GRC Checklist

Most of my rides are pretty simple: Legs, check; Bike, check; Route, check; Cycling Cohort, check (sometimes)

Tomorrow, March 3, 2009 is the Georgia Rides to the Capitol. Just another ride with 1000+ people I’ve likely never met, and even if I have it doesn’t matter because I have this weakness of liking anyone on a bicycle. The myriad of friends aside, there’s much to prepare for a 21 mile one way ride in 20 degree weather. To simplify my task, I’ve made a very loose checklist in order to keep myself on track for what I need to be doing tonight in order to be ready for tomorrow. If only the rest of life were this simple . . .

1- Drink a Beer– nothing fancy, you know it’s going to dehydrate you, but something has to calm the nerves

2- Prepare Hydration Munitions– #1 won’t be the last time that step appears

3- Put on Carhartt– it’s 20 degrees outside, maybe colder, you’ll be glad to have it during the next step

4- Affix Bike Rack on Car– as gallant as it would be to ride to the start line, I’m not Dean Karnazes

5- Dispose of Waste from #1 Properly– Recycle cheap aluminum can from cheap beer that wasn’t as satisfying as you’d hoped

6- Wash Gook off of Pedros Bottles– if you keep a bucket of bicycle cleaning clear and you throw this bucket unceremoniously into your closet after each wash, you’d likely to have gook covered bottles

7- Grab another Beer, Hoping it’s Better Than the First– The odds aren’t in your favor, but you’re about to be outside for a minute, so do something irrational to cancel out the irrational act of going outside to clean your bicycle when it’s 20 degrees

8- Clean Bicycle– You love Cycling way too much to show off a dirty ride, plus, just because you’ve no hair to primp doesn’t mean that you’ve lost all your vanity

9- Take a Break and Write About What You’re Doing– this is a great time to check your e-mail, Facebook, and your website and realize that all of your cycling buddies are STAYING ON TASK! while you’re slacking around.

10- Set Out More Clothes Than You Think You’ll Need– Who cares that you don’t live in Minnesota? What the heck is a wind chill? 20 degrees is cold, and if you’re not used to it, it’s going to hurt. There’s no such thing as Geographic Altruism.

11- Rack Your Brain to Foresee What You’re Going to Forget– it’s no use. You’ll forget something, deal with it.

12- Read Excerpts from 1- “It’s Not About the Bike,” 2- “Bobke II,” and 3- “A Dog in a Hat”– 1- Nothing seems insurmountable when compared to beating full body cancer just before you win the Tour de France 7 times in a freakin’ row; 2- If Bob Rolls quips don’t inspire you to ride, sell your bike and take up golf; 3- no matter how bad the weather in Minnesota, Joe Parkin has been through worse

13- Answer 10pm Phone Call Wondering “Who the Heck is Calling at This Hour?”– it’s your mother-in-law and she’s fabulous, despite your reluctance to admit it

14- Post What You’ve Been Writing– Nothing is more motivating than showing the cyber-cosmos how uprepared you are for a ride you’ve been giddy about for months

15- Wonder When You’ll Actually Go to Sleep– fantasies are a very healthy contribution to the male psyche

Georgia Rides to the Capitol

On Tuesday, March 3, 2009, more than a thousand of your favorite lycra-clad cycling enthusiasts and cotton-joe recreationalists will ride from the town square in Decatur and the town square in Roswell and converge upon the Capitol in downtown Atlanta in order to help raise awareness for improved bicycling conditions around Georgia.

Leading the charge on the capitol will be Mayor Bill Floyd of Decatur, and Mayor Jere Wood of Roswell, both representing the Metro Atlanta Mayors Association and Georgia Bikes! campaign.

The riders will have the benefit of a police escort in the morning ride to the capitol, but are responsible for ensuring their own transportation back. Mayor Jere Wood has offered a return ride back to Roswell for those riders from his location.

The Roswell, “saddle ‘em up and roll ‘em out” time is 9:45am, and Decatur will be rolling out at 10:45, with each group expected to arrive at 11:40am.

BikeMS will be providing a roll up snack luncheon, opposed to the sack lunches of years past, so bring your Clif Bars, and power gels if you think you might need more nourishment for the ride and return. (And never forget your WATER!)

Registration for this even is free but closes at 1pm on Monday, March 2, 2009. The link to the registration site is:

http://www.georgiaridestothecapitol.org/register.php

If you would like to make a donation to this event and cause, you can do so at:

http://www.active.com/page/Event_Details.htm?event_id=1693944&assetId=eb4bf0e6-9acf-4c69-8744-8226f6677452

It will NOT be necessary for you to print out your registration and bring it along as has been practice in years past, which is a nice respite for all those trees providing cleaner oxygen down through our arboreal city of Atlanta. (If you’re unfamiliar with the city, Atlanta has one of the highest percentages of trees of any major city in the U.S.)

Jason and Lee, along with a thousand-plus of your other closest cycling friends look forward to seeing you on Tuesday morning!

Silver Comet Mayhem, Part 2

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. . . continued from 022509

The only lung tax I would be paying on this excursion would be the local tax induced by the robotic pumping of my legs stroke after stroke, mile after mile, taking me into and beyond my first century. The trail is listed, somewhat confusingly, as being between 57.5 and 61.5 miles in length. 125 miles seemed like a nice secure number, and I can assure you that I chose it for no other reason than that apparent abstract, so I took a chance on the trail being 61.5 miles and added a two mile warm up ride at the beginning. This nonsensical addition probably wasn’t necessary, but I wasn’t sure if once I reached the Alabama State Line that I would want to pedal any farther into the sacred state of my wife’s birth, or if I would be amply ready to return home. I tacked the two extra miles on to the beginning and delayed my start time by six minutes.

I ticked off the first 18 miles in less than an hour, four minutes less. My pedal stroke was not yet robotic, as I earlier claimed. In fact, my stroke was fluid, graceful, fast, but not hurried. As I passed my humbled hometown beginnings of Hiram, Georgia; a Mecca of strip malls that simply did not exist when I was there as a wee lad, I believed myself to be on the upside of success with an unexpected, unknown sensation I can best define as Pride– a feeling I never felt growing up in that once deprived of strip-malls little town. I’ll never be far from Hiram in the sense that memory is a sometimes forgotten leash, but in mind, bicycle, and spirit, I was beyond it.

Just before I sped into what I would recognize as Dallas, Georgia, another cyclist called out, “On your left,” and seemed to be passing me in slow motion. He was the car on the road that passes you just because it no longer wants to be behind you, not because it’s actually intending to go any faster. 18mph can’t be considered blistering by any land speed standards, but since I had been maintaining that pace for over an hour and I still had many hours of unchartered riding ahead of me, I backed off a little, let him pass and fell in behind him. He was a solidly built older guy, so I ad no problem riding in his draft and appreciating the shield he offered from self-induced wind. We went back and forth like this for the next 15 miles—me drafting for a couple of miles until his pace slackened, then I would pass him and he would draft me for a couple of miles, and so forth until we reached Coot’s Lake and he unceremoniously pulled off the trail without a wave. I appreciated the help, waved without regard to his lack of parting etiquette, and charged on, at a much slower pace.

Civilization seemed to disappear from my senses and even my memory until I reached Rockmart, where civilization took on a new form. A small town where brick is still the preferred material of architectural standard and businesses exist based on the need of the town’s people rather than the recently accepted business for the sake of business con manipulation of cheap goods as money making enterprise practice set forth by the explosion of strip malls. Geographically, this is the equivalent of psychological tranquility. Rockmart does not appear to be a town to which I would transplant my family and learn the name of the florist and tip my hat to the local librarian as we passed on the sidewalk, but when you’re wrapped up in the struggle of doubt and loneliness through self-imposed task of pushing an activity further than you ever manifested possible, you’re likely to find beauty in the subtle differences and a sense of Poetry which pervades all that you’ve previously ignored. And maybe this is why I ride; maybe this is what pushes me to seek out new experiences. Not that I want life to be different than what it is, but because I’m looking to escape the notion that anything in creation could be boring, mundane, banal or induce that oft-felt sensation of ennui. I ride to experience the world, not as a jaded, cynical adult who has experienced everything worth experiencing and only sees futility in every action or every motivation, but to experience the world with the newness, wonder and mystery of a child, albeit an infant of middle age, which is exactly what I am.

The section of trail after Rockmart introduces hills into the previously flat vocabulary I had been speaking. Perhaps the best definition of these hills would include the word rolling, but hills are hills, sometimes welcome and sometimes a nuisance. The first few hills were nothing with which to be concerned, but as the trail pushed more aggressively toward the Alabama State Line, particularly just before Cedartown, the hills became more intense and my legs began to remember that we had been riding for quite a while, and quite a longer while still remained. As soon as the extended family of hills appeared just before Cedartown, they left just as quickly as soon as I passed through the aging town of selective memory. The trail would offer nothing else new except the darkening clouds of solitude, and the occasional sunny break of breath stuttering farm lands which have not altered since pictures were first available for 19th century history books. Green pastures sprinkled with wildflowers, horses picnicking around tin roofed stables attached to the back of simple wooden farmhouses, and the occasional circa 1980’s Candy-apple Red t-topped Camaro as reminders that some Georgians do not believe in wasting paper on calendars. History, like memory, is either quaint or obnoxious.

As motivated and upbeat as I tried to stay, the remaining ten miles to the state line were an exercise in redundancy. One horizon to the next looked just like the previous segment of broken horizons. Not until I forgot about distance, goals, state lines, or anything else to break the monotony I had previously banished from my future experiences, way back when I first discovered the magic of brick lined Rockmart, did the unassuming arch marking the Alabama State Line and the beginning of the Chief Ladiga Trail, in Alabama, present itself in all of its unexuberant half-way glory. Tired, I rolled unceremoniously past the state line marker and stopped just inside Alabama. Tired and ecstatic make for strange bedfellows, but there was the orgasm of conception in my mind and heart. I just needed that eruption to pump new blood into my legs. Sore and happy.

. . . conclusion pending . . .

Stuck in a Rut– External Blog Link

Liz DiFebo has posted a great concern for cyclists at:

http://inthebikelane.bicycling.com/2009/02/stuck-in-a-rut.html

Sometimes the Muse steps out to the Ladie’s Room to freshen up and we wonder what the heck she’s doing in there. (My muses are all girls. No apologies.) Maybe she got a phone call? Maybe she ran into an old friend? Maybe she skipped town with some quadricepped Adonis who doesn’t need her to motivate him to ride just because it’s been cold, or he has a runny nose.

It’s easy to keep riding once you’re rolling, but what do you have to do to get your lonely wheels socializing with the community of ground?

Silver Comet Mayhem, Part 1

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I once conceived a plan that was so twisted, so maniacal, putrid and sick that I frightened myself by its very conception. The kernel of this plan lay in some lost article I read about the Silver Comet Trail being the longest paved bicycle trail in the United States. This was not a complicated plan I had devised—take a very large guy with more ambition than sense, more pride than training, more strength than endurance, more skin than hair, and ingest in him the desire to ride the longest paved bicycle trail in the United States. Unable to find such a sucker, I volunteered.

The trail begins in Smyrna, Georgia, which is not far from where I live with my wife and child. My son is much too young to understand his dad’s demonical shortcomings, and my wife has been around long enough to find them amusing. She is also more supportive than I am confident, which makes for an unhealthy concoction of “should’ve known better.” She is also skilled at finding Hope’s hiding space and showing me. Just the thought of the two of them makes me smile, so I had the added burden of not wanting to get myself killed.

One hundred and twenty five miles on relatively flat terrain is nothing for a skilled bicycle racer. Some stages of the professional multi-day races in Europe can cover at least that distance along with some leg tangling mountains thrown in. I am not a skilled bicycle racer. In fact, my longest foray, up until September 6, 2008 had been a lung wheezing 40 mile ride through the narrow country roads of Henry and Fayette counties, Georgia. Part of the lung tax I had to pay on that 40 miler was to the car exhausts which manage to skirt by Georgia emission standards year after year, and pass by an even narrower margin the tall guy hugging the white stripe, where such a luxury existed, on his shiny red Trek 1500.

I set out on that sunny Saturday morning with the single minded focus of riding across the western region of Georgia to the state line of Alabama and returning for a cumulative ride of 125 miles. Three times farther than I had yet mustered the endurance to handle. My wife showed me Hope and I disguised it as Confidence and set out for my ride.

. . . To be continued . . .

Greetings from the Cycle-manic Editors of Cyclazoo!

Welcome friends! This shouldn’t take up much of your time as I’m about to head out the door for a ride, but I wanted to nab this snazzy name, Cyclazoo, before some other bald lunatic drank from the pool of the collective unconscious and gulped down Jason’s and my idea. Neither of us are long range planners, so check back often to see how this page develops. We welcome all comments, as long as they are deemed ‘non-suck-inducing,’ and look forward to seeing you here when not out on the roads, on the trails, or wherever you manage to work your lower-most appendages! Now, before it gets dark– gotta ride baby!