your daily bicycle log

evening bike ppl, been starting to get into my cycling lately with a couple of beautiful 65+ mile fairly hilly rides cross the pennines in the last few weeks that pretty much destroyed me (never done anything over 25 before that) but still whet my appetite, but all on hold after coming off on an unfamiliar bike at the wkend breaking my collarbone (pothole too much for weedier road tyres and my panicked braking too heavy on much harsher brakes, so over i go - laugh away). ambitions temp. shift from getting up to 100 miles a week to learning how to eat and brush my teeth left-handed. keen to get back on tho, just not on that bike.

2 months off the bike and my last 2 days of riding have been T_T

i lost about a dozen pounds which i mistakenly thought would transfer into any lost fitness gained... lol

dealing with saddlesores, callouses, sore shoulders/back/ass again is not fun.

sympathies? advice?

butt cream, gloves, epsom salt bath

that should do it.

my mt evans ascent was thwarted because my buddy is not mt. evans ready in terms of acclimating to altitude. i couldnt leave him behind, as i was the only car. :( we rode to the high point beyond the top of juniper pass instead (~11,200?).

actually, butt/chamois cream is more the preventative measure, once you've actually got the saddle sores/funkiness down there i'd suggest some desitin. yes, the same shit you put on a babies butt for diaper rash.

i bought a cheap-ass cruiser the other day, which is my only bike right now and will eventually become a bike to ride down the path from malibu to venice. gonna probably get a nice trek at some point in the near future, but for now the cruiser is what i'm riding around the 'hood as well. enjoying it a lot, went about eight miles around l.a. the other day, four miles last night.

i've been using udder balm

is this a bad idea?

http://pics.drugstore.com/prodimg/14164/200.jpg

assos chamois cream is still the best. accept no substitutions.

gbx do you even wear lycra?

uh

keep riding around in jeans bro

i am not going to wear lycra to school or the grocery store

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HltxGBXiTWA

i also don't wear jeans!

scrubs

had a good bike to work today, 15 miles in 55 min. hopefully i can do the ride home even faster, since it's more downhill.

Iiiii'm picking up my biiiike this weekeeeend! God I haven't been so excited about anything since...actually let's not go there. I hope to have rides to log about soon.

my beater got stolen : (

Aw caek! That is sucky. What happened?

locked to itself outside my flat while i was out of the country for two weeks. worth about £10 so not the end of the world. friend is lending me his until i leave for munich in september.

Okay that is pretty much an engraved invitation. Locked to nothing, day and night for TWO WEEKS?

there's nothing convenient to look it too every night and it's too much of a pain to regularly carry it up onto the balcony. should have put it there for the trip, but whatevs. seriously, it was a terrible bike.

most bikes are not locked to anything in this town. i have now lost two in ten years. only one of those was worth anything.

what town?

oxford. university town without hills. cycling sole mode of transportation for most people living within 1/2 mile of the city centre. lots of students so the bikes are mostly worthless. theft endemic but no one cares.

bike etiquette: coworker is waiting for me to finish so he can bike home with me, but i'd rather just bike by myself. :/ do i tell him that or just suck it up and not hurt his feelings?

probably just suck it up and not hurt his feelings this time

Wrt rashes, I find that sudocream, nappy rash cream, is very effective, I always pack some fore long hiking or biking adventures. You can use a cortizone cream as well but they say that leaves you more open to yeast infections.

25 miles in 1 hr 15 mins exactly this morning (dead on 20mph). I'm staggered that I could manage that on a training ride (especially with about ten miles on London streets) - these aero bars seem to have made a HUGE difference. Really looking forward to racing with them.

I understand Sudocrem "gets everywhere", though I haven't tried it myself.

Nice work Jamie! Are you def allowed to race with them in the races you race?

Nothing extreme, just used bike for transpo around Bklyn this weekend. The road surface on Nostrand sucks, but for some reason it seemed way shorter than going over to Wythe even though I still had to cut west at the end to get home.

Hooray! I can't believe I did without a bike for 6 months.

Oh fucking fuck, Lee actually BECOMES Nostrand? If I'd realized that a couple of years ago, it would have saved me SO many aborted trips home and much wandering around the hasidic ghetto.

lee st is the most interesting of the south williamsburg hasidic shopping districts

Very much so. I feel like Lee is a microcosm of what the LES once was. On a sunny Sunday, you can prob get a good feel for, say, Essex St in 1910.

Nice work Jamie! Are you def allowed to race with them in the races you race?

I hope so, or that was a hundred quid down the drain. You can't use them in road races (i.e. massed start) obviously, because that's too dangerous, but in time trials more people use them than not. I haven't actually checked the regulations to see if mine conform, but I expect they do as I don't know why a manufacturer would bother making something which doesn't conform - who would that be marketed at?

Oh fucking fuck, Lee actually BECOMES Nostrand? If I'd realized that a couple of years ago, it would have saved me SO many aborted trips home and much wandering around the hasidic ghetto

I spent quite a while wondering who Lee was and what the fuck this post meant.

so today i drove halfway to work and rode in. on the way home, i rode from golden back to morrison where i was parked, but via lookout mtn. on a 28 lbs bike with 20 lbs of gear, it was slow but fun. did not eat enough during day, so i was pretty sickly at the top. i went to the gift shoppe at buffalo bills grave and bought a giant junk food choco muffin, which helped get me back to the car.

heres the view from my client's office to the top of lookout. the top is the peak to the left of the "M", not the one above it.

http://i486.photobucket.com/albums/rr222/Chass3ur/Golden001.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasachidur/sets/72157621421711404/

no idea if this will work, but here are some snaps. most were taken while rolling, so not the best, and ive not fiddled with the exposures...

doing a little tour of kefalonia next week. enjoyed reading this to get an idea of what i'm in for.

http://users.belgacom.net/bike-xp/kefalonia2002/en/index.html

that's a great looking tour. had to laugh:

{the bike shop owner in greece is} impressed by our T-shirts, which we had especially printed for this trip – just as we did last year.

is that so cheesy its actually excellent, printing yr own t shirts to commemorate yr trip?

I wish my ride home last night had been longer, it was so nice. Will go out by bike again tonight, but further away this time.

did this short 8 mi. ride today (+ 2 mi. daily commute) http://www.mapmyride.com/route/us/md/baltimore/593124761765294664 is it common to get asked for your bike by other people or is that just b-more? i had a kid half my age say "wanna trade bikes? huh?" and guy 10 yrs or so older than me go "can i hold your bike for a minute? i promise to give it right back"

planning to hit this trail up again soon
http://www.beslter.org/images/projects/stream/frame4-page_3f_03_04.jpg
i've ridden it as far as it can go south and just past the halfway point going northwest

the bike trade thing happened to me a lot in chi but i always was like lol no u fucking kidding? and then we would usually both lol

biked to work again today but i didn't feel as strong as i did a few days ago, and my left knee was a little twingy. shouldn't this be getting easier, not harder? :/

Are you doing any cross training/other strengthening exercises? You may be overdeveloping one set of muscles.

strength could be nutrition, hydration, health related.

twinge could be seat height. look at online fit guides for seat height and make sure you're properly set up.

yeah, my seat is def too low, i was thinking about that this morning.

you know, it was pretty windy this morning, that's probably the main reason why it felt like i was grinding harder than usual.

wind is the mind killer, imo, just pretend that its a really long hill, gear down and try to ignore the fact that it never, ever ends

and def get your seat height adjusted. 98% of cyclists could yank their seats up a bit and put a lot more air in their tires. friend of mine here at school told me that when he was an undergrad, the campus cycling club would go on guerilla filling missions, and air up all the sagging tires on the racks at school

srsly if you ride your bike everyday and don't own a pump...

also lots of unoiled chains out there. i don't know how they put up with that loud ass squeaking n grinding