ride joe ride

The sun rose a minute later today. Tomorrow we’ll lose another minute of daylight. In four weeks, it’ll be too dark to get in a mid-week long ride before morning obligations. Between now and then, the sun will begin to rise after I’m already on the bike.

A year can be divided into time when days are getting longer and time they’re shortening, and they have just begun the slow slide into the dark days of winter. It hit me this weekend: we have a scant six or seven weekends left of endless mileage days and thousands of calories sucked up at coffee shops, ice cream joints, and pancake houses at the turn-around points of summer rides. Just a few weeks left of epic hammerfests and long slow recovery rides and putting in 30k to get coffee before fully waking up.

September always holds out the promise of extending the summer weather, but it’s not the weather: it’s the light. By the middle of August, the failing light is noticeable by even the most committed slugabed. How could you miss it? It’s dark when you used to ride. Your body can feel the days shortening, and it starts to tell you the time has come to ditch the long days on the bike and start holing up for winter with a giant stack of movies and something tasty to start building the winter layer of fat.

It’s enough to make one gnash one’s teeth and weep about the (somewhat) immanent end to summer riding. It would be enough, that is, if not for the factor which utterly mitigates the impending plunge into darkness of winter and endless hours spent toiling away on the torture device, er… trainer:

Cyclocross.

(It’s just around the corner)

I skipped Sherman Park this morning, but apparently there was a pile-up in the 4’s race which sent one or more riders to the hospital. Since corner marshalling at Monsters and watching a dozen or so people hit the ground and two get hauled off in ambulances, my feelings toward crit racing have been ambivalent. Today’s news made this somewhat more clear, though: I’m done with racing crits. There has never been a doubt in my mind that crit racing is potentially dangerous. This season has been driving the point home, though.

In my adult life I’ve been a “bottom of the top third” participant in two other sports besides cycling, and both are usually characterized as being pretty dangerous. Rock climbing has its obvious perils. Ultrarunning, especially when you move into the 100 mile distance, almost guarantees injury. In all three 100s I ran (including the one I failed to finish) I was incapacitated for days afterward. The creepy systemic things that invariably happen post-ultra (temperature spikes, massive sleep disturbances etc) are reminders that lurking around the corner are dangerous systemic failures. Most 100 finish lines are graced by a few people hooked up to IVs. People end up with transient and even permanent kidney damage from blood-borne byproducts of muscle damage. I honestly couldn’t walk for three days after my first 100.

The dangers of both of these sports, however, are different from the danger in crit racing in two important ways. First of all, in ultras and almost always in climbing, the dangers of the pursuit are directly dependent upon the participant. If you get hurt ultrarunning, and usually when you get hurt climbing, it’s your own damn fault. Too much vitamin-I causes kidney failure? Your fault. Your knot wasn’t tied properly and you cratered when you sat back to congratulate yourself on that 5.12 redpoint? Your fault. True, your life always sits in the hands of your belayer while climbing, but choosing your climbing partner is something usually done with a with some serious thought.

If you ride the low cats in crits, you know that cycling is not at all like this. It’s more or less like climbing with a belayer you’ve never met who also happens to look a little drunk. Your safety in a crit is only as secure as the wheels around you. More often than not in cat 5 races (cat 4?), those wheels are being run by somebody who is not entirely confident and/or good at what they’re doing but really really intent on doing it. I am, without a doubt, a very good example of this tendency. You know all that overshooting turns and then grabbing the brakes in fear? Yeah that’s me too. We all have lots of desire to win and less than perfect skills at not causing other people and/or ourselves to crash.

That said, I think the second reason for ending my road racing career early is the one which really sways me. It’s also the one that is more likely to piss you off if you’re a crit racer. If that’s you, you can finish up here and chalk this up to me stopping racing because I was worried about getting hurt. That’s fine with me.

So it’s not really the fear of physical danger itself that’s the problem: it’s the physical danger for such a small payoff. There is no doubt that crits certainly can be fun. When it comes down to it, though, crit racing is riding short laps around a park or a parking lot. The idea that I’ve sorta had floating around in the back of my mind since my first crit is this: it’s really hard to imagine a crit being epic. You know? What would an epic crit be? Can you imagine someone writing a story or making a movie about a crit?

That alone is totally not a problem — we all have fun doing stuff that isn’t potentially epic. The problem is doing something fun, but totally un-epic-able which is also pretty damn dangerous. I used to have a number of pursuits which could be described like that when I wasn’t such an old fart, I suppose. At this point in my life, though, I’d like the physical danger of my hobbies to be in direct proportion to their potential epic-i-tude. If I am seriously risking potential injury, I want it to be doing something that I really believe is worthwhile and not just entertaining. So with that, I’m done with crits.

Road races? Dunno right now.

Before talking about the iBike starts to seem as useful as talking about my Selle Italia SLR (well to me anyway, you may have already reached that point) I should wrap my test of it up as promised. The short version is that I haven’t used my remaining Powertap in a few weeks.

Before I give the pros and cons of the iBike as I’ve found them, I should note a couple of things. One is that I’m using one of the very early iBikes, and the newer ones are much improved by all accounts. One of the chief improvements relates to my second note. A very important part of the iBike system is the software which analyzes the ride data post-ride. On the early units (like mine) the difference between the numbers you see during the ride and post-ride can be pretty significant — think 15 watts difference in average shown on the iBike and in the software post-analyzation.

That said, the biggest pro of the iBike is that it’s accurate. I compared the PT and iBike post ride averages, max watts, normalized power etc, and with very few exceptions they were within a couple of watts of each other. The only time there was a significant variation was when riding in a pack, and this is something which was a known problem with my early unit — it’s fixed in the newer model. And significant variation is like 20 watts or so average for a long group ride. For the vast majority of my training, even this very early unit gives data accurate enough to meet my needs easily.

Speaking of data, the iBike generates a whole slew of interesting data, much of which I think I’d seriously miss if I switched to another power meter. How cold is it really? How much of a headwind is there? How steep is this hill? All questions which it answers and my powertap didn’t. Sure I could add a second computer alongside the powertap to have that information as well, but then my handlebars start looking like the bridge of the Enterprise. Not to mention weight. Okay mentioning weight: I also am enjoying the lack of the leaden rear wheel immensely. I am enjoying simultaneously rolling on deep dish carbon AND having power data even more.

Probably the biggest con to the iBike system is the importance of having accurate profiles for different equipment. Because of the way the device calculates power, the difference between a wool kit and lycra kit is actually enough to impact data. So I might have a racing profile and a training profile (to account for wheels) but then I also need a racing profile for wool kit etc etc. When you include different seasons, it’s not hard to imagine 10 profiles in a place like Chicago where we go through several phases of clothing. Each of those profiles must be made on the bike and essentially means time on the bike spent messing around with the power meter instead of riding. Given how limited riding time always is, this could be a problem for some people. The new model does have a mode which allows you to skip the profiles with some sacrifice in accuracy. While these might be useful in a pinch (i.e. an emergency large gear change maybe) or for getting started, I’d imagine most people wanting as much accuracy as they could get.

So yeah, I am an iBike fanboy I guess. It is certainly not without flaws, but no power solution is. I’ll likely upgrade to the newer generation model at some point but this one is working well enough to tell me that I need to work on my 5-minute power (duh). The graphs from the iBike software are really pretty amazingly geek-cool so I’ll post some of those soon.

“We hate them, yes we do.

We’re not hateful by nature, and we’re friendly to the tall things which walk in the park. Some walk faster than others, and sometimes that scares us. Maybe we’re not friendly, but we don’t hate them. We’re dignified not hateful. We didn’t want to do this.

But the things which ride on two wheels, them we hate. When the weather is warm and the grass is green they move so fast on the pavement in the park that we don’t even see them coming. Suddenly they’re upon us and we have to run squawking out of the way. Sometimes they laugh. So embarrassing. Sometimes they hit us. We all know someone who’s been hit. When the weather gets cool they stop riding their accursed machines on the path and come onto the grass after us. Then we’ve no place to hide from them.

We’ve tried shitting on the path. It makes them angry and every now and again one of them will slip and fall off their machine into it. That makes us happy. Their bikes get covered in it and their funny ugly skin does too. Still, they don’t go away. All we really want is for them to go away. We didn’t want to do this.

The park is ours and we have to make them leave. We even tried stopping them at the cost of our safety. We picked one of us to stand his ground when they approached. The rest of us fled. The stupid creature, expecting him to run, didn’t slow down, and when he moved at the last minute it swerved and fell off its machine. One of their machines with four wheels and bright flashing lights came and took that one away. The others seemed not to care. We are desperate, but we didn’t want to do this.

Then one day we listened to them talking. They were throwing bits of their food at us while they rested. Their machines lay on the grass beside them, and as we ate the bits we eyed the machines wondering if somehow we could take them away. They looked heavy. One of the creatures laughed as he threw more food and said to the others “I’m fattening that one up! I know what I’m going to be having for thanksgiving!” Later, none of us could make out what this “thanksgiving” was, but we knew the look in his eyes. We didn’t want to do this, but the line had been crossed.

Now we’re waiting. It’s a perfect morning. Cold. Windy.

Here he comes up the path, alone. The wind is in his face, so he’s slow. Perfect.

Fewer of us will perish.

Cousins and second cousins and third cousins have joined us from parks far and wide. Look at his face. Never seen so many of us have you?

But still he doesn’t know. He keeps coming. He’s speeding up, the fool.

What’s that? He’s imitating our honk. He’s honking and yelling “move!” His last word.

We didn’t want to do this. The first of us pretend to scatter out of his way as he blasts into us. Then they fold back.

Now.”