Riding at night, Riding in the heat

I have gone to a new shift. 

I start at 4 AM and get off at 2 PM.  My commute each way is radically different.  It's so different each way that I almost don't even believe that I am riding each way on the same day!

Since I start at 4 AM and I ride my bike I get up at 1 AM.  It allows me to have some breakfast, surf around on the Internet, and see what happened to my beloved San Francisco Giants.  I leave between 2:30 and 2:45 to give myself enough time for the 45-55 minute commute and any possible flats, breakdowns or other issues that may arise on my ride.

Yesterday it was 84 degrees outside when I left.  Yes, 84 degrees at 4 AM which is easily the coldest part of the night!  Needless to say, during summer in Palm Desert there is no being cold.

Riding at night is an interesting experience.  You can't see a whole lot even with your handlebar mounted headlight and the occasional street lamps.  Your mind tells you that there is always some unseen danger lurking in every shadow whether it is a giant pothole that wasn't there yesterday, some wild animal, or crazy guy who is waiting to jump out of the shadows and take your bike.

Never mind the fact that at that time in the morning even the crazies are asleep!

Everybody thinks I am crazy for riding at night. They think that it is just a matter of time before someone doesn't see me and runs me over.  I tell them that I am safer at night than I ever could be during the day since on a typical night commute I am lucky to see 5 cars.  During the day it's more like 500 cars go by me.  So the odds of me getting hit by someone who doesn't see me are much much greater during the day.

The biggest difference about riding at night is your lack of sight.  You are forced to concentrate more on the road and that further up the road than you ever need to during the day.  What looks like a shadow could be some debris or a pothole that will put an end to your ride if you miss it or misidentify it.  Where I live there is a lot of undeveloped space and a coyote or some other wild animal can be out there too.  The other night I noticed a shadow coming across the road towards me.  I was able to identify it as a dog in time and hit the gas.  The dog chased me for a little bit, let out a bark, and gave up.  It gave me a start but it reinforced the fact that I have to keep my eyes open in the dark.

It was 106 degrees at 2 PM when I left work to ride home.

Believe it or not, 106 degrees isn't as terrible as it sounds.  Sure it's hot and it's even more important than ever that you don't overextend yourself but when you are on a bike you have your own cooling system.  The wind keeps you from feeling the full effects of the heat.

Yesterday was my first day commuting in 100+ degree weather this year and I learned a valuable lesson.  Heat is extremely energy sapping.  You need to make sure you have eaten plenty of food and you have at least 2 times the amount of water you normally have. 

Oh, and ice is your friend!

I have been riding with just one water bottle, a Camelbak Podium ChillJacket, packed with ice.  That is more than sufficient when the weather is 84 degrees and just enough when it is 94 degrees.  When you cross that 100 degree mark it's time for a hydration pack.  Even though the wind fools you into thinking you are not sweating, you still are.  It is just evaporating in the wind before you really notice it.  You are losing fluid at a faster rate than you do when the weather is cooler.

I learned the food and the water lesson the hard way yesterday.  I didn't eat a ton for lunch and I only had the one water bottle.  Of course the bottle was packed with ice and water as usual.  I got about 9 miles into my almost 13 mile ride and realized that I was probably not going to make it without a pit stop.  My stomach was screaming for food and my legs and arms had become extremely shaky.  I had to stop and grab a Snickers bar and a Rockstar energy water. 

Funny thing is, my commute home was not too much longer than my ride to work was.  I may have been riding home to hard considering how hot it was and that it was the first time I had been exposed to that temperature in about 9 months. 

These experiences are part of what I think makes riding your bike to work so valuable of an experience.  You are forced to look deeper into your situation than just making sure you have enough gas, turning a key, and letting an engine carry you to your destination.  You need to know your situation, know how much it can and will change, and prepare accordingly. 

Hopefully, those experiences help you in more situations than just your bike ride!

Tour De Suisse Congrats Lance!

So I have been watching the Tour De Suisse at last a little bit every day since my original post about it.  Despite it being seemingly boring and the fact that I know next to nothing about that type of Cycling I still find myself checking in on it.  It's really interesting and seeing the crash the other day didn't hurt it's interest either.  Although seeing those guys crash like that made me appreciate helmets even more because just about all of those guys hit their heads on the pavement and hard! 

I watched the final time trial stage today and I wanted to just say congratulations to Lance Armstrong for finishing second overall and Frank Schleck for the overall tour victory.

I also can really appreciate how hard what they are doing is.  The other night, after watching one of the stages of the Tour De Suisse, I went out on my bike and attempted to get it up to 25 MPH. 

Now let me preface this by saying that I was on a 25 LB. Kentfield FS hybrid.

I hit 21 MPH on the approximately 1 mile stretch that I had available to me on my short ride.  I held it for a little while before I came up to a stop light.  Let me tell you that it's tough riding that fast for an extended period of time.  Again, it's not like I'm riding a Madone like Lance, but it is still a tough thing to do.

Now, I'm still not sure that I'm going to become a big fan of competitive cycling or anything but I'm going to be watching more of the tour De France than I normally do.  Hopefully Lance wins!

Tour De Suisse

I watched some of stage 3 of the Tour De Suisse this afternoon.  Frank Schleck from Luxembourg won the stage, German Tony Martin took the overall race lead by a second, and Lance Armstrong moved up from 33rd overall to 21st.

Other than that, cycling on TV is about as exciting to me as NASCAR.

I don't know why.  Maybe it's because I know about Lance Armstrong, Greg Lemond, Floyd Landis and that's about it,  Maybe it's because of the way that cycling is presented on TVm  Maybe it's because I had never watched a race on TV before, or maybe it's because I actually prefer Mountain Biking to Road Cycling.

Beats me.

I do know that a lot of riders do like to watch the Tour De Suisse, Tour De France, or Tour De whatever.  But it's just not for me.  I mean sure, I appreciate how hard it can be to ride in a group of people riding 25+ MPH.  I also appreciate how hard it is to ride 100 mile stages, and I also appreciate how dangerous it is to be riding in a big group of cyclists the way these guys do.  I appreciate the difficulty of NASCAR too.

Funny thing is I plan to tune in tomorrow to watch some more.  I actually took the time to go to Versus.com and see what the leaderboard looks like (actually I just went there to get the info from the beginning of this post, but  I looked over way more info than I had originally intended).  I also want to see what Lance Armstrong can do.  I know that this is just a tune up for him before the Tour De France, but he strikes me as the kind of guy who will just go out and win one of these races just because it is there.  Plus there is hardly ever anything related to cycling on TV.

Maybe it is a little more interesting than NASCAR....

WIND

I hate the wind.

I'm sure that most cyclists hate the wind too. I would rather ride up a steep hill than ride in the wind. 70 - 90% of a cyclist's energy goes toward overcoming wind resistance. That's all the time, not just on windy days. Windy days just mean you are going to expend that much more energy in order to overcome the wind resistance or drag.
This morning, my ride home was one of those times of expending the extra energy. As I was leaving work, a co-worker said: "I hope the wind is at. your back!" after noting the direction of the wind I could only chuckle and say: "I don't think today is going to be one of those days."

Now I have ridden in the wind before, and it's always tough, but today was something else! Before I even made it out of the parking lot I had a serious headwind. According to Weatherbug, that headwind was about 20-30 MPH which is easily the strongest wind I have ridden in.

Normally I ride along at about a 14-15 MPH average but this morning I was struggling to keep up a 10 MPH average. I really had to lean into it. Now, given the fact that my commuter is a hybrid, I don't ride in the most aerodynamic position. I'm also riding with Panniers on the back of my bike and it's as if I was riding with a couple of parachutes attached to my bike.

I managed to fight along through my close to 13 mile trip. Usually, it takes about 50 minutes for me to complete the whole route, but today it took about an hour and 12 minutes. The wind actually added over 20 minutes to my commute time! I do live in a pretty windy area but, at least most of the time, the wind isn't as constant as it was today. I usually get somewhat of a break from the resistance. Apparently today wasn't one of those days.
My legs are reminding me of that ride tonight.
Where is that Ibuprofen?

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Panniers

I recently ordered a new set of Panniers.

The funny thing is, I used to think that people who rode with Panniers were a strange breed of cyclists.  I thought "What could really be so important that they needed to take it with them on their bikes?" 

Then I started commuting by bike.

Now Panniers are almost always on my bike unless I am able to actually get out and ride my bike just for fun which is pretty rare these days.  I would much rather use them to carry my work clothes, a towel to dry off after a sweaty ride, and any food I am bringing to work with me rather than stuff all that in a backpack and have a giant pool of sweat on my back.

The Panniers I am replacing are some Schwinn Panniers that I got for $25.00 from Wal-Mart.  I have been using these for a few months now and I couldn't be happier to be rid of them.  I'm hoping that with the arrival of my new Panniers I won't have to live in constant fear of the bags coming off my rack and getting caught in my spokes any more which currently happens about once a trip.  This propensity for finding their way into my spokes has caused the panniers to form growing holes in them.  These holes happen to be in the bottom of the bags which means they are just begging to dump my work clothes all over the pavement one day.

I should have taken them back after my first attempt to ride with them.  I followed the directions that came with them which consisted of hooking some pretty suspect hooks on to my rack and strapping a couple of straps around the rack.  Well I made it approximately 10 feet before the bags fell off.  I put them back on and then they fell off again.  Since  I was on my way to work I had to backpack it that night.  I did find a way to get them to stay on but I had to wrap the straps around the rack and then around the bags themselves.  At least now they didn't fall to the ground, they just fell into my spokes!  Good thing I don't have front Panniers!

Anyway, I'm pretty stoked for my new panniers which the tracking information from Amazon says should be here by the 9th.  Which will be in time for me to not have to commute with them this week.  I'll have to review them after I use them for a few days!

Bike tour

I'm planning a bike tour.

It's not going to be anything like a 3 week trek through some foreign country our anything.  it's going to be 3 or 4 days and maybe cover 300 miles max.  Considering that I ride about 300 miles in a month, I think that this is an ambitious goal for a first time tour.  I have a buddy who lives in the Bay Area who will be going with me.  I'm not sure any of the other riders that I know would be up for something like this so it will probably be just the two of us.  However I think this may be the best way to go since I think the idea behind a bike tour is not worrying about making anybody happy except yourself which is pretty hard to do when you have a big group of people going with you.

I got the idea from the most recent issue of the Bicycle Times.  In it they talk to some of the staff writers and discuss what they typically take along with them on a tour.  This story coupled with an article in Bike Magazine about a railroad bike tour really got my juices going about grabbing the bike, getting enough stuff for a few days, and riding as far as the bike will take me.

Something about that just seems like a fun thing to do.  Being on the road with your thoughts and your bike.  I'm the kind of guy who prefers to ride without headphones on so being in the middle of nowhere while on a bike sounds like it's something I will remember for the rest of my life.

At this point, there are no set plans.  We are shooting for going in September when were planning on going up to the Bay Area so my kids can visit their grandma on their mom's side of the family.  I think we will go light with one bike trailer full of stuff between the two of us.  A few changes of clothes, some spare bike parts, some food for the road, a camera and not much else.  We have a few different destinations in mind: Santa Cruz, Davis, Sonora, or whatever else sounds good to us.  

I'll be posting more info as the plans develop.  If you have any suggestions on touring essentials drop me a line of leave a comment below.