Cottontail Cotillian

#169
9 miles in Folsom

My whiplash continues to improve so when Himself called from work and suggested a bike ride, I was all over it like stink on a road killed skunk.

He had driven the Truck of Trikes to work, so all we had to do when he got home was to fill up the waterbottles. As much as I am doubtful about permanently storing the trikes in the truck, it is handy.

We hit the trail about 5pm after the worst of the heat. The sun had about 3 hours to go so the glare was not too bad yet. It was quite pleasant to ride in the later afternoon.

I was trying to get Glenn in action putting his waterbottle back. I missed.

We missed, again, clobbering a cottontail on the trail. This bunny dodged to trikes, a pedestrian, and a kid on a bike. Survivor Bunny will pass his dodgy genes along!

By the end of the ride, my neck and shoulders were pretty tired, so we skipped the duckpond loop and headed back to the parking lot.

My Strava stats:

Time	00:54:35
Elapsed Time	01:04:05
Max Speed	21.3mi/h
Avg Speed	9.9mi/h

All is well.

Drip drip drip

#168

7 miles in Folsom.

Today was cooler than the last few days but I still worked up a good sweat. Cold drops of sweat from my scalp hitting my shoulders. Yes, it is June.

Himself may have sweated also, but he is too polite to talk about it.
Me, I have no filters.

I'm more recovered from whiplash than the last ride, but decided not to be dumb about it and we only went 7 miles instead of 10. 10 may have been OK but I can't tell. My upper traps do a lot to hold my head on straight; they got a workout so I suppose 7 was OK after all.

Himself debuted cleated pedals (we had to order shoes wide enough for him before he could clip in). He also debuted a bright blue UnderArmor shirt I made for him. He practiced pulling back, so I'll bet he'll feel it tomorrow.

Thanks to a post on BROL, we figured out that the bosses for the water bottle cages on the rear of the Gekko's seat can be used w/out poking holes through the seat cover. So Himself has two cages for bottles installed.

I tried out Strava as a ride tracking application today. I have to figure out how to rename the route: right now it is imaginatively entitled "Ride."
It will be interesting to see how very much slower I am than others on some of the famous hills around here. Strava collects stats for 'segments' (user defined) of rides and posts comparative listings of others' rides on those segments.

Between this ride and the last one I cleaned my drive train (chain, cogs, deraillers), trimmed chewed up chain tubes, and lubed everything I could think of. I wiped off my bike's frame (there was a lot of dust and dirt and splotches on the underside) and admired the gleaming orange paint. Heck, I even wiped the inside of the rear fender!

While looking around for something with which to flare the ends of the chain tubes (stick the last 1/2 inch in hot water first to soften up the tube), I found that a cheap (and totally ineffective) hand held citrus juicer from IKEA was just the right size and shape to flare the tubes. So it is out of the kitchen and into my toolbox.


I'll probably sneak out Wednesday for an early morning ride.

CU

Waltzing along

#167

4 miles in Folsom

Why only four? Why so many days with no posts?

Well, I'll tell you.

I had a little fender bender (car on car for those who wonder) and, let me tell you, when a pickup truck challenges a Prius, me in the Prius is going to lose. I was rear ended (totally not my fault and all the parties involved agree with that) so I have whiplash for the third time in my life. I'm a freaking whiplash expert by now.

Anyway, I'm getting better every day but rattling around on a trike is not recommended. Or so says the physio and after bouncing around for four miles I would tend to agree with him.

So why did I go out anyway? I'll tell you. (You knew I would; you are so surprised you ought to sit down and have a cup of tea or maybe something stronger).

My sweetheart got a trike of his own. A lovely and very foldable HP Velotechnik Gekko.
Red.
He likes red.
His jacket is red (I made the jacket - it almost rained today so we finally got to wear our jackets.)

We stuffed both trikes in the car and went for a short ride. It was SO GREAT riding trikes with my sweetheart! Just fantastic.

Car-load of trikes and assorted bike stuff.

I was so excited to get out of the house that all I had with me was my phone camera, and I'd set the resolution for pictures very small, but I hope they get the idea across.

Himself went with a simple rectangular trunk bag for now. He stated he will "go shopping" for something else but I'll bet he doesn't.
Speaking of shopping: he did order bike shoes, but he ordered the wrong ones so we shipped them back today and ordered the right ones. The pedals he has are Shimano-type clips on one side and plain pedals on the other so he just wore regular shoes today.

The orange and brown blob on the ground is my cycling jacket (I made this one also). I sacrificed its pristine nature to keep the new trike from the gritty ground (it seems to work best, for now, to tip the trike on the side to fold and unfold it).

The Caterpiller Cha-cha

#166

30 miles today on the American River Bike Trail

I did not head out as soon as I had planned today, so the end of my ride was rather warm and I got slower and slower and sloooooooower. I seemed to have eaten enough (today's snacks were Nature Valley Granola bars (4 total) and an orange. 2 bottles of water and one of electrolytes. I had a wonderful tuna melt and a green salad and a gingersnap at Karen's Bakery Cafe after my ride.

These little guys were out EVERYWHERE. I zigged and zagged and mostly managed not not run any over.

I wonder if today was a furlough Friday (the state offices are closed two (I think) Fridays a month) because there were quite a few people out today.

I saw one group of cyclists at William Pond (my turnaround point today) and it took me a bit to notice that they were all signing. So even non-verbally-communicating cyclists talk up a storm at rest stops.

I tried out a little mini battery powered speaker for my ipod. It worked out well.
(I prefer not to ride with earbuds in. I can't hear enough of my surroundings and they are pretty uncomfortable.)
I strapped the speaker to the back of my headrest supports, facing forward. It was loud enough to hear when I was moving slowly, when I was most in need of entertainment, and basically inaudible at 15mph or faster, when I needed to by paying attention to the trail, anyway. And not loud enough to bother others, I hope.

I finally noticed ONE bike path sign, way way up on a post where no bicyclist I know would look. Good try anyway.

And the official name of the trail is the South Lake Natoma bike trail, which nobody uses anyway.

I stopped at Hagen Park (one of many stops today) and inadvertently disturbed a duck and her ducklings. I wish I had had a video camera running, because the ducklings each tumbling over into the pond was, dare I say, cute.

Duck and -lings pre-tumble

Triple Threat

#165

9 miles in Folsom.

Himself took a 1/2 day off (waaaaay too much vacation saved up) and we pedaled around Folsom's bike trails this afternoon.

He was going pretty fast. My three-days-in-a-row legs were working hard to keep up. But I did. He corners faster than I'm willing to. So I worked a little harder after each corner. And there are a lot of corners in Folsom.

We almost missed our turn because the pavement and the dirt and everything was covered with tree-fluff.

A light coating of fluff

I got tree-fluff stuck to my tires. It went "crunch crunch crunch" when ridden over.

My tire needs a shave! BTW the round dents you see are wear indicators. And it is also pretty easy to see that my alignment is good, also. Well, neutral chaotic, if you must know.

I experimented with slightly higher pressures in my tires (it's been over a year at 80psi all around, I tried 90 in back and 85 in front). Don't know that I can tell the difference.

I've ridden 102 miles in May so far. I'll make, and exceed, my pledged miles. Yay me!

Slings and salmon

#164

26 miles today on the American River Trail.

I took it slower than the last time I went out on one of the 20 mile weekend rides. Yes, it was longer than 20.

This was another ride NOT organized by me but I got to help anyway by leading us out.

Well, I led us out once we got on the bike path.

I learned a new phrase today "bike salmon" when you want to travel on a specific side of the street but it is against the flow of traffic (you use the sidewalk). I am constitutionally opposed (what does that mean anyway? That it is against my personal Constitution or makes my physical self (little c constitution) disturbed?) to riding on the sidewalk to avoid crossing a street in traffic on a bike so I practiced Effective Cycling and got to the bike path before the salmon did.

Whew. That was quite a sentence.

It was cooler today (Delta breeze) so I wore my spiffy cycling jacket for all of 5 minutes. I think it never got over 80 today, but was certainally cooler than yesterdays near-90.

Pretty early in our ride a fellow on a yellow Greenspeed trike zoomed up to the group and tagged along. It took me a while to place him, since the last time I saw him he was on a diamond frame going up and down Beatty Road in El Dorado Hills on our club's annual New Year's Day hill-climbing suffer-fest.

Being totally observant (sarcasm here) I finally noticed that he had one arm in a sling. He had broken his collar bone two days ago in an 18mph mountain bike crash and was riding his girlfriend's trike one-handed because it beat staying at home discovering all the things he couldn't do.
He has a plate in his shoulder.
And the trike was far too short for him.
And one tire was not seated properly so he bump bump bumped along.
Other than that, he was fine.

We chatted for a while, then he found a couple of right-paced roadies to chase.

He would periodically return to the group, the pursue some more roadies. I noticed that the roadies worthy of pursuit were female. Remember, a triker's view of a roadie from behind is a spandex-clad ... well, behind.
I had a good laugh.

We had a variety of speeds along today; I was out in front with sling-man and two others. The ride leader was behind with the other two riders. It was interesting, and a bit pleasant, to be in on a group ride but with unencumbered vision.

We managed to stop at the same places twice for bio-breaks and water and rest, but we did not come to our turnaround point at the same time. Eventually, sling-man pointed out that we had been sitting and waiting for 20 minutes so we headed back, only finding the others nearly at the end of the ride. All's well that ends well.

I feel pretty good for having ridden 37 miles in one weekend. But I'd still like to bust out 60 or 70 in a weekend sometime.
7 more miles and I'll be at 100 miles for the month, 2/3rds of the way to my Bike Month pledge.

Keep ridin' and smilin'

Fine Folsom Frying

#163

Cool lake on a hot day

11 miles on the Usual Loop around the Usual Lake with the Usual Suspects. Well, some of them.
It is getting hot and our 10am start time may have deterred some folks, or maybe they are doing everything for the whole weekend on Saturday. Or or or ...

Anyway, we had a sociable group of 4 people, me and my sweetheart, and two Repeat Offenders (who have come on this ride before).

All went well, except that the water fountain at Negro Bar was turned off. What is up with this!? I'll be emailing Folsom SRA with a request for an explanation. Hope they have a good one.

And Himself was a bit struck by the heat. So he parked himself in the shade, drank some electrolye enhanced water, and I soaked his shirt with some plain water. He cooled right off and perked right up.

We stopped near the beginning of the ride and pumped up a pair of tires and had an interesting conversation about bike pumps.

The other 'bent rider putting his pump back.

Tires pumped and ready to roll

Both of us with recumbents on this ride had Schrader valves on our rides, so we had TWO pumps available, one for each tire on the mountain bike. Made for faster pumping.
My sweetheart (in beige and brown shorts above) is getting ready for his Cowboy Mount, where you get rolling and then swing the other leg over the bike. I could never learn that trick. And now I don't have to.