Bicycling

As of August 2010, the number of consecutive years I’ve ridden at least one double century is 15. I hope to continue this streak for as long as I am physically capable to (barring injury or death, probably five more decades). This seems reasonable to me because one of the minimum fitness standards I have for myself is that I should be able to bike 200 miles on any given day — even without training and if that meant having to ride very slowly — and fulfillment of the goal means doing so just one time each year. Continue reading »

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” said Henry David Thoreau.

These words resonated in my mind as I biked over to Walden for my annual double century. Never mind that this was not the Walden in Massachusetts where Mr. Thoreau lived the life of an ascetic between 1845 and 1847, but rather a town of 600 people 60 miles east of Steamboat Springs in Colorado. Continue reading »

It’s been a good year but one thing that causes me a bit of remorse has been the trifling amount of cycling I’ve done in 2009. By this day on last year’s calendar I had already done three weeks of pedaling (on average) over 100 miles a day in the Tour Divide, whereas so far this year there’s been only two occasions where I could claim that I had ridden 100 miles per week. Including this one. Continue reading »

“The Teva Mountain Games take place the first week in June,” wrote Eddie. “I’ve done the 10k last year (awesome stuff) and the road bike TT the year before. I am planning on doing the 10k and MTB race this year. Also, if there are a ton of other comps going on like wall climbing, kayaking, etc.”

Cycling, running, climbing and more? My eyes lit up when I read Eddie’s e-mail much in the same way a lawyer’s does when he hears the word “lawsuit.” Plus, I had never been down in Vail — the Rocky Mountain town famous for its world-class skiing but also is a haven for almost every other individual sport in the summer. Hence, it did not take long for me to decide I would participate. I even managed to rope Lisa, Jeremiah, and Tori in coming along and sharing a lodge overnight so we could hang out in Vail the entire weekend. Continue reading »

Up to this point, my run mileage for the year exceeded my bicycling mileage — something that is particularly remarkable because I had been running fewer times per week than a toddler gets up to run around the living room within 10 minutes. This is to say that I had been cycling very, very infrequently this year. This was not good considering that a 9.8-mile time trial up Vail Pass I already registered for was coming up soon. As in the following week. Continue reading »

It’s kind of hard to believe but nine months after last year’s 2,700-mile Canada-Mexico MTB race, my mountain bike was still laying in pieces on the basement floor. In fact I had done basically nothing with Cranky the Cannondale since unpacking her from the joke of a bike box I hastily constructed from a dozen discarded cardboard pieces in the parking lot of a dollar store in Lordsburg, NM one day after finishing the epic journey, aside from cleaning and noting all the broken or seriously worn parts. It’s not that I was so “done” with the crisis-ridden adventure that I didn’t want to mount an MTB ever again, but with all the two- and four-wheeled machines I have and other hobbies I do, Cranky was inadvertently left forlorn and forsaken. Continue reading »