Monetize This

Record of Futility

2009-04-06T17:36:00.004-04:00

I bought a month-old mountain bike a little while back -- a fine, critically acclaimed Iron Horse Azure with a mix of XT and Deore parts and the rave-inducing DW-Link suspension.
It seems a bit ... well, maybe effite isn't the word, but it at least seems a bit contrary to pet a mountain bike and marvel at its fine machinery. I haven't done that. I just like bashing around on hairy singletrack and learning through trial and error how to succeed, and how to bloody up my shins.
My road bikes, on the other hand, sometimes leave me in awe. The first of them, with a brazed Reynolds 853 steel frame, came with a full Ultegra gruppo -- right down to the cassette, bottom bracket and chain, and it is a mechanical marvel and scalded-cat sprinter that is a pleasure to ride. The other one was also a fine investment: a beautiful carbon-fiber Bianchi 928 with Ultegra shifters and RD, and 105 FD, chain and cassette and a Mavic wheelset, which a bikeshop-owning friend secured from Bianchi's end-of-model closeouts.
There's an incredible amount of craftsmanship invested in them. Start with the frames -- the carbon one's meticulous layup, or the masterfully welded joints on the steel one and the alloy mountain bike. Then consider the intricacies of machining and assembling the flawlessly performing Shimano components, or the time invested in building the wheels, and the tires, and even the laborious manufacture of the various bolts and saddles and grips and bar tape.
If you think about it, the work that goes into any one of the three is awe-inspiring. And under a good rider, the return on investment would be phenomenal: I have no doubt that anyone from Jeremy Grimm to a ProTour rider could win just as well on my Bianchi as on his. The mountain bike isn't a racer, but any rider who wants to have a ball on a sophisticated XC bike would probably love spending a few hours on it.
I couldn't be much happier. I really don't deserve what I have, much less anything better, and I am quite positive that there has never been an occasion where anything on my race bike -- even on my older steel one -- ever cost me a race I might have won had I squandered a bit more money on it.
That, though, was what I thought until I saw the new crankset from Campagnolo.
My eyes befell it quite by accident on the Performance website, and I immediately averted them. I felt unworthy of even looking at the finest bit of Italian machinery since Sabrina Ferilli, and yet I had to have it. It suddenly dawned on me that my struggles in the Cat 4 field last year had far less to do with my poor conditioning than with my poor equipment. And here was the solution -- on sale, for only $950!
That is only $200 more than I paid for my complete full-suspension, XT-and-Deore-equipped mountain bike. And only $750 less than I spent on my carbon-and-Ultegra Bianchi.
I suddenly felt like I do in those dreams where I'm in front of my college class with no clothes on and it's the last day of the semester and I haven't cracked a book.
I was ashamed. All these years, I've been riding crap. The glee I'd felt over getting an $1,800 mountain bike for $740 faded as fast as I've faded in races on my crummy, heavy, inferior Ultegra junk.
Sure, this new Campy crank is made of plastic and some machine-turned bits of alloy, glued together by grade-school dropouts -- Italian grade-school dropouts. But it must be awful, godawful fast to retail for a grand, because that's what I paid for my steel bike with the full Ultegra gruppo.
The steel bike and its precision machinery have only 18 gear options. With this crank from the 11-speed Campy gruppo, my bike would have ... well, 18 gear options. But they would surely be better. The Ultegra cranks on my two road bikes have never missed a shift (except because of operator error). But the plastic Campy crank would not miss shifts even better.
That was just the beginning of my revelation. Since then, I've discovered the $435 Super Record cassette, the $210 Super Record front derailleur, the $475 Super Record rear d and the $85 Super Record chain all await the opportunity to offset my poor conditioning and extra weight with their mechanical miracles. And the shift-brake levers are even cheaper than Dura-Ace!
I can't wait to pull out my credit card and start mowing down the competition.

- JN

Sweeeeeede New Ride!

2009-03-25T20:00:00.006-04:00

If you read only the first paragraph below, you'd swear my midlife crisis had gotten the best of me ...

I've finally gotten what just about every young man wants: a fast-ass car that accelerates like a TARP-chasing banker, corners like a crit bike, brakes with incredible precision and just begs the babes to dive in the back seat. And it's got a stereo that sounds great whether it's piercing your body and quite literally shaking your bones at quadruple-digit decibel levels or playing mellow makeout music.

Alas, I am not a young man. And no, my midlife crisis hasn't boiled over: The car is my new-to-me Volvo V70XC.

Yup. A station wagon. Oh, and those chicks diving in the back seat? Those are my daughters, clambering to get to the third-row jumpseat. (They also like the integrated booster seats in the back -- er, middle -- row that negate the need for car seats.)

It'll flat-out fly, then stop on a dime. But I told my wife that the best illustration of what I've become was Friday. Yeah, baby! Friiiii-DAAAAY NIIIIGHTTTT! --- and I was blasting Van Halen's "Running With the Devil" -- a pedal-to-the-metal song if there ever was one -- at a deafening volume ... as I gently accelerated my 200-hp 5-cylinder engine to 25 mph on a side street on my way to a church fish fry. If any punkass kids in a Camaro were to smash into me, my car's crumple zones would absorb the impact and my front or side-curtain airbags would safely deploy. Rockin'.

But there's room in back for a dog, or bikes and/or luggage, and room on top for bikes or luggage. (You may tell my wife she has a nice rack. On her car.) And while the gas mileage (not much above 20 mpg) is disappointingly below what I expected, it still is 30% better than the Jeep Grand Cherokee the Volvo replaced -- and better than just about any (ugh) minivan.

And I retain my dignity. In fact, I've actually come to think of station wagons as being cool. Or at least Volvos.

- JN

Your First Bike Race

2009-03-24T12:58:00.006-04:00

One of the newest members of my racing team is about to embark on his first-ever race. He sent an email to the team the other day, asking for some advice.
A friend saw my longish reply and suggested I put it on my blog.
I don't pretend to be an expert, so that's not what this is about. I'm not the world's most experienced racer, and Lord knows I'm not a good one.
But on the other hand, guys who have been racing for many years probably don't remember that first race, or that first season of racing, well enough to recall a lot of the little things they learned in the early going.
So if you or someone you know is where teammate Craig is as he heads to Malabar Farms this weekend to begin his weekend-warrior career, here is a baker's dozen of pointers.
I invite contributions and comments from anyone else who wants to contribute!

1) Get your stuff together the night before, as much as possible. Pack from the feet up to help you remember everything: SHOES (just about everyone forgets shoes once), socks, tights/warmers, shorts, under layer, jersey, whatever your top layer is; then gloves (maybe you don't wear gloves in the summer, but you damn well will now -- or your race will end prematurely for treatment of your frostbit fingers); shades; polyprop hat or ear covers; helmet. And post-race clothes: See No. 10 below. And a post-race snack. And a beach towel. (Wrap the beach towel around your waist while you change strip out of your shorts and into your sweats or whatever.) And your race fee. Now go back through it all and make sure you've got it all.
2) Wearing your team kit (uniform) on the drive to the race is generally not done. Not sure why, exactly, except that no one likes to race in shorts that are pre-stank and pre-sweated-up. But racers generally change into their race clothes about an hour or so before their race, or right after registering.
3) Arrive at least 90 minutes early. That'll give you plenty of time if there's a long line at registration (count on it), and time for getting your number pinned on and warming up.
4) Warm up. Rule of thumb is that the longer the race, the shorter the warmup -- and vice versa. Start out slow and easy, shifting through all your gears to make sure everything's working. Then, after about 10-15 minutes of easy spinning, start jamming hard. Work your way up to some all-out efforts, sustained for a minute or two. Spend at least 5-10 minutes doing hard efforts. Then wind down. This will get you ready for the hard efforts in the race. If your body isn't geared up for it, you could get dropped on the first surge, because the first couple feel a lot harder than the ones that follow -- less so if you get all your aerobic and anaerobic systems warmed up.
5) Ride backwards. If you're allowed to warm up on the course, spend part of your time riding backward from the finish line for a mile or so. Visualize how the race is likely to unfold there. Using your cyclocompuer, note some markers that are 0.1 from the end, 0.2 from the end and about 0.5 miles. Those translate into 175 yards, 350 yards and 880 yards, respectively. We'll come back to these momentarily (No. 9, below).
6) Expect to suffer more than you ever did on "fun" rides. When you think you're about to get dropped -- and you WILL think that at some point -- push harder, longer, to stay on.

The pace will let up just when you think you're about to completely explode, and you'll get time to catch your breath. If you slip off the back, dig hard to catch back on. It is so much easier in the pack, and the inhuman effort it might take to close that 10-foot or 10-yard gap will prove worthwhile when you get back on.
7) If you do get spit off the back, look for other people to work with. Take turns pulling. It's to everyone's advantage to work together to catch up to the main group.
8) Conversely, if you find yourself in a break with another rider or two, work together! Take turns pulling; the more people in the break, the shorter the time each one spends on the front. If you get in a Cat 5 break, odds are that you'll find at least one of the other people in it don't understand how a breakaway is supposed to work and they won't understand that it's to everyone's advantage to make the break work and stay away from the chase. They'll think you're trying to trick them if you tell them to work together, or they'll try to wheelsuck. Those people you gotta get rid of -- unless they're trying to get away from you. In that case, if a dude is real strong, milk him for everything he wants to put into it until he's starting to get gassed, then pull around him and drop him. He will have learned his lesson, one hopes.
9) Back to those markers at the end of the race: Let's hope you're in the main bunch at this point.
a) Start moving up no later than a mile from the end, so that you are among the first 3-4 racers at the half-mile mark, but ideally not first. Draft off someone else until it's time to sprint.
b) Some fellow novice will probably go off at 350 yards, which is probably WAY too soon, and will blow up well before the end. Grab that dude's wheel. You should be at a pace that's just barely short of the max you can sustain. If the wheel you're riding gives even the slightest hint of slowing down, come around, or if you're getting passed, surf to the next strong wheel. Do not be caught taking it easy, saving up too much for the end etc. You need to be working your ass off aty this point..
c) At 175 yards, or maybe 200 if you feel really strong, you should wind up to 100 percent of your sprint -- to the point where you are absolutely going to blow up within 15 seconds or so and you cannot give any more. At that point, give more. You will probably surprise yourself. When you get inside 100 yards, if anyone is in front of you, go around him -- you've passed the point of surfing wheels and drafting off the leader. It's time to win. You don't want to get caught behind someone when he blows up. And you do not want to look back, because you can't control any of the shit going on behind you. All you can do is to hit your max -- and then go beyond what you think you can possibly do, until AFTER you cross the line. You want to feel like you're gonna puke at that point -- and maybe you will.
10) At this point, win or lose, you will be celebrating that the goddamn fucking pain is finally over. Spend five minutes cooling down. Then come back and talk to everyone who will listen about the experience and every detail that happened.
11) Bring nice warm comfy clothes to change into afterward, and use that towel wrapped around yourself to get out of your race shorts. You might want to bring an alcohol wipe to, uh, freshen up. You won't want to wear a single item of clothes that you just raced in once you're done. You'll be chilled and uncomfortable, and wearing that damp crap will help give you saddle sores. Think dry and loose.
12) Bring something to eat right afterward -- a Payday bar and a chocolate milk is a good combo. Don't overdo it, but be sure to refuel. You have a window of maybe a bit over an hour in which your body is most receptive to glycogen and protein replenishment. This is the time your body needs stuff to help rebuild damaged muscles.
13) When you get home, write it all down. You will want to remember this day and relive it over and over someday.

- JN

TT: R.I.P.

2009-03-05T14:23:00.015-05:00

A week ago, I put the wood to the rest of Ohio's Cat 4 cycling community and sent a stern warning: I intend to defend with vigor my USA Cycling ranking in time trialing.

Last I checked, late last year, I was ranked 4th in Ohio in my cat and age group (or one or the other -- I can't remember) in the discipline of TT.

Imagine how highly I might be ranked if I'd ever actually done a time trial. Because I haven't. Not one. And I have never been on a TT bike, or worn a teardrop helmet or a skinsuit. Says a lot about USA Cycling's rankings, doesn't it? Is the sort random? Or perhaps by weight? (The same rankings "computer" once put me among the top 10 Cat 5 riders in the U.S.; talk about damning with faint praise.)

Eight days ago, though, part of that changed: I did my first TT.

It was on a Computrainer in Ray H's basement, and it was only three miles long -- a prologue, if you will. But I kicked such ass on it that among the seven or eight riders who have competed in The Race at Ray's, I now rank firmly in the top 10.

My next highest priority

I don't like climbing, because I'm ill suited for it (i.e., fat). I now know that I don't like time trialing much, either, because I'm ill suited for that, too (i.e., I don't like pain). Still, it was instructive to try it, particularly with a watt meter running on the computer screen -- another first for me.

(I've never seen my power output before. Part of me didn't want to, because I didn't want to be discouraged; part of me was afraid I'd get sucked into it like a first-time crack smoker and wind up selling my plasma to buy a PowerTap on a Zipp disc wheel.)

I really came to watch, not ride -- although riding was in the back of my mind on my way from work to Ray's house. During that 10-mile trip, I tried to warm up to my threshold HR and could barely do it.

So I laid down my excuses (they were true, but still excuses) for Ray and the others: I rode hard the prior day and my legs were shot, and my heart rate was way behind my perceived effort, and I was wearing frigid-weather commuting clothes and riding my old bike.

But the peer pressure got to me.

Then Thom initiated me into the brotherhood by revealing the Sacred Secrets of Time Trialing: Find a level of exertion you don't want to be at because it hurts too much. Then stay there and hope you don't blow up.

I was off like a shot, and immediately my HR soared way above threshold. I was sure I couldn't sustain that, and I was gasping and my legs felt like Greg LeMond's liver. So I guess I was where I should be.

A little over one third of the course was uphill, most of that in the form of a mile-long climb that is probably a 4- to 5% grade; I was sucking wind on that, as my speed plummeted from 29 mph to 13 or so. Thom, Ray and Pete spat beer at me and flogged me with inner tubes to keep my wattage from dropping into the single digits. Then, when I saw the finish line, I managed to summon up the last 650 watts I had in my body to wallow over the line at a speed rivaled by only the swiftest of donkeys.

I wound up completing the three miles in 8:06, I think, which translates to 22.2 mph. But I'm pretty sure that is misleading. First, I had no aero equipment. Second, the Computrainer factors your weight into its calculations (heavier = slower, all other things being equal) and I accidentally told Ray I weigh 186. I meant to say ... uh ... 136. So I'm pretty sure if it weren't for those factors, I would've crushed Steiner's Zabriskie-like sub-7:00 time. In fact, I could've even beat Zabriskie himself -- because unlike him, I actually had a bike to ride.

- JN

Best of Show, Tallest of Midgets

2009-03-04T16:59:00.009-05:00

Great news for all the Clevelanders who believe that bikes are meant to be impractical, collectible baubles to show off more than ride: One of your own, Dan Polito, won Best of Show at the North American Handmade Bike Show last week.

I'd not heard of Dan Polito before today, but now he has vaulted to a level of fame enjoyed by the nation's best foosball player, best heirloom apple grower and maybe even best bong maker. Hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of people will praise his name and Google him. You may be one of them, which would probably make you either an idle millionaire or a fixie-riding slacker. (If you're one of the latter, you might be able to explain to me why your fellow fixie rider/poseurs favor grease-stained Campagnolo caps when Tullio Campagnolo invented -- or at least innovated --your freaking nemesis, the deraillieur.)

You say Pol-EEE-to, I say PoL-EYE-to

If I'm ever fortunate enough to meet Mr. Polito, I expect I'll find him to be very charming and interesting. I'd be intrigued to listen to him explain the art of a good weld for minutes on end, in the same way I can stand in the glass-blowers' shop next to West Side Market and be transfixed for nearly one-sixth of an hour straight. (Maybe longer if I weren't straight, in which case I'd fit right in: abundant 40-ouncers of Olde English were getting drained when I brought my kids there at 10 a.m. on a recent Saturday.)

I don't imagine getting the opportunity to meet Dan, though, because I'm pretty sure Dan and I ride in very different circles. Folks in mine ride out on the road or on the trails; I'm pretty sure folks who ride in his circle actually ride in circles quite literally, on fixies, in front of the Civilisation cafe in Tremont -- forward, trackstand, backward, repeat.

However, the day may someday come when I sell my children and wind up with extra dollars on hand and choose to spend thousands of them on a painfully uncomfortable-looking "grass track" bike, or something else that rejects all of the technological advances that make today's off-the-shelf Chinese-made bikes infinitely better than the best "artisan" bike of a generation or two ago. Should that day come and I want a bike with blinding chrome lugs and maybe some really cool airbrush paint scheme on the downtube that conjures up images of the tattooed arms of LeBron James or Aimie, the barista/performance artist, I will rejoice. Because I no longer believe I'd have to go all the way to Portland to fulfill my impractical and self-indulgent whim: We have the very best at making the very worst, right here in Cleveland. And why not? We're the home of yesteryear's steel industry, so why not be the epicenter of yesteryear's steel bikes (at 22nd-century prices)?

- JN

Uphill

2009-03-03T22:35:00.004-05:00

I was tooling around YouTube the other day and watching people climb Mt. Ventoux, including some geriatrics who don't just look like they wear diapers inside their bike shorts, like the rest of us do.

Yeah, I'll get that little dig in, because those old farts really can kick my ass uphill. One guy looked about 80 or 100 and he did hill repeats on Ventoux -- climbed it back to back. Another old turd had panniers hanging on the side of a bike that looked as old as me.

Videos, as we know, tend to flatten things out. Sometimes -- especially on MTB vids -- you literally can't tell whether the trail is uphill or downhill. Much of the footage of Ventoux must bve like that, because you watch it and think, "That doesn't look so beastly."

So while I was looking at women close to my mother's age smirk at the camera atop Ventoux when they should be in wheelchairs, I started thinking, "Maybe a fatass crit rat like me could make it up there."

Now, it's no secret that I don't like climbing. My lightweight friends who are actually pretty committed to this sport that I disrespect do not understand why it is that I disdain being humiliated and hurt. But I think some of them have had so many bad relationships that they believe pain and subjugation are states of normalcy, so cycling fits their frame of reference, except without the priest, or the guy up the street 30 years ago who gave out the free Hardy Boys books to hardy boys who'd watch special movies with him.

Nonetheless, I do still go out to climb as much as I can, because everyone who has a keyboard and a bike writes ad nauseum that climbing will get you in shape like nothing else. Maybe they haven't seen me climb. I'm not sure how my form is supposed to improve from rolling backward, then falling over on my side and letting loose a stream of urine onto myself, like a dog that just got hit by a car. But it must have some benefit, because that's what they write and I believe everything I read.

So today, I went out at lunch with very little time to ride and decided to make it hurt -- er, count. I rode down into the Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation, then headed southeast to Granger Road. There I turned left up one of the most awful short hills around, suffering from the delusion that I'd do some repeats up it.

The idea of going up it again started to fade somewhere around the halfway point up. As the cars and trucks whizzed by, I felt exceptionally slow and weak. I thought of the guy who was climbing the same hill last year and got hit by a car and died, and for just a moment, I thought he was a lucky bastard.

Still, after I got back to the bottom, I turned around and started back up again, like an idiot. This time I didn't make the top. I've never managed more than two trips up that hill, but now I couldn't even do that.

So I started back north and turned up Warner Road -- not nearly as steep, but still a good half-mile climb. Then I went up and down E. 71st (short, not terribly steep) and E. 49th (ditto, but seriously fouled-up pavement), flying up the road like ... a penguin.

By the time I got back to my car, I'd ridden 50 minutes of my lunch "hour" and had to call it quits. I looked down at the odometer. Ten miles, it said. Even I could do that math in my head: Including 35- and 44-mph downhill plunges, I'd averaged all of 11 miles an hour.

Maybe the day will come when that will be a fairly easy 45-minute lunchtime workout. But that will probably have to wait for the afterlife. If only I could get creamed by a teenaged driver on Granger ... the lucky dog.

As for Ventoux: It would be akin to doing all four of those hills back to back about three times, with no descents in between. And maybe with an Oak Hill stretch or two thrown in.

Judging by the look of those old farts, I have a little time to prepare. But I have a feeling that ascent would be a one-way trip. I'd climb like Homer Simpson and then do a Tom Simpson.

- JN

Potpourri of Pish-posh

2009-03-03T20:59:00.007-05:00

Page 1: Welcome back. Neither of us have been to this blog for awhile, eh? Wish I could say I missed it more ... But I hope you did.
If so, then you probably are sort of pathetic and have a warped sense of what is funny, so I'll welcome you back with this little treat. (Do not be like Steiner and assume you've seen this before because you've seen the first few minutes elsewhere on YouTube. Watch the whole thing.)

Page 2: I've hit one of those periodic spurts of enthusiasm -- mild enthusiasm, I'd say -- for editing video footage. It's kind of fun if you have the time. I don't. But I do have a new laptop, so I've been playing with it, and used it to dig up and edit some footage from a race back in 2006, my first year of "serious" racing.
This was the Tour d'Burg, down in Miamisburg, Ohio, just south of Dayton. The day before was a ballbreaker of a race in Troy, which is half an hour north of Dayton. I'd never raced back to back days before this, and my legs felt pretty dead when I pulled up to the line with the other Cat 5s. Then the referee announced that for some reason (never explained), the promoter was combining the 4s and 5s. Great. I'd raced with Fours only a couple times before, and those were races with a 4-5 field and a 3-4 field. In other words, the strong 4s were all with the 3s. This time, we would all be together.
Watch and see what happens.
Special thanks to my brother, who shot the footage.

- JN

Sat-Tue: 105 miles

2009-02-10T23:14:00.004-05:00

Yee-haw. I rode with bare ears -- as opposed to bear ears -- this morning for the first time since it got cold here back in ... what was that, August?
And if you saw me on the way home, I'll point out that no, that blinding reflection was NOT from Illuminite leg warmers. That was from my bare white legs. (Not bear white legs, nor white bear legs.)
Yes, I pretended it was warm. This February thaw after the last many miserable weeks can do that: It got up to about 58, so I acted stupid. It felt pretty good, actually.
By the time I got home, the sun had been down awhile and I was still enjoying the ride, but frankly, my white bear legs were probably getting a bit chilled.
Yes, this is a time for self-delusion, soon followed by cold reality.
After only a few years of serious riding, I recognize a pattern: I ride alone a lot when other people aren't riding, then start telling myself I'm starting to feel some fitness. Maybe I'll go out and do some intervals at 97% of my LT or climb some hills and think they seem easier than I remember.
Then comes the reality check: I ride with other guys. And they smash me.
The last couple years, that bothered me. This year, my expectations and goals are low and July-oriented.
So when I got punked on Saturday, it wasn't a surprise or a disappointment.
A bunch of Cat 2-3 riders humored me by letting me tag along on an LSD ride to Burton and back. No problem for the first 35 minutes. Then we hit the climbs. Not even long or steep ones. Just the climb up the bricks, and then out of Chagrin Falls. Here I am, trying to hang onto Chris S's wheel while he cranks a bit too vigorously up those hills, and I'm watching my HR creep up, up and up some more, t0 95% of max. Chris is still chatting away, not realizing I've faded to 50 feet back, then 75 feet ...
Then, after a few more rollers on Music, we came to Munn and I was done. Well, I could've made it to Burton, but then on the way home, I'd be holding everyone up, running at the red line while they're getting bored. Nobody would've enjoyed that, and I might have actually cried when we got to Chagrin River Rd. and started up the climb up the other side of the valley.
So I peeled off. Kept riding, but did it alone.
That's what passes for "bad" news. The good news is that I rode for almost 3 hrs. and put in 46 miles -- pretty long for me at this time of year.
I followed that up with another 40+ miles on Monday: almost 16 on the way to work, 17 at lunch and then about 8 home.

... Maybe someday soon I'll start putting thought into these posts again. But I do too much of that at work, and frankly, I'm stick of it. Tonight I put new brakes on my commuter/beater. It was enjoyable. Maybe I should go to work in a bike shop ...

E does NOT equal mc squared!

2009-01-15T17:01:00.004-05:00

I had a little spare time in my day today, so I undermined of one element of Einstein's Theory of Relativity called time dilation.

To oversimplify, Einsten postulated that if two travelers were moving through space, one at a speed approaching the speed of light and the other at, say, half that speed, time would pass more slowly for the first traveler than for the second.

The so-called twin paradox, as I understand it, is another expression of the phenomenon: Send one Doublemint twin hurtling through space in a super-spaceship that travels near the speed of light for a given number of years, and when she returns home, she'd be just a little younger (and presumably just a little hotter) than her now-ever-so-slightly-more haggard twin sister who stayed earthbound.

For my experiment, I bundled up (it was about 6 degrees F) and climbed on my trusty beater bike for some sub-LT intervals -- 10 minutes each at 96-100% LT, with three-minute recovery spells in between.

I can attest that Einstein was wrong.

During those intervals, I traveled considerably faster than I did for the rest periods. And that's when I observed this critical and earth-shattering fact:

At that faster (and far more uncomfortable) interval speed, every minute seemed to last longer than a corresponding minute in the recovery period! Conversely, as I ambled along recovering (pleasantly) at a substantially lower speed, the minutes hurtled by as though they were mere seconds!

This is precisely the opposite of Einstein's theory!

Ye gods. If Einstein is wrong, what are the implications?

- JN

Hard Man, Soft Dog

2008-12-23T16:46:00.010-05:00

My recent approach to blogging is one that should be widely emulated, but unfortunately is not.

Here's how it goes: I think of something quite witty, insightful or crudely funny when I'm away from the computer. Then I forget it before I sit down to write. If I remember anything of it, I remember whatever bit of it was never clever to begin with, and then I say, "Really, now -- is that worth wasting a bunch of effort to write?"

Judging by some of the dreck I read in the blogosphere, some of my putative peers believe that's a question they'd rather not answer. They post every day, whether it's worth it or not. For me, I'm going annual these days -- happy to just quit typing and go on to something more productive, like posting comments on my friend Steiner's blog. Below, by the way, is a photo of Steiner's dog, which shares his taste in beverages. It is a clever little pooch that has taught Steiner not only to pick up its turds and carry them around, but also to make little clothes for it, and to run around in circles and shout.

The poor dog is cold because Steiner forgot to put on its sweater. Shrinkage.

Speaking of cold: I obviously am disregarding every one of my inner voices, because I am not only blogging about blogging (metablogging), but also posting about my training. That's because I find some small measure of self-esteem when it is cold outside and none of my wuss friends will leave the house and I go out riding.

I just finished a workout on my special customized purpose-specific winter training bike:

Yeah, we all know how certain Euro-Pros shun their sponsors and ride some favorite bike that gets cleverly repainted and disguised to appease, say, Giant or Cannondale. (Greg LeMond's Calfee and Jan Ullrich's hand-made time-trial bike come to mind.) You may be thinking that what appears to be a Schwinn Sierra 700 hybrid must actually be a rebranded Parlee. But no -- that's my hybrid. Well, not exactly mine, but it's exactly what mine looked like when I bought it eight years ago for $260.

I've since put a real bike saddle (no springs underneath, unfortunately) and a flat bar on it. I broke, then replaced, all the SRAM 3.0 junk it came with, and busted that little plastic cover on the flimsy crankset. And I've abused it -- which instills very little guilt, given that the bike cost about as much as a crankset or a wheel for one of my road bikes.

A bike like that -- with 40mm tires and semi-disposable parts mix -- comes in handy when the streets are slushy and potholed, or when I'm pulling a trailer, or running to the store or riding on the towpath with my kids or ... anything else that adds up to the 700 hard miles I've put on it this year.

Even intervals are adding to the odometer now, believe it or not. Today, when it was about 20 degrees and windy, I did steady-state reps through the snow flurries at 97% of my threshold heart rate -- 3x10 min. w/ 5 min. recovery. No, I wasn't cold. I worked up quite a healthy sweat.

I like writing things like that -- and recording the data from my HRM and other such bikey-racey stuff -- because it makes me feel like I'm actually doing something about keeping myself in some semblance of racing shape. The reality is that I'm inching back toward my all-time high in weight. I'm about 30 pounds too heavy and $30,000 too light for anything serious in that arena, so racing this year would most likely mean getting dropped -- not just by the pack, but by my wife.

But I've been working pretty hard in 60- to 90-minute bursts. As usual, I feel fairly strong for this time of year. Why? Because I'm riding alone. Put me out there with Steiner, or even a bunch of Cat 4s, and I'll quickly look like his dog in Michael Vick's garage.

- JN

Cold? It's a Snap!

2008-11-23T13:56:00.003-05:00

So it's been almost three weeks since my last post and I'm not quite sure where to begin.

So I'll begin with a simple little post about what I began at 9 this morning, when I was about to get dressed for a rare ride on my road bike. Or I could begin at 20. That was the temperature outside.

It's been months since I went for a 20-degree ride. (That's minus-7 to all my readers in Malaysia, Canada and the U.K. who land here often after Google searches for some combination of the words "chains," "lube," "crank" or "stiff tube".) So I was a bit fuzzy on what I was in for.

I grabbed my oldest MTB shoes, because they're the biggest and most stretched out and they let me wear a wooly pair of socks with some wicking ones underneath. I put on a tech undershirt, some bibs, a fleece jersey, my heaviest tights and a windbreaker. Then a wind vest. Then a balaclava and some gloves (more on them later), and my shoe covers. Then my SPDs -- put them on the bike.

Then I was off.

Then I was back.

I made it about two blocks yards before my eyeballs started to freeze and my legs practically seized up. So I turned around for my ski goggles, which kinda squish my nasal passages sometimes but are like wearing a heater -- they keep my face warm, and then my whole body feels warmer. I pulled a pair of knee warmers over the tights for a bit more warmth.

It was just enough. That was the last time I felt cold.

It turned out to be a great day for a ride. In fact, I worked up quite a sweat!

Maybe a post that's a bit more thoughtful will follow. But I gotta walk before I run.

- JN

Waking Up to Coyote Ugly

2008-11-03T16:36:00.009-05:00

Those of us who have been adults long enough to not have a future to dream about spend a lot of our lives in wistful, romanticized yearning for some simpler time, or a better time from our past.

I feel that way now and then about my early days of discovery in cycling.

From time to time, a new hobby or pursuit grabs me almost violently, and I immerse myself into it with frightening abandon and sheer, unregulated joy. I lose sight of reason and lose track of time when I get that way. And I lose control of my wallet, too.

Cycling did that to me when I rediscovered it in midlife. I couldn't stop yearning, learning, discovering and trying new stuff. Bike porn consumed my every waking moment. I had yet to discover that Performance's "sale" price would still be the same in next month's catalog, or that Bicycling Magazine recycles the same stupid articles every two years. If I had my way back then, I'd have 20 road bikes by now.

Things settled down a lot after I got my Bianchi 928 and upgraded it (wheelset, crankset, stem, bars, saddle) almost to the point where I couldn't justify spending any more. It's all the bike I'll ever deserve, and probably all I'll ever need until I get so inflexible that I'll need a custom Seven with a top tube that's as short as a head tube and a head tube as long as a top tube. Yea and verily, I have stopped lusting in my heart for titanium, and I no longer covet other men's carbon (except carbon that says Zipp on it).

It's liberating to finally accept that an $8,500 bike with full Dura-Ace isn't going to win you any more races than a sweet but affordable frame hung with Ultegra. But it's kinda deflating, too, when the Competitive Cyclist catalog loses its allure -- just like it was when the Victoria's Secret catalog did sometime after kids came along. I'm a little too ... uh, compliant, I guess.

Yet along came mountain biking and WHAM! I was erect again, leering at all those hot models! (Gary Fisher Hi-Fi, Trek Fuel, Santa Cruz Blur, Specialized Epic ...)

Mountain biking, like vampy young lasses in skimpy satin underwear, is best when it's idealized and just slightly (or entirely) out of reach. When it's real instead of fantasy, odds are it'll turn out mean and hurtful, and will disappoint you by leading you on with winnowy curves and blind corners -- then drop you like a rock, onto rocks, just when you think you're having fun.

In both cases, we either never see the crashes coming, or we deny that it'll happen YET AGAIN, because this particular ride is going to be sooo much better than the last one that broke our heart-slash-fibula. Eventually, and usually only after a lot of time and experience, we find something comfortable and realistic for the long term, settle into a nice singletrack rut and start enjoying it all and flowing along with it as it comes. Or so I'm told.

For better or worse, I found a hidden reservoir of youthful stupidity and irrational, neo-hormonal exuberance regarding mountain bikes.

It's as if I've time-warped back to my early days of road biking, when I was either riding, or spending money on riding, or reading about riding, or picking expert riders' brains. My work and my home life suffered. I was chasing after ghosts (lost or misspent youth, maybe?).

Lately I'm close to being there again -- at the point where I have a dangerously low level of knowledge and way too much enthusiasm, like a teenager in a hormone surge, or a hedge-fund manager in 2007. It's an intoxicating state, but a dangerous one.

I'm also kinda hedge-fundy in that I've spent way too much time lately poring over Craigslist, the PD classifieds and eBay for that stunningly undervalued MTB investment. I'm way overextended and on the cusp of a horrifyingly uncertain future. Yet here I am, spending half an hour a day in a far-flung fantasy. Maybe some old guy gets mad at his sponging Boomeranger for being too shiftless to get a real job, but not too broke to buy a Gary Fisher and, on this particular weekend, to go to OSU and get drunk and go to a football game. So pissed-off Dad decides to throw the sponge's bike up on Craigslist and has no idea that the bike he's offering for $200 is worth $2,000. In this fantasy, I wind up like someone who just bought a 1994 Toyota Camry with 3,000 miles for $1,000 from the proverbial "little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays."

My obsessions and all of these negative-energy forces all converged a couple weeks ago.

That is, I bought a mountain bike. An absolute steal.

It is a used Schwinn S-20. Do a Google search, as I did when I saw that Craigslist ad, and you'll see that the Schwinn S-20 was a mid-range FS bike ($1,300-$1,800+) about a decade ago that got rave reviews -- often called "better than bikes costing a grand more," etc. Some veteran riders on mtbr.com posted reviews of it as recently as a few years ago saying they still love their old S-20 better than the full-suspension bikes they've bought since. "Climbs like a goat, descends like a downhill bike ..." Et cetera.

Maybe not today's state of the art. But I'm not, either. And here was one on Craigslist for $60. It had a coil spring, and the stock fork had been replaced with some piece of junk that didn't even fit. But it looked and sounded absolutely more than adequate for my purposes. Sounded sick, in fact. The more I read this baby's online praise, the more flushed I became. Some dumb fool is kicking a babe to the curb and not even realizing what he had?

Within an hour or so, I had talked the guy down from $60 to $50 and I was popping the wheels off to put the bike in my trunk. I felt giddy, but a bit guilty, at the thought that I'd just taken advantage of someone.

I don't know whether the seller felt the same way or not.

Now, I'm dumb about today's MTBs, much less those from a decade ago. So I didn't realize when I bought it that Schwinn has since turned the S-20 into a downmarket bike. Way, way down. Like, hole-all-the-way-down-to-China down (quite literally).

My buddy Wrench did, though.

I had stripped the rear D and shift/brake levers off, then took the bike and the kids over to Wrench's workshop a couple hours after I bought it. The junk fork on it didn't really work -- the guy gave me another fork with it, but it was threadless and the headset was threaded. So I went out to have Wrench put a cheap threadless headset on the bike. (The seller had also thrown in a stem and a pair of bars. So if he could put the headset on, I could build the thing back up.)

And I was pretty intrigued by my deal, so I excitedly asked Wrench if I could eventually upgrade what I thought was the late-20th-century 7-speed stuff I'd pulled off of the bike to 9-speed. He wasn't sure I was serious. He first looked at me like Mr. Spock -- raising one eyebrow out of curiosity about the workings of this inferior life form's brain. Then, un-Spocklike, he showed some emotion. In fact, he adopted the kind of pitiful compassion we usually reserve for the retarded.

"Look: It's 7-speed," Wrench said softly and apologeticallly. "It's got stickers that say 'Shimano-equipped.' And it's got a kickstand mount. It's a Wal-Mart bike. '"

No way, I told him in a weak line of defense. I read on line that Schwinn stopped making this bike in 2001, and that was way before they started selling in Wal-Mart. I granted that the bike might have been turned into junk by owners that stripped it mercilessly. But it couldn't be a Wal-Mart bike. Too old. Right?

A subsequent re-run of the Google search back at home found some links to the old S-20 that, unlike the reviews I'd seen earlier, actually had pictures. Alas: Radically different bike. And no one bothered -- anywhere on the vast Internet, that I could find -- to note that Schwinn has since bastardized that marque and I'm probably the only dumb bastard to get suckered by it. I was feeling worse about it with every passing minute, the way a fellow might when he wakes up and the girl next to him, stinking of stale booze and cigarettes, coarsely says, "It was fun. Now where's my $200?"

(She was a HOOKER? I know I was really wasted, but I thought she just really liked me!)

Maybe it was out of sympathy that Wrench installed the fork and overhauled the bottom bracket and wouldn't take any money from me.

But it is my project bike now. Wrench put in my new $25 headset and slapped the old (10 yrs?) Marzocchi Bomber Z2 fork on it. I added a new Shimano Acera (towpath-grade) rear derailleur. And I moved the shift-brake levers from my hybrid and ran new cables. It's junk, of course. But it'll do the job for now.

And most of the parts are compatible with my old hybrid -- right down to the derailleur hanger. So at worst, I wind up with a bunch of spare parts for a bike that I seriously abuse by riding in the snow etc. and rarely cleaning up.

So it wasn't a real bad mistake. In fact, the $115 I put into it probably saved me from spending seven times as much later that same day.

Here's how:

I went out to Performance to get a couple brake cables and housing ferrules for The Mighty Schwinn. There I saw -- and almost bought -- a bike so sweet that it hurt to walk away from it. (Please don't tell your buddies about it, because if there is any way I can come up w/ the money after X-mas -- selling a road bike, maybe, and the Mighty Schwinn -- I'd like the bike to still be there.)

It's a 2006 Iron Horse Azure -- about a $1,700 bike (MSRP of $2,100) -- that's been gathering dust -- yes, it literally has a coating of dust on it -- for so long that the dealer has cut the price in half. It only runs Deore and some unremarkable Manitou shocks front and rear. But it also has the dw-link suspension, and everything on it can be upgraded as needed. (The same frame, with X.0 or XTR hanging on it and better shock/forks, sells for $3,000 on up elsewhere.) Performance wants $899 for this one -- and I could get it for $809, or maybe even less.

I rode it around (albeit on a parking lot). It was like the first time I made out -- Terri Holzem, freshman year ... whew! I could hardly feel a thing when I hit the bumps, but I was still breathless.

Back to the bike: I turned square into 5" curbs -- sitting and standing, up and down -- just trying to feel it buck me, and it sucked everything up. And I jammed the pedals with as much torque as I could muster on flat ground and felt almost no pedal bob. It was just sweet. And sub-30 lbs.

I might not ever be able to spend $1,500 on a mountain bike, and couldn't even rationalize spending $500 -- I'll probably only ride the damn thing 20 or 40 times before I get crippled or bored. I've got no disposable income, and had spent all my meager birthday money (my racing age is now 47) on my other bike folly and a new-to-me pair of MTB shoes. And my friends at Bike Authority sponsor me and my team very generously; it would be a bit underhanded to go buy a new bike at another shop. Right?

Those are the things I told myself. Still, I had a hot model calling to me, offering herself to me, and I was all agog. It had to be a once-in-a-lifetime. And I had a credit card.

I walked away, though. I regretted it for half of the next few thousand minutes, but I knew it was best. Deal of a lifetime or not.

Then again, this is the 20th bike deal of a lifetime I've seen, in only the lifetime of a six-year-old. Hopefully, if I'm ever flush again, there will be another deal of a lifetime. I'll be 66 or so when my kids finish Catholic schools, and 70 when they're both done with college. But who knows? Maybe by that point I'll be into freeride and downhill instead of cross-country. I'm heading in the wrong direction already, after all.

- JN

Tour de Georgia: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

2008-10-22T21:22:00.008-04:00

Now and then of late, particularly when I haven't been riding enough, I've wallowed a bit too much in angst and self-pity over the fact that one of every six people in my division at work will become unemployed three weeks before Christmas and I could be one of them.

But looking for a job in the midst of what politicians with contempt for history call "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" isn't the most depressing way to pass the time. No, the most depressing way to pass time in "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" is probably trying to raise money to keep some intriguing but almost terminally marginal enterprise afloat.

I thought about this as I listened this afternoon to WCPN, but our local NPR affiliate's tedious pledge drive isn't the subject here. Sure, the station has a tough row to hoe, asking for financial support during interruptions of the insufferable "Diane Rehm Show" in the morning and an even-more-somnolent BBC program called "The Forum" in midafternoon.

Yet the intriguing but terminally marginal enterprise I was referring to is the Tour de Georgia.

But this week's WCPN beg-a-thon has been grating, so now that I mention it, I'll sidetrack.

I usually ride my bike to work, so I don't need a radio. I get to listen to arguments and phone conversations in the cars around me at stoplights. But this week I needed a car for three days (so far) at work. What a bad week to need a car.

Usually, the public-radio stations are semi-listenable (particularly on the way home, when "Marketplace" is on). Even 20 minutes of catatonic midmorning yap-host Dan Malthroup's "Reporters' Roundtable" snoozefests and his giggly smitten-schoolgirl softball questions for famous guests are better than 20 minutes of station-flipping. That just brings carpal tunnel and, even worse, an assortment of putrid "music" and loudmouth right-wing jackass windbags with 10th-grade education and fifth-grade potty humor. Yeah, CPN is a drone of self-important boredom between the time "Morning Edition" ends and "All Things Considered" begins. But commercial radio is chainsaws cutting through steel drums while one neighbor's baby cries and another's dog won't stop barking and your smoke detector and a car alarm across the street are both going off at once. And the phone is ringing.

That relative grace of NPR, however, fades during pledge week. Pledge Week is Public Square at lunchtime -- a relentless gauntlet of begging and shameless attempts at guilt-tripping, which assault you in the brief and gloomy moments of exposure as you rush between two safe-haven places.

Both versions of Les Miserables -- the ones who work in radio, and the ones who receive radio signals from the CIA via a chip in their heads -- are up against some mighty tough times, and even though I tune them all out, I give them some bit of sympathy.

And some credit. They persevere and survive, somehow.

Which seems to be more than we can say for the Tour de Georgia.

Predictions of its demise are pretty much an annual affair, especially since Lance retired and took the big crowds with him. This time, that's probably for real: Its former managers are pouring all of their money and effort into the two other races they run -- the Tour of California and the socialized Tour of Missouri. Georgia economic-development pitchmen are left to try to resurrect the cadaver of a race that, six months after it ended, still has an ad on its website for Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Georgia, one of its biggest 2008 sponsors, with the sponsor's Web address spelled wrong! (How would you like to be a BC-BS exec who spent a small fortune propping up the TdG, only to see your company's Web address -- bcbsga.com -- listed as bsbsga.com on the tour's main avenue of exposure? That's some B.S.)

The TdG fellas' twanged pitch is about as authentic and persuasive as the one that comes from the dudes who coincidentally get "stranded" every night at the BP at 26th and Superior and greet every customer there with some variant of, "Can you spare some change? I just need bus fare to get to my job/my dying kid/my car that's out of gas ..."

Put yourself in the promoters' sorry shoes. "Look, Company X: For an investment of $8 million of your extra cash on hand, you become a foundation partner in the third-greatest race in the most racing-ambivalent nation in the developed world. You will give literally hundreds of Georgians a chance to see, up close and personal, cyclists who look remarkably like the ones they curse at, door and throw shit at on weekends. Except these ones will mostly all be foreign.

"Imagine having your company's brand identified with the second team of a second-tier continental racing squad, a few other teams tainted by this week's doping scandal and Michael Ball's Dope'n'Tattoo Freak Show. It's a marketing dream!

"Oh, and did I mention you'll get a tent stocked with ... boiled peanuts and Natural Light? And you'll get your web address on our web site."

Now THAT is depressing.

Around 6:30 p.m. one evening, I saw quitting time for a poor, crippled beggar. The Lord must've passed by a minute earlier, because I watched her rise like Lazarus, fold up her walker and chair and walk half a block to her man's station wagon. She yelled at and hit her kid, then threw the props in the back of the car and speed off. I wondered how she could live with herself.

Maybe she can become the Tour de Georgia's promoter. After all, she'd have this as her patter: "No, this ain't no act! Lance said he's comin' back in 2009 and racin' here!"

Or maybe the Good Lord will descend upon Brasstown Bald.

We can all pray.

- JN

Downhilling on a Dime

2008-10-16T10:27:00.003-04:00

If there's one big flaw in the world of amateur bike racing, it's that the whole scene takes itself quite a bit too damn seriously. (And it's pretty easy to make the case that that's more true in the Cat III-IV ranks than anywhere else.)

Here is a story about the antithesis of all that posturing. I'll help you get past its biggest flaw by pointing out, as the writer failed to do, that it is about adults.

- JN

Walk+Roll Over

2008-10-15T16:55:00.006-04:00

I and other select, powerful people received an email today announcing this:

Walk+Roll, a Cleveland organization that emphatically puts the "non" in nonprofit, is "looking for inspired, energetic, productive people to serve" on its board and further its mission of pushing biking and pedestrianing.

Now, I'm pretty ambivalent, even doubtful, about the wisdom of some of Walk+Roll's goals -- e.g. lobbying for "Bike-Friendly Cities" crap like bike lanes and bike paths, to which we cyclists are supposed to be condemned forever to share with fat dog walkers, baby strollers, broken glass and detrius.

Also, I have well documented my disdain for being lumped under some "cycling-community" umbrella with all sorts of other bike-riding miscreants who seem dedicated to making us all into targets for Gatorade bottles, doors and legislative backlash. (You know, the two-wheeled jerks who can't follow simple rules of civility --- who ride the wrong way and blow red lights in heavy traffic; who fly up between the curb and a long line of traffic at red lights so that all the cars that passed them already now have to slow down and pass them again; who won't use headlights; and who yell "F--- you!" at anyone who comes within six feet.)

I'm even more loathe to be lumped in with other "pedestrians," a class of people that includes mall walkers; winos who walk around talking to the air and masturbating; overly pink Susan G. Komenoids; Barry Bonds and this guy (whom I actually thought was funny back around 1976, when I was probably high -- secondhand).

Even so, I have a little bit of admiration for good intentions, and a lot of admiration and envy for folks whose outlook on life is cheerful and optimistic instead of poisonous and caustic. Walk+Roll and Lois Moss are good people in that way -- pleasantly deluded, perhaps, but good-intentioned and perhaps happy.

If you like working with people like that, while trying to keep them grounded in some semblance of reality, maybe you ought to apply. Find out how by emailing to getactive@walkroll.com. Judging by the tone of the email I got, Walk+Roll folks are pretty down in the dumps and worried that any chance of reprising just about all of their 2007 programs is doomed by lack of funding and political support. (Maybe Frank Russo or Jimmy Dimora will get on board?) They obviously will need a lot of help with fundraising and prioritizing.

Then again, forget I brought it up. If you read this blog, they ought not want you.

- JN

Cycling: Stick With It!

2008-10-14T22:35:00.002-04:00

After I stumbled across these pictures (warning: heinous), all of my little bouts with road rash, pedal bite and other assorted bike-wreck injury seemed rather quaint. Some fellow roadie suffered the freak bike injury to beat all other bike injuries with a stick.

Yet another reason not to ride? Perhaps. But then again, here's another good reason why the flukish risk is worth taking. And then there's this, from USA Today (4/11/07):

The prevalence of American adults who are 100 or more pounds over a healthy weight has risen dramatically since 2000, a study released Monday shows.

About 3% of people, or 6.8 million adults, were morbidly obese in 2005, up from 2% or 4.2 million people in 2000, says Roland Sturm, an economist with the RAND Corp., a non-profit think tank.

... According to government data, about 66% of people in the USA are now either overweight or obese, which is defined as 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight. Obesity increases a person's risk of contracting numerous diseases, including diabetes, heart diseases and cancer.

Guess I should stop eating these saltines, eh?

- JN

This Just In: Bush Does Something GOOD!

2008-10-14T14:33:00.005-04:00

Bush to open national parks to mountain bikes

By DINA CAPPIELLO
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is taking steps to make it easier for mountain bikers to gain access to national parks and other public lands before the president - an avid cyclist himself - leaves office.

The National Park Service confirmed Tuesday that it is preparing a rule to allow park managers in some cases to decide which trails to open to mountain bikers.

Once it’s finalized, the rule would take this authority away from federal regulators in Washington, who sometimes take years to decide whether to allow bicycles on individual trails.

A park service spokesman said the rule would be proposed no later than Nov. 15 in order for it to be finalized before Bush leaves office.

Staying Within the Lines

2008-10-07T10:52:00.010-04:00

I came upon the three City of Cleveland workers in the image below on my way to work this morning. Initially, I thought they were three Safe-T-Vest-wearing touring cyclists trying to fix one flat tire. Then I noticed the lack of mirrored helmets.

I rode on, but got so flummoxed that I had to do a U-turn and go back, just to make sure I'd seen what I thought I saw. I did see what I thought I saw. Then I stood there on my bike and photographed it with a cell phone. The three parties didn't particularly seem to mind.

(It was a lot like when I went to the zoo yesterday and watched the oblivious primates through the glass. The various monkeys ignored me, which sorta hurt my feelings.)

If you can correctly guess what the primates above are doing, you win a job working for the City of Cleveland. (To get a Cuyahoga County job, simply become related to Jimmy Dimora or Frank Russo.)

The three people in brightly reflective vests are:

a) on a snipe hunt;
b) using a stick as a tool to poke an ant hill and prod some of the ants to emerge and become food;
c) Getting a jump on trick or treating;

d) painting a single curb yellow -- one wielding the drippy roller, one holding the paint bucket and watching, and one watching while waiting to move cones.

- JN

FtMTB

2008-10-05T16:11:00.007-04:00

Regarding my previous post about mountain biking:
I take it all back.

I went out for an hour and a half or so this morning, and came back feeling like I stuck my legs into a Ferris wheel. Once again -- for the fourth time this year -- my shins are bloodied, bruised and distended and it pretty much hurts to walk.

If I were a bird and a mountain biker ...

I found two new trail sections that I'd ridden past before, but never on, in my wonderful but mostly-over-my-head neighborhood singletrack jungle near Lower Shaker Lake. One stretch was a rock-strewn downhill leading to a lot more very rocky downhill runs upstream from the Doan Brook dam.

I told myself to work on my descending a lot today -- drop the saddle to keep the weight back more readily, try to keep the paws off the brakes as much as possible. It was working pretty well, until I plunged down one rocky hill and realized near the bottom that it was going to dump me into a very small and very rocky clearing and I didn't know where the exit trail was. In other words, I was heading to the bottom with no idea where to go.

So I slowed down. Bad move, in hindsight: My front wheel hit something and just stopped, dead. I did not. Nor did the bike. I went over the bars and bashed my shins awful hard on things. Then the bike landed on top of me. Much cursing ensued.

Four weeks ago, or thereabouts, I borrowed that 10-year-old Trek 950 (or whatever it is) and its owner and I and a few other guys rode West Branch. I beat my shins into bloody, swollen pulps. Today I returned it. I'd come full circle. Any sadness over returning the bike is largely gone now, thanks to the pains in my leg.

As for that cursing: I'm still tempted to resume it here. But I won't, except in this secret code: F the MTB.

- JN

Bye, ol' MTB

2008-10-04T20:00:00.007-04:00

I remember when I was little, watching Kevin Ginther ride down the hill to the railroad tracks and go airborne.

I remember watching Mark Nienhaus and Mark Kabbaz and other daredevils barrel down the very steep hill at McDonald Park, zoom across the road and then go blasting up the little uphill and grabbing big air (as it much later became known).

I remember watching other people do lots of crazy things on bikes when I was a kid.

Yup, I usually just watched. I'd sit at the top of the steep hills and watch.

Never had the stones to do the stupid stuff. And it didn't exactly encourage me to see Ginther come back to earth from his airborneness and land on the steel rail of the tracks, hard enough to break his leg and ram the busted end through his skin.

So it comes as some surprise to me that I'm bumming out tonight knowing I have to return a mountain bike I borrowed four weeks ago and have ridden pretty regularly ever since.

My favorite MTB move

I've done some stupid stuff on it. A lot of stuff that I consider stupid, in fact. I've ridden down a lot of hills that were a lot steeper than the ones at McDonald Park or those railroad tracks. I've run along ridges and steep hillsides that punish a mistake by sending you plummeting to probable injury and possible death. I've learned how to bunny-hop pretty well, and have done a complete endo and landed on my feet, upright.

I'm still a wuss, no question about it. And it's not hard to justify it. My family depends on me, and pain hurts a lot -- them's two good reasons.

But little by little, I kept advancing and doing things I never thought I'd try. Every time I trailed a skilled and experienced (and very patient or bored) MTB rider, I'd watch his technique and follow his line and nail something I'd never even attempt when riding alone. Then I'd go out riding alone ande take a few chances I wouldn't have taken before.

And every single time I rode the hidden-in-plain-view network of trails around the Shaker Lakes and Doan Brook -- mere blocks from my house -- I'd discover a new stretch of trail that had been right there all along, but undiscovered because just about nobody rides these gems.

It all grew on me. I'd lie in bed at night unable to fall asleep because I was reliving some thrilling on-bike success or imagining myself cleaning some log or some climb that I'd not yet mastered in real life. I snuck out of work early one day to try to ride the great singletrack mere blocks from my house. And when I couldn't ride, I'd actually get kind of pissy. (But probably not as pissy as I've gotten when I had to walk my bike up or down a crazy little hill 'cause I'm not good enough or brave enough to ride it.)

There's gonna be a good bit of pissiness in the near future, I'm guessing, because tomorrow I have to return my buddy Joe's bike and I may never have the means to buy one for myself. Maybe that's for the best, because it's inevitable that one of these rides will end with a busted collarbone, shattered elbow or broken neck.

I might not miss the wrecks and the pain. But I'm going to miss the riding.

- JN

I Ride, You Pay -- Pay My Bosses!

2008-10-04T08:43:00.006-04:00

We've all heard the latest scare stories -- or at least we males have -- that carrying a cell phone in one's pocket can zap the ol' walnuts, put the junk in a funk, etc.

Now there's considerable evidence that wearing a bicycle helmet inflicts severe brain damage. Maybe it's because of some styrene vapors oozing out of the foam. Maybe the Roc-Loc 4 system exudes lead vapors.

How else to explain the idiotic celebrations in the so-called cycling community because Congress shoe-horned the Bicycle Commuter Act into the pork-packed bailout bill for banks?

Here is what people are cheering:

The $700 billion (that is, enough money to make 700,000 new millionaires, or one new one for every 4.2 millionaires now in the U.S.) experiment in South American-style nationalization of the financial sector is a $20-a-month handout to employers whose employees ride bicycles to work.

No, that wasn't a typo. No tricky wording there. The free money goes to the employer, not the cyclist. Employers would then be encouraged to "pass along" that incentive to folks like me, who ride our bikes to work.

How? By providing bike parking. Yeah, that's one incentive the bill and its brain-shocked backers contemplate as acceptable. If my employer provides "storage" for the bike I ride to work two, three or four times per week, my employer can claim that is a benefit it provides me. I'd have to pay $40 a month to park my car, but the $200 million-per-year company I work for benevolently put a bike rack in the parking deck and lets me lock my bike to it for free. For that $40-per-month "perk" that I "enjoy," the billionaire family that owns my employer -- along with similar companies in bike-mad Portland, New Orleans, New York and elsewhere -- gets to take $240 a year in tax dollars from me and my neighbors. By the way: There's no real monitoring mechanism contemplated in the legislation, so Corporate America gets to be on the honor system as it sucks $10 million a year -- the estimated cost of this provision -- out of the Treasury. We all know how that works.

Naturally, this corporate socialism is not the intent. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an earnest, bowtie-wearing Democrat from Portland (of course), concocted the bike-commuter act to delight the League of American Bicyclists, and his hometown League of Sleeve-Tattoo-Wearing Nihilist Fixie Riders, and the League of SUV and Minivan Drivers Who Live in 3,500-Square-Foot McMansions and Feel Better About Themselves When They Say They're In Favor of Energy Conservation and Alternative Power Sources. He's been pushing it for something like seven years.

The intent, presumably, was to take that money from my corpulent, lazy, car-driving, junk-food-eating, sedentary neighbors and yours, and give it not to corporations, but to me. Me and you, if you commute by bike, and all those other needy people who need a federal handout to compensate them for donning $200 Showers Pass rain jackets, fastening $200 more in halo headlights onto their $1,000 commuter bikes and then stuffing their $25o rack-and-pannier arrangements with lunch and garments.

The theory is laudable. According to a 2007 bill that morphed into this $10 million-a-year employer subsidy, bicycle commuters annually save on average $1,825 in auto-related costs, reduce their carbon emissions by 128 pounds, conserve 145 gallons of gasoline, and avoid 50 hours of gridlock traffic.

I'd like to take credit for my share of that. Not sure I save "50 hours of gridlock traffic," since driving to work is still faster than biking. But I figure I save anywhere from $10 to $20 in gas alone each week, or 20-something bucks in overall vehicular wear and tear at 50 cents per mile. I once calculated, quite roughly, that my commuting knocks a couple pounds per week of VOCs and NOx out of the air. So I can laud myself a little.

If the government agrees that this is indeed a sound social, environmental and fiscal policy, it ought to put a line on my income-tax return for me to take the deduction.

Of course, an argumentive neighbor might say that the "$1,825 in auto-related costs" I save each year should be all the incentive I need to ride a bike to work. That and the likelihood that I'm saving myself thousands of dollars in future (or current) medical treatment by riding. (In fact, my neighbor might have a point in saying that I should have to pay the government because I ride to work. After all, chances are that I'll live several years longer than I would have if I'd kept driving to work while ramming doughnuts into my mouth, and therefore wil be a substantially bigger liability to Social Security, Medicare and society as a whole. I couldn't argue, but I could piss on my neighbor's grave someday.)

But instead of giving that money to me and other people who keep bike racks on their cars all the time so they can drive 20 miles on the weekend to an appropriate "multi-use trail" and ride to Akron, our friends in Congress think it better to let cigarette-smoking bean counters in the corporate accounting office decide who gets the dough, and how. Who will get it? Mostly millionaires.

Thank God we've incentivized bike commuting, eh?

The dildos who run "bike advocacy" lobbies in Washington and spend do-gooders' tax-deductible donations on silly "Bike-Friendly Cities" campaigns and political-campaign contributions (to Blumenauer, among others) call this progress. Rome wasn't built in a day, now was it? And unlike the Gingrich assholes who rammed detestible riders onto every appropriations bill that subsidized corporate fat cats and denuded social-service programs like napalm attacks on the underclass, the backers of this bill got it passed on its own merits as a stand-alone measure. Oh. Wait. Scratch that. Since it failed for seven straight years (including in a Dem-controlled
Congress), they jammed it into the bailout bill, along with billions of dollars in other pork. I almost forgot.

Must be that helmet-induced brain damage.

- JN

Off Road, and Off the Grid

2008-09-16T17:21:00.002-04:00

Sunday, Sept. 14

I’m writing this by candlelight, like our ancestors. This blackout has me roughing it, just like the frontiersmen long before me, or the Amish.
Well, sort of. I am using a laptop powered by a lithium-ion battery. But there is a significant hardship here: If I want Internet, I’ll have to use dial-up! I’m all about rollin’ with a Spartan ethic for a short hang, but I ain’t doing dial-up. I’ll just write this in Word and cut and paste when the power comes back.
It went out around 6 p.m., while I was making tacos.
I think it is quite possible that the cause of the outage is that hell froze over, because I rode a mountain bike for a good long time this afternoon and actually enjoyed it!
I wasn’t good at it, mind you. But I had fun.
There is something incredibly cool about MTB riding at Shaker Lakes and Doan Brook (which should be called Bone Broke, considering the technical difficulty and danger of many of its sections). The coolness is that a beginner like me can pick and choose just how hard I want the experience to be, while an expert could theoretically ride along and do all the sickly stupid, totally wrong things that expert MTB riders like to do, which seem to involve the same sort of self-loathing thought process as driving staples into one's hands, being a cutter or being Eddie Vedder.
In their heavily tatooed misanthropic existence, MTB riders like to talk about "illegal" trails. This description, I’m sure, applies to Doan Brook, because no one is openly invited to ride there.
But the trails down in the gulch along Fairhill, between MLK and Coventry, have all sorts of nastiness: rock gardens, stairs, wicked roots, sharp downhill drops, sharp and impossible uphill climbs.
What they do not have is good flow, for the most part. I'd be surprised if even the best MTB riders could ride very far anywhere on the western or southern slopes of the gorge without dismounting, because the run-ups are too steep and some of the off-camber turns along sheer dropoffs off are too tight.
But there is some fast singletrack on the north side of the gulley, along North Park. Fast as you want, but still a potentially deadly drop along the side of the trail. And since "potentially deadly" seems to be a prerequisite for fun for MTB riders, that must be fun.
In short, you can get your skills practice in, along with some fun. But it’s hard to get a sustained threshold workout.
Not that I need it. That’s what road riding is for.

***

While I rode, the wind whipped up harder and harder. By the time I was heading home, I was getting pelted with twigs and stopping every block or so to move broken branches off the street. Two hours later, while I was making tacos, the power went out.
This is fun! We still have gas, so I could finish cooking. We have running (clean) water, unlike the Great Blackout of Ought-Three, and unlike my brother, who is condemned to using electrically pumped well water.
My kids have no TV to watch, so they rode their bikes (in the flying debris). They ran the batteries down using all the flashlights as toys over recent months, so we’re using all my bike headlights. Soon we’ll take turns making up stories. Then we’ll go to sleep.
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll go moose hunting.

- JN

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

2008-09-10T16:11:00.007-04:00

See? Hockey Mom/Pit Bull Sarah Palin is HOT, even without her naughty-librarian glasses.

She is a bad girl -- bad! (Bore her first pup 8 months after her wedding? That's premature mating.) But don't get her mad. Get your animals straight if you're going to talk about lipstick!

- JN

Lance Armstrong and I: Back From Retirement

2008-09-08T16:55:00.008-04:00

The two-week span since my last post has led to speculation that I have retired from blogging. The speculation is correct: I did retire.

However, I forgot to email the news release announcing my retirement, so no one knew. So here, belatedly, is an edited version of the official announcement:

It's with mixed emotions that I've decided to move on from my career as a sporadic, mediocre blogger fixated with cycling-related subjects. (blah blah blah) I know what it takes to be at the top level of blogging, and realize that mentally I am not able to make the sacrifices that it takes to be there anymore (blah blah blah) I hope to stay connected to the world of blogging because it has been my life and passion for 25 weeks, but I am also keeping my options open (blah blah blah) pursue other interests (blah blah blah) looking forward, not back (blah blah) wonderful years in this incomparable (blah blah) ...

However, within minutes of me not sending it out and then eventually sending it out way, way later, rumors immediately began swirling, culminating in a published report today (this one) that I am coming out of retirement to resume blogging, according to sources close to me. The sources, who requested anonymity but are believed to be among my multiple personalities, also revealed that I will not receive any salary or bonuses for my blogging.

Mine was the first earth-rattling un-retirement revelation of the day. News of the other one, which may be overshadowed by word of my resurrection, can be found here:
http://www.velonews.com/article/82892/sources-lance-armstrong-coming-back
Some excerpts, to save you the hyperlink click:

Lance Armstrong will come out of retirement next year to compete in five road races with the Astana team, according to sources familiar with the developing situation.
Armstrong, who turns 37 this month, will compete in the Amgen Tour of California, Paris-Nice, the Tour de Georgia, the Dauphine-Libere and the Tour de France — and will race for no salary or bonuses, the sources, who asked to remain anonymous, told VeloNews.

- JN

Do Not Go North to Race

2008-08-25T16:52:00.005-04:00

Want to get a good scare?

Imagine a hundred Cat 4 and 5 racers in a crit field with top-4 prizes of $165/$100/$85/$75. Good God: Cat 5s chasing $165? Might as well wax the corners and put wood chippers where the straw bales should be.

This is what's coming up in Grand Rapids in a couple weeks. Participating in the race would not be worth the trip for a Crash 4 like me, because I would return to Cleveland dead. (But I'd take some of the bastards down with me!)

If you weren't actually in the race, the trip might be worth it just for the spectacle -- if you're into watching horrific, nauseating but perversely amusing things such as rodeo events, competitive eating or Peter Gabriel acting as precious as an Oberlin student.

At the start, 22 of the 100 entrants would get run over trying to clip into their pedals. By the third lap, look for the leaders to be skidding as they hit a turn at 26 mph only to find it clogged by guys they're lapping, who are riding downtube-shifter Univegas, wearing cutoffs and billowing T-shirts, and coming to the mortal realization that this shit is hard.

Imagine the drinking game you could play at a crit corner: Down a shot of beer for every time you hear a racer shout "Hold your line!" and a shot of bourbon for every time you hear "Inside!" (Come to think of it, don't: You'd wind up in an alcohol coma or become so brain-dead that you'll want to race cyclocross.)

Scary.

But if I, as a Cat 4, think it would be scary to ride in that race, imagine what a bunch of Cat 2 Masters racers along the lines of Brian Batke, Ray Huang, Rudy Sroka and Tris Hopkins would think of the lot they've drawn in The 50th Annual Tour di Via Italia Race in Windsor next month. If my eyes don't deceive me, the Cat 2/3 masters will race in the same field as the Cat 4/5 seniors. Is this a cruel joke? Or Darwinism? Or are the Canadian categories different in some sort of freaking metric/Celsius way?

- JN

Belles on Bikes

2008-08-25T14:00:00.006-04:00

I finally did something great with a bicycle: I helped my daughters learn to ride it.
The Squirts are 4 and 6, and both are now riding without training wheels -- pretty well, in fact.
Of course, I have a somewhat lenient standard for what constitutes "pretty well": That is, if they wreck not much more often nor more violently than their gravity-victimized Dad, they're doing fine.
Everything happened quickly, in the last handful of days.
It started on Wednesday, when I came home from work to discover that Jen had pulled the training wheels off of both girls' bikes, at their request. I'd been coaxing them toward that - in Natalie's case, for a year plus. But I didn't want to force anything on them. And even though they both have a bit of the daredevil in them, they've not been in a hurry to abandon the extra wheels.
Yet there they were, riding for 6 or 8 feet at a stretch without training wheels.
So I knew it was the exact moment I needed to start teaching -- one at a time.
Wednesday evening, I took Nat up to a nearby elementary school that has a small ballfield at the bottom of a short hill. After some coaching, I lowered her saddle so both feet could easily reach the ground. I took her and the bike to the top of the hill and let them roll down.
It was like watching a robin fledge: On that first trip down the hill, she rode a good 80 feet before losing momentum. On the next, she went almost twice as far. Soon she was pedaling around the field.
So we went to the parking lot at the top of the hill. The pavement has a very subtle false-flat slope -- just enough to be perfect for our purposes. She climbed on the bike and rode all the way to the end of the lot, 200 feet away. Then I taught her the line she'd need to do a U-turn and head back. She got it right on her first try.
Thursday night was Claire's turn. She didn't do quite as well as Natalie, but she's 21 months younger. She did fine on the ball field; less well on the pavement.
I was in Denver when Claire took her first steps, and I don't remember Natalie's. But I'll remember this. The pride and excitement on their little faces was priceless.
Both took their spills and skinned their knees a little, and Claire got a very dark saddle-nose bruise on her inner thigh. These things they thought were great, because it made them just like Dad, who seems to have been nursing one or another road-rash sore for a year now.
On Sunday, we went over to a high school with a rubberized running track -- softer than asphalt if they spill, but hard enough to be a lot easier to ride on than grass. Within 10 minutes, Natalie was doing full 400-meter laps back to back. Claire worked her way up to about 3/4-lap stints before it became clear her tiny bike was too small for her to maintain enough momentum. When I put her on Nat's bike, she rode a full lap on her first try.
Not all was great. At one point, after Claire fell, she saw Natalie riding "the wrong way" toward her on the track. So Claire did what a lot of us with more experience and self-restraint often wish we could do: She heaved her bike into Natalie's path. Big pileup. Later, Nat rode right at Jen and me, trying to be a silly showoff, before realizing she hadn't acquired the maneuvering skills that idiotic pranks require. Again, she went down in a painful heap atop her bike. (Both of them have a knack for landing on top of their bikes, in a painful, bruising way.)
It's slightly disingenuous to say I "taught" them. We parents rarely teach our kids to balance. Best we can do is recognize when they're ready to learn and then help them, which is what I did.
Now we'll see whether I did them any favors: Natalie has often declared that she will become a bike racer "like my dad." If that happens, she will probably hate me. Now, if she becomes a bike racer quite unlike her dad, and actually wins from time to time, we'll both be proud.

***

Postscript: We picked up a suitably cool bike for Nat at the Greek Festival flea market last night -- a Huffy. Its new owner won't be big enough to ride it until spring, but it won her enthusiastic blessing because it possesses the one trait that seems to be most redeeming and important quality to her: It isn't pink. To me, it also held overwhelming appeal for a different reason: It cost $7.50.
Hell of a deal. Now I gotta put some Record components on it, eh?

Why I'm Gearing Up on Training

2008-08-21T11:47:00.005-04:00

The power of positive thinking, and several books that contain seven steps (not six nor eight) to success etc., have convinced me that anything I put my mind to is possible, if I work hard enough. So I've decided to start working hard to win the Tour de France.

Here's my inspiration:

That's Lance Armstrong's house. It is the biggest single residential consumer of water in all of Austin, having guzzled 330,000 gallons in July -- enough for 38 average households.

- JN

The MS "Race" report

2008-08-20T21:49:00.002-04:00

I mentioned a 100-related milestone in my previous post. Here's another one: Finally, I rode a century.
I always knew I'd get around to riding one, but it just never was a huge goal. Or at least it hasn't been for the last few years. I hadn't even really thought about it, because it's been well within a reasonable realm of possibility for the last few years.
A couple years ago, whole passel of detours turned the Pedal to the Point's nominal 75-mile return route from Sandusky to Berea into a 91-mile slog. And this spring, before I'd even begun doing much serious training, a bunch of us rode something like 78 miles through the Emerald Necklace and then home through downtown. So something like five months and hundreds of hours of riding later, I was confident I'd be able to knock out my first century, even though I hadn't done a whit of century-specific training.
So about a week before this year's Pedal to the Point (the MS-150 ride), I decided I'd do the event again, except this year, instead of doing 75 out on Saturday and 75 back on Sunday, I'd just do 100 on Saturday and then catch the shuttle home.
The only question was, how fast?
I figured 17.5-18 mph (somewhere around 5 hrs 30 min. to 5:45), with most of it in a paceline, would do the job without killing me.
So when I sprinted the last 150 meters into Sandusky and saw my average speed was 19.4 mph and we came within 9 minutes of doing it in 5 hours, I was pretty surprised.
I have to give credit to my paceline partners -- teammates Gary B. and Ian, along with a few others who came and went. Gary and some Ironman dude pushed the pace hard at times -- too hard, I feared, when we were still 80, 70, 60 miles away from the end and my legs were already feeling it and they kept jamming it up every roller like there was a polka-dot jersey on the line.
I reminded myself from time to time that this isn't supposed to be easy. That made it easier.
Still, the northwesterly headwind still was wearing me down. It wasn't stiff -- it was actually fairly light -- but it was relentless, and in our faces the entire day.
When we were about 15 miles out, I just decided to wheelsuck the entire rest of the way, and a couple others in our posse seemed content to pull me and another slacker in to the end. But then, in the middle of nowhere, someone among our group made a sudden mistake. Names and details aren't all that important. Bottom line: My front wheel got taken out, in the middle of nowhere. Then my head got rolled over by the next bike in line.
I cussed, bled a little and then got back on the bike feeling ... well, energized. The adrenaline rush was exactly what I needed. I wound up pulling us most of the rest of the way, and feeling strong.
So here's my article proposal for Bicycling:

(On the cover:)
How YOU Can Train for a Century!
(Then, on the inside)
Train for racing. That's it. The end.

- JN

P.S.: Re. this post's title: Every year, most of the (non-cyclist) folks who sponsor me for the MS-150 tell me, "Good luck with your race!" It's not a race, I'd try to explain ... and then I quit trying. Good thing I did, because it became a lie. When you ride with Gary, everything is a race -- especially if some bearded Goldilocks on a 69-cm bike suddenly passes you (and Gary) as if he's issuing a throwdown ... Thanks to stuff like that, I spent more than an hour of the 5:09 ride at or above my lactate threshold.

No. 101

2008-08-20T21:47:00.002-04:00

I didn't realize that I reached a milestone with my last post -- my 100th.
No one else realized, either, so I don't feel bad.

- JN

Cough up some cash, pal

2008-08-13T17:13:00.003-04:00

Thus far, aside from my various emotional/psychological handicaps, I've yet to be stricken by any disease. I am very, very lucky.
You are, too.
But there's a good chance that neither of us is out of the woods yet when it comes to multiple sclerosis. MS blindsides its victims with a sucker punch in the prime-of-life years -- mid-20s to maybe 60 years old. When it comes, it can be truly awful: episodes of weakness, paralysis, blindness etc. that come and go without warning and usually get more severe and longer-lasting until the damage becomes permanent.
Good thing to not have, eh? Especially if you love riding a bike.
That's why I do the National MS Society's MS-150 Pedal to the Point ride each year -- to help those stricken by MS and their families, and to help fund the search for treatments and a cure.
You folks who read this blog aren't going to be making pity sponsorships because you're blown away by my immense sacrifice of riding 75 or 100 miles on Saturday and riding 75 back on Sunday. You can probably ride that without major discomfort, and you know I can too. Still, that doesn't mean you can't sponsor me.
So please -- follow this link and send some coin to the MS Society.

- JN

Spread the word

2008-08-13T13:04:00.007-04:00

The Plain Dealer published a nice story today about beyondmotherhood.com, the website startup by local entrepreneur Shannon Davis. I don't know Shannon. But I know her husband -- a fine gent, a strong rider and a lucky guy (judging by his wife's picture) named Brett Davis. Ideally, the website will become a great resource for people like my wife -- women who want to keep one foot in the working world while doing us fathers the favor of sacrificing their careers to raise our children. Good luck with the new company, Davises. I hope it really takes off -- so that maybe it pays off for my own household, too, someday.

- JN

RIP, Cal Kirchick -- we owe you.

2008-08-11T11:12:00.003-04:00

I just learned, with some sadness, of last week's passing of local attorney and cyclist Calvin Kirchick, who died after having a heart attack doing what he loved -- riding his bike.
Cal was very active both as a recreational bike rider and as an activist in the move to reform the outdated patchwork of cycling laws in Ohio. I posted a link the other day to a bunch of revisions that the General Assembly passed in 2006 to make the law much more sensible and cyclist-friendly; Cal did much of the grunt work to make that happen, so everyone who rides much owes him a debt of gratitude.
We'd met a couple times and he and I traded emails just a couple weeks ago, but I didn't know him well, and I certainly knew him only as a cyclist. So I didn't know, although I've discerned, that he also was pretty active in Jewish-community philanthropy.
I'm told some 500 people attended his funeral service yesterday.
RIP, Cal. And thanks!

-- JN

I'm Backpedaling. (No I'm not. Yes I am!)

2008-08-09T17:03:00.004-04:00

As I rode through Moreland Hills this morning, I got into an argument. With myself.
It started as I rode past the town's sign declaring that cyclists must ride single file, per local ordinance. Just yesterday, I flatly stated on this blog that such ordinances are not legal -- they're contradictory with some 2006 changes to state law regulating cycling. Today I found fault with my own reasoning.

No need to go into too much detail, unless someone asks me to. It's boring enough to listen to me argue one side of a question, let alone both.

However, one of my attorney friends (see? that isn't a contradiction in terms after all) has a standing offer: If you ever get a ticket from some suburban cop for riding two abreast, get in touch with him. He's dying to take the issue to the Ohio Court of Appeals.

- JN

I disagree. Cuff me.

2008-08-07T14:03:00.006-04:00

I got to thinking after writing my earlier post about whether putting more police on bicycles might somehow benefit cyclists.

I tend to believe that just about everyone, not just police officers, becomes a better person in several ways by riding a bike. And maybe bike patrols will help fight crime or curb air pollution. Or build bridges between alienated communities and distant police, and all that other ethereal feel-good stuff touted by well-meaning, grant-spending, coed-seducing criminal-justice profs who concoct ideas such as community policing and convince the federal government to spend billions of dollars on something that works almost as well as D.A.R.E.!

So because I welcome all comers, I consider it good news that, since that last post, I discovered that someone from Cleveland Heights pledged $2,500 to buy bike gear for Cleveland's still-imaginary bike squad.

Swing a leg over a Trek, Ponch and John! I welcome you! I welcome everyone to the two-wheeled world (except those who ride into oncoming traffic; nihilistic fixie-riding misanthropes; smirky recumbent nuts with stupid beards; fat old guys in CSC jerseys who ride $8,500 bikes at 14 mph; sidewalk cyclists; and anyone who drops me on climbs).

But I have to wonder why bike-booster groups, like Walk+Roll Cleveland, Eco-City Cleveland, the LAB and a lot more give a hoot about whether cops are on bikes. Is there some assumption that this would be good for cyclists in general?

Maybe this is the thinking: A handful of Cleveland officers riding bikes will start a chain reaction of good karma, in which the rest of the police force, and then all the suburban forces, and then everyone, everywhere, will suddenly become bike-friendly. And that those proud pedal officers will set fine examples of bikesmanship and demonstrating how bikes belong. Right?

Riiiiight. And I might pedal my velocipede across Lake Erie for a weekend in Canada. You're welcome to flap your arms and fly alongside.

I've often assumed, without critically thinking it through, that putting cops on bikes and/or or educating them extensively about cycling and cyclists' rights would help eradicate the kind of anti-cyclist bias that pervades much of law enforcement. And if law enforcement took the side of cyclists a bit more often, I reasoned, maybe the rest of the world would share the road a bit more willingly.

But now that I've stopped inhaling solvents, I realized just how idiotic that presumption is.
To buy it, we would have to buy that all those cruiser-driving cops are sympathetic to fellow motorists who speed, blow lights and mow down elderly dog-walkers. The officers, after all, are members of the "motorist community," right?

No, the contrary is the truth.

Some, many or all police officers may have a slight bias in favor of motorists when it comes to cars vs. bikes, as many bike bloggers rail. But that's about as far as the cop kinship with other drivers goes.

I've been around officers all my life, and I can assure you that your own observations are true: They almost universally drive like Ricky Bobby, on duty and off, and they enforce the laws as capriciously, selectively and unfairly as Old Testament God -- against their own fellow motorists!

I can't support either leg of that statement statistically, of course. But anecdotal evidence -- meaning, the life experiences of anyone with two working eyeballs -- would indicate that cops are the among most brazen, careless and arrogant drivers on the road.

I'm sure that's an unfair generalization, and I'm sure some sworn officers follow the rules of the road and drive responsibly. I don't think I've seen it. But I've never seen China either, and yet I can believe it is there.

Yet the norm seems to be that officers speed everywhere, with or without the flashing lights. They blow through stop signs and lights. You may live to be 100 without seeing a police officer signal a turn. I've even seen one pass rush-hour traffic on the left-hand shoulder of I-90 westbound, then cut across three lanes to stop at a gas station on W. 117th and saunter over to the john.

Not that I begrudge the police. If I could drive like they do with the near-absolute immunity that a badge confers, I probably would -- especially if I didn't have to buy the gas, and even more especially if I really, really had to pee. It's more fun than driving at the retreating-glacier pace of Gary B., that's for sure.

Besides, these officers put their lives on the line every goddamn day for your criminal-coddling liberal ass, you flag-burning faggot. If they speed as often as they breathe, then that's a small price to pay for their heroism. If one of them crashes into a school-bus stop while hurrying back to the station for the free-to-the-first-taker tickets to the Browns preseason game, you better not judge, motherf-----, unless you've worn a badge and faced the hate, man. You got something to say about it? Huh? Remember 9/11, jerkoff?

They drive this way not just because they think/know they can get away with it, but also because they universally believe they are so superior behind the wheel. They have spent hours maneuvering around cones in a London, Ohio, parking lot, and therefore can handle their cruisers in situations that would cause some dumbshit like you to wreck and/or endanger others' lives.

So that makes them more inclined, not less, to give you a ticket when, for instance, you dangerously fail to come to a complete stop at the everybody-rolls-it stop by the CVS at Fairmount Circle, or when you're doing 39 in a 35 at East 24th and Rockwell at 6:30 p.m. on a Saturday, when the only other moving things within six square blocks are too busy urinating on the doors of local businesses to be threatened by your lawlessness. You are not qualified to blow stop signs or speed because you do not have the advanced training that Reed and Malloy have.

Moreover, admit it: If somebody waved a magic wand and gave you the power to go out for a day and enforce traffic laws, you wouldn't exactly be entirely fair, would you? You'd like to think so. But after a few hours of righteous justice, human nature would begin to set in: "That jackass over there just changed lanes without signaling --- whoa! She is beaucoups hot! ... Another speeder!-- oh, never mind: That's Dave from the group ride. ... Two cars ran the red light and I can only get one; which looks like less of a hassle? ... That car looks just like my old girlfriend's, and any friend of that bitch is no friend of mine ..."

And if cops behave this way toward fellow motorists after all the special training they go through, then why would we assume that putting some of them on bikes would change the way that even those select officers would treat cyclists, much less their peers in cruisers or on Harleys and horses?

Finally: You wanna bet that this officer used to skateboard when he was 12? Lot of good that did for skaters now, huh?

***

For that matter, I'll go off on another tangent (it's been almost two weeks since I've posted, as one reader pointedly observed, so I have some tangents to make up for): We all have to pass the driving test to get a license, yet we start breaking the law within four minutes of getting that cherished DL from a BMV clerk. So why would anyone actually believe that putting questions on the written driver's test about cyclists' rights and responsibilities is going to make any difference in our mistreatment?

That, of course, assumes you buy the premise that motorists are hostile to cyclists to begin with. If so, you'd never be able to prove it statistically. Think about how many cars you encounter on an hour-long ride: Ten? A hundred? Then think about how many hours you ride in a week, a month -- how many cars do you encounter in your 30 or 40 hours of riding per month? Thousands. Yet getting buzzed by a car is so rare that you and all your buddies will spend the next week quivering and bitching about how freaking dangerous it is out there and what a damn shame it is and how you wish you were in Portland, Ore. (where you get ticketed for not riding in the kiddie lanes). In that same span, you probably spent less than half as much time in a car, and witnessed five stupid moves by other drivers -- cut-offs, dangerous braking, crossing two lanes to turn, idiocy on the interstate -- all of which you forgot about within an hour ...

***

Last tangent (maybe):
I don't suppose it ever does much good to smart back to a cop who tells you to start/stop doing something, including all those cops out in Hunting Valley/Moreland Hill/Mayfield etc. who bark at you to "Ride in single file!" But in the event one of them is pissed off enough at his wife to actually ticket you for riding two abreast, don't worry: It's legal. Those local "ordinances" declaring that bicycles must ride single file? They're not.

Those are among the changes that took place almost two years ago, when the General Assembly adopted some pretty sweeping changes in a bill that squashes a lot of the old home-rule nuisance laws. Among the others that went by the books: any local requirement to ride on the sidewalk, and the rule saying we're supposed to ride in the gutter.

You might want to familiarize yourself with the changes. Unless you're the kind of person who likes to argue with cops and tell them how stupid they are because they don't even know the goddamn law. In that case, you didn't get this from me.

Better off just writing a letter to those communities. And getting your ticket dismissed in court.

- JN

Love Thy Enemy

2008-08-07T12:05:00.005-04:00

Item No. 1: Some folks in the so-called "bike community" locally are exhibiting a certain cleverness in pimping an ongoing fundraiser to help put more Cleveland cops on bikes. Perhaps the mindset is that cops on bikes would translate into a more understanding, enlightened and perhaps sympathetic view of cyclists among police, at least in Cleveland.

Here's the 411, as it's being circulated by Walk + Roll Cleveland, a pedestrian/cycling advocacy group:

CPD Bicycle Benefit!
Sponsored by The Harp and Heineken With A Heart
Support getting CPD officers on bicycles for a safer, cleaner, healthier and better Cleveland. We are "passing the helmet" to raise money to buy CPD officers bicycle equipment. Donate online or at the Aug 23 party and be entered to win fantatstic prizes. You can also donate at The Harp where a portion of every Heineken from now until Aug 23 will go towards the CPD Bicycle Benefit. More details at www.walkroll.com/CPD

Bully! Horray! Ride on over and lift a few pints for our Biking Brothers in Blue!

Item No. 2, absolutely, utterly and completely unrelated to Item No. 1 above: I noticed in a report from the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency's National Center for Statistics and Analysis that more than one out of every four people who died in a wreck while riding a bike in 2006 was drunk. Cheers!

What's Up, Doc?

2008-07-25T20:14:00.008-04:00

Cycling begets rabbits.

Once again, I have proof.

I lived for more than 40 years before I got "serious" about biking. Throughout all of those years, I never owned a rabbit.

Now that I am into biking and racing, I own a bunny.

Penny (center): With integrated shit levers.

It isn't mere happenstance, like when you're driving down the street at night and a street light goes black just as you pass it, or when Dave S. wins a prime at Westlake. No, in this case, there is a direct cause-effect relationship between biking and bunnying. So consider this a warning.

Here's the story:

I knocked a rim out of true in a wreckful race last spring, and it sat around for three months. Each time I went to Bike Authority, I'd forget it, and with no plans (no money) to go there anytime soon, I decided to have a friend true it for me. So on Saturday, I loaded my kids in the car and headed out to finally cross off that chore.

Little did I know how that alignment would cause things to align.

My girls had been pestering us for a hamster, guinea pig, rabbit -- some kind of rodent -- for months. But we've managed to put them off and stall, despite whining and begging that rivaled fund-drive week on PBS. We didn't have the money to drop $20 on a bunny and another $60 or $80 on cage and accessories.

Maybe God will send us one someday, I think I told them, lamely.

Alas, just after leaving the wheel guy's place, while the girls chattered at each other like squirrels, I saw a sign.

It was a piece of cardboard tied to a phone pole in front of a house, with the words "Bunny -- Free to a Good Home" inscripted. "Comes with cage, food and more."

The car stopped. I told the squirrels to sit tight. I walked up to the house.

Five minutes later, I hopped out carrying a cage, some Timothy hay and some rabbit chow. And a rabbit the size of a cat.

Now my side porch is covered with rabbit pellets. Our arms -- mine and my kids' -- look like Amy Winehouse's, but it's only rabbit clawings. My dog, who is an ace with two (wild) rabbit kills and four squirrels to her credit, is completely apoplectic, not knowing whether to kill the thing for fun or out of jealous hatred.

If I had no bikes, I wouldn't have had a wheel that needed truing. If I had no wheel in need of truing, I wouldn't have been in Willoughby. If I hadn't been in Willoughby, I wouldn't have seen the sign.

And I wouldn't have a rabbit.

I hope biking doesn't lead to anything else, like lemurs, saigas or star-nosed moles.

We're running out of room.

- JN

Don't Change for Me

2008-07-14T11:02:00.007-04:00

Just before bedtime last night, I left my wallet on one of the un-hooked-up stereo speakers that have been "temporarily" sitting in my bedroom since we needed some extra space in the living room to put up the Christmas tree.

I almost always leave my wallet in the kitchen. But I didn't feel like going all the way downstairs and clear across the estate home to put it there, and the butler was sleeping.

To my mother, this morning would have been all too predictable. In grade school, I would fail to put my shoes where they belong and then work myself into a stomping, crying frenzy in the morning, screaming, "Who moved my shoes?!?" Naturally, when it was time to leave today and I was already 20 minutes late, I could not find the wallet. I wasted another 10 minutes looking for it and was about to ride eight miles out of my way to my wife's car in South Euclid because I was sure it was there. Then I took one last look, which is when I found it where it shouldn't have been.

Which leads to this conclusion, applicable to all areas of life: Do not ever do anything new or out of the dull routine because it will just raise your blood pressure and lead to fright. New and different is bad. Static, predictable and monotonous is good.

***

I still have yet to decide whether to do Pedal to the Point (the MS-150 ride) for the sixth straight year, but I got some practice miles for it on Saturday.

Practice miles for P2P mean miles spent riding in a deluge. We've gotten drilled on the way to or from Sandusky for the last three years running.

Last year I awoke to find my tent and its contents pretty damp from the overnight gullywasher, then rode in the rain for five hours and flatted twice. (Thank God I had arm warmers and a (clean) garbage bag to wear between my jersey and my UnderArmor.)

The year before, we rode through a steady drizzle for a couple hours.

In 2005, we got caught in a torrent just outside of Berlin Heights; it came and went in half an hour.

Those experiences taught me that there's not much point in ranting at the rain. Whether you're in it for two minutes or 20 or 200 doesn't matter all that much; you don't get any wetter than soaked, and you're soaked after about a minute. So it doesn't get worse. As long as it doesn't get cold.

It was plenty warm on my 45-mile solo ride on Saturday, which started under a blindingly sunny sky that left me unprepared for rain. I never even looked at the forecast before I left, and didn't really notice it was clouding up until I got halfway between Chesterland and Chagrin Falls. That's when I saw the skies didn't look good, and I got hit by some sprinkles on Russell Road.

But nothing looked ominous -- until I climbed to the top of Shaker Blvd. and looked west toward SOM Center Rd. and saw a curtain of gray spanning the road ahead of me. I hit it, or it hit me, in about 30 seconds. And it rained, hard, for a good 15-20 minutes.

Then, suddenly, it was dry again when I hit Shaker. My house in CleveHts hadn't seen a drop. Yet.

I hosed off the bike and went downstairs to wipe it down. That's when the rain hit again. By then I was in my SpongeBob SquarePants boxers, lubing the chain.

There was a time when getting caught in a storm would've had me cursing. But last year's P2P was a turning point.

Cyclists like to find joy in suffering, I guess. It allows us to elevate and congratulate ourselves, in large part because it inherently means we can think less of everyone else who doesn't suffer with such quiet dignity and nobility as we do. You know -- like those lazy-asses with muscular dystrophy or spinal-cord damage who never even get on a bike, let alone face up to the physical and moral challenge of riding up Sherman Road or riding in a rainstorm.

Riding from Sandusky to Berea in a steady downpour did suck. But as I passed hundreds upon hundreds of other riders who had abandoned, who were huddling together in rest-stop barns and shelters like Siberian dwarf hamsters at Petland -- it gave me energy and resolve and strength. I was drenched. I couldn't get drenched-er. And I was beating something that made those others quit.

That's what we do, right? That's why we climb, or race, or ride 100 or 200 miles: So that, inside our heads at least, we can embiggen ourselves by calling other people pussies.

Not that riding home on Saturday made me less of a wuss, because I wasn't suffering stoically. Actually, it was pleasant. Sure, there are more pleasant ways to ride a bike. But I'd rather be riding a bike unpleasantly than doing something like watching TV. And if you're reading this, you probably would, too. Or else you're a pussy.

***

If you're a fan of pro cycling on the other side of the pond, you definitely need to read this blog. But don't do it while drinking coffee at your computer, because there's a great chance that you'll bust out laughing with a mouthful and blow it all over your keyboard. I haven't laughed so hard since I first discovered BSNYC when he was in his prime. The link above is to Schmalz's tour preview, which is a must-read to get grounded in his slant before you delve into the daily posts. But there's a new, inspired and hysterical post with each tour stage.

- JN

Caught on the Fence

2008-07-11T22:26:00.003-04:00

Well ... the game of tag kind of broke up.
It ended like a game of hock-sock (half-hockey, half-soccer) at recess back in sixth grade, when Mark Nienhaus got checked, face first, into the chain-link fence and didn't really bounce back because his lip got caught in it. Ripped it right open -- almost off. Everyone just kind of stood there, stunned, waiting to see if he was going to detach. When he did, we were all horrified at all the blood, and Sr. Rosalie was wafting over with a look of terror on her face. Nienhaus got stitches. Again. Still has a big scar 33 years on, and never could grow a moustache to cover it, either.
That was the end of hock-sock at recess.
The e-tag game produced some real ugliness, too. I'd rather not go into it now, and hope I never will.
But no one was really playing anyway.
Cleveland is much too sophisticated for such childishness.
Good luck from a flatlander to all the billy goats who will get ground into pulp at Shreve tomorrow.

- JN

Let's Play Hide 'n' Seek 2.0!

2008-07-09T10:57:00.010-04:00

So I've been "tagged."
If you can scroll down to the bottom of my last post without getting carpal tunnel syndrome or narcolepsy, you'll see that my techie friend Cyclonecross -- a.k.a. Gary -- summoned an uncharacteristic bit of cleverness in his comments and then told me I've been tagged. I'm it, as it were. I must not have been on base.
Now, the more I get to know Gary, the more I like him. (I would not like him at all if he drove a fire truck, because my house would burn to smoldering cinders before he arrived ... verrrrry slowwwwwly, but getting pretty goddamn good mileage! The trick to saving my house would be to get another fire engine to pass him on the way, in which case Gary would probably get scary; he once lit into a 500-yard sprint to humiliate some dork in a Nashbar jersey because dude had the nerve to pass us with a little too much vigor -- on a freaking charity ride).
But Gary has his quirks. He actually likes math, HTML and algorithms, whatever they are. He speaks Web 2.0. He apparently does not share my belief that so-called "social media" are for people who would rather sit at a keyboard and pretend to socialize than to actually meet people.
In other words, Gary lives in the 21st century and I'm in the past, circa 1986. He is Crocs covered in Jibbitz; I am Earth Shoes sandals with brown over-the-calf socks. He has digital cable with Versus; I have rabbit ears and know there's a difference between UHF and VHF. He downloads his porn; I drive to the "adult bookstore" wearing a fake Dave Zabriskie moustache and sunglasses.
The gap between our eras is great enough that we probably need a Ouiji board to communicate -- but he would want a digital interactive Ouiji 2.0 app. That would, of course, mean we would need an IT consultant on standby in order to play, because Ouiji 2.0 doesn't run well with Vista. Which is why Gary always has job security and my job may soon involve the phrase, "Do you want fries with that?"
Fortunately, Gary gave me explicit instructions about how to respond to being "tagged." I have to post six random things about myself, then tag six other bloggers, then post something on his Cyclonecross blog.
Before recess ends, apparently.
Then we all have to line up for Bathroom 2.0. I pity the kid who has to use the stall after me.
So ...
I might not know six bloggers (see above). But here are six things:
1) I am sort of looking for a job. Unfortunately for me, the industry sectors I'm exploring are completely obsessed with social media and the ways that opportunistic exploiters will be able to use Facebook and LinkedIn and WhatNot to drain our pocketbooks. I find those to be about as useless as American Idol (and by now, they're probably sooo last year). Therefore, this "tagging" indulgence in that Web 2.0 playpen is kind of an education for me -- case study. And it may be tax-deductible.
2) I keep this blog semi-anonymous, largely because of #1 above. I'd rather it didn't pop up on the Google search done by a prudish job-candidate-screening HR person who takes umbrage to musings that celebrate shooting pigeons; include cruel, underhanded attacks on other people's appearance; and reveal my Rainman tendancies. The Senior VP for Really Cool Jobs at MyPerfectCompany would be uber-hip, and thus would be a cyclist, and she may stumble across my churlishness during a backgrounder and yank the $250K/yr. job offer off the table because she doesn't appreciate me openly deriding things other cyclists consider sacred (examples 1, 2 and 3, to cite but a few).
Those are the traits that actually define me as a person and prospective employee, but I'd rather dupe people into thinking I'm a dynamic, team-oriented self-starter who's proficient in Web 2.0 and social media, busily working on the next killer app. For those things, I'll create another blog and steal all the great content from other people's sites -- just like Google, MSN and Yahoo do!
3) I thought my dog, Molly, was close to being a goner until I started giving her glucosamine and chondroitin. It was as if I'd begun injecting her with HGH (or would that be DGH?). Maybe it was the glucosamine. Or maybe was happily rolling in some deer shit recently and accidentally tumbled into the canine fountain of youth.
4) I have the best kids in the world -- two beautiful little girls -- along with an attractive and wonderful wife. I keep them out of all of this, though. In part it's so I don't reflect on them in the same embarrassing ways I do in real life. But mainly it's because my years of closely observing the criminal-justice system gave me a sickening insight that the rest of you with little kids ought to understand: Far, far more perverts than you actually realize troll the Internet looking for pictures of little kids and ways to "meet" them. What you've read isn't paranoid hype; it is understatement. Another reason for semi-anonymity in the blogosphere.
5) I'm obsessive. Every few years, I find or rediscover something I love and I throw myself into it with stunning, sometimes almost self-destructive passion. Then I try to learn everything there is about it and spend absolutely obscene sums of money pursuing my new hobby. Those obsessions in the last 15 years have included home brewing, cooking, wine and softball (up to 6 games a week, six months a year, plus 3 hours per week in the batting cages during winter). I still cook -- pretty well -- but I no longer brew. I don't even drink. I gave up softball the week my older girl was born -- involuntarily at first, but I don't miss it.
6) I wish I'd begun bike racing sooner instead of waiting until I was 43. But then, I may have burned out on it by now. Or I'd be crippled.

As for those I've tagged, here's the list: Jodi, Matt, Ray, Russ, Dave and a blogger I don't know but whom I admire, Aki.
- JN

Twin Sizzler, Twin Trends

2008-07-04T13:11:00.014-04:00

The two trends of my season -- inexplicable gains in form (from wretched to mediocre) and inexplicable crappy luck -- collided today at the wonderful Twin Sizzler race in Medina.
The long story short: I hung with the Cat 2s and 3s in the elite masters field (35+), ran down some early breaks, made the selection when we hit the hills and was in pretty good shape 16 miles into a 26-mile race. Then I hit some glass and flatted out.
That's the gist.
If you hate reading other people's long, self-indulgent race reports as much as I do, go ahead and boot up your Grand Theft Auto II.

***

The July 4 Twin Sizzler is a much-derided race among racers, because the road conditions are Fallujah-esque and the intersections poorly marshaled. There's no prize money or upgrade points.
Worst of all, perhaps, to my many overly serious, self-important peers, the Twin Sizzler is non-sanctioned, and its age-group-based citizen races draw a million non-racers for their first race ever or their only race of the year. God forbid anyone who holds a license and has matching top and bottom be confused for one of them. ("Oh, dear, Thurston -- Who admitted those ghastly people wearing sneakers and toe clips?")
Its 8:15 a.m. start is quite early start for me, a non-morning-person who lives almost an hour from Medina. Then my day started off with the kind of exasperation that's familiar to just about everyone who races:
1) Couldn't get to sleep last night, thanks in large part to the party girls next door, who thought it was really fun to sing along with Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" at the top of their lungs well past midnight. When the alarm went off at 6 a.m., I'd been asleep for maybe 4-1/2 hours.
2) Finally get in the car at 6:40 and discover the tank is empty -- like, real empty. Emptier than it ever gets in the Honda, because the Fuel light actually went on. That car's gotta be on vapors for the fuel light to come on.
I get to what I thought was a 24-hour gas station at the corner, desperately needing both gas and coffee, and discover that it is, at most, a 23-hour and 58-minute gas station, because it was closed up tight. Maybe, just maybe, I've got enough gas to get to Ghetto Joe's -- it's mostly downhill.
3) I do make it, only to discover that gangbanging dope boys also sometimes get stuck with the early shift, and four of them begin to take issue with the straps of my bib overalls hanging out the back of my baggy shorts. But like a cat that gets bored with a mouse, they decide to drop it.
4) By now it's an hour and 15 minutes until the start of the race, which is about an hour away, and the question of whether I should even bother becomes more pronounced.
5) My bowels ask for a respite at Brunswick. I hope there is indoor plumbing there. And I'm delighted to see a Burger King. Surprisingly, there are no corn squeezin's or hominy on the menu. But there is coffee!
Fast forward to Medina.
I arrived without making up my mind which race to do, and was totally confounded.
The citizens' race, 45-49 age group, had almost 30 guys signed up, which at first struck me as good.
I knew that a good number of those would look like Dom Deluise or John McCain. Mirrored helmets. Tri-bars, maybe. Flat-bar bikes. Cotton T-shirts and/or Wheaties jerseys that stretch over enlarged bellies. Black Nashbar tops that look like a cut-in-half inner tube with Rosie O'Donnell stuffed inside. F--in' panniers, for chrissakes. But with 30 or more, maybe I'd get lucky and get a good race from half of them.
But last year was not that long ago, and even at my age, I can remember one year back. I did the 40-44 race last year. There were only a handful of quasi-racers like me -- some fellow Cat 5s and out-of-shape Cat 4s. The race blew to bits, with five or six of us together and the rest spread out over many miles like a camel train. I won -- with an average HR of 144.
My teammates were unimpressed. They called me a sandbagger. Said I shouldn't have done the citizens race in the first place.
Now, I'm 20 pounds too close to rotund, and haven't won jack this year. I've barely even finished any races. So sandbagging didn't sound so bad.
But I kept thinking that a re-run of last year's race seemed kind of un-sporting, like hunting chinchillas in an empty swimming pool, with a 12-gauge.
So I aimed to do the elite masters -- a race that promised to include real racers, but supposedly wouldn't be as tough as a typical masters race.
Lots of the studs don't bother with this little race (and don't want to risk injury for no money, no points, not even merchandise -- just a faux-bronze medal with a sticker on it). And, according to my buddy/teammate Dave S., the big guns who do race -- the Cat 1-2-3s who race A's at Westlake -- would all probably race with the under-35 elites, regardless of age. The Sizzler being what it is, it seems rules are optional, and those guys want to be where the action is, Dave said. He went so far as to say Dick B. called the elite masters race boringly slow.
Yet when I was six miles out of town and running pretty damn late, Dave called to warn me that the elite masters field was looking awful strong -- some of the guns were not racing down (in age) after all.
I got to registration and the start was about 25 minutes away. I hemmed. Then I hawed. Then I think I hawed a second time, but it could've been a hem.
Oh well, I thought: Better to get a hard workout and get dropped than to do a 25-mile tempo ride with one sprint at the end. (I would quickly begin to doubt the wisdom of that.) I'd do the masters rather than age group, I decided. So I paid and pinned on number 730-something -- the 35+ elites were wearing the 700s. No going back now.
I rolled up to see a bunch of 2s and 3s -- teammate Tom K., plus Zak D. and Chris R. from Lake Effect, Polo from RGF and bunches from Spin and Orrville -- in the same bunch with this overweight Cat 4 prime-hunter. Good thing I got my 5-minute warmup. Looked like I'd need it. And some EPO and a testosterone patch, and a tow rope.
We rolled out easily, sitting at 20-22 mph for the first couple-few miles, before a couple Orrvilles and a couple Spins decided to stomp on it. I was 4th wheel, so I chased on. I took my turn on the front and then pulled off. No one came through. Break over.
Then Bang! -- a replay. Again, I ran it down (pulling a couple other guys up) and it died. I almost died, too. We were four miles in and I was gasping, wondering if I should just quit.
But I found a nice draft near the back and recovered for awhile. I rode Riccardi's wheel until he went with another attack that wasn't really going anywhere. Then I latched on behind some other guys.
By the time we got to Ballash Road, the "much faster" U-35 elites were within sight, merely a few hundred yards up the road despite their 3- or 4-minute head start. We turned onto Kennard, about 10 miles into the race, and were eating up their cast-offs.
Then came the Hills of Kennard. They're short. They're not very steep. They're not all that noticeable at sub-race pace, if no one is attacking. But they're back to back -- up, brief false flat and up again. Dave S. insisted this would split the field.
It did. Not terribly selective, but most of the other 4s and a couple 3s got spit off. I got caught trying to ride the wheel of the wrong rider, a seemingly nice chap in a Brecksville Velo kit, to the top. I just about got dropped before I came around him on the 2nd rise.
He blew, and my teammate JV blew. I found myself dangling 25 yards off the back of the main group, with no one close enough behind to work with. As hard as I tried, I couldn't close the gap, and I was killing myself for what seemed like half an hour but was probably only 3-4 minutes. I knew I was only halfway through the race and the riding would be easier up there in a pack than here in No Man's Land. So when the road took a small dip, I hammered downhill right as the group ahead caught a couple breakaway riders and everyone kinda sat up.
Here I was with the hammers. I'd made the split. (So did a couple other suspect riders, I must admit -- guys who do, or should, be racing in the B field at Westlake. But there were some strong guys there, too -- guys who win Cat 3 races and masters races with very strong fields.)
Now the riding was pretty flat -- just some rollers -- and the attacks were pretty unconvincing. With only 10-11 miles left, I felt comfortable sitting on, chatting with Chris S., a beast from the East. I figured even if I didn't make the sprint at the end, I'd probably finish with or very near the main bunch. That alone would be a moral victory. And I had two SBR mates -- Rick A. and Tom -- in the front with me; who knows? Maybe I could actually help.
Then came what I should've known was inevitable: Psst-psst-psst-psst-psst!
"Flat," said an Orrville guy next to me said.
"ME?" I replied in horror
"Yup," he said.
Now, I've heard so many flats in races this year that you'd think I'd know that sound intimately. But this flat was a ventriloquist: It didn't sound like it was coming from my bike. And it wasn't that steady hiss of deflation. Sounded more like a leaf or something was stuck on someone's wheel and rubbing a seat stay.
We were bunched tightly together, so I could manage only a quick glance down. Didn't look flat -- not al the way. But then we rode into bright sunlight for a second and I could see it was halfway gone.
I glanced back. No Mavic neutral support. No SRAM wagon. No Snake Bite team car. No helicopters or network TV guys or Gummi Bears trucks.
My race was over. My computer showed an average speed of 25.3 -- one of the fastest races I've ever been in.
I bowed out with just enough air to make it to the marshal at the next intersection. He called a SAG for me and then explained the difference between amateur radio and CBs while I waited. It was very exciting.
About 10 minutes later, I heard, my "slow, old masters" field caught the "young elite" field near town -- ran down the big Cat 1s from RGF and Lake Effect etc. They had themselves a convoy. They crashed the gate doing 38 and said let them bikers roll. 10-4.
I woulda/coulda been there, in which case I would have never let Dave S. and Gary hear the end of it.
I heard it turned into a cluster-foof ending -- chaos and pandemonium and guys panicking and dropping out before the sprint and other such fun. Our Gary took 3rd.
Or so I heard. I was in a pickup truck at the time. Sucks a little.
But I hung on with the hammers. And I flatted. One surprise, offset by something that should surprise no one.

- JN

P.S. To Death Ray: Is this one long enough to make up for the drought???

Ubber dye broke?

2008-07-03T17:10:00.002-04:00

I'm a little late to notice, but: It's good to see the return of one of the area's better bloggers -- a guy who writes as well as he rides (which is high praise): http://ueberdiebruecke.wordpress.com/.

- JN

I'm back. And almost back.

2008-07-03T14:25:00.005-04:00

Sorry. I was sleeping.
It's been awhile since my last post. I'd say any blogger who has any semblance of balance in his/her life should write those words now and again, unless the blog pays the bills. There are some very good bloggers out there who write very bad blog entries, just to feed the beast that doesn't feed back.
I don't claim to be one of those very good bloggers, any more than I claim to be a good bike racer.
But I've had my moments in this forum. And I've been having my moments on the bike lately -- paradoxically.
I spent the first one-third of the 2008 racing season performing like an okapi at Churchill Downs.
The pattern: Too much fat, too many flats, a wreck and a lot of DNFs.
I undertrained all winter and maybe started to overtrain in the spring. It wasn't fun. And I finally gave up on the season about a month ago.
But if results from the last three weeks are any clue, it seems I've suddenly become stronger than I've been all year.
Not sure why. One obvious reason is that all my recent races have been at Westlake, which is flatter than flat. And it's somewhat obvious that the inconsistent level of competition there has been markedly lower than at RATL, Mid-Ohio etc. (although the 24- to 25-mph average speeds of the last few B races has been nothing to sneeze at).
But whatever the reasons, this is the upshot:
I have been able to do almost anything and everything I want to do in the last three races.
If there's a prime sprint and I choose to contest it, I win it. I've even won primes with attacks from 350 or even 1,000 meters out -- the kind of sprints that would typically blow me up and cause me to get swallowed and shit back out long before the finish line.
If a break goes up the road, I can run it down at will, if I need to. If I want to gap the field to wear down some chasers and spring a teammate for a counterattack, I can roll off the front so quickly that I surprise myself, and everyone else, it seems.
I think I've contested 11 primes in the last three weeks. As I recall, I won eight or nine of them (although I somehow didn't get credited for one of last Tuesday's three sprint wins). It could've been 10: I rode a teammate's wheel to 150 meters out on Tuesday and backed off to let him win, instead of coming around for the sprint, when we rode away from all the other sprinters.
Of course, all of this is relatively meaningless because I still haven't won -- or even placed or showed. That's because my sprinting, power and endurance have all come around, but my recovery hasn't. I wound up dropping out after 30 or so miles on Tues. because after the third prime win (and fourth sprint, counting my teammate's win), I couldn't rev it up fast enough to grab on to the peloton again.
I had plenty in the tank to contest the previous week's 40-mile race, but there wasn't really a race to contest: Two of my teammates rode away in a 3-man break, leaving me and a few other SBRs to control the front behind them. At least I finished: The week before that, I got dropped (again) after burning myself up chasing primes.
So I'm still out of shape -- way out of shape, perhaps. But these balls-out sprints have been giving me the workout I want. I maybe could sit on and wheelsuck and hope to sprint for a win or whatever at the end, but riding along at a below-threshold steady state isn't going to get me much stronger.
And the way my teammates have been racing, the races aren't going to come down to bunch sprints anyway; someone will break away more often than not, I'm betting.
If you're betting, don't put your money on me. But damn if I'm not enjoying myself a bit more lately.

- JN

P.S.: I still have given up the ghost on this season. But maybe I'll reconsider Troy and Tour d'Burg ...

Minne-asshole-is

2008-06-17T14:31:00.003-04:00

BSNYC's post today brought to mind one of the more comical (or envy-inducing) things I saw in Minneapolis: A gleaming S-Works Tarmac SL2 with Ksyrium SSL wheels (MSRP: About $8,000) -- and a pie plate, a giant saddle scrotum and SPD mountain-bike pedals.
Overbiked? Yeah.

NVGP Wrapup (maybe)

2008-06-17T14:17:00.004-04:00

Found some cool footage of the Nature Valley GP on YouTube (of course).

Here's Brooke Miller's win, and some more:

Try climbing this shit 18 times. And this is only one of two leg-breaking climbs in the last stage of the NVGP, a crit at Stillwater, Minn., that most of the field never finishes.

Here's the other Stillwater ramp:

Ignore the bimbo as you watch this next one. Instead, look at the hill and think about what Ben Jacques-Maynes said -- words to the effect of "I took a chance and left it in the big ring." The big ring? Jeez. I'd need a big ring on the back -- a 53T -- to climb this beast.

Finally, here's some footage from the NVGP a few years back that underscores why losers like me should never quit the race -- any race:

How I Spent My Father's Day

2008-06-17T13:25:00.003-04:00

I was getting ready for bed in a St. Paul hotel room at 10:30 Saturday night when my wife called to say United Airlines called the house and needed me to call back. The airline wouldn't tell her why.
When the phonebots finally gave way to a human on the Indian subcontinent, I learned my 8 a.m. flight home, via Chicago, was canceled and United would re-book me on a flight that would leave Mpls. at 3:30 p.m. Sunday and arrive here at 9:40 p.m. on Father's Day -- roughly an hour after the bedtime of two little girls who hadn't seen their Dad since Thursday morning.
After I fussed, United "accommodated" me by putting me on the 6 a.m. flight. That way, I'd still get the original connecting flight to Cleveland, to arrive here at 1:20 p.m. Sunday.
The anxiety of dealing with arrogant, unapologetic morons kept me from falling asleep til maybe 12:30 a.m.
So after maybe 3-1/2 hours of sleep, I awoke at 4 a.m. to go to the airport.
Of course, I had to refuel the rental first. More stress.
I arrived with an hour to spare. Good news. Except that I was at the wrong terminal. After a 10-minute walk and a train ride, I was at the right place -- only to find a mile-long line at security (at 5:30 a.m.!!!)
It moved quickly enough that I made my flight. I arrived in Chicago about the same time as the thunderstorms that soon would turn my four-hour layover into something more. A lot more.
After an hour or so, I learned my connecting flight would be delayed indefinitely. After another hour or so, the airline changed the gate to one at the end of another terminal. I then had to walk about 1/2 mile (no exaggeration), schlupping my luggage and laptop and all of the useless books that folks foisted off upon me.
After two hours at my new gate, United decided to mix things up again: another gate reassignment. I then dragged my arse and my stuff all the way back to the terminal I'd originally been at, and beyond the original concourse to the next-farthest one. There, I learned my flight was further delayed.
The airline (United, I repeat) felt so bad about this that everyone in its employ was speechless -- so speechless that not one single United Airlines person apologized through all of this growing ordeal. In fact, I had to listen to United gate agents scold "you people going to Cleveland" twice, effectively telling my fellow travelers to just sit down, shut up and wait after our second gate reassignment and third delay announcement.
After eight hours of that hospitality, I finally got out of O'Hare around 2:15 p.m. CDT; a pilot broke United's consistency by apologizing for the delay.
Shit weather happens. But it's inconceivable to me that any person in any business -- let alone a floundering, failing, reviled one like United -- would be so disdainful of its customer base as United's people were. Bankrupt? NOO! You're KIDDING!
I arrived here in Cleveland an hour later (4:15, w/ time change). My wife picked me up at the urine-tinged University Circle rapid station around 5 p.m. - 12 hours after I left my hotel.
But the hassles melted away at the sight of the two little folks who were bursting with excitement over seeing their daddy. They made their own giftwrap for my presents, which they just could not wait for me to open. And they wrapped me, too -- with giant, giant hugs from little tiny people.
That's why I missed them almost the whole time I was gone.

- JN

Self-Flagellation

2008-06-17T11:19:00.009-04:00

Watching the pros this past weekend inspired me to punish myself Monday for my flabby laziness.

So I went out for a little hill workout. It was no big deal to a fit rider. But I'm feeling it today. Here's the route:

Down Euclid Creek Parkway, then back up. Then back down. Then up the Chardon Rd. hill from Euclid Ave. Then back down and up the washed-out road in the Euclid Creek reservation that parallels Highland, up to Richmond and beyond.

Dropped down through the North Chagrin Reservaton onto Chagrin River Rd. Then up and back down Old Mill. Then up Cedar Rd. and home, battling the 168-mph headwind.

I feel like someone smacked my glutes with a baseball bat. I don't think I'll be a factor at Westlake tonight ...

***

The climb up Chardon was a little less steep, and less than half as long, as the Main St. hill in Mankato, at the end of the 90-something-mile stage of the Nature Valley GP. I realized as I reached the top of the Chardon Rd. hill I that might not be able to make it up the Main St. hill even once, even with fresh legs. Those guys and gals racing up there had to climb it four times -- after almost 80 wind-whipped miles of racing.

Gotta tell ya, they earned their salaries that day (all $10,000 of it, in many cases).

***

Another observation:

One thing that blew me away watching the riders sign in for Friday night's criterium is how damn young they look. We live in a place where every single one of the best racers is masters-eligible, where only a handful of under-25 racers are even semi-competitive at Cat 1-2. So it's kind of a jolt to see these upper-echelon guys who look like they're barely old enough to shave. Rock Racing's Mike Creed looks like he could've starred on "21 Jump Street."

(Creed and most of his pro-racing peers undoubtedly are too young to even get the reference to that show. Most of our best racers around here might not get the reference, either -- because when it aired, they were too old to care about watching it. That underscores the gulf).

Most of the male racers at Nature Valley looked like the interns at work: wet behind the ears, and full of youthful exuberance.

That made me a little less disdainful of supposed peloton "tough guy" Kayle Leogrande. Up close, he is a little pipsqueak. He looks like a kid who played too much with Majic Markers, not the brash, dickheaded felon he wants people to think he is. He also seems pretty personable. He didn't just welcome fan interaction -- he seemed to need it.

Young kids -- particularly those who really need attention and, maybe, love -- do stupid things. Most of us regret our stupidity and try to forget it. It's hard to forget the ink that covers every freaking appendage, though. I feel sorry for self-loathers like him sometimes, and hope he gets happy enough someday to regret his form of self-mutilation.

He and co-tattooed David Clinger (who unfortunately abandoned the laser surgery that was supposed to remove the ink that molests his whole face and head) look like youngsters when you're close enough to see past their ink inflictions. And they both seemed like nice guys.

Clinger before

Clinger after.

Who would you rather look like?

As gaudy as the tats are, their wearers were incongruously inconspicuous once the races started. You tend to get overlooked when HealthNet and Bissell eat you lunch and dinner and have your women in every race.

Michael Ball proclaimed that his Rock Racing philosophy would be "Win or be fired." Looks like he's going to do a LOT of firing. Rock Racing was a complete non-factor in one of the biggest stage races on the NRC calendar.

- JN

Twins are Hot!

2008-06-16T12:35:00.010-04:00

MANKATO, Minn. -- You can't believe Kristen Armstrong until you see her race -- and even then, she leaves you dumbstruck by dominance that has probably never been seen in American bike racing.

From what I saw at the Nature Valley Grand Prix this weekend, no other woman could beat Armstrong unless Armstrong lets her. Not Tina Pic. Not the Europeans. No one.

Her unrelated namesake, Lance, was one of the all-time greats, of course. But he raced with the greatest teams ever assembled. She effectively races alone. If Armstrong raced alone, even at the height of his greatness, he couldn't have dominated like Kristen does -- not even against the domestic peloton.

To analogize in local terms -- and with all due respect to the rest of the pro female peloton -- Kristen Armstrong against the rest of the pro women is like Paul Martin racing in a men's Cat 3 field in Ohio.

Or maybe like Kristen Armstrong racing in a men's Cat 3 field in Ohio.

The whupping she imposed on the other women in the time-trial stage on Friday would've ruined the whole stage race if the organizers hadn't wadded up the rules in order to keep more than a few women racing.

The officials threw out the time cut instead of throwing out the 60-plus women who failed to finish within 120% of Armstrong's time. But with two stages left that favored power climbers, Anderson had already ended the race for GC. The time trial was short (about 6 miles) and mostly flat until the final 1/2 mile or so. That little aberration, though, comprised a climb comparable to Old Mill Road on Deca-Durabolin -- a 20% grade with three switchbacks and no place to relax.

Armstrong won by 47 seconds. Think about that: She put 8 seconds per mile into them.

The officials' leniency didn't matter, ultimately. The other women who would've been excised from the rest of the stages wound up watching from the cheap seats anyway on Saturday. Well, actually, they didn't: When Armstrong dropped the hammer, she was quickly out of sight, quite literally.

The women had already suffered through 80 miles of spirit-crushing crosswinds when they rolled in to Mankato in a tight bunch. Given the choice, most would've probably opted for another 80 miles of wind rather than what awaited them there: Four laps around a 4-mile circuit cursed with an inhumane mile-long climb at an average grade of 14 percent.

The emphasis is on "average": three flat intersections skew the number downward. Most of the wall -- including the last 300 yards -- is probably closer to 18-20 percent. The intersections are way too narrow to give a rider a break, but wide enough to dilute the grade number, and wide enough to cruelly crack a rhythm climber's steady pace. The top half is so steep that it hurt my knees to jog DOWN it, and I had to be careful not to pitch forward into the pavement.

The men, who came through an hour earlier, were climbing it at a walking pace, and a couple of the sprinters were zig-zagging from curb to curb like little kids.

This photo will give you a hint, but not a clear indication, because the sunlit bottom of the hill is obliterated by overexposure in this cell-phone shot. The folks down there were mere flecks when seen from the top.

The women were together for the last time when they hit the start-finish at the bottom of that hill. Then Armstrong looked like something at the Cleveland Air Show. She broke their legs and rode away like she was on an escalator and her competition was riding up a mountain of dirty laundry.

Re-read this post from the top to this point a couple times; the time it'll take you to do that would approximate the gap she built in that one-mile climb.

The bad news for the rest of the peloton was that three more trips up that hill were to follow, and all of the riders had to finish in order to race in Sunday's last stage to scramble for the scraps of second and third place. In the end, Armstrong had put a few more minutes -- and a few more bullets into the field.

***

On the men's side, HealthNet-Maxxis proved itself the full-team equivalent of Kristen Armstrong. Bissell's Ben Jacques-Maynes started the 95-mile stage with about a 45-second lead, and it evaporated when the men hit the 4-lap end circuit. HNM beat everyone into submission by then, and Rory Sutherland gradually inched away from Jacques-Maynes with each successive suffering up the wall.

But Kirk O'Bee and Jelly Belly's Nic Reistad know who to respect:

***

ST. PAUL -- Well, it turns out that the Twin Cities aren't perfect after all: I saw a few potholes yesterday.

Actually, I saw six, maybe seven -- in 460 miles of driving over three days.

Here where the temperatures reach 30 below (that's minus-144 Celsius, I think), and the freeze-thaw cycles are even more violent than Cleveland's, the pavement looks like Disneyland's. It's almost creepy, in the way a wax museum is: The roads bear an unsettling resemblance to what we know is real, but they are utterly unrealistic. It takes all the fun out of driving when you don't get to slalom through Cleveland, shaking like a cell phone on vibrate.

It used to confound me how Latin baseball players, coming from the most decrepit villages in the Dominican etc., would make their living here and then head straight back home to those hovels.

Now I'm not so confounded, because that's how I feel heading back to Cleveland from the Twin Cities.I spent most of my time in St. Paul, in the parts of it that the locals are worried about -- the "bad" parts, as it were. I'd heard, in my pre-trip research, of how these neighborhoods were on the decline and people were panicking.

When I got there, I was sure I must be in the wrong place. I drove for miles through these "troubled" neighborhoods, up and down both main streets and side streets.I saw one boarded-up house. One.

I saw no houses with bars on the doors. And the main street that I'd heard so much hand-wringing about -- all the "boarded-up storefronts" etc. This street was as vibrant as Detroit Avenue in Lakewood, with a lot more ethnic diversity. The "vacant storefront" epidemic comprised about one empty facade out of every 10 or 15.

Its crime rate is almost Disneyesque, too, compared to us. Cleveland has 2.7 murders for every one in St. Paul. The rates of robbery, burglary and vehicle theft there are about half of what Cleveland's are. And I saw only a single panhandler in the entire time I was there -- a guy in a wheelchair with no legs.

To be sure, St. Paul has a lot of ugliness. But it's aesthetic ugliness -- bad 1950s architecture, bad urban design and bad subdivision regulation. There are neighborhoods where ghastly Brook Park-type ranch homes seem to be dropped randomly from the sky. Haphazard lot lines and setbacks, total lack of architectural consistency, garage-centered house designs and general heinous aesthetics dominate more than half of the city. (The other half is idyllic.)

But it's just kind of unsightly, not unsafe.

The city's mayor confided, as politely as he could, that he was taken aback by Cleveland's desolation and the nonstop stream of moochers and bums who descended on him like pigeons. He'd heard about all the cool stuff, he said -- the Rock Hall, the stadiums, the alleged revitalization. By the time his visit last year was done, he implied, he couldn't wait to get out of town and take a shower.

He was almost apologetic to me about his city's comparative health. With some self-consciousness, he acknowledged that his "bad" neighborhoods would be the envy of most major cities."There is no place in this city," he said without boasting, "that I'd be afraid to be in."Here, the converse is almost the rule.

***

I won't even get started on Minneapolis. Long story short: Forget Seattle and Portland. No city has a better balance of cosmopolitan hipness and real liveability than Minneapolis. It is the trendy, cool and urbane twin, compared to its sensible, blue-collar sibling.

Eleven months of winter probably have a lot to do with it, but the cities embrace the outdoors with an almost explosive exuberance. A chain of lakes, each the size of Lakewood or South Euclid, runs through Minneapolis, and beaches and multipurpose trails ring the lakes. On Saturday, thousands upon thousands of people were swarming there -- rollerbladers, cyclists, joggers and walkers.

Windsurfers and sailboaters were all over the lake (even though the winds were intimidatingly high that day). People were just everywhere.

Then I went in town away from those obvious people magnets. It was the same everywhere -- cyclists, skateboarders, joggers and rollerbladers of every size and color.

There were thousands of people on bikes everywhere I looked. The subset of bike commuters alone was bigger than the total of all cyclists in Greater Cleveland, I'm sure. And, for better or worse, the cities have bike lanes all over the place -- especially St. Paul.

"Our" Brooke Wins in Mpls

2008-06-13T23:01:00.012-04:00

MINNEAPOLIS - Reluctant semi-Clevelander Brooke Miller won the sprint in today's Minneapolis criterium stage at the Nature Valley Grand Prix, and you read it here first (unless you read it somewhere else before this).

I get to break the news to the folks back home in Cleveland 'cause I'm here in the Twin Cities on bidniss and I was there to watch it -- along with tens of thousands of other people. And Velonews doesn't seem to care about posting live results from domestic races until the intern comes in tomorrow morning to open the email from Neal Rogers (who, I think, used to be either an astronaut or the lead singer for Bad Company).

So I have the scoop. And this one, too: HealthNet-Maxxis put a completely dominating ass-whipping on the men's field to put sprint-points leader Kirk O'Bee first across the line in a close finish.

Both were great races to watch.

Brooke was obviously very stressed out beforehand, as you can see from this less-than-Rick-Adams-quality cell-phone shot:

Brooke told me once last winter that Nature Valley would be a high priority this year. (She probably does not remember that because she, like many other people I met, seems to have no recollection that we have met. And I often don't remember them, so we're even. But I do remember Brooke: We rode together briefly a couple times, and sat and talked over coffee at the Phoenix on Coventry for way over an hour at meeting for my real job. But today, she had no clue who I was when I yelled a pre-race hello and a post-race congrats. One of those out-of-context things, I guess. Or maybe she did remember, and didn't like what emerged from our meeting -- a small bit of work that nonetheless had an audience roughly 15 times larger than anything ever published in Velonews. )

Well, it was pretty clear to me (if not to the oblivious PA announcers) that Brooke was seriously gunning for the win. She wasted no time getting to the front, and just sat there -- 5th to 8th wheel -- while her Tibco teammates attacked off the front. One Tibco gal got a 5-second gap at one point and I told the bike-race newbies next to me what the announcers were ignoring: That Tibco was forcing the other teams to bring back attacks so Brooke could sit in. And sit in she did: Her SRM will show lots of short 0-rpm rests on the home stretch going into turn 1.

When it became clear no one would get away, the race played out exactly as I predicted: Brooke went into the last lap at 5th wheel and sprinted up the right side for the win, by a good margin (2 bike lengths?). Those novice fans looked at me like I predicted the winning lottery numbers -- as though I were the ghost of Jim McKay. Well, hey -- she set herself up perfectly to be there for the sprint, and I knew she would kill to win. Doesn't make me a genius.

The geniuses are on HealthNet. They sat on their asses for about 30 laps, leaving GC leader Ben Jaques-Maynes' Bissell team on the front to control the race and chase down every one of the many attacks (several of which were from a sloppy Rock Racing team). Then, with about 10 laps to go, HealthNet effortlessly moved to the front and set up the train, driving a pace far too brutal for any attacks. Bissell riders were scattered throughout the peloton by then, and it was academic that someone from HN was gonna win. Should've been obvious to me that it would be O'Bee, because he was in the orange sprint-points leader's jersey.

I was not at the finish for the men's because I thought there might be a good pileup in the last corner, so I was near the 200-meter mark to see the sprinters uncoil. Then I saw O'Bee's arms go up. But the PA announcers said he won by no more than a couple inches over Ivan Stevic.
By then it was twilight over the fabulous city of Minneapolis and its beautiful skyline. I walked past a bunch of despondent non-competitive teams -- Kelly Benefit Strategies and Rock among them -- wallowing in misery around their team cars.

Me? I was far from misery. I felt like I used to when I walked out of a big Tribe win at the Jake. Except I wasn't drunk this time.

- JN

Take Back the Tour, and Take My USAC License

2008-06-11T11:26:00.003-04:00

If I could afford digital cable, this would be particularly good news:

Tour de France advertisers are coming back to Versus--but not without some concern.
Gavin Harvey, president of sports cable network Versus, says many advertisers are returning from a year ago, including Hampton Hotels, Saab Motors, Anheuser-Busch and bike manufacturer Cervelo. Some new advertisers include Exxon and Nestle's Power Bar.
For the last several seasons, the Tour de France--the world's biggest bike race--has been hit with a series of drug scandals that have banished top riders from the event before and during the event.
"Our advertisers just wanted information," said Harvey, in talking about TV advertisers' reaction to the scandals. "We told them the ASO (Amaury Sports Organization, owner of the Tour de France) was doing everything necessary."
Versus isn't shying away from the drug controversy. It started up a new marketing campaign called "Take Back the Tour." In one spot, which shows slow-motion video of a long climber through a crowd of fans, the copy on the screen says plainly: "Screw the dopers, the politics, the critics. They ripped the soul out of this race. We're masochists, believers, and it's our time. Take Back the Tour."
Says Harvey: "We are reflecting the anger and passion of our viewers. It can be real good rallying cry."

For the full story, click here.

It's good to know that enthusiasm about bike racing remains strong somewhere, because it doesn't remain strong within me at the moment.
It's pretty clear that I don't have the time or the inclination to devote to the training I'd need to do to compete at my current level. There are so many distractions at the moment that it feels too good to get on a bike right now and just ride to escape the mounting stresses of real life. And with the short- and long-term future of my livelihood in peril, I don't have the money to blow on race fees.
The good news I got today -- my brother's chemo seems to have beaten back his cancer and gotten him back up to a 25-percent chance of survival -- was offset by gloom and paranoia at work and throughout my industry. Revenues keep plummeting, and one in every five of my co-workers will probably be out of work within a year. Those who survive will be working in what is shaping up to be a dismal work environment.
It's just not worth it -- right now anyway -- to suck the relaxation, the de-stressing and the joy out of riding my bike by turning every other ride into a protracted sufferfest. Yet that would be the only way to whip myself back into the shape to contend.
So I'm acknowledging what has become obvious: My racing season is pretty much over. I'll still do Westlake every couple-few weeks, and maybe a couple others. But all those races I'd written in red on the calendar for July and August are getting crossed off.
It's time to put some Zen back into riding.

- JN

The Tacky Way to Beat Ray

2008-06-02T16:59:00.011-04:00

Nobody is going to beat Mr. Huang, The Death Ray, at the state TT championship. His competition can, however, keep him from winning by trying this, uh, tack -- tested and proven in New Zealand this past weekend:

A popular bike race along Tamaki Drive has been sabotaged by push pins sprinkled along the route, forcing at least 15 riders out with punctures.

The first of seven races in the annual Auckland Secondary Schools time trials on Auckland's waterfront early on Sunday was marred when an apparently disgruntled resident spread the pins indiscriminately along the 16km out and back course from Teal Park in Mechanics Bay to St Heliers - just minutes after organisers had paid $300 to have any debris swept off the road.

One distraught rider was stunned as he pulled nine tacks out of a tyre. Racing tyres cost up to $150 each and inner tubes about $15. [WWHAAA?!?!? - ed.]

The time trials, first raced in the late 1980s, are held with support from the Auckland City Council. They are scheduled for a 6.45am start and finish before 8.30am.

Sunday's race, which attracted 104 teams - up from 40 10 years ago - was over by 8.15am despite the mayhem which left some teams one or more riders short at the finish.

Many of the country's best cyclists, including Olympic/world champion Sarah Ulmer have had their first taste of competitive racing at the event.

Among the field on Sunday was St Kentigern team captain Myron Simpson, who won silver in the testing four-event omnium at last year's World Junior Championships in Mexico. [Do NOT race in Mexico! See below! - ed.]

With riders reaching speeds of up to 50km/h, a blowout caused by such stupidity could lead to a serious accident as the riders, in teams of four or five, are bunched closely.

"It is mindless and I can't fathom why someone would want to do it," said St [An aside: The English language in New Zealand must be pregnant. It's missing a lot of periods. - ed.] Kentigern director of sport Martin Piaggi. "These kids ride up to 500km a week in training to ride the time trials. They don't go out on Saturday night as they prepare to get up at 5am on a Sunday to race. Then, someone does something like this. I can't fathom it at all. I can't believe someone would stoop to such levels to stop the almost 500 kids who want be involved in their sport rather than go out and cause problems."

Event manager Lara Collins, from ASB College Sport, was flabbergasted by what happened, especially as they had, for the first time, paid an outside contractor to sweep the road to ensure a smooth, and safe, surface.

"Luckily, we got through without a major accident.

"But what could have happened if one or more riders had crashed doesn't bear thinking about."

- JN

Look out for the ...

2008-06-02T16:08:00.005-04:00

JimmyNick takes out the frustrations of his crappy season on the rest of the Cat 4 peloton. The dopers are at left.

Actually, this picture is exactly what it looks like. Happened in Matamoros, Mexico (just across the border from Brownsville, Texas, for those of us with Catholic-school geographical skills) on Sunday morning. It seems driver Jesse Campos, 29, was high on coke. But that never caused any of my coke-abusing friends -- there were a lot of them many years ago -- to drive into a curb, let alone a field of bike racers. Something else is going on ...

By the way: I heard a Summit Freewheelers rider tried to attack the field just after the photo.

Lo siento. Solo un chiste, amigo.

- JN

Snider And The City

2008-05-28T11:01:00.013-04:00

I've noticed that Sex and the City's Sarah Jessica Parker ...

... and Twisted Sister's Dee Snider ...

... have never been seen at the same place at the same time. Coincidence? I think not.

Speaking of which: The Plain Dealer, embarrassingly, has still not led its sports section with a Sex in the City story. A1? Check. Arts & Life? Maybe half a dozen times. Style? Natch. Food? Yes'm.

Why the failure to cover this movie in the sports pages?

Fortunately, there is still time. There are three days left in this week. Serendipidously, the Chicago White Sox are here playing the Cleveland Indians. A "Sox and the City" feature, speculating on which of the girls would shag Tribe players and which would rather get Pale Hosed, is a natural.

- JN

The Oh in Mid-Ohio

2008-05-26T22:04:00.005-04:00

Long, long ago -- back in 2007 -- the Mid-Ohio Grand Prix was a heck of a race.
It's held on a wide, fast, sweeping sports-car/open-wheel race track with no 90-degree corners but lots of really fun S-turns that put a premium on apex-hitting. The 2.5-mile track is also quite windswept, adding another tough element to the long, gradual climb that is more than a false flat but not really a hill, per se. That makes it unlike any other race around.
For me, it was a solid top-10 finish in a solid Cat 4-5 field back in the day -- aught-sev'n. The field was respectable -- especially for an early-season race. Yes, the best 4s were racing in the 3-4 race. Still, there were a lot of up-and-coming racers from Columbus (many of whom are now Cat 3) and all the strong guys from Summit, Stark and Snake Bite. I was unattached, and just a 5. So I was pleased that I worked hard and finished 8th, I think.
Last year's other races drew fairly well, too, and yes, a good time was had by all.
All these years later (oh ... only one, plus two months), much has changed.
Some sort of civil war between race promoter Tym Tyler and the Ohio Cycling Association (USA Cycling's state affiliate) led to Tyler's races losing, or surrendering, USAC accreditation. That means no upgrade points from Tym's races, which naturally slashes the 4/5 and 3/4 fields. So the turnout for Tyler races has shrunk even below the mediocre level of the previous couple years. (It's a shame. I'm sure there are good reasons for hard feelings on all sides. But the dude works hard. Without him, there would be fewer than 10 races north of Greater Cincy each year.)
Turnout was thin again on Saturday. Maybe it was because Mid-Ohio is usually a March race that, this year, got snowed into May and onto a holiday weekend -- with starting times at 5:30 and 6:30 p.m., to boot. Maybe it was the purses: about $50 or $75, total, for the 1/2/3 and 3/4 races and nothing but merchandise for the 4/5, women and 5/citizens.
Whatever the reason, the turnout was disappointing for a day that was just about perfect for racing at a unique and exciting venue.
The promoter combined the 4/5, women's and 5/open fields, so the decent-sized pack of 25 or so at the start line was pretty deceptive: Most of them were unattached Cat 5s. One Stark racer, no one from Summit or Spin, and three of us from SBR against a bunch of Columbus racers and three strong women.
Given that, it wasn't surprising that the race quickly blew to smithereens. And it also would be unsurprising to anyone who has followed my regression this year that I was among the blow-ees.
This time, though, it wasn't for naught. Or at least that's the story I'm sticking to.
Teammate MattO jumped on the front and stomped on it from the outset, dragging everyone up the hill and then through the thick headwind leading into the backside. No one was letting him get away, so we were up in the 30- to 36-mph range quickly when we hit the down grade. When things came back together, I was going much faster than the folks ahead of me and found myself deciding between braking and rolling out of the slipstream to slow down in the wind. I elected not to brake and just pulled to the left, figuring the field would drift up and swallow me.
Instead, it was like everyone but me hit the brakes while I was flowing downhill: In a few heartbeats, I inadvertently had gotten a big-ass gap.
So I figured, maybe I can draw somebody out into a chase and wear out some of the competition for teammates Gary and MattO. Through the S turns, I cut the apexes perfectly and my gap was growing, and I still wasn't really trying to get away. Next thing I knew, I had 100 meters or so between me and the pack.
Yet my strategy wasn't working as planned: No one was chasing hard. So as I passed the S/F, I decided to just drill it and see what might happen. If they all kept parking it back there, I might have been able to put half a lap into them and then just settle in at LT for as long as possible. Who knows what would happen then?
Well, when I stood up and hammered, two things happened: One, some folks behind me decided to take my escape seriously; and two, I zoomed past LT and way over my redline on the way back up the crosswind-pounded hill. I looked back and saw people drilling it on the front, and my gap was shrinking as I was cresting the hill and heading into the headwind-swept chicane. And here came Gary, barrelling out of the pack, completely effortlessly.
We were 75 yards up, so I tried to make a 2-up break with him. That wasn't working. "I'm dying!" I shouted. By the time we came out of the chicane and entered the back stretch, things were coming back together, and I thought maybe I could catch my breath.
BANG! Gary attacked into the wind. (Two laps, three strong SBR attacks.) Two guys went with Gary, so Matt and I pulled up to the front, set a firm tempo and dragged things down just a bit through the back-side turns. But I was still out there in the wind, and had never recovered from my break. So I could stick on the front only for 3/4 lap before I had to drop back into the pack and gasp for awhile.
By then, there were only about five laps left in a race shortened by time constraints. The chase was spirited. I dropped halfway back in the pack only to discover that I had forgotten to open the eyes in the back of my head. Had I done so, I would have known that the "other half of the pack" behind me had actually been blown into pieces that were scattered all over the track by now.
Sheet. I wasn't halfway back. I was on the back. Then I was off the back. Then I was gone. There was no one behind me to help.
I tried drilling a hard TT pace to catch back on, on the back side. But I wasn't gaining at all. So I tried to convince myself that everyone else might blow up or flat out or get swallowed by a sinkhole and if only I kept going, I could still do fine. That lasted 2/3 of the way through the long, windblown grind toward the S/F, which is when I called it a race and started doing intervals. During recovery a couple intervals later, I got lapped by a field that had come back together.
I pulled over at the bell to watch the bunch sprint. Looked like Gary got caught behind a bad sprinter just long enough to get passed by the eventual winner, who outsprinted Gary by a wheel. Meanwhile, MattO was in the sprint of his life and came from behind to beat another guy by maybe -- maybe -- a foot. So we got 2nd and 3rd.
Was it fun? Yes, to a point. But was it a real race race? Naw -- a shadow of last year, which other guys said was a letdown compared to prior years. It was more like Westlake. With chintzier prizes. (For Gary: Luna bars! For Matt: chamois cream!)

- JN

The Essence of Commuting

2008-05-22T11:47:00.003-04:00

Here are just a few of the things that crossed my mind -- or, more precisely, my nose -- on my ride to work this morning:

(Dipping into Euclid Creek Parkway) Hmm ... somebody's roasting coffee.

(A bit farther down, where a guy was getting into his car at least 50 feet away from me) Ahh -- that new-car smell!

(On Dille:) Ugh! That's some serious antifreeze stink. That car is on its last leg.

(At Lakeshore:) Mmmm! Kentucky Fried Chicken!

(In Bratenahl:) Mmm-MM! Bacon!

(Developing theme there? You're right -- I didn't have breakfast. Had to fast for a cholesterol-test blood draw. - ed.)

(Slightly farther into Bratenahl:) Eew! Skunk somewhere!

For better or worse, these are some of the little things commuters in their cars miss.

- JN

The Weekly Worlds Report

2008-05-21T11:27:00.002-04:00

The Westlake Weekly Worlds turned out to be a very hard bit of fun last night -- much harder for some of us than others, it seems.

And it ended with some controversy and squawking that probably still has some guys rubbed raw this morning.

The race took on a new character when two strong Spin riders dropped down from the A race (involuntarily, it seems -- there reportedly was some consternation among other A riders over bike-handling skills). Meanwhile, our strongest B riders were elsewhere: Gary B. in the A field and Jason R. at work.

The downgraded Spin guys include an expert-class MTB racer who's not too familiar w/ road racing, and a strong young Cat 4 who is moving up and hoping to go pro someday soon. They joined another young Cat 5 rider who's been a regular in the Bs. They apparently thought they'd put the wood to SBR. They made the race faster than any B race I remember. But as for whupping up on the SBR guys? They miscalculated.

Two Spins broke on lap 2 and apparently thought they'd ride away from the rest of us for 28 miles, but I was right on their wheels. And they didn't know how to rotate. So that break lasted less than a lap.

To their credit, they kept attacking, and kept trying to set up a leadout train for the primes. To their fault, they kept attacking over the yellow line, blowing way too wide on turns and screwing up their leadouts by towing other sprinters. Our guys -- particularly MattO. -- had much merriment by abusing the Spin leadout and beating them on prime after prime. And I kept marking and bringing back solo attacks until my legs turned to Jell-O.

Every time I looked down at my computer, it showed us going 26-28 mph.

About 40 minutes into the race, as I was chasing down one such attack, I felt my front tire getting low. No sudden deflation, so I hoped to ride it to the end. But within a lap, it had leaked past the point of safe riding. So I bowed out.

At that point, my computer showed an average speed of 23.5 mph -- which included two warmup laps, one of which was about 16 mph. Even after I walked my bike 700 yards to the parking lot, the average was still around 21.4. I've been in B races where that was the pace for the whole race. Teammate Rick A. had the final average at something close to 25 -- I forget what, exactly.

Anyway, as to that the controversy: On one of the late laps -- maybe the last? (I was sitting at my car by then) -- another guy attacked after the turn onto Bassett and two SBRs -- John V. and Michael L. -- went with him. Then, as the A field passed, the break latched on to its draft. Now, 2/3 of the breakaway riders insist they did no such thing, and I know how they feel: I felt wrongly accused when this happened to me last year and I got DQ'd by a consensus of the field led by my own (new) teammates. A year later, I still feel like I got hosed. But mixing fields is mixing fields, and if it looks like a duck ... Bottom line: You either pass the As or drop behind them. Unfair, maybe, if the As don't hold a steady and brisk pace. But non-negotiable.

Likewise, crossing the yellow should be a non-negotiable infraction. It's understood that everyone sets up wide of the yellow for the 90-degree and sharper turns. But attacking over the yellow on the straights, or through the S turns, or even using the yellow to advance through the cop turn are all violations, and I saw Spin riders commit them at least three times. The double yellow is the equivalent of an imaginary barrier, and even if you get forced into crossing, it's the same as getting forced into a barrier: Your sprint is done. You cannot advance. If they're going to keep that up, it's time to start demanding some DQs, for their own protection and the peloton's. We do not need any head-on collisions w/ cars or pileups caused by guys cutting back into a sprint from the wrong side of a double yellow.

Utimately, after the mixed-field DQs, the race came down to a field sprint, which leads us to the final Spin miscalculation: MattO broke into their train -- again -- and took the sprint from them -- again, just as he'd done w/ primes all night. Rick A. took 2nd place. Mitch G. from Spin took 3rd.

'Twas a very spirited, hard and fun race. I expect it has a "To Be Continued" tag on it.

I Hope We're Not This Bad

2008-05-20T16:32:00.005-04:00

Congratulations to both the runners and organizers from the Cleveland Rite-Aid Marathon!

Not content to simply hold an irrationally long running race, these legsters also embarked on a novel and expressive interpretation of sport as art. During, or maybe before or after, Sunday's event, they installed at least 500 empty Gu and Hammer gel packets all up and down the lakefront portion of the route (and, we can project, along the rest of the route as well).

The colors add such vibrancy to the North Marginal, and the sheer durability of the non-biodegradable packaging ensures the permanence of this sprinkled-art installation.

In less-hip cities, where the populace isn't tuned in to such impromptu manifestations of street art, some minimum-wagers or volunteers might have been out there "cleaning up." Not here!

Way to go, fellow endurance athletes/artistes, and way to go, Cleveland! The Gund Foundation has a grant for just this kind of urban-creative exuberance!

- JN

What Was He Thinking? (You might be sorry you asked)

2008-05-19T23:15:00.002-04:00

Will Frischkorn provides some fascinatingly mundane insights into a pro racer's train of thought -- or lack thereof -- at Velonews today. Check it out!

The Finish Line?

2008-05-19T10:27:00.005-04:00

I felt winter's last breath this morning as I rode along the lake.

It was a beautiful, crisp day, with a stunningly blue sky accented with cumulus clouds -- about 49 degrees with a 20-mph wind out of the west/northwest that made me have to grind.

The calendar tells me summer's warmth is closing fast, and common sense and experience tell me this front will pass and southerly winds will soon envelop us in balmy weather.

But it's funny: That's not what I felt as I watched the brisk wind whip waves against the rocks.
Rather, the cool, clear day took me back to an early-October morning on the Gulf Islands National Seashore about 18 years ago.

We were on the way back to Little Rock on last day of a vacation at Seaside, Fla., the New Urbanism utopia that then was only in its toddler stage. Every day of the vacation was sweltering and still, until that final day -- those blindingly sunny but unmistakably autumnal hours on the cusp. We donned windbreakers and had a quiet and somewhat sad picnic overlooking the whitecaps and dolphins, to say goodbye to Florida, and summer.

There's a thick melancholy to that kind of sunny but pull-on-the-jacket-for-the-first-time transition, and the waterfront -- any waterfront -- seems to amplify it by about a thousand times.

It's bittersweet, and I've felt it many times in the years since that day on the Panhandle. There was a Labor Day on Put-in Bay when a good friend's barely-ex girlfriend held my hand and we both wondered whether we should hold on to something more, but didn't. There was a long, cool drive alone, along the windswept Lake Erie shore en route to some forgotten place in Michigan, listening to an early-season Buckeyes game as the first flashes of scarlet were appearing in the trees. There was a pleasantly dull afternoon on the deck at Shooter's, watching the big, noisy boats drift in along with an undercurrent of cool air and a forlornly encroaching buzz from eight or nine Bud Lights.

Often by Labor Day weekend, I'm tired of summer, tired of hot, tired of dusty and brown, tired of cracked clay soil and incursions of weeds. I'm ready for fall's color, which I've always loved. I'm usually happy to have had a good summer, and just as happy to have some change blowing in. Close that book and move on to the next one.

It's odd that I can't recall a single transitional day like that in the springtime, in my entire life. Some of those season's-end, summer-into-autumn days are so vivid in my memory that I still relive them in my dreams, over and over. Maybe it's because those first crisp and chilled days after the hot weather are summer's goodbye, and we feel goodbyes more intensely than hellos. Hello means we get to spend some time taking beauty and goodness for granted. Goodbye means we will soon miss it.

What does this have to do with biking? Well, it doesn't really have to have anything to do with it for me to write about it here. But in fact it does.

I was supposed to do a bit of hard work on the bike this morning -- a few sets of sprints on the way to work. But once again, I just couldn't get into that frame of mind. And there's a pattern emerging. I couldn't bring myself to do lactate-threshold intervals on Saturday's 51-miler. I catch myself getting gapped -- by only a couple bike lengths, maybe -- in the A race at Westlake and even though my body might be able to close that gap, my spirit just cannot summon the will to suffer enough to do it, and it's over. Hill repeats? Haven't done any since, what? April Fool's Day?

I read other blogs, like Ray's Racing Adventures and young Robert's, where riders/writers seem to have limitless discipline and enthusiasm, some of which I've often had. And it makes me wonder whether there isn't a parallel in my bike-racing life to those transitional days -- whether I'm watching the summer of my bike-racing era fade into the autumn of my next phase of cycling life.

Or maybe it's the cycle of cycling, where renewal and rejuvenation will soon flower and I'll be eager to go out and punish myself.

All I know right now is that I'll keep swinging my leg over the saddle and going fast. Will I need to try to beat someone else as I do that? Not sure. But if not, I won't look back over my shoulder with regrets or longing. I've never been one to do that. Life rolls on.

Non-Race Reports

2008-05-16T16:32:00.004-04:00

We're halfway through May, and this weekend was supposed to be the Chippewa Creek Road Race, one of the area's oldest and most revered races.

It's also one of the hardest. A lot of my buddies are very disappointed that poor road conditions led to its cancellation.

Me? I'm not really crying. Given my luck, had it gone ahead, I think my race report would've gone something like one of these:

Had a great time at the venerable Chippewa Creek RR on Sunday -- until I crashed out.
The first 27 meters after the start were fun and brisk (29 mph! So much for warming up in the race!). The snow and ice weren't even very bad, considering that this is Cleveland and it's only mid-May.

But somewhere around 28 or 29 meters in, somebody in a car approaching us in the oncoming lane started throwing handfuls of DVDs out the window. Wouldn't you just know that one of them found its way under my wheels? Ay chihuahua - down I went!

Funny I'd say that, because the Sharpie handwriting on the DVD said "Hot Sexy Young Chihuahuas." There was a sticker on it that mostly got scuffed off, but it looked like it said something like O'Malley and Recorder. Wonder what that means? Maybe has something to do with how the DVDs were duplicated?

The driver of that car looked really familiar -- sorta like that prosecutor I've seen on TV, Bill Mason -- but everything happened so fast that I can't really swear to anything. And it wouldn't make sense: Why would Bill Mason be tossing out DVDs labeled, "P.O.'s Pre-Teeners Pix"? He's not running for anything now, is he?

Anyhoo ... speaking of pix, here are the photos of this week's injuries ...

Or this:

Got out of the house late, shoved a banana and a granola bar in my pie hole, waited in the registration line for 30 minutes and did a thorough warmup from my car to the back end of the peloton just as the starting gun went off. I usually like warming up in the race, but I really had to pee!

Nonetheless, I did well compared to other races lately. I didn't flat, didn't wreck and didn't even get dropped until we hit the second set of rollers after the first turn -- probably almost half a mile or more into the race!

My teammates MattO and Gary were in a break with Summit's Russ Fogle and a Spin and a Stark, and they lapped me twice. But the second time wasn't until I was most of the way up the hill on Valley Parkway, almost an entire lap into the race. I think I pulled Matt and Gary for about 15 or 20 feet, so I felt like I did my part to help the team. But I totally blew.

Maybe I shouldn't have quit at the end of the first lap, but I was roached.

On the other hand, it beats the hell out of having my kid die in an earthquake!

- JN

Everything is relative

2008-05-15T22:03:00.002-04:00

Are you grievously bummed that you got dropped from the break at Westlake? Feeling depressed that you just couldn't hold your wattage on that last interval? Or are you angry, maybe, that your kid's dental bills are keeping you from getting the Zipp wheelset you wanted?
Well, here's a little perspective.

- JN

Bike Week: Hurrahhhhh...yawn.

2008-05-14T14:40:00.008-04:00

Are you enjoying Bike Week?

It is just SO different from every other week, isn't it? I can just feel the electricity in the air!

I hear that a few, or maybe even several, additional people are riding their bikes to work this week -- even a judge of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court! Handfuls enjoyed a bunch of "bike-related" movies at the Natural History Museum. Dorky, outcast hipsters played bike polo. And there may have even been a proclamation from the mayor of Cleveland, or something. Plus, all sorts of other regular bike activities that were happening anyway were declared to be "Bike Week Activities," including RATL #4 and a towpath night ride.

But the one event I really wanted to see apparently won't happen: a cage match between Andy Clarke and Fred Oswald!

Local racers know Andy Clarke to be an ass-kicking former Tennessean who rides for the RGF Solutions Cycling Team. He rose from Cat 5 to Cat 1 in less than two years and is sickening in many other ways, too -- a handsome, apparently prosperous businessman who is happy, interesting, and downright nice in addition to being a leg-breaker.

Unfortunately, this Andy Clarke, from Medina, is not the one who is speaking here. (Too bad: the RGF version has some cool stories about riding the Tour of Flanders last month.)

No, the Andy Clarke who's speaking is the head of the League of American Cyclists.

Our own Fred Oswald is an engineer from Berea or Brook Park or some other such badlands who also is an excessively cantankerous, abrasive cycling activist and know-it-all.

Clarke -- the one from LAB, not RGF -- is a big advocate of spending gajillions of taxpayer dollars on bike infrastructure -- dedicated bike lanes, dedicated bike paths, dedicated bike tunnels, dedicated bike toilets, dedicated bike spacecraft and such -- while our schools crumble, crime ravages our country and people starve. If he has his way, the prosperous middle class can ride along unswept pavement deluded by the abject illusion that they have been made safe, while sharing space with jog-stroller moms, poodle-on-a-reel dog-walkers and drivers who make right turns across said passageways without a second look. And anyone who rides anywhere that does NOT have a bike lane will get hit in the head with bottles hurled by tattooed women leaning from the passenger window of pickup trucks yelling "Git outta th' road! Use th' bike path!"

More rationally, Clarke also favors concerted public-education campaigns aimed at teaching motorists and cyclists how to coexist safely and with mutual respect.

Oswald is under the "vehicular-cycling" spell of John Forester, who hates bike infrastructure and really, really hates Andy Clarke. (Wanna see geek vitriol in full flower? Follow that link.) Oswald and Forester call bike paths and bike lanes "bike ghettoes" and they pretty much think the sole raison d'etre of motorists is to kiss cyclists' asses. There's a lot of truth in their condemnation of bike infrastructure, of course, but then, Dennis Kucinich makes a good point now and then, too. That doesn't make him any less ridiculous.

Oswald periodically appoints himself the spokesman for all Ohio cyclists, most of whom loathe everything he stands for. ClevelandBikes and other groups that reluctantly acknowledge him as a member kinda roll their eyes and dismissively say, "Well, that's Fred being Fred ... heh heh."

But it's no fun for Fred to just be Fred -- the pariah/messiah and self-appointed "expert" in Cleveland and Ohio. He seems to slip from time to time toward becoming the William "D-Fens" Foster of the so-called "cycling community."

He, Forester and all their ardent sympathizers (about four in toto) are trying to hijack -- er, reclaim -- the League of American Bicyclists by fielding an insurrectionist slate of other militant bike-junta strongmen to take over the LAB board this year.

Now, if these guys really want to take control of a near-laughingstock organization almost completely bereft of any influence and power, I'll be happy to ask them to run for office on my bike club. The LAB is one of those organizations that calls for a sunrise, then claims credit in the morning. Yet Fred and John are wasting enough energy spreading contempt for Clarke that, if it could be harnessed, it could power a recumbent around the globe two times.

Clarke seems to regard them with the same respect and attention that Dick Cheney bestows on anti-war activists. That pisses off the insurrectionists even more.

We should've gotten Vince McMahon to promote the Ultimate Resolution -- right here in Cleveland, right now during Bike Week!

Picture it: First, the two prophets take turns with a bullhorn to proclaim their gospel to the throngs of bloodthirsty spectators on Public Square, and denounce the opponent as someone who rides without a helmet.

Then, the drama unfolds. The blinding light from a high-noon sun glints off their helmet-mounted mirrors as the two warriors face off on Euclid Avenue, hemmed in by a cage of mobile bike racks. Wearing their neon-orange dorkvests, they clutch the bell- and horn-adorned moustache bars of their fender-and-pannier-equipped commuter bikes in sweaty palms.

Then, as a heavily tattooed, limping (but nonetheless kinda hot) bike messenger drops a hanky from cigarette-stained fingers, the two "men" charge toward one another with such fury that their Nexus hubs trail a smoke cloud from burning grease. Hurling expletives ("Three feet, asshole! It's the law!"), they madly swing messenger bags (covered with anti-car bumper stickers) at each other in pass after pass until one of them gets knocked to the ground, or quits.

For entertainment value, this would beat the shit out of a bike-polo expo at the West Side Market.

Then again, this could be even more death-defying, gory and violent!

***

Page Two:

Hats off to the officer from Cleveland's Finest who pulled Car #512 up behind me this morning while I rode through Rockefeller Park along MLK. She flipped on her lights, bleeped her siren and then sidled up alongside to scold me: "The bike path is for you!" she said (somewhat politely, I readily concede).

"Thanks, ma'am," I replied, "but so is this road."

I think she expected me to cower and comply, and when I didn't, she just drove on.

Back In the Saddle Again

2008-05-12T16:06:00.009-04:00

Page One:
It would suck to get caught in the middle or the back of this bunch in Sicily, wouldn't it? Just think: You're in that Giro d'Italia pack today, with rain falling, while the peloton is cutting around corners at 30-35 mph in pursuit of a break with 12 miles to go. Think that might have gotten hairy? Ask all of the wounded. Bad day to be an Aussie from CSC, that's for sure.

And to think there was a lot of trepidation over the narrow, shoulder-less roads at the Bull Run Farms RR.

***

Page Two:

Speaking of which: I got back on the bike in earnest today for the first time since biting it at that bloody downstate race eight days ago. (Caveat: I did in fact ride a few miles, total, over the previous three days, towing my kid on the tagalong, to and from school and the hardware store. But those were short and very slow.)

Today I rode for an hour in the morning, wending my way from Cleveland Heights to downtown via South Euclid; and then about 30 minutes home in the afternoon. Total: About 24 miles, mostly in Zone 1-2, with some Z3 periods -- but generally quite easy.

Two observations:

1) I'm happily pain-free with only this not-insignificant exception: Hard cranking, or the jarring from riding over busted pavement, hurts my left foot and ankle. That foot was unscathed in the wreck, but is now black and blue, because the giant hematoma on my shin bled and the blood drained downward, leaving me with a swollen, sore and occasionally numb foot. I did not use enough RICE over the last week, that's for sure.

2) I was just starting to round into something close to decent shape a couple weeks ago, then had a regrettably short, light training week leading up to the wreck, and virtually nothing since. Today confirmed the predictable: I'm in shitty shape -- again.

So Westlake looks doubtful at best, and certainly futile, for tomorrow.

But hey -- I'm back in the saddle again! Whoopie-ti-yi-yo.

- JN

My Wife: The Cervelo SLC-SL of Mothers

2008-05-11T21:39:00.006-04:00

Mother's Day is just about wrapped up, and it hasn't passed without me being thankful. As a son, and as a husband/dad, I got more than my fair share of good luck.
I'm not going to go into some John Denver thing here, gooshing all kinds of mushy Hallmark pap. It's not that I'm not a sentimental guy; it's just that this is mainly a biking blog. I have to ride at close tolerances with people who might "swerve to miss a hole" and "accidentally" take out my front wheel if I write that kind of pabulum.
Nonetheless, I reflected on something as I spent a weekend on the DL, a week removed from the wreck I've documented in the last few posts, and a year and a day removed from the first of two crashes last year that inflicted a good deal of pain.
Here's the thing: After each wipeout, acquaintances and even family members surveyed the damage, looked at me stupidly and asked, "Why do you do this?" Yet my wife ever asked that question. How lucky am I?
She has never once suggested that I'm foolish for getting back on the bike after doing the equivalent of jumping out of a car traveling 25 mph. She has never looked at a bill from the physical therapist or whatever and yelled, "We cannot afford your stupid self-indulgence!" She hasn't even rolled her eyes in a condescending way and said with a patronizing smile, "I just don't understand why you do it, honey."
My wife has never once even implied that she wishes I'd quit racing. On the contrary, she encourages me to do it even when I feel like other responsibilities or needs ought to pre-empt that day's, or that night's, race.
She has seen me near tears as I peel off bloody bandages, or hobble around the house on purple legs, or grimace and groan through another painful half-hour physical-therapy session aimed at loosening up a shoulder so internally ravaged that I couldn't remove a T-shirt without her help.
For a lot of people, including some of my relatives, seeing me after a wreck would be outright aversion therapy. Those people may never get on a bike again after seeing what they think it did to me.
But my wife? Not only is she not cowed by my misfortune, but she is actually biking more often lately than she has in years. She'll ride to her exercise class Monday morning. She turned to me this morning as she read a newspaper feature about the Great Allegheny Passage -- a bike path from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. -- and suggested we do it with the kids in a couple years. She's come to two or three races a year for the last couple years, including one of the races I wrecked in, and is eager to bring our girls to watch some more.
Maybe that's because she has seen what my bike has really done to me. It has made me a better person. With her help.
We cyclists ask a lot of our spouses, and mine is happy (most of the time) to give the support I need. That's a lot to be grateful for.
Happy Mother's Day, Jen!

(She doesn't read this blog, so if you see her, tell her about this post. It could score me some more brownie points.)

- JN

Boo-Boos

2008-05-07T22:19:00.008-04:00

I'm getting kind of used to this crashing stuff. But it's not easy to get used to the bruises -- because they change by the day, almost by the hour.

I wrecked Sunday, in the 2nd turn of the Bull Run Farms Road Race -- thanks to an orange cone that someone left inside the yellow lines just past the apex of our 25-mph turn.

Here's where things stand this evening. They look a lot different than this morning.

This first one was the reason for the ER trip. That shin bump was shaped like a little Great Smoky Mountain. But gravity has pushed most of the blood from that swelling down to my ankle. There's a white stripe in the purple, from the top of my shoe.

Now, here's one that was hardly even noticeable in the hours post-wreck. Evidently, it's where I bashed my inner right thigh on the saddle. Didn't hurt much, and it was mostly just a scrape -- in the yellowish area I'm pointing to. But it must've kept on bleeding internally. Now all that blood has pooled on the bottom of my thigh. Who knows where it'll be tomorrow. China?

Finally, the elbow boo-boo. It's starting to hurt now because it's scabbing over. Should have bought the Johnson & Johnson Advanced Care/Advanced Healing pads:

But hey, I've got two family members in the hospital and another friend whose cancer just reappeared. His doc told him to "get your affairs in order." So I'm not complaining. As just about anyone who races knows, the fun isn't free, and these are part of the price, right? With luck, I'll be at Westlake on Tuesday. I can't have my teammates all doing so well without me there to help, right?

Ride on!

Crash Vics OK

2008-05-06T10:58:00.003-04:00

Good news for the (other) folks injured in the Bull Run Farms Road Race: They, too, are recuperating at home. I'm recuperating at work today -- in shorts, with ice packs on both legs. But I could be back on the bike by the weekend.

Evil Doc Plays God with Dogs!

2008-05-05T17:57:00.007-04:00

Remember those sci-fi movies, where some evil scientist makes an evil twin/clone from someone/something else?

They are not fi. They may be sci, but they're not fiction.

How do I know?

Because I have found an evil scientist who has copied my dog. I just saw more proof.

Proof?

My Molly:

Good girl.

NOT my Molly:

Grr! Bad dog!

The latter is a copy -- a cloned dog. More proof? The bottom dog's owner is a DOCTOR -- a MAD SCIENTIST!

And hers is an Uber-dog: It runs five miles!

Suspicious? I am.

- JN

SMACK! Down!

2008-05-05T11:35:00.008-04:00

I keep telling myself that tomorrow I quit mainlining black-tar heroin. Well, tomorrow is going to have to wait a few more days.

I skipped RATL on Saturday because rain was pouring on my drive down to Munroe Falls and racing a crit, with forty-five 90-degree turns, looked way too dicey.

I elected instead to wait a day and do Sunday's nice, safe Bull Run Farms Road Race -- four "mostly flat" laps around an 11.2-mile loop half an hour north of Cincy, on desert-dry roads under a brilliant, beautiful sun.

Therein lies the irony: One minute and 31 seconds into the safe and sunny race, I was scraping myself off the pavement. Again.

The whole day on Sunday got off to a stressful start when my teammate/driver Gary and I realized when we got to Matt O's neighborhood (15 minutes late) to pick him up that neither of us knew where he lives and neither of us had him in our phone's address book. We eventually solved that by waking Rick, our non-racing teammate, way too early in the morning.

When we finally arrived at the race, , we were about 40 minutes from the scheduled start. It looked like we'd pulled in to Buckeye Lake. Cars filled a big farm field, and hundreds of racers were there. This would wind up being one of the biggest races I've been in -- even the women's field had to have close to 30 entrants, instead of the usual 10-12.

We changed, grabbed bikes and got into the registration line, where a girl was typing entrants' registration data into a laptop, and we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, after about 10 minutes, there was a great jolt of progress: We moved up one place in line! There were about 15 riders ahead of us. And half an hour til the start. And the P/1/2/3 field was already closed out. Word was that the 3s and 4s were close to full.

The start got delayed by 30 minutes to accomodate the throngs, so even though we got no warmup, that part of the story had a happy ending. And our race had a happy beginning. For the first 10 or 11 seconds, anyway.

After that, it became evident that this simple four-corner circuit would wind up being very technical and congested. The 12-foot-wide lane had no shoulder on the right, but it did have a lot of busted-up pavement there. On the left was double yellow, and the ref emphasized that the yellow-line rule would be strictly enforced. So our field of 55 or 60 riders was squeezing through an 8-foot-wide funnel from the get-go. That's an interesting dynamic for a race featuring some of the biggest purses of the year so far ($750 for the Cat 4s, about $2,000 each for the 1/2/3 and 3s).

After half a mile of sketchiness, we hit the first turn, 90 degrees to the right, and the hammering started. Immediately, we hit 28-30 mph and stayed there. We SBR guys were near the front, so there wasn't much braking when we hit the 2nd right-hand 90. That's when I saw a flash of discombobulation ahead of me and heard Gary shout a warning.

Now, you might know by now that those dreams that seem to go on for hours actually last only a few seconds. The human brain can process so much more information instantaneously than we realize or can react to.

That's sort of what happened here. I was 4 feet off Gary's wheel and was standing to sprint out of the turn when I heard him shout: "CONE!"

This is not why:

It probably took 1/10th of a second for my brain to figure out what he said and another 10th of a second to figure out what that meant as he swerved. In all, I had about as much time to react as a major-league hitter has to size up a fastball and swing. I swung and missed.

But I didn't miss the cone. It appeared in front of me in a flash when Gary swerved to avoid it. I tried to swerve to its left. But I just clipped the edge of its base.

That was enough. I went airborne.

Again, the microflash seemed to last a minute. I rolled to a seated position and defenselessly looked over my shoulder at the bikes splitting around me, hoping no one hit me. They didn't.

I stood up, cussing, just as my tire popped with a gunshot crack. More cussing. Someone apologized, saying she warned the sheriff's deputy not to put the cone there and that it was on our side of the line and all that. But it was over.

I caught a ride back to the start-finish, where I bitched about the cone placement and asked for a refund. But the purse holders just shrugged helplessly.

Turns out I was the first and by far the most fortunate wreck of the day. As the 1/2/3 field approached the same corner I wrecked on in that race's 2nd lap, two guys bumped and one went left of the yellow line. He got hit by a car and was hauled away in an ambulance. The 1/2/3 field, the 3s and the 4s were all stopped because of the closed road, but the 5s and women were still racing far behind, on their first lap. That's when a woman racer crashed and needed an anbulance.

After 30 minutes or so of everyone standing around, the promoter cancelled the race. I got my refund after all.

My elbow was bleeding and my legs were banged up and my left shin was really swollen. I cleaned up my road rash, got some ice for my leg and lay around while my teammates got a ride in.

Then, on the really long car ride home, it kind of stiffened and swelled. As long as I was sitting still, it was OK. But then when we got back to Matt's house and I got out of the car, the motion of lifting my leg out of the car made me think for a second that I might black out from the pain. Same thing when I got back in the car. Repeat at Gary's.

The leg had a sharply angular bulge in the front. That, coupled with the pain, was getting me a bit paranoid. So as I drove up Carnegie, I decided to stop at the ER at University Hospitals.

The ER doc thought it looked broken and ordered X-rays. I couldn't sit down because the pain was too intense every time I sat down or stood up again. (Wah wah!)

Then I got some non-narcotic anti-pain/inflammatory injection and a tetanus shot. It took about 15 min. for the pain shot to kick in. After that, it was fine.I lucked out: I was in and out in less than two hours.

I took today off work (wah wah!) 'cause the doc told me to stay off my feet as much as possible and keep it iced and elevated.

Now the road rash on my hip and inner thigh (saddle rash?) is probably more annoying than the giant shin contusion. But it's all definitely bearable.

No riding for 5-7 days -- or more if it still hurts, he said.

The bike is a little f--ed up -- tape destroyed, scraped-up shift/brake lever (now matches the left one) and the front wheel was knocked out of true. But nothing major there, either.

And I really lucked out: I always, always race w/ gloves on, just in case I wreck. Digging asphalt, sand and gravel out of your knuckles and palms really sucks. I forgot to pack gloves yesterday. But my hands never hit the pavement.

In all, I am fortunate, especially compared to the two folks whom the meat wagon hauled away. And for the first time in my life, I can put a tape measure around my calf and it measures as big around as one of Dave Steiner's.

I just hope ibuprofen tabs do as well as that shot I got. I'm all out of black tar and Oxycontin, and the doc says I have to stay off my feet. Can't score more. Oh, well. All my veins are collapsing anyway.

- JN

Was the Table Topless?

2008-04-29T10:53:00.005-04:00

If this dude had done this with a Pinarello Prince, I could almost understand it ...

BELLEVUE, OH -- A man in central Ohio is accused of having sex with his picnic table.
The investigation began when a tipster gave police three DVDs showing Arthur Price having sexual intercourse with a metal round table on his deck.
The incidents occurred between January and March 2008.
Police say the DVDs show Price involved in a sex act in his bedroom. He walks out to his deck, tilts the table on its side and has sex with it.
Police say Price lives near an elementary school.
Price admitted that he had sex with the picnic table when police questioned him.
He confirmed to police the incidents caught on the DVDs and said he had also had sex with the table inside the home.
Price faces four counts of public indecency. He is free on a $20,000 bond.

My guess is that he either lives with his parents, or he's been married awhile.

- JN

RATL #2: Some Positives!

2008-04-26T15:38:00.004-04:00

I believe in starting off with a cliche, so: What a difference a week makes.
We got our butts kicked in the first Races at the Lake as a team. Individually, I got annihilated -- dropped maybe four-five laps in. And we had three others dropped and one crashed. Two finished in the field.
Today's race was a huge improvementfor me, and arguably for SBR. It still wasn't a good race, which underscores how bad last week's was. And the bottom line was that we missed the break and didn't bring it back. So not only did we never put Pete in a position to win, but we wore him out by making him do way too much chasing.
But we raced much better. And I felt like a different guy: Hung in throughout.
We didn't control the race -- that wasn't our objective -- but we kept a handle on it. We won both primes, and Matt O. finished fourth, winning the field sprint. Some big-engine triathlete for Summit won by 75 yards, maybe, followed by a Spin rider and Russ Fogle from Summit. Matt was maybe 20 feet behind them.
I felt much, much better and was recovering well after the hills. Coulda been the longer warmup, coulda been some fitness gains after working hard this week.
But I still have only one move in me, tops. I used it on the 2nd-to-last lap. It was a mistake.
I sat in until then, waiting for the break up front to come back. It had a Stark, a Spin and a Summit in it, and I figured it would fall apart like all but one break did last week. Stayed away for a lap, then two. By the third lap away, there were only three to go, and I knew Pete was getting used up and had to be getting frustrated.
Obviously, what should've happened is that SBR pacelines up and chases it down. But we were all scattered. As we came up on the bridge, Matt and I got in contact and we drove hard up the hill to try to pull Pete up. But Pete didn't latch on, probably 'cause we didn't let him know we were coming. When we passed him and he didn't get my wheel, I slowed for Pete and Matt kept blasting away. I launched after him again, but within 100 more yards, I totally blew up along the left edge of the road and everyone passed me by the time we hit the parking lot. Then I looked back and saw Gary, also blown. I dropped back to try to give one last effort, to pull him up. That failed within about 10 turns of the cranks -- I waved him on.
I was 20 seconds down on the field as I pushed toward the S/F line, and it was the bell lap -- no prayer. So I pulled off to watch the finish.
Lots learned today.

That's Some Rollin'

2008-04-24T13:28:00.003-04:00

I just caught up on a wee bit of coverage of the Tour de Georgia, which I keep forgetting about because it is kind of ... forgettable. (Sorry, JC!) I'm not even that big of a pro-racing fan -- just enough to know that the continental teams all sent their "B" or "C" squads to Georgia.

That's not to say, though, that the Georgia race hasn't had its surprises. Take Stage 1, for instance. Boring and very, very flat, the (many) critics have complained. Maybe so -- and maybe that doesn't make for the most dramatic racing. But it makes for a very fast stage -- and the need for speed is, after all, the reason we roadies quit sitting upright on fat-tire bikes.

And if you like speed, look at the average pace for that stage: 28.7 mph!

That, man, is a wicked-fast pace. The top local riders might (might!) sustain for a dozen or two miles at even-flatter Westlake, on a good day, and TdG's stage one was almost triple that length!

- JN

Mo Respek

2008-04-23T16:37:00.006-04:00

Since today's earlier post: Trust But Verify has updated its website -- and mine.

Regarding the latter, TBV insists its dad can't beat up mine. I find that pretty hard to believe, because (a) my dad died in 1994 and hardly has any fight left in him; and (b) TBV's dad has allegedly done stints in prisons in California and Pennsylvania for a string of offenses that included pedagogy -- with young students!! (You think that's sick? He supposedly committed nepotism with his own relatives!)

Or so I'm told ...

Regarding the former: TBV alerted me and literally several other readers that full results for the Cohutta 100-mile MTB race are now available. Local boy Shawn Adams of Lake Effect did finish 8th at Cuhotta, but Ross Clark (Solon Cycles) slightly overestimated his place in the field. I trusted but did not verify his estimate on Solon Cycles' website that he finished in the Top 25. He actually finished 29th out of 130 -- 5 min., 9 sec. behind Floyd Landis. Pretty damn impressive by any standard. In between was local legend Ernie Marenchen at No. 11.

- JN
... You say Cohutta, I say Cuhotta. Let's call the whole thing off.

Respek!

2008-04-23T12:04:00.003-04:00

Eventually I'll post again. Right now I'm too busy, and everyone who reads this blog can see that it is obviously low on the priority list.
But Monday's roundup on the Trust But Verify blog (which can have one hand tied behind its back and still draw more readers than this one, and is probably written by guys whose dads could beat up my dad) called my attention to the fact that at least two local guys did pretty well in last weekend's Cohutta 100 race.
(Fellow roadies: That's a mountain-bike race in a place called Tennessee. And it's really hard, I guess. And no one but a small cadre of MTB riders gives a shit most of the time, except that this year, Floyd Landis entered. That apparently caused a shitstorm of controversy, which makes the race something like a ProTour race. But because Floyd was there, folks like me who have never heard of Cohutta or Tennessee now know that the race is 100 miles of serious ball-busting pain with -- supposedly -- a 2-mile climb near the end at 20%. That is so fucking epic that anyone who finishes is a badass worthy of serious respek.)
I haven't looked up official results, but I believe everything I read, and I read on TBV that Shawn Adams of Lake Effect took 8th. TBV didn't restecp the other local guy enough to name him. But it (grammar quickie: blog = singular = it, not "they") linked to the Solon Cycles blog, which implies the mystery man is named Ross Clark.
Booyakashan!

- JN

The Power to Win at Roubaix

2008-04-17T22:24:00.009-04:00

You folks who have the money to train with power -- that is, y'all who don't have kids in or headed to parochial school -- will find this fascinating: Saris posted Martijn Maaskant's Paris-Roubaix power profile (or whatever the hell you technogeeks call it).

Lots of cool charts that look like an EEG from a pedophile at Chuck E. Cheese, in Technicolor. Wild swings that probably tell a deep and meaningful story to the fortunates who speak and read the language of Training Peaks.

Coincidentally, I stole an SRM and installed it on the very same day Maaskant won. By an even more remarkable coincidence, our output numbers were almost identical, except for one detail. You might notice it, but I'd argue it is largely insignificant to anyone but the most anal math major.

Max watts:
HIM: 1,292 ME: 129.2
Average Watts:
HIM: 272 ME: 27.2
Distance covered:
HIM: 256.4 km ME: 25.64 km

You find the coincidences striking? Well, check this one out: Time in saddle was exactly the same for both of us: 6:05:46! Freaks me OUT!

Finally, I'm posting my power chart here.

Well, after a few days of recovery, I might be good for another 15 miles. As long as it's downhill.

- JN

The Uber-Secret Race Strategy

2008-04-17T12:10:00.007-04:00

.

Attn. Cat 4 teammates:

As you know, our racing season begins in earnest this weekend with the opening of the Races at the Lakes series. Many of us are relatively new to racing, and almost all of us are new to team strategy and tactics.

So the first thing we must emphasize is that this discussion of our SBR team tactics and strategy at RATL is top-secret. If our classified and proprietary plan for this race should fall into the hands of a rider from Spin, Stark Velo or Summit/Rainbow Inks, we might as well be riding beach cruisers in this race, because they will blow our plans to smithereens.

So remember the oath you swore at your secret initiation ceremony: If you are caught carrying a laptop computer -- or even a desktop -- that contains this communication, it is your duty as a teammate to eat it.

Having said that, here is the plan for Saturday's Cat 4 race:

where v = Vilevec and x = Burkholder.

As you can see, it is brilliant, if properly executed. Study it. Be prepared to practice it during warmups -- well out of sight of our rivals.

Any questions? Ask Rick. I was a communications major.

- JN

One Key to Better Riding

2008-04-16T21:24:00.004-04:00

It might be an old, mysterious scent that sends you hurtling backward in time, or maybe an almost-forgotten song on the radio from some magical moment in life long ago -- a sensory cue that's ethereal, but profound. Comes in a flash and maybe disappears just as quickly, leaving behind only wisps of sentiment and memory.

I had one of those moments today, brought to me by the feeling of the wind through my hair on a sunny spring day. The sun and that whoosh sent me hurtling back ...

Of course, I'm talking about the hair on my legs -- I don't have much on my head. And I didn't travel very far back in time. Just a couple years back, when I first started shaving my legs for bike racing. And I didn't ponder with any profundity.

So if you thought this was going to be a thoughtful, heartfelt post,

Welcome! you must be new here! and
I'm sorry to disappoint you.

I'm just saying it's time to shave my legs again. No, I'm not going to post about the process either, or tell you about my new carbon-fiber razor with plenty of lateral stiffness but lots of vertical compliance. You don't really need to read about that, or the bloody nicks, do you?

If I will say, though, that it was mighty nice being out there in shorts, without even knee warmers, for only the third time this year. The warm weather almost made up for my retardedness. Or retardation.

I left the office after the lunch hour to make The Drop (covert delivery of performance-enhancing substance* to a teammate who I'll identify only by initials, which are Tim Fortner). Then I swung down to the Canal Corridor Reservation for some easy recovery spinning after some more moderate to hard and hilly miles the night before.

It was 64 degrees when I got to the lot, with a mild but fairly stiff southerly wind. I was glad to have a lightweight but long-sleeve jersey, but I didn't think I'd need the knee warmers. I stuck them in a back pocket and removed the toe warmers from my cycling shoes. Pretty darn comfy.

I stuck my tube/CO2 in one pocket. Then I stuffed a Ziploc with the other essentials: wallet, house key and cell phone, and put that in another pocket. Everything else I stuffed into my duffel bag; I locked up the car and put the bag in the trunk.

The headwind made for a little more effort than I was up for as I headed south on the paved towpath to Rockside, then on the crushed limestone into Valley View, where I then moved over onto Canal Rd. The plan was to ride 5-6 miles, then turn around and ride back.

But I got a little distracted by a Road Not Taken, there at the Valley View Safety Center. So I took it.

That's where the gentle recovery ride stopped being one. I found myself facing about a 10-12% wall -- not terribly long, it appeared, but plenty steep. A police cruiser crept up alongside me and the two cops smirked, like they were ready to bust out laughing, before they pulled away up the hill. So I cranked it up, of course. I'm not sure if they were impressed when I crested the hill behind them, or if they could even still see me. But I saw them again later and they weren't heckling.

Then I found a lovely little city park with the best softball diamonds and the stupidest-looking dogs on leashes that I've ever seen. Next thing I know, I was five miles past my 5-mile turnaround point. So I turned around and zoomed back down the hill (peaking at 46 mph) and turned north -- seemingly flying with that robust tailwind!

In no time I was back at the car. At this point, you are unwittingly taking my own Awareness Test. No, there's no one in a bear suit dancing in my post. But if you backtrack about five paragraphs, you should be able to figure out why I stood at the back of my car, looking as dumb as the dipshit in the bear suit, except that I was a lot more conspicuous. House keys don't open cars.

So I called my wife, who said she'd gladly bring my key to me at the office. More of an excuse to ride the tailwind. I jumped back on the bike and headed north. Even caught the draft of a truck all the way up E. 49th St. and along Broadway, cruising effortlessly at 30-35 mph. I covered the six miles in less than 15 minutes. And an hour later, Jen and the kids showed up to rescue me. She didn't even make me ride into the headwind -- gave me a ride all the way to the car!

My 10-mile recovery ride turned into 22 miles. But it cleared my mind and helped me blow through the rest of the day's project. When I finished it, I was most pleased: I stood there admiring my work product like Barry Bonds admires his homers.

And I still have enough energy to shave my legs.

- JN

* = SportLegs -- our sponsor!

I Only Read Cycle Sport -- I Swear!

2008-04-15T11:27:00.008-04:00

I have to admit to a guilty pleasure -- but please, don't leak it to the peloton:

I still look forward to getting Bicycling magazine each month.

I hate myself for this, but it's almost like I can't control myself.

The anticipation sort of builds slowly over a couple weeks. I'll know that it has been only two weeks, maybe, since I last spent a full 30 to 45 minutes reading everything readable in the previous edition. But I catch myself turning into the dining room where Jen leaves the mail that I'm supposed to see, to look for the next slim, sugar-coated and vacuous velo-volume from the consumer-oriented minds at Rodale. Each day, there's that little bit of disappointment, knowing that I'll have to take a bath without reading new climbing tips that are almost exactly the same as the climbing tips from a few issues back.

Subscribe today for only 17 frequent-flyer miles or 3 Gu proofs of purchase!

This disappointment is a bit more pronounced right now, because my subscription lapsed. Apparently, there wasn't enough change in the couch cushions when the seventh "This is your Final Edition!!!" bill arrived. If I'd been paying attention, I would've re-upped before it lapsed. It's not like that's hard: You can get a free one-year subscription for buying a bottle of Gatorade or something. At most, I could've raised the money by bringing a week's worth of aluminum cans in to a scrap-metal center to scrape together the $1.49, or whatever a year of Bicycling costs.

The magazine is on my mind because I dropped in on Bill Strickland's post on Bicycling mag's blog, Sitting In, today. Bill is executive editor at Bicycling, which is unfortunate for all of us. It's unfortunate because Bill is a very good writer and an exceptional -- almost unrivaled -- cycling writer. Blogging is to magazine writing what spray-painting the fence is to art. Yet even in his blog, Strickland turns great phrases. He writes like a great racer rides -- with a rare combination of grace, finesse and flat-out power. (One subtle example: The fourth paragraph from the bottom of his last post, which scrapes the illusions of glamor off the pro-racing life without being caustic and cynical.)

Unfortunately, Strickland's job isn't to write for Bicycling. His job, I'm sure, is to steer meetings involving beaten-down people who made the mistake of turning something they once loved into something they now have to squeeze for money. These are meetings at which people drum their fingers, look at each other blankly, and wince as they reluctantly throw out cover-story ideas such as "Get Faster -- NOW!"; "Rock-Hard Abs!" "The Best Bike You Could Never Buy," etc. Those are the ideas that emerge; can you imagine the ones that get shot down?

And Strickland, God bless him, probably also is tasked with flogging the unreadably self-congratulatory dead horse that is the "Bike Town" bullshit into something slightly readable. (What's next, by the way? Bike Town goes to the Moon?) And he has to make sure that every major advertiser has a positive review slotted at some point in the year, with the mandatory phrase "compliant enough for all-day comfort" in every bike writeup. And, during ad-revenue downturns, he probably gets stuck firing the intern and the $30,000-a-year junior staffer who writes the energy-gel reviews so that there's enough money in the budget for Steve Madden to waddle up Mount Ventoux and write about it in the ever-thinner Tour Preview edition, which Bicycling's weekend-riding demographic won't read now that Lance doesn't race anymore.

None of those responsibilities involves much writing. In fact, far too little in that magazine involves writing any more. It's a publication that seems designed to be readable during a single bath, or a few potty stops.

The old-timey Bicycling alums, like Fred Matheny and Ed Pavelka, have barely hidden their revulsion, and I used to think they were bitter over being cast aside. I didn't read the publication much back in the '80s or '90s or whenever its golden era supposedly was.

But I've seen it decline noticeably just in the few years I've been reading it: Same crap, different wrapping paper, every month -- the crap that focus groups and market research dictate.

It's not that I don't sympathize. I can't even come up with a single decent blog-post idea per week. Coming up with ideas for new and fresh cycling stories every month? That's like doing hill repeats up a sand dune.

The strain is really showing this year: For two straight editions, Bicycling (I repeat: BICYCLING) has focused on freaking triathlons! What's next? Cover stories on the best coffee hauses to ride cruisers to? I shudder to think of what those brainstorming meetings in Emmaus must be like.

Still, the mag is like monthly donut social after church: Halfway through mass, I'm starting to think about the little glazed demons. I'm berating the damn donuts at the same time my mouth is starting to water. Then I take my kids downstairs -- it is for the kids, right? -- to the little gathering and in little more time than it takes to read an issue of Bicycling cover to cover (except the stupid little bike-tour ads in the back), I've sucked down three donuts and added three pounds, most of it comprising hydrogenated oils.

Sure, I scold myself and feel a bit dirty. But secretly, I'm wishing for more.

In fact, I hope my renewal has been processed. I can't wait to feed my face with yet another installment of "10 Great Rides You MUST Do NOW!"

- JN

Recovery Writing

2008-04-13T22:06:00.005-04:00

OK, I've fallen off the blogging pace. I'm accustomed to something similar, as I'll discuss shortly. It's been a grueling week and, as far as blogging goes, I've sort of been like I am on most group rides: way too focused on hanging on to be able to think of anything interesting to talk about, if I'm even capable of talking.

I've caught up with my workload. For the moment. But my brain now feels like my body does after a brutal race: sprawled out on the grass, staring at the sky, telling my heart rate to drop while the spittle dries on my cheeks.

So this is like a recovery ride -- a recovery write? Not much interesting or productive coming up here, so consider yourself warned. I'm just spinning out the waste in my head, recovering.

That's how I've spent a decent part of the week literally, as well. Tuesday at Westlake, and again on a 40-mile solo ride in the rain on Saturday, I got worked over pretty well.

It's hard to figure out right now where I am in comparison to last year, because I never kept a very accurate ride diary. And even if I did, there wouldn't be much in there that gives me a quantitative basis for comparison.

I do know two things:

1) With the cutdown in my bike commuting, I'm riding fewer miles, probably. But I think I'm riding a lot (or at least a little) harder than a year ago when I do ride.

2) I'm another year older, and long past the point where that's a good thing. In just about every sense.

With those as a backdrop, I'll be interested in seeing how I feel at RATL this weekend, assuming it doesn't get cancelled like everything else on the local race calendar.

Here's where I'm coming from:

On Tuesday, I got shelled off the back of the A's at Westlake inside the race's first five miles. Now, it was only my second go with the A's, and I wasn't exactly convinced I'd finish with them. But there were guys in the A group that I out-raced routinely when they rode with the B's, and even a couple whom I dropped -- on hills of all places! -- on group rides. So either they worked harder in the offseason (definitely true in the case of one young and ambitious kid), or I just have to sharpen some skills, position myself better in the peloton and learn to suffer a bit better.
On the plus side, I spent most of that race riding pretty hard alone until I slowed down to let the B's catch me. Hanging in with them was easy. So that's good.

There was also some encouragement Saturday. It was shitty outside, but I convinced myself to get on the bike and ride into the cold mist around 10:30 a.m. Then I convinced myself to climb my personal nemesis, Sherman Road, and keep going over its rollers out past Sperry Road to Heath. That's right about where the rain picked up, frigid and annoying. I was in Chesterland, and that southwesterly wind that was at my back was going to be a bitch of a headwind, icy and steady, for the 20-mile ride home.

I was cold. My toes were numb. I was wet from sweat and rain. It sucked. I wanted to call home for a rescue.

But I thought, man, you just climbed Sherman on your 21-lb. steel bike; you can't puss out now.

I kept challenging myself to ride for just one more mile before calling home, then one more and one more. I'd ridden in a lot worse, I reminded myself.

I drove it hard over the rollers on Cedar out past 306, just to stay warm. And by the time I passed that Metzenbaum park and reached County Line, I knew it had become just about pointless to call for a pickup: I'd have to keep riding while my wife got the kids in the car and drove far enough east to meet me, and I'd probably be at least at SOM by then. SOM is maybe eight miles from my house -- practically home.

Then, lo and behold, the rain let up. And so did the headwind. I was supposed to be riding into the teeth of it and instead, I noticed myself smiling as a herd of deer and I looked at each other.
For that moment, it was really damn good to be on the bike. I knew I had some hard work left to do, but I suddenly felt like I'd put the hardest behind me, when most of the local cycling world was on the couch.

From that moment on, the ride home -- even the climb out of the valley -- started feeling as though it were downhill. Maybe, just maybe, I'm not as big a slug as I sometimes think.

Somebody call 696-KIDS!

2008-04-09T18:15:00.004-04:00

My wife and I evidently have scarred our older child for life. We refused to let her watch enough TV.

Here is the result:

Merry Freaking Christmas, Buttholes

2008-04-07T22:09:00.003-04:00

The Easter stuff is all packed away, not to mention the St. Patrick's Day decorations my kids hung. Baseball is underway. Bike racing season hits full stride here in NEO this week, with the beginning of the Westlake and Covered Bridge series, and RATL is only a week and a half off. It's just about time to start shaving legs.

We just had our first day of temps in the 70s. Everyone was out working in their yards all weekend.

So why the fffk do several of my neighbors still have their Christmas lights out -- and on -- and still have wreaths hanging from their houses?

Four Secrets of Active Recovery!

2008-04-06T21:20:00.006-04:00

I'm pretty sure this is not exactly how Chris Carmichael would prescribe active recovery on the day after a long, leg-burning ride, but it seemed to work for me:

1) Eat a disgusting number of melt-in-your-mouth Krispy Kreme donuts after Mass.

2) Spin for an hour in Zone 1-2, at a serene 15.5 mph-pace.

And here's the part you'll never read about in the Bicycling magazine fitness tips:

3) Spend the rest of the afternoon with a 5-year-old daughter on the cusp of turning 6, with 26 just around the corner. Ride bikes with her. Listen to her brag to her friend about her dad. Take her to Petland and watch the unbounded, fascinated elation as she cuddles a Guinea pig and snuggles with a tiny Siberian dwarf hamster, and wrestles gleefully and giddily with a way-too-feisty pug. Watch her giggle and laugh as some sort of cage bird flutters across the store to land on her shoulder, then climbs on her head and stays there until she coaxes it to perch on her finger. See her nose crinkle as she discovers it pooped on her hand.

Then (after she washes her hand!), have her jump into your arms and say, "I love you so much, Daddy! Thank you for taking me to Petland. That was the most fun!"

4) Finally, put her to bed, read her a couple books and give her butterfly kisses and eskimo kisses. Because you can. For now, anyway.

I couldn't imagine recovering much better.

JN

72 miles ... 73 aches

2008-04-05T21:59:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow is the Tour of Flanders, about 160 miles of brutish racing featuring short, steep hills and long, pounding cobbled climbs combined with brutal crosswinds and epic length.

Today was the Tour of Ned Flanders. For me, anyway. I felt like Ned Flanders, that is, as I tried to hang with a bunch of overly fit Cat 2's and 3's for 72 miles of brutish riding.

Hi-diddly-doody, neighbor! You're drop-dilly-opped!

We rode to Solon and into Glenwillow, where we caught the Emerald Necklace for the trip across town -- through Bedford, Walton Hills and Valley View, followed by the leg-punishing climbs to and out of the Brecksville Reservation and along the parkway through Broadview and N. Royalton. Then we hit the parkway's flatlands -- Strongsville, Parma, Berea, Fairview and on into Lakewood.

I was out of my league, of course. Each time we'd hit a hill -- whether one of the short, steep variety or a long grind, or even a short, unsteep one -- I'd fall off the pace. (I'm grateful that my six riding companions had the patience to slow up and wait for me at the top of every hill they'd just hammered up, and even send a tow back for me from time to time.)

Then when we hit the flatlands, the frisky big engines kept pushing the pace up to 27-30 mph. I can hang with that OK for a normal flat ride -- but not when we're 45 miles in with 30 more to go. Even when I just wheelsucked as an erstwhile gatekeeper at the back of a rotating paceline, I still got shelled a couple times -- including what I thought had been a final break at mile 53.

I did't care at that point whether I'd catch back up -- the hammerfest (for me it was a hammerfest) was killing me. So I rolled solo at a crawl for the next few miles and watched my average speed drop, drop, drop - below 18.5, then to 18.4, 18.3 ... before I finally crept up the hill out of the park and into Lakewood.

I caught back up at the Nature's Bin on Sloane, where we refueled for the last 18 miles or so. There was a collective wuss-out (Hey, I'm not complaining!) when we hit downtown and decided to skip the chilly, potholed lakefront/MLK route and shave 4 miles or so by going straight up Prospect and Carnegie.

But when we hit E. 30th, the cramps attacked me -- charley horses flaring up in both legs. I cannot remember the last time that happened. But before my legs seized up, I shouted my goodbyes to the gang, jumped off, stretched out, popped another gel and climbed back on for a gentle 14- to 18-mph solo pace until I crawled up the Stokes Blvd. hill and North Park, unzipping my vest and peeling my arm warmers on the way up.

I was thrilled to have made it -- riding 72 miles is usually an August thing for me, not early April -- and grateful for the pack's patience.

But I was very ready to get off the bike. Rolling up the driveway, everything finally was okily-dokily.

A Sacrifice, A Movement

2008-04-01T14:34:00.006-04:00

Every time I hear of some component or frame failure that afflicts a fellow cyclist, I remind myself (with a snide snicker) how lucky I’ve been.
I’ve upgraded bits and pieces here and there. But I have a 7-year-old hybrid, a 5-year-old road bike and another road bike heading into year 2, and thus far here is the list of my equipment failures:
Three trashed rear wheels, only one of which really died prematurely.
Assorted broken spokes
Some flat tires
Not bad.
As for wrecks, I’ve lucked out, too. Like everyone else, I took a couple of Monty Python spills when I first started riding clipless. And I wiped out a couple times in races. But I’ve never broken anything, never needed any surgery and never had to do anything repair-wise beyond retaping the bars.
I count my blessings -- especially when I consider what has befallen my fellow cyclists.
This, for instance.

Talk about something that blackens your day. This, I solemnly realized when I came across it at lunch today, could only be a result of tragedy. I removed my helmet in a moment of silent respect.
I shuddered as I thought about what could have caused it.
A high-speed collision with a semitrailer, maybe?
A superheated burst from a space-age argon-gas laser fired from a satellite?
Some bad reaction with a Mexican Village dinner?
In any case, the rider had to have perished, and the funeral surely was closed-casket.
I resolved to find out who had become the cycling community's latest Christ figure, and to seize onto the tragedy as the foundation for a bikes-first campaign the likes of which Cleveland has never seen.
It all came to me in a flash. Within an instant, I’d resolved to form a nonprofit corporation called "Bikes First, You and Your Shitty Petro-ilk Last," and to pursue grants from the Gund and Cleveland Foundations for a multimedia/multiplatform campaign.
I wanted to make sure this tragedy would never be repeated.
The strategic elements hit me like Hincapie hits pave, like Floyd Landis hits testosterone (TBV alert!):
The centerpiece, the organizing principle – the hub, if you will -- would be a Ghostbike memorial featuring an artistic interpretation of the disfigured seat. That statement would be illuminated by a perpetual flame, which would be powered by a renewable organic energy source derived from recycled synthetic bike lube.
But this wouldn't just be a mute white-bike tribute.
The monument’s unveiling would be a major grassroots civic/artistic event.
It would commence with a gigantic Naked Critical Mass ride through Public Square, decrying our oil obsession and its war-machine spawn -- and, if grant dollars permit, denouncing homophobia-based short-shrifting of AIDS research.
This would be the near-violent, in-your-face kickoff that would demand the media pay attention and initiate a participatory Nude Journalism experiment by 19 Action News cultural-milieu reporter Sharon Reed.
After our procession spawns a traffic bottleneck that would inconvenience nearly dozens of people who still work downtown and haven’t been swallowed up by giant sinkholes, we then would head to Voinovich Park for a solemn festival of bike-related performance art at dusk.
Its highlights: graffiti artists tagging vehicles nearby on E. 9th St.; and a hipster mime, covered almost completely with pro-bike tattoos, screwing a gas cap into his rectum (lubed with renewable corn oil) in silent protest of our auto-centric culture.
Finally, we would use about $170,000 of our grant funding for a grassroots campaign aimed at shaming non-bike riders into leaving their Volvos in the garage and giving bike commuting a try.
About 97 of every 100 of those will freak out at the first horn honk or the first time a car passes within four feet. Most will then violently jerk their handlebars to the right and bounce off the curb.
The resultant slaughter of innocents along Chester and Detroit avenues would fuel an unprecedented infrastructure investment into 5-foot-wide bike lanes on every Cleveland traffic artery.
Whoever got annihilated on that twisted specter of a bike would not die in vain, I resolved.
The clarity, immediacy and poignancy of my vision left me so stunned that it took every bit of focus I could summon just to dial Thomas Mulready on my iPhone.
Then, suddenly, everything collapsed even as Mulready’s phone was ringing. This dude stepped out of the Phoenix coffee shop and bent over the combination lock attaching the Death Bike to a railing:

I knew immediately he was a kindred spirit by his rolled-up pants, his light-adorned helmet and the defiant manifesto emblazoned on his messenger bag: "Three Feet – It’s The Law."
Problem was, he was alive.
My vision, which materialized so vividly and immediately, evaporated just as instantly.
Then the rest of the divine revelation congealed in my head: He is alive for now. But it would be so selfish of him to let that little detail stand between the present and my vision.
I followed him home. I’ve rented the U-Haul truck. Tomorrow there just might be a little hit-and-run accident.
But his sacrifice will be a worthy one.

The Joys of Parenting, and etc.

2008-03-30T19:06:00.004-04:00

I have a few friends -- happily married or in a really long-term relationship that might as well be marriage -- who insist they will never have children. I can respect that. I probably even contributed to their resolve by cancelling rides to spend time with my kids and then complaining about it.

But there's something indescribably magical about the special little ways that our littlest ones get a kick out of life.

For instance:

Or this:

And my child-eschewing friends will miss the joy of watching their youngsters take after daddy:

OK, here's today's forwarded-all-over-the-internet joke:

A curious fellow died one day and found himself waiting in the long line of judgment. As he stood there he noticed that some souls were allowed to march right through the pearly gates into Heaven.
Others though, were led over to Satan who threw them into the burning fire. But every so often, instead of hurling a poor soul into the fire, Satan would toss a soul off to one side into a small pile.
After watching Satan do this several times, the fellow's curiosity got the best of him. So he strolled over and asked Satan what he was doing.
"Excuse me, Prince of Darkness," he said. "I'm waiting in line for Judgment, but I couldn't help wondering. Why are you tossing those people aside instead of flinging them into the Fires of Hell with the others?"
"Oh those . . " Satan groaned. "They're all from Ohio. They're still too cold and wet to burn."

I'm sure if you ride, you can especially relate.

Stealing a Win in Steel City

2008-03-27T16:20:00.003-04:00

Congrats to Chris B. for SBR's first road win of the year at the Steel City Showdown. I could point out that he had to go to that pathetic place called Pittsburgh to find a field crippled enough to beat. And that the price of a victory in a bike race on the most sacred of Christian holidays is eternal damnation. (Double up on the water bottles, CB). And that I'm jealous. But I won't.

- JN

Mini-Malabar for a Maxi (weight) Rider

2008-03-26T21:39:00.003-04:00

Some of the East Side's big engines, the relative beasts who sometimes kindly wait up when I get dropped on climbs, were heading out this evening for some serious hill hammering to prep for one of NEO's hardest races, Saturday's Tour of Malabar Farms.
I knew, and they knew, that I wasn't really invited to this evening's throw-down. Nobody has to be that blunt with me. I can't climb with the Cat 3s and should-be 3s who were going to go beat the crap out of themselves. I can't even climb with the good-climbing 5s. We all know this. So there was only a brief bit of awkwardness Tuesday night when Dave said to me, "See ya tomorrow night?" and it became clear I didn't know what he was talking about because I was carefully not invited. Thom fumbled for a second before telling me what was up, with a subtle but polite warning: "Uh, it's going to be fast. It's going to be hard."
Enough said.
I might eventually get back to good crit form this year. But I doubt I'll ever be a climber in this lifetime.
Nonetheless, I decided to go off and do my own mini-Malabar on a long lunch hour.
I have on many occasions ridden down Gorge Parkway thorugh the Bedford Reservation, but never up it. It always seemed intimidatingly steep. So it struck me today as a good place to go punish myself for not being worthy of chasing Dave, Pete, Thom and Ray up and down the Chagrin River valley.
I drove out to the Canal Visitor Center in Independence and rode over to the bottom of the gorge, then up the parkway. It was a strain because I wasn't really warmed up, but I found a steady rhythm up the steepest grade (which, I was surprised to discover, was only about 1/2 mile long). Then I barrelled up and down the few miles of rollers to the golf course at the top, at Hawthorn Parkway.
There I doubled back over the rollers but hung a left before the plunge, onto Overlook. That brought more rollers until Egbert, where the road dropped downhill to Dunham.
There I turned around again, back up to Overlook and then back to Gorge Parkway. That steep drop seemed a bit less steep now, having gone up it; I barely touched the brakes on the dive back down to Dunham.
It was getting close to time to head back, but I'd only ridden about 15 miles. So I turned left and headed south up the hill on Dunham for a mile or so until I saw six deer staring at me; I u-turned to chase after them, then rolled on back to Tinkers Creek and back to the visitor center.
I was about to stop there when I saw another hill on the other side of the railroad tracks, which is Hillside Rd. It is a wall - only about 2/10ths of a mile, but straight up for half of that, then there's maybe 50 yards of rest before a steep switchback. Then there's a mile or so of false flat; I saw a stoplight and wondered what road it was, so I kept going until I confirmed it was Brecksville Rd. at the top.
From there I turned around and headed back to the start at the visitor center. But the CuyValley train was parked across Hillside and cars were backed up. So I turned around and started up that short, steep grade again. Halfway up, the train started to roll, so I turned around.
I wasn't blowing myself up trying to hang with the Cat 3's -- I think my average was a mere 16 mph. And it was only 20 miles. But close to half of that was uphill. That makes for a good little workout. For me, anyway.
Oh, and it was enough to drive home that I'm not about to go spend $25 to get dropped a few miles into the Malabar Farms race on Saturday. Good luck, team!

- JN

I Am Nothing

2008-03-25T16:41:00.007-04:00

1) In the incestuous little circle of bike bloggers in this area, it's usually not necessary to link to another blog, because most of us seem to read the same ones anyway. Having said that, I still want to steer you to this particularly insightful post. My friend Dave nails it, with understated yet razor-sharp wit. Unfortunately, he predicts, and mocks, my excuse for my inevitable shitty season -- that I'm "targeting" the late-season races -- before I ever even got to dust it off. Now I have to think of something new. I'm, uh ... racing in New Zealand next winter and I'm just building base miles now. How's that?

2) The San Fran Chronicle published a story on Friday that, along with its 400+ reader comments, is kind of worth reading, especially for us cyclists. No need for me to rehash it. But I would point out that the comments ought to give us pause. I'm on record as being opposed not only to special infrastructure for bikes but also opposed to the elitist self-righteousness that cyclists spew. Yes, you have the right of way over vehicles overtaking you, and no, you are not obligated to ride in the gutter. But you are nothing more than the driver of a vehicle -- a small and vulnerable one. Don't do stupid shit. Don't antagonize motorists. And above all, don't make me and the rest of the cycling world look like assholes. If everyone who rides a bike would share the road as considerately as possible, the flak we catch from drivers would plummet.

3) One of my anonymous un-fans from Jamestown, N.Y. (coincidentally, home of the pro-Landis/anti-JimmyNick website called Trust But Verify) ripped into me the other day, telling me to "get over [my]self" and adding that I'm "less than noticeable in the 'blogosphere'."
I get the first part, which isn't all that unfair.
But as for the remark on my status in the blogosphere: Is that a compliment or a rip?
Help me out.

4) Looking forward to reading "Roadie: The Misunderstood World of the Bike Racer." That world is particularly misunderstood by people who think I represent it ...

- JN

Flogging my Blog

2008-03-21T17:00:00.008-04:00

It's been a pretty overwhelming week for me, and not just because I spent much of it in bed recovering from the flu.

Consider these two developments:

First, I discovered Paris Hilton is family.

Then, only a day later, I stumbled into a way to take this pathetic little blog global. I'll share the secret: Say something snide about Floyd Landis, so that his cyber-soigneurs take offense and call you out in a way that tittilates people from around the globe to see what you said.

They're two Holy Week gifts from God.

And I don't have the slightest clue what to do with either one.

The Landis quip, and Trust But Verify's link to it, got me more hits in a day than I'd had in the previous week or so, and they still keep banging in days later -- visitors from all over the U.S. and from foreign lands where hardly anyone speaks English, such as Germany and California.

I know this because I have a little gizmo on my website called Sitemeter, which not only counts my visitors, but tells me a little bit about them -- where they are, for instance, and what site referred them to mine. Usually, the Sitemeter shows me hitting my own site 13 times a day (I used to "hit my own site 13 times a day" when I was a lot younger, but in a different way) so that I can artificially inflate the web counter and leave phony comments that make other visitors -- both of them -- think my site is popular. But suddenly, the meter showed visitors dropping in from all over.

Which is exactly what I'm afraid will happen now that it's been made public that Paris and I are related. She has to know by now. And what timing: It's Easter weekend, and she probably has nowhere else to go -- so few real friends, and the rest of the family considers her a pariah. So I would not be surprised if she drops by on Sunday -- with about a million paparazzi in tow.

Like the Landis-related attention to my blog, this kind of visit would just be something for which I'm completely unprepared. And that bothers me. I need to think about ways to exploit this nexis of the naughty.

And I think I might have it. Look for a link on my blog to this video soon - if I can get a couple bucks per click, Snake Bite Racing might be riding some new Cervelos, pronto!

VOICEOVER: "When Floyd Landis needed to ride hard into Paris, he knew where to turn."

HILTON: "Floyd chooses Testoderm (R) brand patches. And I'm glaaaaad he does."

VOICEOVER: "Testoderm. When you need help climbing your own private mountains."

- JN

P.S.: Let's try this again: Floyd Landis! Floyd Landis! Floyd Landis! Cheater Cheater Cheater! (Now the Blogger server is gonna crash!)

Share the Road (and my high opinion of myself)

2008-03-18T21:27:00.005-04:00

DALLAS' LAW
By Dallas Murphy

It has happened again. Sadly, it is no longer surprising.

Yet another cyclist has gotten punched in the face and thrown off a bridge by a 6-foot-4, heavyset Maori. This time it was a 63-year-old woman in Auckland, New Zealand.

But it could have been one of us, any of us, anywhere. It may have already been you. Or me. It has become all too common. The March 9 attack was at least the third time a Maori man has attacked a cyclist since January -- and that is in New Zealand alone!

Who among us who rides regularly hasn't come across a Maori warrior who has tried to hurl us from a bridge? How many times must we hear Tā moko-adorned 300-pound men say, "He came out of nowhere!" when police ask them why they toss bike riders into the water?

How many more times indeed? Give me a couple days with Google and let me go far enough back into the past and far enough afield, and I can undoubtedly string together maybe half a dozen barely connected conflicts involving cyclists and Maori, or other Polynesian aboriginals, in New Zealand, Australia and across the South Pacific. Then I, as a cyclist, will indulge myself in some logical fallacies and flights of fancy to lace together those tenuous commonalities, and extrapolate from them an ominous, oppressive and generalized specter that supposedly applies universally.

Having thus inflamed my grossly overblown sense of persecution, I'll puff myself up in outlandishly outrageous and indignant harrumphing and demand that the whole Polynesian world be subjugated until it begins to see me as I see myself: messianic, blessed and just plain better.

Yes, give me enough time and I will dredge up the anecdotal shenanigans to build any case I choose in favor of my fragile yet innately resplendent existence as a bike rider. I will then damn you all even as I hurtle up alongside a line of stopped traffic and get slammed by a right-turning curb-lane car whose driver really had no legitimate reason to look for a cyclist where no cyclist should have fucking been in the first place. I will scream until society commits virtually unlimited resources to building bike lanes (through communities where children suffer and die from an epidemic of lead poisoning because we haven't provided the resources to abate it). I will not rest until Maori and their smog-belching autos are forced from the roads -- or at least forced into the gutter as we sanctimonious cyclists pass, slurping a Starbucks and pulling a Clif bar from our messenger bags.

However, I have to admit: I don't really have time for all that damn Google work right now. I have to drill out my new bar tape to shave a few grams and file down all the links in my new chain.

After all, the Covered Bridge series is coming up. And to you Maori in Summit County: Share the bridge.

Test Those Jelly Beans First

2008-03-18T16:29:00.002-04:00

My kids and I are getting so excited! Only five more days 'til the Floyd Landis Is Innocent Bunny comes to our house! (Shh! They still believe!)

NOT the Pride of Erin

2008-03-17T22:06:00.007-04:00

On a March 17 night two or three years ago, as my wife, the babies and I drove home from a friend's party in Lakewood, my 2-year-old suddenly got way, way too much into the spirit of things by puking in the car. A lot.

"Welcome to St. Patrick's Day," I grumbled. "There will probably be many more of these for you when you get older."

Aye. On this particular St. Patrick's Day, sickness is nigh again. I feel I'm spinning and need to just double over and purge myself of the poison that poured into my body this evening.

Don't get me wrong: I don't drink anymore.

This is worse -- worse than the nausea that rises after 11 hours of downing shots of Jameson's with pints of warm, flat (and grossly under-malted) Guinness to blunt the despair you feel when even drunken girls won't heed your "Kiss Me, I'm Irish!" button.

Hold on ...
(Raaaauuughhhh ... fluuuuussssssshhhhh. Cough cough ...)

Sorry.

Maybe if I explain, I can quell the hurl.

See, a lad named Peter Callahan, from the County Sligo town of Gurteen, came to the States in 1863 with his wife, Margaret.

Peter Callahan is my great-great grandfather. Also along with Peter on that trip 'cross the pond was his brother Cornelias.

Which leads me to what is churning my stomach like hill repeats after cabbage-and-cheese soup and a glass o' whiskey:

Great-great Uncle Cornelias, I discovered a couple hours ago, has a certain great-great-granddaughter who's not a cyclist but knows all about crank stiffness and having her hands deep in the drops. Cycling must be in her blood, because her mom is a hell of a climber.

Cornelias' spawn -- my cuzz -- is Paris Hilton.

And I shudder to admit it, but the mite who did all that barfing in my back seat bears some likeness ...

Augh. I'm going back to the drink.

- JN

Warning: Graphic Content Below!

2008-03-16T22:08:00.013-04:00

If I could, I'd send a truckload of roses to the Florida Senate in Tallahassee.

The members of the Sunshine State's upper chamber are considering outlawing those idiotic saggy pants that hang halfway, or all the way, down the asses of young men, exposing their boxers and butts. The punishment for wearing them to school: suspension.

Hear hear. Long overdue. The only bad thing I hear about this bill is that it lacks corporal punishment for offenders.

Who says Florida is the CDC biohazard dumpster of the states, a backwater filled with mouth breathers, political Cro-Magnons, well-paid college football players and environment rapists? (Well, pretty much everyone, come to think of it -- except one of the 7 or 22 guys named Chris who ride with the Heightsriders group.)

But if Florida can produce something this enlightened, it should embolden all of us to engage ourselves civically and stand up against the assaults on our senses. Personally, I'm not just moved -- I'm inspired.

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to start a grass-roots campaign (I might even recruit a judge or some other unsavory politician for some up-front heft) to target things here that are just as insidious as those prison-inspired droopy drawers. Just a few things worth outlawing:

1) Hair protruding from any opening on a T-shirt or jersey.

2) Cycling shorts that say "Park Tool" on the rear, as though it were an invitation.

3) This:

4) or this:

5) Or, God forbid, this (WARNING: HEINOUSLY TASTELESS GRAPHIC CONTENT FOLLOWS. THINK TWICE ABOUT SCROLLING DOWN):

6) And this jackass, of course, could be shot on sight:

The cleanup would even be easy: With his hematocrit count, his blood would spill like toothpaste.

- JN

Toward a More Bike-Friendly Cleveland?

2008-03-15T18:46:00.006-04:00

Years ago, my wife and I were enjoying dinner at Luchita's on a night slow enough for leisurely conversation with our Mexican-American server.

Somehow -- I don't remember how --the topic turned to the local "Hispanic community" or, as she put it, the myth of an Hispanic community. Cleveland's Hispanics are many communities, and generally don't have a heck of a lot in common, she said. Nor do they necessarily hold one another in equal regard, or in high esteem. They're fractured and fragmented, and sharply divided politically.

A Puerto Rican co-worker later said pretty much the same thing.

That's not exactly surprising, I guess (although the slurs and stereotypes they used toward one another were). People -- just about all people -- are innately tribal.

But that fragmentation and disdain does help to explain why, after all these years, Hispanics have no collective voice and disproportionately little political clout here in Cleveland.
Which brings me around to cyclists.

It's pretty safe to say that anyone who believes in the myth of a "cycling community" isn't a cyclist. Cyclists, too, are fractured into many different groups: roadie racers, fast recreational riders, tourists, mountain bikers, the fixie sect, the strident car-haters, the every-third-weekend bike-path pedalers, etc.

There certainly is some overlap among them: Some roadies commute, and MTB riders ride road bikes, and I've heard rumors that there is at least one bike messenger who actually doesn't sneer in contempt at the rest of the cycling "establishment."

But the only time I'm aware of that representatives of most of those groups get together is for the annual MS-150 Pedal to the Point.

That's because these subsets generally have little in common beyond our affinity for bikes. And the truth is, there's a lot of eye-rolling and even downright hostility toward one another. I certainly plead guilty.

Nonetheless, lot of devoted and well-intended cycling activists are celebrating NOACA's decree on Friday that it promises to work toward a more bike-friendly region.

NOACA is the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, which is a planning board that is supposed to prioritize federal transportation funding. Theoretically, if it wants to, NOACA can put some serious muscle behind the push for more funding for bike lanes, bike paths and more by pressuring, or even compelling, communities to build them if they want money for roads.

And in another symbolic development, a bunch of local cycling advocates under the leadership of Cleveland Bikes is planning a week of bike-focused events in May, which is National Bike Month. Among them: Bike to Work Week, a "Discover Mountain Biking" day at the new Metroparks Canal Corridor Reservation, a "Bike to the Movies" event, "Celebration of Bikes" at Cleveland City Hall, etc.

Both are great in their intended symbolism, and any sign of growth in bike-riding locally is a good thing.

But both the NOACA document and the ClevelandBikes plans underscore the divisions among cyclists at least as much as they nurture some sort of bike community.

For instance, a whole lot of cyclists would argue that the more the region encourages bike paths and bike lanes, the worse it is for cyclists. Right now, with that kind of infrastructure in preciously short supply, newbies are afraid to saddle up and share the road, which is understandable. But if we want to build a cycling-friendly community, we need to be very careful about building it on the needs and priorities of people who ride only occasionally.

Consider this: The closer a cyclist is to a bike path, the greater the likelihood of motorists being assholes. Drivers willingly share the road on Chester or Detroit avenues (at least during non-peak times), usually without so much as a honk. But try riding through the Rocky River reservation on the road; it is all but certain that a cyclist will get honked at or cut off about 90% of the time by people yelling, "Use the bike path!"

That, I'm sure, is what those of us who ride downtown from the East Side can expect more of when the bike lanes open on Euclid. That will be great for anyone who wants to wobble along on her hybrid or his beach cruiser once a month. Not so great for the rest of us: Bike lanes and bike paths doom us to bike ghettos -- unswept, debris-covered, low-speed alleyways, and when we have the audacity to leave them, we get cursed.

That's no way to create a bike community.

Neither is pretending to be one in spirit and body with people who ride bikes like asses. I do not want to embrace reckless riders who cut in and out of traffic, jump from sidewalk to street and zip up between cars or on their right when there's a line of traffic at a stoplight.

I'd rather take the millions of dollars that stand to be spent on fatuousness such as those two silly towpath-trail bridges and use it for practical things: a prolonged, intense multimedia campaign promoting the "Share the Road" message; training for novice cyclists and commuters; training for POLICE and prosecutors; and maybe even a program to pay bike-commute leaders. And I'd use some of it for a concerted enforcement campaign -- cracking down on hostile motorists AND on bike anarchists who give all the rest of us a really, really bad image.

That would accomplish more in a short period of time than all of the resolutions and events and bike ghettos could.

- JN

TV Hates Bikes -- And Now It's Payback Time

2008-03-12T21:07:00.013-04:00

So "The Wire" is gone and I never saw it. No HBO.

"The Wire," I've read, had widely been called the best show on TV, and some critics went so far as to claim it was the best show in the history of TV. That, my friends, has to be hyperbole given that the medium has produced 19 Action News, "Joanie Loves Chachi," "Room 222" and the memorable private-eye saga "Barnaby Jones."

(Here's a barroom argument for ya, by the way: Who was the better shot -- Barnaby Jones or rotund but deadly Frank Cannon? I once seen ol' Barnaby shoot a guy off the top of a 4-story parking deck, with a snub-nosed .38, from the goddamn hip! That was some fancy shootin'. Hard to top.)

Tell 'em Barnaby says ... "You're dead, bitch!"

But for the hell of it, I'll grant the premise that "The Wire" really was the best show on TV. So why was it canceled?

I'll tell you why: It's a sign of a groundswell of public indignity that the evil mainstream media has still not picked up on -- er, up on which the mainstream media still has not yet picked.

So let me spell it out for them:

The public has quietly, but inarguably, been getting increasingly disgusted with the persistent anti-bike bias in Hollywood.

Look at the evidence of the grassroots uprising -- it's inescapable. "George Lopez" -- no bike themes, cancelled. "King of Queens"? No bikes, no renewal. Ditto for "Reba" and "Studio 60 on Sunset Strip."

America, it seems, is staging a silent protest with its collective remote control.

We needn't go back very far in history to remember a time when bikism was rampant on television -- so omnipresent that it was taken for granted. Little more than a generation ago, people thought it was hilarious that Lucille Ball rode no bikes and had no bike-riding friends. It was OK to openly not care about cyclists then.

When bike riders did appear on TV, they were characters to be mocked and scorned, such as evil villain Eddie Haskell on "Leave It to Beaver." (Ironically, Haskell became a bike cop in L.A. before he died in Viet Nam when he stepped on an explosive booby trap packed with headset bearings -- no lie!)

Some people thought times were changing with the civil-rights movement, but there was little progress on the screen. People still called cyclists "bikers" without a hint of shame.

Even "Starsky and Hutch," the show most renowned today for its fearless and groundbreaking social relevence, reportedly caved in amid an undercurrent of bikism. According to Wikipedia and other infallable sources, visionary writer/creator William Blinn originally planned to depict pivotal character Huggy Bear as an African-American bike messenger and friend of crime fighters. But activists went ballistic during those racially tense times, threatening a boycott if ABC didn't head off the pejorative portrayal of a black man as a cyclist. ABC mollified the potential protesters by redrawing Huggy Bear's character as a flashy, jive-talking, snitching pimp who sold out friends each week for a $20 bill.

Historical note: The experience embittered Blinn, who persisted in trying to inject cycling themes into his scripts. Eventually, he drew upon his experience as the writer of "Brian's Song" and tried to break down the bike barrier with maudlin sentimentality. Late in the show's run, he penned an episode in which Hutch helps Starsky, brain-damaged from a gunshot wound, rediscover the joy of life through the poignant and symbolic gift of a hand job on a bike.

"C'mon buddy -- there's still muggers to catch!"

However, ABC cancelled the series before the episode aired.)

Each time progressives thought the tide might turn, Hollywood and the networks squashed the normalization of cycling. Lawsuits ensued, but invariably they failed as courts held that plaintiffs failed to establish that any bias against bikes was intentional.

However, the legal tide is turning in concert with -- or perhaps because of -- the grassroots hostility toward bike bias.

In the landmark lawsuit Orehek v. NBC et al., attorney D. Steiner and other legal intellectuals advanced the proposition that they need not prove discriminatory intent to prevail. Instead, they claimed -- and a trial court in Los Angeles held -- that under the so-called disparate impact theory, the statistically demonstrable lack of bike-themed programs establishes discrimination via a pattern of facts that “are facially neutral in their treatment of different groups but that in fact fall more harshly on one group -- bike riders -- than another and cannot be justified by business necessity.”

So everyone gets the picture now. Everyone, that is, except HBO, NBC, ABC and etc.

But here's my prediction: Whether it's because of the coming popular revolt against bikism or a court-imposed woodshed session, the tide will have turned completely by next season. In fact, word is that , if "American Idol" contestants aren't riding bikes while they sing, that show will be as doomed as "The Wire" and Fox will be cooking up a show about security guards at Interbike.

- JN

The so-called "Criterium" International: A LIE!

2008-03-10T14:58:00.003-04:00

All that good Karma from this morning is blown, and now I'm pissed.

Why?

I just found out the Criterium International isn't really a crit at all! And they don't let Cat 4's in!

Shit ... in ... my ... cereal. That was my "A" race.

Now I'm totally confused. If a criterium isn't a criterium, then what else is a lie in European racing? Are their quote-unquote time trials really stage races? Are their "stage races" actually Madisons?

Yet another reason to hate those Eurotrash commies.

- JN

Back on the road!

2008-03-10T10:51:00.002-04:00

It is a happy day!
For the first time in days, I got to ride outside. It was only about 8 miles to work. But it clears my head and lifts my mood. I feel energized.
It also reinforces my conviction that Cleveland drivers are getting more considerate toward cyclists with every passing year. It seems to not matter anymore how crappy the driving gets, or how narrow the semi-plowed lanes are -- people give room, and almost always without begrudging.
One car tooted a horn at me. And he gave me a wide berth as he passed. Not sure why he honked -- he didn't explain himself when I rode up alongside him at the next stoplight.
But I didn't yell at him or glare, either. Not sure what the point is in that.
Consider: Probably a couple hundred cars passed me on my 30-minute commute. One honked. So roughly 99.5% of all the motorists out there shared the road willingly at best, and without complaint at a minimum. That is a pretty darn good rate.
And it's usually even better: The days I even get honked at are few and far between.
Right now, the snow continues to melt and I might stretch the ride home out by 30 or 45 extra minutes. And it'll be in broad daylight!
The cloud has, for now, lifted.

- JN

Oh God. I Just Remembered: We DO suck.

2008-03-05T21:03:00.007-05:00

Quick -- somebody please remind me why I live in Cleveland. Please point out enough great things about it to chase away the pervasive funk that sets in every time I go to just about any other major city (except Detroit) and see beauty and vitality that isn't even conceivable here.

I need your help.

It's not like I just got back from San Diego or San Antonio. No, I only went to Cincinnati -- the place that, only a few days ago, an acquaintance was trashing.

I hadn't been there in 10 years or so, and the few times I'd visited, I didn't see a whole lot of the town. I didn't this time, either, so I can't say whether it is as bad a place to live as my cycling buddy made it out to be.

But I saw enough to remind me that other cities have vast swaths of livability within their city limits -- trendy neighborhoods and tony neighborhoods and nice walkable neighborhoods with shops, restaurants, galleries and things to do, and people who actually live in them and talk to each other.

You know -- the kind of neighborhoods that do not exist anywhere within Cleveland's city limits.

I'm not talking about three-block-long stretches like Larchmere or Clifton Boulevard. I'm talking about square miles of niceness -- anything that can compare, for example, to Cincinnati's Hyde Park/Oakley area. Or Mount Adams. Or Mount Lookout. Or ...

Here's what I saw while eating dinner for an hour at a super little Oakley Square restaurant on Madison Avenue at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday night: At least 50 joggers. Several packs of cyclists (yes, Cleveland -- cyclists, at night!) and people strolling and dog-walking. Then I went over to Hyde Park Square and saw what appeared to be well-to-do people enjoying themselves -- in the city! These were neighborhoods that don't need to be gentrified because they never fell into disrepair in the first place, where even the rental properties are well maintained.

Then today, I spent several hours along Madison and down at the University of Cincinnati and in Clifton and Over-the-Rhine and a few other areas of town. Not surprisingly, much of what I saw around and downhill from UC could only be described as desolation. But at least as much of the city looked like someplace I'd like to live, and even more of it looked like a nice place to visit.

Then I returned to Cleveland, where the only neighborhoods with well-kept housing stock -- West Park and South Hills -- are pretty low on cool quotient and held together largely by the residency restriction applying to city cops, firefighters and other employees. The retail comprises Giant Eagles and hardware stores, Dollar Generals and Convenient Food Marts. The restaurant scene is pretty much wings or a burger at an Irish-named bar with seven TVs, a video golf game and a jukebox filled with Pink Floyd, Bad Company and Todd f--king Rundgren.

Oh, Cleveland does have Shaker Square -- for the moment. Yes, Shaker Square, which is now anchored by a goddamn CVS pharmacy. I go to the square pretty often, for coffee or ice cream. There's not much else to go for, though. Luchita's is gone. Joseph Beth Booksellers and Wild Oats are long gone. Just about every bit of retail is gone, in fact, except for a toy store and a wine shop. They were there last I checked, anyway.

Retail is gone, but thuggery isn't. In fact, it's thriving. Sit around Shaker Square for long enough and you're sure to see some roving thug or band of thugs saunter in to drop F-bombs or harass outdoor diners for laughs. Is it any wonder that local hotels advise visitors not to go there?

I suppose we have Little Italy. As a neighborhood, it's 300 yards long and 200 yards wide, and its housing stock looks like something out of a West Virginia mine town after the mine closed. But the amenities of its two main streets make Little Italy a nice place to visit -- if you can find a place to park. And if you're white.

But what about West 25th Street, or Tremont? Sorry. Anyone who considers those to be neighborhoods either spends little time there or else has never seen a real neighborhood. Move a block or two away from the popular streets and things start getting ... edgy. Bands of cyclists? Nah. Attractive young women out for a jog? Riiight. Maybe for a sprint -- from the front door of a restaurant to a car. The new "New Urban" townhouses look like an empty movie set: No one ever sits outdoors. Maybe it's because they are uncomfortable being panhandled or offered drugs. Maybe it's because lots of the more-established locals don't appreciate the gentrification agenda or the folks they call "yuppies" and challenge to fight.

We hear from time to time about the boom of thousands of residents in the Gateway neighborhood and the Warehouse District. But those places are fortresses -- living spaces that, ironically, are detached from the streets that surround them. Lunchtime and early-dinner crowds of lawyers and bankers support the restaurants. Then, if there is no sporting event, the streets and alleys around Gateway are abandoned to those who tinge them with urine. The Warehouse District becomes the nouveaux Flats almost every night of the week except Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. All the rest of the nights of the week, it teems with the tanning-booth crowd swarming from Strongsville, Beachwood and Eastlake in search of "Tequila Bombs" and carnal knowledge.

Sure, we have Lee Road, Coventry and Cedar-Fairmount in Cleveland Heights. Both -- especially the former -- are thriving, somewhat diverse economically and racially, and are walkable and reasonably safe. Cedar-Lee is even a destination for people from all over the area.

But they're in a suburb, not in the city. And they are in one of the very few decent suburbs Cleveland has.

For Heaven's sake, Cleveland must be the only major city in the U.S. that has a world-class university surrounded by world-class cultural institutions but no culture -- or a culture of nothingness. From a daily-living standpoint, there is hardly any more that is cool around Case than there is around Hiram College, which probably makes for a perfect learning atmosphere because what the hell else is there to do but look at books? I'm sure the reason China and India seem to account for 96.7% of the CWRU student body is that they're the only places left that haven't figured out yet that college isn't exclusively about book-learning and that it can, in fact, be more fun than entering a convent or a prison. That is why semi-normal Case students (if that isn't a contradiction in terms) live in Cleveland Heights.

Speaking of colleges: Don't even get me started on Cleveland State ... not after I just came from UC's campus.

Yes, when you have just returned from somwhere else, Cleveland is depressing.

But don't get your hopes up -- I'm not moving to Cincinnati. I don't think I could live in any city that names a major expressway after Ronald Reagan.

I'm not moving to Portland or Minneapolis or Austin or San Antonio or Raleigh either.

No, I'll stay here.

After all, we have ... uh, the Cleveland Orchestra ... and Steelyard Commons!

Ba-da-bump!

2008-03-04T22:06:00.001-05:00

I've figured out why Cuyahoga County just can't seem to get its election results tabulated in the same week in which votes were cast. Seems Tym Tyler is running the show.

Wine Quality Doesn't Corellate, Either

2008-02-29T13:14:00.006-05:00

If you are like me, you frequently find yourself asking, "I wonder what nation has a Gross Domestic Product most comparable to that of Ohio?"

Don't sweat it: The answer is below.

I got it from this intriguing map purports to have the answer -- not just for Ohio, but for every other state in the Union. Illinois' GDP, for instance, is roughly equal to Mexico's. Oregon's is comparable to Israel. California's GDP pal? France.

So says the map. I have no clue how old it is, and can't vouch for its accuracy. (But I don't have to. I'm not on the clock. And interesting trumps accurate anyway.)

One clear conclusion: GDP is absolutely no predictor of cycling success. Need proof? Here's a hint to the question at the top. Ohio's secret parallel-GDP nation has produced Tour de France stage winners Cadel Evans, Baden Cooke, Robbie McEwan, Stuart O'Grady, Phil Anderson and Neil Stephens, plus many other ProTour riders. (Have you guessed it yet?)

Ohio has produced ... Davis Phinney.

On the other hand, the Australian philosophy seems to be, "When you're sitting on your ass all day, you might as well sit on a bike." The land area of Oz is bigger than the whole U.S., and the Australian population is 45% larger than Ohio's. Yet our GDP is still comparable?

We must be too productive to jack around on bikes.

Me? I must be Australian.

- JN

(In the unlikely event you want more detail about the map, go here.)

Metablogging

2008-02-28T11:11:00.003-05:00

There's no doubt that by the time I've heard about something cool on the Internet, it has ceased to be cool. At a minimum, it is passe. Or, typically, it has degenerated into the existence of a crackhead, staggering toward death in a perpetually futile quest to recapture the feeling of that first high.

So when I come across a blog where the daily comments reach into the hundreds, I know I'm late to the party.

This blog -- Stuff White People Like -- might be following that rule. Its posts already draw hundreds of comments, so it's popular enough for me to hear of it, meaning it lost its cool luster some time ago.

Or maybe it's an exception. Let's watch for awhile and see. In any case, I'm white and I like the blog. So maybe the authors should write about their own blog.

Oh, yeah: It has nothing to do with cycling.

- JN

Brevity, Compatibility and Gang Bangin', bike-squad-style

2008-02-27T22:32:00.008-05:00

To find friends as nice as mine, most people have to go to prison. Not me. I ride bikes. (Lately, I'm not sure which is preferable.)
My kind friends have suggested that I've been a bit long-winded lately. "Maybe you should post more often so you don't go off on another one of those psychotic rants," one suggested the other day.
Point well taken. So I dedicate today to brevity. In the spirit of Ohio's wildly scrutinized primary election campaign, I'll just do talking-point bullets:

It figures. I just spent about $100 on a few pairs of Campagnolo socks, only to get the jolting news that Shimano has acquired Pearl Izumi. Now my sickly expensive socks will wind up being incompatible with my stupidly costly Pearl Izumi Ultramicroatomicsensor shorts, and I'll get bad shifts.
Mark my words on this: Shimano's Pearl Izumi will come out with some new standard every few years that renders all prior PI clothing obsolete and is not backward compatible. The Three-Arm Jacket, or some such. For $350.
On the subject of clothing: My Snake Bite Racing colleagues and I just got our new kits. I'm going to call them "colors," because I feel like I'm now a member of a gang. I've always wanted to be in a gang, or a "posse" of "homies," but I couldn't get past the part about getting the shit beaten out of me for initiation. But if a bike team had an initiation, it would be like getting initiated by these guys:

Yo, word: When I got made in SBR, the whole team stood around me and scratched and kicked at me and tried to pull my hair (when it was 2 mm. long instead of completely shaved off); only one blow landed, and the guy hurt his hand and couldn't shift for a month. So he called me a fag. And then they sent a young associate member after me to take me down in a race (after I crossed the finish line). Truth.

Just kidding. Gotta add the "just kidding" or someone will curb me.

There's a foot of new snow and the first highly anticipated race of the season is four days away. If you gotta race in mid-winter, though, the only place to do it is at the Mid-Ohio Raceway. My bet is that they have enough plows to make the track spotless. So it should be in perfect shape for me to get dropped on the fifth lap.
My reader demographics recently got significantly better -- or perhaps worse, but at least richer and more snooty -- when a certain erudite Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge pumped me and this sordid blog up in an email to about 50 of his high-falutin' friends. That day, the hits on my blog were off the charts. (Oops! Sorry, y'Honor -- after the whole Dudas thing, I'm probably giving you hives by putting references to you and the word "hit" in the same paragraph.) I'm imagining the folks in his email address book generally ride Sevens and Serottas. I should suck up. After all, with that kind of heft in my corner, maybe I really can shoot Lanigan and Malone after all. But just with the Crosman 760. And only with a couple pumps.

- JN