On Short Rides

Lately I've been running on less sleep than normal, I've caught myself nodding off at the office a few times. To be honest it is mostly my fault. On Tuesday May 27 we conditionally sold our home.

Now allow me to digress for a second, for those of you who have never taken part in a agreement of purchase and sales (for a home) in Ontario the process is pretty straight forward if very legal and tedious. Suppose that I have a home that I wish to sell, first I call a real-estate agent who is (we hope) not a crook - although that is unlikely. Now the real-estate agent’s job is to market the home, to make it sell quickly for as much money as possible - typically agents will suggest a listing price, put the home on the Multiple List Service system, and so on. Now the buyer comes, sees the home, decides to put in an offer. A bargain is reached without the buyer ever meeting the seller face to face, instead the buyer's agent presents an offer, typically put together by the agent, to the seller. The seller in turn crosses off parts of the offer they don't like and send it back to the buyer who makes their own changes. Often the sticking point is the price and it seems from my experience that while both the buyer and seller agree on the big digits, i.e. three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand, or one point two million vs. one point three million, it’s the stupid numbers that cause the most trouble, three hundred forty six thousand, five hundred, vs. three hundred four six thousand even. (Yes less than a third of a percent one way or the other can – and often does - break the deal.) By the time a deal is reached its usually pretty late in the evening and naturally I had to wake up early the next morning for work.

On a related aside, for those of you who are curious, there were two conditions, as it was a condo, the status certificate (condo board records establishing that the condo corporation is in good shape). The other condition was the buyer getting financing secured from a lender. To date the buyer has waived the financing – someone will loan them the money – but they are still waiting on the status certificate, my condo property manager is a little slow… in more ways than one.

Anyway after having a sleep deprived week, I woke up early on Saturday and went for a group ride out to Mississauga Road at Dundas, and back. It started nice and gentle, about 25km/h, but by the time we got out to Mavis some of the keeners were really pushing, we had been gradually accelerating to a reasonable 30 ~ 35km/h, but the 40km/h on an uphill was more than difficult. Ultimately the keeners broke from the pack and raced across lakeshore on their own. I will say this, those keeners forced me to have a pretty good workout.

I should add it rained Saturday early in the morning, it stopped eventually which was nice, but when I got home from my ride I decided to clean my bike from top to bottom. Actually I’ve been told that after any rain clean the bike chain. Well later that day I had to go for a quick ride, again, this time to the office, on the way home I decided to get some more chain cleaner. Foolishly I stopped at a bike store close to home, instead of locking my bike up at home and walking to the store. By the time I left it was pouring, again! Two cleanings, in one day.

Sunday I went for another ride (actually two, first the Ride for Heart, then a nice little 40k), this time on my own, here is my route:

On Warden as I was going up the 401 over-pass I encountered a red light, so I down shifted to the smallest of my three chain rings. Once the light turned green I had no trouble starting but when I decided to up shift to a real gear the chain would not click into the larger rings and I spun helplessly for only a few seconds, but long enough to get really scared as cars whipped past me. Eventually the chain did engage and I completed my little 40k with out much more excitement. Later I played chase with a car on Kingston Road on the way home, I was keeping right beside him until a parked car forced me to slow down.

Monday I went for another ride, this time I took the Martin Goodman Trail in an effort to find my old friends from the skate club. Since none were around I used Lakeshore to get from Parklawn all the way back to Queens Quay. Thanks to a strong tail wind I was able, with only a modest effort, to maintain a steady 40km/h on a 100~110 pedal cycles per minute. (Going the other way was a real killer let me tell you.) As I got near home I decided to bike around side streets, Kingston Road, Woodbine, etc, until I crossed 43km, it took a really long time. I am beginning to think my GPS is not entirely accurate.
Towards the end of that ride I ran into another cyclist and we raced for a little while, but he was better than me, and within only about 5km was quite a distance ahead. I made strategic errors as well as just not being fast enough (and I am terrified of railway tracks having wiped out on some 13 years ago). Clearly I have room for improvement.