On Pictures from the July 29 Escape The Don ride

I forgot to include these before, but here they are:
No, in fact I was not stoned out of my mind when this picture was taken, I don't know what I was, but I was not stoned. (I feel I better point that out because well frankly if that's not the look of someone on some other planet... actually that's the same look Stephen Harper has most of the time... figures.)

This is one of the better photos of me. This was taken at the coffee break point, west of Highway 400, at Steels. Had I known we were about to go about a bajillion miles an hour, I doubt I'd have looked quite so happy.


You can hardly see me here, third from the far left, what you cannot see is I am ready to collapse on my handle bars any second. These Tuesday night rides are INSANE, which is probably why I love doing them.

On Reflecting, why I ride

Recently I had a conversation and I was told why what I do is not an effective training programme. To be sure the language was far more polite than that, but the message was, my training scheme is not worth it.

Good advice if I wanted to win races, except I do not. I don't care for racing, well maybe something really casual like when David from the BCC told me to crank it until we passed that car in the distance, but not an official organized race with starting lines, time clocks, crashes and all that stuff. The fact is I ride for three reasons:

1. The scenery
2. The camaraderie
3. Physical fitness

Allow me to elucidate. On the scenery I love riding through the country side, when you can take a deep breath in and not smell diesel exhaust or a sewage treatment plant, instead it is the air cleaned by the trees, free of carbon monoxide and all the other byproducts of human activity (many of which I do not even want to think about.) Besides which, the forests and the farms offer a beautiful change from the office towers of this concrete jungle.

On the camaraderie, we are talking about the Beaches Cycle Club, I suspect if you looked camaraderie in the dictionary there would have to be the BCC referenced in there somewhere.

As for physical fitness, well I have not lost much weight since I started riding, maybe 5 pounds, but I have lost three inches from my waste line and my pants are tighter in the legs and that is not from fat either. According to mapmyride.com, the last time I went to Lake Simcoe I burned nearly 6000 calories in under 6 hours. My training programme may not win me any yellow jerseys, but I think my cardio health is probably pretty good now, although I am going to get a regular checkup soon from a GP, I'll see what the numbers are then.

I could race, but I would loose, I am not a gifted athlete and here is my dirty little secret. I don't care! I don't want to win... oh wait I said that already. Sure it would be nice if I could keep up with guys like Emile, Thi and Lauri for an entire ride, but here is another dirty little secret, I almost can right now. With a little effort, time and training (that I am already doing) I am confident that I will not be the guy so near the back of the pack on Tuesday nights for much longer and even if I am stuck at the end of the pack, that is alright with me, I would rather enjoy myself and love the sport than beat myself up on rollers and end up doing with my bike what I am now doing with my skates. (That would be a colossal waste.)

On Long Rides and Good Customer Service

First I should say how impressed I am by the people at Mapmyride.com, the site is slow, but on further investigation I realise that is because there is so much data involved in a GPS track of a route. Granted its not Gene splicing or even medical records of every person in Canada, but it is still an awful lot of data, multiplied by hundreds, thousands? of users. Anyway what impresses me is not the slowness of the site, rather it is the responsiveness of their support, just check out the comment in yesterday's post.

Anyway in other news I am trying to organize a ride for the holiday Monday. The route is below, I expect to see all my friends there, or I'm gonna find you after and bitch slap you for being a chicken! No seriously, I hope to see lots of people out there, it is a really nice route. I am hoping to start at Timmy's at Lakeshore and Leslie at 5am, but if people from further away want a later start, as long as they actually are serious about coming I can put it off a little bit, but I would like to dodge the bad holiday traffic by leaving as early as possible.

Lake Ontario to Simcoe and Back

http://www.bikely.com/

An addendum: This ride will be a LSD (Long Slow Distance, not Lysergic acid diethylamide, sorry guys.) My goal is an average speed of 28~32km/h over the 185km, so expect it to take about 5 hours, plus time for a coffee stop at Timmy's just south of Simcoe.

On New Rides and Old Rides

First order of business, the pictures.

Dan and I spent much of Friday night building my carbon fibre beauty. The result, before we were even done was so gorgeous that Dan declared that my bike looked sick. Which to be honest is about the first time I have had something good enough that someone who is an expert in the field, gave such a stamp of approval. (No, not calling her sick, but saying it with admiration.)

I still need a name, Dan suggested Helga, I am vetoing that suggestion. Other ideas are welcome.

In other news, I went for a ride on Saturday with the Beaches Cycle Club, there are no pictures of me. It was the long distance steady state ride, 170km. As I had to go to the store on Saturday for some final tweaks of the new bike I turned around early, which was a good thing. I was riding Amy (the old Roubaix) when the rear tube blew out just West of Dixie. The good news, I did the entire change myself, QB did hold up my saddle for me and Dan lent his moral support (mostly of the "move faster" variety), which was helpful, but it is always a relief to know, in a crunch I can change a tube on the side of the road with nothing but the parts I carry around. (So much for walking to the nearest gas station, eh!)

Sunday I rode my new bike for the first time. She was not exactly a dream to ride, everything felt sluggish, I thought maybe I needed some rest, or perhaps I was just short of red blood from the last donation. After about 65km of struggling, well on the way home actually, I realised my problem. My brakes were tightened down so much that they were rubbing even when not engaged, I disengaged the calipers and I went from struggling to keep up with the pack to being a lead rider the rest of the way.

That is good exercise actually, donate blood then tighten your brakes or skate axles, now go as fast as you can!

In other news Lesley and I went to Niagara-on-the-Lake, which I have decided is such a pretty place that I would like to organize some sort of ride from the Beach to NotL for the Holiday (Civic Day) coming up on Monday. It is only 135km one way from my home to NotL, whats 270km among friends?

Finally mapmyride.com is starting to really piss me off, I cannot load my GPS data onto their site anymore, it keeps saying there are no routes or waypoints on my Garmin which is not at all correct and their site is agonizingly slow. However it turns out I can display what I did on Sunday, I loaded it directly into Google Maps, just click here to see. Or you can see the group photo below, notice how my back was turned... oops!

On Religion

Okay, before I get to my rant on one Religious belief structure, let me start by pointing out there is a new survey, which is religious in a way too. Now come on people, what is your favourite bike/skate boot? The answer to one is pretty obvious for me, the other, well I am not so sure.

In other news, Cor (see my readings) was asking how to train in the winter. He said, "I hate cycling with a passion", I want to stress, Cor hates cycling, I on the other hand think Cor is deranged! Sorry Cor, but you really must be to have such a bizare attitude about the greatest way to get around ever since the invention of the human foot! Anyway I would just like to point out Cor works for the Governement... of Canada no less! And he finds riding boring! Maybe in Ottawa the word boring means exciting to us normal people and exciting means boring? Sort of like Bill Clinton's line "it depends on what your definition of is, is."

I tried to work for the Government of Ontario once, it was so dull I quit the job within six months. Looking busy without actually having anything to do is really teadious work.

Anyway here is a rant I wrote last night that is sure to offend, but hey when has that ever stopped me from publishing something?

My sister-in-law's grandfather passed away recently. I hardly knew him but in the 1990s he seemed like a decent guy. I went to the shiva last night, not because I knew the man - I hardly did, but because you do these things for the living, except neither my brother nor sister-in-law were there. Question, why the hell did I go to the shiva then? Clearly my presence, or lack thereof would not have hurt anyone - sometimes family obligations go too far and this was one of those times.

Anyway I mention all this because it was a Jewish funeral, now understand I am - a born but non practicing - Jew. I have a lot of trouble rationalizing this god person with the horrors that we humans inflict on each other and on "god's" little planet. But what is relevant is at the prayers I did something I was never mature enough to do before, I deconstructed the language and discovered - to my way of thinking - an agonizingly rightist mentality. All that Israel does is good, all that we believe is good and dear god please put an end to our enemies. Now let's see Jesus was a Jew who had followers who started a new nearly identical belief system, except they believe god should put an end to their enemies, Muhammad was an Arab inspired by Jews and Christians who started his own religion in a manner nearly identical to the Christians. Little wonder everyone in the Middle East seems to be at each other's throat all the time.

I would not dare to pretend to know right from wrong in these matters but it does seem to me that a good place to start is by kicking this god person out of our long term planning process and accept the fact that we need to come to terms with our enemies because short of nuking them they won't be smited any time soon.

Here is another random thought on religion. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well god smote the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and changed the flow of the red sea. We humans have smote Hiroshima and Nagasaki (have the ability to wipe out pretty much all human life on Earth) and have changed the geography of rivers, lakes even major seas - does that destructive potential give me any divine powers?

In the BBC radio comedy "A Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy" Douglas Adams describes a set of books, a theological blockbuster, "A Few of God's Mistakes", "Some more of God's Greatest Mistakes" and "Who Is This God Person Anyway?" I wonder if those books would be any good?

On New Survey's

As you can see (unless you are reading an archived copy of this post). I have put up a new survey, it blows my mind how many companines out there make road bikes. But anyway I am pretty sure I missed a few, so please post a reply here if you can think of any to add to the list. As for myself I have yet to make up my mind, I'd like to try out a Cervelo before I vote having only been on a... damnit, I forgot about Coppi! and my Specialized.

Second thought, I am not going to add Coppi, they are actually made by someone else and I have heard that they aren't very good anymore. (If someone else asks for it though, I'll put it up.)

On Easy Rides

Since I gave blood I have been taking it easy, here is Tuesday (July 22) and Wednesday (July 23'rd) rides.

On Utopia

Thomas Moore wrote a book about a place, an island in The New World, considered to be close to ideal, he called his island Utopia, Greek, literally translated as 'Not Place'. In honour of Utopia I give you a recent political cartoon, used without permission, but here is a link to the cartoonist's website, I am sure that promo for Mr. Zyglis will offset any loss incurred by my reprint here.

Sigh. If only!

And from the dystopic world we do live in a stock photo from somewhere in the United States.

Little wonder there is an obesity epidemic in the United States.

So here is the thing about the survey that just ended. Suppose you are a conservative Republican who actually thinks the Bush administration is doing a good job. Chances are you are holding your nose and gritting your teeth on the though of John McCain, you are also a rare commodity in this day and age who probably doesn't much care for my politics. Now suppose you are a progressive of pretty much any stripe, you most like think that the current President (and Vice President) is responsible for any number of crimes and ought to be impeached. Well if you do a rapid one two punch, impeach both Bush and Chenney then the next president of the United States by the laws of presidential secession is the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, a democrat from the great state of California (mostly great because Californians vote Democrat in federal matters, has San Francisco and Carmel by the Sea.)

There's a reason I voted for Pelosi, not Obama, sure I'd love to be able to say, President Barrack Hussein Obama, first president elected since Bill Clinton in 1996, but I sure wouldn't mind saying George Walker Bush, first president impeached since Andrew Johnson (also a Republican, just like Richard Nixon). Oh well, in 181 days someone else will have their hands on the red button and we can all breath a sigh of relief. (Just imagine, if Bush was president in October of '62, now that is scary.)

On An Afternoon Ride

The weather was very pleasant this evening. It has been predicted to rain, so I went for a ride. I accidentally hit the lap button on the GPS so this ride is divided into two sections, they are below.

On Journeys and Advice from Philosophers

I went to Rochester this weekend to visit my friend and while there picked up my Ultegra Group, Yippee! While I was there I was talking to my friend’s neighbour who is a part time bike mechanic and auto mechanic (a real handy guy to be friends with). Anyway I told him my theory about bike gender.

My theory is roughly described here and I will now elucidate further:

Road bikes are women, they are light, sleek, have graceful curves, beautiful lines and look sexy. If you do anything to hurt them, ride over a pothole, take a railway track on a funny angle, they give it all right back to you in spades, but when you treat them well they can be the greatest ride of your life.

Mountain bikes are men, they are heavy, have straight angular lines, they look awkward and have bizarre things hanging around in places there should not be things at all. No matter what punishment you give a mountain bike, it just takes it quietly without complaint.

Well this leaves hybrids, where are hermaphrodites.

Anyway on mentioning my theory of bike gender the bike mechanic told me that logically, a hybrid with road wheels and road bars but maybe shocks and a mountain frame is a hermaphrodite. A road bike with straight bars is a eunuch, since it’s pretty much a useless ride. An interesting theory, but by simply changing the bars, a eunuch becomes female? Strange, very strange.

For those of you who are wondering, yes my friend named his bike’s, the road bike is Bevis and the Mountain is Judy – clearly his bikes have gender issues. (It occurs to me, I never published the name of my current Roubaix, she is Amy, for anyone who was wondering on that score, I am kind of thinking Ashley for the next bike, but not sure yet, Ashley could be a man’s name. No, I have not bothered to name the Coppi, not naming that bike is a mark of disdain I suppose.)
On returning from Rochester I had another unpleasant experience with the border guards, the sad fact is, I hate crossing the border. Those guys give me the willies every damned time. I have decided that going forward I am going to avoid border crossings if and when possible. (Failing that, I am declaring everything because I have the worst possible luck with those guys.)

On an unrelated note when I was younger American friends of mine would ask me which US currency did not have a dead president on it. An idiotic test of history because while they wanted to hear the hundred dollar bill, the answer is actually the ten and the hundred. (Recall, the ten has Alexander Hamilton and the hundred has Benjamin Franklin. Hamilton could never be the president; he was born in the British West Indies.)

In honour of Ben Franklin though I found this quotation which I find very helpful:

I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc. I adopted instead of them "I conceive", "I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so; or "so it appears to me at present".

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him immediately some absurdity in his proposition. In answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appeared or semed to me some difference, etc.

I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction. I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.

-- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

On Lost Passion

I was flipping through the blogs of some skater friends of mine and then I glanced over the Beaches Cycle Club blog. (I wonder if anyone at the BCC has a personal Blog? Something tells me most of those guys spend their free time on the saddle and not writing… hmmm, maybe I should too!)

But it hit me like a load of bricks, I have absolutely zero interest in skating anymore, I have reached the point where I do not even care to read the blogs anymore. I don’t get it. Hardly a year ago I was out in Cambridge with Benji getting my foot molded for my custom Vaypors now here I am, disinterested in skating. So disinterested in fact that on Wednesday, when I pulled my skates out, those same custom Vaypors, there was a layer of dust on them.

I read the plans of the club, the Saturday Steady State ride to Hamilton and the Sunday “Simcoe Scramble” and you know what? Somehow I am going riding on Sunday, probably not with the BCC this weekend, the trip to Rochester I am taking tonight will leave me too tired to wake up early on Sunday morning. But I am going to go for a ride on Sunday. I am thinking, screw this blood donation crap, next weekend I don’t care if I keel over and pass out, I have to get back out there with them, Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe and back, here I come! (That is about 180km, or roughly one full marathon longer than the longest inline ultra-marathon in North America, the A2A.)

In unrelated news there was some ambiguity regarding my recent references to the Doughnut ride. I wrote: Now I have heard that the origin of the name is from the fact that the ride started at a doughnut shop at Laird and Eglington which is no longer there. I meant, the doughnut shop is no longer at Laird and Eglinton, if anyone wants to go on the hammer and drop feast from hell, by all means, show up at Laird and Eglinton, (and yes I cannot spell if my life depended on it.)

I also wrote: my friend’s comment was, how can it be uphill all the time if it’s a ring? Actually that was a misunderstanding on my part, my friend meant, the ride has lots of rollers so it is continuously up and down. I still maintain that the laws of physics as applied to cycling are not the same as the regular laws of physics, in particular, a ring can go uphill all the time. It’s true, just go on a long enough ride and you will discover I am right!

Anyway I am going to continue collecting laws of physics for cyclists, I think they are great, if anyone has any they would like to contribute, by all means, just make a post. At some point I will probably create a static web page of laws of physics, but not now. Right now I have to dream...

...of riding!

On New Rides and Depleted Efforts

I got a Carbon Frame… I HAVE A CARBON FIBRE FRAME!! Yipee!!! Now I just have to attach my Ultegra group, my wheels, my saddle… oh yeah, and the water bottle cages and I am all set. Except, when I put my new saddle on my current bike I did a bad job that when Dan saw it he got good and pissed, so this time I am going to make sure someone who really knows what they are doing assembles my bike. Sadly this means I won’t have my new bike until July 29, Dan is too busy until then, but at least I will be confident in the new bike’s assembly.

In case any of you are wondering, Lesley made it very clear to me, I must sell the ‘old’ bike. So if anyone out there wants a 2006 Roubaix (56cm), that I have had since April, she even comes with 105 pedals, just give me a holler. (The full history of the bike is pretty well documented right here on my blog.) I will even throw in a new chain, if the buyer promises to take good care of her, she’s a good bike, she just needs a new chain soon. (I took the wear gage to the chain a couple weeks ago, it was 0.5%, then on Sunday it was 0.75%, at this rate, two weeks from now the chain will be garbage and if I keep it any longer than 1% the cassette and the chain ring will be garbage too.)

Of course I need a new name for the new bike, I am thinking Lucy, feminized version of Lucifer since she’s bound to be a speed demon, but I’m not sure I like that name. (Sorry but I am really sick of calling my bike, The Roubaix, or worse, this would be “The Carbon Roubaix with the Ultegra Group” Geez, I’d be a walking advertisement every time I had to refer to one bike as opposed to the other.)

Other than that, I skated yesterday, for the first time since late May! I guess if I am going to have a picture of my skates here and call my blog Skater Dreams I really ought to skate at least once in a blue moon. Yesterday was a ‘work from home’ day for me, but I had planned to give blood, so I skated to the clinic near the office. Let me start by saying that at lunch time people are even more out to lunch than during rush hour. One guy in an Acura MDX (a huge Stupid Ugly Vehicle) nearly killed me when he made a left turn after not bothering to look. Then some pedestrians froze up when they saw me barreling towards them. Remarkably when I got to the clinic my blood pressure was only 126/66 mmHg, with a 70 bpm heart rate. One would think that all the excitement I had on the way to the clinic my rates would be an awful lot higher, I think all this biking is responsible for my better cardio health.

For anyone who cares to keep track of these things, I am at 61 donations, according to Canadian blood services, one donation can save three lives, so to 102, 103 and 104, sorry about that chocolate cake, but it was really really yummy going down. Of course thanks too my loss of approximately 10% of my blood volume I am going to have to take it easy for a few weeks, I probably won’t be doing anything with the Beaches Club for the whole of the week to come and then for the first few weeks after just the easy Saturday morning rides.

Meanwhile I am looking out the window here at my desk on the 27’th floor of a downtown office tower, and it is such a nice day. What a shame.

On Escape The Don Redux

It seems mapmyride.com is fastest early in the morning, makes sense. Anyway here is the Escape The Don ride from July 9.



On the subject of the Escape The Don ride here are some photos, all courtesy of Dan Yang (with no explicit permission to use them.) ;)

Before the ride, little did I know at the time I was about to embark on the Hammer Feast from hell... somehow I don't think I'd have been smiling if I knew what was about to happen.

Another before shot, I look so innocent and happy. Funny what a night of chasing after a pack of tiny distant blinking red lights can do to a person's psychology.


And after the ride. Notice I was leaning on my bars? If I did not, I would have collapsed... no I would not have. But when I got home I literally sat down on the hardwood in the basement and did not move for about 15 minutes, I just could not. And to think as I type this I still haven't made my blood donation, that's at 12:30 today. Once that happens then I really won't be able to ride fast... not apparently, that I can ride all that fast right now.

On Escape The Don

I did the Escape The Don night ride with the Beaches Cycle Club, only I forgot to press start on my GPS at the mid way way break at Tim Hortons. Still here is half the route. Last week, Wednesday July 9 I did not forget to turn my GPS on so I can give the entire route and a pretty screen capture so you do not have to wait for the painfully slow but highly useful mapmyride.com website. (Stupid question but why is there site so slow? Are they running it on Windoze Vista? Probably that and some 3com switches! Sorry Robert Metcalfe, your idea was genius, but the company you created blows chunks.)

Actually something is very wrong with their web site, so for now, just a screen capture, maybe tomorrow I'll be able to get the details in a publicly viewable site.

On Summer In the City

The movie Across the Universe has a scene that is supposed to be the Financial District of New York (Battery area, by the look of things, right near Wall Street). In this scene men, all wearing a black suit dance in step. After I saw the movie my mother, asked me if that reminded me of my normal day job at all? The truth is, it really does. Every morning, I certainly don't dance my way into the office, but - and when I walk in this seems especially true - all of us office grunts grit our teeth, duck our heads and barrel through the core of the city to wherever it is we grind out our daily bread.

In the winter the only people passing through are the office drones like me, but in the summer a new species emerges, (migrates North?) they are often heavier, laden with camera's, children, Hawaiian shirts and, typically, copious body fat. In the downtown area these bizarre creatures are often called tourists, and their job, appears to be to take rigorous photographic documentation of thoroughly mundane sites. Today at lunch was no exception.

As I walked south on Bay Street to meet Lesley for lunch I encountered one of these tourists photographing the words "Bank of Nova Scotia" embossed in metal on the side of a building who's principal occupant was none other than Scotia Bank. Just a little further south, at King Street a different tourist was scrutinizing a map, perhaps trying to find the TSE? (He'd have more luck finding it here on The Internet than at Bay and King.) A group of tourists past through the food court at BCE place as we were eating, no doubt where they come from food courts are an exotic locale.

As I write this, it occurs to me I must sound horribly arrogant, I certainly do not mean to. It just seems absurd to me, the reactions people take to new surroundings. It does not help that I am a city rat, born and raised in the concrete jungle, but when I travel I certainly do not get excited by the site of the corporate headquarters of say, Citibank, now the US Capitol on the other hand, that is a site to behold. I guess that forces the natural question, am I any better than the tourists who come here? I guess not, but at least I can have a little fun observing them can't I?

On a totally unrelated note, the survey for Next President of the United States (if you are reading an archived copy of this post the current survey is who should be the next President) closes in six days. Here is a big hint, it's a bit of a trick question, depending on your politics. I will explain after the survey ends, but go ahead and answer, the truth is all options are reasonable, except for John McCain who is not a natural born citizen - therefore the constitutionality of his presidency is debatable at best and no, that's not the trick.

More On the Simcoe Scramble

It occurs to me, when I said the wind will change direction to always be a head wind, in fact that is my own discovery from my skating days on the MGT, back and forth, back and forth, head wind all the way! What someone else at the BCC said was, even if you have a head wind and there are rain clouds behind you this does not mean you have dodged the rain, the wind might be coming from the North at sea level, but at the level where the clouds are the wind is coming from the South. We can generalize this rule to say, if it is raining somewhere, it is probably raining where you are!

Yesterday, during the rain, we came to a steep downhill, it was frankly frightful, I felt I had zero control. For once I was relieved to be going back up hill.

Towards the end of the ride I was pulling the pack when we came to a downhill, by then things had dried up nicely. I floored it, the road was good and the faster I went down the hill the easier the journey back up would be. I was maintaining a steady 52km/h as the hill leveled off, then Dan shot by, he must have been doing at least 57km/h possibly more than 62km/h. I caught up with him a few kilometers later. As I caught up I told him I was out of steam, I was much relieved when he told me, he was too.

There are some pictures from the ride, here they are (the one of me is courtesy of Dan Yang, the group shot was taken by Emile, using Dan's Camera, so let's say it's courtesy of Emile?)

See me, I'm on the left, I took my helmet... because well, I always take off any head covering during a picture... if I can. At this point most of the guys have zero km on their computers, I am at 33.1 I think... or was it 31.3? Anyway I can take some pride in knowing that I while I wasn't doing great by the end of the ride, I was still doing pretty well all things considered.

The coffee break at Tim Horton's just south of Lake Simcoe. Okay a few stories, first this picture was after I started bitching that there are no photos of me on these rides, well Dan set that right. Shortly after the picture was taken we left the Tim's and I was feeling kind of gross, I had just downed a bottle of iced "tea", read: water, corn syrup, artificial flavours, potassium hexametaphosphate, nitrogen tetroxide, unsymetrical dymethyl hydrizine, natural flavours, etc. (Yes two of those ingredients are rocket fuels, I don't remember what was really in the tea but it was about that bad!) Anyway as we are leaving I say, mostly to myself, but too loudly, time to burn some fat, as I pass a line of obese people lined up at that same Tim Horton's doughnut shop. Well, after I stopped laughing it occurred to me, what I should have said was, time to go poison the air and enrich Osama Bin Laden, but I have to wonder if they'd get the reference. I'm a elitist condescending son-of-a-bitch aren't I... but then again, if those people stopped driving to the Tim's and rode a bike there instead, they would feel better and loose a little weight, it was Sunday morning after all.

Today I was riding home from work and I saw a tricked out Ford Mustang and I thought to myself, we have not only made ourselves oil dependant, we have made ourselves in love with oil. Our entire culture is based on oil worship. I am going to say something horribly wrong and offensive, but it is worth considering, maybe to some small extant Bin Laden was right, not killing 3000 people I mean, but in objecting to our way of life. We rape small defenceless countries so that we can drive around in tricked out Ford Mustangs, is that really the society we want to be?

One final thing, today I climbed Brimely from the bottom of The Bluffs to Kingston Road, I can honestly say it's about as hard as Rattle Snake, at least if you don't down shift like crazy, which I did not do. I did The Bluffs all in the same gear as I ride the flats, next time I take my cassette off I'll count the teeth, if I remember.

Finally I have added my GPS data to Mapmyride.com for the Rattle Snake climb, you can view it here.

On The Simcoe Scramble

This morning I rode from my front door on Woodbine south the short run to Lakeshore Blvd., across to Leslie and then from there North to Elgin Mills Road, where I met up with the Beaches Cycle Club. From Elgin Mills we rode together to the South Shore of Lake Simcoe and then back to Elgin Mills. I am sad to say I ran out of steam and hitched a ride home from there. I only covered 155 km, I could have gone the whole way, but I wanted to get home earlier because I was tired, in pain out of water and still had lots to do when I got home. But if, after I recover from my blood donation, there is another Simcoe Scramble I will dip my toes in Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe... probably Simcoe first, I don't want to have to wake up even earlier just to make a symbolic point!

Anyway I used Mapmyride.com, its a painfully slow website, but it does have support for the Garmin APIs which is handy, because I have a Garmin GPS... sorry can you tell I have an M.Eng? Basically Mapmyride.com has all the gory details from my bike computer, you can see it right here.
(Sorry if that link does not work, I am still learning how to use their website.)

Here is a screen capture of the map.
While on this ride someone made the observation, when going one direction the wind is in your face, yet when you turn around the wind is still in your face - which we all already knew, but this leads to a law of biker meteorology:

No matter which direction you go, the wind will always be a head wind, unless you are in a large peloton, in which case the wind is probably at your back.

A new law of physics for cyclists!

I have more to describe from the ride today, but I have too much still to do, if I still remember things tomorrow I'll post some of the more memorable events in this space tomorrow.

On Escape From the Don, aka Windy Wednesday

On Wednesday, (July 9) I did another Escape From the Don ride with the Beaches Cycle Club. You can see the route and previous impressions from my first experience here. I think the sun set earlier on July 9 then it did back on June 24 (well yes of course it set earlier, but not that much earlier). I suppose we must have left later because things seemed to get darker a lot sooner. Another thing I noticed, I have yellow tinted glasses, which are great in the rain, make things look brighter, but at night everything looks depressing with a yellow tint.

The guys seem to have two speeds, fast and FASTER!! I knew what was coming this time so I was prepared, the other guys did a bunch of laps out by Highway 400 North of Highway 401 on Bartor Road, it was interval training. I did no such thing, instead I did some very modest riding just to keep warm and recover. That I did not do intervals does not upset me so much, because I was able to keep up with the pack pretty much the whole way home. It still amazes me how fast some of the guys are, I know I can out accelerate and keep speed with any car on Queen Street, but some of the guys can make the same claim with respect to cars on Lakeshore Blvd. Now that is an impressive claim. Anyway here is the photographic evidence, mostly courtesy of Dan Yang.

Endurox, what a wonderful thing, eh!
I could not get my glasses off as fast as Dan can snap a picture.

The two guys in the foreground (and sorry if I misspell this) are Emile and Tai. Emile has the unique ability to do a 100km on 250mL of water, an espresso and a doughnut, I think he has two water bottles and packs all that food for show. Mind you, Emile does something right, keeping up with his draft in a race pretty much ensures a second place finish for you. As for Tai, I suspect that his problem is he does not know how to ride slowly, as soon as he mounts his Carbon Felt if he's not doing 45km/h he falls over. (But that's just a theory, if anyone has seen Tai go less than 45 I am sure there are people track these things who would want to know about it.)

Ah the end of the ride, and no more of that snot tasting Hammer Gel to swallow.

On The Physics of Riding

A friend of mine was complaining that the mapping tool I use is not user friendly. So I tried the link I threw in my last post and you know what, my friend is right. Generating the map is a joke, but actually moving around and zooming in and out is awful. As part of my reader appreciation program, I will switch mapping tools, so far I have one vote for mapmyride.com, if anyone has another suggestion, feel free to comment below.

Anyway I am not going to redraw a hundred mile route, I have to get some work done today, but here are the turn by turn directions, anyone who wants to can certainly trace my route on their preferred system.

Starting from Queen and Eastern Ave, a couple of us went East to Woodbine then South on Woodbine – we were looking for someone – Woodbine turns and becomes Lakeshore. We took Lakeshore Blvd West all the way to Marie Curtis park where we met up with the rest of the club.

1. From Marie Curtis the club went on Lakeshore West to Mississauga Road.
2. We went North on Mississauga to Burnhamthrope Road.
3. We took Burnhamthrope West to 6’th Line (once we got to 9’th line the road becomes a nice country road, much more bucolic than many other routes).
4. We took 6’th Line North to Britannia Road.
5. We took Britannia to Appleby Line
6. We took Appleby North to Steeles Ave (Rattle Snake Hill is just south of Steeles, the hard core guys would then go East on Steeles to Bell School line, south on Bell School to Derry, west on Derry to Appleby, then back up Rattle Snake again! – I did no such thing.)
7. Continue on Appleby to Campbelville Road, then East, we were supposed to go south on Tremaine Road, but we made a mistake and went all the way to Highway 25 before heading south.
8. Highway 25, (aka Martin south to Main Street Milton)
9. Main Street East to Thompson Road, south on Thompson to Britannia.
10. East on Britannia to 5’th Line, which turns and South on 6’th Line.
11. East on Glenashton Dr (which was stupid, should have gone East further south) to Trafalgar.
12. South on Trafalgar to Lakeshore.

My friend also tried to describe the infamous Doughnut ride to me. Now I have heard that the origin of the name is from the fact that the ride started at a doughnut shop at Laird and Eglington which is no longer there. I have also been told that it is called a Doughnut because the ride forms a huge ring around the city. Whatever the case, my friend’s comment was, how can it be uphill all the time if it’s a ring? Well that question got me thinking about a painting by MC Escher called Waterfall. I would repost an image of Waterfall here, but the copyright looks complicated, so I’ll just link to it.

Anyway thoughts of waterfall reminded me of a joke I had come up with while riding. I have come to almost dread going downhill, because going downhill means I am going to end up going back uphill later on! Hence a revision to Sir Isaac Newton’s famous adage whatever goes up must come down, whatever goes down must come right on back up!

Or here’s another one, Albert Einstein used to wonder, if he could fly along side a beam of light as it traveled through space, what would it look like? Well it turns out you cannot travel faster than, or at the speed of, light. Well similarly, if you get dropped from the pack you cannot catch back up, the faster you pedal the faster the pack will move. And if you slow down, the pack simply gets further away. (This rule also applies in inline skating.)

In honour of Max Plank I propose a new unit of measure for cyclists, the shortest possible distance for a bike is an arc equal to a length of one section of chain on the biggest cassette gear after multiplying by the length of the spoke from the outer cassette gear to the wheel rim divided by 2 times pi, we can call it a Plank Bike Distance. A PBD is the shortest theoretical distance a bike can be pedaled.

How about the Uncertainty Principal as applied to bikes? Well we can know where the pack is supposed to go, or we can be leading the pack, but we cannot know where we are supposed to go if we are leading the pack, see my comment on turning south onto Tremaine Road above (step 7 in the turn by turn directions).

Shades of Schrodinger’s cat? If we put a cyclist on a busy city street with door prizes and idiotic drivers armed with cell phones (throw in a few nails and pot holes for good measure and maybe some train tracks), will the cyclist still be alive after an hour?

As we have a Plank Distance how about a Plank Unit of Energy - maybe as much food energy as there is in one pack of hammer gel? Or a Plank time duration - the time between first and second place in a cirterium? I welcome suggestions for those ones.

On Century Rides

A mile is 1.609344 km, therefore 100 miles is obviously 160km 934m 40cm. Yesterday I rode, according to my GPS 161km, assuming perfect precision that is an entire 65.6m farther than 100miles. My first century ride! Part of that ride included Rattle Snake point, I climbed it, bottom to top, without dismounting or crashing, another first for me. And possibly the biggest achievement, I stayed with the hard core pack the entire trip from Rattle Snake to Lakeshore and Trafalgar (well just after Speers Road I let them drop me because I wanted to cool down in anticipation of stopping at the bakery on Lakeshore just East of Trafalgar.

Here is the route we took:

There are some pictures from that ride, courtesy of Dan Yang.

This is most of the Beaches Cycle Club, I'm in there, on the right hand side, near the back, good luck finding me.

Can you see me in the picture below? It's a side shot, I'm just to the left of the guy on the far right. (Maybe I should not wear my BCC jersey on these photo shoots... rides, right rides!) I believe this image is from just before Rattlesnake hill.

See me standing off in the back? This is at the bakery after the ride was pretty much over.
For once I had a really good idea. Why buy two 1/2L bottles of water for $2.00 when you can buy 1 2.5L bottle for the same price? Incidentally, those water + gel bottles are worse than useless and they are messy too. I ended up pouring about a litre of water on my bike trying to clean all the gel off the frame. For that matter, check out the ingredients on the gel, its really hardly worth it to consume that crap. Saturday I went for a very short ride, Lakeshore to Steels and Lesley then home via Don Mills. There is only one picture, and I am not even smiling. Oh well.

I should have more to report on later but I have too much work right now. If anyone from the BCC, or anyone else really, want's the map I have included above, you can view it right here, with variable zoom and centering.

On reflections

First I want to share with everyone a posting I put on the Globe and Mail website, a pair of cyclists were killed while riding on the Trans Canada out in Manitoba. Some people posted saying that cyclists should be more careful. (Given that these guys were on a country road, I don’t see how they can get more careful, car drivers… well just read what I wrote.)

Okay a little story that happens to be true from right in the heart of Hog
Town.

I commute to my professional office job in downtown, it's 7km, I use my bike. I could drive, I have a fancy over priced 1200kg slab of steel in the garage that costs a fortune every time it goes to the mechanic or gas station, but I choose to bike. Besides being a way to relieve stress, cheaper to use and park, better for me, better for the environment, better for road congestion, better for the over burdened city streets, its a more fun way to get to and from work each day.

Every day I take the Eastern Lake Shore trail past Don Roadway, there is a traffic light, right beside the light is a diagram, it shows a red light and under the light is a "no right turn" symbol. You don't need to speak English or French to understand this diagram, they are all over the city, they mean (for those of you who really do need this explained) No right on red. Today, as I approached that intersection two cars made a right on red. The problem is not cyclists, the problem is not car drivers
who do not pay attention. The problem is that car drivers do not pay attention
and do not even realise they are not paying attention. Being cocooned in one or
two tons of steel and using a slight downward pressure on the right foot to move
forward is too mind numbing.

If it were up to me, cars would be band from all roads. The lazy incompetence of most drivers boggles my mind and when you consider that I am asking for nothing more than what I pay for with the insane tax burden that I have to pick up, (roughly 4 times the national average) to say that I have less right to the road... that's insulting!

Today I am not going to write about skating, or riding or anything of the sort. (Except I guess this whole post sort of is about riding... but it is not really.) Some of you may find what I am about to write boring and I don’t give a damn. Sometimes it is worth changing topics.

The fact is we live in a very precarious time. In late 2000 I wrote the following for mathNEWS:

Our great inventiveness has brought us from the dark ages and the bubonic plague
to our hyper connected dot-com, super frantic, 24x7x365 World where the
difference between day and night is a program called clock running on our
terminals.

So here we stand on the edge of a new millennium and the question
is, what will be the big deal? My guess: Education. For about a thousand years
we have had Universities, and as they slowly become the centre of learning, not
only for philosophical and theoretical matters but also applied and practical
knowledge we must ask ourselves, to what end?

I find the optimism of my writing to be well frankly less optimistic than I remember. But I must admit, in the pre 9/11 World of December 2000 things seemed a great deal less complicated. Everything seems so very much more ugly now, the Prime Minister of Canada sucks (what else is new?), the Prime Minister of England is appalling (makes me pine for Tony Blair), the President of the United States is beyond treasonous (a sarcastic comment about the Bush II administration seems painfully small given the magnitude of their crimes). The democracies of the World cannot seem to figure out what it means to be a democracy. A frightfully large number of American’s in the Blogosphere seem so enamored with their own country that they have yet to figure out that there are major systemic flaws in the system that could spell the demise of the so called ‘shining city on a hill’.

Cheap oil has run out and we have no substitute, this end of cheap oil has brought about a new period of expensive food and surely expensive commodities. Meanwhile the atmospheric carbon dioxide level continues to rise while the only thing most politicians can do, besides agree that there is a problem, is to use green house gases as yet another reason to attack the opposition.

We, the human race, are running head long into a brick wall and the best part is, we see it coming, yet instead of slowing down or changing directions the only thing we seem able to do is run faster! We know that we are killing our planet, nuclear waste, toxins, green house gases, yet we just cannot seem to stop. What really depresses me, people see the ability to drive a behemoth SUV as a right, a freedom even (that freedom is actually a direct quotation from a syndicated columnist I could not get permission to quote at length from). I want to know, when did having a monster tank go from being ludicrous to a freedom? How is it that Tom Jefferson and all those guys made do without that freedom yet still managed to craft the declaration of independence, the US Constitution?

We are not a nation addicted to oil, we are a race addicted to our automobiles and the addiction is killing us.

On bad inner tubes and new goals achieved.

I have done it! I made it to the far end of the Hamilton Beach multiuse trail and back by bike. No fossil fuels were used in my 140km journey. See, here's the screen shot from my Garmin software:

Alright, I didn't exactly set any speed records but actually I need to take a few days off because frankly I think there are parts of my knees and upper back that are pretty much in open rebellion against the rest of the body.

Anyway the plan, last night was to ride with the Beaches Cycle Club, I got up in time, got dressed got out the door and made it about halfway up the hill on Kingston road when my back inner-tube failed. I would like to think I am reasonably good at changing a tube, but I'm not that good. By the time I made it to where the club was meeting they had already left, hence Hamilton Beach.

When I was nearly home I saw a cyclist with his back wheel off and a tube in his hand. I offered help, it turned out he did not have a spare tube and the hole in his tube was unpatchable. Recalling the guy in Oakville who gave me his spare CO2 cartridge, I gave the guy close to home my second spare and my CO2 cartridge - he was going to hand pump 120psi. As soon as we started inflating his tire, the tube burst, there was a huge gouge in his tire. Ultimately the guy called his wife and she had to drive him down a new tire and tube, I on the other hand have no spares of tubes or air, so I really cannot go for a long ride again until tomorrow at the earliest when the bike stores reopen.