Another November Ride

I took advantage of a moms-and-kids playdate today to take a long, fun, and tiring bike ride on gravel roads east and south of Northfield. I didn’t have enough time to make it all the way to Kenyon, but I did enjoy a steady ride through a countryside that’s looking increasingly, beautifully bleak. I detoured off my route to visit the well-known Vang Lutheran Church (slides two and three in this slideshow), a classic Norwegian-American church in that it’s roughly five miles past the middle of nowhere. Those old Norwegians liked their churches white and far, far away.

Elsewhere, I saw acres and acres of cornfields in various conditions (standing, harvested, plowed under), several flocks of sheep, plenty of horses and cows, dozens of farms, and of course miles and miles of wonderful rolling roads. The roads were all substantially less rutted but more gravelly than they had been the last time I took this ride, in September. I’d guess that the county dumped more gravel on the roads and graded them in preparation for the winter. If so, I’m sorry to have carried a few pounds of that gravel back to Northfield in my tires, tights, and pack.

One More Cyclocross Post

Over the past eight days, I have spent more hours hunting for pictures of the big St. Olaf cyclocross race than I actually spent “training” for it. What can I say – I’m a lazy narcissist living in a place where it gets dark early.

But lo and behold my efforts paid off last weekend when I found a small collection of photos of three guys who came down from Grand Forks for the race, shot by one of their family members. I think you’ll agree with me that each photo substantiates my towering athletic prowess. Click through to see bigger versions of the photos, which make it easier to read the annotations.

St. Olaf Cross race 012 1

St. Olaf Cross race 027 1

St. Olaf Cross race 033 1

St. Olaf Cyclocrash

Check out this clip from last weekend’s bike race. The rider isn’t me, thank god, but he won the $24 prize for best crash of the race. I doubt it paid for a quarter of the damage to his bike, or for a tenth of the hit to his ego after so spectacularly failing to bunny-hop the barrier – a point eloquently made by this critical frame from the video.

“Back to School” Cyclocross Race: Whee!

So the big cyclocross race at St. Olaf was about ninety-nine kinds of fun. I’ve never raced bikes before, so there was that fun for starters. There were also the various kinds of fun which all racing entails: passing, being passed, working hard, feeling just a little bit pukey, enjoying the acid-lung feeling after the race. (Personal note: I could have done without the bass-drum thud of my heart rate in my skull, which I caused by forgetting to take out my hearing aids before the race. Lesson learned.) The organizers did a great job with the race, too: the registration was painless, the concessions were ample, and above all the course was well designed and well marked.

And the race had lots of cycling-specific kinds of fun, of course. In (what I recall to have been) race-course order:

  • making the first few corners in traffic,
  • getting the timing right for every time I hit the first dismount and runup (at a barrier that was actually just a big scraggly log!),
  • climbing Thorson hill, the damnably steep “sledding hill” slope of the east side of the Olaf campus,
  • gulping air while riding the short flat at the top of the hill,
  • trying not to soil myself (or crash) on rocky descent to the football fields to the base of the hill,
  • focusing my exertion-fuzzed brain enough to negotiate the various features on the flats: several sharp turns, a combination barrier/water hazard, and the tricky involuted “pinwheel,”
  • managing (with one bloody exception (semi-gruesome photo)) to clip in and out of my pedals well enough that I probably gained four or five spots just by being able to pedal before the other guys were clipped in,
  • enjoying the shouts of “Go, Daddy!” from the girls and the clanging cowbells rung by other spectators around the start/finish area, and
  • looking down the course and seeing the hill just a couple minutes away. Again.

I climbed the hill four times, but only rode it three times after misunderstanding how many laps I had left. (I thought I was on my penultimate go-round, so I planned to run/walk the hill and conserve a bit of energy for the last lap, but it turned out I was on my last lap. The “2” on the board must have meant “two laps” for the front riders, who, I think, caught me early in that lap. Oops.)

I had no idea what to expect as far as results, and I wound up 28th out of 41 riders in my category. Not great, but passable for a first race. A bit more cycling-specific training – especially climbing hills that aren’t long, straight, gravel inclines – will go a long way. In other words, I have a few dates with that hill.

“Athletic” Experiment: Cyclocross

What with my new bike, my riding a fair bit since August, and my complete lack of fitness for running races this summer, I decided to try a bike race this fall – the “Back to School Cross” cyclocross race that’s been held at St. Olaf College for the past few years. This year’s race is going to be held on Sunday – quite a while after school started at Olaf, but at a good time for me.

Cyclocross is a kind of racing in which riders use bikes akin to typical road bikes(drop handlebars, relatively high gearing, skinnier tires, and such) to cover off-road terrain that usually includes various obstacles like mud pits, low hurdles, unrideably steep hills, and staircases – all of which can require a rider to jump off the bike, run through or jump over the barrier (sometimes carrying the bike on one shoulder), and then hop back the bike to resume the race. Dismount and carrying sections are the classic elements of cyclocross courses, which are typically pretty short, twisty loops (a mile or so) which the racers have to do over and over for, say, an hour. The Olaf course is classic in this sense, though the beginners’ race at Olaf tomorrow is shorter, just 31 minutes long plus one 1-mile lap.

I’ve been practicing my dismounting, carrying, and remounting “skills” (the sneer quotes are my own) for the past month of so, but I still expect to make a complete fool of myself on those parts of the course. And riding in a group (at least off the start line) will be interesting. My experience with “packs” pretty much begins and ends with the occasional walker in the Arb. On the other hand, I hope my experience as a runner will help on the (few) “run up” sections, and my riding this summer (both on gravel roads and in the Arb) will hopefully at least keep me from passing out during what promises to be a pretty intense half-hour or so. God only knows, though, what’ll happen when I hit the Olaf course’s notorious “Pinwheel of Death”:

More Riding

Last weekend, Ben Witt, the owner of Milltown Cycles, the shop where I bought my bike this summer, sponsored a 50-mile ride on gravel roads around Northfield. I couldn’t take the time away from the kids to do the ride, but this amazing collection of photos by one of the tour riders show it to have been amazing. Many of the shots remind me of sights I’ve enjoyed on my own rides this summer and fall, but then there’s photo 23, which is just spectacular.

I gotta find a way to do this ride in 2010. I have twelve months to get ready!

Novemberiding

I’ve never gone on a pleasure (okay, “training”) ride this late in the year, but today’s gorgeous weather (and the possibility of a bike race next weekend!) pulled me out onto the roads today. In between some intervals, I enjoyed fantastic scenery. Click here for a small set of photos, including these two.


November 1 Ride
Southeast of Northfield, looking southwest. (Compare to the same scene on September 12.)

November 1 Ride
A great vine-shagged silo (and its inexplicable counterpart, a miniature lighthouse) at a farm just a bit down the road from our house.

Cows, Colleges, Contentment

With the girls in a wonderful early-bedtime, deep-sleep groove, my evenings have become radically more open to doing something besides dealing with the awful bedtime routines of last spring and summer. (May they be gone forever, and may I forget them soon.) I can now go off and do stuff without guilt (or a penumbra of ire and exhaustion) at 7 p.m., which both makes life a lot more tolerable ad coincides nicely with the high season of activities at the colleges. Accordingly, I’m indulging, especially but not only in the evenings. Over the last month, I’ve seen one rock show at Olaf and one at Carleton, done some figure drawing at Carleton’s open modeling sessions, seen art exhibits at both Olaf and Carleton, and attended the opening artist talks of a new exhibit at Carleton’s art gallery. Over the next month, I’ll hopefully draw at more of the modeling sessions, see another concert (at Carleton this time), squeeze in some runs in the dark autumnal Arb, and try my legs at a cyclocross race at Olaf. Northfield is a good place to be right now, figuratively and literally.

Autumn Ride

I hit one of my favorite gravel roads for a short ride this afternoon between lunch and our annual visit to the pumpkin patch. For the first half of the ride, I suffered by heading into a 15mph wind. For the second half, I suffered by trying to get some energy out of legs that had been trashed from standing at the concert last night. Even so, it was a gorgeous ride. I hope I can do it a few more times this fall, and maybe even give it a shot this winter.

The view south down Ibson Road, which was about 90% of this ride:
Ibson Road

A tattered windmill on a farm along Ibson Road. Anybody see Don Quixote nearby?
Quixotied

The view over my bars – though this shot doesn’t capture any of the zillions of caterpillars wandering west to east over the road. Why so many? Why were they all going west to east, and always so perfectly perpendicular to the road? Strange…
Riding Along

Three Tanka for an Evening Run

I.
Thirty minutes long
Spanning all the day’s phases:
Starting in bright light
Passing through gathering dusk
Ending in shimmery black

II.
All the leaves prefer
The path and reject the trees
Every step crunches
And you can see deep into
The gray brown black of the woods

III.
Running in the dark
The trail seems to run downhill
Through sharper corners
And pass dim bushes which hide
Many small fearful creatures

(More on tanka)

Avalanche Rescue

This is one of the most riveting videos I’ve ever seen: video shot by a backcountry skier as he is buried in and then rescued from an avalanche. By about 4:30 in, I was hyperventilating right along with him, and the moment (at about 6:05) when his rescuers uncover his face is unbelievably powerful. (The video page has a lot of good backstory.)

Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska from Chappy on Vimeo.

Valley Grove Ride

Though a morning outing with the girls on their bikes went quite badly, with innumerable stops and even more fussing about the act of physical exertion, I decided to risk the pay obeisance to the cycling gods by venturing to the locally-famous hills on Valley Grove Road, southeast of town. I found a nice little route that was about two-thirds gravel roads (my favorite surface) and one-third paved roads. The the toughest climbs (none longer than a mile) were on pavement, and just before I reached them, I had good look at the Valley Grove churches, two century-old Norwegian churches that overlook a swath of beautiful prairie). It was a fun hour’s ride, and wonderfully scenic, too.

September 26 Ride

(The road in the right background is the road from which I took the second photo.)

September 26 Ride

The red barn is visible from at least a couple miles away.