Adventures in Michael's Life

Its a... They are boys!

2012-01-24T07:32:00.000-05:00

Pictures to follow, but the 3D ultrasound is conclusive, they (twins remember?) are boys, Joshua Dyson and Zachary Alexander.

And in other news Iran is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, if they did that 20% of the World's oil would not make it to market, mostly in East Asia. Military expectations are that if Iran were to close the Strait it would take the American's something between a few days and a month to reopen it. Economic expectations are that if the Strait were closed the price of oil would spike from about $100/barrel to about $150/barrel.

On personal updates and other things.

2012-01-23T08:06:00.000-05:00

In reviewing my previous post, I noted the Saudis have declared that in order to maintain a desired level of social services they feel that the desired price of oil ought to be about $100 (US) a barrel I went on to note that their previous target price was $75. One thing I neglected to mention, the Kind of Saudi Arabia is not exactly known for it's first rate social services.

In other more personal news, regular reads may not know that Lesley left me. Actually that woman left me some time ago, since then I met someone else and got married. Now Mrs. Cole and I, well really Mrs. Cole, I just help out here and there, are expecting little ones, not a little one, but twins! I think I've got a picture around here...

Of course when I found out twins were in the picture I remarked that we'd need a bigger house. The ultrasound technician said that's what every father who finds out he's about to have twins says, a new house and a new car. Anyway last night I watched a rerun of Top Gear where James May is reviewing some Land Rover and at first I thought it looked kind of cool and has a modest four banger diesel. Then I realised, that Range Rover's got less internal volume than my Jetta, probably gets way worse milage, and honestly, I'm never going to drive across Death Valley, at least off road across Death Valley, so what's the good of such a silly machine? I will get a bigger car, I think a diesel A3, it's a hatch back pretty good on the comforts and great on the milage. Of course most importantly, as a soon to be father, it's got a great saftey rating. (For reference, here is the NHTSA web site.)

Actually the NHTSA never rated the A3, but the similar A4 got five stars. By contrast my Jetta got four or five stars depending on where the crash happened. The only Land Rover rating I can find is for a '96 Range Rover, the NHTSA only tested front impact on drive and passenger and it only got three out of five stars. (Side impact was unrated, but I will bet it wouldn't do well.)

But back to the wedding, I won't bother with the wedding photos, but I will throw in a link to some pictures we took from Florida just before the wedding.

One day in Florida it was very cold, about seven degrees Celsius, my future mother-in-law thought it would be funny to go for a walk on the beach in winter attire. She had left Toronto just a few days earlier in the middle of a snow storm. I took some pictures with the zoom lens from her apartment (she's a snow bird).

The apartment is about 2km south of the Kennedy Space Center, the tour guide, (of course I took a tour!) was saying that KSC is America's space port, I never thought of that previously, space port, sounds like something out of Star Trek, but it's actually true, KSC is a space port. Weird to even think that, anyway here are the pictures.

On Big Vehicles

2012-01-18T08:11:00.000-05:00

I am still driving a bazillion miles to work every day. (Readers you can start to feel sympathy at your earliest convenience.) But one thing I have to gripe about, truckers and the trucking industry. I personally pay about $20,000 a year in income tax, now some of that money goes to help keep unemployed Newfoundland fishermen on unemployment insurance, some goes to build subways... (excuse me Le Metro in Montreal), and some goes to build highways here in Ontario, highways that seem to be flooded with poorly maintained trucks.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying trucks are the bane of my existence, they just come pretty damn close. They need forever and a million miles to accelerate to highway speeds (causing traffic disruptions for miles behind them), they need just as long and far to decelerate, they are unstable, in the winter the top of the trailers are covered in snow and as a result leave a mini snow storm for the sorry sods stuck behind them. All too many truckers are very reckless with their vehicles, tail-gating and not allowing others to merge or change lanes and for kicks from time to time a whole wheel will just fall right off at speed on the highway and collide with another car three lanes over, going the other direction! (Killing the driver.) Then the industry will circle the wagons and call it a freak accident and say there is nothing that can be done about it. (Hint guys, as an amateur bike mechanic I'll tell you what the fix is, grease your lug nuts and use a torque wrench.) Then people get to wonder why there are so many highway fatalities.

Speaking of big vehicles, I found the following on the Globe and Mail web site in the drive section:

The shortcomings of the SUV genre have been well documented in works like Keith Bradsher’s High and Mighty – The Dangerous Rise of the SUV. Bradsher’s book shows how SUVs conquered North America thanks to an odd confluence of consumer demand, flawed government regulation, and short-sighted corporate policy (SUVs were hugely profitable for car companies).

Engineers were confounded by the popularity of SUVs, which are designed around an odd set of parameters – they’re too heavy, they have too much frontal area, and their height makes them unstable. But automotive purchase patterns are determined by a number of forces, and the strangest one of all is human nature. Author Malcolm Gladwell noted the psychology of the SUV market in a 2004 New Yorker story: “... internal industry market research concluded that SUVs tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.”

Its a funny thing the SUV as a concept. I was speaking with a co-worker of mine who is a major auto enthusiast, he is in the process of building a car from parts using a Ford 1969 Mustang body with a big block V8 (I think his engine will have something in the neighbourhood of 350 cubic inches or about 8L of displacement, naturally aspirated). Obviously this guy loves his cars, and trucks, he has a Ford F-150 for use as his family (wife and two kids) and daily commuting vehicle, that Mustang will be his track day car.

From reading my blog, I would expect that he and I would disagree about many things, actually we don't. I am not so sure the F-150 makes much sense as a commuter but the engineering behind building a car, espeically one designed to be absoultely the fastest quarter mile (400m) finisher I have to respect. (Building it naturally aspirated means that while it will have an incredible quater mile time it's city fuel economey will be apalling, but at least it will be a lot less maintenance than say a 2L VW Touareg with a turbo charger.)

Anyway one day while talking with my co-worker, about cars, he mentioned that the SUV was the dumbest idea in automotive engineering. We concluded that it was a pickup truck chassis with a hatchback body on top. Now for non-engineers what this means is, well a truck chassis is designed to be very stiff and not very stable, but very cheap - after all it is assumed that truck drivers are more careful and have more weight to lug but do not mind driving slower. A hatchback is designed to be faster (than a truck) and have a higher centre of gravity than a conventional car. Combine the two and you have the worst of both worlds. A very high centre of gravity on a very stiff frame (even the so called 'crossovers' need a stiffened chassis) with a huge cross section to the wind. Net result, unsafe at any speed and pathetic fuel economey.

Furthermore, just becuase the engine has the latest in fuel saving measures, turbo chargers, fuel injection, and so on, the bottom line is, there is only so much energy that can be usefully converted from the potential chemical energy in octane into forward motion on the road. In fact I can even assert that for every four joules of chemical potential energy the classic internal combustion four stroke engine will only get about one joule of foward energy. (You want better fuel milage, ride a bicycle.)

On a related note, I heard on the news yesterday, the Saudis have delcared that in order to maintain a desired level of social services they feel that the desired price of oil ought to be about $100 (US) a barrel, their previous price was $75 (US). I also recall that in 2000 (12 years ago) it was $24 (US). Factoring in inflation and the fact that the US dollar, actually thanks to the disaster in Europe we better compare the green back to the Chinese RenMinBi (Yuan), so lets see in 2001 $1 (US) was about RMB 8.28, whereas today $1 (US) is about RMB 6.29. Thus the US dollar has allowed (by the Chinese) to decline by about 24% while the price of oil has gone up by over 400%. Now let's assume inflation from January 2000 to today averages at about 3% per year, inflation over 12 years would be 42.58%, thus what cost $100 (US) in 2000 should cost $142.58 (US) but factoring in the decline of the US dollar lets chop another 24% off, so $100 (US) in 2000 becomes $176.80. Thus if the Saudis liked oil at $24 (US) a barrel in 2000 they should like oil at about $42.43 (US) a barrel today.

The fact is the Saudis have always liked a low price of oil, it keeps the addict (America and Western Europe) hooked on their cheap smack. I suspect the real reason Saudi Arabia is letting the price of oil go up is to give the appearence that they still have some control over the price of oil. Currently a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Light Sweet closing at Cushing OK will set you back $101.20 and a barrel of Brent North Sea crude will cost about $111.19.

I guess the moral here is SUVs are the ultimate symbol or reckless excess in an enviornment that is rapidly running out of the good stuff. An interesting aside, the following article links oil price volatility to the rise in political partisanship.

On Internal Cables

2011-12-13T08:11:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago I went for a ride, what else is new, on my newest Roubaix. (Pictures to follow). She is very pretty but during my ride I had a lot of trouble upshifting to the 53 chain ring from the 39. I took the bike, hereafter I'll call her Abby, to Malcolm who tightened up the front deraileur for me. (The problem with this bike is, due to internal cabling and the way the original store set her up - they didn't bother to install the barrel adjusters - getting the front deraileur set correctly requires a very skilled hand, in other words, Malcolm.)

Anyway when I got Abby home I set to work on her, Malcolm noticed, with nothing but eyes that Abby needed a new chain. (According to my Park Took chain checker, the wear was at 0.50% or still good.) Trusting Malcolm over a $50 tool that never really did show wear correctly, and the fact that I do have over 3000km on the chain, I tossed my old chain and when I did I could see that the front deraileur cable was unwinding. I had a new task for myself, strip Abby, right to her BB30 bearings, lower the stem a little (the bars were high), replace the bars (I had just bought a pair of Easton EC90s). Swap out her dura-ace shifters and rear deraileur for SRAM Red (I like SRAM shifting more than Shimano) and naturally, replace the cables.

Okay all of the above is pretty standard stuff, except Abby's cables are, as I noted, internally routed. You want the definition of a pain in the rear end, try routing internal cables. Malcolm told me that on old steel frames one would sometimes see guys who had, over the course of their bike's life replaced pretty much every component except that rear brake cable because fishing that cable is so damn difficult. Thankfully, for me, Abby is carbon fibre, so I had a few dandy little tricks I can employ.

First to get the gear cables from the top of the down tube to the bottom bracket I used four items:

Fishing line
electrical tape
A twist tie like the kind that come with small electrical appliances to wrap the electrical cord (those ties are smoother, less friction, than the ties that come with garbage bags)
A very powerful magnet (I used one from an old server hard disk drive). SCSI and SAS hard drives seem to have the most powerful of all the hard drive magnets. (Luckily I'm in IT so I get access to lots of hard drives.)

Alright, if you haven't already figured out how I made things work, remember Abby is carbon fibre, not steel. Still not sure? Well first I taped the fishing line at one end to the bars, at the other end of the line I taped the fishing line to the twist tie. Then I inserted the tie into the hole at the top of Abby's down tube and used the magnet (on the outside) to guide the tie to the hole at the bottom of the downtube. Then tape the fishing line (at the end by the bars) to the gear cable and guide the gear cable by pulling the fishing line. (Although in retrospect I should have put off pulling the new gear cable until I had finished running all the fishing lines, also masking tape is cheaper and would probably work just as well, if not better, than electrical tape.)

Now the hardest line to run was for the rear deraileur and this line runs the length of the chainstay, that is from under the bottom bracket all the way to the rear drop out. Now using magnets here is quiet a bit harder. Sure Abby is carbon fibre, but the rear drop out as well as the area surrounding it, in fact the entire join from the chain stay to the seat stay, is metal, I think steel. Ultimately what I did was take an old gear shifting cable, some electrical tape, fishing line and my trusty tie wrap. I used the gear cable to shove the fishing line with tie wrap and electrical tape in from the wrong end - the drop out end - and drive the fishing line forward into the chain stay far enough to clear the steel drop out. Once I could feel the tie wrap with the magnet I used the magnet to draw the tie wrap forward to the hole at the bottom bracket (a very narrow hole at that!) A little bit of the tie wrap would expose from the hole and then using a plyer I was able to pull out the tie wrap and fishing line.

A confession, first I took Abby to my local bike shop and asked them, after several frustrating hours, to do that final run of the rear deraileur cable, but by the time I got Abby back on the stand at home the cable fell out. So I did have to learn the hard way how to route internal cables.

As for the rear brake cable, that was actually very easy, push the cable through the top tube from the hole near the stear tube, once the cable is near the hole near the brake, just use a magnet to bring the cable up and close to the hole. Use a folded tie wrap to loop around the cable at the brake end and push from the stearer tube end while pulling up on the tie wrap. (Sorry if I had a third hand I might have taken some pictures of this step.)

In Computing the most difficult programming task is writing an Operating System, probably the context switches, (hint: push all the registers, interrupt, return from interrupt, pop all the registers) are the trickiest bits of programming. I've heard the for a pianist Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is probably the hardest piece of music to play. Having routed internal cables, well they aren't the Rack 3, and they sure aren't a context switch on an x86, but damn they were tricky. Maybe next time I'll just take Abby to a bike shop, yeah - as if!

On Driving

2011-11-16T07:47:00.000-05:00

There was an interesting article in Velonews. I think Charles Pelkey (The Explainer) is great. But I really liked the image, Space Taken by 60 People. It turns out that image is all over the Interlink Net thing-a-ma-jigy.

I am still, shudder, driving to work. I cannot stand the drive. Recently at a dinner with my parents my father said that several employers have relocated from the 'burbs to the city because the young people live in the city and do not want to drive to work. I asked my dad if he could pass that memo on to my employer. (Actually I have a number of complaints about my current employer, not the least among which is the drive to work.)

Mind you the drive home, at least I go against traffic, the disaster that is Toronto highways at rush hour, ouch! By six in the morning the inbound roads are clogged, just bumper-to-bumper stop and go, with cars, hardly moving at all. And by three the outbound roads are just as bad.

There is a fix for two issues here, one is Toronto's structural budget deficit of about $350m~$400m the other issue is the traffic. Road tolls, passing the money collected directly to transit and road repair, thus relieving the city of two massive line items from the budget. Enough pussy footing around this issue I say, it's time Mister "end of the war on the car" Mayor Rob Ford did something that required courage and enacted road tolls, and not just on highways, arterial roads too.

Here is how I see a system working, first bring back the hated vehicle registration tax of $60/vehicle/year. (That's about $60m in the city's books.) Then every person that pays the tax gets an E-ZPass transponder that works in both Toronto and the North Eastern US (see so you can go drive to say, Boston and you get to by-pass the toll booths on I-90). Now, make the vehicle registration tax more palatable, when you get your transponder, and every year thereafter the city credits your E-ZPass account with $60.

Okay, so we've got about a million cars with E-ZPass transponders and then we open it up to everyone who lives in the 'Burbs, they can also obtain an E-ZPass from the city and register it and all that, or they can get one from the Niagara Bridge Authority, but the point is everyone has the option of getting an E-ZPass, so it's fair. Next if you drive into the City of Toronto and do not have a transponder you pay a flat say $12 per weekday or $10 on Saturdays and $8 on Sundays and Stat Holidays to drive in the city for the day. (Use automated Toll collection, perhaps photograph licence plates, like on Highway 407.)

Now for motorists who have a transponder their licence is not photographed (or if it is by accident, because the licence is registered the photo is dropped by the OCR system when the image is received for processing.) Instead, at every major intersection (and highway interchange) in the city the transponder is recorded. For every, say kilometer the motorist drives they get a bill for perhaps ten cents, to a daily maximum of say, $8 on weekdays, and $4 on weekends and holidays.

Other considerations, well there are rental cars, rental car agencies would have to collect the tolls on behalf of the city, but that is trivial. There would also be people from out of town who drive in and stay for several days, well they might have say, a New Jersey E-ZPass, in which case they'd get the same billing as a Toronto resident (if they kept their car parked in the hotel, the transponder would not pass any major intersection so there would be no bill for that period.) If the out-of-towner had no E-ZPass, and drove in on a Friday and did not leave until Sunday then they would get a bill for $12 on Friday, $10 on Saturday and $8 on Sunday summing to $20 for the weekend. (Clearly both entering and exiting the city would have to be tracked for non-transponder based systems.)

Obviously the whole thing would have to be very carefully controlled to ensure the privacy of the motorists is respected and the security of the IT infrastructure is maintained but there are millions of cars that drive in the city every day. If the city collected an average of say $5/day times perhaps a million cars, over a 365 day year the city would collect $1.8bn, use perhaps $100m for maintaining the system, spend perhaps $400m on road repair, that leaves $1.3bn for building new subway lines, every single year. Within just a few years the city won't be collecting much in the way of road tolls because we will have the most remarkably effective subway system ever.

Isn't that a better way to get around?

More On Peak Oil

2011-10-20T08:26:00.000-04:00

I am planning, if the weather cooperates, on going for a nice bunch of bike rides. In the mean time, just some statistics that really make me wonder if urban sprawl was worse than just a really bad idea.

According to Jeff Rubin Peak Oil is not so much a supply issue, it's a problem of price. We cannot get oil cheap enough to use for energy. But according to one of the people who posted a response it is a lot worse than that. (I will have to validate this data, so take it with a huge grain of salt, but...)

To paraphrase:

In 1930 humanity was drawing from the ground about 2 billion barrels of oil per year with an average EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) of about 100 to 1. Hence the amount of net energy available to humanity from oil was then of about 1.98 billion barrels energy units. (US Government figures indicate that one barrel of oil generates about 5.8 million BTUs).

In 1970 humanity was drawing from the ground about 17 billion barrels of oil per year; however, this oil came from more difficult wells to access with an average EROEI of about 30 to 1, thus total net energy was about 16.3 billion barrel units.

In 2005 humanity was drawing from the ground about 30 billion barrels of oil per year with an average EROEI of about 15 to 1. Hence the amount of net energy available to humanity was then of about 27.9 billion barrels energy units.

Looking forward now, Alberta tar sand oil has an EROEI of 1.5 to 1. Ultra deep water oil may not be much better, if it is even positive. The BP Macondo (Deep Water Horizon) well has shown how much technology was stretched and the newly found ultra deep water oil reservoirs off Brazil are much deeper and will be much more difficult to put into production. Furthermore, Arctic oil is at the moment only a dream because there is still a moving ice cap during the winter in that region). As for shale oil, like for shale gas, one will be lucky if its EROEI is even positive.

Many people who would know these things, for example, The Chairman of TOTAL, among others, have publicly stated that humanity will be lucky if it can reach an output volume of 100 million barrels per day i.e. 36.5 billion barrels of oil per year.Hence at some point in a not too distant future, humanity’s oil production will reach 36.5 billion barrels per year with an average EROEI of about 1.5 to 1. When that happens, the amount of net energy available to humanity from oil will only be of about 12.1 billion barrels energy units.

Thus we can see our total available energy in the not so distant future will be quiet a bit less than we had in 1970. Yet we still have to drive as far, and now India and China are on stream. Recall that in 1970 there was no outsourcing to India and China was in the middle of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. As a society we really have to start diverting funds from highways and auto manufacturers bailouts. Time to build more rail, more bike lanes, and critically, more transit infrastructure. The fact is, we cannot continue down our present course, while the numbers I cited above may be way off the mark, I'm sure we can all accept that we cannot continue with business as usual for all that much longer. We can either keep running until we run headlong into an impenetrable wall, or we can begin the transition away from fossil fuels.

On Crazy Motorists

2011-10-14T08:14:00.000-04:00

I have to drive to work these days. I do not much like it but probably until next spring (when I will try to ride at least a couple times a week) I will be driving every day. At the best of times, the drive is very stressful. I leave super early each morning just to avoid the worst of the traffic. The best part, I live in the city for many reasons, one being, so I don't have to drive! Only I am working in the 'burbs so I guess I kind of do have to use the car. This morning there was a lovely accident on the highway, of the four lanes, two were closed. One of the guys, a really over weight, long beard, looked like he belonged in the Hells Angles type, in the accident was leaning against his car, apparently uninjured watching the cars crawl by. I would guess that one fat man caused several hundred million dollars in lost productivity and wasted fuel. Good job fatso!

Anyway I was watching a new episode of Top Gear last night. Clarkson and May were reviewing electric cars. After they discussed the high cost, up front, the cars were about thirty thousand pounds, then there's the short life span of the batteries (three to ten years depending on how well the batteries are treated) the short driving distance, the long recharge time and so on. Ultimately Clarkson suggested that petrol power was much better for cars, at which point Hammond asked what happens when the oil runs out. Of course the guys started waxing on about the joys of hydrogen powered cars.

Okay, lets get something straight here, hydrogen as a power source of fuel cells, is really potential chemical energy, that gets is potential energy from some other source. Typically we get hydrogen from breaking down natural gas, except natural gas is a fossile fuel that is also going to run out. We can get hydrogen from water, by electro-chemical seperation but where does the electricity come from? The Fukushima Daiichi power plant?, Chernobyl?, Three Mile Island? Okay, I know, Wind Power, only where will we put all those wind mills?, there's a lot of NIMBYism when it comes to wind power, and what happens when the wind doesn't blow? Or what about Solar? What happens when the sun doesn't shine? Coal? There's lot of coal in the world... do I need to spell out the problems with coal?

The bottom line is the days of the single user automobile are numbered, ten years from now there won't be bad traffic going to work becuase I don't think there will be anyone driving to work on a daily basis. Fuel for automobiles is already expensive, just watch the price of oil, we are still in dream land when it comes to the real price of our wasteful ways. Only here's another thought? How will we eat when fossile fuel fertilizers are too expensive? And the act of trucking the food from the farms to the cities, how will we eat? How will we stay warm in winter? I don't know the answers to any of those questions, I suspect because there is no good answer.

On Rides and Work

2011-10-11T09:15:00.000-04:00

Well work has been gobbling up all sorts of my time. I used to be I could pack in a good three quality rides a week as well as pile of shorter rides. Now I'm lucky if I get two rides in. Sigh, recessions suck. (And anyone who doubts we are now in a recession boy have I got bad news for you!)

So I've been thinking about the post I made back in August, about the SUV and the Vegan. Some people, who don't know the Vegan, disagree with me. A Vegan is allowed to own a monstrously unsafe machine that is vastly wasteful.

Then again, I'm not saying a person isn't allowed to own an SUV, this person made what, to them I am sure, was an adult decision. And as an adult I am entirely within my right to point out that I think it is extremely hypocritical. To give so much regard for every earth worm and toad, and to remind everyone around them of their fondest regard for the birds and the bees, then turn around an buy an SUV.

I'm sorry but if you want to tell everyone about the virtues of veganism, I should think that you should keep your choice in motor vehicles restricted to the very modest. Then again, I would think that anyone who cares about our dear planet should keep their choice of vehicle restricted to the most modest vehicle that will accommodate their needs. (That's why I drive a diesel four door car, the one and only family car, and it is small.)

Anyway I found some lovely new routes, I hope I get to ride more. I am really sick of the inside of my car.

On Trees

2011-09-26T14:44:00.013-04:00

So the story goes, in February I moved. The new house has a tree in the back, it's a Ailanthus altissima or 'Tree of Heaven'. Now permit me a rather long quotation from Wikipedia about this 'Tree of Heaven'.

Ailanthus altissima, commonly known as tree of heaven, ailanthus,[...] is a deciduous tree in the Simaroubaceae family. It is native to both northeast and central China and Taiwan. [...] The tree grows rapidly and is capable of reaching heights of 15 metres (49 ft) in 25 years. However, the species is also short lived and rarely lives more than 50 years.
[...]
The tree was first brought from China to Europe in the 1740s and to the United States in 1784. [...The tree] was initially hailed as a beautiful garden specimen. However, enthusiasm soon waned after gardeners became familiar with its suckering habits and its foul smelling odour. Despite this, it was used extensively as a street tree during much of the 19th century. Outside of Europe and the United States, the plant has been spread to many other areas beyond its native range. In a number of these, it has become an invasive species due to its ability to quickly colonise disturbed areas and suppress competition with allelopathic chemicals. It is considered a noxious weed in Australia, the United States, New Zealand and several countries in southern and eastern Europe. The tree also resprouts vigorously when cut, making its eradication difficult and time consuming. In many urban areas, it has acquired the derisive nicknames of "ghetto palm" and "stink tree".

Yes sir, that's what I had growing in my backyard. Well in late May there was no evidence the tree was even alive, there were no leaves but lots of fungus growing on the tree. I sent in an application to remove the tree, on the grounds that it was dead. I transcribe below a copy of an arbourist report that I paid, frankly a lot of money to obtain.

MR. MICHAEL COLE IS THE OWNER OF [Address redacted] AVE TORONTO AND IS CONCERNED ABOUT A DEAD TREE LOCATED 8 METRES FROM THE BACK OF HIS HOME. THE THE TREE IS A 97 CM DBH ALIANTHUS TREE AND IS DEAD THERE ARE NO LEAVES OR VIABLE BUDS, TREE HAS GIRDLING ROOTS AND HAS SUFFERED FROM POOR PRUNING PRACTICES. TREE HAS CO-DOMINANT STEMS 2.6 METRES ABOVE GROUND WHERE SEVERE DECAY EXISTS. LACK OF BARK AND FRUITING BODIES CAN BE SEEN IN PHOTO. TREE IS DEAD AND HAZARDOUS AND IS THEREFORE EXEMPT FROM CITY OF TORONTO TREE BY-LAWS. TREE SHOULD BE REMOVED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Then there were some pictures, here they are.

So I sent a scanned copy of my arborist's report along with the images to the City of Toronto Forestry Services department. Here is my cover note.

Michael Cole 31/05/2011 9:12 am
Dear Sirs,

Sorry for the delay however the scanner at my office was broken for the past couple weeks.

Please see the attached arborist report as well as images of the tree in my back yard at [redacted]. It is my intention to remove the dead Alianthus tree and plant two saplings, likely one maple and one oak, further from any structure. If this request could be expedited so that I can plant the new saplings before the summer (give them extra time to take root) I would very much appreciate it.

Thank you

Michael

Never underestimate a tree's ability to start growing when you least want it to, at least if it's a Tree of Hell.

Dear Mr. Cole,

I have reviewed your request for an exemption including photos attached for the 97 cm diameter Tree of Heaven tree located at the above noted property.

Please be advised that the noted tree does not qualify for an exemption under the Private Tree Bylaw as it is neither dead (100%), terminally diseased or imminently hazardous. You may obtain a permit to remove the subject tree based on its condition.

Please submit the required application to injure or destroy trees on private property, application fee ($100), payable to the Treasurer, City of Toronto, in form of certified cheque or money order and replanting plan, in order that we may proceed with the permit issuance process. You may obtain a permit to remove the subject tree based on its poor structure condition.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Jetmir Balashi,

I had to reply, although it turned out Balashi had inspected the tree between when I last looked at it, and it grew it's first leaves. (Great timing.)

The attached, for the second time, arborist report explicity states “tree is dead”. Now I may not be a biologist but being dead is a binary state, the tree is either dead or it is not dead. How can it be something other than 100% dead? Please read the end of the second line of the arborist report, or if you do not have Adobe Acrobat I will transcribe the entire report here:

[See the arborist report above]

Why do I need a permit to remove this tree?? My neighbor reports that last summer parts, i.e. entire branches, of the tree blew into his yard and nearly damaged his property. If property damage occurs because I could not remove what a certified arborist tells us is a “hazardous” tree who is going to take the financial and legal responsibility???

Well either I can see the future, or the truth is, I was right and the city arborist doesn't know a hazzard when it flies eight meters across the backyard.

Bring out the disgust.

I wrote another email to the city,

Sirs,

I am attaching a copy of my correspondence (attachments.zip) with the city from late May and early June of this year. At that time I requested permission to remove what was thought to be a dead tree from my yard. I noted that branches of the tree had fallen in past years, as it would turn out this problem has become steadily worse.

I was told "...that the noted tree does not qualify for an exemption under the Private Tree Bylaw as it is neither dead (100%), terminally diseased or imminently hazardous." By:

Jetmir Balashi,
Urban Forestry Assistant Planner
Tree Protection & Plan Review
Toronto & East York District

I am attaching images taken in the immediate aftermath of the recent storm (20110822.zip). I do not yet have a quote on the cost of repairs; however, I suspect the amount to be in the range of many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. I should also note that what is left standing is very definitely a hazard. As this opinion is shared not only by an arborist, but an engineer (myself), I sincerely hope you will not present further impediments to my urgent request to get rid of what is left of the tree.

Frankly we are lucky, my wife was standing near the window when the tree became airborne. If she had been hurt I would not be sending this email, instead I would be calling for criminal charges of negligence against those responsible for what would have been an entirely preventable disaster.

Yours,
Michael Cole

And here is Balashi's reply:

Subject: 12 Coleman Avenue - Request to remove damaged tree before it causes more property damage

Hi Michael,

Please be advised that I visited your property earlier this morning and confirmed that due to the damage incurred during a recent windstorm, the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) tree situated at the rear of your property, is imminently hazardous and therefore exempt from the City's Private Tree by-law. Attached is a copy of the Confirmation of Exemption form.

As you indicated in your email, Urban Forestry staff did previously inspect this tree based upon receipt of a request for exemption from the Private Tree by-law to remove a dead tree received from yourself. The tree was inspected and it was determined at that time that the tree was neither; dead, terminally diseased or imminently hazardous and therefore not exempt from the by-law. The results of this inspection were conveyed to you via e-mail on June 3, 2011. At that time you were advised that the tree was in poor condition and that Urban Forestry would issue permit authorizing its removal should you apply to do so.

It is import to understand that trees are living organisms and their condition is in a constant state of change. Also, we are unable to fully predict how trees, in any condition, will react when exposed to extreme weather conditions such as those we experienced this past weekend.

Please let me know if you need any further information or would like to discuss this matter further.

A question: Why do these guys get salary? I never would have imagined a job description of:

Go uninvited onto other people's property.
Examine the local fauna.
Deny home owners the ability to protect their own property.

I wish I worked for the city sometimes!

On SUVs

2011-08-05T11:46:00.000-04:00

The trouble with large organizations is that to get anything done requires a mountain of paperwork. My employer has contracted me out for an extended period to a very large company that requires reams of officialdom to get anything accomplished. I have done perhaps two hours of useful work over the past three days, the rest of the time I have spent waiting for the tools I need to do the useful work. It occurs to me, you want 100% employment? Just have one employer, they would be so dreadfully inefficient there would be a labour shortage.

In other news, someone I know (and that’s about as much hint as to who they might be that I am willing to give) is a vegan. Okay, so far no biggie. I mean I am a liberal progressive kind of guy, stands to reason I’d know a few vegans. Not that I am a vegan, or even a veggie, sorry, I like my chicken, hamburgers, and a good steak is always welcome! Anyway this person I know, the vegan, got themselves a new car. Well not great, but you know, North America, we kinda need motor vehicles, sucks but what can you do? It’s a large car, well alright, needs to transport the kids… no this vegan doesn’t have children… okay the bicycle? Sure why not – driving a bicycle is silly if you ask me but then I name my bikes so I cannot be an authority on things sane. Except, and here’s the kicker this person bought an SUV.

Okay, I concede if you have kids big cars make sense, I figure a station wagon, or as the English call them, an estate car is probably the most sensible thing, lots of passenger space, low centre of gravity means it can corner faster and safer, reasonable fuel economy. Or if you have lots of kids and (or) lots of cargo clearly a minivan or people carrier would be the right thing to buy. But when to buy an SUV? Well I will concede SUVs make sense if you drive on the dirt roads a lot, but other than that, lousy fuel economy, dangerous tendency to roll over, small passenger and cargo space (yes it’s true, you get more interior volume in a minivan than an SUV, and probably more space in the average estate car than in a mid-sized SUV as well). So why buy one of these things, particularly if you are a proud vegan? Doesn’t the damage done by burning the extra gasoline rather offset any good done by going vegan?

One lame excuse I hear from time-to-time, SUV drivers will talk about how efficient modern engines are. So lets look at VW/Audi, since I have a Jetta. True, the 2.0L engine that one finds on say the Audi Q5 or VW Tiguan, is the very same engine found on the 2.0L A4, 2.0L Passat and so on. Heck the chassis on the Tiguan is probably the A4 chassis. But funny thing, that aerodynamic drag of a big body way up in the air, just clobbers the fuel economy numbers. Don’t believe me, check out the EPA ratings. (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/) Just comparing a 2.0L standard Tiguan with a 2.5L Jetta SportWagen, the Tiguan gets 18mpg city to the Jetta’s 23mpg, the Tiguan gets 26mpg on the highway, the Jetta, 33. The EPA estimates the average Tiguan driver will burn 16.3 barrels of oil per year, the same amount of driving in a Jetta, 13.2 barrels per year. Of course the Jetta’s got the bigger engine and it weighs less so it will be more fun to drive. But what about interior volume, well it is true the Tiguan has 95.3 cubic feet of passenger space to the Jetta’s 91.7 cubic feet, but once we discuss cargo there’s a slightly bigger issue, the Tiguan has 28.3 cubic feet (or 56.1 cubic feet if you fold the back seats down) to the Jetta’s 32.8 cubic feet (or significantly 66.9 cubic feet with the back seats down). In other words, not only is the Jetta cheaper, faster, burns less fuel (and I haven’t even discussed the possibility of a diesel Jetta) but it’s got an extra ten cubic feet of cargo space yet looses only four cubic feet of passenger space to the Tiguan. So the numbers would suggest, get the Jetta. And I have yet to look at the NHTSA safety rating, let me see, well apparently both cars get four out of five stars. Okay SUV fans, same manufacturer, comparable vehicle, yet I can discern no good statistical reason why a person should favour the SUV over the estate car. Unless that four cubic feet of passenger space actually matters that much, in which case, why aren’t you looking at the Minivan?

I think I’m going to take up Veganism, then maybe I’ll understand the attraction of the Stupid Ugly Vehicle.

On A Long Ride

2011-08-03T11:51:00.000-04:00

Apparently the BCC went for another ride up to Lake Simcoe on Sunday. Ironically I did not go with. Well the weather was supposed to, and apparently did rain, a lot, up north. Down in the city it did not rain much, if at all. I spent the day mostly resting actually, it was nice. Of course Saturday I rode about 110km (GPS hiccuped and reported almost 700km, so I will stick with 110km, since that is about what it measures to with Gmaps.) Then on Simcoe (holiday) Monday I rode 196.1km to the Forks of the Credit which is the prettiest six and a half kilometers of road in Ontario.

I said it was ironic that I did not go with the BCC to Lake Simcoe, it was ironic because I created the route they took. But then the new route, to the Forks is even better than the one to Simcoe. Sure there is more built up city riding, but my route makes up for that with the country riding that is in there too.

Anyway here is the route I took, and having done it once, I have already revised it to make it even better, here is my new route. I have to admit, I am really looking forward to my next ride out there.

I promise, I will write up a review, if I get a chance but work is keeping me very busy lately.

On Bad Driving

2011-07-26T08:25:00.000-04:00

New rule, motorists are not allowed to critique cyclists who run stop signs.

Today I almost got hit by a car, I was on Cosburn between Woodbine and Coxwell heading west, there are no stop signs, lights, or cross-walks on that stretch; however, there are several side roads that intersect Cosburn. A motorist in a tan Sunfire who had a strong resemblance to the fat bald mayor who hates all things that aren't cars or the Toronto Maple Leafs ran a stop and made a right turn right in front of me and then continued west only marginally faster than me. (I caught up with him at the light at Coxwell, that's how I got a good look at today's dangerous driver.)

Oh, another rule, gunning engines, passing a cyclist, cutting him (or her) off that's another show stopper. Motorists don't seem to understand they are operating a very large vehicle, if they cut someone off there is a strong chance they will end up side swiping and not actually cutting off.

You know the thing that really bothers me about all this? I could drive to work, I've got a vehicle, I can afford the diesel, parking is not that expensive. I choose to take transit or ride, for one thing I am causing less traffic, less wear on city roads, etc. More importantly, I am not poisioning the air we all have to breath. Anyway I promise, I will get around to an analytical review of the Space Shuttle eventually, but here is a thought to tide us all over for the time being, it's the Earth as seen from space, actually from the International Space Station. That's about 100km of air, we've fucked it up pretty good already and if we continue with our car driving wasteful ways, that blue stuff won't be able to sustain us for all that much longer.

This is it, we don't have a life boat, we screw up Earth, we are homeless.

I assume we all recognize Earthrise, taken by William Anders on the Apollo VIII mission to the moon, Christmas 1968? I sure don't see any other habbital planets within a few light years of that blue and white marble.

On Random Items

2011-07-25T09:31:00.001-04:00

First an update, if you have Googled Clarence Rose or Joachim Grams and come to this blog. Yes, it is a scam, sorry but do not sell your Craigslist item to this piece of work. For additional details, see this post.

I noticed someone Googled 'Aaron Arndt Gears Bike shop' and came to my blog. Yes I know Aaron, he's a great guy. Like me he started in skating, was way better than me. (Frankly comparing him to me... well massive insult to him, sorry Aaron.) I had thought Aaron planned to go into teaching, but I guess the lure of working in a bike shop, well if I didn't have a mortgage I'd likely work in a bike shop as well! But he was a great coach and I know he does fittings at Gears, so if you are thinking of getting a bike fit done by him I sure you will do well. (I plan to get him to fit me on Alex, the TT bike, just as soon as the weather gets ugly.)

The terror attacks in Norway, well since it's so recent I have to say something. I am horrified yet filled with sympathy, and disgusted at these xenophobic gun toting nuts. That's all I can say. My thoughts are with the families of the victims. (No prayers, religion caused this mess, it won't fix it!)

In other news Cadel Evens won the yellow jersey, well done Cadel, a first for the Aussies! And Mark Cavendish finally got his Green Jersey. It was a good tour for the English speaking world! (And at the risk of making a really corny riding pun, the Manx Missile fired and finally hit his target!)

I went for a ride yesterday, up to Lake Simcoe. It was my intent to ride alone but ran into a bunch of people from the BCC and rode with them for a while. It was a proper hammerfeast, though not of my desire, it had been my intent to ride a steady pace, not an unsustainable one. By the time I got back into the city I could hardly scratch out 24 or 25km/h I was in so much pain. In a way it was a great ride, but in other respects, I really need more self discipline. One thought that did occur to me as I rolled past a wind swept Lake Simcoe, this would be a great late season ride. Even if I taper to the point that I cannot ride the full 180km of a Lake Simcoe run, I can always drive out of the city and shorten the ride to 120km or so.

Anyway my appetite is returning and thoughts of that other woman are fading. Time to concentrate on the future again.

On Melancholy

2011-07-22T09:40:00.000-04:00

I had an English professor in my undergrad days. His PhD thesis was on the book The Anatomy of Melancholy, Professor McCormack is pretty sure he is the only living person to have read the book in it's original Latin.

Now I am no expert in Melancholy but re-reading my previous post it occurs to me I did not properly summarize my emotional state yesterday. Then again it is rather difficult to put into words what is going on.

On the one hand it has been exceedingly hot lately so my loss of appetite could theoretically be explained by the heat, but I doubt that. Since I've submitted the papers and completed the divorce from Lesley I find myself recalling days of old. That is to say back when she loved me.

I cannot put a precise finger on the day that Lesley stopped caring about me, but one event I recall was when I was undergoing some professional hardship and I remember she went out of town with her girlfriends. I told her to, I did not want my own difficulties to make her life at all worse. But really, shouldn't a spouse always be around in the bad times as well as the good? Not that Lesley was around much in the good times either for the last year or so that we were 'married'.

When I was still married there was a television advert, it was for a soup cracker, the image of a tomato soup with the song 'Lonley, I am so Lonely, I have nobody... etc.' playing on the audio track. I remember cleaning my ride, probably Jordan at the time, and hearing that song and it hit me, I am all alone.

I am in a much better place, yet still I recall ten years of my life, that is almost a third of my time on this planet, poof the thing that mattered more than anything else gone. In a blink of an eye. Well no, it was more drawn out than that. She just stopped loving me, and I didn't see it coming, I suddenly had a lot more time to ride. (Little wonder 2010 will probably go down as my strongest year ever, yes I'm a year older, but I've met someone else who wants me to be around the house more and on the bike less.)

I guess the moral I can draw from this... is nothing. There is, near as I can tell, no moral tale whatsoever in the post. I suppose I should stop wallowing in the past, it is good to remember but one must still live. I must endevour not to lament Lesley and the expense of those who love me.

On Yet More Change

2011-07-20T16:32:00.000-04:00

Well it's official kids, Lesley is no longer my estranged wife, 42 years to the day from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's little walk on the moon, Lesley is now my ex-wife.

I am happier now that it is done. But there is still a knot in my stomach, I think it's the heat but the stress from going to court for the past couple days and everything at work. Well I lost my appetite, I have to force myself to eat breakfast, and then resist the urge to puke it all up on the short ride to the office. Dinner is almost as difficult to eat and while I toss and turn at night, at the office I have trouble keeping my eyes open.

Divorce sucks, if you find someone and marry them, well make damn sure they are right for you before you marry them. And if you are curious what else is out there, after tying the knot, well be honest with that other person, because being lied to sucks too.

On Change

2011-07-19T08:25:00.000-04:00

Why do people change things? Change career paths or jobs is rather obvious. But what about activities? When I started this blog I was an inline skater. Go check out those posts from I think November, 2007. Then around May 2008 I discovered the bike. Here's the thing, from a usefulness standpoint the bike makes sense. I can ride from Toronto to Rochester, I can get to work 10 or 30km from home every day, on the other hand, I'll be completely honest, and maybe this is rose coloured glasses, but in general skaters are a friendlier bunch than riders. (Perhaps having the underdog sport makes them nicer? Or maybe it's just been so long that I don't remember the ugly, just the beautiful? - Who knows!)

I still much prefer to ride my bike to just about any recreation, but that said I think I've come to an important realisation. I don't like to ride in large groups. There are rules, accepted behavioral norms, attitudes, all sorts of reasons to stay home and sleep in. I'm told Mountain Bikers are a lot more flexible this way, which is a shame, for me, because I have so little interest in riding off road. (Nothing against the Mountain Biking set, I just prefer speed, distance and stable solid ground.) It's too bad there isn't some form of road biking where the rules are more or less tossed to the wind, except lets be honest here, a lot of the rules actually, annoyingly, are required and make sense. As long as I have to share the road with cars I'm bound by the Ontario Highway Traffic Act and if I ever find myself in a draft I'm bound by the rules of etiquette for the pelaton.

I guess I'm just tired of all the structure, lord knows I'm not having fun in the group any longer and if I'm not having fun doing what is a recreation, (well riding to work is not a recreation, but I'm talking here about group rides) maybe I should re-evaluate what I do for fun?

On Youtube video's, one funny, one very not funny.

2011-07-08T12:40:00.000-04:00

Here are a couple video's I've been referred to on Youtube.

The first is funny, it makes fun of frankly a very rigid road riding "culture". I should point out the main character has a white saddle and black bar tape.

Now for something a lot more serious, more on peak oil.

On Long Rides

2011-07-06T09:16:00.003-04:00

I know, I promised to explain why I think the Space Shuttle is the worst sort of engineering there is, but that will have to wait for another day. I've been riding.

Just over a week ago Ian Wilcox and I rode out to Klienburg, it was a nice short ride. Thanks to an exceedingly strong wind from the North West by the time we got out to the hills I was pretty tired and had some trouble with the hill climbing. Of course the trip home was blazing fast, but when I got home I was in quite a bit of pain.

Then instead of riding to Rochester this year I tried to ride to my Aunt and Uncle’s cottage. Dawn made me throw in the towel at Orillia (170km) she said I was looking really tired and I’d likely hurt myself if I pushed hard for too much longer. Probably this was a wise call, there was a lot of construction as I went further north.

Then Sunday I rode up to Lake Simcoe and back, I went with a few guys from the BCC who were prepping for the Louisville Ironman. I was the only guy on a road bike, everyone else was on a tri-bike. Frankly, drafting off a tri-bike is a good excuse to ride alone, there is no draft at all. As well, all those fancy Cervelo’s just kept breaking, flats, loose bottle cages, you name it. Unless a person really spends the time with their ride while she’s on the stand, she’s going to fail in all sorts of different ways on the road.

Then again, and this might be very un-Canadian of me, but I hate Cervelo, I think they are a very over-rated brand. People talk about how great the warrantee replacement at Cervelo is. Sure it’s great, everyone with a Cervelo has had to use it, sometimes two or three times. Now I’ll admit I have lots of Specialized bikes, but the only one that has every actually failed on me, was in a horrible crash and Specialized replaced that bike, which was a lot more, to be honest than I was expecting – and one, of several, reasons why a reader will never hear me bad mouth them, they make really nice machines.

I have to admit this year I’m really peeved, I cannot watch the Tour in real time, unless I get a TV cable at my desk at work or pay $30 I’m stuck using the PVR. Anyway its funny to hear the journalists talk about these early stages of the tour as if they matter. Everyone knows, winners, either Schleck or Contador will be found in the mountains in the south, not the wind swept north. Anyway my money is still on Contador, although I really want to know, where is the Manx Missile? I was expecting great things from Cav.

On Bad Engineering (Part II)

2011-06-23T08:46:00.003-04:00

Previously I wrote that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was an example of, well frankly bad luck more than anything else. Lets face it, if Barney Elliott had not been around at the time, there would have been no footage of the failure of the bridge and then the failure of the bridge would not have won the notoriety it gained.

Today I would like to look at legitimately bad design in the form of the Bugatti Veyron. Here is a thing that is utterly, completely devoid of practical use for the improvement of human life. On the contrary, because it is such a fuel guzzling, traffic inducing hog, there is nothing about this machine that justifies its existence.

Consider the achievements of this machine, it has a 1001hp or (depending on the model) 1200hp engine. Is this engine some marvel of new and novel design? No, heavens of course not, it's simply a 8L W-16 (two side-by-side V8s) with four turbo charges. In other words it's four 2L 250hp turbo charged engines that have been glued together. A marvel of cam timing, except even there, only two overhead cams, so a total of four cam shafts are required. But when you think about it, a 250hp 2L four cyclinder turbo charged engine, nothing fancy there.

Well it is true the Vayron is fast, 240km/h, except consider this, the TGV has a top speed of 320km/h and unlike the Vayron can actually sustain such a speed for prolonged periods (without a traffic citation or a blown tyre - to say nothing of the fact that there is only one oval, I know of, big enough for the Vayron to reach full speed on.)

Ah yes, but a Vayron is more direct, you have to wait for the train if you take the TGV. Well yes, but then at least the TGV only stops for scheduled passenger loading and unloading. The Vayron, well pedal to the metal will exhaust the 100L tank in 12 minutes. So really highways of the world get fleeting glances of this ludicrous machine, the Vayron's natural home is a gas station. Heck even at "normal" highway driving, it managed to suck away 18L per 100km, or 13mpg (US gallons). That means that while the 100L tank might make it a full 556km on the highway the fact is this is a function of the swollen size of the tank. A normal small car typically has a 40 or 60L tank. If we go with those numbers the 60L tank would last just 330km, and heaven knows what city driving would get.

Yes but the point of the car is speed!

Okay, conceded as a recreation for small boys and rich men with a mid-life crisis, the Veyron fills a market niche nicely. But for an engineer wishing to push the envelope, the only significant achievement in the Vayron are the $10,000 tyres. As far as I can tell the rest of the vehicle is a complete waste and in a peak oil environment, the Veyron is a criminal waste.

Thus the Veyron, for being hailed as an achievement in engineering, that it is not, for being as wasteful, more so actually, than a Ford GT (a car that won infamy on the hit BBC car review TV show Top Gear for being a gas guzzler), gets the status of second worst engineering design that I can think of!

My next post, why I believe the Space Shuttle is an example of the various worst possible design.

On Bad Engineering

2011-06-22T08:54:00.003-04:00

Recently on the bike club website someone got all excited about an auto review of the Bugatti Veyron and that got me thinking, movements in engineering that we, well us engineers, should hang our head in shame for. Where to begin? Well clearly Tacoma Narrows has to go down in any list of bad engineering moments, for failure to account for the then unheard phenomena of aeroelastic flutter, we cannot really go gang busters on the engineering of that bridge. Lets see, there is the Bugatti Veyron, at a staggering €1.9m and gobbling up it's entire 100L of gasoline in 12minutes at full power the Vayron's natural home, the gas station, has to go down as one of the silliest ideas in engineering. But truly the worst design ever has to be the Space Shuttle.

But lets rewind for a second and review the entrants.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built in the 1930s in Washington State, it opened on July 1 (Dominion Day!) 1940 and was destroyed by 42 mph (67km/h) winds on November 7 1940. The bridge lasted an entire 129 days before it failed the result of aeroelastic flutter. An area business owner shot a film of the bridge's collapse, in the book Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke called that film the most expensive 11 minutes of movie making ever. (The book, Fountains of Paradise was written before the making of the James Cameron movie Titanic.)

Becuase there were no deaths in the failure of the bridge, and becuase the bridge failed for entirely new and novel reasons (in 1940 no one had heard of the concept of aeroelastic flutter, this bridge, Galloping Gertie as the locals called it, opened up a brand new field of study) the Tacoma Narrows Bridge does not actually represent bad engineering, just bad luck that someone happened to be around who owned a camera.

Next post, why the Bugatti Veyron is bad engineering, but not the worst.

On Club Rides and Other Details from the Lake Simcoe Ride

2011-06-21T08:59:00.004-04:00

Yesterday's post was long. (I actually started writing it from my Blackberry at the Tim Hortons near lake Simoce, originally it was written in the present tense... yes I know, my grammar sucks, but hey this isn't the front page of the Globe and Mail, then again my grammar is better than theirs!)

Anyway I got tired of writing the previous post and just sort of stopped at 16'th Ave. and Ninth Line. Now I believe I noted, Ninth, below 16'th is a really crummy road, far too much traffic, at least on a Saturday, but that said, I have to wonder what a Sunday would be like.

But back to my story, the ride into the city was mostly fine. Right up until I got to Kingston and the Danforth split (just west of Midland). I was tired and rolling into a bit of a headwind, after 180km, almost all of them alone, I had decided to take things easy. I ultimately got to the traffic light by the Variety Village pool just east of Birchmount rolling along at only about 30km/h, this is a frequent sprint section where everyone in the club goes hells bells gang busters and burns whatever they have left, I basically had nothing left. Anyway I caught a red light and queued up in the traffic, just as the light changed and I started clipping in some guys from Hello Velo tore past me. I should have just ignored them.

Something about being passed, I saw red and cranked it up. Of course without a draft and 180km already done, I was in no condition to sprint, but then they caught a red light and I was far enough back that it turned green just as I arrived. I hammered and they did catch me, but not for a little bit. As they passed the second guy signalled to me to get on his wheel. So I figured, a free draft.

Just after I joined the paceline the guy in back started to pull forward, the guy in front started dropping back. Well we all know the rules, keep the gap small, so I did, I knew this would ultimately mean I'd likely have to pull soon but I recover fast. (And I was only about 2km from home now.)

Then the guy who had been in front starts dropping right behind his buddy's wheel nearly cutting me off and almost forcing me onto the sidewalk. I have to admit I was more shaken by the sheer bad handling of one of Paul Parker's guys than I was by all the bad motorists. After that fiaso I dropped back and stayed away from the two Helo Velo guys. If one is not riding among reasonably skilled riders, it is probably best to ride alone.

Sunday I could not ride long, had to be home early, but I did ride with the guys. (I'd love to rant here about one of the guys in the club, who shall remain nameless, but I'm a lot more mature than that. Don't worry, if you are reading this blog, you aren't that guy.)

Anyway here are some pictures from that ride.

On A Lake Simcoe Ride

2011-06-20T07:57:00.004-04:00

I met QB at the Grinder at 6am Saturday (June 18) morning. The weather was supposed to be cool so after getting my cloths on I had to take it all off and put on knee warmers. I don't think QB was waiting too long he was adjusting his cadence sensor when I got to the Grinder.

QB is something powerful, I really had to push myself to keep up. (In my defence QB would only do one third of what I had planned for my own legs.) QB was also tapering, he'll be doing an Iron Man in Nice next Sunday. (Lucky #$@&!) Oh and QB if you do read this, good luck! Not that he'd need it.

QB and I went up Leslie, most of the pulling coming from th guy on the tri bike (QB). Just past 19th Ave there is a lovely little hill a tri group was climbing, we powered to the top, QB turned back and I kept going, clobbering the tri guys at a rate of six or seven a minute.

As I approached Stouffville road one of the tri guys pulled past me. I jumped on his wheel as he gradually slowed down to a painfully slow pace. I got out from behind him and powered away, after a time he surged past me and I grabbed his wheel again, yet again his strength failed him and I went out front. This silly surge and die was driving me crazy and I was loosing interest in the guy's worthless draft when we got to a technical decent with tight turns around a pond (Haynes Lake) just north of Bethesda Side Rd. I am not the most technically proficient rider out there but at least I can hold my line round a corner which was a hell of a lot more than this jerk could do. I would try to pass right, he'd suddenly weave right, no warning. I would try to pass left, he'd weave left. The hill levelled out I scrambled passed him and went gangbusters up a hill. I figured he'd surge (I'm not a particularly good hill climber) and drop me then I could ride comfortably for a while. Sadly he was a weaker climber than me!

Eventually on a rolling flat the tri guy did overtake me and I just watched him hammer past me.

Despite efforts to keep up a nice gap, I had nearly snapped all the distance between us when luckily the tri guy turned at St. John's side road. I continued to New Market and turned east on Mulock (Vivian).

I continued North on Warden, occasionally passing, cyclists. At Boyers Side I had planned to turn left (west), except Boyers was surfaced in loose gravel and looked completely unfit for road bike. Instead I went west on Base Line Road, a busier road to be sure but I only had to use it for 2km. Then I took Deer Park Drive to Varney (there's a short steep climb on Deer Park) and Varney to the south Shore of Lake Simcoe. I first saw the lake at 8:55 in the morning. I completed my run of Lake Drive not very long after and was queued up at the Tim Hortons at 9:20.

I learned a valuable lesson about myself. I need one supplemented bottle to get to Lake Simcoe and two bottles, one plain water and one supplemented to get to Stouffville. It is also important to take breaks. I stopped to rest at the Tim Hortons for about a half hour before continuing. The result was I was pretty strong for the journey south.

I set out down McCowan Road, which on a Sunday is devoid of cars, but not Saturday. Mind you, it's not like, say Kingston Road which is chalk full of cars, McCowan has some traffic, but I am talking about maybe two or three cars a minute as as one gets further south, especially below Ravenshoe Road the traffic on McCowan drops off almost completely.

I modified the route to Stoufville, instead of turning at Vivian I only took McCowan as far as Herald Rd (Green Lane to the west). Herald was almost empty, I think on my 4km trek of Herald Rd there were perhaps five encounters with cars (almost as many encounters with fellow cyclists.) The first bit of Herald, from McCowan to Highway 48 was a dense pack gravel that stuck to the pavement, it was not the most pleasant thing to ride on, but not all that bad. After highway 48 Herald was a delight, the one thing, I planed and did make my south (right) turn on Ninth Line, but one can easily overshoot Ninth Line, there is no stop sign for Herald Rd traffic (unlike Ninth Line) and the sign is very small.

Ninth Line is quiet possibly the nicest road in Ontario for a cyclist, there are no, and I really mean not a single car, except the ones going east/west on Davis and Vivian, all the way to Aurora Rd. There were a few lovely rollers, the last one before Vivian was positively brutal. Someone like Thi Ng (the mountain goat!) would have loved it, I was hurting, but it still felt pretty good.

As for the rest of the ride, I tore down Ninth below Bloomington a little above the posted Speed Limit (50km/h) and yet got passed -in more than a few cases dangerously close- by a good many cars. I was in Stoufville by about 11:30 and took Reesor Rd (or 10'th line) to 16'th Ave. There was a group of roadies there who looked lost. I asked if they needed help. They declined and I decided to try 16'th Ave. I took 16'th to Ninth Line again, unlike Ninth up near Vivian, here there was a ton of traffic, and I was happy to turn east again on 14'th Ave.

In all I rode 184.6km in about six hours 10 minutes, I averaged 29.9km/h and burned off over 7500 calories. In all I can think of few better ways to spend a Saturday morning.

On Recovery

2011-06-07T08:11:00.003-04:00

Last week the weather was astoundingly good, up until Saturday, naturally! That said I did manage to punch in a few miles. Remarkably in the period since I started riding Abigail (just over a week ago) I've already logged nearly 350km, plus I rode to Lake Simcoe, on Sunday, I used Jordan, so in just over a week I've logged over 500km and I'm not even riding to work in Richmond Hill anymore. (Which in the nice weather is a bit of a shame, but then in the lousy weather I now have the option of transit or the beater bike.)

Of course I also rode to Simcoe with a few guys, we took, well I took the camera so there's only one picture of me, the one where the timer was used. Jason, Patrick, Ryan and I covered, well actually Jason had to go to his aunt in New Market so he only did about 150km but the rest of us did about 180km of beautiful rolling southern Ontario. I have to admit, and I'd like to think this is somewhat big of me, Jason, Pat and Ryan are all much stronger than me. Period. I've got the prettiest bikes, but at the end of the day their engines are way better than mine.

Well that was a surprisingly easy admission to make. Still upsets me when I get my rear end so seriously handed to me, I mean the guys were nice and all, they waited for me a bunch of times, but it's still upsetting to get clobbered so consistently. I want to be the nice guy who has to keep stopping to wait for someone, instead I'm the one panting and huffing and puffing to the top of the hill while everyone else is leaning on their bars watching me from the top of the aforesaid hill.

On the final part of the jouney home we rode over some railway tracks, they did horrible things to my back tyre. Ultimately I replaced both the front and back tyre. But I took some pictures when I got home, those cysts on my tyre are disturbing. From now on I will dismount to cross those tracks.

If I still worked in Richmond Hill at least I would be packing in more miles, but I guess part of the problem is this past winter my base really fell apart. I was so busy with the move and everything I just did not have time to work on my cardio strength.

Anyway Monday I rode to work. After spending 180km on Jordan Abigail just did not feel right, her saddle is too low (didn't stop me from clobbering the cars on Danforth Ave.) and the bars are too high. I raised the seatpost a little last night (Monday evening) but the weather was iffy. I woke up this morning to the sound of thunder, loud thunder.

I suppose I really ought to ride to work even in weather like this, but it's very easy in the rain to call it a recovery day. Still six bucks to get from Main and Danforth to Davisville and Mount Pleasent? Damn, I can ride that in under 15 minutes, mostly obeying traffic law, the subway took over 30 minutes and it was subway only.

This is the problem with transit, you have to stop a bajillion times and it is not direct. At least I do need some recovery time, so it's not all bad, but still, the six dollars is offensively expensive. I am litterally paying $0.33/km if someone paid me that kind of money to ride, I'd quit my job and take up residence in a very nice split level in Rosedale!

On New Rides and Burning Too Fast

2011-06-01T07:44:00.003-04:00

Lets see, where to begin? Well I got a new ride, I've got her all road worthy and damn is she fast. Here are some pictures.

So a little about my new ride, first I'm calling her Abigail, which apparently means her father's joy in Hebrew - yes I did go to Hebrew school (and got yelled at by Israeli teachers) from grade four to seven but they never did teach me the meaning of the word Abigail, that job ultimately fell to Wikipedia.

Anyway some technical specifications. First she is a Specialized S-Works Roubaix, 2011 model year. But with some serious modifications, for one thing, a careful review of the above pictures one ought to be able to see I added a chain catcher. In addition, I remove the Specialized compact (50/34) crank - I'm sorry it is pretty, but Specialized, your cranks suck! (Had one on Alex - the TT bike on the right, but the crank is not rigid and it keeps dropping the chain back to 39 when I try to up-shift to 53.) Anyway I replace the crank, since it's a BB30 bottom bracket, with a SRAM Red 53/39 crank, which is nice, but actually for anyone who buy's SRAM Red, just so you know, their cranks are actually Truvative, of course SRAM owns Truvative - or is it the other way around?- but just so you know, it says SRAM on the side, it's really Truvative.

What else? Oh yes, the wheels, notice, they are Tubular (or sew-up) Fulcrum Racing Zeros. Very fast, actually I think noticeably faster than my Clincher Fulcrum Zeros.

I will say this, having had Jordan to ride for almost a year now, I don't much care for Shimano Shifting, Shimano makes a great drive train, but I think I am going to replace the Dura-Ace shifters and rear deraileur with a SRAM Red shifter system on Abigail.

Of course none of this means I am replacing or phasing out Jordan, it's just that well, as we all well know, the number of bikes we should have is n+1, where n is the number of bikes we currently have! (I haven't decided what the next bike will be, for now, I want more aero wheels for Alex and like I said a better shifting system... oh and new bars, those Specialized bars feel like tooth picks, I want something fat!, for Abby.)

So yes Abby is getting extensively modified from the basic Specialized high end (S-Works is their top of the line) bike, but I really have to tip my hat to the engineers at Specialized, that's a sweet frame they designed. The componentry they stuffed on it, really ruins it though, but at least that is easy to fix.

Anyway even though Abby still had to be properly sized for me, I really wanted to ride her on Saturday. Then it rained in the morning. So that evening, when it became apparent that the rain had stopped and things were dry enough I called up Ian Wilcox and the two of us went went on a hammerfeast. I sprinted like it was nobodies business and had to keep stopping and waiting for Ian, yeah, Abby is fast - or maybe I'm fast when I'm all scrunched up?

Sunday morning it rained so I adjusted Abby, put on a longer, S-Works (of course) stem, and raised the seat post. Then Ian and I went for another ride in the afternoon. It was hot, really hot, and muggy. Somewhere north of the city I flatted and had to do a road side tubular swap. Turns out it actually is not all that hard to swap a tubular tyre roadside, but if you are going to use tape, carry a knife to cut the tape with! (Ooops!) By the time Ian and I got to Stouffville I was dehydrated, riding home - after quite a bit of water and juice, was tough.

Monday and Tuesday I rode Abigail to work. Tuesday on the ride home the GPS went funny and said that on what I estimate to be a 19km route I did over 440km... not bad for half-an-hour of spinning. Tuesday night I went for a club ride, the Tuesday night insanity feast. Here are some pictures.

The guys were fast, damn fast, probably does not help that I have yet to fully recover from Saturday, leave alone Sunday. But they were also more than a little jealous!

Anyway we rode about 75km in about 2 hours 40 minutes, or about an average of 28.5km/h. The Lakeshore bike trail was packed and we just could not get any speed, until we started going up Royal York.

Of course Wednesday my ride to work was painful, probably did not help that there was a gusty head wind. But I managed to get myself riding reasonably quick. On Merton I was doing 35 - a 30 zone when a car recklessly overtook me so that I could catch up with him at the red light. The driver did not look to his right when he saw me. I was so tempted to ask if he enjoyed his reckless driving and that thanks to my GPS I'll only have the cops charge him with speeding. But I have better things to do with my time, like admire a very pretty little bicycle... or three!

On Rides, short and long

2011-05-26T07:41:00.002-04:00

This past weekend was the Victoria Day long weekend. I had hoped to do club rides on Saturday and Sunday and a long ride Monday. Now my original plan for Monday was Forks of the Credit, but it turned out there was construction out there so instead my revised route called for a Lake Simcoe Monday. Then it turned out that it was going to rain on Monday and Sunday so I moved Lake Simcoe to Saturday.

I strongly suspect, well I know actually, because I kept moving the dates around a lot of the guys could not come out. In the end I did the full 180km by myself. Not that I minded, I took my iPod and listened to Trance for six and a half hours, turns out Trance is great music to train to.

Sometimes you get a really good song with a tail wind and suddenly you feel like the greatest thing on Earth. Such a thing happened as I was working my way east from Leslie Street to Warden at 19'th Ave. I had to climb the highway 404 overpass and the sun hit me head on with green fields all around and not a car in sight. I cannot describe what a wonderful feeling it was. It was a glorious ride, although I did push myself too hard, my stops were very short, just refills and quick washroom breaks, then back on the saddle. By the time I got home I was hurting. I did stop to take a few pictures.

On account of bad weather predictions, though the weather's been pretty good, I've been spending my time on the beater bike, which is actually a really good way to train. Holy smoke it hurts going anywhere at all! I do a couple one hour rides full out on the beater I'd clobber everyone at an ITT on Alex (my ITT bike). Anyway this morning I was just on my morning ride to work, on the beater, in the rain. And at a red light a group rolls past me (they were going North, I had to turn but there was no right turns on red), once the light changes I see red and hammer and catch up with them pretty quick. Turns out they were the Morning Glory group out for, a wet ride I guess. Then I discover why I hate group rides in the rain. I have fenders they have pretty Cervelo's, mostly Cervelo's (will not rant... will NOT say anything bad about Cervelo... must... resist urge!)

I tried to drop off their back, but despite the fact that I have office cloths and my lunch in my backpack, and am on a 25-30 year-old steel beater with a busted 6600 Ultegra groupset I still get to the front of their pelaton. (At least I did not give them rooster tails!) I guess they were out for a long ride and wanted to save their strength, mind you it is Thursday, don't they have to work? Maybe their rides don't work well in the rain, or maybe the machine needs a better engine? Sorry, I should not talk like that. :)

On Riding and Rain

2011-05-20T08:37:00.000-04:00

I’ve done quite a bit of riding lately. Of course on account of the fact that my job is much closer to home, distance is shorter, but I am trying to make up for it by doing things faster and with more hills. Most days I now cover Cosburn from Donlands to Woodbine, or even further, faster than the cars do. (It helps that I have a bike lane and the cars have traffic – of course I have the same 40km/h speed limit they… disobey, and I often have a head wind – when I go east, go figure!)

Anyway I have done a bunch of hill climbing and a few club rides since my last post, one of the club rides involves a nice little climb on Brimely road. It turns out the hill (which we do repeats on), is about 890m (at least the loop I do). It starts at 88m above sea level and I turn and do it again at 160m above sea level, so it averages around 8%, but is in places as gentle as 4% and at other times is 13%.

Thursday evenings we have a little ride up and down the hill. I set a modest goal for myself, after all, it is only mid-May, I decided I would do four repeats of the hill, some guys did three, some did six. One person, a new guy, got to the bottom and from what I understand he basically just went up a little bit, turned around and went back down. Most of the guys were done and the new guy was still at the bottom. I still had plenty left in the tank and in my legs so I went back down the hill and rode up with the new guy. Mostly trying to encourage him as we rode. Towards the two thirds mark, the hill leveled off from 13% to 4 or 5%. I got back into the saddle (obviously at 13% I’m not going to be sitting all that much, I am no Alberto Contador). As the hill became more level I pushed the new guy, steadily, for about 150m (or about 500 feet). It is a nice feeling when you can, well frankly rescue someone, from the bottom of the hill.

The following week it rained almost continuously from, well Friday afternoon until Thursday morning. Although the grass and the trees are mostly green as a result of all this damned rain (more expected over the coming long weekend) the rain is getting to me. But at least I can now ride to work in the rain, I use the beater bike, something I could not do when I worked 25km from home. Tomorrow, Saturday, is supposed to be a nice day, so I am going to ride up to Lake Simcoe. I doubt anyone will come with, so I may need to charge up my iPod, oh well, at least I will get one good ride in before the rain that is predicted to ruin Sunday and Monday.

On Flats and Other Things

2011-05-06T09:02:00.002-04:00

I know, I have not posted much lately, sorry. Things have been crazy.

Obviously the whole move nonsense is far from finished. It turns out the imbecile I bought the house from lied in the listing of the house, the driveway is not legal and I got a parking ticket for using it. (I've had to get an on street permit, thank goodness it's a quiet street that people don't generally park on.)

I got a new job, its not a problem with the old job but the new role, is, I think, a step in a better direction. I can take the subway to work, it's only 10km away - so I can ride even on the beater Coppi to work. And the role is itself a promotion, even if the pay is slightly lower. (I save so much on the commute, I'll suck up the slight loss of income.)

Of course all of this means that I have not had much time to write lately. Well actually, part of it is also a case of, hmmm, weather's starting to turn, I could stay home and write blog posts or...!

So I had a flat on a Wednesday evening joy ride. I was on Queens Quay on the way home, east bound, when not for the first time I noticed the ride quality was suddenly pretty lousy. Queens Quay as a westbound road is bad, but usable, for the eastbound cyclist, take another road! Maybe Bathurst to Front and across Front Street?

Thursday was hill climbing night with the club. It was very nice, I kept my pace down on the first climb and on the second climb I kept it steady, on the third climb a bunch of guys, not in the club came out and did their first climb, they passed me, but then just a few meters later, I passed them. On my fourth climb they managed to pass me again but I had to save up enough to do all the other 'tour of Scarbrough' stuff we had planned.

We rode over to Meadowcliffe Dr., there is a short hill, perhaps 30 or 40 meters long and maybe 18% at it's steepest. As the guys got to the hill, I was a little behind, having down-shifted to early, I yelled out, "anyone who climbs the hill in the saddle gets a cookie!" I did not part with any Fudgee-Ohs last night. Then again, I did not earn one either.

Still I did pretty well and had enough gas left in the tanks to really hammer it home.

On Weekday Rides

2011-04-08T14:59:00.003-04:00

I have done an awful lot of rides since I last wrote. I have been busy, what can I say? Mind you busy riding, rather than writing about them, not such a bad thing. Anyway Sunday April 10, it was supposed to rain, then it was supposed to rain in the afternoon. So I went out for a morning ride with the BCC. One of the guys in the club flatted and a few of us stuck around while the rest of the club continued on. As it turned out, I was probably the weakest of the bunch who stayed to help with the tyre repair. It's not every mechanical I get to say, it was great, we screamed up Warden at about 40km/h. Then Jeff Norman, who must know roads in Toronto better than most people know the back of their hands, took us on a lovely little underpass to the Don Valley Parkway, we wound up meeting up with the main body of the group only a few kilometers from the site of the mechanical.

The club ride continued north and sure enough, when at about 40km from home it started raining. By the time I got home everything was soaking wet. Naturally in the afternoon it was warm, bright and sunny. So I spent much of the following week cleaning Jordan. That said, by Thursday night I had ridden over 500km since April 1. The season may just be starting, but things are ramping up pretty quickly now.

Here is a new rule, no looking at bicycling related websites, I drool, it is not healthy. And parking my ride at my desk at the office, not much better frankly! I keep turning and admiring. Sure she's pretty and all, but I don't see her enough on the uber long 300km rides? Well I only see her top tube bars and front wheel tyre and spokes. But apparently I don't see enough, because when at the office I keep turning and looking at my ride like she was a work of art. Then again, look at the bike or look out the window at a suburban wasteland, difficult decision.

On Weekend Rides

2011-04-04T08:30:00.008-04:00

I do not have my GPS with me now, so no statistics. But I do recall that on Friday evening I rebuilt Jordan, well actually the rebuild was a week long affair culminating in Malcom from Biseagal tightening the cables up and adjusting the gearing. Now I should add here that when I rebuilt Jordan I put new levers, derailleurs and logically cables on her so that when the gears started misbehaving on the Saturday morning ride, I just assumed there was some seriously ugly cable stretch going on. So Saturday just before noon I rode back to Malcom, right after the ride, and asked him to have a look.

I should probably insert here the part where I confess to having taken apart my crankset about a dozen or so times in the past to clean it.

Returning to my story, Malcom has a quick look at my sweet little ride and I end up taking a Taxi home. Below are some pictures of my 39 chain ring. (It is a good thing I had a spare crankset at home. Yes I really do keep an emergency 53/39 crankset!)

The next day Ian Wilcox and I went for a little ride, well actually the whole Beaches Cycling Club went for a ride, but Ian and I went further. It was a beautiful route. We went up Leslie, but I did not feel like riding through New Market so at Vandorf we went east to Warden and along Vivian. Then to avoid yet more busy roads we took 9'th line south all the way from Vivian, it was wonderful, hardly a car, a bunch of joggers and an occasional walker. It was riding, the way riding a bike is supposed to be. By the time I got home I was in all kinds of pain and loving every bit of it. I should go on more rides like that. Anyway here is a route, very much worth doing again, or possibly (since Warden is a very quiet road early in the morning on weekends) just take Warden north right from the beginning.

Sunday_April_3_Stouffville http://www.bikely.com/

And here are some pictures of me on that ride.

On Slow Recovery

2011-03-21T07:31:00.004-04:00

Over the weekend that just ended I rode 91km on Saturday and burned about 3950 calories in just under three and a half hours (yes a somewhat pathetic average of just over 26 km/h) and on Sunday I burned just over 4100 calories on a 105km just over three and a half hour ride (about 27km/h average.)

From this we can conclude a couple things. One is I have a lot of improvement to make, but the other conclusion I draw is that I am getting my strength back. The problem I had is over the winter I had all the grief of moving and staging of the home meant I could never use the trainer. (I shoveled lots of snow, but that does not do much for the ride.)

The summary of this past winter is as follows, since January 1 anyway, I rode once in early January and then nothing until March 13 (100km), including that March 13 ride I have done 383km in just over 168 hours. Not nearly what I would do in the summer, but it is starting up again. (Also since my current chain had - as of March 12 - 3589km and the tyres were at 1695km, I need to start really thinking about a new chain and tyres.)

Anyway enough of the mechanical and statistical details. The rides, well, Saturday Evan, Ian and I rode the Mississauga Loop, I need to figure out a better return path from Evans and Royal York to Christie at Dupont (have to do the hill on Christie, have to climb that hill!) We had what I am sure all would agree was a good ride, save the wind out of the North that nearly blew us over. On the other hand that north wind carried us down Tomken at a psycho speed. I was chasing Ian at one point on a flat and I was clocking in 50km/h. Ian and Evan are clearly in better shape right now than I am. I need to build my strength back.

I also had a sort of mini-bonk, I was getting dropped and just could not keep up, I realised my body was in glyco-synthesis mode and I could not figure out why, until it dawned on me, I am not drinking water (supplemented) - too cold, and not eating. I guzzled back half my bottle and got back into form pretty quick.

We were climbing a hill and I sort of growled as I neared the top, it's a psychological thing to growl at the hills. Well at the next red light another cyclist, on a commuter comes up beside me, kind of surprised me, she was running in stealth mode and reprimanded me for growling in hear ear - I was about one and a half meters away from her when I passed. But she was being all righteous, probably because she was on a bicycle... (yes I was too, but that's hardly relevant for the righteous set!) So I apologized, the light changed and I took off with the wind overpowering her rant on the importance of eating granola whilst wearing Birkenstocks. I think the problem the righteous cyclist has is that they think that the act of riding the bike is a sort of punishment that merits righteousness, that someone would ride for pleasure means that the someone is not worthy.

Sunday we rode up to Stouffville, well actually Musselman Lake. It was wonderful. At the start of the ride there was (in no particular order) Pat, Brook, Peter, Thi, Ian, Paul M - who clobbered me the previous Sunday - and myself. Pat and Brook took a slower pace once we got out of the city and we caught up with them in Stouffville where they had short looped. Peter kept with us to Stouffville where he broke off to get home earlier. Ian Paul and Thi then proceeded to clobber Michael several times on the way around the lake as I still need to get a lot stronger. But they were nice enough to wait for me. The ride south was brutal with a near steady head wind of about 10~15km/h. Still it was a lovely route, we used 14'th Ave and Middlefield to get back into the city. Ian and I agreed that this was the best way to re-enter from the North East.

Ian and I were talking about recovery, we both knew we would need a day or two (or about a dozen for me!) off to recover. Ian was a little bothered because the weather for Monday was supposed to be nice, turns out, it's raining.

It was a good weekend and I hope to have many more this spring, summer and fall just like the one I had. Thanks guys!

On Earthquakes and Japan

2011-03-16T13:49:00.002-04:00

Recent events in Japan have been very troubling. I was listening to the Radio and CBC had an expert on Nuclear reactors on. The expert was outlining how roughly 2% of all the workers stuck at the Fukushima plant will develop fatal cancer within, I think it was a year, as a result of their efforts. The expert went on to point out that while all the workers were sure to volunteer for such a risky role there would be no problem finding volunteers as this is Japan where society places honour in such a high regard.

I have to admit I am rather impressed, if I worked as say a Computer Network Analyst at Pickering and there was an Earthquake or some other disaster, volunteering to help out would not be high on my list of priorities, I think. I don't know, I guess I should be grateful that I am not in a position where volunteering to put my life on the line is something my job would ever require.

Anyway I happened upon this article by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It does explain a lot about why the reactor just will not shutdown. A problem I do not think the traditional Candu design has, suddenly Candu does not look so bad. Still makes me think, maybe we really do not have any long term solutions for our energy needs, maybe we will be living like we did at the turn of the nineteenth century when the oil runs out.

In the meantime I am going to donate to the Red Cross for the Japan Earthquake - it is the very least I can do.

On Back in the Saddle

2011-03-14T07:10:00.004-04:00

Finally, this long and dreadful winter is nearly over. Sunday I got to ride for the first time since early January. I posted the route below to the Beaches Cycling Club website, which we mostly stayed true to.

Route_Around_City

http://www.bikely.com/

Only one other person came with, Paul M., and the route was shortened a tiny bit, but it was a properly long hard ride all the same.

We set out on damp roads across town, bypassing Dundas around Leslie on account of the construction. When we faced the full onslaught of the wind I told Paul we should start drafting, that did not last long, the first time I drafted Paul I got mud and salt all over my jacket and glasses (and bars and stem and...).

When we turned up Royal York I found myself out of the saddle just to keep up with Paul. A season out of the saddle, moving, has done nothing good for me. By the time we got to Bartor Road, just north of Wilson it was clear to me, and much as this may pain me to say, probably Paul as well, that he's a lot stronger than me... for now!

The ride north was a suffer and grind feast into the wind. When we finally hit Teston I was ready to just fall over. I knew if I had one of those power taps I would have found out I was churning out some insane wattage.

By the time we reached Major Mackenzie I knew there was just no way I was willing to ride north to Elgin Mills again, so we took Major Mack back to Leslie where we had our one encounter with a really daft driver. The guy was honking at us at waving his finger as if we were misbehaving. Then, not long after he passed us, we caught up with him. I waved at him and yelled 'Hello', as I turned south on Leslie. Paul told me the driver was wagging his finger again. (Some drivers really need to learn their place, I guess.)

In any case it was Sunday morning, it wasn't like there was tons of traffic or we were weaving between cars or anything like that. Besides the finger wagging guy, there were maybe four other cars at the red light, Paul and I were riding completely the way we are supposed to, but for the fact that we weren't in a paceline, but hey, in general one should ensure to take up an entire lane on four lane roads. Motorists should change lanes when passing riders, frankly I don't want to get clipped by someones rear-view mirror.

We stopped at the Tim Hortons at Leslie just south of 16'th Ave, not far from my work actually. I bought a hot chocolate and a muffin, which ended up weighing on my stomach like a lead boot. We certainly did not perceive a tail wind going home, at times there was a head wind, but to look at flags and such, there was a strong tail wind all the way home, which may explain how we were able to fly home so fast after grinding for hours just to get North.

Ultimately, by my GPS I did the following, in 4 hours 16 minutes 54 second, I covered a comparatively modest 100.3km (hey it was my first time on the saddle since January - it actually was too far I think, but that's a good thing!). I burned 3747 calories, so enough to justify patronizing Mr. Horton's establishment, I hope! I averaged a very slow 23.43km/h but with a heart rate of 142bpm - so I think I was working a little harder than the speed and distance numbers would suggest. I maxed out at 53.99km/h and 201 beats per minute.

When I got home, to the new house, I had to clean my ride, Jordan was covered in mud and salt, just caked in dirt. I took her apart completely while Dawn, who had just returned from Florida wanted to watch Apollo 13, a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre had left Dawn inspired. So while watching Apollo 13 I took Jordan apart and because I don't have a hose setup yet, I had to wash the bike, the frame itself, in the shower. (Naturally this provoked a few sarcastic remarks.)

Although I am a far cry from finished with cleaning Jordan from my day in the wet, the ride was a good thing, and I am glad I got out. Next weekend, I will have to do 100km at least once, and hopefully twice and as soon as I can, I am going to start riding to work again. I need to get my legs and my rear end back into shape.

On Ramblings, not related to the ride.

2011-03-07T10:01:00.004-05:00

Things have been very busy for me lately, obviously, as a function of the fact that I am moving. Anyway there is a real-estate agent who mostly works the Beaches area of Toronto (I guess you could say the lower east side.) He works for the firm Keller Williams and has a team of about ten people. We used him, well someone in his team did all the "leg work", there really was not very much work done by the team in truth. Anyway the point of this preamble is to say, if you live in the GTA and need a real-estate agent, do not use my guy, his team is dreadful! A list of a few of the petty items, then the big ones, for why I cannot stand these people.

When we put our house on the market we had an agreement with the agent that they would cover staging, they told us that this was unusual, no it is not. They told us that normally the seller covers staging, no other agent I have spoken with told us we would cover staging. But after some haggling they agreed to pay for the stager, that they were going to use.

The stager came and made some changes and then the photographer came and took pictures, but one room was not cleaned up in time and rather than retake the photo they just yanked that room photo from the website. (Just a template with no site tracking and no adverts to the website that I could find.) They made a colour brochure, but not a particularly fancy one - it looked like a template with photographer supplied photos. They did not even bother to replace the stagers ad copy with the MLS feature sheet (or brochure), so every time someone came into our house they knew who the stager was, but not what features the house had, for example, I was the only home owner on my side of the street with working Air Conditioning. (The builder botched all the homes, I was the only home owner willing to cough up the $6000 to fix my Air Conditioning.)

Eventually an offer came in, it was seventy thousand dollars under asking with less than three weeks to move out. I felt we had priced our home very reasonably so I signed back ten under asking, I was pissed off. A another offer came back still fifty thousand under asking, we came back twenty under asking. Our agent had a conversation with the buyer's agent, no way would they come above forty thousand under asking, and likely not even above fifty under asking. I went to bed, pissed, our agent had tried to pressure us to settle with fifty thousand under asking. (Obviously we would not accept the offer.)

The following Sunday (a week later) we got another offer from the same couple, twenty five under the original asking price, less than two weeks to move out, oh and despite the fact that we had explicitly excluded the electric fireplace, Lesley really wanted that fireplace, the buyer had included it in the deal. Ultimately the deal was, twenty five under asking, less than two weeks, with my comment to the agent that I would not be able to move everything out in time - duh! And Lesley could keep her fireplace.

So that was that.

Except, the house was messy when I left. Of course it didn't help that I almost got an ulcer because when the idiotic buyer's agent inked the deal, they worded the one condition (buyer needed to arrange financing) so badly that when they sent in the waiver of the condition it was not worded properly and I nearly lost the deal on my new home, that I had less than twelve days to offer and close on. What happened was when I sent the waiver to my lawyer he was not satisfied that it was a proper waiver of the condition, the mortgage lender was dissatisfied and basically everyone on my buying side was unhappy and I almost missed the deal on my new home, it was sorted out, but that sort of thing should have been caught by my agent two days earlier.

Anyway I did move out, frantically, and the house was messy, sorry, I tried to keep the place clean, I really did, but frankly how can I when movers are trooping through at the rate of three pairs of boots every twenty seconds? And there just wasn't time to get all of our stuff out of there, what we did not need, we had to leave, too bad!

I left a note of apology and threw in my natural gas Vermont Castings barbecue. I figure the barbecue is worth about $400 - you try finding a good natural gas barbecue! - and it still works perfectly well. (Yes I found a replacement, but it took a lot of searching.)

We closed on the property on Friday February 25, on Sunday the 27'th, I had the following exchange with our agent:

From: BUYER
Date: 2/26/2011 1:51:39 PM
To: BUYERS AGENT
Subject: New Home
Hi Liz,

We just come into our new house and it looks like the previous owners didn't finish clearing out. The fridge and freezer are full of food. There are 2 shelves of DVD's in the basement, alot of junk in the laundry room and a storage shelf full of stuff in the garage.

From: OUR AGENT
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 10:14 AM
To: Michael Cole;
Subject: FW: Email from Buyer of 76 Woodbine

Hi Michael and Lesley, below is an email the buyer agent has received from the Buyer of your home. Was this intentional? Did you forget to get some things out or did you just leave what you did not want? Is there anything you wanted? Please advise.

From: Michael Cole
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 10:47:40 -0500
To: OUR AGENT
Subject: Re: Email from Buyer of 76 Woodbine

Of course there's a lot of stuff we didn't have time to clean out. That's what happens when they give less than two weeks to move. Everything in there is garbage.

From: OUR AGENT
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 12:40 PM
To: Michael Cole
Subject: Re: Email from Buyer of 76 Woodbine

Wow I am shocked. We did a very good job for you people and now we get treated like dirt. You accepted the closing date if it was going to be a problem you should have spoken up. You could have asked for help or even better let them know you didn't have time to move the garbage but someone would be by later to deal with. I will send some flowers as an apology on your behalf but they are billing you for 1800 got junk.

From: Michael Cole
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2011 02:16 PM
To: OUR AGENT
Subject: Re: Email from Buyer of 76 Woodbine

You told us the deal could not happen if we moved the closing date although I specifically asked for a change of closing to give us the time we needed. I have bent myself in knots trying to move out in time and get my affairs in order and this is how I am thanked?

Spare me your shock.

END OF THREAD

Now I have calculated that our agent collected $21,875 for whatever "work" and expenses she did or incurred. Allegedly our agent worked for us, allegedly. But if you live in the GTA and need an agent, I have a guy. I used him on the purchase of my new home, he is honest, he is thorough and I have never had an reason to say anything bad about him in the course of two purchases and one sale, except I disagree with his politics, he is conservative and I am very progressive, but whatever! Anyway we didn't use him on the sale because Lesley wanted to use someone who specialized in our neighbourhood and I didn't want to fight her over something so modest. By the time everything was said and done, both Lesley and I agreed (remarkably - we are separated after all) we should have used my guy instead.

That said, if you live in the GTA, avoid high profile agents working under Keller Williams, they are not to be trusted with your most valuable asset.

On Winter

2011-01-28T14:29:00.003-05:00

I know, I have written anything in a while. There are a lot of reasons, some, annoyingly, of a legal nature. I will say this, I must ensure not to write about some things, again, ever! Silly. Anyway I am contemplating goals for 2011, watch this space for those in the weeks to come. For now, I have the following:

Get to Rochester, do not bonk, actually get to Jeff Brand's front door. Do it in under 10 hours (not counting stops for border crossings and washroom). Do it with two washroom and one food break in Ontario and two water, one washroom break in New York.
Ride to Lake Simcoe a bunch of times, average over 32km/h with a sustained pulling speed of at least 35km/h (that is to say, when out in the country and there's a nice long pull from yours truly I have to maintain a speed of at least 35km/h).
Ride out to The Forks of the Credit, enjoy the prettiest road in Ontario a few times, do not dehydrate or bonk on the way home. Make Ian Wilcox blow up from riding fast for too long.
Actually make Ian Wilcox blow up period, if I can be intact when Ian runs out of gas that's has to count for something.
Clobber Thi Ng on a 10% or greater climb.

On Everything is Wrong

2010-12-08T08:05:00.003-05:00

Yes I stole the title of today's post from the title of a song by Moby. But here are the recent news items I have been tracking, starting with the local and moving outward.

1. Do not trust police. During the recent G20 convention in police went completely overboard arresting nearly everything that moved. The police detained people for hours, laid false charges (that were subsequently dropped without explanation), and assaulted innocent bystanders. Of course a personal favourite, they incorrectly employed a World War II era law that was intended to protect industry in Ontario against Nazi sabotage, when this issue was recently brought up by the Ontario Ombudsman, a police spokesman vilified the Ombudsman on the radio.

2. Police cannot be trusted with weapons. So it turns out Tasers can kill people, Taser International does not say so on their website, as of yesterday, but there are all sorts of lists of people who have died while getting tasered. And I am not just talking about Robert Dziekanski. I am frankly of the opinion that Tasers should be handed out to protesters at major conventions so they can protect themselves from the police hoodlums who seem to do more damage than the protesters. Someone should remind these brutal thugs that if protecting my rights means disobeying the Canadian Charter then I might as well not have a charter of rights at all!

3. Oil prices are going right back to the place that started this horrible recession we still have not recovered from. There are a lot of economists out there who seem to think Jeff Rubin is completely wrong, but I do not understand how these economists can possibly explain where the next hundred years of cheap oil is going to come from. The fact is, we have run out of easy to find and access oil, now we have to look under thousands of feet of water, and then miles of clay under that, or look to tarry gunk in the subarctic, just to meet current demand. Meanwhile every year existing production drops by 5% because of depletion, yet we still have not found a way to power our economies without this goo.

The eternal city of Rome was founded, according to legend April 21, 753 BCE, it was sacked seven times. Ultimately, most historians would be inclined to agree the empire itself came crumbling down on September 4, 476 when the Germanic chief Odoacer forced the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustus, to abdicate. Rome as an ancient seat of power lasted 1230 years, how long will our little empire last?

Note content in italics in the paragraph above quoted directly from Wikipedia.

On Physics and Driving

2010-12-02T09:09:00.003-05:00

As a cyclist I don't much like rain, it's cold, it makes my sweet ride dirty, (and being that I am both vain and anal a dirty bike is simply a bike that needs to be brought into the house for a good proper cleaning that ought to take at least 8 or 10 hours). But one good thing about a bike in the rain, the narrow (23mm wide) tyre slices through water and has plenty of grip.

Cars are a different matter. Tuesday I was driving to work in what I would call white knuckle driving. The rain was coming down in buckets and the expressways had some pretty hefty flooding. The roads felt slick and I was sure the car was going to spin out somewhere, yet all around me the motorists on the parkway were roaring along at a million and six miles an hour (well more like 10 to 20% over the posted limit).

I think this is a good place to review what happens when a car tyre is on a wet road. Water builds up in front of the tyre. A narrow bike tyre does not have this problem, and since bikes go slower than cars, the water has time to migrate around the tyre, which is more than I can say for the car. As the car roars along a lip of water in front of the tyre forms, if the car then accelerates just the tiniest bit the car can literally jump onto that lip and now the car is said to be hydroplaning. That is to say, the car is now floating on the surface of the water, there is zero contact between the rubber and the road.

I guess I should not be so surprised, after all these are Toronto drivers we are talking about. Sigh.

On Blowing Up and Burning Out

2010-11-15T08:56:00.003-05:00

So as I mentioned previously I did a lot of riding last week. I rode every day from Saturday November 6 (63km) though until (and including) Saturday November 13, 85km. My shortest day was November 6 at 63km, my longest was Sunday the 7'th at 125km. The total distance was 674km in eight days, which does not sound all that impressive I suppose, except, pulling eight consecutive rides in November, and averaging almost 85km/day this time of year is something that is worthy of a blog post.

My ride on Saturday (November 13, 85km) was a strange one. First it was not raining, just very misty, foggy one might say. But from the house the road looked dry and visibility was pretty good to a few hundred meters so I figured I'd be fine for a ride. Then I hit the road and almost immediately visibility dropped to under 50m. Having ridden every single day for the previous week I was feeling pretty enfeebled and with the lousy visibility I was seriously tempted to just abort and head home, but, I soldiered on. As I rode North the fog started to lift and with the clearing of the sky my head cleared as well and I started to really enjoy the ride. Car drivers were bizarrely exceedingly courteous and frankly the ride up Royal York was little more than a big love feast. Not that I mind, I wish more drivers would behave the same way around cyclists as the motorists on Royal York.

I rode east across Steeles for a while, Steeles is a lot better ever since the city resurfaced almost the entire length of the road, except just past every major intersection the right lane is undergoing road work for about ten meters. I wish they would hurry that road work up, there is nothing worse than being squeezed into a tight lane with cars that are in the post red light rush to the next red.

In frustration I gave up on Steeles and took a side road just east of Bathurst. Just after the turn a blue hatchback Mazda with an empty bike rack passed me. (No big deal so far. ) Then without signalling or looking the Mazda made a right turn at an intersection (no stop required) and had it not been for decent reflexes and outstanding brakes (thank goodness for Malcolm Munroe and Shimano Dura-Ace) I would have been either t-boned or plowed into the Mazda. I yelled at the driver, something along the lines of questioning his intelligence and some other choice expressions and continued on my way. A block later I encountered the Mazda again and the driver tried to engage me in some sort of conversation, now talking to someone who nearly kills me is not my idea of a good time. I tried to get away as fast as I could. (It took a few tries, but eventually I managed to escape the idiot in the blue Mazda.) Irony, besides the bike rack, he was wearing some sort of high-tech long sleeve jersey, like he had just done some outdoors activity, maybe he was going to reprimand me for riding?

Thanks go the mist at the start of the ride Jordan was covered in mud by the time I got her home. I am doing another one of my uber cleaning jobs on her - good timing, I am on call this week and cannot go for a ride.

On Riding, A Report

2010-11-12T09:01:00.002-05:00

I am swamped at work. But at least I have managed to squeeze a few good rides in, as I mentioned earlier, Saturday was a 63km day, Sunday was 125km, Monday was only 78km, but Tuesday was 80, then Wednesday was 84 and Thursday was 79, I suspect Friday will be about 100km, to make a nice even 609km... I guess I better do 101km today... or maybe 191? Oh 750 is a nice round number, 241km? Damn shame I have to work today.

Anyway back to the treadmill.

On Good Long Rides

2010-11-09T08:54:00.002-05:00

In my last post from Thursday (November 4) I noted that I planed to do core exercises. Then that annoying concept, the thing I do to pay for the house and food, and critically bike and related accessories, you know, the eight hours a day (well more like ten hours a day) five (six) days a week? Starts with a J... like Job... yes that's it my day job, it got in the way. Well as much as it could my job got in the way, but I my little diesel conspired to get me back on the saddle, the starter motor on my diesel car is dying.

Now granted in an ordinary gas car it is possible to get the engine rolling without a starter motor, just park on some flat ground and push the car until its rolling fast enough and jump behind the wheel. Diesel's are a little more difficult, because the engine has no spark plugs, ignition is achieved by knocking, so it takes a lot more torque to roll the engine over. I did take the car to my neighborhood mechanic and while replacing the starter is not the hardest job ever, sourcing a starter motor for a nine model-year-old small diesel engine quite possibly is.

So my car is at the mechanic, and the days while cold are sunny and dry. As if I needed another reason not to drive, Lesley was sent to Ottawa by her job, (yes I officially hate all day jobs!) Lesley decided to drive her truck... land yacht... big black gas guzzling behemoth.

So Saturday I rode, only 63km - but then I did only drive about 15km, Sunday I rode, 125km then Lesley wanted to get some lunch and instead of using a sesnible mode of transportation we drove to lunch, another 10km. Yesterday I rode to work and then drove the car to the mechanic (78km by bike and 2km by car). Today I expect to ride about 80km (to and from work) and, well, cannot drive at all. Of course that leaves, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, which luckily, the weather is looking good. So I guess I'm stuck riding, oh the humanity!

Actually I do want to mention the 125km I did on Sunday. Now I admit, by my standards 125km is nothing special, but this ride sure was, the route is below. From around Dufferin and Teston all the way back to King Vaughan was nothing but rollers, some rather steep. At one point on Jane Street there was a nice tail wind with a fairly steep decesent and I was hammering away in the 53/11 or maybe 53/12 when some car whips past me, now I was doing 64.5km/h (by the GPS) and it is a 70km/h zone, but if that car passed me at anything less than 30km/h I ought to retake physics 121. But other than some really bad drivers, this was a wonderful route and left me with the really nice pain. I hope the weather is nice so I can ride this thing again this Sunday.

To_KettlebyRd

http://www.bikely.com/

And here is a group photo, from Keele, just south of Kettleby.

On Flatting

2010-11-04T09:34:00.002-04:00

Tuesday November 2 was a bad day. Any day when a bunch of angry lunatics wins elections is a bad day. Tuesday was especially bad because my back tyre ripped wide open on Brimley road between Eglinton Ave. and Danforth Road.

So for anyone who might happen across this blog who is new here, I'm what might be called a lunatic myself, as in I am crazy about riding, my bike that is. Anyway I use clincher tyres, (tyres or tires that have an inner tube), as opposed to tubular (tube is sewn up inside the tyre) or tubeless (tyre has no tube and is glued to the wheel, like that of a car tyre).

Now one might think that with a ripped tyre it would still be possible to ride home, since the tube did not rip, except, when the tyre rips what happens is, the metal threads inside the tyre are now exposed and the tube is bulging around them, although come to think of it, even a clean rip the tube would still fail. If a person is ever bored on a rainy Saturday afternoon, take a cheap road bike tube and try to inflate it to 40 psi. Now normally road bikes should run at about 90 to 120 psi (sometimes even as high as 140psi), but if one were to inflate a free tube to 40psi, well it would not work, the tube would explode.

What happens is, inside the tyre the tube has no room to expand so the air simply becomes more dense and the tyre feels harder. But in the open the tube expands and expands, so that the equivalent of 40psi of air pressure makes the tube rather large and then kaboom. Well when a tyre rips, suddenly there is all kinds of space for a tube to expand into and kaboom. What I find really annoying, this particular ripped tyre had all of about 500km on it. All but the very thinnest racing tyres (of which this was not) should last 2000km, this was the second failure of that tyre too, the previous failure was at about 30km of use.

Anyway that failure seemed like a good invitation to stop riding and recover, in five days I commuted to work three days (so about 80km a day on Friday, Monday and Tuesday) and did two days of intense club rides (Saturday and Sunday). I think a couple days off is very much necessary, that said I think I'm going to do some core training, it will probably help.

On Weekend Rides and Hurting

2010-11-01T09:03:00.004-04:00

Over last week I did not have a chance to ride after Monday. Monday morning it was raining so I drove to work, in the evening it was nice and Lesley was jet lagged (she just got back from visiting her parents) so I went for a ride and blew a flat on the Royal York overpass over the Gardiner Expressway. Shortly after I replaced my inner tube my old manager/director gave me a call and asked me to look at a network configuration if I had a second. (Funny thing about blowing a flat, you loose interest in the actual ride after flatting, well it's not so much a loss of interest as a fear that the replacement tube will fail too.)

Anyway Toronto was hit by a weather "bomb" yes that's a real meteorological term, although it conjures up images of blizzards and hurricane force winds with intense rains, it was more of a weather dud. Listening to the radio and hearing predictions of 90km/h winds I figured, better to be in a big steel tub than on a tiny little carbon fibre work of art. As a result I did not ride Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

Friday I had a chance in the evening to extend my ride, so I did exactly that, and my total distance, about 30km to work and 73km home. Then Saturday a bunch of us in the Beaches Club went up to Stouffville, and a few of the guys must have had their Wheaties that morning because they left the rest of us in about six different kinds of pain, it was a good leg burner of a day.

Sunday the Beaches club had their end of season ride, what end of season? There's no snow, and even if there were, end of season... humph, end of rear, as in my rear end, ride in the snow! Anyway the BCC end of season featured a drive out to scenic Dundas Ontario, a nice warm up of 90km followed by a lunch and then a drive home. Now I'm sorry but if I cover 73km on my (albeit extended) commute home and over 100km on a regular working day, I'll be damned if I am going to drive over 100km just to ride 90km, unless said ride were a race, but as it's a social ride, uhm, save the diesel, ride to the ride.

I suspect I sound like a pompous jerk, but I'm sorry, driving a bike somewhere, sort of strikes me of asking a fish if he'd like some water to drink. Bikes are, to my thinking, the best and most decent way to get around, using a car to drive a bike that is in good repair is... unethical and immoral. (Driving a bike to a shop to get repaired, that is a different matter entirely - of course - but even better, driving to the shop buying tools and fixing the bike at home yourself is even better still.)

Anyway a couple guys had a similar opinion, well actually I think they just did not want to spend several hours driving, and sitting in traffic, just to do a three hour ride. So we did our own little ride, it hurt, in a really, and I do mean really, good way. There were 14% hill climbs, there were 55km/h (sustained) descents, there were head winds and tail winds. There was even, shudder, snow, but it did not accumulate. It was a really good ride, it even featured a coffee stop, but while I confess from the front door of my house I did not ride Jordan, I did mount the saddle as soon as I had walked her to the street, and again while I did dismount, before I got home, that was because I had to open the garden gate to get into the front yard. In short, total distance on Jordan 129km, total distance walking or driving the bike: less than 20m, or less than 0.001% of the distance covered.

Anyway here is a very nice, car free, route, very much worth doing again.

2010_HalloweenRide

http://www.bikely.com/

On The Next Mayor

2010-10-27T08:52:00.002-04:00

Robert Ford got elected mayor on Monday, in retrospect I have to admit, much as I find the man detestable I can see why so many people voted for him. I wrote the following in a comment in the Globe and Mail web site, I think it sums things up nicely.

I live in Toronto, but would never vote for Ford, as an avid cyclist and firm believer in the importance of immigration into the city I would never want a man like that running things. But I suspect the reason a lot of people did vote for Ford was frustration, salaries are stagnant, debts are increasing, the cost of living is only going up, the value of homes is expected to go down.

In this personal financial disaster, garbage men go on strike so that they can keep bankable sick days [In 2009 city workers all went on strike for about a month], city councillors (mine, although I didn't live in the beach when she got elected) are using my property taxes to sue people, and general waste on the part of council (who voted themselves a raise during a recession and major strike). Well anyone who wasn't promising to hurt those who would go on strike, or even better those who voted for a raise whilst the rest of us were hurting, couldn't possibly expect to do well.

I have to admit, I am not keen on my choice of language, "anyone who wasn't promising to hurt those" is quite a bit more violent than I like, but on the other hand that does seem to embody the spirit of the Rob Ford revolt. Still I have to wonder, all of this talk, reducing taxes, cutting waste, finding new efficiencies. What will Ford do when he realises that he cannot possibly save more than a percent or two from the city budget without really making those less fortunate among us, those who need city services like public transit, really start to suffer? Somehow I suspect the Ford years are going to be marked by a new level of stratification.

I hope I am wrong.

On Ranting, An Addition

2010-10-25T08:22:00.002-04:00

Like most old media news sites, the Globe and Mail allows for people to comment on articles. Well I am of the opinion that the Globe and Mail's comment section must surely be the most heavily loaded with grumpy curmudgeonly old farts web site out there. Holy smokes, what a bunch of complainers and right wingers! They should have a pop-up on the, Join the Conversation, link, the pop-up could read: all hope abandon, ye who enter here.

What else is going on? No much, I went for a ride on Saturday, it was a nice ride, but too short. It was widely expected to rain on Sunday so I slept in, which I have to admit was nice. (It would have been nicer if the boys - cats - would let me keep sleeping, but they decided that I ought to get out of the bed and they can be very persuasive.) It did rain on Sunday, as expected, so I did not feel all that guilty sleeping in and then doing house work.

The bike frame that caused my hit counter to spin a couple weeks ago will go up on ebay. I'd really like to sell this thing already damnit!

Oh yes, Toronto is electing a new mayor today, must... restrain... myself... Rob Ford... is... a... won't... say... it...

Ah ha! I didn't call the councillor from Etobicoke North a total douche bag! Oh ooops. Anyway at this point we've all heard the arguments why Ford was an accident, but, the angry ranters who seem to populate the comment section of the Globe and Mail are running rampant all over the polling stations. I fear to wake up tomorrow and discover that fat incompetent is my mayor, but it happened once before and we survived that idiot, barely. If Rob Ford becomes mayor maybe Leslie and I can move to London, Boris Johnson rides a bike, and it sure would be nice to watch Top Gear without adverts.

On Destructive Rantings

2010-10-19T07:42:00.004-04:00

Okay with a subject like that, and given that right now my thoughts are of the upcoming municipal election, one might expect I would go after the highly bombastic, bullying, obese, wife abusing, drug addicted, DWI (in Florida in 1999, same time he got busted for pot) candidate for mayor (and ahead in the polls) Robert Ford.

Now in fairness, whenever Mister Ford opens his mouth he reminds me of the guy who sold me my beat up used VW Jetta. (I ended up needing to do all kinds of work to make the car road worthy, because the dealer was a liar and a crook, hey he was a used car salesman, every time I hear Rob Ford open that mouth of his I cringe.

Anyway I do not need to rant, this morning I got around to reading the Focus section (Editorials section) of the Saturday Globe and Mail. (Hey it takes me a week to plow through a Saturday Globe, but I do keep up on the website... or used to, ever since they redesigned everything I've been seriously contemplating cancelling my subscription, that paper really went down hill fast.)

Anyway in the Saturday Focus section of The Globe there was an article about how Mister Ford is an everyman because he is fat. I cannot show the article here because The Globe pulled it from their website on account of the fact that the Ford people were complaining it was offensive and inappropriate. (This from a guy who routinely bullies his fellow councillors during council meetings, just do a YouTube search for Rob Ford, there are tons of examples.)

But my personal favorite, Rob Ford has a single lawn sign, it's white with red and blue print, as if he were American or something! (News flash Mister Ford, Toronto is, last I checked, still in Canada.) Anyway more significantly, the sign reads something to the effect of "Rob Ford, Respect for taxpayers." Of course it might help here if I explained something, Rob Ford says he will reduce our taxes, while cutting spending (fair enough), yet have no impact to front line services (excuse me?) and reduce the municipal budget deficit at the same time (WTF??). How is this respect for rate payers? When last I checked, building roads, sewers, hiring police and firefighters cost money. Paying down the debt costs money, this money comes from taxes. How on earth is it respectful to say "I will do the impossible if I am elected." Frankly that is the Rob Ford "Respect for Taxpayers".

Certainly there is very little respect for voters intelligence, but then Toronto is a pretty tolerant city, we had the first legal gay marriage, and gay divorce in North America, city publications go out in something like 23 different languages, our gay pride parade is one of the biggest in the world. I think we'd rather have the "Kenyan, Muslin, student of Rev. Wright, palin around with terrorists" black fellow by the name of President Obama as our Prime Minister than that scary white guy from Alberta who really is an economic terrorist! (Well personally I'd rather have Prime Minister Obama on his worst day than Stephen Harper any day!) Anyway my point is, sure we're tolerant, we are so tolerant we will take a blithering idiot and make him our mayor, heck we did it once already, Mel Lastman! So I guess the real question is, would a Mayor Ford be worse or just as bad as Mayor Lastman? My money is on Ford being worse.

Anyway enough wining about a guy who cannot control his eating, or wife abusing. (Sorry but then you know, if you run for public office, probably not wise to hit your wife... and no, just because I never hit Lesley does not in any way imply I plan to run for office, rather it implies I have a very small amount of decency.)

On a totally unrelated note, on Thanksgiving Monday, October 11, I rotated Jordan's tires. I rode to work on Tuesday and Friday, I rode on Saturday, Sunday and again to work yesterday (Monday). In one week I covered over 500km, I am already past the half way point to another tire rotation. Holy smokes! No wonder my legs are sore. I love riding, too bad it was raining this morning or I'd be past 600km by the end of today. Maybe a weather induced break will be a good thing though, like I said, my legs are sore. A couple days of healing will probably do a lot of good.

On Rain

2010-10-14T08:14:00.007-04:00

It is really difficult to think of anything to write when a guy's been away from the saddle as long as I have. (Two whole days!) Actually two days is not so bad, last week sucked, because I was primary on call looser boy, I rode once, Monday. I got caught in the rain and spent the rest of the week and into the weekend cleaning Jordan. End result, in the last fourteen days, I have been on the saddle just a few times.

So thanks to the rain I have to drive to work. Only it is worse than that, because my mother was in a car accident (she's fine, car needs some body work). Mum is now without a car so I loaned her my old Jetta on the, mistaken, belief that it was going to be a nice week and I could ride all week long. Now I have to ride Lesley's gas guzzler. (Lesley likes her truck, but last night I filled the tank, hoping I could ride today and leave Lesley with a full tank, 3/8'ths of a tank on an Audi Q5 costs as much as a full tank of diesel for the Jetta.)

You know I have to admit, I am too car dependant, I was thinking this morning, I should ride the Coppi to work in the rain (on the other hand 25km on slick roads). But then I look at my baby boomer parents and the very notion of getting around without using fossil fuels fills them with dread.

Frankly this attitude of the car is a god to be worshiped, it's the Rob Ford view of the universe!, or at least North America. We already live in a world of peak oil, that much is obvious, consider the chart below which I pulled from here. Now one thing to note is this chart ends just as the 2008 recession really started to hit. As of October, 14 2010 (Thursday) at 09:20:28 the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (the benchmark crude that the graph below plots) is $83.45.

In other words, with the exception of the pre-recession high, back in July or August of 2008, oil has never been as expensive as it is today, and we are very nearly in a double dip recession right now!

Heck lets, consider the price of oil over the last 150, or so, years. (This graph was also pulled from here.)

So in fact the only time oil has been as expensive as it is now (now being since peak oil set in, which would be, I believe, around 2004) was when we first discovered the stuff and were trying to figure out how to pull it out of the ground.

But really, the real reason we should worry about how we get to keep driving, here is a graph from Wikipedia of non-OPEC and Russian oil. Note that we have in fact peaked.

Now some wise guy is going to comment that there is Russia and OPEC (and unconventional oil) are not included. Well consider this:

[World] reserves are confused and in fact inflated. Many of the so-called reserves are in fact resources. They're not delineated, they're not accessible, they’re not available for production.
— Sadad I. Al-Husseini, former VP of Aramco, presentation to the Oil and Money conference, October 2007.

Or I like this graph, also from Wikipedia.

It is a graph of OPEC reported reserves, the caption from Wikipedia says it all:

Graph of OPEC reported reserves showing refutable jumps in stated reserves without associated discoveries, as well as the lack of depletion despite yearly production.

In an average year oil comes out of the ground and so the lines should drop, then a discovery is made and the lines should go up a little, or an elephant field is discovered and lines rocket up. But often times in this graph we see elephant type jumps without the associated finds.

Perhaps this (from Wikipedia) explains things,

One difficulty in forecasting the date of peak oil is the opacity surrounding the oil reserves classified as 'proven'. Many worrying signs concerning the depletion of proven reserves have emerged in recent years.
...
For the most part, proven reserves are stated by the oil companies, the producer states and the consumer states. All three have reasons to overstate their proven reserves: oil companies may look to increase their potential worth; producer countries gain a stronger international stature; and governments of consumer countries may seek a means to foster sentiments of security and stability within their economies and among consumers.

Okay so oil is running out, the next logical question, will we find a replacement? Because if we don't, well thankfully there is apparently enough arable land within 100 miles of Toronto to feed the city's population. But I hope there are enough horses to pull the food into town.

On Cleaning Up After The Rain

2010-10-09T23:08:00.001-04:00

I have spent too much time cleaning my sweet ride, well it is not too much time, it is just that I am too tired to write about, so here are the pictures instead.

On Scams

2010-10-07T09:08:00.003-04:00

I have a Trek Equinox E7 frame I am trying to get rid of. The story of how I got it is rather long and complicated but at this point I have a frame, it is (right now) for sale and I threw a few pictures and a little description of the thing up on Craigslist.

Yesterday I had a response:

On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Clarence Rose wrote:

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY --- AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

--
Hello Seller,

Do you still have the item for sale? and how long have you been using it.

Rose.

I responded:

Hi Rose,

Yes the bike is for sale. I think it has about 60km of use on it, so hardly used at all.

Michael

The next question was as reasonable as it was predictable:

On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Clarence Rose wrote:

Thanks very much for the mail,I'm interested in buying it,may i know why you wanted to sell it and what's it present condition.

So I answer to the best of my ability:

Hi,

Actually the guy who bought the bike for triathalons decided he wanted a conventional road bike and gave me the frame. I have inspected it and it clearly is hardly used. It has a small scuff from transport (to the original store where it was sold) and it has accumulated some dust but it otherwise is in perfect condition.

If you would like to see the frame, it is at Biseagal (http://www.biseagal.com/welcome.htm) at 388 Carlaw Avenue (Between Dundas and Gerrard on the West side) look for the Yellow Inde-Art Design House sign Biseagal is in the same enterance down the hall on the right hand side.

http://maps.google.ca/?ie=UTF8&ll=43.666046,-79.342104&spn=0,0.001072&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=43.665961,-79.342069&panoid=jwIdvDvvzTMbDw5CvLFVCQ&cbp=12,244.88,,0,4.57

If I am not around, just ask Malcolm, the owner of Biseagal, to show you Michael's Trek frame.

Michael

Now the alarm bells started ringing:

I so much appreciate your response to my earlier mail. I wish to let you know that I'm satisfied with the condition. Like I said there's no doubt I'm gonna purchase it. Therefore I want you to consider it sold by withdrawing the advert from craigslist. Note that you will not be responsible for shipping and handling. My shipping company will come to your location for pick up. Kindly provide me your name and full address, so i can forward it to the shipping company to calculate the cost of pick up for me. Please get back to me as soon as possible.

May your troubles be less, your blessings more.
and nothing but happiness comes through your door.

I do not need to be scammed thank you, lets get some standard anti-fraud measures going:

Like I said, the frame is in the shop, see the email below for details. If a shipping company is going to retrieve the frame, how are you going to pay me? I only accept cash.

Well Rose might be in the scamming business but they are not in the very much going on between the ears business:

I'm not in town presently that is why i want to hand over this transaction to PayPal and my agent so as soon as the payment has been made then my agent can come for the necessary information.. Just get back to me with your full home address and your PayPal email address for the instant payment.

I don't have a copy of my response to this note, but it went to the effect of, "The bike is in the shop, you can see it there, you can pay me cash only I don't use paypal. Sorry."

Why do people try to scam? Who gets fooled? Such a shame, the whole damn thing.

Oh incidently, Rose's email might show up as: Clarence Rose [300000kms@gmail.com]. If you ever plan to sell anything on Craigslist, make sure to avoid this guy.

On Religion (again)

2010-10-06T07:59:00.002-04:00

A forewarning, this post can be really offensive, particularly to anyone of deep religious belief. I am becoming quite an atheist and this sort of expands on my notions. (Frankly I wish I had a private diary as well as a public blog.) I would ask any religious person not to read this, or read it and remember it’s just my ideas on religion and is not meant as a criticism of the next person’s belief structures. Actually if anything this is a critique of my own beliefs.

I was driving to work today when I had a bit of an epiphany, religion, as most humans (okay, more likely just me) view it, is incredibly arrogant.

An example of my slightly wacked beliefs is in order here. Some time ago I participated in the Montreal 24 hour inline relay race on the F-1 track in Montreal. Over the course of the evening Jacky Schu had the baton and would have to pass it off to me (I in turn passed it off to Daniel Dumbrill who passed it back to Jacky, one hand off per lap, each lap was just under 5km.)

Into the evening the rain started, at first it just made things unpleasant and somewhat dangerous. Around two in the morning I was to do a lap, I went out from the paddock and waited on a bleacher for Jacky, about a minute before Jacky arrived the rain started coming down in biblical proportions. (I.e. Genesis 6, This is the line of Noah, Noah was a righteous man, he was blameless in his age… – Sadly I did not need to consult The Plaut Commentary to write that quote, I’ve got it stuck, hard wired into my brain.)

Anyway I did my lap in the rain and just about a minute before completing my lap, the rain let up, a lot. Thus I developed two theories, God hates me, and God’s sense of timing needs work.

See the arrogance? Why on earth would a supreme deity give a damn about my rollerblading adventures? It is just like when I yell at the sky in the rain on Monday, imploring any almighty to keep the rain back until I get home. (If you want to find out the outcome of that particular prayer, see yesterday’s blog post.)

Or the epiphany? I got a bunch of green lights on the drive to work. Really I should be thanking the city traffic planners, there is no supreme deity involved.

Of course this brings me to the logical question, when is the almighty at work? When Osama Bin Laden’s minions smash airplanes into buildings and kill three thousand innocent people? When the Christian Crazies in Florida threaten to burn hundreds of Qurans? How about when other Christian Crazies protest a soldier’s funeral - he was gay. (Shortest definition of tasteless, crass and inhumane I have ever seen.) How about when the Jewish Crazies build homes in The West Bank?

I wonder, would say a cow view a human as the physical embodiment of the divine? (After all, look at the power a rancher has over the cow.) If so what is a cow thinking as it gets marched to the slaughter? Would the cow think, I have upset my master for my deviant beliefs or would it think I am going to a better place now? Either way, makes me wonder about God’s motivation, makes me also wonder if there is one.

On Rain

2010-10-05T08:48:00.007-04:00

I hate the rain. I mean sure plants need it to grow, but if I could control such things, nothing would fall from the sky when the temperature is below about 5 degrees above freezing (so no ice or snow on the roads) and it would never rain during the day - more riding time!

Yesterday morning both the Weather Network and Environment Canada's weather models predicted no rain for the whole week. How much things change. About an hour before it was time for me to saddle up and mount a beautiful (clean) black Specialized Roubaix I looked out the window and saw some ominous grey clouds to the south. Now here's a silly question, why bother checking the weather? I mean, if its going to rain, too bad, it's not like I have a spare car I can drive home. Anyway I checked two different Doppler radars hoping that maybe one was stale data. No such luck, a cloud about 100km long and perhaps ten wide running from the south shore of Lake Ontario up north of Oshawa was working it's way north west from New York towards Toronto.

So much about that weather is just wrong. Usually the wind blows from the north west, so that cloud should have been moving away not closer. Anyway I started for home and probably made it 20km before the rain really started hammering me hard. (Of course I go south east so I was basically moving right towards the storm.) At first it was just irritating, it's cold and my face is getting wet, then almost suddenly the ground went from moist to soaking wet. Soon water had penetrated my shoe covers, then shoes and socks so my feet were cold. Water was soaking down my jacket leg warmers so instead of providing warmth my clothing was actually making an unpleasant situation dreadful.

I stripped off my clothing by the washing machine in the basement, when I took off one of my shoes and put my foot (still wearing a sock) on the floor I left a big wet foot print. Taking those wet socks off was a very nice experience. Later that evening I took some images of my ride, Jordan, she is in very bad need of a very serious cleaning.

Yesterday I decided that since I will be stuck at home, (I'm on call), the whole weekend I might as well clean my ride. Well suddenly I have no choice. So here is my revised plan.

Over the course of the week I want to clean the brake hoops (the part of the wheel rims where the brakes make contact) and the tyres. (Make sure there is no glass or metal embedded in the tyres.)

Also during the week clean the chain, first use a chain cleaning kit and a simple degreaser, then go nuts, take the chain off and put it in a bottle and use a naphtha based solvent.

Leave the chain to dry (allow the solvent to completely evaporate) over the course of the week.

On Saturday take Jordan apart completely and clean all parts. I even take the chain rings off the cranks and clean the chain ring bolts. (I will keep the bars, headset, brakes, deraileurs and levers together, as it is a lot of effort to retune the cabling - I'll replace the cables at the end of season anyway.)

On Sunday, or if I am making good progress on Saturday I will put Jordan back together. With, hopefully some images of a stunning black and red bicycle that makes grown men (at least one grown man) drool.

Apparently for mountain bikers, mud is a badge of honour. Mud, if you ask me, is ugly. Mud ought to be the symbol of a construction sight, or maybe the trenches of World War I, not a badge of honour.

How on earth am I going to clean all this damn mud?

I need a power washer, I guess.

Sigh.

I love this down tube, when it is clean there is something really pretty in a big fat down tube. Right now, not so much.

Arrrrgh!

On Repairs and Ultra Rides

2010-10-04T13:15:00.002-04:00

The Furnace Creek 508 was this past weekend. For a couple years now I've had a bit of a dream to do that ride, admitedly it is considerably harder, both in terms of hill climbing and distance than anything I have ever done (Toronto ON to Rochester NY in a day) but it still sounds like one awsome ride, if for no other reason than for 508 miles I would not have to worry about riding in the rain.

One thing I find very annoying is, for the life of me, I cannot find a final 2010 results page. I am curious to find out who won. Peter Oyler went, I understand he came in fourth or fifth, but I am curious about a few others, some of the guys who compete in the 508 are surely worthy of admiration. For example, one guy, Michael Emde, has competed in the Furnace Creek several times, he came 3'rd in 2005, 2'nd in 2009, and 1'st in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Imagine riding 508 miles in the desert and being the fastest guy to do it... three times! In a row! That has gotta count for something.

Anyway I am on call for the week to come, I am going to try to ride, in considerably colder weather than The Death Valley, to work each day. But this weekend I will have to stay close to the computer, so I guess I will be cleaning up Jordan. But a good cleaning will be a good thing, a clean bike is a healthy bike!

Actually a good overhaul is in order, Jordan ought to be past the 1000km mark since the last tyre change. So I will probably try to do the following:

Friday night:
* Clean chain and leave out to dry.
* Take off cassette and soak in solvent

Saturday:
* Take off all parts and clean

Sunday:
* Reassemble
* Tidy basement

On Rides and Idiot Cyclists

2010-09-27T09:05:00.002-04:00

On Saturday a bunch of us (eight in total) from the BCC rode 100.5km to Stouffville and back, the wind was just brutal, coming from the North West. Mind you the trip home was nice, we flew south. Then on Sunday Thi and I went for a little ride, 136.1km of pretty intense rollers. Thi let me do most of the pulling (nice guy) on the way into the wind and then he got the chance to stop and wait for me at the hill tops on the first leg south (now that I was spent from breaking the wind).

When we got to the coffee shop in Stouffville we found a bunch of BCC'rs out for the 85km Stouffville ride, so we rode home with them. I thought I was spent when Thi and I got to the coffee shop, but maybe it was the tailwind or maybe it was steady downhill I felt a lot stronger coming home and was able to roll from the front to the back and back to the front of the paceline a bunch of times to ensure no one was getting dropped. Of course now my legs are sore, but its the good pain.

Here is a way to identify true roadies, if a person walks down the stairs without issue they are not a true road cyclist, but if walking down the stairs, even a day or two after a ride is agonizingly painful and difficult, you may have a roadie on your hands. Yes walking downstairs today has been a study in pain. I think I might buy myself a toboggan, just to get from the bedroom to the kitchen. (Good thing there is broadloom on all the stairs!)

Anyway quick thoughts on the up coming municipal election here in Toronto, yes I think Robert Ford is a fat serial exaggerator (he claims the bike lane on Jarvis cost the city $6 million when the actual cost turned out to be $59 thousand). Ford has the support of big Jimbo the first minister of Finance in Canada to run a deficit in more than ten years and a member of the Ontario cabinet when the province was $5.7 billion in the hole yet according to official statements, still in the black. Ford also believes that the signed on transit city plan (a $7.2 billion expansion of light rail and bus lines for Toronto) should be canned and the money saved be used for building a new subway. (Apparently somehow enough money will be saved by backing out of signed contracts to build underground subways instead of grade level light rail?)

Well at least Sarah Thomson has a really interesting proposal. I am not sure it is a solution to all the city's traffic... issues, but it is a definite step in the right direction. I'm still unsure if I like Thomson or Joe Pantalone more but one of those two will definitely be getting my vote come November, unless some sort of "Anybody but Ford" coalition gets it's act together and someone else steps up to the plate.

Finally, last night some idiot cyclist tried to cross Lakeshore Blvd. at Colborne Lodge against a red light. The first car to hit him, flung him into a second car. A 40 year-old on a red mountain bike without identification was pronounced dead on the scene. Now as a cyclist I have to admit, I've run red lights from time-to-time, I'm not proud of it, but then I only run reds when it's a side street and I'm on a major street and, critically, there are no cars. Or if it's a 'T' intersection and I am not impeding auto traffic. But crossing Lakeshore at Colborne Lodge, that is just insane, worse it gives the rest of us a bad name.

On Drive Chains

2010-09-21T10:00:00.004-04:00

Someone on the BCC website recently found an article entitled Today is the world premier of the chain-less Hungarian developed bicycle. Okay either this article is about the most poorly researched article ever or the authors are excited that Hungary is free of it's chains and into a new world of cables. Sorry guys, but chainless bicycles are old news.

Yesterday I went to a meeting with, as it turns out some old friends of mine from my undergrad days. The meeting was in Waterloo so I had to drive there which was upsetting because it was such a nice day out. When I got home I was tired, I find driving to be fatiguing, so I went for a ride to wake up. (Actually I went for a ride because it was a nice day out.) In 2:57:58 I rode 87.19 km so averaged 29.39km/h, I maxed out at 63.65 km/h and burned off 3719 calories as I bore into a pretty nasty headwind (naturally when I turned around the wind died off some so I did not even get a free ride home).

At the start of the ride the wind seemed to be coming out of the south west so I picked a route that was as south and west as possible so that I would have less work to do on the way home. I have to admit, I like my slightly modified Mississauga Loop which I draw below, using Matheson instead of Eglinton is a really good idea, Matheson is a quieter road (at least in the evening) and it is in much better repair. It does make the ride a little longer, but hey, long is good.

Sept21_RideAroundMississauaga

http://www.bikely.com/

On the way home I was stopped at a light, on Davenport about a third of the way up a steep hill (Christie Street). A guy in a red VW I think Jetta, looks at me as I stand waiting for the light to change. When the light goes green, he guns his engine, jack rabbits and cuts off the bike lane and slows as if to stop. I yell something to the effect of "get out of the bike lane". And he drives to the top of the hill and pulls over. As I pass him (now legally parked) he yells at me "I was gonna give you a draft". Then after I pass him without saying boo he goes and tries to catch up with me, so I hammer hard and know that he can trivially catch me, I wait until he's along side and I slam on the brakes - at least I can out maneuver any car - then I turn on a side road and wait for him to drive off. Strangely I don't want to have an altercation with a motorist any more than I want a motorist to give me a draft up a steep hill. Mind you I find it exceptionally hard to believe that his motives were to give me a draft, I mean, either he is the dumbest nice guy in the world, or more likely he's just an inconsiderate driver - have not seen that before!

Logically, why would a cyclist need a draft up hill? Besides, how much draft is a small car going to give? And even worse, I was breathing hard, it is a short but steep hill, now I'm taking in auto exhaust, yeah, that's just want I want during a tough hill climb. So like I said, either the dumbest nice guy or inconsiderate.

On Goals and Rides

2010-09-15T15:13:00.004-04:00

Back in June I proposed a challenge, measure how much distance was done using fossil fuels and how much was done using a bike. I have a confession to make, I stopped recording driven distance, principally because in mid July I was sent to London Ontario (over 200km) for work and then had to make a return trip the same weekend, for a total drive in one weekend of almost 950km. I am working on changing things around so I will not be doing that much driving going forward but for now, sadly, I need to keep buying oil by-products. On the other hand, because I drive a beat up old diesel that does not even have a working air conditioner, my 950km of driving resulted in the consumption of an entire 45L of fuel. Still it was a lot of driving, not a good thing.

Anyway, Sunday, September 19, there was a race, the Queens Park Grand Prix, which is just a fancy way of saying a Criterium at Queens Park Cres. Among the competitors include Michael Barry and sixth fastest man in the World (fastest in North America) on a bicycle, none other than Ryder Hesjedal. One would think the results would be a foregone conclusion, they were not. Now don't get me wrong, that a Canadian is the fastest cyclist in North America and has a real shot at a yellow or pink jersey one day is totally about the most awesome thing for Canadian cyclists to look to but that some guy, Jeffrey Schiller, from London Ontario won, is even more cool because it means that Ryder is not a one off thing, that just maybe we have more great roadies coming down the pipeline? If only car drivers would be considerate, we - Canada - might actually be able to put an entire pro tour team together one day.

Speaking of rude drivers, I have decided, the most annoying thing motorists do, for now. I am hammering away, for example, this morning, I am booking it on Queen Street west bound towards Coxwell, now Queen is a 40km/h zone and I was clocking 48km/h according to my GPS. So would someone please explain to me, why, if I am in the right lane and a car is in the left lane the driver has to do 60, cut me off and then make a right turn, rather than go at the posted speed limit and make the turn in safety behind me. The number of times I have been cut off by right turning cars in the past three days is disgusting, and they don't even get anywhere, if they just went behind me it would be safer and they would only be a second or two slower than by doing things dangerously.

As for riding, well this weekend I rode on Saturday and Sunday with Thi from the BCC. Both were published rides but on Saturday there was also a ride to Stouffville and Sunday was the Crit so I guess most people had other ideas. Anyway both were good rides. On Saturday Thi had to get back home in time to open his shop we had to turn for home early but I took a little detour and ultimately rode 100.5 km in 3 hours, 27 minutes and 20 seconds, I burned 4440 calories and averaged a heart rate of 135 bpm, my top speed 56.72 km/h and despite an awful head wind at times and a lot of traffic lights we still achieved a 29.08km/h average speed. (I did a few extra hills too.)

On Sunday we took a very scenic route around South Eastern Ontario, we covered 134.6km in 4 hours 24 minutes and one second, I burned 5457 calories and had an average heart rate of 133 bpm, my top speed 56.47 km/h and this time, with another brutal head wind still pulled off a 30.59km/h average speed. It was a very hilly route and as the green of summer turns to amber and crimson of autum, one of the prettiest rides I have done. The full route is here, or see below. The one thing is, I wonder if Westney is a good road from Taunton to Highway 7, if we could use that and bypass 7 completely that would be a good thing. Still this was a very nice route and enabled us to bypass Oshawa while still getting all the really good hills packed in.

Sept_19_Route_As_Taken

http://www.bikely.com/

On Riding West and Oil Economics

2010-09-13T07:57:00.003-04:00

Saturday a bunch of us from the BCC went out for a properly long ride. It was supposed to be out to the Forks of the Credit, except that due to construction the road was closed and the very best part, the reason we hauled all the way through the city to Belfountain had to be missed. Still we rode over 198km with an average near as makes no difference of 29km/h, which is especially impressive because on the ride out there was no wind but by the time we turned around there was a brutal head wind.

On Mississauga Road, up around Boston Mills Road a bunch of guys in an oncoming Jeep threw a full water bottle at us, and nailed someone in the pack square in the head. I wish we got their licence plate, we would have phoned that one in, but they drove much too quickly (I don't think they were worried about a speeding ticket if they were throwing 1kg projectiles at people.) It was a really disgusting and repulsive thing to do and frankly kind of ruined the ride for me there.
I mean the guys I rode with were great and the scenery was nice, but when drivers have that sort of attitude towards cyclists. It was not like we were blocking the Jeep (he was oncoming, remember?) and it is a quiet country road with lots of room and we were in a single file paceline too, almost in the gravel on the right hand side! No this sort of attitude from some drivers, it is where the expression "war on the car" comes from. Of course we all know there is no war on the car, that is silly political grandstanding, what there is, is an expectation among all too many motorists that they ought to have an untrammeled right to the road, that anyone who dares to take precious tarmac from their beloved automobiles is fair game for their grill or their water bottles. I guess I can only hope that the monsters who were out for a joy ride got busted by the police for reckless driving at some later point that day and end up loosing their licence and are forced to ride a bike for the rest of their days, that to me would be an appropriate punishment, somehow I doubt that is what is going to happen.

On my drive to work I often listen to the radio but lately I have found CBC to be rather unengaged. I have taken a new habit, doing number crunching. Today I started with the fact that the Peel P-50, the smallest production car in the world had fuel economy of 1 gallon (presumably UK, or imperial gallon) per hundred miles, now one imperial gallon is 4.546 Litres and one hundred miles is 160.9344km, so the P-50 can go a mind blowing 35.4km on a Litre of petrol, put in modern metric terms, a P-50 gets 2.82L/100km, which is about twice the range per Litre of my diesel Jetta. But what gets me, is while the fuel economy is pretty impressive, consider this, that P-50, uses about a million calories of energy to cover 10km, by contrast for one thousand calories, using my bicycle I can cover 25km, and I look a lot less idiotic on my ride than Jermey Clarkson in his.

On Politics and Bottom Brackets

2010-09-09T14:59:00.002-04:00

Lesley was asking me about the plans some Florida (why is it the dateline for all the craziest things that happen in the United States seem to be somewhere in or very near Florida?) pastor has for burning a bunch of copies of the Qur'an. Now I will grant you I thought the response to the Danish Muhammad cartoons thing was way over the top, but this is very different, mostly because it is almost completely the reverse of the Danish cartoons.

To the reader, one must understand that I am a bibliophile, I have a passion for books and reading almost as much as I have a passion for riding. I find the notion of book burning repugnant and the idea of attacking someones religion by defacing or destroying the underlying ideals manifest in printed form repulsive. That something like one and half billion Muslims are enraged by this idiot Rev. Jones is unsurprising, that even Sarah Palin does not approve is only a modest surprise, but you know when you the nations foremost lunatic saying your actions are wrong... well I guess I'm just joining a very large choir.

Oh and yes, congratulations Mrs. Palin, you beat out Rush Limbuagh, Glen Beck and Bill O, that's real spunk to beat those guys to the top of the lunatic pile, and so quickly. You go girl!

Anyway enough angry ranting about lunatic attention seekers... although, well Toronto has a municipal election coming up and I just want to say, as I have said all too many times before, this "war on the car" is crap, the real war is a civil war. Now that I have to drive too work so much, it is painfully obvious, don't allow trucks on highways during rush hour and really crack down on illegally stopped or parked cars during rush hour. Bikes aren't the problem it is vehicles that block lanes or need too much space and time to accelerate or change lanes.

Anyway as for biking, well I've got Jordan back!! Yipppeeee! What happened was a chain ring bolt had come off the crank and mashed itself into the chainstay where Specialized has a metal plate to protect the stay. Anyway the metal plate was all ripped up and rubbing right up against the chain ring (yes I will have to replace that chain ring :( - but at least not right away.) I thought I simply had a busted bottom bracket. Anyway when I took the crank off to replace the bottom bracket I saw the sorry state of my chainstay. Well thanks to Mr. Carbon Fibre, aka Malcolm Munroe and Specialized I was able to get a replacement part and have it expoxied down. Malcolm (a skilled machinest) was able to look up the tables for the bolts that go into my chain ring and it turns out that if you have aluminum bolts (standard on the Shimano Dura-Ace 7900 crankset) torque the bolts to 12Nm or about 8.86 foot pounds. Yet another reason to always have a torque wrench when doing bike repairs, its just too bad Shimano does not document that torque anywhere.

Lesley and I went to DC last weekend, maybe this weekend I will write about it, but since all the images are still on the SD card at home, I'm going to put off writing about Washington.

On Matters Divine

2010-09-02T13:37:00.002-04:00

Talking about religion is always a risky subject, there is a real chance I will really leave someone pissed off and lets face it, the religious crazies, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim - take your pick, they are loony. (Not to say that say, your average Hindu is a bad person, the overwhelming majority are, I am sure, very good and decent people, but when some Mosque gets blown up in India well, violence seldom begets peace.)

Anyway I bring this up because a couple years ago (September 18, 2006 to be specific) a pastor, fellow by the name of Pastor John Hagee (I can already hear some people moaning) said "Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans... New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God... there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came."

Since Hagee's little rant against The Big Easy was divine punishment there have now been two major oil accents in the Gulf of Mexico that I think are worth bringing up. One is the well known Deep Water Horizon well, the other, an oil platform called Vermilion just exploded this morning, no word yet on how much (if any) oil is escaping. (Allegedly no oil is getting out, but well, in theory only five thousand barrels a day came out of the Deep Water Horizon, in fact it was closer to sixty thousand barrels a day.)

So I have a question for Hagee because I'm a little confused. Are these oil spills the work of divine retribution because New Orleans still has not mended in her ways? Are they divine retribution for too much use of oil? Are they divine retribution for kicks? Maybe they are big oil's retribution for the fact that we had so much fun beating up on old Tony Hayward? If so what was the Kalamazoo oil spill retribution for? The American revolution? (!)

Anyway maybe, just maybe these oil spills are our planet's retribution for being such appallingly lousy stewards of what really is, or was, a pretty pleasant place to inhabit. Anyway a hurricane is working it's way up the Atlantic Seaboard, I hope another one of these hurricane's floods Hagee's home, except I don't think he would understand the irony.

On Rides

2010-09-01T09:51:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I was riding to work when there was a sudden slippery feeling on the pedals, thereafter pedaling backward became considerably harder - not that I pedal backward all that often. When I got to work I removed the chain (gotta love KMC master links) and found the same resistance. Relieved, the issue had to be the bottom bracket (an easy and not horribly expensive part to replace I carried on with my day).

The ride home included a frightful cracking noise from the area of the bottom bracket. When I finally got home, after feeding my boys (the cats) I set to work on Jordan (my ride) and took apart her drive train. Removing the crank took an awful lot of force, and when it finally came free it took part of the bottom bracket along with. (Further backing my theory of a busted bottom bracket.)

Then I walked around to the drive side and removed the other half of the crankset. Behind the crankset on the Specialized Roubaix frame, just behind the bottom bracket on the chain stay is a metal plate that I guess is there to protect the frame from a dropped chain or a really flexible right crank? Anyway for whatever reason that plate has literally folded up and was rubbing against the crank.

In fact the issue with Jordan was not her bottom bracket, the issue is that folded metal plate. The good news is, the plate is epoxied to the frame and the carbon is undamaged, so it should be a simple matter of removing the folded plate and replacing with a good epoxy (Specialized, if you are reading this, use better epoxy for the sake of my mental health please) and new metal plate. The bad news, doing this change will require a skilled machinist, who thank goodness I know, except he is very busy and probably will not be able to fix my poor ride for at least a little while.

I've been having a lot of mechanicals lately, but then it occurs to me, I have been doing an awful lot of riding - more than driving even and when one considers I just blew $650 on auto repair, well I have yet another reason to like my bike.

On A Difficult Hill - an amendment

2010-08-30T10:38:00.005-04:00

I found a couple pictures of myself from the Rattle Snake ride I wrote about earlier this morning.

I am in the blue BCC jersey at the front of the paceline.

And there is even a few seconds of me pedaling in the linked video.

On a Difficult Hill

2010-08-30T08:41:00.002-04:00

I recall during this year's Tour at one point the pelaton was climbing some hill, must have been near the Alps, it was no HC climb, just a Cat 1 or 2 affair. Phil Liggett was giving a description, 7% for a couple kilometers than 12% for a kilometer or whatever it was and so on.

Yesterday the BCC did the hill at Rattle Snake Point for the first time in 2010. The first time I did Rattle Snake, Sunday June 22, 2008, I didn't actually do Rattle Snake. I bonked and cramped and wound up walking up to the top of the hill. I was such a wreck for the journey home Dan came up behind me and pushed me to help me catch up with the pelaton. At the time my steed was an almost completely stock 2006 Specialized Roubaix, except for two upgrades, she did have Mavic Ksyrium SL wheels, and blush, aero bars. Ironically that bike has a classic triple crank so theoretically was ideally suited for Rattle Snake a hill that seems to be, mostly 16% grade. (Okay for all you statistical junkies, the Stock 2006 Roubaix, my ride at the time, has a triple crank of 52/42/30 and a 9 speed 12-25 cassette, so in June of 2008 I could not hack Rattlesnake at 30-25.)

Well I did Rattle Snake yesterday and my legs, as one might expect, hurt today, but I did do said hill and could have made a second pass if I felt sufficiently masochistic (as well I hate the decent out of the escarpment, so I need to feel brave as well as masochistic) but anyway, it was the first time I did Rattle Snake on a standard double crank, granted I did have a swollen cassette, my crankset was 53/39 with a 11-28 ten speed in back.

So to the non technical folk, what do all the numbers mean, well its the number of teeth on the various cogs that make up a bike drive train, let me express it as a ratio, for every tooth on the crank on my old bike there are 0.833 teeth on the cassette, whereas on my new Roubaix (Jordan) for every tooth on the crank there is 0.718 teeth on the cassette now more cassette teeth do mean that you move slower climbing the hill, but that also means that there is less resistance so my new drive train is actually about 16% harder than the old drive train.

In short, I climbed the same hill that I could not climb two years ago. I did it with 16% more torque than I would have needed two years ago (not that I had that torque at the time). I made it to the top and still felt strong enough to hack the hill all over again.

I think I've improved a little bit, but lets be honest, its the machine, not the engine. I mean when a guy has a ride as sweet as mine, well I can't let the bike be disappointed in me!

Anyway I woke up this morning, checked the weather, saw there was a chance of thunderstorms and used that as an excuse to get another hour of sleep and drove to work. But I'm rather glad I got that sleep, and I think my legs are grateful I didn't ride today. I still hurt from yesterday, some things do not change.

On Red Lights

2010-08-26T15:22:00.003-04:00

There is something about cold air and sudden stops. I was riding to work today and about 250m from an intersection (yes I just measured, with Google maps) the 'Do not walk' warning started blinking, according to the warning I had about ten seconds with, I would guess a 20km/h head wind.

Now that I'm in the compartive comfort of a desk, with all the trappings of computerized life, I can say that closing that 25m/s was quite impossible, it would have required ramping up to 90km/h. But being that I am a lousy judge of distance (or maybe it was 15 seconds? meaning a more reasonable 60km/h) I made a full on attempt at the light and wound up slamming on the brakes and down shifting all in the last two or three seconds.

The trouble with sprinting hard in the cold is it really, really hurts the lungs.

The following is from Road Bike Rider, it describes a lot of rides I go on.

Wicked Wednesdays

Every Wednesday evening, my bike club hosts an interval workout on a hill at the local university. The climb takes 5-6 minutes and we do it 6 times. Rain or shine. Darkness or daylight. Forest fire or student protest.

Our coach refers to these sessions as Level 5 or anaerobic threshold workouts. Even if you pace it perfectly -- negative splits, each interval faster than the last -- it hurts. I'm talking root-canal, tax-audit, "I-think-we-should-start-seeing-other-people" pain.

I begin dreading Wednesday evenings around bedtime Tuesday. By Wednesday lunchtime, I'm feeling nausea that has nothing to do with my midday meal of organic yam and raw kale from my Biggest Loser lunchbox.

Then I show up at the workout and scan the group to see what fresh dose of humiliation awaits. Last week it was the 65-year-old guy who dropped me like a tub of Grecian Formula. It was inspiring. Really.

A few weeks ago it was the one-armed dude. OK, he had 2 arms, but one was in a sling. He flew past me like a, um, person with fully functioning body parts.

Did I mention the 50-something mom? The 15-year-old lad who I swear was on training wheels last month? Both quicker than me. A fellow could choke on all this inspiration.

Why keep at it? Like most cyclists, I'm stubborn, masochistic and a little delusional. All this toil and trouble have to make us stronger, right?

Plus, I do eventually finish ahead of some people -- the ones who come to one Wednesday and never return.

I may not be fast, but I'm pretty good at one thing: showing up.

On Riding In The City

2010-08-23T15:13:00.002-04:00

Saturday (August 21) Ian, Thi and I went for a quick ride around the city. The boys were fast and it hurt, in a good way. I will here try to summarize the route to the best of my recollection.

We first had to work our way to the bike trail from the Toronto Public Library Branch at Gerrard and Broadview. This involved a great deal of winding around street car tracks, bad drivers (question who is worse, pick-up trucks or taxis?), oblivious pedestrians and so on. By the time we got to the trail I was seeing red and started an attack, Thi held on and would not let go. Ian was still warming up and dropped off. I slowed down and by the by Ian got back on. Of course having set a speed Thi and Ian were now ready to run hot.

We went up Royal York and as per standard operating procedure missed the light at The Queensway. When we finally did clear Royal York and The Queensway I was feeling slow and it showed, 26 km/h, Thi and Ian started complaining and before I knew what's what, found myself desperately drafting trying very hard not to fall off their backsides.

When we got to St. Phillips I made a discovery, the entire run from Dixon to Weston I was never once going slower than the posted speed limit. Sadly there was no cop around to give me a speeding ticket. (A speeding ticket whilst cycling would be awesome!) I maxed out at about 55km/h just before hitting the brakes as I neared the traffic light at Weston, Ian and Thi both passed me going down the hill. We used Oak St. and Wendell to cross highway 401, which is probably one of the nicest places to cross the highway in the city, it is a minor side road with no interchange.

We used Bartor, Arrow, Signet and Weston Road to get up to Langstaff, while mostly keeping the pace down to the low 30s an occasional sprint up a hill left me hurting. But when we turned on Langstaff we got nailed by a good 20 or 30km/h East Wind, it was a fight to go east. We used Creditstone and took it to Rutherford and then down Keele, although looking at the map now, it occurs to me, one day we should just take Creditstone (becomes Melville) all the way up past Major MacKenzie - heck a guy could use this as a route to (or from) Klienburg.

The journey home was, with the exception of a rude driver (honked at for no good reason) largely uneventful. The trip down Russel Hill road from just below St. Clair to Dupont was, as always, a complete adrenalin rush. There was a Toyota SUV in front of us at Clarendon, by the time I got to Cottingham (about 500m down the hill) the Toyota was out of sight it was so far back. (It probably helps that I was taking a 30km/h zone turn at over 50km/h.)

On Rosedale Valley Road an entire car managed to pass us on the 2km run from Park Road to Bayview. When we got back to Dundas Thi decided he needed to log some extra miles so while Ian had to meet someone Thi and I decided to try to meet up with the Saturday Pickering group, on the way we found Jason Charette who rode with us.

We climbed the hill at Kingston Road between Birchmount and Danforth, Thi started hammering and while Jason and I were keeping a fine form at first, doing 35km/h up the hill I found the 90km already on my legs hurt too much and I decided to drop back a little and regain my ground later on. I think Thi was feeling generous and decided to stop at the Tim Hortons just past the Danforth merge. We waited a while and the Pickering group never showed, so we headed home. In short it was a good day, complete with a lot of proper burn your legs sprinting and hill climbing. Hopefully we will do another ride like that one again soon.

On Trojans

2010-08-18T07:51:00.002-04:00

As I alluded to yesterday, I broke down and bought a Lezyne Micro Floor pump that mounts beside the water bottle cage on the downtube. I am still schleping around the Carbon Dioxide cartridges and pump while I decide how to do things in the long term.

Anyway a quick product review, from an end consumer who paid for the thing out of his own pocket. When I brought the pump home the first thing I did was try it on a deflated tyre, it takes a fair bit of hand action and it is a pain to bend over far enough to work the thing, but, it is a lot easier to use then the hand pumps and getting that high pressure that roadies like, 120psi, does seem possible. Although the pressure gauge seems a little flaky.

First I started inflating the tyre and the gauge stayed at zero for about ten or fifteen pumps, then suddenly the gauge shot up to 20 psi and quickly, four or five pumps hit 40 psi, the pumping steadily brought the gauge to 70 psi where it again stayed no matter how much pumping I did. Now this particular tube did have a leak, but it was a slow leaker and while the gauge said 70psi I did a pinch test and it felt more like 120, maybe even 140 psi.

So, in short, besides a flaky gauge this is an effective roadside recovery tool, except, the pump is all machined aluminum which is a good thing when it's a floor pump or when you want durability, but when you've got the pump mounted along side your $1000 to $3000 carbon fibre bicycle frame, just millimeters from your feet that are turning in the cranks 80 to 120 revolutions per minute you probably don't want machined aluminum banging up against that carbon beauty. Ultimately I took a leaky tube, which I have several, used a sharp pair of scissors and wrapped both ends as well as a wide point near the base of the pump with sections of tube and then kept the tube in place with elastic bands. My fix does not look pretty but at least my frame will not get hurt. That said, if someone from Lezyne ever does read this, a couple requests:

Please make proper rubber frame protectors that would mount on both ends of the pump and probably strap to each other so they don't fall off (maybe strap to the frame too so there is extra protection against the pump falling off?)
Fix that damned pressure gauge, it was brutal.

That said, the pump itself is pretty good, I don't think anyone would want to lug something like the Lezyne around in a race, but on a training ride, especially when you get far from home, it is a good thing to have around.

Now as for the subject of this post, yesterday I found three Trojan horses on my PC at work, they completely buggered up network file access. I don't visit those, cough, inappropriate, web sites, so I have to wonder how they got here. Must be Microsoft.com, sorry does that count as inappropriate? I'm beginning to think so!

On The Problems With Carbon Dioxide

2010-08-17T12:58:00.002-04:00

I feel a little like a pro cyclist lately. Let me explain, a friend of mine was telling me, the higher up you get in the world of cycling, the more often you change teams. Yes sir, I am back in the job market, sorry to say, but the current job is too stressful. I think this is a function of entrepreneurs, they can start a business but cannot listen to the advice of others. Anyway enough of head banging.

So I have been horribly busy with work lately and haven't had a chance to post recently but here are some updates.

Friday the 13'th I rode to work, it was very nice, logged 79km and then went grocery shopping. Saturday Thi and I did a ride around Mississauga, ended up logging 110km. Later that day Thi and I sat around and drank a lot of beer while I changed the cassette on his Zipp wheel set, he was a 12-27, now an 11-28. (Actually I now know I'm an old fart, a lot of beer, was two bottles, actually we mostly sat around and talked, cycling, politics, economics, all sorts of random things.)

I was on call on Sunday so I stayed home. I did laundry, I made pasta, I swapped out tyres on Jordan, she's got Vittoria Open Corsa EVO CX now, she had Vredestein Fortezza Tricomps. Now in theory the Vredesteins are slower and heavier, they are a bigger pain to change than the Vittoria's, but, the Vredesteins almost never puncture roadside. The Vittoria's, well I found a staple in the on my very first ride after the change, I got to work. Didn't check through the day and when I went to go home, noticed my back tyre was flat. A road side change in the office!

So Monday afternoon, in the comfort of my office, 25km from home I changed a tyre, luckily it was a Vittoria so it was not a total war to get the thing off my wheel, unluckily it was a Vittoria so all it took was a rusty staple to puncture. Sigh. The first Carbon Dioxide cartridge did not discharge properly and got my tyre to about 40 psi, I need 100 psi on a road bike tyre. The second cartridge was even worse, down to 20 psi. I was beginning to loose faith in my pump. The third cartridge worked, about 80psi, enough to limp home.

I got home, put Jordan on the stand, had dinner with Lesley and went back downstairs to look at the tyres, maybe there would be a thumb tack?

When I got down to Jordan I found the front tyre to be in perfect condition and the back tyre was clearly, using my thumb and forefinger test, down to between 20 and 40 psi. I took the tube and tyre out and gave a very careful inspection of everything, I put the tyre and tube back and reinflated to 120psi. About a half hour later I rechecked, 100 psi. Yet another tube later and I was in business. The suspect tube I inflated on the floor until it was about six feet on it's side, by this morning, it was nearly flat, but no evidence of a leak. My pet theory, some dirt wedged into the valve from my pump and air was escaping from whence it came. So I am going to throw in the towel, I am completely fed up with the carbon dioxide cartridges, I cannot get to a good air pressure and all to often end up loosing a tube to the vagaries of the pump. I won't use a hand pump, I'm sorry, I am not good at masturbating in public (ever see a person use a hand pump? 'Nugh said.) Instead I will get a bottle cage mounted mini floor pump, obviously the ideal, well the ideal is a support car with spare wheels on the roof, but given that I am not riding Le Tour, I guess this is probably the best I can arrange, hey it beats walking home, or shudder, driving!

On Red Lights

2010-08-11T07:52:00.003-04:00

I ended my previous post with a comment to the effect that I guess I am going to have to get my speed training on my daily ride to work. Well today would have to count. Now it is only about 25km from home (near Woodbine and Queen Street) to work (near Highway 7 and Leslie) - almost all uphill. But I averaged 29 km/h. Okay, so the guys in the Pro Pelaton do a lot better, but then they don't have red lights. I swear I think some traffic planner is looking at me from some camera (or several cameras) and timing the lights so I get red after damned red. (The sound you hear is my eyes rolling... blasted red lights.)

Yesterday the best manager in the world came by my place for a beer. Its funny, when I worked for Ian there were days I couldn't stand the guy, but looking back, Ian was the best. Anyway Ian came by, we talked about aviation (his father used to work for Pratt and Whitney Canada and his brother works at Embraer) we talked about old times, what my former colleagues thought of the restructuring - they are mostly actively job searching, eight months later than Ian and I, but at least they see the writing on the wall. We talked about Triathlons.

Ian told me something interesting. A woman he knows is a runner, she runs marathons and has even done so well in the famous Boston Marathon she's been invited to do a Triathlon. Only problem, she's a runner. Anyway she's high enough up the food chain that she landed herself a nice Cervelo of some sort (Ian doesn't know the exact model but I got the impression it's a proper Tri bike). Now this lady and her fancy Cervelo are training to do a Tri. I asked about joining a bike club, and Ian told me something that I've sort of always known but never really put two plus two together in my head. The lady doesn't want advice, most people don't want advice come to think of it. Anyway she doesn't want advice so badly that she would rather train by herself than in a club. I guess this is why so many women run or ride alone? Anyway I'll have to remember that the next time I see someone lift their heels whilst spinning.

On Not Dropping

2010-08-10T08:42:00.003-04:00

I have been insanely busy at work lately. One of my soon to be former co-workers (lucky guy landed himself a new job) was saying, ominously, I thought, that the reason we are so understaffed is intentional. This is a private company and the owner pockets more if he is slow to hire replacement workers, meanwhile everyone who is left knows that the staff shortfall is temporary and works harder, expecting (hoping) the void will be filled soon.

There is a saying, He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. To me that is the same as the golden rule, Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Example, and reason for posting the platitudes. I do not like to drop people, even when someone says "oh go on without me". The truth is, nobody likes to get dropped. So to that end on Sunday I went for a ride and one of the guys who came out was having a hard time keeping up with the pack, so I slowed down and rode with him. Thanks to the rain we decided to abort and take the Go train home and only did about 90km, but at least we got out and had what for me was a gentle ride through scenic South Eastern Ontario. It was a nice ride, maybe a little slower than I might prefer, but really I don't care. To me the main thing is, on the route I took, nobody got dropped, nobody was left alone to fend for them self and nobody had that horrible knot in their stomach of "if something goes wrong I am up a creek, 50 or 60km from home with no support", sure they are 50 or 60km from home, but at least they aren't alone and that makes a world of difference.

A slower ride, with good company is much better than a faster ride alone, or with hammer heads. If it means I have to do all my sprinting on my way to work, well worse things have happened.

On A Tour of Toronto

2010-08-07T19:42:00.002-04:00

I'm going to complain a lot here, you have been fairly warned.

A nice story, I am sure we all know what being Hung, Drawn and Quartered means. Well actually I suspect most people don't. But anyway the part about being Quartered really disturbs me. You see the traitor would first be hung, not long enough to kill, just long enough to break the larynx so the traitor could not say anything politically unacceptable. Next the traitor is put on a rack and is drawn, that is to say they get stretched, now bone it turns out stretches more than flesh so the flesh rips from the bone and tears apart. The traitor is quartered, that is to say, his arms and legs are chopped off. The traitor's internals are removed and set ablaze while still connected to the brain, at last the heart of the traitor, still beating, is removed held up for the assembled masses to see and it is declared "behold the heart of a traitor". Finally, the traitor's head is chopped off.

I describe the circumstance of the deaths of some of England's finest traitors to give an example, specifically, I would rather be hung drawn and quartered than ride down Kingston Road on a Saturday late morning. (Okay, I'd rather ride down Kingston, but given the choice I'd have to pick none of the above most any day.) I had come up with an ITT route through North Eastern Toronto that avoids Kingston road completely. I had run ITTs since April. Suddenly someone else is running ITTs just North East of the city that require riding up Kingston Road. Oh well, I'd rather do my own thing than go up Kingston, so that's exactly what I did.

Another complaint, I am going to complain about a certain candidate for mayor of Toronto who set up a very large booth at The Taste of The Danforth on Saturday. Rocco Rossi has postulated that bike lanes slow down traffic. Now I have spent a long time today both riding and, ugh, driving. And I can say with some confidence, the reason traffic does not move has nothing to do with bicycles or bike lanes. The reason is a lot more politically, expensive, than blaming cyclists, the reason traffic gets snarled so often? Parked cars. Think about it, a bike lane, heck two lanes, one in each direction, mean hundreds, maybe thousands fewer motorists at the cost of one car lane, the best numbers I have seen is that a multilane limited access expressway can handle a maximum of about 3000 cars per hour. Of course a major signalled arterial road can probably handle only a small fraction of that, perhaps one thousand cars per hour? But how many bikes can stream down a bike lane in an hour? Now a parked car, just one parked car, particularly an illegally parked car, or even better an illegally parked car in a bike lane, can impede all those cars while Franny runs into the Bakery or while Billy is doing his banking. Of course the cyclists lives are endangered and motorists are even more frustrated, then their normal surly SOP, but hey, at least Billy didn't have to park legally, walk around the block and heaven forbid actually take more than ten steps to get to the ATM.

Yes, on today's ride their were cars in the bike lane. Arrrgh!!

None-the-less today's ride was good, I burned hard for two and half hours and when I got home I hurt, in a good way. In a way I'm rather glad I skipped the ITT, my ride, despite the parked cars, was a lot better.

Oh yes, I know, I promised Thi I'd describe the trip home from The Forks of the Credit, no I'd rather not. Ian Wilcox, who came out with me, said the Forks are magical, I think they are beautiful. But I also think that if Thi wants to see what riding in the Forks are like, he's just going to have to come out riding with us there one day.

On The Prettiest Road in Ontario

2010-08-03T08:06:00.003-04:00

I cannot be certain, having never seen Highway 11 (Yonge Street) as it hugs the north shore of Lake Superior but I strongly suspect that the most stunningly, magnificent road in the entire 917,741 square kilometers of land that are the province of Ontario have to be the 7 or 8 kilometers that make up the Forks of the Credit road.

I neglected to take any photos, principally because all I had was my blackberry and I really did not want to spend the time fidgeting with the same damn thing that has cost me hours of sleep this past week, but I can describe things.

First, here is the route that was planned.

Revised_Forks_of_the_Credit

http://www.bikely.com/

Now due to a problem with my GPS (I think I did not transfer the GPX file correctly) we did not exactly follow the route above and found ourselves on Derry road from Mavis to McLaughlin. Derry is not a pleasant road for a cyclist, the speed limit is 70km/h and it is six lanes, three in each direction. So I think some change is necessary. First, if a group ride is going to meet up at Marie Curtis Park, one has to consider the big tarmac barrier between Lake Ontario and, most everything else, the Queen Elizabeth Way. To cross the QEW safely one could use Dixie Road... uhm, not a chance, Cawthra (even worse), Hurontario (oh please!), Back track to Browns Line, use Evans then The West Mall and on to The Queensway... uhm, No!, or I guess stick to Mississauga Road, the only highway interchange that does not scare me.

Of course if we take Mississauga road, we have to backtrack, but whereas I tried to backtrack in stages, first to Credit View, then on to McLaughlin via side roads, I think a more reasonable approach is to backtrack with fewer turns, specifically, take Mississauga Road to Burnhamthrope, then Burnhamthrope west to Creditview, left on Credit View and then right on Rathburn and left on Confederation Parkway. (Or possibly, Mississauga to Burnhamthrope and Burnhamthrope directly to Confederation Parkway, except Burnhamthrope gets busy the further west you go.) One way or an other once on Confederation Parkway just go North as the Parkway becomes McLaughlin Road.

Anyway eventually, Ian, David and I made it to the Tim Hortons out by Hurontario and Mayfield, we were right at the boundry between suburban and rural. I stopped for a while at the Tims where I refilled a water bottle with too much Perpetuem (I must remember in hot and humid weather to use one scoop of Perpetuem, the fact is in the weather we've been having lately, I need a lot more water per calorie.) Maybe I should buy some insulated water bottles, warm perpetuem is postively disgusting.

We (Ian and I, David had to return home) resumed our north bound journey up Mississauga Road, traffic dissipated and was replaced with a steady barrage of rollers. Hill climbs, while short, were steep, a typical hill grade was 10%, some were shallow at only 7 or 8% but some were pretty nasty at 13%. So while not Rattle Snake, that particular region of the Niagara Escarpment had some pretty tough hills to climb.

Eventually we got to The Forks of the Credit, I cannot do that road justice, so I will simply say, tight turns, steep hills and a 180 degree hair pin turn that is all of perhaps 30 feet from the east side of the south bound lane to the west side of the north bound lane, all on a 13% grade! All under a green canopy of old hard wood trees. There is also a lovely little coffee and ice cream shop at Belfountain just south of Bush Street on Mississauga Road.

In short it was a lovely 200km day, and my legs hurt, all in a good way.

On The Saddle

2010-08-01T13:21:00.002-04:00

My week of hell is almost over. Soon I'll be able to disconnect my company issue laptop from my hip and reattach my saddle to my rear end... I wish! But at least I'll be able to go for a ride again, something I have not done in a week.

Anyway I drew up a route through Brampton and on to The Forks of the Credit. Although a difficult route (complex hairpin turns on steep hills) this is quite possibly the prettiest road in Ontario.

I was going to go on a rant about candidates for mayor in Toronto, but the truth is, I just don't feel like ranting... I think I should take a nap, I'm tired. On the other hand, Rocco Rossi isn't worth my rant, so is Robert Ford. I really detest politicians who know what the right thing to do is, but then campaign against it because such a campaign makes for better optics.

On Call

2010-07-26T13:02:00.003-04:00

Starting today I am on call. This means for the next week I must be near the laptop and blackberry and able to deal with issues promptly. So no riding for me.

In other news, The Tour is over, I think I predicted somewhere in this blog that Contador would win, I think I also predicted that Schleck would do well, I also believe that I predicted a certain American from Austin would not even make the podium. Well the only mistake I made, I didn't think Armstrong would fall apart so miserably. But hey, Armstrong is an old guy now, I guess he got so used to winning. For Lance I will bet it felt like, come to France, ride around for a few weeks, pickup prize, repeat every year, maybe he needed to take a few sips from the bitter draft of defeat to wise up?

I once heard a guy say he expected to finish first in a race he was going to do. Loosing is important if for no other reason than to teach a little modesty. My guy, well he came in 7'th, not bad, but a far cry, by something like eight minutes in a one hour race, from the first place my guy expected. I wonder what happened to his ego?

Toronto will have a municipal election in November, I am trying to decide do I vote for the most (only) bike friendly candidate, or the least bike unfriendly candidate who I think might actually win?

On Being Dropped and Riding Alone

2010-07-25T13:12:00.003-04:00

Before I forget, yesterday I rode 131km, today 163km (100 miles is 161km, so I have done a century! - for the first time in two whole weeks, recall on the trip to Rochester I ended up riding 285km in a day, and that was July 3.)

Anyway a few statistics and then some highlights from today's ride with the BCC.

As noted, I covered just over 163km, I did it at an average of just over 30km/h, burned off almost 7000 calories and I ended up stopping three times. The first stop, a Tim Hortons so some of the women who came out needed to use the washroom - I cleaned my glasses with a napkin. The next stop, at the bakery in Goodwood, I refilled my bottles with tap (probably artesian well) water, finally I stopped alone, at my office for some water cooler water on the way home.

On the way out the guys were feeling well frisky I guess, they were going fast, too fast to last the 140 or so kilometers so I came up to the front and told them to slow down and actually got a few thank yous for that which was really nice. Ultimately I ended up pulling for a while which is alright with me, I like to pull.

As we got near major turns I would try to jump way ahead of the pelaton, okay it would have looked like I was making a break away, but in fact I was simply making sure to make the turn way before everyone else so they would see me turn and join in. There was one problem, on the way from Oshawa to Goodwood there were quite a few rollers and well, I could stand to loose a few pounds. I get clobbered on hills. I would try, at the base to pickup some speed and jump ahead of everyone else, they of course, would, by in large, pass me, but at least I'd still be somewhere in the pelaton at the top of the hill. At least that is my thinking, the problem in a bike club is, one guy starts hammering and before you can say dropfeast, everyone is going full hells bells out. I tried to stay on, I really did, and exploded, a-la Fabian Cancellara on the Cor du Tourmalet, but unlike Fabian who was doing a domestique's job of pulling Andy Schleck, I was just trying to lug my own rear end up the hills and stay with the guys.

I got dropped.

Hey it could have been worse, unlike everyone who dropped me, I knew the route to the bakery and then home. I think I should insert advice for anyone going on a long ride in the country side, turn by turn directions on bars is nice, but when you are trusting that you will see the road signs and that your directions are actually... accurate - you are most likely to find yourself in some serious trouble. If someone is going to go for a ride, either bring a GPS, like mine, one that will tell you, you are off course, or perhaps drive the route before hand. But if you do not have an instinct for distance, make sure you ride with someone like me, someone who studies maps for hobby and knows almost all the major roads from Peterbrough to Hamilton, from Barry to Lake Ontario.

The guys went off course, I tried to yell at them, first that they dropped me, and a bunch of other people it turned out. Later I tried to yell that they were not turning where they were supposed to. I could have tried to snap the distance, but when a guy gets dropped there really is not much incentive to race back up to those who dropped him to say, hey guys, you are riding on a really crummy road that is high traffic and will not even get you where you want to go. In any case, I'm not sure I could have snapped the gap, it was too big and I was still recovering from my explosion.

Actually in a way the guys who dropped me were lucky, sort of, the route they took was much shorter, by about 9.5km, over what by the time they dropped me was only about 30km for me. On the other hand, they rode on some of the lousiest roads, for cyclists, north east of Toronto. Roads with very heavy auto traffic volume and very fast auto traffic volume, personally I get my fill riding home from work in rush hour so I took quiet scenic roads with more rollers and five other guys, we talked, we rode, we climbed a pretty tough hill into the wind, it was nice.

We caught up with the fast guys at the bakery in Goodwood where we discussed the journey home. I had been warned that there was construction on one of the key roads, then someone else chimed in that there were cement barriers on another key road. Alarm bells were ringing, a detour around the barriers was dreamed up, someone else suggested that the construction ought to be done by now and we should just brave it. Well we got to the first road, where the construction was and the word gravel comes to mind, so does the expression exposed road bed. Now don't get me wrong, I've rollerbladed in 100mm wheels over gravel and exposed road beds, but that doesn't mean I like it. I had a chance to bail and did just that.

As soon as I dodged the first patch of construction I pondered my revised route, and observed I was riding alone. Well at least when I ride alone it is difficult to get dropped, and its not like I have not rode alone before. I dreamed up a route that involved a little bit of Scarborough, I do not like riding in Scarborough, but if I had stuck with the guys, there would have been even more Scarborough. (Scarborough drivers... sigh.) So maybe this riding alone was not such a bad move? Then I thought, I'm sick of this Perpetuem in my water, I just want some plain water that does not taste like chalk. It occurred to me that I could just ride on to the office, if I took a route a little further west the office would be on the way home and I would get to avoid Scarborough completely.

I wondered for about five whole seconds if everyone who was with me would mind using Leslie street to get home, then I remembered, short of a sudden case of split personality disorder it was just me and my ride. In a way riding home alone was a good thing, the fact that I had a huge tail wind for the journey home helped and in general riding alone sucks, but this one time, I think fate handed me a big huge favour by making me elect to hack it on my own.

As I neared home I saw the GPS was at 158km, I dreamed up a quick detour, just to make sure to cross the 100 mile mark. I was hunting down a couple rabbits on the bike trail when I hit 161km. (I caught the rabbits too, about 161.5km). For anyone not enlightened by a bike yet, a rabbit is a term for another cyclist one is attempting to chase down.

Although speaking of rabbits, there was a guy, on Leslie, just north of my office, in a full Cervelo Test Team kit and with a Cervelo bike who caught up and passed me, but passed me so slowly that I was able to hop onto his wheel. Then he started dying on the hill, so I got in front, he moved off to the right and would not take my draft. When I yelled to him to take my wheel he did not even look at me. At a red light he zoomed up the right hand side of the lane and I stopped behind the last car, so he had a good 20 second lead on me as soon as the light changed, but rather than try to catch him I slowed down to make the turn to my office, people with attitude like that... I do not know what to say to them, but he really was not that impressive. Especially since I was snapping the gap even though I was actually trying to get away from him by riding slowly.

On Riding in Humidity

2010-07-24T14:50:00.003-04:00

Thursday as noted, I rode from work to the dentist then on to the Thursday night hill crazy ride through Scarborough. It was supposed to, and in fact did rain on Friday morning, so I drove to work. I was going to go for a nice evening hammerfeast through the city but was instead tasked with going to the Data Centre, again.

I sent a note to Thi Ng and Ian Wilcox of the Beaches Cycling Club asking if either (or both) would like to do a quick early morning 80km tour of the city. Thi was booked up with his wife and Dim Sum, Ian the man who eats NCC (Nuclear Custard Cakes) went to bed at 3am and so naturally took up my offer and met me around 10:30 on the Lake Shore trail near the Boulevard club. I had already done a loop through Mississauga but was happy to add an extra 60km to the 70km I had already logged.

I think perhaps I pushed myself a little hard on the Mississauga loop, or more likely, Ian is in fact a space alien who has some sort of bizarre metabolism that can enable him to clock in speeds that convert typical tyres into jello. Or perhaps Ian takes EPO? Is there a motor in his bottom bracket (unlikely, I've done repairs to his drive train myself, I have never found anything unusual there). I suspect that the truth is a lot more innocent than any of my innuendo. I suspect rather that while Ian was sleeping, or perhaps under some hallucinogenic induced comma someone surreptitiously slipped Ian another one of those damned NCCs.

Assuming the guilty party is reading this post can they please stop feeding Ian that stuff? Damnit I'm busting every part of my anatomy trying to keep up with this guy, 40km/h, 45, 50, 55, 60 kilometers an hour, heck I'm passing the cars, and Ian is just motoring along like he is out for a pleasant ride to the store to get some baguette and maybe have a smoke whilst wearing a striped jumper. This is an annoying position to be in. I've got sweat pouring off me in such volumes that armed with a hydro electric damn a guy could make a pretty penny selling the energy from my falling sweat to Ontario Hydro. Then Ian starts complaining about a drop of sweat in his sun glasses, I'm thinking, I should buy myself a a new pair of swimming goggles for my next ride behind that engine.

So yes, Ian did make me hurt, but it was a good pain and I am looking forward to my next ride with Ian. No not because I want to hurt, rather because I have something special in store. A bungee cable and a six pack of real beer - for me, I'll give Ian the NCC.

On More Pain

2010-07-23T08:22:00.003-04:00

Remember the Cervelo ad from the 2009 Tour where one of the Cervelo Test Team time trialists was going on and on about how, "when you like zee pain, zen you know you are good"? I'm not so sure I'm there yet. Well actually last night, right after I rode, I liked the pain. This morning, no not so much.

So here is my past seven days of riding:

Saturday/Sunday (July 17/18): Stuck driving back and forth to London Ontario, 950km and not one of them on the saddle - sucks.
Monday July 19: Rode to work and home again, 75km, a few thousand calories, back on the bike. Rode too hard to every red - so excited to be back on the saddle - wanted to puke my lungs out every time I stopped.
Tuesday July 20: (by the way, Happy Anniversary Neil Armstrong - an Armstrong who was dignified by his silence - Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins). Thought it was going to rain, drove to work, then to the Data Centre, squeezed in a quick 85km race the cars ride in Mississauga, should do that again soon, what a ride!
Wednesday July 21: Slept, hey come on, I did stay up until 4am from Tuesday night on account of the Data Centre - hey is anyone hiring a senior network analyst? (I want a job that doesn't kill me, I think I am averaging 60 hour work weeks.)
Thursday July 22: Rode to work, then to the Dentist, then to the Thursday night ride. Total distance, thereabouts 115km, total calories, in the neighbourhood of 5000, top speed on a busy four lane road, over 55km/h - scary when the truck pulled out in front of me and I almost crashed into him - what is with pickup truck drivers?

Now as for the Thursday night ride, well I climbed the Scarbrough Bluffs at Brimley, three repeats, yes I suck, but in my defence I still have not fully recovered from my all nighter on Wednesday/Thursday July 14/15, forget about London and then the Tuesday/Wednesday just past. Okay enough excuses, for anyone not fully up to speed on Brimley, this is no Tourmalet - actually I feel like a bit a fool talking about Brimley the day after Schleck and Contador dueled it out on that Hors Categorie climb. But anyway here is Brimley details, it is a 72m climb, starting at 85m above sea level, the climb takes 970m, below is the hill in profile.

After climbing Brimley a few times we toured around Scarborough for a little while, I was out of water and started to get really bad, but managed to hang in until the bitter... thirsty? end.

I think though that while an occasional hill is good, I prefer a better mix, one or two good long steep hills and some flats, and maybe some rollers. With the high temperatures and humidity, the wind from going fast really helps to cool things down.

On Pushing too Hard

2010-07-22T08:56:00.004-04:00

This week I have not had too many chances to ride. Monday I rode to work, I suspect because I spent pretty much all of the previous weekend driving back and forth to London Ontario and no saddle time, I pushed way too hard, every single red light I wanted to cough my lungs up because I had no chance to slow down gently.

Of course Tuesday I spent in the Data Centre so I did the ride before that but I was so drained that Wednesday I went home from work early (by car) and slept. I still have not caught up with my sleep but at least I am doing a little better than yesterday. Question, is it possible to be so fatigued that one exhibits all the signs and symptoms of alcohol consumption without drinking anything? I felt drunk with fatigue and I haven't had so much as a millilitre of the good stuff in a week - yes I know, I need a life.

That actually reminds me of a story, once years ago, I got to a police roadblock where they were doing spot checks for drunk drivers. The cop sticks his head in my window (to smell my breath of course) and asks when I last had something to drink. I reply, "a couple weeks ago" and the cop starts laughing at me. Hey at least I earn more than he does, but I bet his job is more exciting than mine (not that I would want the excitement.)

Anyway an annoying thing for me, why is it that Versus no longer shows the Tour, I found a website that does have it, actually there are several, free places to watch and I am looking forward to seeing Schleck clobber Contador, but it would be nice to hear Phil explain why riding in a pace line saves a rider up to 30% the effort of riding alone, even up the side of the Tear My Legs Off mountain. Speaking of which, the boys are climbing what looks like the Col du Soulor in the rain now, after this the Col du Tourmelet and then no more categorized (or HC) climbs until 2011.

A final thought, I've always thought Armstrong was a jerk, but seeing how well Contador behaved the other day when Andy dropped his chain, well I really hope Contador just bonks or cramps completely and Schleck beats Contador by a good three or four minutes. (Am I being mean or does Contador have it coming?)

On Pain

2010-07-21T00:03:00.002-04:00

I am in the Data Centre the Carrier Hotel in downtown. There are buildings like this one in every city of any size all over North America. Your phone calls, web browsing, emails, all that good stuff pass through buildings just like the one I'm in. In fact, if you are in Canada it is highly probable that your next phone call will pass through wires not two meters away from me right now, yes even local calls in Vancouver have decent odds of being routed all the way to Toronto and then bounced back to Vancouver.

Here is a dirty little secret, the very building I am in also houses the data centre for a major Canadian mobile phone company. This is bad because if this building, even just the floor the mobile carrier operates on were to say flood, or burn - all to frequent events for major data centres - the mobile phone company would literally be unable to continue as a business, their cell phones would become paper weights.

Anyway I mention all this not to show off, there are plenty of people, most much smarter than me who work here all the time. I bring this up because it is now just after midnight on Wednesday morning. I babbled on about a data centre because I missed a Tuesday night ride, I figured I better explain why.

The good news for me, the reason this post is not my usual irritated tone, is that I did manage to squeeze in a little trip around the city prior to coming back to work. I rode, well I won't try and cheat, 84.88km in just under 3 hours. I burned, well a lot of calories and I raced the cars. (They usually beat me, but not by so much that all that many motorists would laugh.) Typically the light would turn green and I would be half way to the next light before the first cars would even catch up. In short the ride was a very intense interval session, burn hard to the next red light, recover for 15 or 30 seconds and then burn hard again to the next red. While my average speed was only a little shy of 29km/h, my sustained speed, that is the speed I was booking when I was not slowing down for the next light, was somewhere between 35 and 40 km/h.

I do not have the route, my GPS is with my ride at home; but, I can describe some of the interesting bits (I'll post the route some other time.) I took the Lakeshore trail west, and passed... well everyone from Stadium road right to Park Lawn. At one point there were two guys in kits from a very unpopular bike club, now I should insert here that most of the time when I passed someone it was a pleasant thing, just a "on your left" and "thank you" but for these guys I hammered, hard. I think, too hard, they did not even try to catch up. Oh well! (This club has a reputation, well earned, that everyone not in the club knows exactly what the bottom side of the noses of the club membership looks like... they need some tissue!)

I hammered on, I personally like to find a distinctive looking car and see how long it takes for the car to properly drop me if we both obey the traffic laws, well alright, no motorist in Toronto obeys the speed limit but that just makes the challenge harder for me. I made it from below Bloor up Royal York to The West Way (where I turned off) in range of a red minivan, total distance, about 4 or 5km.

Eglinton Avenue is a disaster, I lost a lot of time, bouncing through potholes and fighting a miserable head wind. I went south on Tomken, passing cars, at speed, as I went - which would sound a lot more impressive I admit if the cars in questions were driving at the posted limit, they were not even close.

Dundas from Tomken to the West Mall was a great place for intervals, hammer at 45~55km/h and then stop. Repeat every few hundred meters. I think I spent more time out of the saddle accelerating than I spent in the saddle maintaining speed. Oh before I forget, the West Mall is being resurfaced and is one lane in each direction, and Evens Avenue is so badly in need of resurfacing from West Mall to Islington it is rather sad.

I went back up Royal York, at The Queens Way a Taxi driver asked me if I was Andy Schleck or Alberto Contador. I told him I thought Contador was a dick. The taxi driver told me he had not heard the latest on the tour, I told him that Contador was ahead by 8 seconds. That driver was cooler than every other taxi driver in Toronto combined! I wish more cabbies followed the TDF, I'll bet they would be a lot more considerate to cyclists.

I climbed Christie street but it was nothing impressive, I was starting to hurt, on the other hand the trip down that hill, at Russell Hill Road was awesome. I was clocking over 50km/h - it's a 40 zone, and that's 40 for very good reason. Taking a turn at speed is a total adrenaline rush and a half.

In short, the ride was painful, but all in a good way. I should do it again sometime, but maybe try to go a little faster.

On Driving, Final Thoughts, For Now

2010-07-20T10:36:00.002-04:00

I filled up the car after driving to London Ontario and back (twice). The car is a small diesel (a VW Jetta to be specific). Total distance driving in two days: 954km, total fuel consumed, a little more than 7/8'th of the tank, size of tank 50L. In other words, at just under one dollar per litre of diesel, I blew $43 and about 45L driving 954km.

It probably helps that the air conditioning does not work, but still, when the fuel economy is that good, why do I have to buy either a VW or a Mercedes if I want a small diesel? By switching from a regular gasoline or petrol powered vehicle to alternatively a bicycle or small diesel look what I have done to reduce my carbon foot print, when will other people join in?

I rode to work yesterday, since July 1 I have done 1018km on Jordan, I rotated the tyres last night. I went to bed expecting it to be raining this morning and clear Wednesday. When I woke up, the prediction had been revised, clear Tuesday rain on Wednesday. Good job guys. Well I guess if the weather stays nice maybe I do a little ride tonight, but I'd rather ride to work, that way not only do I get to ride, but I get to reduce the driving I do at the same time.

Here's another thought. I saw an advert recently for a power tap. I know I should, from a training standpoint, use one. Knowing my power would be really helpful in ensuring I am training properly. But check out the price, the Cycle-ops power tap is about $1000, mind you a couple years ago, the Cycle-ops was $2000, so give it another twenty years and maybe I can afford one.

I want to know, why are power taps so expensive? Hook up a spring with known elastic properties to the drive train, measure the force applied by measuring the flex of the spring (all very easy to do applications of a high school electronics course) then gauge speed of the spring as it rotates, again trivial. Now multiple, force in Newtons times speed in meters per second equals Watts of power. Where does the $1000 price tags come from? The fancy packaging? Sorry but I just cannot bring myself to piss away that kind of money for technology that is so simple.

On Excessive Driving

2010-07-17T22:35:00.002-04:00

I had to go to London Ontario to a client site this weekend. Sucks.

I had to drive to London Ontario to a client site this weekend. Sucks worse.

I had to drive to London Ontario to a client site this weekend and apparently the weather was great for riding back home. Sucks balls it sucks so bad!

I had to... oh you get the idea and someone else ran a club ITT and in one day got a bigger turn out than I could despite all my begging and pleading. Since I am practicing not swearing (I've had to spend the day in the presence of clients.) I will not say what I'm thinking.

It gets better.

Yesterday (Friday) I packed up the servers for the client site and we brought them down, only we discovered that the servers, HP Proliant DL 380s were incompatible with the HP Proliant DL 180 rack rails that were in the boxes. Ooops, that would be a my bad. So I had to schlep back to the office in Richmond Hill (200km most assuredly Not in on the saddle.) Get said rack mount rails and haul back to London Ontario. Total distance driven (thanks to traffic jams and a car with no working air conditioning in 37 degree heat), since Friday night, 670km. Total distance ridden: Zilch, bupkiss, nadda, ZERO!

At least I may have discovered a great place for an ITT, in my efforts to keep a wind happening so I wouldn't melt in the car I drove on some back roads, and well this might just work.

It is a lot further than the traditional ITT circuit, but that might be a good thing. Drive out to some point near the start and ride from there as a warm up. No riding in crowded cities, and ITT on a flat circuit... mind you, if we are doing an ITT, and driving to the start... hmmm, rural Ontario out near Kitchener Waterloo might work. Then after we could all go to the Math Building at U(W) and watch Michael gag as I enjoy the memories of undergraduate skule.

On Jobs and ITTs

2010-07-16T12:19:00.003-04:00

I get more readers on this blog, remarkably I get readers at all here!, than on the BCC site. There's something really strange about that.

Anyway I've got to go to London Ontario to work this weekend, we are setting up a system at a large corporation there. The only tan I will get is from a bunch of computer monitors, meanwhile the weather here looks wonderful. (Maybe I can fit Jordan in the trunk of the car and if I get lucky... the car windows will be smashed and Jordan will get stolen... okay forget that idea.)

Point is I doubt I'll have much to post, or time to post it for the next couple days, sorry.

I did want to ask though, for anyone who might want to try some variety, I'm thinking, maybe going forward an alternative to the traditional BCC side, an out of town ITT on some quiet country roads in Erin Ontario. (There is a personal reason for Erin Ontario I admit, look just to the right of this column at the pictures of my bikes.) But there are actually some very lovely roads for riding up there. The idea is, drive to say a Tim Ho's and then warm up riding to some arbitrary starting line, and do a nice 40km circuit. After, well I guess drive home. Thoughts?

On Wear and Tear

2010-07-15T08:05:00.002-04:00

Sorry if I'm not 100% Compos mentis today, I'm afraid I had to work until 3am in the data centre and then by the time I got everything sorted for the day it was 5am and time to get ready for work. In short, besides a few cat naps I've stolen (at my desk at work, on a pile of empty boxes in the data centre, etc.) I basically am running on the 5 hours of shut-eye I managed to sneak in the night before last. Being an IT guy and trying to be... well anything else, is damn near impossible.

So here is a random thought, Dragonwave makes Microwave relays used to telecomunications, Dragonwave is Canadain and their sales were down massively, blamed on cancelled orders from their biggest customer. (I know Wind Mobile uses Dragonwave, I wonder, are the Egyptians pulling the plug on their Canadian foray?) Anyway none of the above has pretty much anything to do with anything. I just read about Dragonwave this morning in the business section of the paper and have been wondering about Wind, there is a lot of evidence that starting a mobile teleco in Canada is damn near impossible and I think Wind is near dead proof of my point.

Now as for wear and tear. I had a chance, while in the data centre to think about my ride. On Friday July 2 I put brand new Verdestein Fortezza Tricomp tyres on Jordan and the next day rode to Rochester NY. Well yesterday, July 14, I noticed that the back tyre was really starting to wear down. Now there is a rule of thumb in cycling, after 1000km, switch the front tyre with the rear tyre because the front will hardly have any wear, and the rear will be almost spent, after another 1000km, throw both tyres out and put on a fresh pair. How could it be that these tyres were already almost half spent after just 12 days? So I added up all the mileage I've ridden since July 2, here it is:

July 3: 285km (almost to Rochester NY)
July 4: 178km (rode around Rochester then home from Niagara Falls)
July 7: 75km (rode to and from work)
July 8: 100km (rode to and from work and did the Thursday night hills ride)
July 10: 64km (ITT and warm-up for ITT)
July 11: 155km (BCC Sunday ride)
July 14: 75km (rode to and from work)

Total: 932km. Well I guess it's a case of little wonder my tyres are nearly half spent, they are 93% of the way to a rotation. In fact, by the time I get home from work today, since I rode in, I will be due for a tyre rotation. Damn, 1000km in less than two weeks, there are months when I don't drive 1000km!

Oh, in case anyone is wondering, the other consumable is the chain, usually about 3000 to 4000km, get a chain wear gauge from your local bike shop if you don't already have one and check the wear... I guess in my case every two weeks!

On Public Transit

2010-07-14T07:40:00.002-04:00

Sucks.

I honestly think I should just leave it with one five letter word. Lets face it, surface transit in North America is appallingly awful. I remember I once wrote a long winded email to a columnist at the Globe and Mail because she made a similar tirade against public transit. Now that I ride so far to work every morning I understand exactly where she is coming from.

I mean when I drive the Bus or the Street Car is no big deal, you get ahead of it and you are good to go until you catch up with the next one. But on the saddle, well I'm still going to pass every bus or street car given enough mileage, it just takes a little longer. The fact is the sorry sods who drive these things seem to forget no matter the colour of the light, they have to stop to load and unload, I don't, unless the light is red of course. I've lost count, honest to goodness, of bus drivers who seem to think I'm racing them (or are they racing me?).

With respect guys, yes, you can go faster than me in absolute terms, I max out at around 60km/h depending on conditions, buses are probably governed to, I'd have to guess 100km/h or so. (In fairness bus drivers are probably used to cyclists who max at around 30km/h - but then they don't even start to close the gap after the light changes until... well typically I've passed the their next stop.)

The thing that really annoys me about buses though, diesel exhaust. Yes I drive a diesel car, but its a small car, buses spew tons of black filth into the air that I am running a 150 to 180bpm heart rate in. (My car also spews the diesel exhaust about one foot -30cm- above grade, the bus exhaust is about 10 feet -3m- up.)

I realise public transit is a good thing, if more people took the bus, or rode their bike, there would be few of those pesky cars to deal with. The civil war among car drivers might finally end if more people took the bus. But it just seems to me that in North America the way we designed our cities, it's like we thought the word BUS was spelled without vowels. I guess what is needed really is something like the truly great cities, like Copenhagen, have, physically separate roads for bikes, transit and regular vehicles.

One final thought, if we consider almost any suburban road, going from one side to the other, there is a property line, typically marked by a fence, then some grass, then a totally unused sidewalk, then yet more grass, then the curb, then the road, then the other curb and grass, another unused sidewalk and finally more grass. Would it not be possible to turn some of that grass or perhaps an unused sidewalk in a road level bike lane, physically separated from the cars and the buses yet not requiring massive infrastructure changes?

On Jordan

2010-07-12T22:11:00.002-04:00

As I have documented earlier, Erin was cracked and as it turned out the crack was fatal. Obviously I am upset, hey I like my bike enough to name her; but life goes on, or I guess I keep grinding. So I have a new ride, Lesley thought, because of the black colour scheme this bike looked more 'bad ass' and so a more 'bad ass' name, Lesley thought was Jordan. (Apparently one of Lesley's co-workers, Jordan is a bad ass.)

Here are some pictures of Jordan during the build and after a good cleaning.

On Sunday Morning Rides and Other Things

2010-07-12T07:59:00.003-04:00

No I have not stopped writing my little novel, I just found a little time to work on this Blog as well. Anyway before I get into the Sunday ride, I should add one detail I previously omitted from the events at the ITT I did on Saturday.

The ITT was on an open road, there were police on hand and notices advising motorists a race is in progress but despite the fact that this was a quiet country road that could have been closed without serious impact for a the four or five hours on a Saturday morning, it was left open. As a result besides sharing the road with fellow trialists I had the chance to share the road with motor vehicles.

Just after the turn around near Stoney Lake, a minivan came along and passed me, but for whatever reason chickened out when the time came to pass the guy not 5m in front of me. The minivan sat between us and all I could do was mutter expletives as I breathed carbon monoxide and drafted the damn thing. Finally after about 30 seconds I got fed up with the motorist and rode in the oncoming traffic lane around the minivan. So I did break a major rule of time trialing I drafted, in my defence though, I was trying really hard not to. (Question, why can't the OCA just close the damn road for the morning? sigh.)

Anyway yesterday I went for a ride with the BCC, it was a very scenic route through rolling hills North West of Toronto. The company was great and the speed was just about right. The fact was you cannot do much better than the ride I had yesterday... well sort of. There is a hill, on Mount Pleasant Road near Kleinburg, this hill has a grade of about 10% and rises through about 100m of elevation. I was, I thought, justifiably proud of the fact that I was the first person in our group to complete the climb. The view south east from the top was astonishing. Anyway we rode home, it was a very friendly and pleasant group ride, the sort I really like and I was happy - but for the fact that I was drinking fluids too fast, ran out of supplements and was just about to start bonking (I was drinking plain water for the last 45 minutes or so) as I got home.

After the ride, and a lot of food, I set to work cleaning my new Roubaix. Now while cleaning my bike I like to have the television on, so I had a choice, I could watch what would turn out to be a Spanish victory at the World Cup, or I could watch a rerun of the Tour De France. As anyone who knows me would know, I watched Andy Schleck clobber... well everyone, it was beautiful! (Come on, the Tour or a football game? I can see a football match anytime, but this is The Tour!) Except, and this is why I'm not so proud of my hill climbing abilities, Andy did his little clobber routine against everyone on a Category 1 hill. At one point during the climb Phil Liggett was saying something to the effect of "the lower part of the mountain is only 7 or 8% but this section, for the next 3 or 4km is 9.9 to 10% grade." The best part, the stage of the tour the guys did yesterday, stage 8, ended with a Cat 1 hill, it was preceded by a couple Cat 4, a Cat 3 and a previous Cat 1 climb and the guys covered almost 190km.

Memo to self, I will never be a great, or even all that good, sigh.

Of course I already knew that I won't be Mister Amazing, but still, to have one's own mediocrity shoved in their face like that, it hurts.

On the 2010 OCA Time Trial in Norwood Ontario

2010-07-10T17:08:00.003-04:00

So I have now done my first OCA official, fully sanctioned Individual Time Trial, complete with measurements of the bike and everything - even an entry fee.

The ITT itself was on a very pleasant and scenic road through central Ontario, in fact I'll draw the route on Bikely. Or just look below.

OCA_2010_ITT_in_Peterborough

http://www.bikely.com/

Actually the 180 degree turn was a little further along, because the route worked out to about 37 or 38km. Now with the exception of the turn itself the route was very nice, quite flat, just a few 4% climbs nothing more than perhaps 10 or 15m of elevation change and by in large the roads were in reasonable condition. The turn was 180 degrees on a country road that was hardly wide enough to turn with a TT bike, had I been on a road bike I would have been laughing, but hey one technical turn in 35 kilometers, not bad.

Prior to the event I learned a valuable lesson, well two actually.

1. Before putting on bike shoes, use the washroom and then do the paper work then get ready (ended up needing to ride out to a quite area, not easy to find when everyone is warming up, to have a natural break... oops.)

2. In an ITT know the rules of bike sizes, I was okay there, but I actually was overly paranoid, the UCI rule states, the nose of the saddle must come no further forward than 5cm behind a line that extends through the centre of the bottom bracket - I can move my saddle forward almost 4cm - ooops! (I wonder, how much a saddle move would help my time, I suspect on a one hour circuit, probably three or four minutes!) On the other hand my bars extend too far, but I cannot do anything about that, I'm too big, the rule is the ends of the bars (excluding the moving parts of the shift levers) must not go past 75cm in front of the same line that goes through the bottom bracket. Because of my height I get an exemption, which is, if the rider's elbows form less than 120 degrees when on the saddle and reach the end of the bars the bars may extend as far as 80cm from our line but no further. In my case the bars extend out to about 76cm - oh well.

Anyway this might be my first OCA ITT, but it is a far cry from a first ITT, nonetheless I still felt horribly unstable at the start and did not get my foot clipped in until about 10m out, a minor loss, I can live with (perhaps 1 second was added to my time.) I think at the previous ITT the guy who 'launched' me had a better grip so I was able to properly clip in.

For some reason, soon to be investigated when I went to move from the 42 to the 55 ring (from the small to big chain ring) the first time I tried the chain stayed on 42. Now I should insert that originally I had Specialized S-Works chain rings, and those damned things were so flexible every time I would try to upshift the ring would flop out of the way and the chain would land back on the 39 ring (the S-Works rings were 53/39). I replaced the S-Works ring with a regular... well huge Dura-Ace 55/42 ring. Ever since Dura-Ace was installed the problem of the flopping chain ring has gone away, until the ITT, a second attempt at an upshift worked and I was off, loss of time, I'd guess around 3 or 4 seconds.

Sadly, for me, the guy right in front of me never showed up, so I did not have a rabbit to chase down. After about 8km, my usual ITT distance I started hurting and a guy from the Lapdogs started passing me. I put the hammer down hard and put mister Lapdog behind me, a little later he would catch up again and I would have to hammer hard again, after about 25km of cat and mouse with the guy from the Lapdogs he finally got ahead of me and I just could not snap up the distance. He probably finished about 5 seconds before me, but started 30 or more seconds after me.

I read that last paragraph, and think to myself, I'm a dick! I mean, who cares how I did relative to the guy behind me, this was an ITT, as in Individual Time Trial, and I shouldn't worry about Mister Lapdog, I should worry about Mister Michael, who by the way had gone in with a goal (not previously posted) of doing an approximately 40km ITT in under one hour, and for that I can be very happy to report (from the OCA website):

Bib: 83, Name: COLE Michael, Team: Beaches Cycling Club, Cat: RME.4, Time: 0h 58m 33s, Gap 4m 51.59s.

I wonder, if the saddle had been adjusted right, (oh yeah, and if I had not been biking to Rochester NY not 168 hours earlier) would I have trimmed 4 minutes and 52 seconds off my time? I doubt it, but maybe. Oh right, no more dickishness, I promise.

In short I'm happy, I hurt, I felt like I could not go any faster and I did something pretty damn remarkable, I did a 38km ITT in under an hour.

Now time to clean a bike.

On Time Trial Rules

2010-07-09T08:51:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow I will do my first Ontario Cycling Association (OCA) sanctioned Time Trial. (I have done many Individual Time Trials (ITT) before but as this will be a fully offical, conforms to the rules of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) - sort of, I thought it best if I put up some links to the rules of TT bikes and ITT in general.

An aside, I just said this race will conform to the UCI regulations - sort of, the reason for the sort of, the UCI changed the rules for the shape of the 'box' that makes up the area behind the steerer tube, and encases the down tube and top tube. In particular whereas before I think the rule was that bikes were supposed to have boxes no bigger than 8cm on a side, the UCI previously did not bother to enforce the rule if the steerer tube was integrated into the box. The UCI decided (just before an ITT in fact) that now they would enforce the rule. Ultimately it turns out my 2009 Specialized S-Works Transition is not legal unless I cut off the wings on the downtube. (Given that we are talking about ruining a $3000 frame, that is not exactly likely to happen, sorry guys.) So I am hoping that the OCA will recognize the fact that those wings will make such a modest difference - hey it's not like I'm going to make a podium finish here - versus the financial hardship removing said wings would impose on me that the OCA will, like USA Cycling waive the above rule for weaker cyclists like myself.

Anyway here are some useful guides:

1. This page on Slowtwitch (a Tri website) discusses rules and contrasts Tri vs. TT configurations (basically the rules for Tri are pretty trivial, for TT, they are insane.)

2. This PDF is straight from the horse's mouth (in the spirit of I don't trust anything on The Internet) this comes from the UCI and is a sort of users guide on how to build a legal road or TT bike. (I suspect the link will break pretty fast, the UCI seems to like moving things around, sorry.)

3. This PDF is the UCI regulations for road races, it does not explicitly state, the bike geometry or anything like that but it does govern the rules for the race itself. (Chapter 4 is on Time Trials and like 2., above, the UCI seems to like moving things around so I suspect this link will not last very long.)

4. This page is where the UCI rules are, I suspect this link will break soon enough too. But for the time being this is where I found links 2. and 3.

On Bicycles and International Borders

2010-07-05T00:52:00.002-04:00

In the past two days I have biked across the border, twice. The first time, Saturday July 3 at around 12:30 EDT at the Rainbow bridge there was one car in front of me at the bridge and when the border guard found out I was biking from Toronto to Rochester he was... well his reaction was exactly what I was expecting (hoping) for. His final remark to me was, "have a safe ride."

Now as I noted earlier, I did not quite make it to Rochester, Jeff was tracking my progress on Google Latitude, which apparently reported that I was moving at around 30km/h on the multi lane limited access expressway that is the Lake Ontario State Parkway, I guess the rGPS isn't quite as great as Google would like everyone to believe (I was about 10km away from the Parkway, on route 18). At some point Jeff decided to drive out and meet up with me, which he did about 35km from his home. Now having run out of powder (my own mix of carbs, soy protein and electrolytes) and now surviving on diluted Poweraid (most gas stations don't sell Hammer Nutrition products), my muscles were starting to cramp and I was not exactly feeling 100%. Jeff offered me a lift and I took him up on the offer.

I did not want to fight the West Wind for the journey home so Jeff, ever so kindly drove me to the border (and if Jeff ever reads this, I really do appreciate that drive), I would bike across the border and take the GO train from Niagara Falls, which meant returning on Sunday as there is no weekday service to Niagara Falls. While in line at the border I made the egregious error of lining up at a new border guards queue, and being that I was on a bicycle as opposed to everyone else in their two ton steel cage, I couldn't really switch lines without annoying several motorists, so I waited while Mister dot all the I's and cross all the T's processed people at about half the speed of all the other agents.

Finally it was my turn to face Canada's answer to border security. Let me just say to border guards far and wide, as a good generalization most bicycles do not in fact have licence plates. Sorry guys you will just have to make do with my passport. (Which reminds me, I have to get a new one, sigh.) Even better than the fruitless search of a licence plate and let me add, honest to god, you cannot make stuff this good up, the border guard asked me if I had made any significant purchase while in the US. Imagine if you will, I am on a fancy schamncy S-Works Specialized Roubaix (in fact the same frame that carried Tom Boonen to victory in the 2009 Paris-Roubaix) with all the fittings and trimmings of a very expensive, very fast road bike. My jersey pockets are loaded down with supplements, passports, credit cards, cash, tire changing equipment and a Blackberry. I do have two water bottle cages (with water bottles, that have, surprisingly - water inside) and fitted on one of the cages is two CO2 cartridges. My only other storage, a tiny saddle bag, has just enough room for two inner tubes, a photo copy of my health card, a Tim Hortons prepaid card and a multitool.

So the border guard asked me if I had made any purchase, I often wondered what I would do in response to such a question. It turns out, I would stare at the border guard looking incredulously at the source of such a profoundly lunatic question. The border guard suggested that perhaps I bought my bike in the US - a curious notion, since I had to get to the US first before I could buy my transportation home. Ultimately the border guard did let me go, after having found out that I have been to such bastions of criminality as China, the UK and France. (I'm still not sure why he made three passes through my passport, but hey at least that his his prerogative, apparently being mind numbingly air-headed is also his prerogative!)

Having cleared the silliness that was that particular border crossing, I had an hour to kill before the GO train would arrive, I decided to go to St. Catharines and get the train there, except I took too long (head wind) and had no choice (not that I was bothered) but to bike home. The ride home, 154km, a little riding around in Rochester with Jeff, plus 285km on Saturday means that in about 40 hours I rode about 3 full proper centuries. I did not achieve the outlandish goal of biking to Rochester and back, but given what I did achieve (and the pain I endured almost from the beginning - I rode the Coppi earlier this week and the saddle height is now so far off the mark that my right knee is still hurting). I think I can be proud of what I did, I think I can also say that if I ever propose to ride to Rochester again, can someone please come and kick some sense into me, biking a double century in a day without support is a really dumb idea and I would not recommend anyone do it.

On Goals - an update

2010-07-04T10:39:00.004-04:00

Previously I wrote out, with tongue planted very firmly in cheek, some goals, here is my current status.

1. Do at least one, preferably all three OCA ITTs, try to average no less than 40km/h for distances of 15km or less and no less than 37 km/h for longer ITTs. (A little ambitious, but it is always better to aim high and come up short than aim low.) - Well truth be told there are two OCA ITTs, but I am registered for the first one on Saturday July 11.

2. Toronto to Rochester without wanting to just roll over and die when I get there. - Failed, wanted to roll over and die when I got here, but yes I'm in Rochester NY right now, sans car, but avec my bicycle! (Actually... it turns out the rear brake was rubbing when I cleaned my bike, the morning after, I thought I was just bonking hard. When Jeff came out about 35km from his home - in his car - and offered me either a bottle of water or a ride over the last 35km, I took him up on the second offer, so I only covered the first 285km or 177miles, I failed to do a double century.)

2b. Rochester return to Niagara Falls if not all the way home, subject to weather. - The GO train does not run from the Falls on Mondays and there is not enough time to recover, Jeff will be driving me to the border and I will take the 7:20 train home from there. Truth is this ultra randonneuring is too painful for me.

3. Achieve demerit point velocities in a 60 (or higher) zone, in Ontario one must be driving at least 15km/h over the posted speed limit to get demerit points. (Note this goal cannot apply on downgrades greater than 3%. In other words, my goal is not achieved if I scream down a steep hill, I need to be on near flat, flat or up hills and doing the required 75km/h to reach this goal.) - Oh pulleeese, where did I come up with this?

4. Ride to Lake Simcoe a bunch of times, of course, hey it is my favourite ride. On McCowan between Doane Road and Ravenshoe road pull at no less than 40km/h the entire way. On the journey home, once south of Ravenshoe, on Warden, average no less than 33km/h to Stouffville Road. (If the lights are green, average at least 35km/h.) - Well does it still count if I was pulling North on Warden at around that speed? Anyway if I didn't quite achieve the specified speed, I came awfully close on June 27.

5. Ride the panacke of South Western Ontario to Rattle Snake Point, climb said hill with a 53/39 chain ring and 11/23 cassette. Have enough left in my legs to still be able to catch any break aways or race David Silcox to the next Taxi without going into cardiac arrest as soon as we reach the "finish". - Haven't done a club ride to Rattle Snake yet, this season, oh well!

6. Do. Not. Bonk. Ever. - See this one sort of... who are we kidding, this one is a complete contradiction of 2. and 2b. A person cannot do a double century without bonking, It. Is. Just. Not. Possible!

On A Challenge

2010-06-23T08:57:00.002-04:00

A quick aside, yes work on my novel continues, but in the meantime here is a different, green, way to train.

Everyone has a monthly calandar, lets face it, real-estate agents give them away faster than some drivers flip birds, well here is a new application for that calandar that will help with training.

Every time you mount the saddle and cover distance, no matter if it is recreational, or to go grocery shopping, or get to work, on an $8,000 carbon fiber beauty or a $80 used Crappy Tire Special write the total number of kilometers covered in blue pen for that day on the calendar.

Every time you drive, or are driven, no matter if it is an electronic bicycle, motor cycle, automobile, SUV, 54 foot tractor trailer, etc, record the total distance in black.

Every time you walk somewhere, besides around the office or to the Tim Horton’s across the street, but actually cover significant distance you are free to record that with a green pen (This one is optional, but some days we have to buy groceries and this will reward people who do not drive even when it’s raining).

Sum up the green and the blue numbers and divide by the sum of the black.

The goal, have the largest number possible, in other words, do the most cycling and walking and the least consumption of non-muscular energy sources.

Now I know some of you are thinking, well Gee Wiz, I drive a Prius – as Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear would point out, the environmental impact of making the batteries and complex systems in a Prius make a Prius about as bad as a Hummer over the lifetime of the vehicle. What about EVs or E-Bikes? Well the electricity has to come from somewhere doesn’t it?

Anyway the point of this challenge is two-fold; one burn less of the gunk that is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico at something like 35 to 60 thousand barrels a day. And two, exercise more.

Good luck and feel free to give your score, for the week or month, in the comment section below.

On Lamentations for a Lost Ride

2010-06-15T10:51:00.002-04:00

During a recent ride to Lake Simcoe, 183.9km, it rained. By the time I got home my ride was so thick with mud she was more brown than red or black. As I have done many times before I set to work cleaning her up, I washed the chain, removed the crankset, bottom bracket and wheels and began the work of hosing her down and making her shine.

When I wash my bike I always start in back and work my way forward, there is no particular reason, it's just where I start from habit. So my ride was almost clean when I discovered the crack, running about an inch along the inside of the head tube and then about an inch along the top of the down tube. Its a small crack, I cannot even see it unless my frame is out in the light of day, but the crack is there and when I rock the fork I can actually see the crack grow.

It would seem therefore that my ride's days in the sun are over. A short summary of some of the rides I did with that bike seems fitting here:

Harriston Ontario (Bonked at 150km) Covered 196km, summer 2008.

Lake Simoce and Back via Stouffville (Bonked at about 180km) Covered 200km, summer 2008.

Rochester NY (almost, sun went down and had to get bailed out 50km from destination) Covered 250km, spring 2009.

Return from Rochester NY (almost, sun light again, bailed out in Hamilton) Covered 230km, spring 2009.

Rochester NY (nearly fell asleep on the bars at 220km) Covered 320km, summer 2009

Lake Simoce from Lake Ontario (twice in 2009)

Raced cars to work - often beat them to the next light, surprisingly often.

A bunch of Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday night rides, got dropped a bunch of times, sometimes intentionally fell off the back and enjoyed the ride.

Lake Simcoe from Lake Ontario June 13, 2010 - broke a frame

On Writing and Other Things

2010-05-25T09:51:00.002-04:00

Sorry, I have not posted much lately. I have been working on my novel. But for anyone keeping score, Saturday was a rest day for me after biking to work every day last week (25km up hill to work) and 35km home (I take a longer route home to avoid the heavy afternoon traffic.)

Sunday I rode with the club out to Goodwood (120km) it was a proper hammerfest. Sunday was a nice short trip up to Lake Simcoe, 180km, 6 hours. According to the GPS, I burned off 13,000 calories in two rides. Anyway back to the novel.

On Hill Climbs

2010-05-08T12:06:00.001-04:00

Someone tried to catalog all the tough hill climbs in the Toronto area. Obviously there really is not all that much to the list, but even Toronto has some hills.

Anyway I just thought it might be a useful thing. Sorry I have not posted much lately, been horribly busy with work, and writing the book I mentioned earlier, done about one and a third chapters so far.

On Terror in New York

2010-05-04T08:45:00.002-04:00

New York is an awesome city.

My OAC (Grade 13, or Ontario Academic Credit) Algebra and Geometry Teacher, Mr. Pupko, a very respectable guy who never used the word "awesome" until the day he made his remark about New York City. Al-Geo was a tough course, and I took the semestered version, even harder, Mr. Pupko who has a Masters in Math and is from New York was a hell of a tough teacher, that Grade 13 course was harder than anything I took in first year at Waterloo Math. By the time Mr. Pupko made his analysis of his home town the dozen or so of us who had not dropped out were standing around his desk going over our final grades. To be honest, that class had a more graduate school feel about it than my M. Eng. classes ever did.

I digress, I just wanted to say New York City is the greatest achievement of the human condition, a remarkable feat of opinion and steel with plenty of good art work in between.

By now we all know about the aborted terror attacks of Saturday May 1. A would be terrorist loaded an old SUV (another reason to hate SUVs) with explosives and fertilizer, parked the vehicle in Times Square and tried to flee the country.

The Globe and Mail ran a column about the owner of the vehicle being busted as he tried to flee. I wrote the following comment, which I think is worth preserving. I have modified it slightly to improve readability.

...although [Attorney General] Holder said U.S. authorities “will not rest until we have brought everyone responsible to justice,” suggesting additional suspects are being sought.

These nut cases are criminals, pure and simple. Find them, arrest them, give them the rights afforded any accused and if convicted punish them as dictated by law. Something the Obama Administration, by the above quote, clearly understands and the former [Bush] Administration had a serious issue with.

We, Canadians, and Americans, are people who live in nations of laws and we should never forget that even when the most horrible criminal acts are committed. For when we disregard our own laws we sink to the same level as these criminals. Besides, by granting the criminals some special exemption from our criminal code, we give them a power over media and the weak minded that they should never ever have.

On Guilt

2010-04-29T11:38:00.002-04:00

My new job is so far from home that I had to buy one of those horrible machines that converts stuff that ought to stay buried in the ground into green house gasses just to get to work. (Yes I have officially joined, albeit ten years late, the rat race.)

Well today I ought to feel especially guilty, the US Coast Guard now believes that horrid oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is five times worse than expected (some two hundred thousand gallons of oil are spewing from the seabed into the water). I guess I do feel guilty, a little anyway. But I can draw comfort from one thing, a ratio, 40%, two days out of every five days in a working week I will be cycling to work, starting, well, this morning! In 57 minutes on a sweet little Specialized Roubaix I call Erin, I covered as much ground (home to work) as I typically cover in a loud little diesel Jetta, in 50 minutes. Sure it takes a whole 14% longer to ride than to drive, but I feel great, I burned calories, instead of diesel fuel, and I can go for two bike rides in one day, what could be better? Right, three rides in a day!

On April Fools

2010-04-23T15:42:00.003-04:00

Well actually this is no joke, Saturday July 3 this will be my ride,

SecondAttempt_Ride2Rochester-ver1

http://www.bikely.com/

and Monday July 5 this will be the journey home (also by pedal power),

Rochester_Toronto_Return_v2

http://www.bikely.com/

I have spent no small effort making sure that both routes are 321.87 kilometers each way, this is numerically significant because 321.87 is a round number... if you convert to miles! Yes that's right, just over 200 miles, each way, (weather permitting) in three days I will do two double centuries, and none of this metric century BS.

I am not doing this for charity, or for bragging rights, although the bragging rights are pretty cool on their own, I am doing this to prove I can do it, although I should point out while this is an achievement for me, it pales in comparison with the feats of far greater cyclists than myself, for example, Peter Oyler.

On Used Cars

2010-04-22T13:57:00.003-04:00

As I wrote earlier my new job requires that I drive to work every day. (I am working on biking to work, there is tremendous feeling of shame to drive today, Earth Day, especially since it is such a lovely day). Anyway I bought what I think is one of the most environmentally conscious vehicles out there.

No not a Toyota Prius, and I want to smack anyone who suggests a Prius is a good choice for the environment.

Consider for a moment that a Prius uses huge batteries filled with toxic chemicals that have a useful life of about four years, then all the parts that a Prius is made from have to be shipped from all over the world, its not like the thing is made from a pile of raw materials in Toyota City. The Prius has two different drive systems and a complex computer that does have a way of failing, apparently, as well as a convoluted transmission system and annoyingly grip-less tires, perfect for getting into a skid on Toronto roads in the winter.

The car I bought is a very used (300,000 km, or about 186,000 miles) 2001 VW Diesel Jetta. Being the physics major I almost was, I should point out that 300,000 km is how far light travels in a vacuum, in a single second. By contrast it took that little diesel almost ten years. So why is a diesel Jetta better for the environment than a Prius?

Well for one thing, a diesel is made from very conventional materials and parts, besides being cheaper, this means items typically do not travel nearly as far to get the vehicle built or maintained. Although admittedly the Jetta does loose to the Prius in fuel economy. On a recent drive from Toronto to Rochester and then tooling around Rochester a little and drive most of the way home (about 400km all in) I burned 21.88L or achieved 5.47L (of diesel) per 100km, by contrast according to the EPA fuel economy statistics a Prius should achieve a whopping 4.86L (of petrol) per 100km, in other words over the 300,000km my Jetta has been road worthy it burned an additional 1830L of fuel then had it been a Prius.

Of course since the Jetta is a diesel I should expect the car to be road worthy for at least another 200,000km or so, in short that Jetta should probably go on running for something in the neighbourhood of two and a half times the life span of a Prius. Building a car burns a lot of energy, 1830L of fuel equivalent? Probably a lot more, and really the energy is required to build two and a half cars!

Of course someone reading this is thinking about Ethanol as some sort of solution to all that ails the world; a solution that a diesel car cannot take advantage of. First Ethanol, at least corn Ethanol takes more energy to make than you get out at the end, in other words, corn Ethanol is not a solution to anything except low corn prices. Second Ethanol, because it takes so much energy to produce is actually worse for the environment than plain Jane petrol. Finally there is a plant derived energy source that requires little energy to produce, can be generated from plant waste, i.e. corn stalks, not just the edible corn itself, is actually edible and can be used as a lubricant, except it only runs in diesel and is called bio-diesel.

Is my little Jetta a cure for that which ails the world? Of course not, my bikes yes, not the car. But the Jetta is a step in the right direction.

On The Highway of Hero's

2010-04-14T17:40:00.003-04:00

As part of my new job I need a car. It sucks, I like to ride, but sometimes I guess I've got to burn the fossil fuels. So I decided, rather than burn a bajillion liters and wear out Lesley's brand new gas guzzler, I bought a very used 2001 VW Jetta TDI (diesel).

Anyway the guy selling it lives way out in Oshawa and I had to drive there today to give him the deposit. Now for people who are not from the greater Toronto area, every time a Canadian Soldier dies in the field their remains are flown to CFB (Canadian Forces Base) Trenton and then driven along the 401 to the Don Valley Parkway and south to one of the hospitals in downtown for an autopsy. Every time this happens, people of all sorts gather on the highway overpasses and drape flags over the side and watch, meanwhile the police close most access to the highway. The highway has been renamed, Highway of Hero's.

I bring all this up because Oshawa is between Trenton and Toronto, and some of our boys were KIA (Killed In Action) in Afghanistan. I had the chance, not that I would care to repeat it, to drive under all those patriotic overpasses and contemplate Canada's role in Afghanistan. This is what I wrote to a friend of mine:

Every highway overpass had people out with flags and "Support our Troops" ribbons, more soldier's remains are going in for an autopsy.

I got on the 401 core lanes just before they closed access to the core lanes and whizzed into town. Meanwhile at every single overpass I was reminded of why I was averaging 120km/h on the 401 at 4pm.

I have to rant about politics for a second here, I don't doubt the integrity of people who would wait out, sometimes in snow or rain, sometimes on a nice day like today, to give their last respects. But we all know, in a couple months the last of our soldiers are coming home and then what? Have we actually done anything useful? Afghanistan is reverting to Taliban control, Hamid Karzi (our guy in Kabul) is a criminal and we've lost over a hundred boys and girls, they are children really, and several billion dollars. I used to think we were going to Afghanistan to get the
SOB who sent 767s into the side of the World Trade Centre, now I don't know what the fuck were doing there and the whole damned thing is really upsetting. Meanwhile people keep standing on highway overpasses with Canadian Flags and people like my neighbour (a reservist) get to contemplate going to a country to "liberate" the locals who feel they are under an occupation. In this situation we cannot possibly "win", so why send my neighbour at all why not just call it a bad day and move on?

Sorry I'm full of morbid thoughts, but I guess after that drive on the 'Highway of Hero's that's gotta happen.

Watching the Paris-Roubaix

2010-04-11T18:15:00.003-04:00

Well someone on a Specialized Roubaix won the Paris-Roubaix again, this time Fabian Cancellara of time trialing fame. Of course I cannot watch, Versus carries the race at 6 Eastern (right now!) But in Canada we don't get Versus, we get OLN which means instead of one of the great bike races of the year, we get re-runs of "Survivor Man". Hey Americans get President Obama, Universal Health Care, and real television (if you exclude Faux news... and most of the rest of the drival, that we get too anyway), maybe I should move to The States. Arrrgh! Anyone from OLN who ever happens to read this, pull the dumbass reruns, put a proper event on the idiot box, please, pretty please.

On Goals not achieved

2010-04-02T20:05:00.002-04:00

Recently I published a list of goals. While I cannot say that my tongue was completely planted in cheek when I wrote my list, doing 75km/h uphill is damn near impossible short of a hurricane at your back, there were a few goals I did have that I was serious about, in particular, 6. Do. Not. Bonk. Ever. Well today I rode 222.9km (probably a little further, forgot to hit start on the GPS until I had covered about 2km). And predictably, I bonked!

Anyway sorry for the lack of posts recently, I have been hard at work on a novel. Yes really, I've already written about 2500 words, its a murder mystery that takes place in a post oil New York City, there are no cars, obviously, and global warming has run rampant. I've read over what I have written so far, I think it's actually pretty good. Who knows, maybe one day you'll be able to go to your local book shop and ask for the latest by Michael Cole!

On Spring Training

2010-03-18T16:15:00.002-04:00

Jeff Rubin the former CIBC World Markets chief economist wrote a book a little while ago, Why Your World is About to Get a Lot Smaller. In this book Rubin calls gains in efficiency "head fakes". What happens when people discover that they can heat a 1500 square foot home with the same natural gas they once needed for a 1000 square footer? They get a 2500 square foot home. Oh sure it is a little more thoughtful than that, but I clearly remember when mom and dad went from a two car to a one car family. The new car cost as much to lease as the two old cars did before. Dad said the savings would be found in reduced auto insurance, still I think my parents could have saved even more if they had stuck to a more modest vehicle. (Do not even get me started on the irrationality of SUVs with big engines, big diesel engines.) As for my parents luxury car, it ended up costing a lot more than the two previous cars combined - replacement car parts are not cheap.

Speaking of efficiency I have started my spring training, building up intensity and duration. It seems hard to believe but just a month ago riding to work was, thanks to the exceedingly cold temperatures, painful. Now my biggest issue is keeping the sweat situation under control as I hammer down University.

In the evenings I often ride out on the lakeshore trail to the Humber River and back. It is not a particularly trying ride, actually it is quite easy. But a short hop along the water's edge gives me a chance to stretch my legs and forget about everything, even if only for a short time.

I have to admit though, riding the trail is not all fun, now that the weather is improving the trail is crowding. I suspect in the weeks to come my route may take a more northerly path west. But as always my rant (yes dear reader I come packing heat today) is directed at automobile drivers.

Why is it that drivers believe that the rules of no parking or no stopping when in a bike lane do not apply? Sometimes I think I should lug a hammer or perhaps a brick around and smash the windows of cars that force me to ride in and amongst the two ton moving killing machines. I try with quite some success to ride where there are bike lanes, this means that over an 8km direct route to work I end up going about 12km. But the truth is there is little point, every few blocks some piece of work has lodged his (or her?) car right in the bike lane and forced me to pass through and between cars. What's the point of a bike lane if cars can park there?

Sometimes I think that (Toronto candidate for mayor) Rocco Rossi, who seems to be campaigning as a conservative candidate for mayor of Toronto (he was the former national director of the Liberal party of Canada) is right, we don't need a bike lane on Jarvis St or Bloor Street. Frankly given the lack of regard motorists have for cyclists and bike lanes, I do not think a bike lane will not do one iota of good anyway.

What Toronto needs, desperately, is huge, god awful, painfully, horribly, expensive oil. Gas so unaffordable that Rocco and his cronies are reduced to public transit.

I suppose this next bit reveals me to be the antisocial curmudgeon everyone has always suspected, but I long for the day when gas is so expensive everyone is reduced to riding bikes. I have a really mean spirited dream to ride up behind some of the really offensive drivers (in my dream those drivers would, because of peak oil, now be cyclists). I would come up behind the offensive drivers, the ones who used to stop in bike lanes or cut me off whilst merging with traffic because they were not paying attention, we all know the type, the ones who honked and drove recklessly. Well I would love to come up behind them and scream obscenities at them and then hammer past as they struggle on under the weight of all their flab. Of course in reality the cyclist who was a motorist deserves no such treatment, they are to be commended for doing the right and decent thing. Still the dream of exacting vengeance on overly aggressive drivers lives on!

Anyway I donated blood again, number 68 for me. I got to thinking, my type, AB+, is pretty rare and exotic, but not very useful. Given how much donating hurts my performance why do I bother? I guess the person (or 68?) who's life I saved can explain why my donations matter, I just hope my donations are saving lives. It would be a shame if my blood was just poured away.

On Jealousy.

2010-03-04T12:45:00.004-05:00

To my readers, if you have never read Michael Barry's blog you should have a look sometime, I've got a link to it on the right. Not only is he a Toronto boy and a cycling nut but his name is rather similar to my own. Except he's the lucky guy who gets to ride a bike for a living, and live in Spain during the off season. (Yes I am rather jealous.)

Anyway I just wanted to point out a few specific posts Barry wrote that I found particularly interesting, Getting Back on the Bike seems appropriate this time of year, it is about resuming training after the off season rest. Of course my off season is about three months, Barry's is about three weeks (insert more jealousy).

Another interesting post is about bike mechanics on the pro teams. As Barry points out in Mechanics' Tools, a pro tour mechanic often starts that career in their teens and often find themselves doing the mechanical work for their entire career. Now that would be a really awesome job for me, combining my love for cycling with engineering, except I'm a little past my teens now. I guess when it comes to the pro mechanics all I can do is be more jealous.

On Spring

2010-03-02T16:09:00.002-05:00

Spring officially beings March 21 at 1732 UTC (or 1:32 in the afternoon two weeks this Sunday) when the vernal equinox takes place. The fact that I have already logged appreciable distance rides does not make the pending arrival of good weather any less exciting. (Especially given how crummy the weather was last year.)

The fact is were it not for the thought of long rides in the sun, with green fields and grass all around, I strongly doubt I would be at all sane by Friday. So in the spirit of dreaming of warm weather here my goals for 2010:

1. Do at least one, preferably all three OCA ITTs, try to average no less than 40km/h for distances of 15km or less and no less than 37 km/h for longer ITTs. (A little ambitious, but it is always better to aim high and come up short than aim low.)

2. Toronto to Rochester without wanting to just roll over and die when I get there.

2b. Rochester return to Niagara Falls if not all the way home, subject to weather.

3. Achieve demerit point velocities in a 60 (or higher) zone, in Ontario one must be driving at least 15km/h over the posted speed limit to get demerit points. (Note this goal cannot apply on downgrades greater than 3%. In other words, my goal is not achieved if I scream down a steep hill, I need to be on near flat, flat or up hills and doing the required 75km/h to reach this goal.)

4. Ride to Lake Simcoe a bunch of times, of course, hey it is my favourite ride. On McCowan between Doane Road and Ravenshoe road pull at no less than 40km/h the entire way. On the journey home, once south of Ravenshoe, on Warden, average no less than 33km/h to Stouffville Road. (If the lights are green, average at least 35km/h.)

5. Ride the panacke of South Western Ontario to Rattle Snake Point, climb said hill with a 53/39 chain ring and 11/23 cassette. Have enough left in my legs to still be able to catch any break aways or race David Silcox to the next Taxi without going into cardiac arrest as soon as we reach the "finish".

6. Do. Not. Bonk. Ever.

On A Few Random Thoughts

2010-03-01T06:32:00.002-05:00

Well the Canadian Olympic Men's Hockey Team won the gold. As a Canadian I think it is Federal law that I include that note at the beginning of my first post game Blog entry. So there, I said it!

Alright in fairness, as a Toronto boy growing up in the 70s and 80s, you do not follow hockey unless you had some sort of mental disorder. Hockey was predictable, The Leafs would loose. So I followed baseball; but, honestly is there a sport more boring to watch than a ball game? I gave up on Baseball after two back-to-back World Series wins and a strike, the back-to-back wins sort of felt like mission accomplished and the strike felt too much like a big "Fuck you" from the guys who were paid millions to scratch their male anatomy whilst spitting on national TV.

Maybe that's why I took up more speed based sports? Sort of me versus the clock. And I stopped watching or following sports for several years. Judging by the popularity of the PS3 and Wii, I would have to say I was ahead of my time.

Anyway enough lamenting my lack of sports heroes. Although after my previous rant, I really better say something nice, and this one is well deserved, Yes the Canadians were awesome, they won the gold and nobody expected them to, but we would be lousy sore winners if we didn't acknowledge the outstanding game the Americans had. Truth was the Americans should have clobbered us, maybe the loss in the first game against them woke our boys up to reality but the fact was at times, even in yesterday's game it looked to me like the Americans were skating circles around Team Canada. So yes we won, but I have to ask, why did I never hear the Star Spangled Banner? Maybe I remember wrong but do we not play the national anthems for all three podium countries? And why did no one from Finland come to collect a Bronze? (Or did they get that in a separate ceremony?)

Well enough of winter, I rode my bike to work and it feels like spring. I hope I'm right, shoveling snow sucks and I don't care how much the kids love the good old hockey game.