Your friend up in the sky

 Fully into glare season now, our definition of a good riding day changes from our hopes for spring and summer.

In short: your best friend when the sun slants in from the south (or north in that other hemisphere) is a high, dry overcast.

I do love the late autumn and winter sun, but not when I'm sharing the road with motor vehicles. I don't like it when I'm trying to ride a trail with it blinding me and casting deep shadows among the rocks and folds of a challenging off-road course either, but I really don't do that anymore. I would rather enjoy the stabbing glare from a beach or a mountaintop, on foot. Either that or a nice window letting that brilliance and warmth slant across the cup of coffee and some baked treat on the table beside me.

If your schedule allows it, ride your glare season rides during what passes for the middle of the day. The sun will still come in low, but not as low. A cloudy day will expand your safer window by blocking the direct blaze. I have nearly hit pedestrians several times when riding in glare. Blinded drivers are even more likely to hook a turn in front of you when they can't see you at all, as opposed to simply ignoring you.

You can dress for most weather, including a cold autumn rain. Build yourself a fixed gear for those crappy days when you don't want to expose your good bike and its many moving parts to the water and grit. Riding fixed also keeps your legs moving, which is great for generating warmth and developing a very smooth, efficient pedal stroke. It limits your speed on the downhills and makes you exert as the cranks force your feet around. You might resist the pedaling force or simply try to keep up.

Purists consider a brake to be cheating. They can kiss my ass. Slap a front brake on there to help you out when you need it. And fenders. There's no great virtue in slathering yourself with grime while a cold, wet spray saturates you from below as well as above.

Outdoor riding is always more fun than abusing yourself and your bike on a trainer. Cold weather riding is the hardest activity to dress for, but it's worth the trouble just to get out there and log some actual miles. You will redefine "comfort," but at your worst you will still not be as grody as Fridtjof Nansen and Fredrik Johansen were after more than a year in the same underwear. So get out there.

Stuff I like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that stuff is water

Road crews have used heavy equipment to shove back the encroaching snowbanks along some sections of roadway where regular plowing had reached its limit. The towering piles of icy chunks look impressive, as do the dramatic icebergs at the sides of larger parking lots.

Even where the special effects have not enhanced the effect of a big snow year the regular plowed banks run wide and deep.

Another snowstorm is coming on Wednesday.

All that stuff is water. When it thaws rapidly, rivers flood and the land turns into a quagmire. When it thaws slowly, rivers merely rise and the land turns into a slightly shallower quagmire for a longer period of time.

For the bicyclist spring thaw means deep, salty puddles at the base of the snowbanks. It means wet, briny grit spraying up from your tires onto anything not protected by full fenders. It means potholes and pavement cracks. The frost heaves are much less of a problem for bicyclists than motorists because we can maneuver among them. The mostly rounded ones feel like waves. But the fault lines where upthrust has lifted one section of pavement higher than another deliver rim-bending jolts to the inattentive rider.

The rail trail I might use for a few early-season park-and-rides on studded tires will turn into a swamp once its packed covering of ice and snow gives way to warming temperatures. Sections of it drain well and dry readily, but other stretches notoriously do not. And if Wednesday's storm brings glop that never really sets up, the only way to pedal the path will be on a fat bike.

I will speak more of fat bikes in a separate post. I don't have one and can't justify the expenditure to get one, but I like the concept well enough. And even a fat bike will bog down in deep mashed potatoes and applesauce.

Time to head out on the pavement on a fixed gear with fenders. Wear waterproof shoes. Things are going to get messy. But before that we can still use the snow for its various purposes until it undeniably turns into nothing but a sloppy liability.