And the bike bites back.

Ah yes, it's that time of year where we're trying to get the last hurrah out of a quickly waning summer season. The rain and cold has hit in the northeast, and things have gotten pretty sketchy pretty quickly.

Trails are soggy from heavy fall rains, and are covered with wet leaves and deadfall, so in the interest of not ruining the hard work of many, we stick to the road on days following heavy rains. Of course, there is nothing saying that deadfall and leaves aren't on the sides of the roads either.

That being said, in the 5 years that I've spent seriously riding, both road and trail, I've had my share of crashes, mostly on my mountain bikes. Of course, there was some bruises and scrapes involved, but nothing too terribly bad. Of course, all that had to change on Sunday afternoon.

Riding in paceline, no more than 4 miles from home on a beautiful 60 degree, sunny day, a large sticks (heretofore known as the "little bastard") managed to wedge itself into my front wheel behind the brake caliper. This means that my forward momentum of approximately 20mph carried me right over the bars and to the left, into the lane. Fortunately, no cars were right behind me at the time, and I escaped being flattened by a moving vehicle. My face and body didn't escape the pavement though. My chin cracked down onto the tarmac hard, leaving a deep gash, before I slid and tumbled across the pavement.

After taking a second to determine if I was going to die (I was not) I came to the following conclusions:
1: I was pouring blood from my shredded chin
2: My teeth were all still intact
3: I was laying in the middle of the lane, 2 feet from the yellow centerline, as was my bike and bottles.
4: WAS MY BIKE OK!?

My course of action (the two in front of me were scrambling to get back to me at the time) was to scrabble over to my bike on my hands and knees, and half carry half toss all my gear to the side of the road before staggering to the shoulder.

I realized that the bike appeared OK, and even though I was dripping blood at an alarming rate, I appeared to be mostly ok. So, off to the ER I went where they glued my chin back together after fishing out some of the grit.

So here we are, two days post accident. My body is aching and sore in places that I didn't even realize I had. My chin is disgusting to look at, worse to touch and even more painful than I could imagine that it would be. In fact, at times the pain is almost nauseating.

All because that little bastard decided to make itself known and put a quick end to my season. At this point, by the time I heal enough to begin riding again, the snow will be falling and the holidays will be here, which means no riding.

Ahh holidays. What more of a bummer does the year include other than "the holidays?" Those are almost as low on my list as the "little bastard."



On the plus side, time on the sofa means plenty of cycling DVD watching. Hello 2009 Giro and 2008 Tour DVDs.

And a month later...

Here I am again.

Forget updating ever couple of days, I can't even remember to check my bank balance that often. No, I'm kidding. Actually, the real difficulty in updating very often lies in the fact that life (which includes cycling, imagine that!?) has been interfering with...well, life.

Here in the northeast we've become mired in that awful beast known as "fall" in which the sun drops below the horizon early in the evening and leaves us stuck on stationary trainers or bundling up and donning lights to stick out a few miles in the chill of the evening air. It's an ever-present dilemma that anyone in a New England state will have to come to grips with early in their cycling experience. Gone are the long lazy evenings of tooling along trails and less traveled back roads. Those carefree summer days are replaced by worries of darkness, fallen leaves hiding slippery roots or potholes in the road, and the creeping chill of the coming winter.

Not to fret: the weekends are prime time to spend with the rubber side down. Knobby or skinny, mud or tarmac, spinning or mashing, climbing or descending, it is all good. It's just the exhilaration of the ride that makes the week's troubles melt away. It is worth all the time spent in the office, in meetings or on the phone. And it's one of the only escapes from reality that allows us to focus on the next obstacle in front of us without any thought of the consequences lying down the trail.

Wouldn't it be nice if life was just as easy?

I was informed yesterday...

That I forgot the link to the Livestrong Challenge photos.

So, in the spirit of giving (which is a rare spirit for me) go to town. http://picasaweb.google.com/robdamanii/LivestrongChallenge#

After a long hiatus...

Here we are again. Yes, it's been nearly 2.5 months since my last update, but there has been good reason for such an issue. I have been very heavily training for the Philadelphia Livestrong Challenge for the past couple of months. This has meant that weekends have been spent consuming pasta, riding copious miles on my (new-to-me carbon) road bike, and practicing how to suffer mightily at the hands of steep and long slopes.

Why? What's the point?

I have two family members who were claimed by cancer, and I wanted to help the Lance Armstrong Foundation to put this mean bastard to rest, once and for all. So I trained, I trained hard, I suffered, I considered giving up, but I persevered. I rode the 100 mile Challenge, which also happened to be my first ever century (I only began road riding last year, and I was pretty much unable to complete even the metric we tried last year.) What a century to start with, right? 100 miles in 85 degree heat, 90% humidity, sunshine blazing down on the roads....it was fantastic.





So, right on.

Now it's back to relaxing. No more training schedules of 75 miles on Saturday, recovery ride Sunday, intervals Monday, etc etc. From here on out, it's going to be "mountain bike whenever I feel like it, road ride to keep some fitness, and drink beer as necessary."

I've been looking very longingly at my long neglected mountain bikes hanging in my garage. My Dawg has been whimpering at me, wondering why he hasn't been run in a while, and my King is still asking when his first race will be. Well champ, hopefully I'll have a free weekend here and there to make that happen.

Here's mud in your eye.

Yet more rain...

It has been utterly disgusting how much water has condensed and fallen from the skies in the past few weeks. It seems like we've actually had maybe 2 sunny days per week here in the north east, and that seems to put a damper on the amount of riding one can do. Although the road miles are racking up pretty quickly (what with all the long training rides while waiting for the trails to dry out) and the fitness is good, that's no substitute for getting out and getting dirty.

In fact, this season has been something of a renaissance for fat tire riding for me. Since we've been training ourselves nuts for the Livestrong Challenge and the Harlem Valley Metric Century, riding a mountain bike has been less about training and getting faster than it has been about goofing off, having fun and kicking it old school, with not a care in the world.

Oh yes, and since I have an iPhizzle, I should be able to update from any place, at any time. Maybe even in the no-man's land of Vermont when I go and hit Kingdom Trails again this year.

Yup. That's about the half of it. A new appreciation for mountain bikes, some thrills on the road, no crashes yet this year and a couple of lofty goals...it's a good season so far.

Oh sure, it's been a LONG time...

...but what can I say? Nothing will absolve me of the sin of non-updates, but I can try.

Work has been stifling. I've got a metric century and then a century to train for. I've not been sleeping well. The weather has been combative to say the least.

On the other hand, I seem to be doing something right with my training, as I'm still improving, even when I've only managed about 6 hours per week in the saddle, and sadly, very little of that is fat-tire related saddle time.

Oh, and MountainBikeTales.com will have the new issue up soon. Just as soon as I have a few spare minutes to get it all formatted.

Stay tuned.

TGIF...and Happy Easter.

Another April Fool's day has come and gone, another Easter is now upon us. Since we as humans tend to look at holidays with a sense of amazement and we regard them as a milestone in the passing of time. How often do we hear "wow, it's Easter already?" or "Wow, how can it be 4th of July already? Where has the time gone?" So as the march of time wears on, we pass holiday after holiday and occasionally consider what we've accomplished to this point in the year.

As a cyclist, we find that holidays are less important to gauging what has been accomplished in life than the general populace. Our accomplishments are measured as races and calendar events, training miles and hill climb times. Every race day becomes a holiday, another chance to cut loose and measure our progress. Many people life their lives by the professional racing calendar, wringing their hands in anticipation of races like Paris-Roubaix, Ronde Von Vlaanderen and Liege-Bastonge-Liege (I apologize in advance for my horrendous spelling, but I am French language retarded.)

Holidays are tough times of the year for cyclists. We love spending time with our family, but there's an interesting dichotomy in that our bikes are often considered family, or very nearly so. All too often, a holiday affords us a day off from work, which would be considered a gift of family time. There always is a tough decision to make: human family or bike family? The tyranny of the work week can often drive us to crave the freedom of the open road (or trail) as an outlet for our stresses, frustrations and emotions, and the gift of a day without paperwork, phone calls or meetings is a godsend. However, when we consider the two families at odds with one another, it becomes a balancing act of epic proportions.

So what can you do? You've got all day, a gift from "the man", and you need to get your fix. Ride early, ride late, ride with your other family, or just plain ride. Your other family will understand. They'll see the grin, feel the aura of happiness and joy, and all will be right in the world.

Just don't overcook the ham by going on a ride and forgetting it's in the oven.

Happy Easter, Happy Passover, Happy Whatever. Ride tough, keep the rubber side down.