A Cyclist’s Time is Fluid

Pictograph of Hands in Red Rock Canyon, NV

This blog has always been about the trailside tree with the tumor; Mike the grey haired commuter on the maroon Miata, lining up the 80 water bottles from my pantry end-to-end and performing dare devil stunts over them.  They’re slices of bike bread.  I’m sure you have a fave like the Sink Shower, Ault Park Mary, or the Competitive Couple.  Sadly my creative bottle has been a bit empty since February when I puked in my hat at Worlds.  Perhaps I peaked.

When Gumbo boy occasionally writes a guest blog I always remind him to look for the unusual, the details that raise an eyebrow, something that makes you smile.  A week or so ago Corey explained the relationship between a lazy eyed llama and motivating junior cyclists.  It was a good example and reminder of the reason you read, like us on Facebook, and follow on Twitter and Strava.  Cycling is just as much of who we are as our relationships, our professions, and our homes.

If your racing, doing a charity ride or planning a bike vacation this summer chances are your car is painted in bird crap, the cats are licking the dirty dishes in your sink, and you have a family of baby bunnies in the tall grass that used to be your backyard.  I completely understand.

I’ve been doing the opposite.  For the past four months, since racing Masters Worlds I’ve put my focus on some things that took a back seat to training.  My buddy Frank calls them “domestics.”  I planted daisies and an Azalea bush, had great conversations on neighborhood walks with my wife,  and used a toothbrush to get the last bit of Louisville mud out of the shifter box in my 4-Runner.  I ran the beach in the Dominican Republic, hiked down the White Rock Trail to the Colorado River in Arizona and visited Booger Hollow in Georgia.  As a result, I haven’t really had an interest in writing for a while. 

It’s not that I don’t love writing or racing anymore.  I do.  I also like pulling weeds out of the garden.  I like reading good books like “The Art of Racing in the Rain.”  Producing radio commercials for a living, I also like freelance money.

The beauty of cycling is that our lives aren’t on schedule.  We don’t eat dinner at six o’clock every night, get the oil changed every 5000 miles or put the trash on the curb the night before pickup.  A cyclist’s time is fluid.  What a shame to arrange your life’s activities by minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. 

We save laundry for rainy days; cut coupons on the couch at night, only make the bed when company is coming over and hide unopened mail in the pantry.  You discover how to live among a thriving population of dust bunnies, how to romanticize a drippy faucet, and smile at peeling paint. 

I was going to apologize for not writing a whole lot in the four months since cyclocross worlds.  However, I know you get it.  To do so would be apologizing for living the wonderful life we share with bicycles.  

Cycling Socks At Work

While I'm out riding and hopefully cooking up another good post, enjoy this previous post from the Joe Biker blog on AOL, the blog before the Best Bike Blog Ever*, dated 9/8/08.

Maybe this 40 year old cyclist is a trendsetter, or maybe I’ve just crossed the threshold of youth and I’m so out of touch that I’ve lost my fashion marbles. But, I really think these Sock Guy cycling socks look quite trendy with my work clothes today. They’re black with a brown star, so if your pants rise up a bit and someone catches a glimpse more than ankle high, ka-pow! I knock them out with my cool cycling-slash-work socks.

We had a blackout of sorts in the Cincinnati area this past week when the winds from Hurricane Ike blew threw. As of today, the 6th day after the storm, there are still around 80 thousand homes and businesses without power. I had planned on doing some laundry after the Loveland OVCX series cyclocross race on Sunday, but with no power, no laundry. Of course, even though our power came back on Monday night, I still use that as excuse to why I haven’t washed the heap of clothes in the bedroom and instead dipped into the cycling socks drawer for something to wear to work. Now, looking at my styling socks, I’m wondering if there are other socks in that drawer that I could wear to work.

I could be on the cusp of a whole new category of work socks. Normally men wear two colors of socks to work, black or brown. Alas! I have discovered something new…the Ralph Marlin Grateful Dead Fish Tie of the at work sock world. The tall-crew socks seem to do the trick. You can’t rock regular cycling ankle huggers at work. So, I went on the Sock Guy website and tried to find a few other styles of cycling socks you could rock at work.

Here we have the “Money” cycling sock, perfect for the sales staff. Put your feet up on the boss’ desk and ask for a raise or an increase in commission percentage while you flash these in their face.

Here’s the “King” cycling sock, which are quite effective when you need to lay down the law with your subordinates.

And for the riff-raff of the company, like myself, here’s a stylish racing stripe to impress your co-workers with at happy hour when you dazzle them with conversation about your last cyclocross race.

Pulling Weeds & Hamstrings

You know why cyclists, and other pro athletes, seem to retire around age 38 or so? It’s not because they are past their prime, achieved all their goals or ended up with their name on an El Puerto list.  It’s because they got to the age where they own houses and grass and gardens and planter boxes and all the muscle ripping ligament tweaking upkeep that comes with it. 

By nature, cyclists appreciate beauty and therefore cannot turn their back on garden weeds or burnt out patches of grass.  They seek perfection in form and movement.  The flow of sweet single track and echelons that mimic migratory flight, engrain the theory of natural order in a cyclists noggin.  Tell me you don’t want your yard to look like a Graham Watson photo of a flowing flowered French countryside or Colorado Aspens framing a meadow. 

The grass in my yard must be even height.  Weeds cannot distract my eyes from the roses.  Planter boxes perched above a cobbled patio must elicit the feeling of an Italian café.  However, the fitness developed from riding bikes drains out the second you stoop over and pull weeds from the garden, leaving you a quivering worthless heap.

After a landscaping project last fall, wheel barrows and burly men in steel toed boots carrying plants, soil and sod up the hill and into our backyard put the hurt on our already hurting side yard.  In hindsight, a neurotic side-effect of cycling, maybe I should’ve anticipated the traffic on the path and had them sod the side yard too.  Second guessing aside, my nagging sense of natural order told me that I had to patch the grass, pronto! 

Cyclists learn from their mistakes.  The last time I worked in the garden, pulling weeds, I also pulled some hamstrings.  You would think that being fit and flexible, having the ability to ride for hours, bunny hop and cyclocross would keep us immune from the aches and pains of the typical fatso doing yard work, but that’s not so.  I would hedge a guess that even the great Eddie Merckx, whose toughness on the bike gave him the nickname “The Badger,” fell victim to his own bull-headed cycling stubbornness, and was eventually demoralized working solo in his Belgian garden.  For cyclists, gardens are kryptonite.

To keep the Kryptonite from exacting its toll, this time I decided that it wasn’t wise to bend over at the waist to patch the grass.  To avoid unnecessary hunching, crouching and stooping, I would kneel on one knee, a brilliant tactic I thought.  My strategy was to patch the hillside going left to right in rows starting at the bottom, to minimize travel up and down the hillside.  Like systematically putting food in my outside jersey pockets and spare tube in the middle, I laid the buckets, hose, trowel, claw and bag of seed mix in a systematic order in front of me to avoid overreaching and contorting my body in unnatural positions.  I stayed hydrated.  I even took two breaks and a natural. 

For three and a half hours I patched.  Standing on the sidewalk, looking up the hillside I admired my work.  In two weeks I’d have grass-babies.  In a few months cyclists from all around would come to my yard, tuck their sunglasses in their helmets, and ponder the plush even looking grass.  By the end of summer it’d be worth the attention of Graham Watson’s lens.

For three days I’ve been sore.  While not as crippling as last time, the garden got me again.  It put the whammy on my right glute and hamstring.  I haven’t ridden a bike since.  Thankfully it’s a rest-week.  Aside from training to become more fit as a gardener, or crawling through the garden like a snake pulling weeds with my mouth, I’ve realized the best way a cyclist can achieve natural nirvana and avoid getting hurt in the garden, is to hire a team. 

A typical landscaping crew is remarkably like a bike team.  There’s the team leader that doesn’t do any work unless it’s of the highest order and there’s the strong domestiques that slog the wheel barrows and plants from the truck to the yard.  It’s no surprise the landscaping cyclists that I know are usually the owners of the company, immune from the hard labor.  Attacking my garden on my own is like being in a race without the support of a team, doomed to take on every weedy attack on my own.