Bicycling

Indoor Cycling

Last Friday the sun was shining and the weather told me it was 45 degrees outside, and with that sun shine it felt more like the mid 50s. So, for the first time in around 4 weeks, I actually went for a bike ride outside. And looking ahead at the weather it looked like this would be my last time outside riding until spring.

I put on my tights and a long sleeve undershirt with a short sleeve jersey over it and took off. Between the time I decided to ride and actually riding the sun had disappeared behind some clouds and it felt every bit of 45°. I would get warm climbing a hill and be chilled when going back down, but still enjoyed the fresh air.

We bought an inexpensive indoor exercycle for Donna to work on strengthening her drop foot so she could rejoin me in bicycling again and when it got chilly in October I actually used it a couple times too.

A couple of decades ago I tried indoor cycling to keep in shape, but never really took to it. We tried one of those where the rear tire ran on a shaft connected to magnets for resistance, but it felt so sterile. Then I borrowed a set of rollers from another bike club member thinking that because rollers required you to use your balance it might seem more like actually riding. That was marginally better, but still boring as hell. Both these were setup in the garage and all I could look at was the wall. I added a fan to simulate movement. I tried adding music to listen to, but nothing worked, if I made it 15 minutes into a workout it was a great day. After a month or so of trying, I returned the rollers, donated the mag trainer to Goodwill and resigned to limited cycling over the winter.

Here in Oregon there will not be limited cycling because, while a few folks around here do ride year round, I’m not hardcore enough. The indoor exercycle is it. But I can stand it a lot better than those earlier attempts back in South Carolina. Firstly, the bike is indoors in the family room downstairs. Secondly, we have turned the 55″ TV so that it faces the bike nearly head on six feet away. And thirdly, we have found a YouTube channel called Indoor Cycling Videos so I can pretend I’m actually bicycling outdoors.

The videos range from 30 minutes to a couple of hours and are mostly from over in Europe. There are road bike rides and mountain bike ones as well. Almost all of them have a readout along the bottom showing time, speed, distance and hill gradient. Because this exercycle has a heavy flywheel where you control the effort by twisting a knob on the downtube I try to make the resistance larger when going uphill and less when the gradient reads negative.

Most of my outdoor riding around here was right was around an hour in duration. Riding indoors on this type of bike really can’t do coasting because the pedals are connected to the flywheel unlike outdoors where coasting down hills is a nice respite. Also I can’t really stand up on the pedals and spin like I can on the road bike. Indoors I am really sitting and pedaling all the time, so for now the 30 minute indoor rides are enough. I may try and move up to 45 minute ones, but probably won’t go longer than that because just sitting for that long won’t be fun.

Bicycle Tires

Last week’s Tire Juggling post got me thinking about our collection of bicycles and their tires. We currently own five bicycles, one tandem, two road bikes and two mountain bikes. Every one of those bikes have different size tires on them. Our tandem has 26″ tires. My mountain bike because it has a large size frame it is mounted on 29″ tires and Donna’s being a size small frame came with 27.5″ tires. My road bike has 700c tires while her road bike has 27″ rubber.

Whenever we go for a mountain bike ride I carry two different size spare tubes and trust me, those 29″ & 27.5″ MTB tubes are big. At least with the road bikes, a 700c or 27″ tube will work with either size size and for the tandem a 26″ tube is all it takes.

If 5 bikes sounds like a lot for two people, ha, at one time in the 90’s we had seven. We had a pair of dedicated club ride road bikes and a pair of road bikes set up for commuting to work. We had a pair of Bridgestone mountain bikes and a Santana Sovereign tandem. But those 7 bikes required only 3 different tire/tube sizes, the tandem and road bikes were on 700c tires, the commuting bikes sported 27″ tires and the mountain bikes rode on 26″ tires.

Where Were You Mike?

Two weeks ago I was on a road bike ride when I flatted. Go read Thanks Mike and come back, I’ll wait.

Today is Sunday and I didn’t take my usual Sunday morning ride out to the end of Lakeshore Drive and back. The Oregon Interscholastic Cycling League was holding a big race near the mid-ride point, so I thought it best to avoid the area. I also started the ride a little later than usual, so I opted for the mountain bike and just rode the local alleys, a bit of a couple bike paths and some neighborhood roads.

While headed home the front tire started to buzz more than expected of a knobby tire on pavement should. As I continued on, the buzzing increased in volume – whirrrrrrrrrrrrr. I had a puncture. I made it a block and a half before the tire was so flat that if I turned the handlebars it would probably squirm right off the rim.

I have a seat bag that has a spare tube and a flat kit just for this occasion. so in theory I should be able to fix my problem. But I didn’t even try. At this point I was just 6 blocks from home so I didn’t need a Mike rescue this time, I just walked the last 4/10 of a mile home.

And to answer my parenthetical question of two weeks ago, it is not always the rear wheel.

Thanks Mike

Today is Sunday and I took my usual Sunday morning ride out to the end of Lakeshore Drive and back. This gives me a nice little 15 mile ride, but today I only made it about 4-1/2 miles. At first it sounded like I sucked a tumbleweed into my back wheel, but when I looked back, there was nothing visible, but audible was a different story – hisssssss. I had a puncture.

I did a quick U-turn thinking maybe I could ride a ways back towards home, but that wasn’t happening. As soon as I got going in that direction the air had all escaped. I walked a few steps to get out from in front of someone’s driveway and settled in to see about patching my new hole in a tube.

I’ve been carrying around a modified water bottle with flat repair stuff inside just for this occasion. It used to be on the tandem so the spare tube in there wouldn’t fit the road bike, but there was a quick patch kit, 3 tire irons and a CO2 inflater with a couple cartridges so in theory I should be able to fix my problem.

I had just removed the rear wheel (why is it always the rear wheel?) when a fellow in a Honda CRV stopped next to me and zipped down the window, “Need some help?” I replied, “Not sure, but I might.” I told him I thought that I had the stuff to fix the issue, but hadn’t really checked yet. He pulled over, walked back and asked if it would be easier if he just gave me a lift home. It took me roughly 38 milliseconds to run through the hassle of doing the work on the side of the road in my head and the possibility of failure before I said, “If it isn’t too much trouble, I’ll take that ride.”

Turns out, he is also a cyclist and knew first hand the hassle of trying to fix a flat on the side of the road and the indignity of walking several miles home pushing, not riding, your bike. And one time when he had a flat someone stopped and offered him a ride home, so this was his way of paying that fellow back and leveling the cosmic score.

Later in the morning, for a test I attempted to fix the flat with the stuff inside that water bottle. I could, but in 10 minutes in my garage, who knows how it would have gone out there in the wild.

Thanks Mike.

Broken Spokes

Toward the end of June I took the road bike out for a ride for the first time in a while. I was going down a small hill not far from home slow with hands on the brakes because of the stop sign ahead and because of the cracks in the road. Halfway down I heard the distinctive “PING” of a spoke breaking and I could see the front wheel wobble in a singular spot. I opened the front brake so the rim wouldn’t scrape against them and turned for home.

I dropped the wheel off at the the local bike store to get it fixed and they said it would be done later that day or at worse tomorrow for a total cost of $37 ($36 for labor and $1 for the spoke. True to their word, early the next day I received a text to let me know the wheel was ready. I brought it home and stuck on the bike, but things were busy, so I didn’t take the bike out for a spin.

A couple days later I had time for a ride, so I got all dressed and ready to go, but when I went to roll the bike out of the garage the back tire was being tugged at by the brakes. I lifted the back wheel off the ground and spun it. The rim was contacting the brake pad in one spot. Sure enough, there was another broken spoke! I only heard one “PING”, did the two spokes, on different wheels, break in sync?

I took the second wheel down to the bike store. This time the repair was going to take week because they were backlogged. I bought this bike, used, in 2016 and from my research it was actually brand new in the year 2000 based on the color, so probably these rims are 22 years old. Wondering if this broken spoke problem will continue because of their age, I asked how much it would cost to have the wheels rebuilt using all new spokes. So, the total would be: 32 spokes per wheel, 2 wheels $64 plus the labor of $90 per wheel equals $244. This makes it, based on the fairly inexpensive group set of the bike, a better to just buy a new set of wheels.

The back wheel was ready yesterday afternoon, so this morning I got to go for a ride. I didn’t break any new spokes so maybe that whole conversation about new spokes or wheels is moot.

47.4 miles on 5 drives in the last week or so.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 47

Moore Park Monday and OC&E Trail Tuesday


No Snow Plow Needed

Today to celebrate the first day of summer we rode our mountain bikes 9 miles1 on a section of the OC&E Woods Line State Trail, a 109-mile rail to trail State Park. We have walked or rod bike ridden the first paved 10 miles of the trail before, but this is the first time for riding on the first bit of the unpaved 100 miles section going east out of town.

Yesterday we did our usual walk along the trails of our favorite Klamath Falls park for Moore Park Monday.

7.3 miles to Moore Park for Moore Park Monday.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 34

 

GCN

While we don’t cycle as much as we used to, we still like to watch the professionals do it. Every July since in the early 90’s we have watched the Tour de France on whatever network has shown it. Probably for the last decade or so we have subscribed to NBC Sports Gold, the most recent home of the Tour de France 3-week grand tour.

Along with the Tour de France NBC Sports Gold showed several other races as well, from a couple of spring classic one day events, to a couple of week long races like the Tour Down Under in Australia and Paris-Nice in France. We have also been able to watch the Vuelta a España, one of the three other 3-week grand tours.

The only 3-week grand tours we have never seen is the Giro d’Italia, well, that changes this year. Turns out that Global Cycling Network, something that started in 2013 as a YouTube channel, now carries the Italian grand tour. We have signed up for the month of May for GCN+ for a mere $9 just so we can see this grand tour. They also carry tons of other races from Europe, so maybe we just might sign up for a whole ($45) so we can get all sorts of commercial free cycling content.

18.5 mile trip to the Running Y for a 3 mile walk.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 18