This week is the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, and Kent & Christine and Beth both have lovely things to say about life without a car. So many lovely things to say that they’ve said everything I could imagine saying! My favorite line: As Peter once told Kent, “I don’t ride my bike because […]
Thinking into the box
Re-reading some old posts from my LiveJournal, I came across one about “cyclist’s left”, and remembered that among the things I learned in my LAB Road I class was yet another name for this type of turn (in addition to cyclist’s left and hook turn): box turn. However, the results I get on Google for […]
The miracle of rotated handlebars
So I went through this entire odyssey after I discovered that Meg’s handlebar/stem combination wasn’t working well for me and wasn’t going to be easy to replace. I looked for stems that would work and found almost nothing, and I couldn’t figure out whether any non-31.8 handlebars would work. I think the odyssey is finally […]
How to relearn Spanish and have fun too
My Spanish is, to say the least, rusty. At one time in my life I could do literary analysis in Spanish and probably knew more technical poetry terms in Spanish than in English. These days it’s pretty much limited to “Hi, how are you?” (“Hola, como estás?” for those who didn’t just translate that in […]
cyclical epithets
Is there a name for the following phenomenon? But Siobhan said we have to use those words [Special Needs] because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see […]
LAB Road I class experience
One of the things I’ve done the past two weekends (in addition to a 50K ride, a 14-mile ride, and a birthday party) was take a local League of American Bicyclists-certified Road I class. The goal of a Road I class is to take any cyclist who can ride a bike and teach them basic-to-intermediate […]
Ride report (brief): Usual Sand Hill-Whiskey Hill-Woodside-Atherton route
Not too much to report on the route today because it’s my standard quick loop. Stats: DST: 14.1 miles AVS: 13.1 MXS: 28 Ride Time: 1:03 Got passed by an asshole motorcyclist on Menlo and a jerk honking motorist on Santa Cruz (near the Sand Hill intersection, same place I almost got sideswiped by a […]
Disappointment, commitment, and RoadID
Disappointment is a funny thing. I wasn’t sure when I got up this morning whether I was going to ride my bike or walk to the train. I hate to admit it but I don’t always like doing a riding commute. Walking to the train is just so simple, and fairly calm and stress-free. If […]
Sensible advice on visibility
I’ve complained before (though perhaps not on this blog) about the advice given to cyclists to “ride as if you’re invisible”, because it just doesn’t make any sense. If you assume no one sees you, you can’t ride with traffic at all. Finally, a piece of cycling instructional material backs me up: People will often […]
Ride report: Sequoia 50K 2008
Nice ride today! It was the same route as last year — I talked to an acquaintance of mine who helps organize the ride, and he said they change every two years. But I think my mind had smoothed out some of the hills early on in the route, because I didn’t remember how challenging […]