Putting an Old Soldier Back Into Service

Our little household is moving towards being a little smaller still, as one of the crew - our daughter, LB - is getting ready to head off to college. One of the things LB has asked for is the opportunity to take a bike to school so she can ride to class and otherwise use it for transportation.

When she was little, LB was frequently my cycling companion. The donor frame for my trailer project was originally a canvas child trailer, which LB had spent many hours inside, with books and snacks to entertain if watching the scenery became less interesting than desired. As she got older we moved on to her own machine, starting her out with a pink Giant with training wheels:

She cuts a pretty suave stance, does she not? This picture was taken at a trailhead, just as we were heading out for a ride together. It’s from 11 years ago, which is frankly a little hard for me to believe.

She came off the training wheels, of course, though that was a bit of a challenge - for the first little while every time we practiced, with me running alongside, she’d want to turn her head to look at me and talk. When she did this, her hands, and the handlebars within them, followed the direction of her head...

I am not a person who has the "N bikes + 1" gene, so LB’s subsequent bike history is brief - a Specialized mountain bike, purchased used, sits in-between the Giant and current day. We still have it, though it’s a little small, and we should probably find it another home. Most recently when she rides - which is not often, her interest declining with age and competing activities - she rides the Schwinn Suburban that originally belonged to her mother.

Her father (me) has offered to ride with her many times, but he is apparently "too competitive", wants to "go too far", and "doesn’t want to take breaks".

I mean, I’m probably guilty on all counts, but you think she’d give the old man some slack...

The old Schwinn - a big-box store purchase twenty some years ago or more - has gone largely unloved and unmaintained over recent years. I’ve ridden it a handful of times myself, typically in the winters, it’s knobby tires offering more purchase than those of my Cannondale road bike (though the Cannondale has also seen snow in its time):

The Schwinn, like the Cannondale, was almost entirely sidelined once I got my Catrike Pocket. A part of why I wanted the recumbent trike was for the additional stability on snow and ice - I enjoy riding in the winter, but I do not enjoy the sensation of a bicycle simply disappearing out from under me, which always happened at least once a winter. Probably my last time riding the Schwinn was the ride in which I compared it with the trike during it’s first winter.

All of this meant that the bike was going to need a little TLC to prepare it for regular use. I figured this ought to start out with a wash...

I considered taking it in to our LBS for a tune-up, but I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my Expedition, with increasing levels of success. I’ve even managed, on my last foray into maintenance, to successfully tame the dark mystery that is the derailleur with help from a video by Utah Trikes. I figured it was worth a try to do it myself. After all, I could still take it to the bike shop if there was anything I couldn't address.

It was surprisingly cooperative for a machine that has received so little attention over the past two decades. The chain and sprockets cleaned up fairly well, and with a few twists on both ends of the cables the derailleur is shifting smoothly and accurately with the grip shifters. The tires are holding air without complaint. I even put the original saddle back on it - It had been replaced with a custom saddle meant to reduce pressure on the female nether regions, but that saddle was also a soft fabric design, and the bike will sit outside most of the time while LB is at school, so the water resistant vinyl of the original seemed preferable.

It’s common for folks in the cycling community to denigrate these low end machines, and I certainly have a propensity for higher end devices myself. Still, I think these bikes absolutely have their place. Though I’m hoping she’ll catch (or re-catch) the bug someday, LB is not an avid rider and doesn’t need a carbon fiber or aluminum road bike to get her from dorm room to classroom. What she needs is something that will reliably allow her to sleep in an extra ten minutes and then successfully whisk her across campus, while not drawing undue attention from prospective bike thieves (I can only imagine how long a high-end Trek or Cannondale would last in the bike rack before being snatched up). This old girl is perfect for the task.

Alternate Cycling Universe

As the world continues to struggle with the ongoing pandemic there is ongoing discussion about the changes that it is and will cause to our lifestyles. The nature of shopping, social gathering, and working are all seeing changes.

Transportation is also being affected. Bike shops are running out of inventory as people look for a means to exercise in the out of doors and for an alternative to public transit. We see cities making changes to the ways that streets and byways are used, closing spaces to automobile traffic in favor of human-powered options.

I often find myself wondering what our society’s would look like in terms of transportation if things developed along different lines - if the development of the internal combustion engine hadn’t come along when it did, spawning our embrace of, and dependence upon, the automobile. And lately I am wondering if we might not be starting to see a bit of what might have been.

A few years ago, inspired by reading David McCullough’s Wright Brothers biography, I put together a timeline analysis of bicycle adoption. To sum it up briefly, the development of the safety bicycle - essentially our modern bicycle - happened so closely in time to the automobile that, in my humble opinion, cycling never had a chance to take hold before people had a motorized option.

What if that hadn’t happened? What if, say, the internal combustion had never been invented or perfected to the point that it could be made in a small enough package to power personal transportation?

It does seem that, prior to the introduction of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the world was not necessarily expecting such a thing to develop. A trip through cycling history sites shows that there was considerable effort in the 1800’s to develop human powered vehicles. Yes, we all know about the penny-farthing bikes of the 1870’s, but things started ahead of that...

Folks were clearly pretty inventive. They didn’t yet have the key developments - pneumatic tires, effective gearing, lightweight materials - that make our modern machines so capable, but they were clearly on the path. If those inventions had come along earlier or if, as we said, the internal combustion engine hadn’t, I suspect our transportation sector would look very different. What would that alternate universe look like?

I don’t think anyone would argue that human-powered vehicles would be routinely used for long-distance transport. I suspect we’d see rail heavily employed for that purpose. While it’s sadly insufficient here in the United States, rail is still a primary transportation mechanism in many countries around the world. Early locomotives were, of course, built on external combustion engines, so they fit with our thought experiment. Many trains now are electrically powered, and we’re going to assume development of electric systems would have progressed as they have in our current day. For the US this would be a significant change - we’d likely see railroads in the place of our interstate highway system, connecting our cities and towns, probably with express routes between major cities supplemented by regional and local lines.

I’ll pause here let my fellow US citizens picture that - it’s a mental image that takes a little while to absorb. No highways.

It would also mean no heavy motor vehicles - no long-haul or short trucks, etc. The US used to be covered with rail lines and spurs to facilitate local movement of heavy goods like grains and coal. Cyclists in the States are already familiar with that fact, at least obliquely - it’s the bulk of what Rails to Trails was built on, recovering the land from defunct rail lines.

Or - perhaps by the equivalent of current day in our alternate universe it would be more accurate to say: there would be no heavy motor vehicles with internal combustion engines. It might be the case that electric vehicle technology would have evolved sufficiently for short-haul heavy vehicles (range being a long-term problem for electric vehicles we are only now starting to solve). So - perhaps electric farm equipment, and electric trucks bringing loads to the local depot for rail transit. But I suspect that our alternate universe would have relied on animal power for moving heavy loads for much longer than our actual one did.

For virtually everything else - for short distance transportation, certainly, and possibly medium distance as well - I think we’d be looking at human-powered vehicles. After all, cycling is the most efficient known form of human transport.

One of the things about this aspect that fascinates me is trying to consider the form those HPV’s would take. I don’t take it as read that we’d all be tooling around on a typical upright, diamond-frame bicycle at this point. In our alternate universe the HPV is the primary means of transportation, and would have had nearly 200 years of development with that as a focus. In our actual universe cycling has been somewhat sidelined as a recreational activity and/or as a transportation option for children and for those who cannot afford, or are not allowed, motorized alternatives (when I say "not allowed" I am picturing the men you see riding an old bike wearing work clothes and smoking a cigarette - I suspect we all know what’s going on there...).

Without that sidelining our alternate universe might well have seen cycling technology advance at a much more rapid pace. Consider, for example, that the first derailleur system was developed between 1900 and 1910, but we didn’t really start to see bikes with multiple speed gear sets here in the US until the mid-1960’s. Now we have cycling machines with extensive gear ranges - I’ve got 30 speeds on my Catrike Expedition, for example - but those are relatively recent developments. I suspect they’d have happened sooner in our alternate history. Similarly, we’d likely have seen the adoption of more exotic materials - aluminum, titanium at least - earlier on to reduce weight.

I mentioned above that I suspect we - or at least, most of us - wouldn't be riding around on upright two-wheeled bikes. While I obviously have a bias here towards recumbent trikes, I come by it honestly. Some people come to trikes because, for one reason or another, they aren’t able to ride an upright. While there’s nothing wrong with that - I love that trikes let people continue to ride - I came to trikes because I think they are cool. Since I first saw an article on a Greenspeed, probably 15 years ago (possibly longer), I’ve wanted one. And one of the first things I thought about it was: "that is the natural evolution of the bicycle". In addition, with HPV’s being the primary form of transportation we wouldn't have been as likely to see the ban on recumbents by the UCI that is felt to have propped up the upright bike over recumbents in the 1930’s.

Not to say that I think our alternate universe denizens would necessarily be riding about on Catrikes and HP Velotechniks. Actually, I suspect people would be mostly moving about in something like a Velomobile. Particularly in less weather friendly areas, an enclosed human powered vehicle would make more sense, and riders would benefit from the aerodynamic advantages as well. I suspect they’d be somewhat different than what we see now - there would likely be a need for better cargo carrying options, though perhaps that could be managed with trailers or similar systems. Pulling a trailer is an acquired skill when it’s behind a motor vehicle. It’s considerably less intimidating a task when it’s attached to an HPV.

We are in the middle of an e-bike boom in our our actual world, and one suspects that would have happened much sooner in our alternate world. Having battery support would be needed to operate mechanical systems - wipers and ventilation systems, for example. And while it took a very long time to get electric cars with ranges that match gasoline vehicles, that range wouldn’t be necessary in our alternate reality. But having the battery support would make our HPV’s practical medium-distance vehicles. No train to the next town? It’s only 30 miles - let’s just take the Velomobile...

There are other implications as well. Streets would look different - there would be considerably less need for traffic controls - stop signs and such - and probably no need at all for stoplights. The Dutch have already demonstrated this to a considerable degree. Road surfaces would last longer without the constant pounding of one- to three-ton machines. Pedestrian injuries and traffic deaths in general would be far, far lower. People in would be far more fit, on average, given the routine cardio workout involved in traveling from place to place. Not to mention the lack of issues surrounding air pollution and all of the problems with finding, securing, drilling, refining, and transporting oil.

Will our world look more like the alternate universe we are considering here going forward? It’s hard to say for sure, but the opportunity appears to be there at the moment. The effects aren’t simply academic. Multiple European countries, particularly (but not exclusively) Denmark and the Netherlands have seen many of the benefits listed above with their focus on cycling, and we’ve already seen an improvement in air quality with the reduced automotive traffic during the shelter-at-home orders. And one expects the changes, to the degree they occur, will be seen more in the cities than in rural areas, particularly here in the States - there’s a lot of territory to cover, and that old train network is long gone. But I still enjoy the idea...

Springing Forward

About a month ago I wrote about the challenges that February seems to provide above all other months in terms of getting out and getting miles in while cycling. For myself, what I observed is that the weather in Northern Illinois, in particular, conspires against you as you try to fit those miles in.

As March rolled in it brought with it, as we all know and are living, a different world. But while that is the case, March also brought along the things that it always offers: warmer weather and longer days.

From a cycling perspective, this March turned out what is, in some respects, a surprising result - it’s my second-highest mileage month on record, and my highest month ever for total number of rides.

For the numbers folks, that’s 218.41 miles across 18 rides in the month of March, an average of 11.86 miles per trip. It’s not a lot compared to many others, but it is for me, and one should always compare one to oneself.

In the time since I’ve been keeping records - nine years now, give or take (thanks Cyclemeter) March has always been more active than February (or it has when both months are on the record - there are years back when where neither of them show up in my app). But it’s usually to a small degree - not anything like this. This year March is literally three times higher than February.

And what’s up with that? In part, I do have an overall trend of increasing my riding - this past February, while lower than its neighboring months was better than Februaries past, and year over year I’ve been increasing since 2017. But there’s more to it as well.

Life has changed for all of us to greater or lesser degrees. There are things that we simply cannot do right now, for the good of ourselves and of others. I think it’s common, in this type of situation, to look at the things we cannot do and yearn for them. But while that is a natural response, a better response is to look for what we can do.

One of the things we can do is ride. While many of us are living under Shelter at Home orders, one of the essential activities listed in those orders in most states (if not all - check your state’s order) is exercise. Illinois’ order explicitly includes exercise as a vital activity, as long as social distancing guidelines are met. Few exercise activities are as inherently suited to those guidelines as cycling.

Honestly, you have to really work hard to stay within six feet of each other on a bike or trike under most circumstances (and why would you want to?).

As the month of March progressed into madness, it started for me with continuing to go into work - I work in healthcare, though in a supportive rather than direct role - but being directed to limit contact and maintain distancing while there, and then ultimately to work from home. I work at one site three days per week, and typically take my trike in to work to ride over lunch at least one day a week, reserving the other two for collegial gatherings over food. Under these circumstances those gatherings were largely impossible, and so it just made sense to leave the trike in the car for each day.

Six days a week I also check a PO Box for work that’s about eight miles from home. Under under normal circumstances I might find the opportunity to ride instead of drive to that box maybe three times per month, maybe once per week at most. In March I took that ride six times, with three of them being over the last week of the month.

Why so many of those trips on the trike? In part, well, why not? The days are longer and my risk of running out of daylight on the way home is progressively lower (and I do have lights on the trike as well), since checking the mail is typically an end-of-the-day activity for me.

But I realize too, maybe now more than ever, cycling (and exercise in general) clears my head and centers me. Virtually all of the news we get now, and 85% of the posts on social media, is related in some way to the pandemic. Add to that the fact that, like all of us, my schedule and routine are completely altered, and when working the reality of the situation is just unavoidable as a topic in virtually every meeting; feeling stressed by all of it is inevitable. In this past week I found myself particularly dismayed by the situation, and talking to MLW about it she listened for a while, and then said to me "have you gone riding?"

And she was right.

When I got done with my ride after that, everything that had me dismayed was still a part of reality, but the effect it had on me had diminished significantly.

None of this is new - not to me and, most likely, not to you either. But even though I’ve been active most of my life I do periodically need the reminder of just how beneficial it is to go out and do things that get your body moving, get your heart rate and breathing up and running. It doesn’t have to be cycling, of course, that’s just my drug of choice - anything that gets the blood flowing is fair game.

I know others are finding this too, at least to some degree. While I was still going in to work I found the path that I typically ride on far busier than in times past. In fact, I drive past it on my way in to work each day (it’s literally right down the road), and in the mornings the parking lot, which has usually been empty in the earlier hours, was now routinely packed.

It’s vital that we remain within the guidelines being provided to us, but within those guidelines it’s also vital that we remain healthy both physically and mentally. Which is why it’s time to ride...

The Road Less Traveled

I have a section of a pretty regular route, my ride to check my mailbox, that has a couple of pretty enthusiastic dogs on it. One of them is an Australian Shepard that is clearly interested in running along and herding the trike (and routinely approaches 20 mph), and the other is a brown and white dog that is, I think, more concerned that I’m an interloper that must be dealt with (he seems, shall we say, less friendly than the Aussie). I also worry that they are out on the road when I’m riding by. These are not heavily traveled byways, but as a child in the country I lost more than one dog to the road for similar reasons.

There’s a road that more or less parallels the road the dogs are on less than a mile to the west. Taking it would avoid the dogs, add some variety to an otherwise very familiar route. It also rides through a wooded area, part of it a tiny preserve - Bartlett Woods or Knox Grove, which astonishingly has its own Wikipedia page - given to the county by a landowner a few generations ago. The road has a lot to recommend it.

The problem, of course, is that it is gravel.

I don’t love gravel roads - a topic that has come up here once or twice before. But I slowed down as I approached this road on my return trip and gave it some consideration:

As I looked down the road it was clear that it was the right kind of gravel, which is to say that it’s a gravel road with virutally no gravel on it. It was wet, so it was going to be slower and sloppier than the usual road, but I wasn’t especially in a hurry, and the combination of (presumed) canine absence and allure of variety helped me make my choice.

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I’d been down this road before by car once or twice, primarily to see the aforementioned preserve, but it had been several years. And while the first portion of the roadway was standard Illinois backroad scenery (open fields - empty this time of year), it wasn’t long before I was rewarded for choosing the road less traveled.

Most of the roads in my part of Northern Illinois hew to a grid system, but a few remnants from the era of horse and wagon routes do remain. This was no exception. As you approach the woods you can see the s-curve in the road, probably undertaken to gain the best angle for crossing the creek.

As you get there, of course, you get a view of the creek itself. This is Bureau Creek, which I’ve mentioned here many times before. Many small Northern Illinois waterways are rather dull affairs due to long-standing human intervention. The area has undergone significant alteration over the years in order to provide dry land for agriculture, and so streams and waterways were channelized in order to abet drainage. For the most part, Bureau Creek seems to have been spared that and, if anything, enhanced by additional volume from the drainage systems. In part this may be due to its size. It is unclear to me whether there is a clear, explicit definition to separate a creek from a river (and searches don’t help much on this topic), but Bureau Creek could probably have been called a river under other circumstances - in many places, for example, it is wider than the Little Vermillion River a few miles to the north.

All of this means that the views along Bureau Creek often offer exactly the sort of thing you are looking for from a waterway.

And then, rolling past the creek, you arrive at the entrance to Knox Grove.

This has not been a place well loved by the county. The little foot bridge and the sign are almost the entirety of the improvements here, and neither is new. It would be easy to look at this sort of situation and remark that it is a sad one, but it’s somewhat understandable. The woods here are small, and largely part of a watershed. When LB and I visited it years ago we found the ground soft and difficult to traverse, and she was nearly carried off by mosquitos. Not every natural area is inviting to, nor needs to be maintained for, humans.

Once past the entrance to the grove, the side-journey was pretty much over. This section of road is slightly less than two miles long, and it’s somewhat of an anachronism for our area. While northern Illinois is intensely rural, most of the backroads are paved. A few months back, when I posted about my nemesis - a particularly abusive section of rocky roadway - some folks opined that I just needed to get different tires for my trike. This is a fair suggestion, but the reality here is that gravel sections appear only intermittently. If you were looking for an extended gravel ride - and people do - I literally think about Bob Sharpe over at Old Man Gravel every time I approach a road like this - it is challenging to find continuous, connected gravel roadways in our area for more than a 3-4 mile stretch.

For me, mostly that’s just fine - pavement is my friend. But it is nice to to periodically take the less trodden fork.

Okay - time to ride...

2019 Cycling Year in Review

So it’s that time when we look back at the year that was and consider where we’ve been, what we’ve done in regard to our goals, and consider where you’d like to go from there. And here at Applied Life it’s now an annual tradition. You know, cuz I did it once before, last year.

We’ll set aside the fact that there’s nothing actually special about the end of the month of December, and further set aside the fact that a more reasonably designed calendar would end the year either on the winter solstice or the vernal equinox. But that’s what you get when you have a calendar designed by committee, so, you know, I won’t even bring that up here.

As always, it is always important to remember to compare oneself to oneself, not to others. I periodically have to remind myself of this, particularly when undertaking something like this. With that in mind, what follows is a look at _my_ year in cycling.

Distance

My goal for this past year was to get to 1500 miles. This seemed a reasonable, achievable increase from my ultimate 2018 total of 1372 miles (well, technically 1372.14, but who’s counting...).

That won’t seem like a huge increase - 1372 to 1500 - for some people, I realize. In the cycling groups I follow there are people who literally have tens of thousands of miles per year. But keeping in mind that adage of comparing oneself to oneself, it seemed reasonable at the time.

I may have undersold myself. I met the goal this year, and then sailed past it a bit, to hit a year end mark of 1722.34 miles.

In terms of the how and why, according to Cyclemeter I rode both more often, and for longer distances per ride on average. Last year I managed 106 rides, with an average distance of 12.94 miles. For 2019 I came in at 121 rides, with an average distance of 14.23 miles.

That may seem pretty elementary, and in some ways it is. But rides and distance both take up time, and it can be challenging to squeeze additional riding into my schedule. But I did make a conscious effort to increase the length of my Sunday rides, which seems to have had an effect. I’ve also tried to do a better job of taking riding opportunities where they present - for example, riding to my mailbox on days when I am working from home (it’s a 16-mile round trip to a PO Box - I’m not just riding to the end of the driveway).

It also helps sometimes when you have a new toy, which brings us to...

Machines

I know that a lot of cyclists are N+1 types (as in the right number of bikes to own is the number I have now - _N_ - plus one more). I am not. I think new bikes are cool and all - they sure do look pretty sitting there on the showroom floor. But I’m really much more the sort of person who establishes a long-term relationship with a machine. I rode my 1987 Cannondale for at least a decade before getting the Catrike Pocket, and I was set to ride off into the sunset with the little blue machine.

But I didn’t.

At the end of July I took possession of an Atomic Orange Catrike Expedition.

To be clear, was absolutely nothing wrong with the Pocket, and I’d been happy riding it for the past two years or so. But I’d purchased the Pocket as my entry into the world of recumbent trikes, a chance to see whether or not I liked it. My selection of it as a particular model was one of convenience - it came up as available on eBay, was in my price range, and was only an hour away.

It’s worked out well for all of that, but when I felt like I was finally in a position to consider getting something different, I decided to take a more considered look at what I thought would work for me and my cycling goals, and the Expedition seemed to fill the bill. I’m liking it a lot, as anyone looking back across the posts this year can see. And I suspect this will be a long-term fling.

And this doesn’t hang the Pocket out to dry. I resized it for MLW so she can have her own triking adventures.

Trips

This year, as usual, most of my rides started and ended at my driveway. But between opportunities offered by work travel, and some additional general adventurousness, I did get out to a few new trails, as well as revisited some more. Those included:

• The month of May offered an opportunity to drive down to the pointy end of the state, so I took a ride on the Tunnel Hill Trail, riding from Vienna to Karnak.
• In June I made the trip over to Sterling to tackle the Hennepin Feeder Canal trail. I managed to get very wet. Incidentally, the feeder canal provides the water supply for the Hennepin Canal. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Illinois gateway trail for the Rails to Trails coast to coast path project.
• In July I returned to the I&M Canal trail and learned a thing or two about what the rainy season can do to a trike. And then I returned again to go hunting for my lost flag (ugh).
• In August the opportunity to ride the Des Plaines River Trail presented itself.
• I rode in the Farmondo again in September.
• On Black Friday this year I decided to give the Expedition a shot at the Military Ridge Trail in southwestern Wisconsin. I did not distinguish myself in terms of either speed or distance, but I did learn a thing or two about the rolling resistance provided by wet sand, and got quite a workout in the process.

There were a couple of others that I returned to or tried but didn’t find the muse to put them down here, including two return trips to Rend Lake (one on the Pocket, one on the Expedition), and a late day adventure riding north to the titular Tunnel on the Tunnel Hill Trail (that one may still get its own post). One of my goals for last year was to explore more trails and, all in all I think I managed to get there.

Miscellaneous

I had a couple of other areas of more technical exploration in 2019:

• When I ordered the Expedition I also ordered up a pair of Shimano Spd sandals and decided to give being clipped in a try. That experiment was not successful, but I did learn some things along the way; and
• My desire (okay - need) to sometimes have coffee along for the ride led me to add a Terracycle Adjustomatic Bottle Mount to my Expedition. Besides having a product name that is just delightful, it also works very well; and
• The addition of a second trike required me to rethink the storage setup in our comparatively tiny garage. And finally
• Serendipity brought along the opportunity to get a new mobile trike garage in the form of a Subaru Outback. That experiment is more successful than the spd shoes thus far...

Next Year?

The end of the year is also the time to set goals for the new one coming.

In terms of mileage, last year I set my goal at 1500 miles. In retrospect, that seems like it may have been too safe a number, but I also find myself mentally wanting to make excuses about how I’m not sure where or how I would fit much more riding into my schedule. I’m sure I’m not the only person that struggles with that issue - as I said before, distance equals time. Still, I think I need to at least shoot for a 2000 mile goal.

There - I said it. Now we’ll see if I can actually _do_ it...

Last year I said I wanted to explore more trails. I’d like to do a little more of that for 2020 - I think there are a handful of routes in areas I visit that I haven’t yet taken advantage of. But I’d really like to manage a couple of options that I didn’t achieve from last year:

• I would really like to finally make it from LaSalle to Ottawa along the I&M Canal Trail. I tried this year, but was stymied by mud and... well... just so much mud. And I didn’t make it back later in the season, when the rain finally had tapered off.
• Similarly, I didn’t make that trip further down the Hennepin Canal Trail. I did, as noted above, take a ride along the feeder canal, but I didn’t make it back down for the main event. Portions of the Hennepin Canal trail were closed during the rainiest parts of this spring (this is something that, hopefully, Rails to Trails has a plan for sorting out), but again, didn’t take the opportunity to return to it later in the season.

And along these lines, I’d like to see if I can’t find a way to fit the occasional stop in at restaurants or taverns along those routes. This is a thing that I’ve often considered, but with one exception - the Lodi Tap in Utica, following my struggles with the mud along the I&M canal trail (did I mention the mud?) - I usually just keep going (I’m a fairly solitary soul by nature). But I think that would add to the variety along the way.

And finally, I need to finish my trailer project. I’ll be honest here and admit that part of the issue is that working on the trailer directly competes with riding - both are spare time activities, and faced with doing one or the other, I’ve generally chosen to ride. I may need to bring it inside and do some work when the winter snowstorms rise up.

So: that’s it for 2019. Come on 2020 and show us what you’ve got!

Frostbike - A Review

One could be forgiven for thinking that a book about cycling in the cold months of the year would have a very narrow field of interest. After all, it’s a pretty small group of people who even want to venture out to do anything in winter’s chill, much less spinning pedals on a decidedly weather-exposed machine. Indeed, for myself I first heard about Frostbike: The Joy, Pain, and Numbness of Winter Cycling by Tom Babin through the Winter Cycling group on Facebook. This is an excellent, and well moderated group, but it’s group that exists in part because a relatively small number of people share the interest. And, of course, those folks are nuts, right?

It turns out that this perspective is, in fact, a distinctly North American one. As Babin notes, here in the US and Canada...

What usually happens when winter rolls in is that the number of cyclists tumbles, and those who do it are seen as zealots or oddballs.

As the book makes clear, however, there are other parts of the world that do not share our way of thinking. Babin explicitly describes arriving at the airport in Oulu, Finland, and finding that the bike routes not only came directly to the front door of the airport, but they were being actively used. And he was there in February.

That’s right - Finland. in February.

But none of that was what I expected when I purchased Frostbike and downloaded to my Kindle last spring. I bought it last March, at the end of the winter riding season, purposely planning on holding off reading it until things got chilly here at the end of the year. I was anticipating a book about the author’s personal journey towards becoming a winter cyclist, and I figured that would help me with mentally gearing myself up for the next season. And the book does include that journey - I suspect Tom Babin’s beginnings with the world of cold-weather pedaling will be familiar to many winter cyclists. But Tom Babin is a journalist and cycling advocate from Calgary, and Frostbike extends well beyond his personal journey.

Frostbike explores the bigger picture of understanding where people have been historically with respect to cycling and winter, as well as literally journying to cities around the world to see how other cities - cities where there is actual, real winter - handle cycling.

It’s not too big a spoiler to say that they handle it well. Of Oulu, Finland, Babin writes:

I realized I had probably, in just a few minutes, seen more people riding in the snow than I ever had in my life.

From Finland he also travels to Copenhagen to keep his perspective from being too narrowly focused, and finds a similar picture. And when he asks people there why they ride in the winter the answer is both surprising and simple:

The reasons people ride bikes in the winter, he said, are the same reasons they ride bikes in the summer–doing so is quick and convenient. You just have to dress for it.

The book also takes time to investigate why we seem to have such a different perspective in North America from Northern Europe when it comes to winter cycling and, frankly, just winter in general. Where he arrives is illuminating, and for myself placed the finger finally on the nose of a phenomenon I’ve been trying to mentally sort out for years. I remember, as a kid, enjoying being outside in the winter weather, and having friends routinely joining me. I still enjoy it, but I no longer have company in those pursuits. He hits the nail on the head with his observations and conclusions in this area. I won’t give it away here, but I will offer this quote as a teaser:

For Canadians, and perhaps many North Americans, complaining about the weather has become second nature, our default way of relating to each other.

You will see the cycling advocate in this work as well. In particular, he does an able job of outlining whether, and why, cycling infrastructure should be supported and maintained in winter months, and it involves a hard look at whether there are other facilities that municipalities develop despite not having year-round applications...

Going in, it is good to be aware that the book is very much focused on learning about and developing winter cycling for urban settings. This should, perhaps, not be surprising - that’s where the bulk of cycling focus seems to be, where the majority of people are to be found, and arguably urban areas are where cycling has the most benefit to offer in terms of reducing congestion. There is some discussion about the development of fatbikes, and it was interesting to read the history in that area, but it’s ultimately in service of the author’s efforts to determine which type of bike will work best for his (urban) winter commute. I would have liked a little more about the broader world of winter riding. Still, my hope for more on the wider world of winter cycling was an expectation the author did not promise, and was not obligated to meet.

There is also a section at the end of the book, styled as an addendum, offering up tips for winter cycling. It’s brief, but practical, and will be helpful for new adventurers. I’m certain that the existing, died in the wool cool kids will have disagreements with the author’s recommendations, but then again, they don’t really need the tips either.

If you have an cyclist on your holiday shopping list, or if you are just interested yourself in looking into winter cycling around the world, Frostbike (I love the play on words with the title, and iOS autocorrect, incidentally, hates it) is an excellent read. It’s available in hard copy and Kindle through Amazon. (Regular readers will be aware that I usually listen to my books, but Audible doesn’t (yet) carry this particular tome).

Enjoy. Now it’s time to ride. In the cold...

Harvest Roads

Here in Northern Illinois the harvest season is well underway. This means multiple changes to the landscape - both figuratively and literally - from a cycling perspective.

Country backroads are a boon to cycling because they are typically quiet thoroughfares with minimal traffic. As a bonus, in my area at least, they are mostly paved, and so offer that solitude of cycling without having to contend with the evil of gravel. But when the corn and beans start to come down things change. These once quiet byways become busy, occupied with trucks and machinery as farmers go about plying their trade.

And when I say trucks and machinery, the and is somewhat important. On most days out my way you’ll perhaps occupy road space with a full-size pickup or the occasional box truck (think UPS or FedEx). But this time of year you may also encounter a variety of farm implements - combines and tractors pulling grain wagons, along with the grain trucks themselves - that are not typically present the rest of the year.

If you think you feel tiny cycling by a full-size pickup, a couple of minutes riding side-by-side with a combine or tractor with wagons in tow is a real eye-opener. And I say “a couple of minutes” because they aren’t fast-moving vehicles. When they pass you it takes a while. It pays dividends to simply slow down and let it go by more quickly.

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The composition of the roadways changes too, in a way. The process of harvesting produces a lot of botanical detritus that often ends up scattering across the roadways. Mostly this is in the form of portions of corn cobs, husks, and stalk that eventually just blow away in our prevalent prairie wind. This year, however, it’s been unusually wet - both rain and our early snow for the year - and so the detritus mixes with the prodigious amounts of mud pulled up and then dropped from the treads of machine tires. This makes for some new challenges...

Each time I come up to one of these sections I am very pleased to have fenders.

The rest of the changes are in the literal landscape. What has been a world of roadways walled with corn interspersed with breaks of pasture and beans and occasional houses is now mostly open rolling and flat. For a brief period of time the cornfields, in particular, look to display the aftermath of some great battle (which, in a way, I suppose they do). The world is now open and, from some angles, virtually endless off to the horizon.

These changes also change the nature of the wind patterns. For a substantial portion of the summer and early autumn you can count on the stands of stalks to function as a windbreak from some angles, and as a channel from others. Now, as they get cut away, the wind is increasingly diffuse and ever-present.

One of my favorite parts, visually speaking, is the in-between time. As the combine starts cutting its way through there are suddenly openings, apparent pathways through the corn that, however, briefly, give the impression of new worlds to find if one were just to follow down them.

(One does not, of course, because one does not wish to become a farming accident. It’s interesting and momentarily a little romantic, but you gotta live in the real world...).

These patterns of change are part of the joy of riding out in rural roadways here in the midwest. Every time of year has something to offer, something to see.

Now - time to ride and see what’s different today...

Rural Bike - Part Two - my Candidate

So - a couple of weeks ago I laid out my thoughts on what the criteria were for identifying the ideal Human-Powered Vehicle (HPV) for rural life. If you are starting here, you may want to go back to that post. I will admit, tho, I got a little lost in childhood nostalgia and youth shaming, so if you are looking for the TL:DR on the criteria, they were:

• The machine must be capable of covering long distances - 10-20 mile round trips - comfortably on open secondary roads.
• It must be a human powered vehicle. It’s fine if it’s amenable to electric assist, but it cannot rely upon battery power.
• It must be able to contend with varied weather and road conditions. Generally this is going to mean:
  • Some type of effective fender system.
  • Being stable and functional with a load under high wind situations.
• Be capable of carrying cargo - the Bike Design Project specified their urban guidelines around a gym bag or a single bag of groceries, which makes sense for their purposes. For a rural lifestyle, a larger carrying capacity would be needed - I’d say the ability to manage 3-4 full paper grocery bags (or equivalent volume), with those groceries including at least one full gallon of milk. The machine should be able to manage that load on all rural road surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and hills.
• Be capable of remaining stable and upright under load. This criteria is borrowed from the Bike Design Project, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Your machine has to be able to stand safely on its own if you have to get off of it when it’s fully loaded. Otherwise you’ll break your eggs, have to chase your oranges down the road, and cry over your spilled milk...
• Must be capable of a reasonable average speed over flat(ish) terrain when operated by a rider who rides regularly. Here let’s say reasonable is an average of at least 10-12mph. I think any slower and it risks even dedicated riders avoiding use in favor of a car.
• Be a durable machine capable of many years of use with basic maintenance.
• Be capable of using aftermarket lighting and visibility systems for effective forward and rearward visibility.
• We are looking for a type of machine here, not a specific brand or new design. What sort(s) of HPV meets these criteria?

At the risk of offering up an early spoiler, I’ll freely admit here that my candidate for meeting these criteria will likely be unsurprising to regular readers:

The Recumbent Trike

"Oh, well of course," you say. "You see here, Martha, I told you last time that’s the way it was going to go. He set this whole damn thing up to justify his love for those gorram three wheeled contraptions."

"You did say so dear," Martha replies. "You did say so".

"Harrumph!" you say. "That’s it. It’s clear now: He’s in the pocket of big trike."

Ok - first, good on you for pulling out an actual "harrumph!" That’s a word that really doesn’t get its due nowadays, and deserves a comeback.

Secondly, I am not in the pocket of big trike. I’m not actually sure that such a thing exists, and if it does, I am quite noticeably not in their pocket. Noticeably so because I’d happily jump into the pocket of big trike and roll around in those lovely big trike dollars. Hello? Anyone out there in the great trike conglomerate listening... anyone...?

Ahem. Anyway, yes, my response is somewhat predictable, but let me defend myself. First, I want to clarify and add some detail and distinctions. I wrote "the recumbent trike" above, but what I really mean to say is:

A Recumbent Trike with a Trailer

There, see? It’s a lot different now. Right?

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The thing is, although it may seem somewhat like I’m leaning towards the thing I’ve already chosen, the reality is that rural transportation was a big part of what I had in mind when I chose to get a trike. As I mentioned last time, I grew up riding around the countryside, and when we moved back a decade or so ago I realized that, while I enjoyed riding my road bike around the area, there were a number of factors for which it was not ideal. This came into clearer and clearer focus particularly as I began to expand my riding "season" into a year round enterprise. You only have to have an upright bike disappear out from under you once or twice on a January morning before you realize that, although you rode all over the place as a kid, you only did it in the summer, and that you didn’t need much carrying capacity to bring home a half-dozen comic books.

Taking a look back in my journal verifies that this has been on my mind for quite a while. I wrote about the Evo and The Bike Design Project back in August of 2014. While that work was specifically for Applied Life, it really got me thinking about the rural bike question. Three of the four subsequent entries in my journal touch on this topic (yes, I also write about cycling for myself. It’s a thing, ok? I’m not proud...). On August 3rd of 2014 I wrote:

The demands for country and small town biking are certainly different than they are for urban settings... On first blush, frankly, I think something like a tadpole trike with a trailer would likely be ideal - essentially the pickup truck of the biking world.

And a week later, on the 13th, I wrote:

The more that I consider it, the more useful a trike and trailer seem to me for the type of transport need rural biking presents.

Why am I taking you down this trip thru my journal entries? Mostly because these were from 2014 - three years before I actually got a recumbent trike.

We moved out to our Homestead in the late spring of 2009. By summer 2014 I’d been riding as an adult out in the hinterlands for five years, and been thru my first year of winter riding. I’d had a fair amount of riding time on an upright across the open prairie to consider against for thinking thru what might work better out here. And of course, I’ve been testing that idea over the past two years or so.

So - all that said - here’s my rationale against the criteria to explain why I think a recumbent trike (with a trailer) is possibly the perfect rural HPV approach:

Long Distance in Comfort

I’ve been riding most of my life, and I’ve ridden a lot of different types of diamond frame bikes. I spent most of the decade prior to getting the Catrike Pocket riding a 1987 Cannondale SR400 - an aluminum road bike.

The furthest I ever rode the Cannondale in a single outing was just under 27 miles, and that just once. Otherwise rides were more typically in the 8-15 mile range, with occasional jaunts in the 18-22 mile territory. I started tracking mileage with Cyclemeter in 2011, and my best year with the Cannondale was 2014, where I managed 752.47 miles over 69 rides, with an average distance of 10.91 miles per ride.

My first year with the Pocket - 2017 - I rode 937.51 miles; 83 rides with an average distance of 11.30 miles per ride. To put that in perspective, I got the Pocket in early June - nearly halfway thru the year. 808.31 of those 937.51 miles - 86% - are on the Pocket. I rode further on the Pocket in its first seven months with me than I’d ridden for the entirety of 2014, my best year on the Cannondale.

I loved - and still love, at least in concept - the Cannondale. It’s a sleek and elegant machine; it’s lovely, lightweight, and fast. It’s also beastly uncomfortable, and has become progressively more so as I’ve gotten older. This includes both the creeping pain on the backside during the ride, and the tension across the back of the neck that would start on the bike and continue for the following day or two. That factor absolutely limited my riding time.

For a while I thought it was available ride time that was limiting me when I was on the Cannondale. Longer rides - 20-30 mile and further jaunts - can eat up a couple of hours on a precious weekend day and really cut into the time available for other things. But that limitation seems to have just dropped away with the recumbents. The Pocket is slower than the Cannondale, and yet I started to routinely ride further. I think to some degree I was kidding myself that the discomfort wasn’t an issue.

I’m certainly not the only person who has reached this conclusion. Matt Galat at Ja Yoe! writes and talks about comfort over time being a primary factor in his choice of a trike for his world tours.

I think sometimes we have a tendency to set aside comfort - when it comes to cycling we may feel like we should be willing to sacrifice that for the other benefits. But the reality is that when the activity is less comfortable it becomes less desirable, and as a result we tend to engage in it less. And the purpose for this thought experiment is to look at using the machine for at least semi-regular transportation in rural settings. Rural riding for transport means distances, and particularly choosing to cycle rather than to drive. Cars have a lot to offer here - choosing a less comfortable option to ride out of misguided principle is likely to result primarily in just choosing to drive.

Contending with the Weather

Rural riding often means contending with less than ideal weather conditions. Here I’m not talking about rain - we can probably all agree that, if it’s raining, the rural transportation cyclist is going to opt for their car. But the reality is that in much of the world, and especially in the US Midwest, rural means wind.

Drive through the rural midwestern countryside for any length of time and you will repeatedly come across stands of white turbines, pointed into the breeze, propellers spinning slowly, but inexorably. It’s a view I’m very familiar with - I can see it from every window in my house.

Though I have, believe it or not, had people ask me whether the turbines make it windy, the reality is that there’s a reason there’s so much focus on wind power out on the prairie and plains. It’s always been a little surprising to me that harvesting wind power didn’t start sooner out here. Of course, the impact from the cyclist’s perspective is that, as delightful as it is to have a 15 or 20 mph tailwind, it’s a bitch-kitty when you are riding into it headlong. If you are riding for purpose - to the store, say - the extra weight of your cargo and the oppositional press of the wind will seem to have a multiplying effect against your effort.

While the wind doesn’t go away when you are riding a recumbent trike, the lower profile of the machine does make a difference. What’s more, the stability of having three wheels under you means that there is no risk of falling over when the wind brings speed down to a crawl; and equally so, little to no risk of blowing over when dealing with an oppressive side wind. Dealing with the wind like this was a key factor in Maria Leijerstam’s choice of a trike for her successful ride to the South Pole, a ride in which she started after two competitors on upright bikes, and arrived ahead of them. She also cited the stability of the trike allowing her to successfully manage a shorter, but steeper route than the other record hopefuls - she didn’t have to worry about falling over.

Being in a lower profile to the wind is also just more comfortable most of the time, especially when it’s cold. I detailed my own experience with the difference between riding upright and recumbent in the cold and snow a while back. Getting down out of the wind, relatively speaking, makes for a warmer - or at least less cold - ride in chilly times.

Stability

That reference to snow brings up the other important advantage - stability regardless of conditions. While it’s not for everyone, there are absolutely people who ride year round. When the ground gets slippery - whether due to rain or snow or dirt or gravel - three wheels are going to be more likely to stay under you than will two. I’ve ridden both upright and recumbent in the snow, and read the accounts of many other like-minded souls. There is virtually no one who rides on two wheels in the white stuff who hasn’t had the experience of a bike just... disappearing out from under them. For just a moment you are like Wile E. Coyote, right after he’s run off the cliff - you hang there in mid air.

...And then: pain.

Fat bikes and winter tires make that better, but they don’t eliminate the issue of falling the way that third wheel does. I’m not saying it’s not possible to wipe out on a trike - I have it on good authority that it can be done. You know, from... other people. But it’s still more stable.

Carrying that Load

The relative stability makes a difference here as well when conditions - weather or hills or weight - cause the going to be slow. On an upright machine, when the speed drops below a given speed it becomes harder and harder to keep the bike vertical. Maintaining balance is a non-issue on a trike. This can become vital when hauling things - remember, our criteria is to be able to carry four full paper bags worth of groceries, including at least one gallon of milk. The jug of cow juice is eight and a half pounds all by itself, and a paper grocery bag can supposedly hold up to 25 pounds, so those four bags could conceivably come out somewhere near 100lbs of groceries.

I don’t think for a second anyone is actually going to fill those bags up to a full Benjamin, but the reality is that the weight, particularly when combined with hills, wind, or both, will potentially slow things down considerably. The tripod position, combined with the very low gearing most trikes have on the bottom end, can make the distance between continuing to pedal up the rise or falling over (or having to get off and walk it).

I had a little experience with this without the use of a trailer earlier this year, hauling an empty LP canister into town and bringing back the full exchange. A full canister comes in around 34 or 35lbs, and my trike managed it well. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it on an upright bike, but I suspect it would have been considerably more challenging.

Speed

I set a minimum speed criteria for this thought experiment because I think its a relevant detail - if the trip to and from the destination is too slow, I think folks are going to go for motorized options. Trikes aren’t the speediest form of HPV available, to be sure, but I am certain there are models that can meet the 10-12 mph average I set here - when I hauled that LP canister back and forth with my Expedition I had my slowest time ever on that route, but my average speed still came in over 13mph. Would an upright cargo bike be faster? Maybe, but I think there’d be some question about that when dealing with a full load.

But there are limits. Just as there are trikes, there are quads out there, and they would also have many of the advantages of a trike - stability and comfort, for example. But I suspect the additional weight would risk bringing such a machine in below the speed criteria.

The Other Stuff

The first four points - comfort, weather management, stability, and ability to manage load - are ultimately the reasons I look at recumbent trikes as being the ideal candidate for rural human-powered transport. It is also important that the machine chosen be something that is durable and can be expected to last many years with basic, and the trikes that I own and have looked at seem to fit this bill. They are more complicated than a standard diamond frame bike, to be sure, and there are areas you need to attend to when owning and riding them. These are not significantly more complicated than with an upright machine, however, and well worth the trade off in capabilities.

The one primary difference out in rural areas - and admittedly a potential limitation - is that if you have a local bike shop, odds are that they have limited experience with trikes. You will want to learn a thing or two about bike maintenance under those circumstances. However, I suspect this is ultimately a reality of rural cycling in general. My "localest" bike shop is twenty miles away. The folks there are great, but it’s an hour round trip to have them work on my machine. I’d imagine a lot of other folks in rural settings are in a similar situation.

In terms of lighting and such, most trikes provide an abundant number of locations for placing such equipment and can be made to work with standard bike items with little to no effort. The wider frame, particularly in the back, arguably provides a more visible profile to attach lighting to, and provides the option a more varied lighting pattern for motorists to see.

Rearward vision is different on a trike. You have to have mirrors to see behind you - you cannot just look back and easily get a gauge on what’s behind you. However, for rural riding on an upright I’d argue that you really need to have mirrors as well. Looking back is uncomfortable even when you are up in the wind, and I found I felt much more aware of my surroundings once I put a mirror on my road bike back in the day. This is doubly the case for the trike.

Disadvantages

There are a couple of potential disadvantages to using a trike for rural transport, though I think they are limited. Probably the biggest thing is that they are more challenging to move around and park. They are sometimes heavier, and always bulkier than an upright bike, so it’s harder to simply pick one up and move it around. They take up more ground space, so they don’t easily just plug into a standard bike rack and you can’t just lean them up against a building or post. It takes some creativity to figure out how to securely lock them to things.

These same factors do affect storage, and while many rural folks have a fair amount of space to keep things, those who do not will have to be more creative in that respect.

However, none of these things are insurmountable, and I don’t think they take away from the overall advantage of the platform.

Summing Up

So there you have it - my candidate for the ideal type of rural human powered vehicle, or, more colloquially, rural bike. As I’ve said, I’m certain regular readers will not be surprised where I fall on this, but the reality is that rural riding is a large part of why I got a trike in the first place (the rest of it was because I thought they were really cool).

Others, I’m certain, have other ideas for what works best and/or their own thoughts about why I am wrong here. There are certainly other styles of cargo bikes out there, often with a rakish, military-look to them that can certainly be attractive. But this one is my choice, and one that I’m finding works well for my version of rural transportation.

Ok - time to ride...

Winter Cycling Unpreparedness

The introduction of November has been pretty chilly for us here in Northern Illinois. Over the first weekend of the month I was riding with snow accompanying me along the sides of the road:

The irony is that, looking at the weather conditions that accompany that ride on Cyclemeter, it was about 51° while I was out and about. The snow, in the relative protection of the ditch, hadn’t quite gotten the message.

But the reality is that most of our days over the first third of the 11th month have been in the unusually cold category. This doesn’t stop the cycling, of course, but it does mean some changes have to be made in terms of gearing up for the rides.

And there lies the struggle.

Now begins the time when I realize that I may not be fully aware as to the location in which I stored all of my cold weather riding gear. I mean, I’m certain that at the end of the last use I put them in a perfectly logical location to make them easy to find the following season. Unfortunately, November Erin is not in the same mindset as April Erin, and I think that guy might have been a bit squirrelly anyway...

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So then comes the internal discussion: did you put your balaclava and gloves in with the rest of the family gloves and hats? That would make sense, right?

But one pile of hats and gloves on the floor later, and they are nowhere to be found.

"Perhaps" you say, "perhaps you left them in a pocket or a sleeve of your winter coats or vests". And then you nod knowingly: "perhaps April Erin didn’t put them away at all". Because that guy can sometimes be a bit of a slacker.

And this can be kind of interesting because you then realize that you have cool and cold weather items that you had forgotten about in the intervening months:

"Yup - gotta break out that light leather jacket while it’s still in the reasonable temperature range".;

And:

"Oh - I forgot about that down vest." And then gaze admiringly at the color.

(Yes, it’s orange - specifically burnt orange. No points for guessing that one).

All of this to finally think "is it possible I just put them on the closet shelf with my other cycling gear? Could it be that simple?"

Yes, dumbass, it’s that simple. Heaven only knows why that wouldn't have been the first place you’d look, but now at least you have a mental inventory of all of the rest of the winter gear for the house. Because you needed one of those. For some reason...

The struggle continues, a bit, with what to wear when. It’s a tenet of cold weather riding that you want to be layered and, if possible, vented, so that you can open things up and/or remove them as you get warmer. But there are areas where that’s harder - particularly your feet. And so I’ve had one outing over the past few days where I decided to go with wool socks and sandals - committing a fashion crime to split the difference on foot warmth. As to my level of success, well, I’ll report back when I can feel my feet again.

All kidding aside, once it’s all out and I start using it regularly, there really won’t be any difficult with it. But fall in the midwestern US is an ongoing struggle where what was appropriate clothing this morning is too much by afternoon and simply inadequate by night. That effect is amplified when riding.

But, regardless, now that I’ve finally found my stuff (dumbass), it’s time to ride...

The Nemesis

I love riding through the countryside - the majority of my time cycling is done on rural thoroughfares, viewing the grass (yes - and corn and hay and soybeans) of the open prairie. But there is one part of rural riding that I simply cannot bring myself to love:

Gravel.

When I was young many of the roads out here in northern Illinois were gravel, including the one upon which our homestead currently sits. As time has gone on, however, gravel has progressively moved aside in favor of tar and chip, resulting in fewer rocks thrown, fewer dusty cars, and fewer bikes disappearing out from under you due to an errant stone.

It’s that last part that has always been the primary problem with riding on gravel for me. As a kid I had a friend who lived about three miles away by gravel, and the challenge was always getting myself to mentally work past the fear of struggling with the treacherous rock surface in order to get there. Most of the parcels are about a mile square, so after a while I solved this by riding the other way around the block to his house (hey, I was a kid - give me a break!). It was technically further by about a quarter mile or so each way, paved, and so far more comfortable, and likely faster, because picking your way around the rocks is usually very slow going.

As an adult I’m riding longer distances and can, with some recon and the help of mapping software, lay out routes that avoid the gnarly substrate. And typically this is exactly what I do. About the only time of year that I routinely embrace the gravel roads is in the winter, when their evil has been rendered impotent by dint of a layer of fine white powder. But there are times, on a few routes, when brief bits of gravel figure in and I have to weather my way through the stone. I typically avoid those routes, but it’s nice to add in the variety from time to time.

The challenge of gravel was somewhat tamed with my transition to primarily riding recumbent trikes. One of the primary difficulties - the sudden vanishing of the machine - is eliminated with this change. And that does make it more pleasant. While the ride is still rough, and the going is slower, a route with a mile or two of gravel connecting one point to another is often workable.

But there is one exception. Not far from my home is a mile or so of gravel that is, quite possibly, the most hateful bit of pathway in the tri-county area. This mile of jagged rock and stone is the Sauron to the simple orcs of the other chipped stone byways.

Yup - that’s an actual picture of the road right there.

Ok - so no, not really. This is an actual pic of it:

There are two factors that make this road stand out. The first is that the surface seems to be made up of unusually large and rough stone. I don’t know if this is just the first surface they treat and so it gets the extra-large substrate off the top, or whether this is just so lightly traveled they don’t think anyone will notice.

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The second factor is the hill. There are a couple of them on the road, but the one at the East end, just before it rejoins the pavement and the twentieth century, is relatively steep. Now it’s not that I mind climbing a hill or two when I’m riding - this generally just adds to the challenge, as any cyclist knows. But the combination of the angle and the very loose gravel means that it’s extremely challenging to maintain purchase with the rear wheel. This would be a problem on an upright bike, where your back end would be slipping sideways out from under you, risking a topple. It’s a slightly different issue on the trike. The couple of times I’ve ridden this road on the Pocket what I’ve found on this hill is that I end up sitting there in first gear, functionally immobile while my rear wheel spins free in the rock. Sometimes the rear wheel throws away enough stone that it gains purchase for a move forward of, say, six inches, before then repeating the sequence over again. Each time I’ve tackled this on the Pocket I’ve ended up getting off and taking the ignominious step of walking the trike up the hill.

So, you might ask, if you hate it so much why would you ride on it again? And I would say that’s an excellent question, and one that could probably be answered by the simple admission that I’m a bit of an idiot. However, not wanting to make that admission, let me now try, perhaps a little to hard, to suggest that there are reasons:

• First, taking this road alters two of my favorite routes by cutting the longer one shorter, and adding distance to the shorter - it makes for a 25-mile ride while going longer would be 29, and shorter would be 20; and sometimes 25 miles is the distance you want.

• Second, the quality of gravel roads changes with time and wear, and I was wondering if this road had perhaps now been used enough to make it less hateful.

• Third, while this mile or so of stone demon had been a severe struggle on the Pocket, I’m now riding my Expedition, which has a longer wheelbase, wider track, and bigger wheels. I wanted to see how the new trike tackled it.

Ok, if I’m being honest, it’s 98% the third option there, and 2% of just throwing in the other two so that I could make a list and seem a little less dumb. The Expedition is a different machine. I’ve ridden it on less severe gravel roads and gotten through just fine - I wanted to see how it managed this... thing.

This section of the highway to hell essentially constitutes mile 23 of the 25-mile ride I have laid out. That means I’ve already expended a fair amount of energy once I get to it. I could reverse the route and tackle this very early into the ride, but that erases the challenge of the hill at the east end, and that was part of what I wanted to learn about for the new trike, so there we were.

The first thing that I realized when I pulled on to it is that it hasn’t worn down since the last time I saw it.

It’s still full of large, blocky stone, with very little by way of tire ruts to offer softer purchase. There are only two houses on this stretch of road, and one of them is just off the pavement, so I suspect there’s just very little traffic here to make for that wear and tear. Good for the road crews, but no so much for me. I did briefly wonder, just as when I was a kid, how bad, really, I wanted to do this, and considered whether just going another four miles or so around it wouldn't be better. But no, dammit, this is what I’d come to do.

The fIrst clear impression I got from it was that it was just going to be painfully slow going. The resistance from the rock and tire slippage, along with the jarring nature of the ride, meant that I was going to need to pick my along in low gear even on flatter portion of the road. And that lack of wear and tear meant that, although you could see evidence of automotive travel within the stone, tire ruts were very shallow, and still mostly covered in rock. They helped where they were present but not, you know, a lot.

And slow it was. On Cyclemeter’s speed graph you can see the portion where I seem to have slipped into a pool of molasses:

The slow pace really does a fine job of prolonging the agony and allowing a person to reconsider their choices in life. Not just the choice to take this section of road, mind you, but all of their choices. Because it took me three and a half weeks to traverse this mile of roadway. Three and a half weeks! Or about 15 minutes, but I swear it sure felt like a lot longer than that.

I’d like to tell the hero’s tale of how I persevered through grit and determination here, but mostly I just felt sorry for myself as I pressed on, working my way up to that stupid hill so I could see if the difference in layout would make a difference in climbing up it. And more than once it occurred to me that I could have approached from the other side, just ridden down the hill, and then ridden back up it to answer the question. I didn’t have to ride the whole distance.

Of course, it occurred to me in the middle of the ride down that road. Because I’m an intrepid explorer. Or an idiot.

But here’s the deal: when I got to that hill, I was all prepared to find myself needing to dismount and shamefully walk my trike up over the rise.

But I didn’t.

The Expedition, in its lowest gear, crawled its way up that slippery hill and crested the summit. (Yes, it’s still northern Illinois and no, there aren’t really any summits, but come on - it was a lot of work - allow me some creative license here).

I was pretty pleased and duly impressed. The difference in geometry, and maybe the fact that the pannier bags are directly over the rear wheel as opposed to in the frame like they are on the Pocket, seems to have made the difference.

So what this means in practice, I guess, is that I don’t have to have quite so much trepidation about approaching the average gravel road. If the Expedition can pick it’s way successfully along this detestable behemoth of a “road”, it should be able to handle the other, far less problematic sections that I encounter on my other routes. I’d already seen a bit of that, of course, but until this I couldn’t be sure about the more problematic surfaces in the area.

Gravel riding is a thing, now, and some people just love it. Gravel bikes are out there, and there are various ways to fit out machines to make them more suitable for tackling the rocks. For myself, having mostly moved on to machines of the three-wheeled persuasion, there are fat trikes out there and many brands of trike can have their wheelsets converted to allow for this. For my part, I encounter gravel infrequently, and so I’d rather not deal with the trade offs - heavier wheels, slower machines - that come with specializing in gravel. Instead, I prefer - and am pleased to find - that my primary machine be suited to the road, but be able to manage the rocks on rare occasion. Fortunately, as this otherwise painful ride has shown, it seems to be up to it.

Okay - Time to ride...

Rural Bike Part 1

The ideal urban bicycle is a recurring theme in the overall cycling world. Comb through bike magazines and websites and you will see it come up periodically. Generally the discussion and debate centers around the features that a bike needs for the urban cyclist who will be using it as their primary means of transportation. There has even been a contest or two towards designing such a machine. I put forward my vote on that front as well.

You can understand why this comes up with respect to urban settings. Traffic congestion paired with a growing interest in alternative transportation makes the question a poignant one, and the needs of the urban lifestyle offer an interesting puzzle to solve in this respect. For example, because the inner-city cyclist may have to carry their machine up multiple flights of steps you want the machine to be relatively lightweight, but it still must be durable enough to manage the reality of city streets, and ideally not be constructed of a material that will make it costly to build or repair. And, of course, that’s just one bullet point; there are multiple other factors to consider.

Back when I became aware of the contest and this theme in general I began to wonder about the other side of this: what makes for an ideal rural bike?

It’s not a question that comes up in magazines or on websites often, and I suspect that’s for a number of reasons. Rural areas don’t have the traffic congestion issues that urban travelers contend with, of course, nor the population strain that suggests impending limits on the use of motor vehicles. Travel down any city highway during rush hour and you can see that we really are approaching our limits - if we haven’t already reached or exceeded them in practical terms - for the ongoing use of independently owned and operated automotive travel in those areas.

But out in the country? There’s no rush hour. I mean, sometimes you have a stack-up of traffic while you wait for a train or get behind a tractor, and sometimes you end up with two or more people at the four-way stop at the same time (gasp! - who goes first? Think, think, mentally pull up the rules of the road book...), but otherwise it just isn’t a thing.

There’s also the realistic question that I suspect many people would ask: is it even practical to consider cycling as transportation in rural areas? The distances are longer, of course, and the travel is often for different purposes. The urban cyclist may ride to the store or market to get groceries, but the store is probably only a few blocks away, and the proximity means they can shop frequently for a smaller volume of product, making cycling a practical alternative. The rural counterpart is going to want to purchase things in larger amounts due to distance (I can tell you for a fact that no one out in the hinterlands ever allows the toilet paper to get down to a single roll in reserve...). And given all that, isn’t everyone living out in the boondocks just going to get a truck?

Well... no and yes.

Unlike city living it’s really not the case out in the country that you can go without owning some type of automobile. In urban and suburban areas there are multiple alternatives to draw on, from traditional taxis and buses to Uber and Lyft and car sharing services like Zipcar, when a self-propelled, weather protected option is needed. Versions of those services might eventually find their way to the remote climes, but they generally aren’t there yet (tho I did see a ZipCar in Dixon, Illinois this past summer, so maybe...). There are just times when the weather, or the mission, will make for the need to have a motor vehicle.

Still, that need for an automobile doesn’t mean that it wouldn't be possible for a substantial portion of routine travel in rural areas to be made via an HPV (Human Powered Vehicle). In fact, I can verify that when I was a kid my friends and myself did it all the time. Up until a certain age it was the only way to get around if your parents weren’t able or willing to take you. And they often were not:

Me: Mom, can you give me a ride to Matt’s house?

Mom: You’ve got a bike don’t you? Get on it. And anyway, why are you inside? Go outside, and don’t come back in until the sun goes down.

(I love ya, Mom!)

For you younger folks this may seem perplexing, so let me help you sort it out. Have you seen Stranger Things)? Of course you have. You know the part where the girl moves things with her mind and where monsters come out from the upside-down? - that’s fiction. The part where the kids ride absolutely everywhere on their bikes? that’s real. I know it doesn’t seem that way because your parents drove you all over the place, including to the school that was four blocks away, but I assure you it was absolutely true. I know - I essentially grew up a few miles outside of Hawkins Indiana except, you know, in Illinois.

And that was how it worked: Want to see a friend? Ride two or three miles down the road. The two of you want to get a coke from the elevator? Grab a couple of quarters (yes - 25¢) and ride another mile or so over to get one for each of you. Finished with the coke (or Fanta - they always had orange Fanta...)? Let’s go play in the creek (that’s pronounced "crick", incidentally) a couple of miles away.

And of course, eventually you had to ride home, ideally getting there before dark. All in all it was quite possible for us to ride 10-15 miles in a day from spot to spot, and most of that riding time it was on single speed bikes with coaster brakes and banana seats. We really didn’t think much about the distances, just the destinations. The bikes were freedom.

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Eventually I had a five speed Schwinn road bike with a light and dynamo on it, so then darkness wasn’t even a limitation. At that point I was a little older, and was allowed to ride into town, which opened the world up even further - I could go shopping for comic books and stop at The Kitch-Inn for a grilled cheese and a chocolate malt. I can verify that it is possible - though extremely inadvisable - to read a comic book while riding your bike back home. Hell - it was my primary motivation to learn to ride hands free...

Before I get too far down the nostalgia rabbit hole (I know - too late...), my point to all of this is that there was a time where neither we kids, nor the adults overseeing us, found the idea of purposeful travel across the rural countryside via HPV either impractical or unusual. That perspective, pervasive though it is, is an artifact of a much more recent sensibility.

It is true that distances to reach anything are further than they are in urban settings, but further doesn’t necessarily equal far. In the upper Midwest of the US, at least, the word "rural" doesn’t just describe houses sitting out in fields, alone. Rather, rural areas are a combination of country houses and fields and pastures and small towns, most of which offer some level of provisions - gas and food at least, and often an array of other services. Based upon life experience and a quick eyeball of the map I’d say most towns in northern Illinois are within 10-15 miles of another town, which leaves country residents always within +/-10 miles or so of supplies and, if they are lucky, within similar distance of their work (tho I suspect this may be getting less common).

So - while I’m not about to argue that people in these rural environs should move to a cycling only life for transportation, I would argue that self-powered transport is an option some of the time. I might also argue that, with the right type of machine, cycling could likely be an option for more of the trips than one might initially expect.

All of which leads us up to the question: What would the right type of machine be? What are the features that make for the ideal rural cycling machine?

Setting Criteria

As discussed initially, the urban bike contest identified a number of factors to be considered by contestants when developing human powered transportation for city settings. Some of the criteria for a rural bike may overlap, but there are definitely differences in the needs for a rural cycling machine. I would posit the following criteria:

• The machine must be capable of routinely covering longer distances - 10-20 mile round trips - comfortably on open secondary roads.

• It must be a human powered vehicle. It’s fine if it’s amenable to electric assist, but it cannot rely upon battery power.

• It must be able to contend with varied weather and road conditions. Generally this is going to mean:

  • Some type of effective fender system.

  • Being stable and functional with a load under high wind situations.

• Be capable of carrying cargo - the Bike Design Project specified their urban guidelines around a gym bag or a single bag of groceries, which makes sense for their purposes. For a rural lifestyle, a larger carrying capacity would be needed - I’d say the ability to manage 3-4 full paper grocery bags (or equivalent volume), with those groceries including at least one full gallon of milk. The machine should be able to manage that load on all rural road surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and hills.

• Be capable of remaining stable and upright under load. This criteria is borrowed from the Bike Design Project, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Your machine has to be able to stand safely on its own if you have to get off of it when it’s fully loaded. Otherwise you’ll break your eggs, have to chase your oranges down the road, and cry over your spilled milk...

• Must be capable of a reasonable average speed over flat(ish) terrain when operated by a rider who rides regularly. Here let’s say reasonable is an average of at least 10-12mph. I think any slower and it risks even dedicated riders avoiding use in favor of a car.

• Be a durable machine capable of many years of use with basic maintenance.

• Be capable of using aftermarket lighting and visibility systems for effective forward and rearward visibility.

• We are looking for a type of machine here, not a specific brand or new design. What sort(s) of HPV meets these criteria?

I’m excluding a few of the other criteria from the Bike Design Criteria. For example, they wanted their designs to incorporate anti-theft systems and built-in lighting systems. From my perspective there are multiple versions of both items readily available on the aftermarket, so it seems superfluous to require them here. I’d also worry about any such system that was incorporated into the machine in a specialized or bespoke fashion. One of the contestants for that competition had USB ports for charging lights, etc. To me, that’s a high tech solution that is really just built in obsolescence - cycling machines last for years, and USB-A is already on its way towards being replaced...

I’ve also not included the idea of being amenable to being carried up stairs. One of the things that rural settings generally have in abundance is storage space. Folks out in the country are likely to store their machines inside, but certainly not in the house. We can expect a garage or shed to be available.

Finally, you’ve seen me use the word “bike” here interchangeably with HPV and “cycle”. That’s intentional. I see no reason to artificially limit the number of wheels to two if there is a better option. Two-wheeled bicycles might be the best option for urban settings because of flexibility of movement and storage, but most of that advantage is irrelevant in rural settings.

So that’s it. Obviously I’ve got ideas of what might be the best candidate to fill this bill, and I’ll plan to let you know my thoughts about what and why in this space next time.

In the meantime, tho, let me know what HPV’s you think best meet the mark through the comments either on Facebook or thru Twitter. If you’ve got pictures of a specific machine I’d love to see those, or if you just want to describe it that’s great too. Maybe you’ll change my mind and, if there are enough of them I may take those suggestions and put them together in another post for everyone to learn from and enjoy.

Ok - time to ride...

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I write about cycling a lot here on Applied Life, but it’s not the only topic here. I also consider broader issues on the topic of transportation, discuss the effect of science and technology on daily life, and periodically review or discuss books and music. Very occasionally I just write about Things That Actually Kinda Suck. I also live in a 150-year old farmhouse that my Great Great Great Grandfather built, and periodically I and My Lovely Wife write about updating the house and about country living in general over at Prairie Homestead.

If you enjoy reading these posts please feel free to check out the others. If you want to know when new posts go up, please feel free to follow me on Facebookor on Twitter: @ErinJWade

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Farmondo 2019

For my third consecutive year I decided to enter the Farmondo - the group ride put on by Tempo Velo bike club, based in Sterling, IL. The event is three separate group rides of different distances - 20, 43, and 80 miles. Each year I’ve participated in the 43 mile ride. It is not a race - not technically - just a group ride where you are timed, your time is rank-ordered against the other riders, and the information is then publically posted for the world to see.

I was excited for the ride this year because it’s my first year with my Catrike Expedition. I have been finding that the Expedition is faster than the Pocket that I’ve been riding the past couple of years, and I wanted to see if that would hold true over a longer ride (43 miles is the longest I’ve ridden thus far, and so far I only go that distance once a year - in this event), particularly over the hilly terrain that the Farmondo covers (if there is a hill around Sterling, they’ve found it for this ride).

So it was with that in mind that I headed out last Sunday morning with the trike in the back of my Honda Fit.

Knowing that there was rain in the forecast, and that the event ran regardless of weather, I’d purchased rain gear the day before and packed it up in the pannier bags. I also spent time the day before getting all of my lights on to the charger and setting up a new battery mount for my phone since I would be using it to track my ride stats and to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on the ride (in one ear only, of course).

Things did not go as planned.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

It’s about 45 minutes from my home to the starting point in Sterling. I gave myself plenty of time to get there, or so I thought. But while I was riding through Dixon - about 35 minutes from home - I realized that I had not taken any of the lights off of the charger. They were sitting at home, happily sipping electrons off the grid and, most importantly, not on the trike or in the car with me in any way, shape, or form.

After a bit of self-flagellation I mentally set this aside - nothing I could do about it at that moment; I certainly did not have time to go back - and continued on course.

When I got there I looked at the immediate weather, which was a light mist, and looked at the radar, which seemed to be offering more of the same going forward. I made the executive decision not to put on the rain gear (though I did keep it in the panniers), reasoning that I would get damp, but not so much so that I’d be uncomfortable, and not nearly enough to justify the trade-off against the bulk of the rain gear.

Then I hauled out the trike and started to get things set up - flag on (I almost always just keep that in the car, so I had it along) and went to hook up the battery for my phone and found that it was, well, also not there.

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I’d thought that I had put it in the mounting position the day before, but I must have set it aside while working on prepping other things. I say "must have", because finding it "not there" led to a search of the car to see if it had just fallen off, if I’d set it somewhere else, etc. But it was simply not present.

This offered up an interesting problem, given that it limited what I could do with the phone. I’ve got an iPhone XS Max, which has pretty good battery life, but GPS is a battery hog. I’d been doing longer rides without the backup battery tho, and it had come thru when I left the screen dark most of the time and just checked in on my pace periodically. This is what I determined I would do.

But processing that threw me a bit and, more importantly, slowed me down. So I found that, as I was walking the trike up to the starting line in the parking lot, they announced "riders ready?"

I was not.

I pulled the trike up to the side of the group and mounted. I did not have my helmet or gloves or glasses on yet. I reasoned thru my options, put on my helmet and clipped in, and put everything else in my sweatshirt pocket, figuring I could put them in as I rode. Because I was to the side and not in the pack, I let the entire group go by - I didn’t want to cut anyone off - and took my position in the absolute rear of the pack. It’s a timed event, so this didn’t seem like a problem. I’d be compared against my start and stop time, not my position in the pack.

All good, right? I rode forward down the first straightaway, just behind the rest of the group. I rounded the first corner, rode forward another hundred feet, and heard a "click" on the pavement.

I think anyone who rides regularly can tell you that you become accustomed to a certain array of sounds as a part of the experience. There is the sound of tires on water as you go through a puddle, of stones as the come up against a fender or the frame, and all of that occurs against the backdrop of the mechanical sounds of the machine.

The "click" was not a familiar sound.

I knew the sweatshirt pocket was not an ideal location for storing anything, being open on the sides. It’s not ideal in general, and even less so in the reclined position of the trike. But it was only going to be for a short time, right? Well, it was clear that I’d dropped something, though I wasn’t sure what.

I turned around and rode back. I passed the truck that brings up the rear of the group and said "dropped something" to him as he went by. Another couple dozen feet and I found my reading glasses (stoopid middle-aged eyes) there on the asphalt, miraculously undamaged. I picked them up and turned around and started pedaling back the other way, now behind that pace truck.

The beginning part of the race in Sterling crosses a four-lane section of Route 2 at a stoplight-controlled intersection. The police actually cordon that off for the riders. Unsurprisingly, however, when the pace truck went thru - visually signifying the end of the group - one of the two patrol cars, the one dealing with traffic to my left, or closest to me, pulled away. This left me stopped at the stoplight, and falling further behind.

The other officer had remained and saw me. After a cycle of traffic he very generously stopped and directed traffic to get me through the intersection ahead of the changing light and got me on my way (my enduring thanks to him!).

I was now far enough behind now that I could no longer see any of the group. After the stoplights they make a left turn through the neighborhood, which took them out of view. I’ve ridden this ride twice before, so I knew that was the case, but I honestly wasn’t sure which left turn the route took, and I’d been watching the traffic, not the group, while I’d been sitting at the intersection. That uncertainty actually caused me to briefly wonder if I should just pack it in and call it a day, but I took my best guess at it, and about four blocks later came across the pace truck, patiently waiting for me (my enduring thanks to him as well). A block or two later and I could see the tail end of the group having turned right at Challand Middle School and followed them. I felt much better actually having people in view.

I was also breathing pretty hard at this point, since my pace was a little higher than it might otherwise have been this early on, trying to make up for lost time and catch the group. And I don’t care how many times you tell yourself that your position in the group doesn’t matter because it’s an individually timed event, you still want to catch up to (and pass people in) the group. Plus, you know, I’d lost actual time by turning around and by sitting at the stoplight.

The Rest of the Ride

Once I got past that comedy of errors, everything started to level out and work just fine. To ensure sufficient battery life for ride tracking I opted not to listen to any audio on the ride. This made the ride a more meditative experience in some ways. I ride that way sometimes outside of this, but this was a long ride, and I usually like some entertainment as a part of things.

That decision allowed me a little extra battery life for some video and pics along the way:

The video is from mile 7 of the 43-mile group route. I’m probably going 14 or 15 miles an hour in that segment. And importantly, I think I’m gaining on someone (!).

If you like the scenery of the Illinois countryside (and I do) this is a lovely ride overall. It’s also interesting to me because your ride takes you past at least four cemeteries - one in the town of Sterling (where you turn left to stay on the route, I gambled, and turned out to be right, thankfully), and the others mostly tiny rural affairs that dot the countryside out here.

It did rain for the majority of the ride - you can see that the sky is steel gray pretty much throughout. My executive decision on the rain gear turned out to be a good one. I wore linen pants for the ride as well as a rash guard. Both sets of items have the benefit of drying quickly (linen is a great material for warm weather where you want to cover up rather than using sunscreen - I prefer it to spandex for riding). The only fly in the ointment was my cotton sweatshirt, which got very hot about four miles in, but I didn’t want to stop and lose more time taking it off. The upside to that was that by mile 10 it was so thoroughly drenched that it was no longer warm, so it ultimately worked out.

Aftercare

The folks at Tempo Velo always have a spread out for the end of the race - tacos made on the spot, beer and soda available (and the beer is always interesting - I had a Harp), and this year they had custard from Culver’s in the mix as well. It was a smaller group at the end this time, most likely due to the rain, but those who came and rode got to eat and drink well.

Results

After the ride the results get posted online. It takes a little while for this to all get done, but once it is, it’s there for you to consider. My goal this year, and every year, is to do better than last. And as I mentioned, I also wanted to see how much the Expedition seemed to contribute to increased speed/decreased time.

Obviously, my muck-up at the beginning had an impact on my time. I turned around, I got stopped at a stoplight that the event timing expects you to simply be able ride through, and I spent the first several minutes of the ride futzing around with getting gloves on and such, which is not an ideal path towards increased speed.

So here’s the deal: I was faster than last year.

That 3:17:53 for this year compares to 3:20:46 last year. I’ll grant that it’s not a lot faster, but it’s still an improvement of nearly three minutes (2:52), all with a series of unintentional self-induced impediments along the way.

In terms of how much of it is due to the new trike, and how much is due to me, I’m gonna chalk most of it up to the trike. I did condition my way up to the ride distance this year, but my training was fairly similar to last year. My average speed for the ride, however, was up from 13.09 mph last year to 13.29 mph this year (according to Cyclemeter), and I was definitely carrying more weight in terms of both the trike (which is two lbs heavier than the Pocket) and the rain gear in the bags.

And despite all of the chaos, Cyclemeter, which tracks stopped time (the race timing does not - it’s all event time) finds that I was sitting stopped for less time this year than last. I didn’t purposely stop this year or last, so all of the stopped time both years was in situations where traffic required it - e.g. waiting at road crossings and such. So apparently I did have some good luck in there, even tho it didn’t feel like it in the moment.

All in all, and the comedy of errors aside, it was (and always is) a fun event. I was once again the only trike rider in the 43 mile event, but I was not the only trike rider that day. Another gentleman, with a Villager he’d rode in the 20 mile event, and I met and chatted for a few minutes afterward. It was good to see and touch base with a like-minded soul.

And good to put this ride down in the books.

Sizing Things Up

As I mentioned when I first wrote about my new Catrike Expedition, part of the reason that I went forward with getting the new machine was because MLW had expressed an interest in riding a trike as well. Like many people, she remembers enjoying riding bikes when she was younger, but finds the riding position - and especially the seating options - of a DF bike to be ...unforgiving.

If there had been any question that this was a desire in earnest, it was erased by the fact that, within a day or so of my setting up the Expedition, she was already out riding on the Pocket, using a pillow as a spacer to reach the pedals. This, of course, because the Pocket was still sized to me.

Any time a new person gets on a bike of any kind, things need to be adjusted. The seat and handlebars on a DF need to be raised or lowered, for example, to fit the height of the new rider. The same is true for a recumbent trike, but the process is different and, at least at first blush, a little more intimidating.

This is because, for many types of recumbent trike, re-sizing means re-setting the distance of the boom - the telescoping portion at the front of the trike that holds the pedals - and then either shortening or lengthening the chain.

The first part, I think, sounds pretty straightforward. The boom just slides in and out, and so it’s somewhat analogous to moving the seat on a DF bike. It’s that second part that gives a bit of mental pause: shortening or lengthening the chain.

I mean, all of us with any experience with bikes as a kid know what a chain is; it’s that thing that lets the pedals move the bike forward, and also the thing that catches our pants, gets grease on us, and periodically falls off, making us unable to move while our friends, not realizing our crisis, continue to ride away...

Ahem.

What we didn’t learn, most of us, was how to _do_ anything with the chain except oil it periodically and re-set it on the sprockets when it came off, incidentally cursing that oil for now being on our fingers. (I still remember the revelation I experienced when my dad showed me how to more readily re-set it by flipping the bike upside down - perhaps my first real-world lifehack).

This means that approaching that portion of the re-sizing seems a bit of an arcane, black art - a bit of sorcery known to the grizzled bike shop wizards of old, but a power which the novice knows not how to harness.

But: I’ve been resolved to learn how to do more things myself, my localest bike shop being 20 minutes away. And while MLW had devised her own solution for reaching the pedals, it seemed like it would probably be nicer for her to have it actually sized to fit her. So it set forth to tackle it on my own.

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The first thing I did was consult the folks at Utah Trikes on how to do this via their channel on YouTube. They actually have a very nicely done video that shows how to go through the process, including how to set the gears before doing so (tho you’ll want to watch it a couple of times, because that’s a brief aside several minutes in).

Then I marked the old spot on it for me with a sharpie, loosened up the quick releases on the boom, had MLW sit down on it, and went to slide the boom in and...

...nothing. Wouldn't move.

I’d been expecting it to slide right in, so I was a little surprised at the complete lack of movement. But, faced with an obstacle, I did what any red-blooded American male does:

I hit it.

By which I mean I smacked it at the front with the heel of my hand. This was successful, as far as it went, except it made my hand sore very quickly. I commented that maybe this would work better if I had a rubber mallet.

I made this comment standing five feet from my toolbox which, incidentally, had a rubber mallet sitting on the floor in front of it. So, of course, I continued to hit it with my hand. I point this out in part so that you will understand the grace and kindness my wife exhibited when she quietly said "you know, there’s a mallet right there" and completely refrained from appending "dumbass" to the end of that sentence.

Turns out the mallet worked at least as well as my hand, and with considerably less incidental discomfort. Who knew? (Yes - MLW knew, that’s who).

Once the boom length was set I... let it sit for a few days.

We’d set the length on a weeknight, and some time ago I learned to let new and longer projects wait until the weekend, when I have more time to struggle with them. Otherwise I become frustrated with the need to leave things partway completed - better to do it all at once. And given that I hadn’t changed a chain length before I didn’t know how long it was going to take me.

When I did sit down with it I first started with simply locating the master link on the chain. The chain on a recumbent trike is long - much longer than on a DF bike - and as I slowly worked my way through it I found myself wondering if I was simply cycling through the same sections of chain over and over again. I solved this by cleaning off a couple of links so I’d have a clear, shiny reference point (turns out there may be a benefit to not routinely cleaning your chain... kind of).

Once I located the link I started working on getting it apart. I did not have a master link tool, but I reasoned that it looked a lot like a set of needle nose pliers, and I certainly had those, so they would work just fine.

Right?

Well, no. After about five minutes of aborted attempts I decided that maybe it would be better just to ensure I had the right actual tools for the job, hopped in the car and headed out to my localest bike shop: Bike Works in Peru. The folks there were, as usual, very helpful. I explained what I was doing and they put together the items I needed and got me on my way. I was literally in and out in less than 15 minutes.

And what a difference the right tool makes! It literally took seconds to open the master link with the tool once I put it in play. This is a thing that I have had to learn over and over again across the course of my life - maybe this time it will stick (Narrator: It didn’t).

My experience with the chain tool was similar to that of the master link tool. It took a little longer to sort out just how to seat the chain and just far I would have to push the pin in in order to get it thru, but once I sorted that out it just came apart as designed.

As laid out in the video, I’d taken a picture of the position of the derailleur before I started moving things, pulled the two ends of the chain together until the derailleur position matched the picture, and put them back together. Bob’s your uncle - I was finished!

Well, I thought I was. I set up an improvised rope and pulley (using a garage rafter in lieu of the actually pulley) to get the rear wheel off the ground so I could cycle thru the gears. I was pretty pleased with this:

It worked a treat, and I began to spin through the gears on the big ring, pleased to see that it hit them all, and then again to see it on the middle ring. And it worked okay on the small ring, except that the chain was dangling slack in the top few gears. Which meant I hadn’t taken out enough chain.

In the area of true confessions, I’d taken my picture of the rear derailleur with the chain in a different position on the rear sprocket than they recommend in the Utah Trikes video. I’d realized this fairly early on, but I figured, you know, as long as it’s all in the same position at the end it’ll be fine, right?

Right?

So, again: no.

And now I didn’t have an accurate picture to use for reference. What I did have, tho, was another trike that I could set up with the gears in the same position and hopefully that would approximate the correct orientation for the derailleur. Which is why you see the orange Expedition sitting behind the Pocket here:

I got the gears on the Expedition into position and used that to eyeball the derailleur angle on the Pocket. Now I can’t honestly say whether it was a brilliant idea or just good fortune, but it actually worked (they say sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good)!

And there you have it - One Catrike Pocket, resized for My Lovely Wife. We also ordered her up a new flag to go with it, and she’s ready to hit the road.

Catrike Expedition - Differences in Setup

As I mentioned last time, when I ordered my new Catrike Expedition I chose to do some things differently from how they present on my Catrike Pocket. While I love the Pocket, I’ve had two years of riding experience and research to consider what I might do differently the next time around. As such, the configuration I arrived at was mostly stock, but with a handful of extras, primarily:

• A right-side mirror with mount
• A full fender set
• The Utah Trikes rear cargo rack
• A set of pannier bags (Axiom Seymour Oceanwave P25’s)

Let’s talk briefly about the why of these in turn:

Mirrors

The Pocket has grip shifters - you twist the handlebar in order to shift gears. That allows for an option of putting the mirrors right on the end of the handlebar. The Expedition (and I believe actually the entire Catrike line now) has bar end shifters occupying the end of the handlebar. This means that mirrors have to go on separate mounts along the steering mechanism. A left-sided mount comes stock, but I realized fairly early on with the Pocket that more mirrors was better, both for a broader rear-view as well as from a built-in redundancy perspective, so I ordered a right sided mount as well. One of the nice things about that is that the mirror mount also allows for additional mounting points for accessories.

Fenders

The Pocket did not have fenders when I got it, and still does not. This is a thing that I find I regret every time I ride thru a puddle, every time it starts to rain, and certainly any time I’m dealing with mud. The fact that it still does not have them is due in part to the fact that I’ve struggled to find fenders to fit the 16" front wheels (tho there is at least one option for the rear). Suffice it to say I’ve spent a fair amount of time with dirt-speckled forearms, and I was hoping to find a better way this time around.

I think the fenders look good on the Expedition, but it is clear to me that the rear fender setup is going to be a source of some noise on the road. I’ve been able to isolate most of that (a couple of carefully placed bits of sticky Velcro - soft side), and what little remains I think will be a fair trade off against the mud-stripe that would otherwise appear on my back.

Probably the one limitation that they do otherwise present is in how the mirrors are mounted. At the suggestion of folks on the Recumbent Trikes group on Facebook I mounted the Mirrorcycle mirrors without the little vertical arm on the Pocket.

This has the effect of decreasing vibration a bit, making it a bit easier to see what’s coming up behind you. Where the mirrors sit atop the fenders on the Expedition doesn’t allow any room for that option.

And actually, it’s not clear they allow room for it without the fender - the mirror might hit the wheel. I could possibly adjust the position of the mount in future, but I’ve left it for now - we’ll see how much the vibration bothers me.

Rack and Pannier Bags

The Pocket does have a cargo rack, and by the looks of it, it may well be from Utah Trikes (actually, given that the Pocket’s boom is painted, I suspect it may have been ordered from UT by the original purchaser, since this is an option they offer). It works well, so I knew I was going to want one on the Expedition. The Pocket also came with the Arkel frame bags, which I thought were an elegant use of space when I first saw them, and I still think they are.

Unfortunately, it is sometimes the case that an elegant design is not always the most practical or effective alternative. I find the Arkel bags can be challenging to get into and/or to zip up at times, as the zipper is very close to the frame. And while they make good use of the space in the arc of the frame, that also means their size is limited and the shape, dictated by that arc, isn’t terribly space efficient. But probably the biggest issue is more mine than theirs - the way the zipper sits, if you forget to zip it up and ride away, odds are good that you will lose your stuff.

I am... good at losing stuff. I’m good at it without the help of the design of these bags, and they have conspired to abet that tendency on an occasion or two in the past. So I wanted a design that closed at the top, such that if I failed to zip it, wouldn't start leaving a trail of breadcrumbs made from my gear.

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I went with Axiom Seymour Oceanwave P25 Panniers. The name is a mouthful, but key components to these for me were the additional size, the top opening feature, extra side pockets, and a carry handle for them when off the trike. This last item is a bonus in case I ever need to park the trike someplace where I’m concerned about someone getting into the bags (I did a brief search for lockable bags and didn’t find any, tho I’ll bet they are out there). I don’t carry a ton of gear, but the additional space in these actually leaves room for things like a sweatshirt or other changes of clothes, which is a thing I’ve often wished for in the mixed weather of spring and fall.

Other Differences

Not on the list of differences are a couple of things that I didn’t get (or at least, haven’t yet). On the Pocket I have a Power-On Cycling headrest. The Pocket did not have a head or neck rest when I got it, and the degree of recline to the Pocket’s seat isn’t such that I felt it was really necessary (tho it is nice to have from time to time). But what this item did offer was a higher mounting point for a rear light, as well as a convenient handle for walking the Pocket.

You only have to get a flat tire three miles out one time to realize how much you want a handle to walk your trike by. Or so I hear...

But the Expedition comes with the Catrike neckrest as a stock item, and it also sits a bit taller. I think it’s quite likely that I’ll still end up ordering another headrest from Power-On, but I figured I would try out the stock arrangement before shelling out the coin.

I also didn’t order, and thus have not installed, the heel sling kit from Terratrike that I have on the Pocket. As with the headrest, it’s not due to dissatisfaction with that item - I actually find the slings work nicely, particularly with an addition retention strap across the top of the foot. But I while I’ve been riding bikes of one stripe or another most of my life, I’ve actually never used clipless pedals. I thought it might be worth giving it a try so that at least I have a frame of reference for comparison.

I ordered a pair of Shimano Cycling Sandals for this purpose. I wear sandals for three seasons of year, cycling and otherwise. My preferred sandals are Keens, but it appears that they have elected to stop making the Commuter Bike Sandal (I actually emailed the company to verify this - they are really what I wanted). In fact, cycling sandals are, for some reason, a rather difficult thing to find in general, and where I could find them they were often either out of stock or not available in my size (and I’m an inch shy of the national average height - I’m not an odd fit). Is it possible that I’m the only one with feet that get hot when riding?

It’s worth noting that purchasing the sandals means that right out of the gate this is an expensive experiment - the sandals cost nearly three times as much as the heel slings, and they obviously won’t work for winter riding. I’m determined to give the system a fair shake, but it will have a hurdle to clear to be better.

Going Forward

And those are the differences going in. I’ve been out on the new trike three times thus far, and I’ll be heading out today. It is a different experience than the Pocket in multiple ways - I’m liking it, to be sure, but it’s different in ways that are interesting, at least to me. After I get a bit more seat time we’ll discuss.

Time to ride...

Capture the Flag

Last week I wrote about my early July trip down the I&M Canal Trail from LaSalle to almost the Buffalo Rock State Park entrance, a trip that involved mud pits, and resulted both a filthy trike and a lost flag and rear light.

No Flag

The flag that I lost came with the trike when I bought it back in 2017. In my mind it really is a part of the character of the trike. It’s featured in many of the shots of the trike on this site. I was frustrated and tired - and sick of wet, muddy clay - when I gave up looking for it, but when I did that, my intention was to purchase another, identical flag. The following morning I fired up my iPad and began my search for just that.

Things went south quickly.

The flag in question was a Soundwinds design, the owner of which is retiring and selling off his stock; my flag was sold out. This was very discouraging, and the similar designs in stock, tho very nice, just weren’t what I was looking for ¹.

My cheapness gene was also starting to kick in, and I was beginning to balk at the prospect of dropping money on a new flag and new rear light when I could have looked longer the day before.

So I set the iPad down and felt bad for a couple of minutes, and then an idea occurred to me. I looked up my route on Cyclemeter in map view, and I’d made it a good portion of the way into and thru Buffalo Rock. With any luck, I thought, if I came in from the other side - from the Buffalo Rock entrance to the trail - I’d only have to contend with one of the clay soup patches (the one I chose not to ride thru the day before).

There’s a big assumption or two in there, I realize. Based on the map, I was probably only a mile or so from the Buffalo Rock trail entrance when I’d stopped, but there was the real possibility that the entire mile was soup. I hoped not, but it was possible. I was also assuming that the flag would be wherever it came off the trike - that no one else would have come along and picked it up. This latter item seemed a fair bet, tho, simply because I had been the only soul on that section of the trail for the entire ride the day before, despite it being a weekend.

I debated whether or not to bring along the trike or simply walk the trail. I hadn’t yet cleaned it up from the day before, and if I could ride the distance it would go much more quickly; but if it was all soup that would be a wash. I decided to bring it along, and figured that, if I found the beginning of the trail at Buffalo Rock to be soup, I could just leave the trike in the vehicle, but then I’d have it if riding were an option.

This turned out to be a good call, as I was relieved to see that the first, visible portion of the trail westward from Buffalo Rock was dry and intact. This meant that, for a half-mile or so at least I could move forward with pretty good progress.

And then I encountered the soup.

This particular batch also had an additional impediment, as there was a tree down across the trail about 25 feet into the clay soup.

Tree in soup

Given that I was going to have to portage the trike over the tree, and that the tree wasn’t very far into the soup, I decided just to carry it up to the tree. A Catrike Pocket weighs about 33 lbs unloaded, probably 35 or so with my gear. I was certainly still carrying my kid around when they weighed that much, so it seemed reasonable.

I listened to and rued the repeated "thuk-thuk-thuk" of my footsteps in the muck as I walked up to the downed tree, and stepped over it with my left leg. As I set my foot down, I felt a sharp, stinging sensation in my left calf.

Literally a stinging sensation.

I looked down to see the Yellowjacket stinging me, ended its existence, and quickly stepped away from the tree. As I looked back I could see a couple dozen of them swarming around this side of the tree near the ground. Either they had nested in the tree before it had fallen, or it disturbed a ground nest when it fell. Either way, they were not happy about it (and besides, Yellowjackets are aggressive assholes anyway), and one of them had decided to take it out on me.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve been stung, and I was not nostalgic for the experience. It took nearly a week for the bright red spot on my calf to fade and, in the interim, it provided a sensation I did not recall from prior events - it itched. A lot.

That was for future me to enjoy however. I continued to carry the trike another quarter-mile or so until we got to dry land. I tried to wipe and/or shake off as much of the clay as I could from my sandals, and began to pedal forward.

I was quite surprised when I saw it.

I’d expected to find it - if I found it at all - laying on the ground to one side of the trail or the other. That’s primarily where I’d been casting my eyes both the day before and during the bulk of this particular mission. The reality was something... different.

Flag in the distance

Flag up close

To be honest, it hanging there like that was initially a little creepy - reminiscent of something you’d come across wandering lost in the woods trying to shoot a documentary. I wondered for a moment if perhaps someone else had come along and found it, and hung it up so that, if the owner came looking, it’d be clearly visible. But that did not appear to be the case.

On the vine

On the vine

The closeup here shows it as I found it. The streamer at the top of the flag appears to have gotten wrapped around a hanging vine, and then lifted it up off of the lower half of the pole. The connection where they join isn’t loose, exactly, but it is pretty easy to slip on and off. I may need to add a bit of tape to increase friction at the connection.

Once I got over that initial creepy impression I was simply relieved. Though the trip took me out of my way for the day, it did save me the cost of a flag and a rear light (and I seem to go through lights at a prodigious rate anyway).

I lashed the flag to the rack on back and went back to once again tackle the clay. I rode thru it on the way back, at least up to the Yellowjacket tree. There I stopped a little short and considered strategy before trundling thru.

"Considered strategy", I say, like there were a lot of options. Ultimately it just involved making sure I had a good, firm hold on the trike and then going over the trunk as quickly as possible without slipping and falling in the clay soup. And there I was actually successful (yay) - gotta take the wins where you can get them.

As the day before, I emerged from the trail with both myself and my trike coated in gray.

It wasn’t gray when I got it

This particular adventure was different, tho, because I knew what I was getting into. Of course, this did not cause me to gain any newfound fondness for the sticky, slippery, sucking mess that is muddy clay (not that I’m bitter) - I won’t be signing up for a mud-soaked cyclocross event any time soon - but I was in much better spirits upon arriving at the trailhead. So much so, in fact that I decided to ride back the other way, towards Ottawa, for a couple of miles. Besides, I reasoned, I really didn’t have a better way of getting the extra clay off of the tires...

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1. The Soundwinds website says that some of their designs were going to be taken over by Premier Kites "later in 2019", and that a link would be included on the site when that happened. There was no link one the site when I looked at it - there still isn’t - but I decided to go over to look up Premier Kites anyway, just to see what they have to offer and, sure enough, they had my flag design in stock.  ↩

Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns

In my day-to-day life I think of myself as a person who is somewhat technically inclined. If you are having issues sorting out how to do something with your technology - your iPhone, your Mac, and yes, even (grudgingly) your Windows or Android device - odds are good that I can help you out with that. I’m even somewhat mechanically inclined, or at least I was in a past life. For much of my 20’s and early 30’s I did the lion’s share of maintenance on my own vehicles - oil changes, spark plugs, brakes - and only went in to the mechanic for more involved activities and repairs (Honda timing belts, for example, were beyond my ken).

Bicycles and other HPV’s are relatively simple machines. Yet despite my technical history, I am often surprised - and frequently stymied - by how little I actually know.

Some of this is simply due to experience. As a kid I learned to do things like raising and lowering my seat, and adjusting bent handlebars, both from necessity (the former due to growth, the latter typically due to misadventure). I got considerable practice with re-seating slipped chains as well. But when it came to other skills, like changing tires, and certainly when we move on to the more mechanically intricate components of a derailleur system, I confess to have been largely mystified.

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As a kid, issues with these components would simply have to wait until I could get my Dad to help. As an adult, returning to cycling after a hiatus borne by focus on work and schooling, I found that it was generally preferable to let the local bike shop handle the areas where my knowledge base and skills were lacking.

This worked out fine when I first started back riding. While I was enthusiastic and enjoyed it, in those early years of return my riding time and distances were relatively modest. My need for LBS intervention was largely limited to annual checkups and occasional rear wheel straightening on my relatively ancient Cannondale SR400.

However, a couple of related factors have caused me to have a change of perspective on this front. The second of those factors is the fact that my riding time and distances have increased considerably over the past two years. My records in Cyclemeter go back to 2011, and before 2017 my highest mileage year was 752.47. What’s more, that was in 2014, and my mileage dropped in 2015 and 2016 to 547.18 and 260.49, respectively.

Come 2017, however, my mileage increased - to 937.51, followed by another bump to 1372.14 miles in 2018. I’m on track to do a similar distance (and hopefully further) for 2019.

That increased distance is undeniably due to the first of the factors: In June of 2017 I got my recumbent trike - a 2012 Catrike Pocket. As I’ve detailed elsewhere here, while I’ve always enjoyed cycling, the recumbent trike really kicked that into high gear.

I’ve realized, though, that the trike does provide some interesting implications from a maintenance perspective. About a decade ago we made the call to move to a rural setting. This is a great thing when it comes to going riding - instead of piling things into the car and driving to a trail, most of the time I literally just head out of my driveway - it’s miles and miles of riding pleasure at my doorstep.

However, living in the boondocks also means that everything is far away. While I talk about my LBS, in reality the localest bike shop is a half-hour drive. And while they are great and always helpful, the Pocket is somewhat of a specialty item, and the nearest Catrike dealer is nearly an hour’s worth of travel time distant.

None of that is to complain - I knew what I was getting into when I moved out here. What it does, though, is help to refocus my attention on the need to learn some things about maintenance and repair. Realistically, now, if I can’t fix it myself it means that I can’t ride the trike, at least not until I can fit in a trip to the shop. It’s a different situation than back when I lived in a city with a bike shop nearby, and amplified a bit by the specialized nature of the trike.

(I do still have my Cannondale as a backup, but in general, I’d rather not take that option).

So - I’m learning. I’m quite certain I still have a ways to go. As I detailed here, a couple of weeks ago, I managed to successfully change a tube myself for the first time, along the side of the road. But I’ve now also had to change that tube twice more since, leaving me trying to figure out what the unknown unknowns are about the situation, and realizing how little I actually know about wheels and tires. With the help of some of the very friendly folks on the Facebook recumbent trike groups I’d gone through and done my due diligence in terms of inspecting the wheel and tire itself for debris. But I’ve now also realized that I didn’t ever know what rim tape was or what it was for, and it appears that mine is in need of replacement... (more on that in the near future).

Making that particular potential issue now a known unknown. And if that fixes the recurrent problem, it will move the the known category. If it doesn’t, well, then clearly there’s another unknown unknown...

Bottom line, however, I have to gain a wider base of knowledge and practice - remove the unknowns - if I want to continue to ride and ride further distances.

And I do.

Cycling Gear - San Pellegrino

I do not, as a general rule, use cycling-specific clothing.

This is not to say that I don’t have clothing that I wear to go cycling. I do have specific articles of clothing that I reserve for cycling - a specific pair of shorts, a couple of shirts and rash guards that I alternate between for riding. But I don’t own bicycle shorts, don’t wear bibs, don’t have cycling shoes, etc. I find that similar, all purpose gear typically costs less than task specific items, and is suitable for multiple uses. For example, I’ll wear components of the same gear for hiking and cross country skiiing as I do for riding, depending up on the time of year.

However, Father’s day brought an exception to that rule. For the holiday MLW purchased for me a San Pellegrino cycling jersey.

It’s resplendent in bright orange - my favorite high visibility color and my second favorite color overall. It’s incredibly lightweight, vented, and extremely comfortable, with additional venting available through the simple act of zipping down. I wore it for its inaugural ride the afternoon of Father’s day, and it’s been on every ride since.

It is a traditional cycling jersey, so it has the pockets on the back. I was initially a little concerned that it might be uncomfortable on the trike, but the pockets are barely noticeable. And it all means that there’s a bit of me in the middle of the trike that is just that much easier to see.

So - as you can probably tell - I really like it. The only problem now is that I’m philosophically conflicted. You know, because I don’t wear cycling specific clothing.

Except for this. And philosophically conflicted or not, I’m gonna keep wearing it!

Roadside Repairs - Part the Third

Although I write about cycling here a lot - it’s the majority of the posts on Applied Life at this point - I do try to vary the subject within that topic from week to week. But sometimes the fates have other ideas (apparently).

Last week I had a sudden, but fortunately non-catastrophic,disassembly of my left front axle to to write about. I wrote that up, got dressed for a ride, did a careful walk-around on the trike, and hit the road.

Somewhere just after mile 6 my rear wheel started to get squirrelly and, when I looked back at it (this is a bit of a stretching feat on the trike) I could see that it was uncomfortably low on air. I had a flat.

My first strategy was to hope that it had somehow just gotten the air knocked out of it (I know, I know - wishful thinking). So I pulled out the hand-pump that I keep in what is almost certainly a purpose-designed pocket on the back of the seat (there are several of these pockets on the back of my Catrike Pocket seat - it’s a clever design) and pumped it up. And it seemed to hold air, so I remounted and rode away.

...for maybe 100 feet.

Yes - then it was flat again, and it was clear something more permanent had happened to the tire. I’m frankly not sure what - there was no clear event to proceed this, but there I was, regardless (which is why I think the Norns may have been having a little fun with me).

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So there I was, a little less than halfway into my ride, and at the furthest point from home in the route, and I began to debate in my head about whether to call for a ride.

The thing is, I’ve never successfully changed a tire on the trike. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I’m actually not sure if I’ve ever done so on any bike or cycle. If I have, it’s been a very long time. And by successfully, I mean that I’ve tried on a number of occasions, but those efforts have ended up in failure for various and sundry reasons - either I’ve flattened the tube in the effort to install it, or I’ve been unable to get the tire back on the wheel, or encountered similar such issues. I managed to do both when I tried to change a tire on the Pocket myself the last time, and ultimately gave up and took it the 20 minutes down the road to the local bike shop. And that is my general approach, for better or worse, because I’d typically rather spend my time riding than repairing.

But here I was, at the side of the road, with a choice to either tuck my tail between my legs and slink off, or take a shot at rectifying the situation myself.

After a bit of thought I reasoned that there was very little to lose by giving it a try. First, I was already immobile and had a bad tube. This was pretty much the worst the situation could get, and if I failed I’d still be making that call for a ride.

Second, and more important, the situation was different than in the past. I’ve now watched the guys at Peru Bike Works change the tires on the Pocket’s wheels multiple times, plus I’ve spent a bit of time on the subject on YouTube as a result of my last adventure in this area, and so I’ve learned a bit about the technique. Perhaps even more important still, that watching made me realize that something existed that I, even more embarrassingly still, had previously been unaware of: tire levers.

You’d think that, in forty-plus years of riding, I’d have come across these little marvels before. I’m quite certain they are nothing new, and I fear they may be nearly as old as the pneumatic tire itself. Still, I had previously been ignorant of their very existence, and so every time I’ve tried to change a tire I’ve employed the tool within my toolbox that most closely seems to fit the task: a flat-bladed screwdriver. Which works, of course, to move the tire off and on the wheel, but routinely pinches or pokes and flattens the tube. At which point I then have to go to the bike shop...

This time, however, I was armed with both new knowledge, and new tools that were appropriate to the job. I was also emboldened by the fact that it was the 20" rear tire, which would probably be a little more pliable and easy to move than the 16" fronts had been. So I gave it a shot.

I rolled the trike to an easement area aside the street and started to work. I was in a residential area of the town of Mendota, which at least meant I was in the shade and out of the wind, and didn’t have to contend with traffic moving at rural road speeds near me as I worked. Of course, it also meant that I was on display to everyone in the neigborhood, making a public event of my potential failure.

The wheel came off of the back and out of the chain perfectly, and the tire levers absolutely did their job. I was, frankly, astonished at how easily the tire came off the wheel.

I inspected the tire and found no cuts or holes. And the leak in the tube itself had to be very small, as it would hold air for a bit before deflating. This was encouraging, since it suggested that the tire was fine to continue riding once (if) I managed to get everything up and running.

Going back on was a little more effort, but not as much as I’d feared it would be. The levers were a big help in this respect and, after noodling with it a bit, I was able to reseat the tire around the new tube. Then I went to pump it up with the hand pump and...

...nothing. The new tube would not hold air. I tried pumping it up for several minutes (or at least so it felt) with absolutely no progress made.

I really do not think I’d pinched it or damaged it putting it on. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but I don’t think I ever even came near it, even with the tire levers, so I suspect it was faulty from the get-go. Fortunately I had another (I carry two tubes to match the rear, and three for the fronts, which always seemed like overkill given that I couldn't change them myself anyway, but sometimes things work out...).

I reversed the process, pulled the first tube off, put the second one on (I pumped it up a bit to test it first), and that one held air. So - you know - success!

I popped it back on, and continued with the rest of the ride. The entire process took a long time, relatively speaking - Cyclemeter says my stopped time on this route was nearly 52 minutes, and I can verify that 50 of those were due to the flat; So I certainly wasn’t speedy. But that was nearly an hour spent developing experience at something that, if I continue riding (and I will) I will almost certainly need to do again.

I had never before used either of the two tire levers, or the little hand pump (which I’d purchased for that pocket on the back of the seat shortly after getting the trike two years ago). This one use more than justified the purchase of both, and I’m glad I had them - and the extra tubes - along for the ride. I probably won’t be so quick to run to the bike shop next time this needs to be done.

And when I got home, I immediately ordered two new 20" tubes from Amazon - Fortuna favet paratus...

Father’s Day

I have the good fortune to be an active person by nature. What I mean by this is that, as a general rule, I don’t have to drag myself off the couch and force myself to go outside and do something active. I’m at the other end of that spectrum - on days that I cannot go out and engage outside I feel a little trapped and start to get stir crazy.

I owe that good fortune to my father, Jim Wade.

He taught me so many things, and began those lessons early.

He taught me to throw and catch a baseball and swing a bat. I was in little league, first in Compton and then in Mendota. I continued on to senior league, and even played a little in High School. When it was needed he stepped up and coached me and my friends.

He showed me how to drive a nail and solder a pipe. I learned how to make a thing level or plumb, the difference between the two, and why these things are important. What’s more, he showed me what men could accomplish with their hands with a little time and effort and expertise; showed me by example time and again.

He taught me how to deal with a bully and throw a punch, and how to give fair warning before doing so. I said above that the lessons began early, and this was taught to me at five years of age. What’s more it was extremely effective (in a way that would surely be significantly problematic in the schools of today), and also had the effect of teaching me that, once employed, it was not a skill that had to be used often.

Though he taught me to defend myself, he also taught me never to raise my hands against women. This lesson was not just abstract - it was hands on, swift, and immediate, and delivered with far more care and kindness than the brash teenager who received it deserved.

He taught me to operate machinery of so very many types - from go-karts to minibikes to motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats, cars, and trucks. He taught me to drive a stick and how to turn into a skid. He taught me to back up a trailer - and tho I’m still working on that one, the fault there is on the student and not the teacher.

He taught me how to bait a hook and cast, and taught me the patience of waiting for a fish to bite. With him I learned the absolute joy of a shore lunch made from the incredibly fresh fish you’ve just caught. He later taught my child the very same skills.

I learned how to swing a driver and operate a putter at his hand. When I was very small he cut down an old set of clubs and re-affixed handles to them so they’d be the proper size for a young learner.

He taught me to ride a bike, and before that showed me the joy of riding by taking me out on his bike with him. He did this by hand-making a wooden seat designed to sit and balance on the top bar of the bike. It was an implement that would surely terrify new parents today, but it spawned a love of cycling that carries through to this day.

And there’s so much more that I could list here. Some of these lessons I use regularly and routinely, like cycling and driving, while others are much more occasional. But I value them all, and so many of them taught me more than the skills inherent, but also lessons about winning, losing, self-esteem, taking a fall - about life.

And in so many ways, all of this taught me perhaps the most important lesson of all - how to be a father. I’ve tried to pass those lessons along as best I can with my own child, and can only hope to have done half as well.

Thanks Dad - and Happy Father’s Day!

Roadside Repairs - Part Deux

It’s been a little less than a year since I had a brake come apart a few miles into a ride. I was actually thinking about that event this past Sunday as I was getting the Pocket ready for a ride and, as a result, checked the brakes to make sure they were tight. A few seconds with the allen wrenches on each, and they seemed to be just fine.

Confident that all was good, I hit the road for a 29-ish (ok - 28.7) mile ride. Bucking the trend of this extremely wet season, it was a near perfect day for a ride: Sunshine, 69° (F), a relaxed (for the prairie) 12mph wind (Cyclemeter keeps track for me). Honestly, it would have been hard to ask for better weather.

As I came into the last third of the ride, I was heading south, with that 12mph wind at my back. The road was relatively level and I was running at a pretty decent clip, a little over 20mph (no bragging here - this was definitely with wind assist). And then something came up off the road.

Now, as anyone who rides can probably attest, tires do periodically pick things up off the road. On the recumbent trike you are much more intimate with your wheels, and so you become more aware of it when it occurs. Even more so if your front wheels do not have fenders, as is the case for me. It happens often enough that, at this point, one tends to dismiss it.

Which I did. At least initially.

But a second or so after seeing (or maybe feeling - it goes by very quickly) the debris, I heard it land.

...It made a metallic "ping".

Most road or trail debris is of the stick or rock variety, so a metallic sound is, shall we say, at least potentially troubling. So I slowed down, did a U-turn, and rode back slowly over the prior 1/8th or so of a mile (again, I was moving at a pretty good clip when it happened). I couldn't see anything from the vantage point of the trike on the way back, but I rode slowly back over the section again the other way. Again seeing nothing, I decided I was going to have to get up off the trike and walk the area to be certain there were no issues.

After a couple of feet I reached my turnaround point, and saw a wheel skewer laying on the road.

Now, for just a second, I swear what I thought was "oh - someone lost a wheel skewer here".

This despite the fact that the skewer was about six inches long, and I am literally the only recumbent trike rider for about 30 miles or so, as best I can tell. It clearly would not have fit any kind of traditional upright.

But that was for just a second. Ok - maybe two. (I swear I’m not dumb. Not really...) And then I looked back at my Pocket:

And so now I knew what I was looking for along that road. Or at least what else, now that I’d found the skewer. I needed to locate the two seating nuts (my term - I’ll bet they have an actual, technical name) that hold the skewer into the wheel and mounting bracket.

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I walked back over that 1/8th mile or so and, after several minutes of looking, found the outside one in the grass on the opposite side of the road. It’s forward momentum had apparently bounced and traveled it across the other lane of travel to rest there.

I carried the nut, a little worse for wear (though some of the scratching is from another incident) back and placed it on the seat with the skewer while I went to look for the inside one.

It made sense to look for it in the general vicinity of the skewer. Where I found it, tho, was a few feet further down the road from my turnaround point - on pavement I hadn’t yet traveled.

For scale, it helps to realize I did my turnaround right by the stop sign, which is also where I saw the skewer.

Piecing it together I figure the sequence of events was something like this:

1. The outside nut worked its way loose and came off first. This was the item I saw/felt come loose and bounce away with the "ping".
2. At that point the skewer was loose, but still on the trike. When I did my U-turn the skewer fell out as I hooked around. This probably gives an idea of how quickly I did the turns (recumbent trikes handle like go-karts - it’s part of the fun - but perhaps not advisable when your wheel isn’t, you know, attached).
3. Shortly after the skewer exited the inside nut came free - either off of the skewer or off of the trike - and being lighter than the skewer, continued its forward momentum.

An inspection of the wheel found that the springs were still intact. The repair - such as it was - was the simple action of putting the pieces back together. The fix took considerably less time than the finding of the pieces.

But as I was doing that and then resuming my ride, some considerations ran through my head.

First - how amazing and fortunate is it that the wheel stayed on the trike? I suspect this owes in large part to the fact that the disc brake calipers are mounted to the frame and not the wheel, helping to keep everything in place. But all told, I probably rode a little more than a quarter mile (albeit slowly) with the skewer (axle) missing, including two U-turns - riding back over the area looking for what I found - before I got off the trike.

Second - how fortunate is it that I actually chose to stop? As I said, things being kicked up by the front tires is not an unusual occurrence, and I nearly dismissed it and kept going. I was about 20.5 miles into my 29-ish mile ride, and things were going well (or so I thought). I really did not want to stop. How far into that last stretch would the wheel have hung on for? And how rude an awakening would it have been when it came apart?

Third - how amazing and fortunate is it that I was able to find all three pieces? I was able to avoid calling the road support crew (also known as my wife and/or child) to come and get me, mostly due to dumb luck.

I’ve ridden over 1100 miles since the incident with the brake, so I’ve gotten more than my fair share of mileage without issue, I think. In fact, so rarely do I have any difficulties with my trike that I think I may have become a bit complacent with the equipment checks (I checked the brakes because I thought of it, but they were the only component I checked). All-in-all, I’m feeling pretty fortunate.

But - you know - I’m going to start checking things a little more regularly too. I think I may have used up my supply of dumb luck.

Fortuna favet paratus...