Quitters

 "I don't feel safe out there."

"The roads are so narrow."

"People are all on their phones."

"Someone I know was killed."

These are just a few of the lines I hear from the quitters: the people who are getting rid of their road bikes because they don't enjoy being out there on the travel ways that we all pay for with our taxes and have every right to use. If they're in the shop, these quitters aren't quitting cycling outright. They're just being intimidated into leaving the public right of way to go play on various closed courses, or highly limited corridors like what passes for a rail trail around here.

Most of the time, I overhear the conversation between the quitter and a salesperson on the retail floor while I toil away in the repair shop. It makes a weary day wearier.

To be fair, if I lived in Wolfeboro I would probably come to dislike road riding, too. Every time I think about moving closer to work I think about the severe limitations on riding, imposed by the hills and water bodies that have shaped the road system since colonial times. The typical New England road has a white line and a ditch. Combining that with resort-area traffic in the summer makes road riding increasingly stressful as what used to be a rural area gets overrun by creeping suburbia. We're not seeing too many cookie-cutter housing tracts yet, but the attitude of drivers, and their numbers, make the roads busier in all seasons, compared to how they were in the end of the 20th Century.

Creeping suburbia extends to my area as well, but the terrain of the glacial plains allows for longer sight lines and some degree of wider roads, and the lack of particular geographical attractions, like top-tier lakes or brag-worthy mountains means that most people on the roads are just passing through. But we do have our dinky rush hours. And GPS has turned the road in front of my house into some kind of "secret" escape route for southbound motorists when Route 16 is choked with traffic.

One quitter this week said that a friend of hers "passed away while riding on the road." Passing away is something you do in your sleep. Even if you die from natural causes rather than the smashing trauma of a motor vehicle impact, if you're mounted on a bike when you have your stroke or heart attack you're going to hit the ground hard. People are funny about death. If your friend's terminal experience was horrendous enough to get you to give up a form of cycling that you say you loved, say "killed." Give it the full horror and outrage that it deserves. Highlight this side effect of humanity's bad decision to prioritize the passage of motor vehicles over the health and safety of nearly everyone and everything else.

Other riders quit the road because of physical limitations that accumulate with age and injury. Some retreat gradually through upright bikes that replace their drop-bar models. Some go straight to the e-bike. Some try mountain biking. Some head straight for the path.

There are very few transportation cyclists around here. I'm pretty sure I'm one of the most persistent, and I ain't shit compared to real dedicated car-free people in areas and occupations more conducive to it. My occupation has been quite supportive of my cycling fixation. It just pays so horribly that I can't recommend it to anyone as a long-term program. But other people, better people, in generally more populated places, manage the synergy of a decent-paying career and a bike for transportation, to demonstrate how the world could be a better place for productive citizens, not just dilettante fuckoffs with silly dreams.

Transportation cyclists seem less inclined to quit than recreational riders. When you just do something for fun, you stop as soon as it is no longer fun. There are days when transporting myself across the necessary miles isn't a lot of fun. A couple of days ago as I rode down Route 28 I tried to estimate how many miles I've logged on just this route. I'm sure it's more than 40,000, possibly as high as 60,000. That may seem like a lot, but it's over 32 years. My average annual mileage wouldn't even make the charts among real year-round transporters, long-distance tourists, or anyone training to race. It's just the result of stubborn, stupid persistence. My total mileage in that time is far higher. I used to ride more for fun. And I didn't include the training miles I log to get ready for the commute or to stay in some kind of shape transitioning into winter. The 40-60 figure was just on the principal commuting route. 

I don't push myself as hard as I used to. When I pushed myself harder, it didn't feel as hard. I was younger. The key to longevity as a road cyclist -- aside from not getting crushed by a motor vehicle -- is avoiding debilitating injury. Especially with a somewhat long route, a dedicated bike commuter is an athlete with more than just the riding career depending on completing the course, day after day. So I go ahead and take the car on the grossest days. Recovery is key, and an aging body doesn't recover as well over a single night, especially if the aging rider has gotten too frisky the day before. Commuting turns into a time trial. Oops! How did it get to be so late?! Oh well. I'll sprint this one as hard as I can and promise to do better tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, stomps in this hectic pace to the last syllable of yet another work week.

The rides are frantic, sandwiched around days so incredibly tedious for the most part. But you go from moment to moment of reward, finding something of value in the neck-deep mud of your own created predicament. And be glad because the mud so far remains below your face. If I could have imagined anything else in sufficient detail, while there was still time to implement it, I would have done it. So without real complaint -- just a continuous profane grumbling and self reproach -- I get on the bike for another day.

We interrupt these brake cables...

After I spent hours cutting these interrupter levers into the brake system on my old road bike, the next commuting week offered no opportunities to try out the rig until the very last day.

It takes some creative packing to fit my standard commuting load onto a bike with no racks. I'm not ready to go full racks and fenders on the old road bike. It would just be a watered-down version of the Cross Check, not even that much lighter once I hung all the nerd-rigging on it. Just setting it up with frame pack and expander seat bag is enough of a handicap on its sporty capabilities.

After a week of shortened commutes -- park-and-rides fit around various schedule conflicts and stormy weather -- I expected more of a feeling of speed and power when I set out on the racy bike with cleated shoes and all. The fact that it was exactly a week since I had dropped a 10-foot log on my ankle while bushwhacking through a Class VI road on the previous Sunday's commute probably held me back. It's amazing how much your ankle swells up after something like that.

I had gone to check on Bickford Road, a very mellow line through North Wolfeboro, unfortunately abandoned by the modern world. I had first gone through it in 2011. In the fall of 2016, I went back to do a little stealth pruning and found it badly washed out. But I knew that some locals go through there in their trucks, so I hoped that they might have done some heavier remedial work on it. With the Cross Check and walkable shoes, I figured I could get through one way or another.

The road was in bad shape, with multiple blowdowns across it at different points. Feeling curiously adrenaliny, I attempted to heave two broken sections of a fallen birch out of the way. The longer piece slipped out of my hands and nailed my leg.

As a good uninsured American, my first thought was, "How expensive is this going to be?"

"Don't need stitches! Don't need stitches! Don't need stitches!" I said to myself as I reluctantly brought my eyes to focus on the wound. I gingerly tried to part the reddening gouge down the center of the ridge of swelling that had sprung up immediately. The news was good: no flaps. But the jagged end of the log had scraped the front of my shin, drawn this gouge down the medial side of my ankle, scraped down along the Achilles tendon, and pummeled the soft tissue hard enough to make it numb as it increased steadily in size. And I was miles into the woods, alone. I pulled my sock up for whatever compression it could provide.

Even uninjured, I would have been unable to ride for the next mile or so. The road was a rocky stream bed. The rocks were slimy and black with algae. There was standing water in some places, deep mud in others. The temperature seemed to jump up 20 degrees as mosquitoes and biting flies swarmed around me in the stifling, windless air. It was a fever swamp.

I had limped and trudged to where the road improved enough to remount and ride, almost at the junction with Stoddard Road. I still had to ride ten miles home to ice and elevate my ankle.

The numbness didn't subside for several days. After it did, the nerves decided to catch up on the pain they'd been putting off. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I didn't feel like a powerhouse, cleated shoes and all. The bike felt good. It was nice to have the auxiliary braking position. I've really gotten used to that.