Wire Road and Me

Earlier this week my car was attacked…by a deer. No lie. The road I was on is one that I have spent a lot of time on. I have driven it at least once a week and sometimes several times a week over the past decade. It is one route that I take to get to my office at the fine federal nuclear facility where I work some of the time. This road and I have a long and checkered history.

It was on this road that my car broke down while I was taking my Dad to see my office and meet my co-workers. As we were trying to get the car going (a familiar experience I had lived many times before with my Dad), we were snuck up upon and surrounded by a pack (Ok, there were only 3 but they looked mean) of gnarly looking dogs. They appeared on the horizon, circled the car and slowly closed in on us. We got in the car and waited them out. I am certain we were lunch. They lingered for a while and even came up and looked in the window at us. They eventually moved on and ate someone else.

This is also the road where I noticed that graffiti began to appear on the backs of road signs near a particular intersection. The graffiti had a specific theme to it—KKK. Over the course of several weeks, the amount of graffiti grew and it was clear that it was marking the intersection as a place to go…I assume for social gatherings of like minded people. I envision friendly soft ball games, family picnics, maybe even bake sales raising money for trips. I became disturbed and tried to find some authorities to look into things. I decided calling the local sheriff likely wasn’t going to help…I assumed he might be the star pitcher of one of the softball teams. I called the state police and they suggested I call the FBI—really. I called the FBI and left several messages, but no one ever got back to me. Finally, I called the Anti-Defamation League. They asked for pictures. I had to go to the intersection, get out of my car, and snap some photos. Needless to say, I was a tiny bit nervous. It is kind of a desolate road where a nosy, liberal, Jew loving, do-gooder could disappear easily…”paddle faster, I hear banjos.”

The ADL told me there were some hate groups in the area and this was likely their work. I don’t what they did, but the accomplished what no one else would or could. They got the DOT to paint over the graffiti on those signs within a few weeks. As a post-script to that happy ending, the graffiti is back.

This is also the road where I found a cat that had been hit and left to die. I drove by the cat, noticed it was in the middle of the road, head up and looking around. I tried to just keep driving, really I did. I couldn’t, though. I turned around and drove back to the cat, parked my car, scooped it up in my shirt, and took it to the roadside. I proceeded to knock on the doors of the trailers nearby to see if anyone owned the cat. No one was home. About 10 miles back down the road I had just driven was an animal shelter, so I decided I had to take the cat there. I scooped it up again and put it on the passenger seat of my car. It let out a few pathetic meows and then laid its head down to rest. Somewhere along the way that poor kitty went on to his reward because when I got to the shelter, he was dead. So I dragged my recently dead cat into the shelter and they took it from me. Thankfully they believed my story and didn’t think I had hit the cat and was trying to dump the evidence and run. They took the cat…and gave me back my shirt.

So this road and I have a strange and unpleasant history. Still I drive it frequently. Monday morning at around 7 am I was tooling along minding my own business, ignoring the KKK signs and the feral dogs…and it happened. I saw the whole thing from the comfort of my driver’s seat. The deer came out of the woods—a good sized four point buck—and trotted along the roadside. I slowed down expecting him to run across the road in front of me. Instead he ran up along side my car. I can still picture the moment frozen in time—me looking at him just inches away on the other side of my car window, him looking through the window at me. He had a crazed look in his eye. You know the one…it is the one a frat boy has when the party is ending and he still hasn’t found a “date” for the evening. I slowed down more hoping he would run on ahead and across the road. Instead he lunged at me, body slamming my car door and obliterating my rearview mirror. Fractions of a second later he bounced off my back door and then the trunk. In my mind’s eye (because I no longer had a rearview to see him back there) I can see him making a second and third lunge at me. As I turned to look back, I saw him scramble up off the road and run back into the woods. I could have sworn I saw him spit at my car as he ran off.

I pulled over and removed the husk that once was my rearview mirror and I found that my back door was open. Apparently, on that second lunge he tried to open my back door and get in the car. Luckily I got away—I don’t what would have happened if he had gotten in. I can’t help but picture an isolated clearing where feral dogs, wild-eye deer and burly men are gathered to burn crosses.

I won’t be going to that office next week but after Thanksgiving you can bet I will consider seriously a new route that avoids Wire Road.

Trickin’ Out the Granny Cruiser

After tackling my first organized metric century, I decided I needed to hone my training. To bring that along, I’ve made some modifications to the Granny Cruiser. I wanted to convert it (a Specialized hybrid) into something that has more of a road bike feel to it. I swapped out the big, fat spring loaded, gel filled seat for a small and hard road saddle. I want to get my butt used to riding on that kind of saddle. Switching back and forth was just messing with me. I also got rid of the 38mm bumpy tires and went down to 32mm smooth tires. I could have gone narrower but the bike shop didn’t have them in stock so I went with what they had. Granny is all tricked out.

I could have gone even further. I can still change out the seat post—get rid of the rusted shock absorber post I’ve got and replace it with something lighter. I could also replace the big, fat fork with rusted shocks with something lighter, too. Right now I am not as worried about weight as I am fit and feel. I want my body (my back and my butt) to get used to riding a road bike…or some cheap approximation.

Oh, and I also got a cheap cycling computer. It displays speed, distance, time, calories burned, etc. I had been using my IPhone to do the same thing, but the battery wasn’t lasting on the 4 hour rides. Plus, tugging it out of a pocket made it hard to check. The bike computer is mounted right on the bar so I can obsess on speed and distance all I want. At one level, that is satisfying and at another it is just a bad idea. I like to know how fast and how far, but it is way too easy to focus on that and miss the ride. Way too easy.

The thing with this bike computer is that I wonder about its accuracy. In order to keep track of speed and distance it has a sensor that is mounted on the fork with a magnet on a spoke. The magnet spins past the sensor and that is how it measures distance and speed. The thing is that I have had to mount both really close to the center of the wheel in order for the magnet to get close enough to the sensor…because of the big, fat fork on my bike. The instructions for the computer show both being mounted about two-thirds of the way out the radius of the wheel. I am no physics genius, but I somehow doubt that this thing is designed to compensate for differences in the amount of time it takes the magnet to spin around. The further up the radius, the longer it will take and the closer to the center the less time it will take. That has got to affect how it measures speed and distance. I’ve ridden the bike twice with the computer and the second time the sensor and magnet moved almost to the center of the wheel. On that second ride, the distance seemed to be off by about a half a mile over 20 miles. The first time, it seemed to be pretty well on…based on the gps in my IPhone.

I hear you Clement…”none of these things are all that accurate, just go ride your damn bike!”

Anyway, with my new toy and modified bike I went for a 40 mile ride last Monday. When I ride I try to keep my cadence high and steady, and that means shifting down when I need to. I went out hard and tried to keep a 17 mph pace and I did a pretty good job. I made it home in just under 2.5 hours. I was pretty happy with the pace and my ability to keep it up.

Feeling all Superman-like because of my experience on Monday, I went out pretty hard yesterday. I again tried to keep the cadence high and maintain a steady high speed (thanks to my new computer I can watch it go up and down with each gust of wind, slight hill, and shift of the gears). I did really well on the first 20 miles. I averaged 18.5 mph and finished in about an hour and 10 minutes—the fastest 20 miles I’ve done. As a quick reality check, professional cyclists average 24 mph or more and keep it up for 100 miles.

On the return 20 miles I found out why I had gone so fast on the ride out…I had a pretty strong tailwind that blew me down the road. On the way home…I had a nasty headwind…all the way home. In case you are wondering, riding into the wind is hard…and demoralizing. It is hard to keep a steady cadence and you spend a lot of energy trying to get back to the pace you want. Riding into that head wind killed me in less than 2 miles. The 20 mile ride home was slow torture. I made it home in just a little over 2.5 hours and averaged 16.5 mph. Doing the math, if I did the first 20 miles at 18.5 mph then I did the second 20 miles at 14.5 mph. Superman to Pee Wee Herman again.

I think I learned a lesson. I need to maintain a steady and sustainable pace. If I want to do interval training to build speed, that is fine but my intervals need to be a lot shorter than 20 miles. The same theme keeps coming back…I am an idiot for not figuring out how to do this stuff before I go and do it…and I pay the price with suffering.

I’ve requested some books from the library. Unfortunately the perfect book for me was already checked out: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cycling.

Further proof that thinking before I act is not my strong suit…

Never Open Cat Food with Anger in Your Heart

I woke Saturday morning to the same sound I’ve been waking to for several weeks…ever since we started feeding our cats wet food…the sound of the two of them meowing at me to give it to them. We call it stinky food…because it is stinky. I really just wanted a cup of coffee, but I also really wanted them to shut up. They count on that and they push me to the brink. So before I got my coffee I started getting them some stinky food. We’ve been buying the individual serving cans with the pull-tab open. The pull-tabs are handy, but every once in a while they fail. Today was one of those days. Because I didn’t want to put the broken can back and have to deal with it later, I tried other ways of opening it. First I tried the can opener. It is one of those fancy ones that takes the top off without leaving a sharp edge. I ran it around a couple of times and about ripped the nail off my finger trying to pry the top off. Yeah, those don’t work on pull-tab cat food cans.

At this point I was getting a bit frustrated. Well, maybe more than a bit frustrated. I was getting mad. So I got out a fondue skewer. I think you can see where this is going. I banged on the top of the can to try to push it in. That didn’t work and I was really getting mad. So, I got out the big wooden spoon. You know the one, every kitchen has one. I got that sucker out and I slammed it down on the lid. Nothing happened. Really mad, I raised that spoon in my hand like Norman Bates and plunged it down with all my might. In a calm and rational frame of mind, you should be saying, “Don’t do it, you idiot it will…” Yep, that spoon handle blasted through the can lid and sloppy, stinky cat food exploded all over me and the kitchen. Coffee became moot. My eyes were bulging, veins throbbing in my temples. With all the dignity I could muster, I scraped that stinky food off my face and the counter, piled it on a plate and gave it to the cats. And then I made my coffee.

If I had made coffee to start with, I might have handled the whole thing differently. I might have been a little smarter and a little calmer. But I didn’t have coffee and I wasn’t smarter…and I had anger in my heart.