Why ride a bike?

Part One, The Practical Reasons:

• A bike is faster than walking.
• A bike is faster than taking the bus (especially if you consider the time spent waiting for the bus and walking to and from bus stops – you can’t just walk out the door and have the bus magically arrive).
• A bike may be faster than a car (when you consider getting stuck in rush hour traffic and the time spent parking/getting to and from your parking place).
• A bike is cheaper than a car:
  • cheaper to buy – you can buy a phenomenal bike for $10,000 – like a Ferrari but $2-300,000 cheaper (depending on the Ferrari model). A bike for basic transportation is maybe $15,000 less than a car for basic transportation. (Comparing a Trek FX or Zektor to a Toyota Yaris)
  • cheaper for daily use – no gas or electricity to buy, no parking fees to pay.
  • cheaper to maintain – a bike is much easier to work on yourself – no sheetmetal in the way; if you pay for maintenance, it is still way cheaper
  • cheaper to insure
• A bike is cheaper than a car for society:
  • fewer resources used to produce them
  • no fossil fuels burned to power them
  • fewer urban acres devoted to parking, which makes more land available for other development (at a higher use-value) or open space, which creates less impervious surface, thus decreasing urban runoff:
    • this means less pollution of waterways
    • fewer urban floods
    • faster recharging of underground aquifers
  • less wear and tear on existing roadways, less need for ever-larger roadways
  • A bike is the most efficient form of human transportation in terms of energy usage per mile traveled.
  • I’ve never fallen asleep riding a bike.

Part Two, The Health Reasons:

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2005 – 2018 same person, 13 years and maybe 50,000 miles later -clearly riding makes you younger – and even restores hair!

A picture is worth 1000 words. So two pictures must be worth 1000 words plus a whole lot of data I therefore don’t need to cite.

• riding a bike burns fat
• riding a bike leads to greater aerobic fitness
• riding a bike causes minimal stress on joints
• riding a bike leads to lower stress levels, reducing mental health costs
• as obesity and cardiovascular disease lead to greater societal health costs, riding a bike has public health, as well as individual health, benefits

Part Three, The Fun Reasons:

• Riding a bike can be done alone, with family, with friends, with strangers – whether you like your fun in solitude, with loved ones, or as a way to meet new people, you can do it on a bike
• Riding a bike lets you observe the little changes in the world around you – you can see your surroundings more easily than in a car so you can see wildlife (whether urban or rural), watch seasonal changes (seeing flowers bloom, trees bud out and leaves change color, watch and hear waterways freezing and thawing) [We won’t repeat pictures you’ve already seen here – scroll back through old posts for more.]
• Riding a bike gives you time to think and reflect – or to stop thinking and just feel the rhythms of your body and your interactions with the bike, the road, and the world around you.

hoarfrost

Half-fast Fall Classic, Devil’s Lake

Sunset, stormy night (NOT a fire in the distance)

Part Five, Because Frazz Does It:

Short subjects (or, in Herb Caen parlance, three dot journalism…)

Ice fishing season started before deer hunting season. That is not normal. To continue weather weirdness, I saw all of this within a couple of minutes, on the same small bay:
* piers dismantled and stacked neatly by the shore
* piers frozen into the ice, likely destined to become scrap metal by spring
* ice fishers
* shoreline fishers working a 30’x30′ opening in the ice
* someone fishing from a boat…

I just watched “The Donald Trump Story” on television, but under its original title “Gaslight”…

I hope to answer the question “Which is harder – the Death Ride or the Horribly Hilly Hundreds? ” I rode them 27 years apart so it’s not a fair comparison so far. Both are about 200 km or 125 miles. The Death Ride climbs 15,000 feet, the HHH about 11,000. The Death Ride climbs to over 8700 feet. The HHH never reaches 2000. The Death Ride contains five epic climbs; the HHH about 40 short and steep ones. My experience is that a long steady climb allows one to settle into a rhythm. A short steep climb tempts one to charge up it, only to have to do that 39 more times – so my current hypothesis is that the HHH is harder (for me), as long as you hang out at elevation before Death Ride…

If I fail to answer the question, at least I plan to have fun and tell you about it after. Now I just need to get the time off work and make the arrangements for the 40th anniversary Death Ride.

I got two STDs. The Death Ride is July 11, 2020. The HHH is June 20,2020 -doing them three weeks apart wouldn’t be a fair comparison, either. Save the dates…

I just earned my last badge.

At work I was invited to try lovetoride.net. We formed a team and recorded all of our riding for a month. At the end of the month I won a dozen tamales, so I did it again the next time. In addition to tamales, one can earn virtual badges for things like encouraging others to ride, riding a century, commuting by bike… Last year I noticed the badges were piling up but I was missing two: “Legend”, for recording 10,000 miles on the app, and “Super Commuter”, for commuting by bike 200 times in a calendar year. So rather than just recording rides for a month when they were running a promo, I started recording all rides just before the coast-to-coast trip. 10,000 miles came soon after. 200 days came in November 2019. No big deal. That’s just doing what I normally do for the first 40 weeks of the year. But now I have a fake badge to show for it…”Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”

“If you’re not blazing a trail, you’re just breaking wind.” Frazz, by Jef Mallett

Uncle!

“No exposed flesh” is a reasonable dictum in mid-January. When winter is still six weeks away, it is almost enough to make a long-term resident cry “uncle!”

The temperature should not be in the single digits (Fahrenheit) in early November. When I got my bike out of the garage to go to work, the wheels wouldn’t turn. The tires were frozen solidly to the fenders and I had to chip them loose before I could roll the bike out of the garage. It wasn’t quite icy enough to lace up the skates but it was close. I usually put the studded tires on between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I may have to move that up to tonight. [And yes, the studded snow tires are now on.]

Meanwhile, corn and soybeans are still in the fields. Fall was too wet to harvest. Now the beans are beansicles. Flood watches are not normally issued in late fall around here, but we have them again this week. On the other hand, the university crew was out rowing yesterday. It may be below freezing, but the lake is still liquid, so they can still train on the water.

This is the first fall in memory in which I mowed the lawn and shoveled snow in the same week. The wet fall meant the grass had not yet gone dormant even after the first snowfall. Green leaves fell during the first snowstorm.

Usually we wonder if we’ll have a white Christmas. This year was a white Halloween/Samhain/Día de los Muertos.

“Winter Wonderland” Chet Baker (but it’s still fall!)

Checking my old backup hard drive, I came across a little something I did back in 2007. It was the magazine open on the lap of the snowperson in the photo below.

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Snow sculpture and Time magazine parody by hfcc

I also found a picture of my old bike.

Lake freezing before my eyes

Rowing season may have just ended. But I was wrong – they were out the day after this photo was taken. I don’t think the crew bought an icebreaker.

Might be time to get the piers and boat hoists in before it’s too late.

The half-fast cycling club got together to do what we do best, in accordance with our slogan: “When the going gets tough, the half-fast go for a beer.” The occasion was the 25th anniversary of a local brewpub, and even those we haven’t seen on a bike all year showed up. Not to be dropped by the group, I spent the week in training with single malt Scotch.

If it’s too cold and snowy for you to want to ride (we’ve already set records for both), and you’re in Madison WI, save the date: Sunday, December 8 at 3PM at Trinity Lutheran Church for “War and Peace: Music of Remembrance” with the Choral Arts Society.

In Praise of Snot

The other day I heard Bill Bryson on NPR talking about his latest book. To paraphrase, he said that our bodies deal with cancer on a nearly daily basis. Usually we recognize mutated cells as invaders and destroy them before they cause damage. This is, of course, a completely unconscious process. Our bodies are way smarter than our conscious minds. (Imagine having to take responsibility for beating your heart every second, and still having enough consciousness left over to decide whether The Bachelorette was making a smart choice.) It is only on the rare occasions that those cells divide uncontrollably that we are faced with what we know as cancer.

That got me thinking about mucus. Over the years I have seen a lot of fad diets come and go. In the ’70s, the “mucusless diet” was a big thing. The theory, as I understood it, is that when we have a cold we have an excess of mucus and therefore mucus is bad. We have a stuffy and/or runny nose and we don’t want that. The next step was that certain foods cause us to produce mucus and we should avoid them. Among those “mucus-producing” foods were all dairy products. Being a Cheesehead, that was pretty hard to swallow. No 11 year old Cheddar? No Brie? And don’t get me started on the Velveeta on which I was raised.

What if that is bass-ackwards? What does mucus do? It forms a protective barrier. When we leave a dusty environment, we notice that we want to blow our nose. When we do so, we blow out some pretty disgusting-looking stuff – dusty mucus. The technical term for that is boogers. Our body makes mucus (snot) to line our mucous membranes. That snot ensnares toxins in the air we breathe – dust particles and god knows what else. It traps that gunk so we can get rid of it before it gets into our lungs and causes some real damage.

When we have a cold, that system gets overwhelmed. Something has gotten past the defense. Our body makes more mucus to try to repel the invaders. Too much, too late. That we have failed doesn’t mean the system is bad. Our body also has an inflammatory response. Sometimes it, too, is overwhelmed. At that point we suppress it with ice, elevation, and anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen or steroids. Does that mean the system is bad? No, it just means that it sometimes overcompensates after its failures. (Sound familiar?)

Likewise, mucus is not bad. Mucus is a good thing. We need it every day. It is only when it is overwhelmed and tries to overcompensate for its failures that it becomes excessive.

Long live snot! (And eat cheese if you want to.)