actually hurts you if all you do is pedal. It neglects too many other muscle groups and does nothing for bone density, flexibility, and core strength. A false start on riding season just makes me repeat saddle toughening multiple times before the real season sets in.

Road riding has one massive advantage: convenience. There's a road right at the end of your driveway. If you happen to live where there's a trail -- bike, hike, ski, or what have you -- right outside your door, that's great. But most of us don't have that. Okay, I do, but I know that it's not the norm in most places. But a road rider on any form of the machine can walk out, hop on, and pedal away. My winter choice is the fixed gear, but you have to develop a taste for that. The guy who brought his road bike in this week has a fixed-gear that I built for him, but he doesn't automatically think to go that way. He used to compete in triathlon at a high level, so his introduction to cycling was on sophisticated, multi-geared machines. He seemed to enjoy the fixie when we rode together a time or two, but it didn't win him over.

When riding season actually gets close I will start the routines of riding and supporting exercises. But riding has always fit my schedule best when I use it to commute to work, so that it eats less time out of the rest of my day. The supporting exercises are fairly minimal. When I can get on top of my seasonal depression, I do them even when I'm not riding. But if I can ski regularly it takes care of everything I need until early spring.

Cross-country skiing is the ultimate one-stop shopping for general fitness. It goes beyond the obvious cardiovascular benefits. Classical skiing especially works the limbs through a nice, full range of motion, while the core is exercised symmetrically in support of the stride. Skating is less satisfactory, but still better than anything else outside of a planned and varied program in a gym, using specific exercises to isolate muscle groups and boring the shit out of you until you quit. But you can't get up and go on your skis if the trails are brown, or if thin cover leaves subsurface obstacles that could dump you on your face.

Just trudging around on cross-country skis provides a muted level of the muscular benefits, but less of the cardiovascular aspect, unless you really go out and bulldoze on your heavier boards. You will get your heart rate up, but I find it hard to persist at that level when I'm not making much headway through the landscape. Also, groomed trails get chewed down to nothing when they're not refreshed with new snow at regular intervals, so your trudging is likely to be done off-trail. Mature hardwood forests offer many passable spaces. But it's now more of a hike than a swooping flight in pursuit of a sleek physique.

Even the trudging had started to suffer from the lack of a consistent surface. On a recent bushwhack up the mountain behind my house, I rediscovered the sensation of actually walking, when the steeper slopes turned out to have melted off. It was downright pleasant. The snow that fell Wednesday night won't improve the skiing enough up there, and it will make the walking harder. But that's New England. It might freshen up the smoothest of the groomable Nordic trails for a low-grade version of  the high-grade experience. And I might even get a shot at it before it turns into some other weird, half-frozen thing.

TIT

Driving season always gets me thinking about Time In Transit. I've written about it a number of times before, but a new entry puts it back on top of the pile.

The recent vacation week marathon required that I not only arrive on time, but early, to prepare the rental area for the coming day. A lot cannot be done the night before, because rental gear is being returned wet right up to closing time. The boots in particular have to be laid out with air space around them, so they can dry, before being tucked back into the close confines of the boot shelves. This could be a few pairs or 30. Or more, if we had a phenomenally big day. Thus, I am shooting to arrive a half-hour early to brush off the dried mud and rack the boots. After the boots I hang the ski poles. They are hung on pegs close set to fit as many as possible into the rack. I try to rotate them so that the same few aren't always going out. Then there might be snowshoes to brush off and hang, as well.

On a good day I can drive to town from home in 20 minutes. On a really good day, I might shave that down with a bit of sociopathic speeding on the highway stretch. That in itself demonstrates the creeping sociopathy bred by driving all the time. I will ask myself whether I am behaving like someone I would want to share the road with on my bike. The answer is a conditional yes. If there are cyclists, I amend my driving to cooperative mode. But absent any fellow pedalers I am easily lured into speeding, and playing the entire paved surface for cornering lines. I drive the way I ride.

On a bad day -- the more typical circumstance -- I get behind someone driving slowly, perhaps erratically, and the oncoming traffic eliminates any chance to pass legally and safely. I do not pass illegally and unsafely, though I do admit to the temptation. The highway department has eliminated two or three passing zones, all of which I had used over the years. I miss them.

The difference in transit time is considerable when I get behind someone pokey. If you take 20 minutes as the benchmark average for an unobstructed run, 30 minutes is 50% slower. I always have trouble with calculations like this, because 10 minutes is 33.33333% of 30 minutes. And 30 minutes is not an unreasonable transit time. When cycling, I prefer to be passed by someone going for 30 minutes rather than 20. On the other hand, if the road is clear enough for a clean 20-minute trip, the faster driver has plenty of room to give me space, and most of them do. It only gets ugly when traffic is tight and a speeder is still trying to push it. That's when people pull out to pass coming right at me, or try to pass in gaps that they should have declined. I will say that such shenanigans are fairly rare.

So there I am in bike season, riding along the highway at a steady speed. My time in transit varies very little. A major delay, like a flat tire, will blow the average completely, but if all goes well I can count on completing the inbound run in less than an hour. Even a ten-minute variation from a 55-minute average TiT is only about 18%. Most of the time, my longer times in transit are from route variations.

Weather can make a difference to drive time. This has been a somewhat snowy winter for commuting. But the difference still hinges more on traffic than on absolute driving conditions.
With a decent set of snow tires and years of experience, a driver can move along pretty well with no one else on the road. It's definitely below the dry pavement average, but still satisfactory. I've pushed through some pretty deep unplowed fluff with only front wheel drive, given a decent set of tires. But get behind someone handicapped by bad rubber and anxiety, and the drive turns into a slog. And not all snow is created equal. When the plow trucks have been on it, they may leave behind a fairly well scraped surface with exposed pavement or they may pack it into a skating rink worse than it was before they attended to it.

Winter conditions would have a big effect on bike time in transit. In years past I have made a few winter commutes, when the weather was not snowy, so the only obstacles were cold and darkness. You can dress for cold and light for night. I would also only ride on work days when my schedule allowed me to complete the whole route before nightfall. My interpretation of "nightfall" was loose enough to put me into dangerous dusk, but I was inexperienced and thoughtless enough to go for it. But the game changes when you add snow, ice, slush, and wide, deep puddles of brine. Whatever your legal rights to the road may be, when you force the interaction between motor vehicles and bicycles you will arouse feelings not easily addressed in the time you will have available to debate them with a steamed motorist.

Pushing the beginning of the season, I have set out in adequate conditions from home, only to find the highway coated with ice on the height of land on Route 28 coming into North Wolfeboro. Even worse, the shoulder might be coated, but the travel lane clear, forcing me to squeeze in with the flow of commuters driving to work, or risk falling beneath their wheels if I stay to the right. There's no good place to be in a situation like that. I reiterate that in some circumstances the assertion of legal rights will create more ill will than acceptance among the motoring public.

Studded tires are a limited answer. The metal provides sketchy traction on pavement, and wears down, so you might not have as much of it as you would like when you finally get to ice. The tires are heavy because of all the metal, and they're not cheap. And if you've ever had to fix a flat tire that's stiff, cold, wet, and studded with metal spikes, while hunkered down in a snow drift, as passing motor vehicles spray you with salty splather, you're not eager to repeat the experience. All the while, the clock ticks on your time in transit to work.

I've used studs on my park-n-ride path commute, but in virtually every year the snow has arrived deep and soft, and hung around until mud season. And the "park" portion becomes very difficult because many path entry points are not plowed out.

In full-on bike season, I run into traffic delays when I use the rail trail inbound. I run into some delays outbound as well, but I'm not shooting for a fixed arrival time. Because the path is very badly designed, improvised around the strictures of an active rail line, all users are crammed between the rails for much of its length. I have written a lot about its disappointing shortcomings, to no avail. The rail car club has disproportionate leverage, and bikes are at the bottom of everyone's priority list. Inbound on the path I can be forced to a walking pace as I accommodate pedestrians who all give me the stink eye anyway.

On wider paths, a rider can still encounter pedestrian volumes that fill the available space, as well as slower riders. Is the answer more lanes?

In urban and suburban areas where the majority of people drive to work, commuters allow for traffic by leaving earlier. More traffic? Leave even earlier. Super commuters living more than an hour by car from their place of employment have to pad their expected time in transit to allow for the time they know they will spend at a steaming standstill in normal morning gridlock. If by chance they get all the breaks and arrive at work early, congratulations! They've just flushed that free time down the toilet of gainful employment. I speak from the point of view of someone who wanted to have a life, not just a job and possessions. So time means different things to me than it might mean to them. From a purely biological standpoint, we all need only to reach maturity, find a mate, reproduce ourselves, and die. That makes everything else a luxury. It sounds pretty grim, though. If we're going to be that simple, I say we just go all the way back to photosynthesis. It's self-contained and solar powered. We wouldn't be bothering anyone. Make the world safe for stromatolites again.

The Last Marathoner

Today marks the close of what we in the winter tourism business in New Hampshire call Massachusetts Vacation Week. All of the New England states take a week of vacation in February, but they don't all take the same week. Typically, Massachusetts takes the week that begins with President's Day weekend, and New Hampshire takes the following week. For the ski industry up here,  vacation weeks are the peak earning period of the winter.

Big operations might take on extra help, or routinely handle such a high volume that the vacation week onslaught just makes the normal shifts a little busier. In our little shop and touring center it's more like the Alamo. Everyone is on the parapet firing or behind some cover reloading. All leave was cancelled. We would work through our days off in a 12-day marathon. The shop is open seven days a week in the peak of winter or summer. Only in the past few years have we taken to closing on Sundays in the spring and fall. So each person's schedule overlaps, covering days off. Eliminate the days off from a week, and each schedule nets out to 12 in a row. I've written about the disorientation that develops during this period. That piece was written when we had the retail concession at Jackson Ski Touring, where we had a much heavier onslaught with a much lower common denominator. But we did the marathon before we had the Jackson gig, and we have continued since then.

Up until a couple of years ago, the Wolfeboro shop had two full-time backshop operatives. Then Big G decided to cut the wire and tunnel to freedom. For the past two winters we have only had part-timers in addition to me. So no one else goes through the 12-day grinder. El Queso Grande works seven days a week all the time, but the shop is his life's work. Despite the wretched financial state we all share, he does have the cachet of ownership, and justifiable pride at the considerable contribution his family has made to the community over the decades since they stepped into the tar pit of small business ownership. He appears to have nothing else he'd rather be doing, especially since various medical problems cut off his career as an aging athlete. If he felt better, he would want to ride his bike and ski more. But he doesn't have an unwritten novel or endless cartoon ideas hammering in his brain to make him constantly question his life choices. The two phases of his life are working and resting up to work some more. This is not said in disrespect. His life is hard and he works hard at it.

I am the last marathoner. Gone is the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the tourist wranglers. We'd be burnt out, irritable, zonked with fatigue, but we would have each other. I am the last.

Once the marathon ends, the season winds down very quickly, regardless of the amount of snow or the enthusiasm of the dedicated skiers. We can't reconfigure the shop to bike work for at least another month, but the general public is mostly finished with winter after their February gorge on it. If the weather enables it, we will have some busy weekends. For me, the easing of the schedule means that I might have the chance to dig through the scraps of paper with scribbled notes on them and develop the ideas captured there.

Yearning for spring

Winter can be quite enjoyable if you are in a position to use winter conditions with appropriate tools and activities. Otherwise, it is just a challenge to survival, both physical and mental.

As a college athlete -- albeit a dissipated and hedonistic one -- I had heard what happens to weekend warriors who try to continue to compete after they emerge into the Real World and let other responsibilities take over the time they used to spend on training. I only nursed delusions of higher level competition in fencing for a few years after graduation, but I had every intention of remaining physically active.

Physical capability requires continuous maintenance. I found lots of interesting ways to explore under my own power. I recommend all of them. But only a couple work well as routine daily transportation. Cycling is the only one that is basically universal. If you walk, you need to live within timely walking distance of your destination. If you row or paddle, you will need to transport your vessel or have a place to keep it on the water. Park-and-whatever options do reduce motor vehicle use, but don't allow you to be completely car-free.

Bike commuting provided continuous physical activity. It fit neatly into a part of the day already committed to commuting in general. Biking is not complete exercise, but it provides a great baseline from which to add a little of this and that to fill out your needs. It also marks you as some kind of arrested adolescent or weirdo, but that's society's problem, not cycling's. Society will make it your problem if you ride. You have to do your own cost/benefit analysis to decide if it's worth it to you.

One of the hardest things to get used to when you're out there riding a bike and trying to live a low impact life is finding out how many people hate you for it and think you should die. It doesn't have to be the majority. You only have to encounter one homicidal jerk. That's true whether you get tagged by a hit and run driver or you happen to be at the mall the day one of them shows up and opens fire. In spite of that, I find myself trapped by winter, waiting for the opportunity to go expose myself to the contempt and hostility of the motoring public, just to be able to fit physical activity conveniently into my schedule again.

As a member of society and a denizen of a northern state, I don't go wobbling down the icy, narrowed roads on my bike when conditions are adverse. Once you accept that the majority of people have valid reasons not to use a bicycle for transportation, you have a responsibility to examine your own priorities as you expect them to bend to your decision to ride. If biking was really a valid option for low income people to get to their jobs around here we would see them out in all weather. In some places you do. Those would be the places that get first priority when someone starts handing out infrastructure improvements. In the other places, where harsh-weather cyclists are rare or nonexistent, people have clearly made other adaptations. In an open winter, or as winter finally loosens its grip, I will take training rides and ease into the full-distance commute. As long as most roads are lined with slumping snowbanks, and narrowed by flows of ice, I will find other things to do. But it is hard. So many other things I need to do involve no physical exertion at all. Case in point, I'm sitting here on my ass, writing, because this is the time I have.

Unfortunately for me, the shorter options for the commute aren't open until late in the spring, because they involve parking areas and sections of trail that are buried in snow. These thaw slowly to mud and then dry gradually to a decent riding surface. For the past several years I have had to pull off some sudden long days in the early season.

Trainer riding is not only mental torment, it is very abusive of the bike in the trainer. The bike is clamped into a frame instead of free to lean in response to rider input. The rider's sweat cascades down over the machine for the entire trainer season. I do my best to avoid using a trainer, preferring instead to use off-bike cross training activities and some roller riding for smoothness. But that was when I wasn't as mired in depression most of the time. The nice thing about commuting is that I can flog myself to do it even if I feel like a worthless piece of crap. It beats sitting in the car feeling like a worthless piece of crap.

When the days get longer, there's more daylight to burn. Even before commuting season it's easier to fit more things into a day away from work, or into the margins of a day wasted on gainful employment. Meanwhile, I'm keenly aware that one should not wish time away. Just keep tunneling, and look for rewards in each shovelful.