Early comes late, late comes early, and the middle disappears

 Autumn is here. All through August we were warned, but could put off recognition. September makes it stick. The sun rises later, sets sooner, and slants in lower. The light goes from morning to afternoon with no long bask in noonday sun.

Very soon, dusk will fall too early for me to complete my full commute safely. Route shortening options all have drawbacks. I could start at the parking lot for Ocean State Job Lot ("The Blot"), but that only gets me a little over three miles. I save a little time, but loading and unloading the bike eats several minutes, nearly eliminating any time I saved by traveling at car speed rather than bike speed for those few miles. That leaves me with about 11 miles each way. Not bad for a week or two, before the darkness closes in while I'm still on Route 28. The highway isn't as bad as Elm Street, because there's a bit of a shoulder and  sight lines are better. But people get dopey in the fall twilight. It's a lot harder to judge peripheral clearance in the darkness, so even a well-lighted cyclist is more at risk, especially if a driver is half lit.

Any options that involve parking closer to town also include driving extra distance off of the direct line to get to them. Now I'm really not saving much gas or wear and tear on the car at all. Most of these options require driving on dirt roads that might be rough. All of them require left turns off of the highway in the morning, with impatient drivers behind me and coming toward me. I might get a quick, clean left turn or I might be hanging there, all tensed up, waiting for a gap so I can clear the pipeline. I know that other drivers are supposed to be responsible and alert, but I hate to depend on them.

Most of the parking options in the woods along the way are awkward in some way. I have arranged parking at the driveways of friends and acquaintances, but it was always a little weird. There's a little parking area at Bryant Road and the Cotton Valley Trail, but particularly since the pandemic it's more heavily used. I might find no space or only a tight squeeze, when I'm on a tight schedule. And I burned out on the trail about that time, too. Tired of getting the stink eye and passive aggressive overtures from pedestrians and dog walkers who insist on more groveling than I'm inclined to do. I'd rather be out on the road where people are just trying to kill me, but it's less personal. So I was taking trail parking, but then riding on the road. I felt guilty about that, on top of the time, hassle, and extra driving involved. It isn't transportation cycling anymore when it doesn't reduce car use.

I feel some fear as the darkness closes in, not for myself when riding so much as for what I will find when I try to get back into full-time riding next spring. Age takes its toll whether you're paying attention or not. It progresses gradually for a couple of decades in which you can grumble about being in your forties or fifties. You know you're losing a little bit all the time. But then you hit a point where you're losing noticeable amounts as soon as you let up. You can't take a few weeks off and hop back in. You need to find ways to stay consistently active, and even then you will need to feel your way back in to see where the new limits have been set. My average speed has been fairly consistent for a couple of years, but a wee bit slower each year, and definitely taking more out of me. "Peak form" is not a summit anymore, it's just a shallower hole.

Your riding area may differ. When I lived in Maryland, I was able to use the bike year-round with only a day here or there when snow or ice made the riding a foolish and selfish indulgence. I had the best lights I could get, which were a feeble glow compared to the lights of today, but even the motor vehicles had dimmer lights, so it averaged out. Also, I rode on city streets much of the time, so the municipal lighting illuminated the general area. When I lived outside the city for a while, the commute traversed a few miles of darker highway, but it worked out. I was younger, the terrain was much easier, and the winters were mild.

There were also about 100 million fewer people in the country overall. Much of the population growth has been concentrated in the eastern megalopolis. I lived in it then, but north of it now. Maryland's population has grown by roughly two million since I settled there after college in 1979. Most of its growth occurred after I left. By comparison, New Hampshire's population has only grown by about 350,000 people since I arrived. On some days it feels like all of them are on my route, smokin' dope and texting, but I know that's an illusion. For the most part, smoking or not, they pass without incident. Back in Maryland I was on the receiving end of honks, swerves, spitting, thrown objects, profanity... all the stuff of a crowded society. It was only the 1970s and early '80s, so weapons were not discharged, and only very rarely shown. Mostly the drivers just used the car or truck itself to express themselves. It happens here as well, but much less often in my immediate area. I hear bad stories from not far away. It only takes one to ruin or end your life, but that's part of how we conduct ourselves on the road in any vehicle.

I have noted that more people seem to give way to their hostility under the cover of darkness. I have also noted, and continue to note, that the self-centered lighting on motor vehicles puts forth a blaze of light for the operator to see down hundreds of feet of darkened roadway, but that same blinding glare is aimed at oncoming vehicles with their own blinding glare, so that no one can see. Stick a cyclist into that, even with the best lights you can mount, and we're all lucky if we get through it without someone getting tagged. Cyclists have their own aggressive lighting, which can do more harm than good if they're not aimed carefully. No point blinding a driver if you actually want them to maneuver safely past you.

Headlights on motor vehicles have gotten weird in general with the high-intensity LEDs that supposedly project plenty of usable light while also forming weird shapes unlike any headlights of the ancient past. Navigation lights on ships and planes are meant to provide instant recognition of size and direction of travel. Lights on road vehicles should be no different, given how we're expected to travel at high speeds in tight formations. We're either operating close to another lane or two full of other speeding vehicles or in a single lane, perhaps with bicyclists and moped riders alongside. We have to make quick, accurate decisions. People drive too fast. Some people drive erratically.

Bike lighting can't equal the options available to boxier vehicles with four or more wheels to define the shape of them. Look at tractor-trailer rigs and even smaller trucks. They have lights all over them that define their shape. Passenger vehicles, even the super modern ones with weird lights, still conform to a general headlight/tail light/parking light configuration. Motorcycles and bicycles just don't have enough surface area to offer a large and definitive array.

Mere brightness is not a virtue. Motorcycles with super bright headlights are actually hurting themselves by blinding motorists. No one needs to see you from half a mile away. They need to see you from a few yards away, and be able to see the clear path to avoid you. This is true whether you have a motor or not. Visibility from further away helps somewhat to allow the driver of a larger vehicle to plan ahead, but not if it's so blinding that the driver loses the line when it matters the most.

Motorcycles with dual headlights run a risk of an oncoming or crossing driver estimating their size and distance wrong, seeing them as a larger vehicle, farther away. And super loud pipes just make people want to kill you. Factor that into your safety calculation.

When the commute ends I have to fit riding into the days when I'm not working, or into the margins of the days when I do. Because the sun comes up later, and motorists are going to work in the mornings, a dawn patrol training ride carries many of the same stresses as a commute, while providing none of the economic benefits. It's easy enough to suit up and get on the bike, but maybe not the best use of the time, since other forms of exercise provide more benefits in overall fitness and bone density. I get a lot more core and upper body exercise when I'm not hurrying out in the morning to make the bike ride to work and arriving home already fried from the ride at that end of the day. The rider is part of the machine. It -- you -- need maintenance just as much.

Do you want to be in good shape, or do you want to be a bike racer?

 Trainee David has signed up for delayed entry recruitment into the Navy. He'll be a senior in high school this year, but decided he'd like not just a job, but an adventure. So now he's learning a lot about how he measures up to other recruits, and about military organization.

Here's a kid who can hold his own on a sponsored junior team, who has been racing since he was 12. He's not a star, but he's a solid team rider, following a disciplined and supervised training program to compete in bicycle racing. He prefers cyclocross, but he's done quite a bit of road racing and has raced mountain bikes as well to round out his experience. But he falls short in PT tests because of his complete lack of upper body strength.

Climbing specialists, time trialers and competitors in long road races end up with shoulders like a cat. No need for brawny arms and broad shoulders when you're trying to reduce frontal area and put maximum power to the legs.

When I dabbled in racing, off-season training meant something off the bike. Some people speed skated. Some people weight trained. Some people did that weird cross-country skiing thing where you could actually ski uphill. Only a few people that I knew of could or would go to a warm place where they could stay on the bike all year. Others experimented with new indoor training devices like the RacerMate. And I mean the original RacerMate, with no electronic devices, just a couple of squirrel cage fans that provided resistance against a roller that pressed on the rear tire when your bike was clamped in a stand. It was the original wind trainer.

It wasn't supposed to be good for you to do just the one thing. Obsessive training has become more commonplace these days, but you can mess yourself up pretty well if all you ever do is ride in some form or another.

David has gotten a few pointers from our resident climber/former ropes course builder/former power lifter and trainer Sam. As a teenager, he can command his body to do something different and see immediate improvement. He's already gone from "Oh my god, pushups are hard!" to counting off by the dozen. And he was already working on core strength as part of his cycling regimen.

Never an obsessive trainer, I would usually lose interest in the bike racing season right after the district championships. I would still "train" as an excuse to go on long rides almost every day, but I didn't really enjoy most of the actual racing. Throwing elbows with a bunch of testosterone-saturated lunatics didn't appeal to me that much. I just liked having a nice bike and riding kind of fast. But if you say you're a competitive athlete it sounds a little less wimpy and aimless. Or so I hoped, anyway.

Riding around the countryside fit in with a generally exploratory curiosity. That led me to backpacking, rock climbing, various boats propelled with paddles, and cross-country skiing, which led to New England. In any season, a wanderer can find a way to find out "what's over there?" by a human powered means. Faced with the example of my parents, who lived normal, productive adult lives in modern civilization, and therefore got fat and spent much of the time unhappy about it, I figured that no matter what happened I wanted to stay in motion. Civilized society wants you to throw yourself into deterioration for the sake of the economy. Embrace that decay! Whoever works the longest hours wins! Your life should destroy you either because it makes you sit at a desk too much or beats you to death with grueling toil. Either way, if you're not well on the way to disability by the time you're in your 40s you've been slacking off.

As I paid attention to other responsibilities, my activity had dwindled to mostly just bike commuting. The kayaks hung from the rafters, ready to be lowered onto the car, but never used. They became dance halls for mice. Once in a while we might use them. For a while it wasn't too bad, but then came the day when they suddenly seemed a lot heavier than they used to be. Use it or lose it. I looked in the mirror and saw those cat shoulders. That warning propelled me back to the free weights and exercises to see how little I could get away with and still regain the ability to lift and lug things.

Cross-country skiing no longer provides. When we had the shop at Jackson Ski Touring, I made sure that everyone who wanted to get out got to tag out during the best part of the day to taste what we were selling and keep enthusiasm high. The shop opened right onto the groomed track, so transitions were instantaneous. This is not true in Wolfe City. We are operating with minimal staff, and the nearest trail access is still a short drive from the shop. Tag outs are rare, and temperature conditions make night skiing after work treacherous as things freeze up after sundown. In the morning, it's hard to get organized and get to town early enough for a meaningful workout before shop hours. So I basically just get fat and irritable. I even wrote a song about it called "Snacking out of boredom and depression." We'll see if minimal indoor training keeps me more or less together for the eventual return of spring.

When gentle exploration seemed like a good example to set, it felt more worthwhile. Now it seems like the time would have been better spent on direct political activism and preparing for the bloody time that will follow the collapse of civilization when that political activism failed anyway. Oh well. Live and learn.

Holiday treats

Here's another one that could go as appropriately in my ski blog as in this one.

The turn of the year brings holidays typically associated with food and festive beverages. But the combination of weather, darkness, and the needs of my employer usually reduce my physical activity to its lowest point in the year.

I'll freely admit that one reason I chose human-powered travel so many years ago was so I could be a little undisciplined about what I ate. Humans were meant to move themselves around. We have invented various devices to carry us, but that fosters a mental addiction that leads to physical decline. Forcing myself to ride a bike to get from place to place inserted a naturally recurring period of exercise, augmented by additional exercise to travel anywhere off of my routine paths. Motorized transportation has its place, but a life built around minimizing it as much as possible helps the body get the regular use it needs. It also makes tasty treats taste better. It's fuel! It's fun! It's both! Oh hey, I ate a little too much. Sorry, everybody. I just have to ride farther. Or walk farther.

There is a form of bulimia in which the purge phase is excessive exercise, so that's another spectrum we can find ourselves on. But just because one end of the spectrum is a dangerous condition doesn't mean that the middle is bad. I would bet that most of us -- myself included -- slide more readily toward the sedentary end than the gaunt and haunted figure stomping on a treadmill at 3 a.m. And I do not make light of that person's plight. These days, I eat too much and I gain weight, because it's harder to justify the time spent playing outside. What do I need my health and fitness for? I should be trying to die, to make way for the younger generation to flourish in the space I vacate.

Life is habit forming. I don't want to live any longer than I'm enjoying it, but I don't want to cash out before I've had the last possible fun. How do you know when that is? You kinda want to hang around until it's obvious, since you can't unkill yourself. Besides, I can still be helpful to people who might need to learn something I can teach them.

Pretty heavy musings on a buche de noel, eh? But I used to be able to burn off baked goods within minutes after I ate them. Now I promise to try to burn them off some time in June. If all goes well I will be laying down base miles to get ready for bike commuting by early April, but the winters have been such physiological quicksand that the first month and a half is just damage control.

On the plus side, I'm not a very imaginative cook or sophisticated eater, so I revert to a fairly boring diet based on my attempts at nutritious food. Even so, I enter each new bike season with deep fear and doubt, which deepens my appreciation when I regain strength. Always in the mist of the future I can see the thickening shape of the serpent that will one day trap my limbs and squeeze my lungs as I fight vainly to rise one more time.

I love to start the day with a nice cup of coffee and some kind of baked goods. The coffee pot alone is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed, but throw in some pie, or home-made cinnamon rolls, or a whole bunch of other things the cellist is good at making, and every night is like Christmas Eve. And, since she's home so little now, I have to get it while I can.

This year I have front-loaded the queue of baked treats by making the cellist a Boston cream pie for her birthday cake. That's what got me started thinking about the Solstice baked-goods binge. The recipes I used for the pastry cream and ganache were not printed out, they were scribbled on scrap paper, so I -- inexperienced in the kitchen -- couldn't visualize the amounts. I'll be carrying pastry cream and ganache for lunch tomorrow...and probably the next day.

Death Wish

A recent death has a lot of people around here thinking about how they want their own passing marked. Some have suggested that they'd like the survivors just to have a big party. Piece of cake! Just be a complete bastard. People will be dancing in the streets.

You get to a certain age and you start to consider mortality. That age will vary depending on your life experiences and many other factors, but sooner or later you think about it in more than merely theoretical terms. Or at least the theoretical scenarios are more fleshed out than just a sideways squint at the concept and a hasty look away.

I'm no fan of death, but we're stuck with it. A lot of our lives are spent trying to evade the risks associated with activities we enjoy, and retaining whatever degree of youth we can. It isn't just to be young as such. It's a practical matter. It's also a matter of pride to be able to do things and not make dumb mistakes that get you eliminated. On the other side of the equation, you might not want to hang around too long past your freshness date and end up some wizened husk, technically alive but incapable of living. On the third hand, maybe it's a weird, cool trip, being nothing but a wicked old brain on top of a body that no one expects anything from. It's a lot of work for other people, though, and I hate inconveniencing anyone unduly.

I hate funerals. I'm not even planning to be at my own. I'm hoping for the "missing, presumed dead" option. But maybe I'm secretly hoping that if I vanish from other people's perceptions so that they're not totally sure I'm irretrievably gone I will also sneak away from myself and just sort of vaporize, like dry ice. Hey, it's worth a try. As for the funeral itself, I'd prefer to save people the inconvenience. If anyone is around and wants to do something, it's on them. I can just imagine it.

"Join with us now as we try to make sense of the life of this aggravating schmuck."

Given the rise in pedestrian and cyclist deaths on the road, I have to wonder if my own healthy habits are going to kill me. I don't need statistics to make me think about the hazards of traveling without a shell among the armored vehicles. The statistics just underscore how little we matter.

Rage against the dying of the light

My father is dying. He's not going in any immediate way, but he is 92, and his poor life choices are catching up with him. He is that bizarre anomaly, a healthy fat man. He's not as healthy as he would have been if he had prevented himself from getting fat, but he's not your stereotypical mess of clogged arteries. He could go for at least several more years. And they're already not fun years. He knows too well what is happening to him, and how he made it worse.

His parents both lived well up into their nineties. But when his mother died in the mid 1980s, she had been a vegetable from an acquired -- not genetic -- debilitating illness since the late 1940s. His father was somewhere between 96 and 98 when he died, blind and infirm, in veterans' home in Indiana. My father knew he had the potential to live a long time, if his job or some other intervening catastrophe didn't take him out first.

A diligent survivor, he had dipped briefly into poverty and uncertainty after the disintegration of his family around 1943. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1944 after flunking out of MIT. He qualified for the Coast Guard Academy, and emerged as an officer in 1951. He served with distinction until his retirement in 1979. He survived storms at sea, and the Arctic night, and his propensity to drive long distances without stopping. He has even survived a classic American diet of meat and starch. He quit smoking in time to avoid cancer and heart disease. In an alternate universe, he kept smoking and survived anyway. We'll never know. But he has lost a lot in the last few years, making his present existence pretty miserable.

He's a fighter, literally. Although sailing was his passion, he also boxed in college. He learned how to make his characteristics work for him against fighters who were larger and faster. Manly anger was a power source. He's far from a one-dimensional character, but that inner fire was his emergency battery. A man of reason, he would tap into a furnace of accumulated rage when he needed to make a special physical effort.

The inner fire and his oddly durable genetics allowed him to get away with very haphazard exercise all the way to his eighties. You might think that's pretty good, but when it's no longer good enough the endgame isn't pretty. His fat is a hard, firm fat. He cannot bend to tie his shoes. He can't even pull on his socks. Crippled with pain from a degenerated hip, he got himself a new one just a couple of years ago, and has recovered pretty well, but he still resorts to a walker for a lot of maneuvers in his home, which can be disastrously awkward when he has a digestive emergency occasioned by the years of poor diet.

To stave off the macular degeneration that blinded his father, he gets a hypodermic needle in his eyeballs every couple of weeks. Sometimes he goes a month. An avid reader, he now finds it extremely cumbersome, because the degeneration was not caught quickly enough to preserve perfect acuity.

His tendency to default to a chair, to reject walking and jogging because he didn't want to look funny out there, is calling in its debt.

Contrast this to my mother's father. Longevity also runs on my mother's side. An optometrist in private practice until he was in his early eighties, Earl made a point to take a walk every day. As a younger man he had been a vigorous tennis player. He was always lean, aided perhaps by some food allergies that kept him from pigging out, but also by a work ethic that included conscious physicality. His mind grew more vague as he went through his last decade. I carried on a correspondence with him as long as I could, but my last letter to him was answered by my uncle, explaining that Earl couldn't continue the exchange. My grandfather's last act was to get up from his seat in the living room and walk to the bedroom, where he dropped dead from a stroke at age 98. I know from our late communications that he did not like the dimming of his mind. As he went into that tunnel, he knew he was going into it. It wasn't classic dementia as such, but he had taken pride in his intellect and was sad to see his sharpness fade. He was heard to long for death quite a while before he reached it. But at least he could tie his shoes.

My father is no fan of either elderly decrepitude or death. He adopted a more physical lifestyle just a few years ago, but it still wasn't a full-bore campaign of daily walks. The phrase "too little, too late" springs to mind. He still defaulted to his chair in front of the television, where he trolled through the full array of news programs, and processed what he saw through a mind trained by decades of administration and policy analysis in Washington. His body fits most naturally into the shape of an armchair, and yet he loathes the stiffness and slow shuffle of his gait when he rises from it. This is what happens when you know better, but you don't do better. He rages against the dying of the light, but his body cannot function solely on that emotional fire. He did not build the machine to carry out his will. He dwelt too much in the mind, aided by a body that produced surprising results for too long, lulling him into a sense that it would always be thus.

The young cadet went aloft in square riggers, and climbed the forestay of one of them hand over hand, just to show that he could. The officer advancing up the chain of command retreated to the dignity becoming his rank, and the less physical duties required of him. He complained of his expanding waistline for years. After he retired from the Coast Guard he had complete control over his time, but spent none of it trying to recapture any of his youthful physicality. As he advanced through middle age, he excused his portly physique by saying that the men in his family all aged that way. He viewed it as inevitable. Genetics are not like a box of chocolates. If you know the traits of your lineage, you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get. But you don't have to merely ride that train to the last stop, taking whatever your DNA dishes out. Start raging early, and don't stop.

Breaking the ice

With the temperature barely 40 degrees (F) and the wind gusting to 30 mph, the day was hardly more inviting than the previous week. But you have to start somewhere. So I did.

Base miles used to be a token thing. We had to remind ourselves not to push big gears before we'd spun the legs for a few hundred miles, one short ride at a time. Short is relative, too. Fifteen or 20 was   nothing. But that's the point of base miles. They were the nothing that adds up to something; the body's reminder of the shape and rhythm of the pedal stroke.

Speaking of the pedal stroke, apparently a recent study has made a high pedaling cadence obsolete. The article I read described the study and did indicate that more work is needed to see how the new information fits in with decades of practice by millions of riders. As usual, a search for answers has turned up more questions. Meanwhile, we all have to live in the real world. I'm going to maintain the cadences that have served me well throughout my cycling career.

Every rider learns the activity from the practices of the riders they know. You learn from your friends.   Maybe you learn from educational programs like Cycling Savvy, Smart Cycling, or a book like Effective Cycling. Most people just start with an interest, buy a bike, and start riding. There are also plenty of magazines and websites. Lots of people who ride and write and need money are happy to find an outlet. There's no shortage of talent.

Anyone who has forgotten to be obsessive about fitness over a long winter will need to take the base mileage phase of the bike season more seriously. I'm physically incapable of going too hard, so that's not a temptation. It's a true rebuilding process.

When I started riding with more than the attention of a child, the people guiding me shared what they knew, including the use of fixed-gear bikes as part of developing a smooth pedal stroke across a wide range of cadence. We didn't focus on that point. The initial challenge was to ride the fixed gear after growing up with bikes that would coast, especially as those bikes offered more gear options as well. The fixed gear seemed like a humorous challenge. It also shaped us as riders without making us think about it. Only after a while did someone more experienced point out the built-in benefit.

A generally human-powered lifestyle will provide a fitness base in that same unconscious way. The fact that I got drawn into the outdoor recreation industry meant that I was doing professionally what people outside the industry have to pay to do. The fact that the outdoor recreation industry pays poverty wages meant that I would never be able to afford the activities any other way. If I wasn't selling the gear and teaching what I knew of the skills, I would not have been there at all.

My mentors in bicycle mechanics were the kind of people who learn how the machinery works and use that knowledge to fund their participation. As skillful tool users, they managed to do a lot of things because they could refurbish old equipment and build some new things with the tools and knowledge they had acquired. They didn't have to follow the more conventional route of making as much money as possible in some unrelated but sufficiently lucrative field and then spending the money on equipment they didn't know much about, to enjoy an activity that they had to fight to find time for. Their interests went well beyond bicycles, and included boats, motorcycles, and airplanes.

The mushrooming crises caused by the consumerist lifestyle make all recreation look extravagant. But at the heart of any human powered recreational activity is the concept of human power. If you are accustomed to getting around on your own feet, or powered by your own exertion in or on a vehicle made for that, you'll be more ready to slide into a more human-powered existence in general.

The separation of human exertion into categories of beneficial exercise, destructive overexertion, and sedentary occupations has led to a general physical decline in which we have some phenomenal athletes, a percentage of fitness hobbyists who are fairly well toned, and a large percentage of people who are so entrapped in the machine age that they have lost most desire and ability to function without a cocoon of mechanical assistance. Labor-saving machines have become barriers to activity. People given leisure face financial demands that make leisure a burden. Free time is just another word for unemployment. Leisure is for the leisure class.

I have always welcomed time to think and to appreciate the beauty that I see around me. But I have had to acknowledge that I pay for this with my precarious financial state, and the likelihood of an impoverished old age, should I live to be old. Perhaps this is the real deal that we should all have been acknowledging. It seemed like we could do better for everyone with our technology, had we been able to convince ourselves to give up the winner-take-all mentality that we had been led to believe was best for us. I've been observing competition for more than 60 years now. I can tell you that it improves nothing but itself. It's a good thing to push your own capabilities. It is not a good thing to build your life around beating other people. It may be natural. It may be the inescapable seed of our destruction. But it ain't good.

In our bloody past it was normal to torture captives and criminals, and to enslave the vanquished. Peel back the technology of weapons until you get to spears, clubs, arrows, and crude blades. At that point, competition for resources makes sense, because hostilities can be contained to more or less natural methods on a short-range battlefield, protecting territories defended by slow-moving ground forces. Border skirmishes keep everyone honest. Start adding alliances and evolving better weapons, communication, and transportation and you reach the point where we perch today, teetering over two or three precipices.

What does it mean to all of you out there? It means that there's a better reason to go for a bike ride than not to.

The Evolution of Cross-Training

In ancient times, when I felt free to play, winter was a time to explore as widely as time and money would allow. I did it all -- or mostly all --: I climbed ice, I trudged up above treeline in what you could call mountaineering, I skied cross-country and some Telemark, I hiked. The cross-country skiing was mostly exploratory, on ungroomed terrain, but working in the business put me close to groomed trails. Learning more about the equipment and technique became a professional necessity and an enjoyable addiction for a time.

Mind you, I never intended to get into the gear business or the recreation industry. These happened by accident in search of basic income. Having put my eggs in the "creative" basket, I had little to offer the world of office jobs or practical trades. What I know I have learned by doing. Being a bike mechanic still seems like a worthwhile skill set, made less enjoyable by the consumerist avalanche that buried the industry and the pedaling world in the 1990s. The industry dumps more debris on the pile every year, rather than showing any inclination to dig some away and focus on simple pleasures. So it goes.

Wrenching has not been a gold mine. And the creative eggs are either spoiling in the basket or are easily overlooked in the tall grass and the jumble of other people's more brilliant output. So I guard my resources and spend nothing on journeys long or short that I do not need to take.

Ice climbing was easy to quit. The tools are expensive and the problems don't entice me. As a subset of mountaineering, ice and rock climbing made sense, within my conservative comfort zone. No longer mountaineering, I no longer think much about the supportive skills.

Achievers need mountains to climb. Artists just need mountains to appreciate. I don't need to be clinging to a couple of microscopic rough patches above a deadly drop to have a nice day out on the crags. I'm not keeping a score card of peaks bagged and waiting to be bagged. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a matter of personality.

Two elderly men I know provide a perfect example of the pros and cons of each approach. The achiever now spends most of his time sitting in a recliner, watching cable news and analyzing situations over which he no longer has much influence. He spent his entire adult life in organizations: government service, sailing clubs, yachting associations. He has plaques, certificates, medals, trophies, attesting to his performance in various hierarchical settings. He has memories of when life was fun, even though his performance focus made it very hard to tell that he was having fun at the time. The artist bought himself a Kevlar solo canoe a couple of years ago, and still goes out paddling, even after a heart attack and the usual pain and stiffness of an aging body. He's in his 80s. He will stop when he is no longer physically capable of going.

Some competitive types manage to remain competitive in their age group until they drop. Some tourist types probably stop and rot sooner than they need to. There are millions of people I've never met, so I can't say for sure. I do observe that the artistic appreciative types, and the achievers with something of the artist about them, seem to remain alive until they're dead, compared to people who need to be at or reaching for the top of a given activity, who stagnate when they realize that big glory is now out of reach.

I'm just trying to stay strong enough to continue my self-propelled lifestyle.

As winter has deteriorated over the years, opportunities to charge right out the door onto usable surfaces have diminished. At the same time, the odds of finding something worth the trip at the end of a self-indulgent drive have diminished as well. I can take a slog in the slush from my own back door more easily that I can take one miles away. From a pure fitness standpoint, the slog from home is more enjoyable than any indoor training, and just as effective as a slog for which I had to burn gasoline.

Winter riding seems less inviting now than it did. Are the roads less clear, or is it just my dwindling testosterone? Can't tell you. I know that the slop storms we get seem to inspire the road crews to slather way more salt than they used to, and the glop impinges on the travel way a lot. Micro-climates also affect riding conditions on most routes around here. Areas that don't get as much sun remain colder, with persistent snowdrifts and ice. Increased population puts more drivers on the roads. Decreased bike use among young people means that more and more of those drivers have not had much -- if any -- experience as riders. Most mean well, but they lack the empathy born of personal knowledge. And some lack empathy entirely.

Then there are simple logistics. In my care-free years, my house was tiny and easy to care for. When it grew into a music school (now closed), the building itself became permanently larger. I would not get a refund if I removed part of the structure. The money is spent. The building is here. And the driveway doesn't clear itself. I gave up on plow guys, because they never live up to the promises. So, every snowstorm, I have to be out there with the snow thrower. You learn a lot you might not already have noticed when you have to move all of your own snow. Moisture, density, depth, can make the difference between a one-hour job and a three-hour job.

At least in this crappy snow year I have not had to go up and shovel the roof. Even though that is the only technical climbing I do anymore, I can live without it. The roof is the quicker part. Moving the avalanche piles afterward is when the real work begins. And none of it was easy.

All that home maintenance stuff does count as exercise. So does splitting and stacking wood. But it's not complete and balanced exercise. For that you need to get out and find something you can do for more than an hour, arms and legs, like cross-country skiing. And not much else is like cross-country skiing, in the way it incorporates the entire body and mind. Metaphorically, things are similar, but they don't provide the conditioning benefits.

In desperation a couple of weeks ago, I dug out the old Nordic Track machine, intending to flog myself through at least a half-hour on it before letting myself have supper. It's not much like actual skiing, but it does use arms and legs in a similar motion. Because you are working hard, but going absolutely nowhere, with no swoop and glide, it is absolutely the most tedious, miserable toil, unrelieved for me by any musical or video distraction. I just want it to be over. As it happened that evening, the cellist called when I was 17 minutes into it. After we finished talking, it was that much later, I was that much hungrier, and I couldn't get myself to start again. And, the next day, I felt like total crap. Joints hurt, I had none of the feeling of cleansing and residual endorphins that usually follow a good workout. So screw that. I'm back to trying to get out and wander around at any opportunity.

Right now I have to go move 3 inches of slush that fell yesterday, in case daytime highs in the 40s to 50 don't get rid of enough of it. Cross training, man. March is a wild card when it comes to winter weather around here. I may be out riding soon, or we might get shut down until mid April. The second half of winter is like another whole season. Animals are fighting it until the end, trying to get to the easier feeding of the growing season. Hut-bound humans atrophy every day, right up to the very day that they manage to break out and start moving around again.

The magic number is 300

When I dabbled in bicycle racing, the training manual we passed around recommended laying down about 300 miles of low-gear base mileage before beginning differentiated training. This was in a climate zone that did not offer a strong alternative training activity like cross-country skiing on a regular enough basis to count as a real routine. Even if a rider took up speed skating, which was available and had a small following, the change in muscle use at the beginning of regular riding season required some adaptation.

In a climate that shuts down outdoor riding pretty completely, base mileage is vital. I don't do any competitive sport riding, but any open-road commuting is part criterium, part time trial. Lacking the discipline to ride a trainer with the religious devotion necessary to provide a real fitness base, I need to get those base miles before launching the commuting season. Alternative outdoor activities have nearly vanished in the changing climate, so I'm coming off the couch with only good intentions.

Last week I hit the 300-mile mark and noticed an immediate improvement. I'd been trying to go easy, but you can't hold back when you're sharing the road with motor vehicles. If a traffic situation demands a quick sprint or a longer interval, you do your best.

Even before the 300-mile mark, I noticed that my whole body worked better now that I was using it as it was meant to be used. We're built to propel ourselves. Obviously, walking and running are our natural forms of locomotion, but the genius of the bicycle was that it adapted those motions to the circular pedal stroke. The bicycling position has evolved so that it places some potentially destructive demands on the upper body, but the general concept remains completely benign. If you ride a lot in a forward-leaning position, you will want to do some stretching and strengthening exercises to prevent neck and shoulder pain. And a little core work is never a bad idea.

I wonder who first came up with the idea of strength and flexibility training. There we were, scruffy hominids scrounging in the landscape for things to eat, devising tools of various kinds. Life was an endless camping trip. We walked, we ran, we climbed. We picked things up. We figured out how to build things. It was all based on walking, running, and moving things into useful configurations. Some people were stronger than other people. Who first figured out that strength and physical efficiency could be enhanced with specific exercises?

It doesn't matter. We know it now. Ignoring the whole noisy industry and marketing campaigns promoting specific programs and products that will make YOU, yes YOU, STRONGER, HAPPIER, SEXIER, AND MELT AWAY EXCESS POUNDS LIKE MAGIC, we know that using your own power to get from place to place will make your body work better. Rest is a vital part of the training cycle, but you can actually be too rested. Crawling toward this year's bike commuting season, I wondered if my accidentally sedentary winter might actually have shortened my life. In a country that considers health care a luxury, who can really afford to live an unhealthy lifestyle?

People who try to live gently, self-propelled and modestly housed, end up looking like parasites in a consumer-driven, wealth-obsessed economy. We slip through the small spaces, gleaning our sustenance like mice. We don't have much of a wallet with which to vote. It makes us an easy target for the contempt of the worshippers of hard work and self advancement. No one is questioning those sacred precepts. Hard work in the service of destruction is not a virtue. But voices of reason are drowned by the noise of traffic, industry, and broadcast media.

Many hands make light work. We could be taking turns doing short stints at the destructive labors that need to be done, rather than trapping some people in those destructive endeavors until they are crushed, and letting others evade that contribution to the general welfare. Like any simple solution, it's too complicated to arrange, so we will continue to live haphazardly and let evolution take its course. I just thought I would throw the idea out there. We could have arranged things in that way and coasted our population gently down to a sustainable level. Instead we live by instinct, as always. The result will reflect our true nature and potential, as will be evident from the ruins we leave behind.

In memory of Sachs Sedis

Ordering chains the other day, I sifted through the offerings from SRAM, KMC, Shimano, and others. Our default chain has been SRAM, because their chains are descended from the legendary Sedisport, the sleeper deal chain of the 1980s.

Very little can be seen of the original Sedisport in the SRAM chains of today.  The formerly flared inner plates are now straight.

The outer plates are shaped very similarly to Shimano's Hyperglide and Uniglide chains, which the Sedisport once outperformed. The change was gradual, and the chains are still functional and durable. But the reflex to choose them is probably more emotional than anything else.

Vintage Sedisport. Burly side plates, cleverly flared inner plates to facilitate shifting. Born when drive trains were moving to six speeds. My, my. What will be next? Gears that click into place?

Look at the opportunities for advertising, recklessly squandered. The side plates of the chain are completely blank. It's as if they expect their distinctive design to speak for them.

The 1990s saw the introduction of the Sedisport ATB. The links shown here date from after the merger with Sachs, as the stamping on the side plates shows.

The outer plates were straight, with beveled edges. The pins were starting to be riveted in ways that led to the development of closure links. Shimano, of course, had their persnickety special pins. Sachs developed a closure link shortly before they were bought by SRAM.

Ten- and eleven-speed drive trains need straight-sided chains because the spacing of the gears is so tight. Differences, if any, are subtle. Because I don't indulge, I depend on the feedback of those who do to decide what to supply them with. I know what I favor, but that can change every year as the industry removes options.

Chain shopping was tangential to larger games of componentry chess I started last fall, when a couple brought in their Seven touring bikes to be reconfigured with more practical drive trains, and another customer wanted to dress a new frame with an 11-speed racing group. His Specialized Roubaix had cracked, and Specialized had sent a warranty replacement. Same brand, same model name, but of course it had some different specs. That game was more a matter of cost-benefit analysis, working within his budget and a couple of specific requests.

Interesting indoor activities help pass the time as winter reclaims March. This happens every year. We complain that the mild weather won't stick around, but 20 years ago these conditions would have looked like the beginning of April, not the beginning of March.

The hard freezes after springlike warmth have pretty well wrecked the cross-country skiing, even in the nearby woods. This limits alternative training activities to things that are more boring, and therefore less likely. Despite the fact that I can literally feel that sitting on the couch is killing me, I still slouch in front of the computer, teasing my mind with little jabs of electronic stimulation. Old friends, new friends, hopeful signs, terrifying trends, ads for diseases you, yes you, probably have...

Back to the hunt for bike parts. Look at that: Specialized has multiple road models that list for $10,000. Way to grow the sport! When civilization collapses, where will we charge our electronic shifters? I know, I know: personal solar systems will continue to work, as long as you can find a place to soak up some sun in between attacks by various desperadoes unleashed by the apocalypse. And you'll be able to scrounge hydraulic fluid for the brakes for quite a few years before things have reverted to more medieval conditions. Brake pads, on the other hand...

I've gotten out for a few fixed gear rides. The return to cold weather puts me back to scrounging kindling and pine cones to start the evening fires in the wood stoves. Scavenging wood is best done on skis, as long as there is any snow cover. It's not a high-intensity workout, but it combines some basic exercise with a practical need. That's been my guiding principle for my entire adult life.

Bike commuting is to train for

Whenever someone tells me that something basically trivial is "to die for," I am briefly tempted to make them do it. But the vapid assertion provides a take-off point for more substantive ones.

Here it is, the end of February in northern New England. Around my house and in the woods, the snow is anywhere from six to 24 inches deep, except in places where it is deeper because of windblown drifts or created piles. But these are the remains of the much deeper snow we received in two storms very close together just before the middle of the month. That was before the temperature went above 60 degrees for a couple of days, in the middle of a longer period when the nighttime lows hardly got below freezing. The jet stream giveth and the jet stream taketh away. That's not to mention the other factors making New England's typical gyrations even more bizarre.

The thaw has shriveled the snow away from the road edges, clearing the bikeable area. At the same time, it destroyed the groomed trails on which one might have laid down a winter rhythm of alternative training.

While I have not seen riders, some of them have reported to me that they have been out and have seen others out. Calls to the shop for bike tuneups began while the snowbanks still slumped into the lanes. Road salt made those puddles as briny as the ocean. But people fixate on the temperature alone. Warmth is the deciding factor, even when they'd be better served by cold.

We did need the thaw to shrink the snowbanks back. But once the whole travel surface is clear, a freeze keeps things dry. I know a couple of things from years of experience: first, someone who gets their annual tuneup now will need more work by May or June to deal with the effects of salt and wet grit; second, when the weather turns cold again -- and it will -- bikes brought in for early service will be forgotten until June. Most of them will be forgotten in our shop, where we will have to work around them until their owners feel the urge for them again.

Riding in the grit and brine is probably only a little more abusive than pounding on a trainer, with a rain of sweat flowing down over the machinery.

I surveyed the route on my way home from work yesterday. If the roads stay this clear, I have no excuse not to launch the commute as soon as Daylight Relocating Time kicks in. With that in mind, I headed out for some base miles on the fixed-gear today.

The first hundred yards reminded me what a crappy winter this has been for exercise. But then I also did several sets of squats yesterday, in anticipation of the anticipation of the beginning of riding season. So the fried quads owed a little to that, as well as the time spent on the couch in a pile of cats.

I used to dream of glorious endeavors when I trained, especially during the first heroic rides coming out of the winter. Now I dream of surviving and thriving in my commute. The commute was always there, but I took it for granted. It's not good to take anything for granted.

The weather may change again. March can be snowy. Once we pass the equinox, however, the sun really gains the advantage. Even now, it is much stronger than it was a month ago. It quickly attacks late-season snows. And if the pattern remains dry, or the wetness comes on warm air, the road will remain clear.

Freedom isn't free. To be free from the car, I have to be strong enough to claim it. It's to train for.

I hate sharing the road

Driving season is grinding me down the way it always does. Sitting behind yet another ambling piece of flotsam as I'm trying to get the hell to work on a two-lane highway with lots of curves and steady traffic, I pine for the freedom of bike commuting. The vast physical, emotional, and psychological benefits outweigh the little bit of death fear that always accompanies cycling among motor vehicles.

Every year, I explore the motorist mindset. I absorb and radiate the impatience of the throttle-pusher forced to curtail speed because other legitimate users are on the road. The idiots staring at their phones, who somehow think that their weaving and speed changes aren't totally obvious make me wish I had a device with which to break in and blast them with a loud reminder to pay attention to piloting. One guy was so bad, I flashed my high beams at him repeatedly whenever I saw his face turn downward toward the touch screen. Flashflashflashflashflashflash! It seemed to work. He may have hated me, but at least the finally gave up on his phone until our paths diverged.

Critiquing other road users has become more dangerous this week, since New Hampshire did away with concealed weapon permits, releasing any gun owner to carry a concealed weapon with no restrictions or oversight. Hell, everything became more dangerous. Gun lovers like to say, "an armed society is a polite society," but fear creates reticence. The idea that anyone might be armed means that  speaking up when you see an injustice now calls for a higher level of courage. No one need fear that they will be stopped and questioned because law enforcement caught sight of a corner of a gun butt.

I've considered packing heat in the past. I had a concealed carry permit under the old system, but I did not renew it when it expired. Now I don't have to worry about the permit, but the reasons to forgo armament remain. If you pull it out, not only do you have to be ready to use it, you will have increased the chances that you will have to. Anyone even catching sight of a weapon you are carrying may use it as justification to take preemptive action. And guns weigh a lot. I'll be better served by an extra bottle of water.

Speaking of water, I've been hydrating desperately since the kidney stone. Unable to afford the defective product known as health insurance, I have to treat myself for things as much as possible. When I consulted my primary care provider a couple of weeks after the stone passed, because I still had residual twinges and wanted to get at least a cursory examination, she did not recommend investing in the expensive and inconclusive imaging procedures that might detect remaining stones until I had pursued many weeks of assiduous hydration. I had told her that the twinges were gradually subsiding. They ramp right up when I let myself worry. Those with the most to fear in America's pay-to-play health care business have the most incentive to suppress those fears, so that stress does not trigger the illness that will ruin everything.

The good news is that beer turns out to be a health beverage. Do not exceed the recommended dosage.

Lacking the resolve of my younger years, I find it hard to get my 10,000 steps a day. We're about two weeks away from Daylight Relocating Time. Depending on the weather, that may enhance exercise opportunities attractive enough to overcome my depression. I have to hope that the hits have outweighed the misses in this hit-and-miss winter, when I begin to lay down a more regular rhythm of effort and recovery on the bike.

Commuting like your life depended on it

As a person ages, regular exercise becomes more important to keep the body moving and the mind engaged. Well before you reach the point where someone is holding your elbow and guiding you gently across the carpeted floor of the nice facility in which you spend your last days, you'll get around better if you do as much as you can under your own power.

Wolfeboro is full of old people. The median age in New Hampshire is rising in general, but certain towns attract retirees, meaning that the population is not only aging in place, it's recruiting people who have left the work force. This provides a lot of subjects to observe.

As I watch the retirees through the years, I see that the active ones  -- not surprisingly -- do better than the inactive ones. The local working-age commuters also enjoy an automatically better fitness base. Because of my foolish life choices, I'll be in the work force until they dump my body in an unmarked grave. So it's vitally important to me to stay in shape and save money. Transportation cycling, even for half the year, makes a critical difference.

The bike path system in town draws the largest percentage of locals who pedal. Anyone not fortunate enough to live within a half-mile or less of an access point is very likely to drive to the trail, unload the bikes, perform their obligatory exercise, and drive off to whatever is next. This is also true of many riders who are not yet retired, especially in tourist season. The Cotton Valley Trail is about to be completed all the way from Wolfeboro to Wakefield, fulfilling a plan published back in the 1990s. This makes it a destination journey for people who like to drive around, sampling different paths and trails.

The trails also attract walkers, some with dogs, some with strollers. During peak usage periods, riders have to negotiate this crowd, and the non-riders have to put up with the cyclists.

Walking is actually the best way to get around the tight center of Wolfeboro. I use the bike to get to town, but for any errands right in downtown I will walk, making better time than anyone on wheels when the traffic is at its height. Even when traffic is sparse, a cyclist will have to negotiate left turns and hills, and then find a secure place to park. If the distance is a half-mile or less, hoof it.

On trails or on the road, the vast majority of riding is done for recreation and exercise, separate from the utilitarian needs of daily life. A tiny handful of people use bikes for transportation. Most of them have an athletic background of some kind. We slip through Wolfeboro's legendary summer traffic with ease, but the prisoners of internal combustion all have their reasons to stay sealed in the can, barely moving on a really bad day. They're right: the blockage only lasts for a little over two miles at its worst. Then they can rip along, formation flying with their fellow motorists, far faster than some sweaty idiot pushing on bike pedals.

In the winter, I do not push bike pedals. With access to the cross-country ski trails, and a love of winter hiking and mountaineering, I have always set aside the bike when icy roads and encroaching snowbanks made it an unfair imposition on the road users who really truly can't get around any other way. Loggers and tradesmen need trucks. People who have to cover a lot of distance need to go faster than 15-20 miles per hour. We're all in this together. Yes, many road users could benefit physically and economically if they left the car home and pedaled on the errands on which you see them out there, but a lot needs to be done to make that easy and inviting. Right now it intimidates them.

In winters with little or no snow, the roads are as clear as in summer. Then I will ride, because I am not fenced in by a snowbank.

At some point, even a fit and healthy person starts to get physical problems. A slowing metabolism means that the pounds pile on much more quickly when the exercising stops. If people have walkable and bikeable routes to routine destinations, they have the option to leave the armored wheelchair in the garage, and get a little more conditioning without having to think about it. They'll never believe that they could change the traffic mix in their favor if they all just went for it. They stay in their vehicles, scaring themselves and each other so that only a few at a time ever give it a shot. And then it scares them, so they go back into the car.

Some people love their cars and would never consider getting around by bike. And they don't automatically rot away after age 70 as a stark warning of the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle. Some people manage to live long lives of happy smoking. There's no guaranteed formula. But the odds favor someone who remains active. I feel decrepitude eagerly hook its claws into me when I'm forced to be inactive. Even though the commute sometimes just feels like a treadmill grinding me toward my anonymous death, I know that it is helping me.