30 Days of Biking

Ah, surfing the web and listening to podcasts have something in common that addicts me. I discover interesting things hidden among the rest. In this case I was listening to the Bicycle Radio podcast and came across 30 Days of Biking.

Founded by @patiomensch and Zach Amon, both of Minnesota, the idea is pretty simple: ride you bike everyday for 30 days. In their own words:

The only rule for 30 Days of Biking is that you bike every day for 30 days—around the block, 20 miles to work, whatever suits you—then share your adventures online. We believe biking enriches life, builds community, and preserves the Earth. This is the second year, and third round, of 30 Days of Biking!

I really like this idea and so I am promoting it here. You don't have to be training (but you could be), you can be slow or fast, you can ride far or to the end of the driveway to get the mail. All that matters is that you ride.

The upcoming 30 day challenge is for April 2011. You can get more information on using the #30daysofbiking hashtag on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. This challenge is setup to be a social media event, but don't update Twitter while riding!

For me personally, I will have 2 very challenging days to ride in April. I have a business trip to India and that involves a whole day in travel. I leave on a Friday and arrive near midnight Saturday night. I can do a ride Friday morning but Saturday is going to be tricky to have any chance to ride. I am planning to ride the Sunday in India and hopefully during the week as well. The return trip has a similar problem, but the time difference helps cooing back so it is less challenging. Still I am going to sign up and do my best to find a way to ride.

Cruiser Restored

Last year I fixed up a simple cruiser for my daughter to ride.

It is a Huffy of indeterminate age. Mostly I cleaned a lot of rust although the chrome fenders were in good shape. I did replace the fender stays and the handlebars, both of which had no chrome under the rust. I repacked the wheel and headset bearings.

The seat and grips were new along with the white wall tires. I added the Wald Grocery basket on the front and it makes a nice ride.

I did a lot of cleaning. The decals were pretty messed up but the blue metallic paint was in good shape. So I used a heat gun to get the decals off and a Black & Decker rotary tool to remove rust and plush the finish. My other favorite trick (found on the internet of course) to remove rust is to put some diet soda on the area and rub it with aluminum foil. You can use regular soda but it makes a sticky mess because of the sugar.

My daughter seems to like this bike pretty much. She rode with me to a local farm to get some vegetables. It is 15 miles round trip and there are some pretty decent hills. She tackled them pretty well on this single speed. On one particularly steep section she walked, but she got back on before the top when the slope eased off a little. I think she would have made even the steep section but the swept back handlebars don't give the best leverage for standing up and climbing.

If you are thinking of tackling a project like this for a commuter or errand bike, I would encourage you to go for it. I didn't spend much money and got a lot of satisfaction from the finished bike.

My Moment As a Bike Messenger

Yesterday, I had a brief moment as a bike messenger. Well, there was no traffic and my bike had both gears and brakes, but I was carrying a large envelope and I was racing the clock.

Where I work is a several hundred acre campus. Riding my bike to work means that might bike is in front of my building and is available if I need to go to another building. The most common trip is to and from the gym having either showered after my morning ride or changing clothes for the ride home. But yesterday I needed to deliver some paperwork for a visa I need for an upcoming trip.

I had a meeting until 2:00 pm and that is just before the mail pickup to overnight my documents. So I needed to get to our travel department as quick as possible. I had all my documents in a manilla envelope but for transporting on the bike I skipped that in a large envelope that closes better.

So downstairs I went, on the bike, large envelope in hand, helmet on head, I was off to the building for travel. Even without a Chrome messenger bag, I made the 1 1/2 mile round trip in plenty of time to make the overnight drop.

On the ride back, it came to me that even though there was no traffic, I had just made a delivery not entirely unlike a bicycle messenger. And the pay was even similar. I am get to be on planes for 19 hours plus 8 hours of layovers each way next month. But I may get to ride in another country. I am working on the details now.

Just Because You Can Take It Doesn't Mean You Should Dish It Out

While reading BikeCommuters.com I came across this essay about the mean streets and road rage involving drivers, cyclists and walkers. This got me to thinking about a couple of things.

First, I am grateful for where I live. Partially because of the greenways and partially because the drivers seem better than those described in the essay, I don't experience the hostile conditions many seem to deal with.

The second thought is about riding on mixed use trails. How many cyclists become the equivalent of the drivers they hate once they are the fastest vehicle? Are they terrorizing the runners, joggers, dog walkers, baby stroller pushers and other slow users of the paths? Are the bikes passing at a distance they feel is safe without regard to how the person on foot feels about that margin of safety? Do they get upset that joggers are running in the bike lane on the slightly softer asphalt rather than the hard concrete sidewalk just a few feet away? Are riders more concerned with turning the pedals to keep a good average time or a target heart rate to slow down enough when passing to make everyone enjoy their day?

Well, it is pretty easy to draw parallels between the way drivers sometimes interact with cyclists on the road and the way cyclists sometimes interact with pedestrians on a path. My thought for the day is just because a driver has treated you badly, you should not do the same to a pedestrian. In fact, I would state it even stronger. Because a driver treats you badly, you should know better than to do the same to slower travelers.

Quotes from the National Bike Summit

Some day I would like to go to the National Bike Summit, but today I will settle for sharing a couple of quotes.

First from Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Democrat from Oregon pointed out "Every body on a bike is some body who is not in front of you in a car, competing for a parking space.”

Later Sadik-Khan, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation was talking about the measurable safety improvements where the new bike lanes have been added. “When we put down a painted bike lane, there’s a 50-percent reduction in fatalities for all users of that street: cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists,” she pointed out. “So when you put these bike lanes down, you are improving the safety of every one that uses that street.”

You can read more about the National Bike Summit at the Alliance For Biking and Walking or Bike Portland.

A Sense of Accomplishment

On this morning's bike commute I figured out what is wrong with the world. Well maybe it seemed more profound when my brain was oxygen deprived climbing a hill, but still it is a thought worth sharing.

We need to emphasize personal accomplishment over winning. Attitudes like second place is just the first loser lead to several problems. One is a do anything to win and the other is shutting down and not even trying because you feel you can not win.

On the other hand a personal accomplishment like riding your bike to work for the first time, are just as worthy of recognition. Now that is not to say that you can expect to visit the Whitehouse like the NCAA Basketball Champions because you rode your bike to work two days in a row.

Still when times get tough and you are tempted to do something you know is wrong to get back on track, it helps to have a grounding in appreciating not the public recognition but the personal sense of accomplishment. Is it so important to win that you are willing to sacrifice your personal feelings of accomplishment just to win? 

Isn't it better to do the best you can with pride that it is the best you can do, than forego your sense of what is right to win? People need a strong grounding of emphasizing personal accomplishment, starting with the parents, teachers, and coaches and continuing with their friends. And the most important person is yourself. In reality, you are the main one that will be impressed when you ride your bike to work every day for a month.

I will end with another well known quote which I find much healthier. It is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. And I would include how you live your life.

Old Enough to Drink

I call my road bike Alfred for multiple reasons I will point out as I go. It is a glossy black 1987 Trek touring bike with red decals. Since it is 24 years old, I like to say my bike is old enough to drink. When this bike was new it was one of those crazy Cannondales with the large tubes. And since it was aluminum (Al on the periodic table, hmmm Alfred starts with Al too), people expected it to fold under me anytime. In fact it seems that the public was so leery of aluminum that the fork is steel. But 24 years later it is still rolling along. And the tubes don't seem large at all these days.

Of course, I have upgraded a few things. Back when it was new I added a Blackburn rear rack. Besides the usual things that wear out regularily (tires, handle bar tape, brake pads, and chain), I built a new set of wheels at the beginning of 2010. One big change from this was moving from 27" wheels to 700C. Fortunely the bike had plenty of clearance and the brakes plenty of reach, so that this tranistion was very easy. I was going to need custom built wheels because these bikes have 126mm spacing in the rear and being aluminum it is not a good idea to try and bend them enough to fit the 130mm hubs generally used on bikes these days. So I found some NOS* Shimano 105 hubs with 126mm spacing on the rear. I bought those and took them to my local bike mechanic Matt the Cary Cycle Surgeon. Matt ordered me the Velocity Dyad rims I wanted and caluclated the correct spoke lengths. I built them slowly and carefully, added some Schwalbe Marathon 28mm tires and they have been great.

The old hub had a 6 speed Suntour freewheel. The new hub takes a Shimano UG cassette. The Uni-Glide cassettes were replaced with the HG (hyper-glide) cassettes still in use today. So I had to find a NOS* cassette as well and I got a 7 speed one. This should make you wonder about the shifters. I am still using the original Suntour downtube shifters. The rear shifter is indexed but can  easily be switched into friction shifting which is what I did. Front shifters were not generally indexed when this bike was new.

The Dia-Compe brakes and levers along with the Nitto stem and handle bars are all original. So is the Sugino crank set. In fact I wanted to switch to a triple crank set, but on closer inspection I discovered that the existing set was a triple. It just didn't have a small chain ring bolted on. I had the bottom bracket replaced with a slightly wider one and added the granny gear. I don't use it too often, but when needed it is great. I am pushing the front derailer to its limits to cover all 3 gears, but it is working.

Chatting with the guys at the various LBSs I frequent paid off when I was offered a set of SKS fenders that a customer had returned at a steep discount. They are silver plastic with black stripes. The fenders go great with the black bike kind of like the Batmobile (another Alfred reference). I have been working on getting the arc of the fenders to better match the bike, but as long as they do their job without rubbing I am content.

As the miles started to add up my rear demanded a better seat. I went with a Brooks B17, black of course. It was ok at first and I did experience numbness where no guy wants to be numb on some long rides, but now I have either broken in the seat or it has broken me in. I rarely notice even slight discomfort even when it takes me all day to ride a century.

The last time I changed the handle bar tape, I used a red and black mottled pattern. I also ordered some bright red Planet Bike bottle cages to match the logos. Being a touring frame it has mounts for 3 bottle cages.

I have been using some low end Crank Brother Egg-beater pedals. They are about 15 years old and I noticed recently that the cleats barely had any tab left. As I looked for some new cleats, I found they were about $22. Instead I picked up some Crank Brothers Smarty pedals with cleats for $20. I have been warned that the quality of these can be pretty spotty, but looks like I was lucky. I used them on a recent century and  two 200K brevets. The small platform makes them more comfortable than the plain egg-beaters.

Alfred takes care of me like his namesake took care of Bruce Wayne.

* NOS - new old stock - means unused product that has never been sold at retail