Upper Limits, Lower Limits (Last Miles Part Two)

Shadow Selfie, Stony Brook, Princeton

26 December 2017

Not content to be beaten by my 2015 self, I needed 39 more miles. Perhaps if Rick W hadn't listed a ride on Boxing Day I'd have let it go. When I saw his post I figured he hadn't gotten around to canceling it yet; the day's high wasn't even going to reach 32 degrees.  

Best make sure, so I emailed him. "Yes," he answered, "my threshold is about 20 degrees (before wind chill). Given the projections for tomorrow to be mid-20s, I'll be there." I saw his crazy and raised him half an hour by riding from home. I figured I'd peel off from his group anyway, not being able to hold his pace on a warm day.

I wore my warmest everything. Riding with a crosswind up to Princeton my knees got cold. That was a new one. I was otherwise toasty until I reached the ride start at the Princeton Shopping Center. Peter F was already there. "I'm going to drop off at some point," I told him. He said, "Rick's not gonna do 45 miles. It'll be more like 25." He added that we wouldn't be going into the Sourlands either, which meant that I'd pretty much have to be along for the full route.

Rick drove in a few minutes later. We had to fumble around to find a pen that worked so that we could sign in. I had to take my lobster-claw gloves off for that. Bad idea. 

We started up Mount Lucas Road. An annoying little hill on any other day, it was still annoying today but at least it warmed us up. Descending, however, pretty much sucked.

"Brutal," Peter stated as we reached the bottom. We didn't have to ask what he meant.

I had to pull the pair of glove liners out of my pocket and add them into the lobster-claw mix. That's high-end cold right there. The claws make my hands sweat if the air is anything above 32 degrees.

Rick had two short routes in mind. When we got to the decision point I already had almost 20 miles. I voted for the shorter route. Not that it mattered; Rick was halfway into the shortcut turn already.

Everything on me was toasty except for my toes. I was wearing my ventless, ankle-high winter shoes, with toe warmers under my toes and on the top of my shoes. I had wind-resistant booties on top of all of that. There wasn't room for anything else, which was part of the problem, because ideally one should have room to give one's toes a good wiggle. I had room for a mediocre wiggle. When I bought these shoes a decade ago I hadn't known about wiggle room, nor that Sidi runs small. 

I hadn't bothered filling my Camelbak in the morning. I'd stuck with a bottle of Gatorade-water, hoping that the salt and sugar would keep the water from freezing. That mostly worked, except that the valve froze solid. I resorted to unscrewing the cap and drinking at red lights. 

We got onto Canal Road at Blackwells Mills, 18 miles from home. We were protected from the wind there. Rick's route conveniently went the same way I was going, so we stayed together into the middle of Princeton. We parted ways where Washington Road meets Nassau Street.

"Thank you, I think," I said.

On my way back down Princeton Pike I turned onto the bike path where it crosses the Stony Brook. When I commute to and from work I go over the Stony Brook bridge. I'm always very focused on traffic there and I never have the chance to look around. I stopped on the path and pulled out my camera. I was surprised that it worked; my old one would never have tolerated this much cold.

I was in time for a line of geese passing under the bridge.

I had time for one artsy shot before my feet began to yell at me.

I coasted into the driveway with 40 miles, beating my 2015 distance by two miles. The thermometer on my GPS read 26 degrees. It was 12:05 p.m.

The Gatorade was starting to freeze.

I stood in the shower, the water on as hot as I could stand it, until my feet warmed up again.

Pete G has sent around an email asking if anyone wants to ride the towpath tomorrow. Whaddaya say, feet? There's more room in my mountain bike shoes.

Last Miles of the Year

Sky over Cherry Grove Farm, Route 206, Lawrenceville

25 December 2017

I never set out to have five road bikes. I never set out to count miles either. Yet here I am, a phone-accessible spreadsheet in hand, the date in one column and a row for each bike, dutifully entering the distance at the end of each ride. None of it matters, of course. Racking up more miles doesn't make me a better person. 

November came around and I looked at my total. If I could get in 250 miles by the end of the year I'd reach 5000 miles. I checked last year's spreadsheet. I'd fallen short by 120 miles. I decided that this year I wanted to get there. It would be a first*.

Then I went glassblowing twice, and it snowed, and I painted the house, and it snowed again, and all of a sudden there were 120 miles to squeeze in before the end of the year.

No problem. The Thursday before Christmas would be a short day (for work and also the winter solstice). I'd take Beaker into work in near-freezing air, get 14 in, and beat last year by 2 miles.

Friday I was staring down a stressful afternoon with the family. In the morning I stripped Beaker of her commuting light and went out for a solo ride, camera in my pocket, to find 20 or 30 miles and take some pictures.

Back in 2000 and 2001 there was a Friday night ride that left from Pennington. It was almost always the same route. It was the first ride I led when I substituted for the regular leader. It's a good recovery route, with a minimum of hills and very little traffic. Keefe Road has a bridge out, so I took Federal City instead and passed close enough to the iconic pole on the Pole Farm. This is where having 40x zoom comes in handy.

This is also a zoomed in shot:

Close to the side of the road were a few tufts of ornamental grass:

On Carson Road I stopped for a hay bale,

and, of course, the chair -- only now it's two chairs -- on the little mound where the road makes a sharp turn:

Bayberry Road:

On Woosamonsa Road, on the stretch between Route 31 and Burd, is a herd of cows:

They were perfectly positioned so that, no matter how close I got, the fence obscured them all.

I got back home with a little over 31 miles. 66 and change would get me to 5000. Two more rides would do the trick.

Then Bob N sent an email to the Hill Slug regulars. Would anyone be up for a Sunday ride from Hopewell?  Hot diggity!  The short route from home to the elementary school is 10 miles. I offered to map a route and make it official (the club's new ride calendar is handy that way). I came up with something that would give them 43 miles and figured out a sane way to stretch my to-and-from distance to give me 66.

The forecast was for clouds and temperatures hovering five to ten degrees above freezing. I wore my heaviest gloves and packed a lighter pair; I'd need to switch off several times.

I didn't give myself quite enough time; nor did I count on a mild but steady headwind. When I passed the cows on Route 206 I didn't stop.

I arrived five minutes late, one minute behind Ken G. Ed W (who had passed me in his car and so knew my whereabouts), Ricky, Bob N, and Pete were also there. Pete's healing knee would limit him to a couple of hours. Ed had a time constraint. Both would need to peel off before we reached Sergeantsville.

There was a good winter sky above us in the parking lot.

Playing with my zoom, I honed in on a pair of crows across the street:

Not once did I stop for pictures as we zigged and zagged up and across the Sourland Mountain, over the hump on Van Lieus (where we could see Round Mountain in the distance), across 31/202 on Old York, up Wagner, down Wagner, up Wagner (with more potholes than I remember), and finally north to the Sergeantsville General Store.

I didn't take one of my usual routes back. We took Frontage Road, no longer the smooth passage we'd remembered, and went up Gulick. I stopped there to change gloves and also to get a picture of the tree I know I must have taken pictures of before.

Ken peeled off at the top of Marshalls Corner-Woodsville Road. We were down to three. Bob had ridden in from home. If we had wanted to be dramatic, both of us could have split off and left Ricky to enter the parking lot by himself. We didn't do that.

On the way home I did stop for the cows. They live in the Cherry Grove Farm (not the organic one on Carter; the one on 206 that sells eggs and cheese), the largest piece of unprotected open space in Lawrence Township, which stretches from 206 to Princeton Pike. I sometimes see the herd grazing by the Pike on my way to work in the summer.

If you zoom in, you'll see the second cow on the left giving side eye to the cow on her left.

I'm having too much fun with this zoom lens.

Now something past 3:00 p.m., the sun was low in the sky.

I rolled into the driveway about a mile short of 5000. A trip around the neighborhood did the trick. I'd done 67 hilly miles in near freezing weather at the end of December in order to meet a ridiculous goal that has no meaning anywhere ever. Still, it felt good to have done it.

At least I'm not on Strava.

(*Actually, no. While writing this blog entry I found that I'd gone 5038 miles in 2015. Now do I have to find 39 miles between now and January 1?)

Revenge of the Left Turn

Winter Sky*

17 December 2017

Pete G, fresh off of knee surgery and serving as an impromptu scout, gave us the all-clear for a Sunday road ride.  I put on my warmest everything, covered the lens of my new camera** with aluminum foil, and headed to Pennington on Gonzo with Jim.

There was enough salt on the road to turn our tires white within the first mile. Joe M had called in advance to warn us of black ice in the Twin Pines parking lot. When we arrived half an hour later it was mostly gone. 

I didn't have a route in mind other than to stay off the always-icier mountain. I started with the old Friday night C+ route with Jim, Joe, Chris, Andrew, Dave H, Pete, and Ricky.

I stopped on Van Kirk to take pictures of the stream, the snow, and the distant herd of cattle. What I thought was my glasses fogging up turned out to be my gloved fumble-fingers having nudged the exposure dial to something like 1/8 of a second. The pictures, overexposed beyond repair, have a surreal quality to them, so here they are:

Fortunately, Jim posted to his blog within hours of the ride's end. I stole one of his photos:

Noticing the erroneous exposure time only when I stopped again on Titus Mill Road near Route 31. This is the Stony Brook, partially frozen.

By now I'd decided to go to Boro Bean in Hopewell. My picture stop put me far behind the group. Instead of waiting for me at the Route 31 light, every Slug but Jim turned left. I'd been considering a right turn, which would have put us on Route 654 a lot sooner. This was a rare situation in which I didn't Sprague anyone only because I wasn't sure how safe Route 31 would have been. I turned left with everyone else and yelled at them instead.

I could have taken revenge by turning from Woosamonsa onto Poor Farm. I'd promised no big hills, though, I was riding a tank of a bike, and I'm sure Pete would have murdered me on the spot. We stayed on Woosamonsa, where I got off a few good scenic shots.

The Slugs eventually had to suffer for their left turn. I led them all the way up Bear Tavern to Route 518, and from there we climbed the Woodsville double-humper. Jim complained about the Woosamonsa and Woodsville descents. He has to complain about something. It's how we know he's happy. (He's thinking, "Shut up. I hate you" right now.)

Pete, having spent as much time as his knee would allow, had peeled off at Burd Road. The rest of us piled into Boro Bean, where a server asked Andrew if he wanted room for milk in his cafe au lait and Dave melted into the corner easy chair.

From there we went directly back to Pennington; it was less than ten miles. Ricky stayed with me and Jim nearly all of the way back to my house. 

On the way, Jim let it be known that I'd managed to pack 2000 feet of climbing into the group's 35 miles. 

Maybe next time y'all will wait for the leader.

My new camera has a 40x optical zoom. I tried it out on the squirrel's nest in the oak tree in my front yard.

Wow.

If I don't scratch the lens and I keep an eye on the exposure time I might just be able to do something interesting.

(*Winter Sky is one of my favorite Big Country B-sides. Stuart Adamson took his life 16 years ago yesterday.)

(**I wound up sending the first new camera back; it had no manual shutter capability, which wasn't mentioned at all in the online description. Instead I have a newer version of the past two Canon PowerShots. It has a video record button where the power button used to be. You can bet I hit the wrong one at least four times during the ride.)

Rides to Somewhere

Assunpink Creek at Mercer County Park

3 December 2017

Bob N met me at my house for extra miles and I showed him the way to Mercer County Park. Tom was leading a "ride to somewhere." All we knew was that it would be 42 miles and flat.

Ricky, Joe, and Andrew rounded out the crew. I had time for a quick trip to the little bridge over the Assunpink behind the East Picnic Area. I wanted to see what the light and the trees were doing.

They didn't disappoint.

"I scratched my lens again," I told Tom when I returned. For a minute he wasn't sure if I meant my eye or my camera. "With anyone else it wouldn't be a question," he said. Dude. I haven't scratched my cornea in two years.

"My camera," I said. "I can't shoot into the sun." This is the second time I've done that. This camera, a Canon PowerShot, has a series of flat, floppy louvers that pull back when I turn the camera on. They're prone to being pushed out of the way by other things as well. I do my best to keep my camera pocket free of anything else, but it only takes one object one time to nudge the lens and that's it. Before this Canon I had another one that I killed by scratching the lens (far worse than this time). Before that Canon I had two Nikons, which were cheaper and a lot crappier all around. I have to compromise between durability and price. I'm not willing to spend a lot of money for something that I know is going to get jostled around and maybe even rained on. On the other hand, when I spent too little money the camera bodies fell apart on me (I had to hold one together with a rubber band). The Canon PowerShot hits the sweet spot: it's cheap-ish, has a reasonable number of controls, has a good range for optical zoom, and pieces don't fall off. Its weakness is the floppy lens covering.

Tom took us southwest, on a scenic loop past the Robbinsville airport, through the rural end of Hamilton, up Hill Road (of course), and down to New Egypt. We were there for maybe twenty minutes, and for most of that time a man of indeterminate age, in work boots, a pack of cigarettes protruding from both chest pockets of his jacket, squatted near the doorstep of Scott's market. He was scratching off a series of lottery tickets, and when he finished he spent another ten minutes investigating them intently.

The coffee wasn't up to snuff. It tasted like warm water. I dumped it halfway.

The return route took us out of town from the east. The late, great Taster's Canvas building, empty for the better part of a decade, finally has a new occupant. I couldn't tell what; we went past too quickly and I don't remember the name. It sounded vaguely mechanical.

Near the northern end of Millstream I had to stop for the cows.

My presence awoke the sleepers,

who, upon stirring, peaked the curiosity of the rest of the herd around the corner, who came around a fence in a low-speed stampede that got everybody running to the left.

They took a look at me as they went by.

Later, as we crossed over I-195 on Imlaystown-Highstown Road, I doubled back to get a closer look at the row of pigeons perched on a streetlight.

When the Sunday group assembled outside of Bruno's, Chris announced that he didn't have a route in mind. "We'll ride to somewhere," he said.

It was a group that I almost didn't have the legs for. Some were Cranbury regulars. Not having fresh legs, I spent the outbound trip focusing on keeping the pace. There were few turns.

Chris' somewhere ended up being the Quick Chek east of Cassville. We didn't stay there long, and we beat a fast path back because someone felt a drop or two of rain. A cup of Winter Larry's jet fuel (coffee mixed with hot chocolate) and a little tailwind got me to Allentown with less effort.

Now that it's December I don't know how many more two-ride weekends we'll be able to squeeze in before year's end. Not that it matters, but I'm about 150 miles away from a big, round number I've never hit before.

I ordered a new Canon PowerShot. It's cheaper than the last one and has almost double the megapixels. If they haven't improved the lens cover, I'll fashion something myself to keep it protected. It also happens to be red, which is different.