Blowing & Drifting

Today, I was supposed to compete in the first of two ski races this winter, the 26k classic race at the City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis. I was scheduled to ski the 42k classic race at the Mora Vasaloppet next weekend. When I registered for these races last summer, I was very, very excited [...]

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If Mother Nature respected my wishes, She would have blanketed southern Minnesota in snow six weeks ago. In fact, I would have been happy with snow six days ago. But we’re still snowless here, so I figured that a solid gravel-road ride could stand in for my three-year streak of skiing on Christmas Day. It [...]

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Friday afternoon, I rode home through the Arb, which wasn’t unpleasant:

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Wednesday, I took the day off to do a long gravel ride, my first substantial bike outing after the Almanzo way back in May. I had initially intended to do an all-day century, but then I decided that my legs probably couldn’t handle a hundred miles of gravel cycling. Luckily, the guys down at my [...]

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The very best sound a bike can make is the crunchy sizzle of tires going fast over gravel. The second-best sound a bike can make is the crisp crackle of going through dry leaves, like these early fallers on my route home from work.

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We’re all not killed on the roads every day. Yesterday, in the course of a couple blocks of my ride home, I saw a woman who didn’t look up from her cell phone for the better part of a full block, another woman who hurtled through a three-way stop at about 35 miles an hour, [...]

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This hill is short and not very steep, but I love the way it seems to just end, rather than start to descend - in my imagination, like some of the great summits in the Tour de France. This one’s about 99% shorter than those climbs, though…

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After finishing the Almanzo 100 in May, my thoughts turned – as they do – to writing something about it. My two-part race report was a start (May 16 and May 20), but I was lucky enough to be able to turn those blog posts into something more like a real essay, one that’s just [...]

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Today was a Very Big Day for bike-riding at our house. After a week’s hard work, Julia mastered the ability of starting all by herself, meaning that she no longer needs a parent to help her start, go, or stop. She wins the day’s Overall Achievement Award. If anything, Vivi did even better. She’s been [...]

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Right now, a Northfield cyclist named Ben Oney is 1900 miles into Tour Divide, an insane bike race that starts in Banff, Alberta, and follows the Continental Divide all the way down Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the Mexican border. (You can track Ben online; he’s currently about 1,900 miles – yes, miles – into [...]

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Today was my fist ride since the Almanzo 100, my first pain-free workout in three weeks, and my first ride in short sleevesince last fall! The view – though a bit gloomy – wasn’t bad, either.

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(A tanka.) Trees lean together Touching limbs over the street Rows of lush arches They open as I ride through Letting the sky down to me

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I was busy today. How busy? So busy I didn’t have a chance to update my social-media status until after I got home. A day without a couple updates is like a day without coffee – hardly worth the trouble. In an effort to partly rectify this horrible situation, here are six status updates I [...]

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In the lengthy first part of my Almanzo 100 race report, I dealt mostly with the overall shape of the experience for me. This second part relates some details that I want to remember, that fill out the Part I post, and that might be interesting to other cyclists who want to ride the Almanzo, [...]

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Trying to accommodate my athletic-endeavor verbosity, I’ve divided my race report into two pieces: this summary of the race and a separate, more detailed description of the experience, to follow soon. These 800-odd words are the one to read if you’re just passingly curious. And if you’re not even that, I don’t blame you! The [...]

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