On Dreading

Today is Wednesday, therefore tomorrow is Thursday, the day after Friday and the day after that is Saturday, September 13, 2008. Roughly between 0700 and 0930 on Saturday (actually it will probably be between 0720 and 0910) I will be skating. I will be doing the North Shore Inline Marathon, for the second and very likely last time. Any regular reader of my blog knows that when I signed up for the NSIM back in April I was an avid skater, any regular reader who has actually been following my blog since then knows things changed just a little. The truth is, I cannot wait for Saturday, Saturday afternoon that is! The marathon will be over and I can get down to the business of selling my unused wheels and bearings, to make room for my bike repair tools and spare parts.

A part of my life will be over, just as a new part begins. Ironic, I used to be completely addicted to inline skating. I figure in the period between July 2004 and April 2008 I probably spent upwards of 1200 hours on skates. I loved the freedom, and the speed.

And then I lost the passion. It was not as if I just decided one day, that's it, I am giving up on this, I think it was a combination of things. The new bike (Amy) the extra long distance to get to TISC, whereas the Beaches Cycle Club is right around the corner. The change at TISC, I went to have fun mostly, but it seems from what I read that the focus shifted to winning races and away from the relaxed environment that I liked. (Hint to elite racers out there, guys I have a day job that causes enough stress, when I go riding or skating I am trying to relieve, not re-live stress.) I am not trying to say these changes are a bad thing, I am just saying I am not interested in winning if I can't have fun doing it and what I read of this year's programme did not look like my cup of tea.

Anyway one thing any skater has to admit that cycling has them beat on, I can ride my bike from Woodbine and Queen St. in Toronto all the way to Hamilton Beach, let all the Toronto skaters draft off me for a few of what would be recovery laps, before turning around and heading right up to the top of rattle snake point, and then home... which inspires me to propose a new ride on Riding Too Far.

Another reason I love to ride, since I switched to riding I have done even less driving than before, I am averaging about 10~15km/week. Now think about this, in driving 15km we will say I get appalling fuel economy, that is say, 2L of gas, there are roughly 300million people in North America, if we all burned 2L of gas a week, that would be 600ML/week or about 70ML/day, lets assume that industry uses an amount equal to consumers, so 140ML/day, and lets further assume that there is 40 gal. (151L) of gas in a barrel of oil, that means that for gas consumption, North America would use about 1M barrels of oil per day, if everyone drove as little as I did. (Oh and yes, notice that I assume 6 and 96 year-olds all drive.) Well 1M barrels of day sounds like a lot until you realise that in fact the United States alone uses more than 10Million barrels of oil per day! Instead of driving to Hamilton, ride a bike. If we could all cut our gas consumption back by as much as I did, global warming would become the great non issue of the 21'st century instead of probably the greatest threat to the human race since the invention of the atomic bomb. If we could all cut our consumption back as much as I have, the United States could end its dependency not just on Saudi or OPEC oil, the United States could end it's dependency on Alaskan and Canadian oil! Imagine a World where Osama Bin Laden is no longer a threat, a World where air is clean and traffic fatalities are a thing of the past, it is possible you know. Just ride a bike more.

On A New Blog

I would like to introduce everyone to a new blog I have started, Riding Too Far. If anyone has a long ride they would like to publish, no matter what club, if any, they are in, or where in the world the ride is, please get in touch with me. The rules are simply, the ride must be long and it must be a road bike ride.

Here is something from the first post in Riding Too Far which is a sort of philosophy of the blog.

This blog will be used for planning long rides. What is a long ride? Well riding far enough that doing it alone would require a certain insanity that most people lack. A ride where Hammer Gel goes from being a disgusting goo to the essential fuel that prevents bonking. In short the distance is not so much a numeric value, rather it is a state of mind.

I will be publishing everything relating to the Simcoe ride, as well as all future long rides there.

On Trouble with Tires

This weekend was frustrating. For an outside observer I am sure the whole thing is comic in a pathetic sort of way, but for me it was frustrating.

Lesley and I had planned to go hiking on Saturday, we had planned on spending a day enjoying the last of summer warmth and sunshine, instead, it rained. Rain sucks. We spent much of the day sleeping and grocery shopping, not exactly the romance I had hoped for. Best of all I slept so much I had all kinds of trouble sleeping Saturday night.

Sunday was a group ride with the BCC, as I mentioned earlier I was the ride 'helper'. Which I took to mean, I ought to ride with the slower pack. Which was fine, up until the point where someones tire blew out, perhaps 2km into the ride. Now replacing the tube went reasonably smoothly except for some bizarre reason that I cannot explain I just knew that tire was going to cause more problems. I should have said something, I don't know why I did not, because sure enough, at about 35km into the ride, at Elgin Mills and Regional Road 30 that same tire failed again. This time a patch was attempted, it did not work, then someone else threw their spare tube in, it had a hole in it, then someone else donated a tube to the cause and we were fine. Just prior to the tube failure I had started my own little break away, there was a steep hill and I wanted an easy ride to the top. It was after I got to the top someone else caught up with me and told me that so-and-so's tube had failed.

I would like to quickly enumerate here (this was one person's tire problems for one ride):

1. change of tube 2km into ride
2. patch at 35km
3. patch does not work, change tube again
4. new tube has a hole in it, change tube again

Of course to make sure we were suffering appropriately, it was around the same time we got that second tube working that the sky started to open up a crack. We decided to cut the ride short and head west on Elgin Mills. It seemed, from looking at the sky, that the rain was in a tight cell that was centered on Elgin Mills, just west of us, so I had the pack steer North to Stouffville Rd and then west on Stouffville. It was a good call, we got a couple drops of drizzle but not much rain.

We made it to Unionville and stopped for coffee when the sky opened up and rain really started with force. I have decided that riding in the rain is not fun, especially when it is cold. There is something even less fun than riding in the rain though, that is being the looser who rides over a piece of metal or glass or whatever it was that slashes a tire and causes yet another tube problem, when it is a nice day changing a tire is perfectly reasonable thing to do, but when its raining and muddy, changing a tube sucks the big one.

It sucks to change a tube even more when the first tube explodes during inflation. It sucks to change a tube even more when it is your own bloody tube on your own bike! And it sucks still more when the second replacement tube does not even get you home and you are stuck taking shelter from the rain in a bus shelter until your wife can come out and pick you up. At least one person was kind enough to wait with me until Lesley came out and rescued me. That made the wait so much more pleasant, if I was not so darn cold I probably would not have minded the whole experience so much, but with all the tube failures, three of my own and four of the other guy (who will remain nameless on this blog) it was a pretty frustrating day. The rain certainly did not help, the best part, the weather report, which I checked prior to the ride, looked fine.

Here is the route I took on Sunday, in high definintion or see below.

BCC Sept 7 2008 Ride

Share your bike routes @ Bikely.com

To top off the whole experience, last night I was showing a friend how to install a replacement tube, the tube was not installed correctly, the tire blew during my morning commute to work. Oddly when I checked, by applying weight and bouncing the back wheel the tire seemed fine, it was only when I got into work and pinched the tire I realised I was riding a flat, even during the ride itself everything seemed reasonably smooth. I seem to have bad luck with tires these days.

On Routes and Plans

I was going to go into an angry tirade against the Toronto International Film Festival. I was going to rant about how disorganized and frankly at $20/ticket over priced the whole experience is, it is a movie after all, not live theatre. But I will not recount my recent tale of woe trying to obtain tickets. I have a hate/hate relationship with the celluloid industry. The movie shoots in Toronto often take up all the on street parking sports near my parents home, obstruct roads/paths and often force me to squeeze my bike between their over sized trucks/pylons and the street car tracks not 15cm away. I realise much as I love to hate the movie industry nobody likes to read my rantings, so I am going to stop bitching and move on to things that make me happy.

Sunday, that is tomorrow, is a Sunday ride with the BCC. I am trying to commit the route to memory, that is probably the most difficult part of these rides, sure some hill climbs are pretty tough, but remembering the exact route, that takes real effort. I guess I better get it committed to memory though I volunteered to, how did Dan put it, "Mike Cole has opted to be a Ride Helper for Sunday's Ride". Dan is in Montreal, busy looking at 2009 model year bikes... I wish I worked in a bike store, when I go to Montreal it's to add a new Fast Ethernet Interface to a Cisco 3845 or something like that.

Lesley and I had thought of going hiking today but the weather has been really foul, so we slept in then took Kalubi to the groomer to get a hair cut. When we get the big guy back maybe I can take an image of him (its not a photograph, that involves celluloid and acids and such) and post it here. I think Lesley opted for the 'Lion Cut.'

Anyway I am still dreaming up changes to the Lake Simcoe and return ride. I am eyeing a few modifications to the return trip to make things a little nicer and longer. First come right down Warden (as per the original plan) but at Stouffville Road hang a left and go right across Stouffville (becomes Main Street) and then turn right at 10'th Line, then take 10'th south (becomes Reesor Rd.) A couple reasons for this change:

1. There is a nice coffee shop in Stouffville just before 10'th line so we can get more water, coffee, whatever before the last section of the ride.
2. Racing down Reesor is about the damned greatest experience for a speed freak like me that I can think of. There are parts of Reesor where I start cranking it and look down at my GPS and can hardly believe how fast I am going, and with so little effort too!

Anyway once we reach Finch we have to go around the zoo (Old Finch Ave East to Meadowvale then South) then we have some options for which I really would like some feedback before I settle on the final route:

1. Roller insanity: AKA West on Ellesmere to Scarborough Golf Club Road. Ellesmere has two huge rollers with traffic lights at the bottom of each valley, every damned time I get to those bloody lights they are red. So when I say Roller insanity what I really should be calling it, is pain in the legs hill climb evilness. (Preceded by a monster ride the brake feast.) Oh yeah, there is a lot of traffic on Ellesmere, this is probably the busiest of the four routes.
2. Valley feast: AKA West on Old Kingston then Kingston Road. Old Kingston drops just west of Meadowvale into Colonel Danforth Park, then just as you finish the roll out from the drop, you have to climb the hill out of the valley. Then merge up with Kingston Road and the hills become a slightly more manageable steady climb to around Brimely.
3. Cheating: AKA use Kingston road that bridges over Colonel Danforth Park.
4. The Long and Winding Road: AKA find a way around Kingston Rd (probably take Sheppard East to Port Union and then go South) and get onto Guildwood Parkway and ride that to Kingston Road. This is probably the lightest route for car traffic, with some lovely hill climbs and it is also the longest route.

In all cases we end up on Kingston Road, eventually, which we take due south west - Kingston becomes Eastern Ave at Queen Street - until we reach Leslie Street, then a left and a quick right and we are back where we started the day. (Actually just past Midland we take Danforth Ave. a short distance, to bypass the section of Kingston Rd that is in desperate need of resurfacing.)

Other items I need feedback on: time, since the weather report for the 20'th is a high of about 22 degrees I am thinking, we can probably put off the start time to 6:30 and meet the Elgin Mills crowd at 8:00, get a little more sleep and ride when it is a little warmer? Or do we want to contend with fewer cars?

Please post your thoughts below, I would like to settle on the final route when I get home from Duluth. Hey in exactly one week I will be done with the North Shore Inline Marathon, seems like only yesterday I was registering for it, damn time flies when you ride a bike!

A few good rides

Alright first, this is something to tinker with, but if it gets the creative juices flowing then it is a good thing.

A route to Wasaga beach by bike

http://www.bikely.com/

And here is a high resolution link to that route. Actually I am thinking, a better route out of the city is along the lakeshore and then north towards Aaron's house, instead of turning off at Aaron's just keep on trucking until you hit Lake Huron.

Now here is my modified route to Lake Simcoe, I have added a detour to take a more scenic route back into town, the total distance is only about 15km further this way then the route I proposed earlier. (A high resolution map is on the other side of this link.)

The Extended route to Lake Simcoe

http://www.bikely.com/

On The End of an Empire

Here is a picture from the Sunday ride, I took most of the photos on Dan's behalf so there is only one shot of me, courtesy of Dan Yang.

Dan was in front of me on his bike and held the camera facing backward, while riding at around 30km/h, under those conditions a very good shot, it is just too bad the sun was not higher in the sky.

Below is an essay, if you came here to read about riding or, if you've been living in a cave, skating, you might as well go on to the next blog, because the following will not interest you.

There was an article in the Huffington Post (see what I am reading on the right) today on the subject of the Republican Party. Entitled Off the shelf the article by Robert L. Borosage spent a great deal of time praising America's thirty fourth president, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Admittedly there is a lot to like about Eisenhower, and as Borosage points out, there is a lot to dislike about Eisenhower. But what I wanted to point out is not how good or bad a president Eisenhower was, rather, it was the condition of the rest of the World at the time.

Consider, Eisenhower was elected in 1952 and served for two terms or until Kennedy was inaugurated in January of 1961. During that time Europe was still in shambles from World War II, Russia was under the grip of a system which time would reveal to be a failure of massive proportions, and a leader who's paranoia was beyond insanity. Japan was a smouldering ruin, and China... well if Russia was a mess, China was even worse. At the time Eisenhower was elected, in fact long after the end of his term in office, America produced more oil than she consumed American factories exported manufactured goods all over the world, but mostly to American consumers, American farmers fed the world and the federal budget was balanced, even the long term costs of social security was not considered a major issue because there was a baby boom in full swing, Americans were producing babies faster, much faster, than they were dying.

In considering all of the above it is hard not to consider the 1950s as a golden age of the Pax Americana. I use the term Pax Americana as in Pax Romana, and just as the Peace of Rome was hardly a peace at all - students of Roman history can have quite the brain storm trying to think of a period when the Roman Empire, or Republic was at peace - America was in perpetual menace by a country who could hardly feed or clothe her own citizens, but did make an atomic bomb.

In modern times we look back on the 1950s mostly wistfully, there was high employment, a good standard of living and a man could get a factory job, without completing high school and support his family on a very satisfactory income. (A guy like me with a Masters in Engineering, well damn, I'd probably be working at NASA if I wanted to, no doubt wearing a white shirt and a thin black tie and be as comfortable then with a slide ruler as I am today with my laptop.)

Republicans are promising us a return to that age, the age of Leave it to Beaver. Except I think it is time for us to face some facts, it is time for reality to set in. The 1950s were not a normal period at all. Europe recovered from World War II, the Russians cast aside the ideas of Marx, East Asia has adopted a maxim of 'business is war'. Possibly most critically, The United States depends on other countries for the life blood of the modern military and economy, the United States needs Canadian and Mexican oil and drilling new off shore wells or tapping the Alaska Wild Life Refuge is not really going to fix the root problem, oil is running out and new elephant finds, or newly opened fields will only postpone the inevitable day of reckoning. The day when we return to life as it was in the eighteenth century.

What is going to happen when we cannot truck food across the country faster than it rots? What will happen to our cities of millions of people when all the food must come from no further than a few hundred miles away? What happens when there is no fertilizer because, lets face it fertilizer is a petrochemical, just like plastic and ironically, the very roads we drive on.

What happens to the vast military machine that exists in the United States today? Like it or not, the empire of bases has allowed the US to become the great commercial power. Think about it, Osama Bin Laden is not a real threat to Americans, yes he is a murder, but ultimately The Seven Dwarfs of big Tobacco are responsible for the deaths of more Americans every year than Osama Bin Laden will claim in his life time. So why the big effort to hunt down Bin Laden? Because he is the first real threat to America's military hemogony since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is just a theory, but surely the circumstances surrounding this whole 'war on terror' seem just a tad too war like and not enough focus on catching a criminal.

But returning to my original thought, if America is not able to contain the threat in the rise of this modern more rebellious strain of Islam, if America is ultimately held hostage, her own insatiable need for oil being used to finance one side in the 'war on terror' while her tax dollars finance the other side, shades of the 'war on drugs', how long until the breaking point?

How long is it until America goes bankrupt having loaded the world up with arms and run up the visa bill without the income to pay the mortgage, will the whole experiment in rule of self government come crashing down in an orgy of subprime debt? Has self government failed already? One hundred or one thousand years from now will historians look back at the Supreme Court appointment of George Walker Bush in 2000 and say, it was on that day, in December 2000, that rule of self government ended in the United States? Just as March 15, 44BCE on the steps of another government institution that Rome gave up on democracy and became an empire. An Empire that could not even last 500 years before being over run by barbarians. Will the Rome look eternal next to Washington?

Anyway, sometimes a person needs to write an essay, I had the idea bouncing around that Republicans really do believe that all we need do is lower taxes enough, end abortion, teen pregnancy increase the size of the US army another five hundred thousand, and the days of black and white sitcoms will return with huge chrome fenders. Do I really believe this is the end of American Empire? I am not sure, eight years ago I was dead certain that no matter if Al Gore or George Bush became president the country was too strong for one guy too really screw things up, now I am not sure if the country is strong enough to pull herself out of her current funk ever.

I will not have much to report on riding for the next few days, I will not be doing any group rides until Sunday and then no more rides until after the Duluth Marathon on Sept. 13, I need to taper. So sorry to say, you may have to put up with more politics here for the next few days, but I will say this now, baring something really substantial in Duluth I expect that by Sept. 15 almost all references to skating will be gone from this blog. Somewhere along the way to getting a passsion for riding I completely lost the passion for skating and now I am beginning to view the entire weekend of Sept. 13 and 14 as a lost weekend.

On Goals not achieved

I think I want to cry. I had set a goal of Lake Simcoe and back. I know I can do it, it's 180km and I have done 196.5, just last week. I did not achieve my goal, I had hoped other people would join me, but perhaps the 0530 start was too early? Maybe, unlike me, most people don't go for these ultra-endurance rides? Whatever the case I was alone and as it turned out, perhaps that was for the best. Something I ate for breakfast did not exactly, see eye to eye - so to speak (write) - with my stomach. I decided to turn for home at Vivian Road. (Incidentally, Warden is still under construction North of Vivian, besides some construction signs the only evidence that there is, or ought to be, construction on Warden is the fact that the road surface is absolutely pathetic, but not because it is being worked on, rather the road is just in plain bad shape.)

Anyway here is what I did, 101km, I guess nothing to be ashamed of, in April I'd be amazed by that kind of distance, but compared with what I wanted to achieve, and the average speed (only 25km/h), again see my remark about a stomach and a breakfast for my excuse for the lame speed. Since a blog is just a public diary I guess I should record my emotional state on making it home, I felt lame. Anyway enough from the self pity department. Here is the route if you don't want to click on the link.

Labour Day Ride 2008

http://www.bikely.com/

Obviously this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, therefore I invite my readers on a little ride. I propose that the Saturday after the Duluth North Shore Inline Marathon we all go for a little road bike ride. This ride is open to everyone who has the endurance, guys if you can hack a 42km inline skate Marathon a bike ride of this duration will be trivial... no it actually it won't be at all trivial, but I have faith. Of course I would like to see lots of people from the BCC as well, (the date I am proposing is September 20). The ride would start at the same 0530 time and would follow a similar route, except that we would stay with Warden once we cut over from Leslie right to Baseline Road and then use Warden for the return trip - keep things simple and Warden is mostly a pretty good road, except between Davis Dr. and Vivian but that's just 2 out of 90km.

For those of you who want to come but are not sure because you live far from the starting line and 0530 is awfully early you have two options. One, I have a guest bedroom, available on a first call first serve basis, you can spend Friday night here at The Beach (aka The Beaches). Or the other option, you can meet up at the Starbucks at Elgin Mills and Leslie (North East corner) at 0700, that ride is approximately 110km.

Baring appalling weather I am doing this, and I invite everyone to join in a bucolic adventure through Southern and Central Ontario. If you are joining in, please post a reply in the comments to this post. I will answer any questions you might have. If your questions are private, send an email to mjcole121@hotmail.com and post a quick note here telling me you emailed my hotmail account (or if you know my real email address, just use that).

September 20 I will do this if it kills me!