Dan Action

Growing legs February 23, 2009

The weather here has been pretty moderate, making for very little excuse to not get out and ride. I’ve been putting together some new loops to make things interesting. One with a good number of short but sharp climbs and others with constant rollers. I’m getting pretty excited for some warmer riding weather all the same though. It always feels like I’m working twice as hard in the cold. I really don’t have so much meat on my bones to speak of, so I tend to be really tense when on the bike for a couple of hours or more in the cold. I usually finish the ride, take a hot shower and crash out for a bit.

I did get out on the mountain bike a couple of times. It gave me hope for the season of fast riding to come. The trails were’t too soft, though on one of the warmer days (45 deg.) some sections started to thaw leaving me and Brendan to push our bikes through some horrendous mud.

In other news, all the Rapha coverage from the Tour of Cali we rode is finished up, leaving you, the hopeful viewer, with pages and pages of gorgeous photos and write ups. The gems of this ride, however, seem to be the videos taken. They’re posted up on the Rapha Continental site as well. They are nice additions to the project, not to mention, beautifully shot.

Last night there were some roller races here in Philly. Not too sparsely attended, but also the event seemed to be kept close to folks’ chest so as not to overwhelm the relatively small bar they took place in. Apparently, they were put on by some folks from NYC to rev up some excitement about Monster Track taking place this weekend. The top three finishers here were to be put into the finals at the roller races happening there. I did end up as the final winner and was assured to be given a round trip Chinatown bus ticket from Philly to NY, shown a good time throughout the weekend of events there, and get to compete. I also won a r.e. Load bag. Good times. Folks were super nice and I finally got to meet Jorge, a guy who I’d been in touch with for a while. Brendan got fourth, and a bit tipsy and we took a nice slow road home afterwards.

As spring draws near so much stuff is starting to ramp up. As mentioned earlier, Monster Track is this coming weekend, the Hand made show is also this coming weekend, training races are starting to happen most likely in your area, and I’m trying to navigate it all.

Nathalie’s spring break starts at the end of this week, so I hope to get to spend a bunch of QT with her, including a pre-ride of Battenkill’s new course. Anyone in? Probably the weekend of the seventh and eighth of March.

Here’s some photos to catch you up.

 

Snowed In February 5, 2009

  Well, Philly finally got covered in snow. I have to say that I was most definitely looking forward to the first substantial snowfall here. I love the quiet that a good storm brings. Some time in the evening is when it all started to really stick and accrue. I couldn’t help but to go out and play for a while. Advantageously, our street is really devoid of folks driving on it and is most definitely too narrow to get a plow down it, so we got the dogs out and started to frolic in earnest.  The dogs went crazy! It was little Batter’s first time in it ever. When the dogs got a bit tired and wanted to get back inside I decided to grab my bike and take a little ride around the neighborhood.

It’s such a great time to ride. Most people driving are going really slow, and are more or less helpless. Lots of folks were out just walking around or futilely shoveling for their ease of getting out the door in the following morning. I will say it’s a pretty benevolent time to be out riding around. Not to mention how fun it is to lay the bike sideways, skidding around every corner.

The next day, however, is dramatically different. Nothing gold can stay. As aformentioned, our street will never see a plow, salt, or sand, but that lays no comparison to the streets a bit more at large. Upon getting to the end of my street that morning, I was greeted roadways of browned and rapidly melting slush. Such is the way, but I still hate it. For one, with the sides of the streets lined with heaps of snow from plowing, there is little room for passing traffic. Drivers of cars, a little less helpless than the night before, are a little more irritable and just want you out of the way. They’re also a bit more reckless, drawing too deeply from that felling of marginally increased ability and tend to lose control or their cars around corners or slide through stop signs and traffic lights pretty often.

Another reason the degradation of once fluffy powder n the streets sucks, and this is kind of embarrasing to say, is that I don’t have a bike outfitted with fenders. Not only that, I don’t have a bike that even has eyelets for them. In the recent past I made due with one of those budget seatpost mounted spatula marketed as a fender or “mudguard”. I have come to abhor those things. They move around, they cover only half the wheel, and, on my bike at least, they sit so high over the rear wheel that water usually gets past it and all over your back still. All this and still nothing to do about the water and what-have-you soaking your feet from the front wheel. So yesterday I went and bought some full cover fenders. I got the Planet Bike kind that just clip to the seat stays and the fork blades. I still needed to make some changes to them as they were going on my track bike that has minimal clearance between the frame and wheels. So I switched the struts from the front fender to the rear and set the shorter front fender over the back wheel so the fender ends at the bridge, but covers the wheel closely, and then chopped the rear fender which now has the struts from the front, and set it so that the front of the fender ends at the fork crown and extends most of the way rearward around the wheel. Pretty full coverage.

Once protected from most elements, at least those on the ground,  I set out to test them out. I felt like a kid with new rainboots, hitting every puddle and snowpile I could find. Shoes stayed dry, as did my hindparts. Mission accomplished.

Now I just have to wait out the snow on the trainer, there’s no heading out on the roads in this state. Oh boy!

 

Weather the Weather February 3, 2009

  Upon getting back from California, I entered into a sewing frenzy. Nathalie and I were trying to get a whole bunch of our stuff made for this punk flea market here in Philly. After a couple of intense days of working, we were able to bring somewhere close to fifty hats, ten pouches, fifteen neck warmers, and a bunch of random bike parts literally to the table.

The event itself was really pretty encouraging. Besides selling a fair amount of our wares, we got to talk to a lot a folks, and if nothing else, assert our presence to a greater base here.

Along those same lines, we have been getting a ton of positive feedback on the stuff that we have sold so far. It makes me really happy that you could actually enjoy and appreciate something that I make.

Anyway, with all that over, I feel I’ve been unpacking and cataloguing memories from my trip to California with Rapha. 752 miles in 7 days for a 49 hour ride week. Suffice to say, there is a lot there to go through. We saw the terrain and landscape completely change in the trip as we traveled roughly north to south. From lush coast and climbing through dense redwood forest, to mountainous pastures giving way to the brambled, brown hills of the Sierras, and finally the scrub and rocky facades of high desert climbs like Angeles Crest and Palomar mountain.  Carey, who pretty much kept us all from losing our minds got some amazing pictures and videos, and they’re up on her Flikr page.

Words are so small given the space that the ride has taken up in me. It would take too many to fill. The gorgeous, aching photos and film that has come from this are probably the best way to really see it.  As a photographer, you pretty much couldn’t miss. It was all that beautiful.  Jeremy also has some great content on the Embrocation blog.

Here the weather is erratic. Yesterday saw me getting out for a couple hours on the bike exploring some new routes; today huge snowflakes are falling with no signs of abatement. After riding in mostly sunny weather on the west coast, getting back on the trainer here is a special kind of torture given to those with only the deepest resign. Damn.

Got some good stuff to look forward to though. Battenkill, the Philly race weekend in early April, and maybe even the Grant’s tomb crit in NYC. Who knows, but I might as well use the fitness I’ve been gaining to an early season advantage, right?