Patience has its Rewards

So last week I was struggling with anticipation as I waited to ride until the plows had made their journey through the countryside. But the moment did finally arrive.

By way of context, this was my driveway that morning:

I’d like to claim that I put those tractor tracks in the snow, but that was my cousin, who graciously comes up and plows us out when we are hemmed in. And prior to the plows going through, this is similar to what the roads in the area looked like. Now, I’m not afraid of riding in a little snow, but I don’t have a fat bike or trike, and more importantly, there was a lot of material on the road - I didn’t want a plow depositing a load of the white stuff on me as it passed me by.

The waiting worked out tho - this is what the roads looked like as I ventured forth:

And this is the thing about winter road riding. I am sometimes quite certain that people think you are (or more specifically, that I am) insane for going out. But what you see in that picture - which is a secondary, rural road - is what I encounter the majority of the time.

This is a point that Tom Babin touches on in Frostbike. People often think about winter as being 3-4 months of punishingly cold weather, but the reality is that, like the rest of the year, it’s usually mild temperatures punctuated by brief extremes. Most winters here in northern Illinois we do see temps in the negative double-digits (F), but that’s usually brief - maybe a few days. It’s possible to dress for the extremes, but even if you stayed in for the very cold days, the rest of the winter is quite manageable.

There are those who prefer to stay in and ride on trainers when it’s cold, and I intend no shade towards them - people should get to like what they like. But if you’ve ever wondered whether you just might be able to manage it out in the winter climate, I’d recommend going for it. It’s not an arctic expedition - you’ll find an abundance of days that are quite amenable.

Speaking of which: time to ride...

Anticipation

Almost every Sunday morning after I wake up and - let’s be honest - after I have my first cup of coffee, I start thinking about where and when I will ride. And while I experience that virtually every week, this Sunday, in particular, the feeling is especially acute.

There is a combination of factors contributing. First is that I made the conscious decision to forgo a ride last Sunday in favor of getting a couple of projects finished. These were things that definitely needed attention, and Sunday is also my day for projects. Usually I prioritize riding and do what I can for projects afterward, but occasionally things have to go the other way around if a thing is going to get done. But this means that I’m a ride short in my mental tally now.

The other factor is that we have snow.

We’ve had dustings and such this season, but the snowfall over the past few days is the first that we’ve seen in earnest, offering an actual ground cover. I’m very much looking forward to being out and about in it.

But there is also a problem: we have snow.

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The snowfall was continual over the past couple of days - slow, but persistent. But the temperatures during the day were hovering around the mid-low 30°’s (F), slightly above freezing for much of the day each day. This appears to have led the road crews out in our rural area to bide their time before getting out and running the plows on the backroads - to wait and see how much will melt away before committing township resources to removal. As a taxpayer and owner of vehicles with all-wheel drive and snow tires I can appreciate that.

For the next several days, however, high temps are forecast to stay below freezing, which means the plow trucks will be out. Which means I need to wait a bit.

To be clear, I am not afraid of riding through a little snow. This is a thing I’ve been doing for a while now - it’s all part of the fun. But I don’t want to be on the road on my trike when the plows go by. You’d be astonished at how much snow can actually land in the lap of a person on a recumbent trike. Or so I imagine...

So I’m sitting, waiting, listening and watching for evidence of snow removal vehicles. Over the years I seem to have developed the ability to detect and isolate the characteristic sound that a plow truck makes as it passes by the house. It’s a little like how my dogs can hear the kibble landing in the food bowl from anywhere in the yard.

Maybe one more cup of coffee, and then maybe they’ll pass by...

Keeping All Your Eggs In One...

When I asked MLW what she wanted for Christmas this year, she requested a fancy countertop egg cooker. This is a thing that makes hard boiled eggs, soft boiled eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, scrambled eggs, pheasant eggs under glass... (not sure about the last one). Seemed a perfectly reasonable request, so we ordered one up.

...and sent it back to exchange for another one that worked. And when the new one arrived we were missing one key component to egg making happiness: the eggs.

For me this presented an opportunity to kill three birds with one egg - I could make my sweetie happy, get in my Sunday ride, and get an opportunity to use my trike as transport and see how it would handle fragile items across the six miles or so of country blacktop between home and town.

The fragile part was really the only question in the mix. I’ve done multiple cargo runs into town on the trike, and carried some heavier items as well, but I wasn’t entirely sure how this one would go. My Catrike Expedition is a capable machine, but it has nothing on it resembling a suspension. And the roads here aren’t bad, but they do have their fair share of expansion joints and other imperfections to contend with, and I can confirm that my tuches is familiar with each and every one of them.

Still, I figured the worst that could happen would be needing to clean out a pannier bag and then having to drive in and shell out cash for more eggs. Seemed a reasonable risk, so off I went.

When you live out in the country the tendency is to purchase things in bulk. No one wants to discover that they are down to just one of anything - sad when it’s eggs or lunch meat, terrifying when it’s toilet paper. So that meant I was going to be carrying back three dozen eggs in two 18-packs.

I put them in my pannier bag with the old zip-neck fleece pullover I carry for temperature emergencies as padding. What I didn’t adequately prepare myself for was the change in perspective that occurred for the ride back.

Literally every bump, crack, frost heave, or other tarmac imperfection became locked into my visual radar, and each time I chose poorly - each time a bump smacked harder, more smartly than seemed ideal - I winced in sympathetic, anticipatory pain.

This also had the effect of slowing me down markedly. The wind was not against me, and my load wasn’t heavy - it’s two cartons of eggs, for goodness sake - and yet my average for the return trip dropped to something south of 10mph as I gingerly picked my way back across the prairie landscape.

When I got back to the garage I pulled out the cartons and contemplated opening them there to see how I’d done. However, I have a personal tendency towards tragic mishap when it comes to interacting with fragile and/or fluid containing items, and raw eggs, it seems to me, fit in both categories. As I considered it I could picture myself opening a carton, having carried it all the way home on my trike, and then unceremoniously dropping it’s contents on the garage floor.

Hell, I figured I was going to be fortunate to just not drop them while carrying them in to the house.

So I carefully picked them up - with both hands, just like Grandma Marie taught me - and took them inside. I set them firmly on the table, ensuring they were securely placed before I opened them. And:

There you have it. I suspect I was being a little over the top in my concern on the way home - I’ll be more comfortable next time. But I’ll still carry them in using both hands.

On the Board

I really wanted to get out and ride on New Year’s Day. I mean, while the day itself is somewhat arbitrary, I like the romantic notion of getting out on day one; first day of the year, first ride of the year, that sort of thing.

The thing was, while I liked the idea of it, I was having trouble getting myself to actually do it. This is unusual for me - I generally just enjoy riding. I hadn’t been out super-late the night before, nor had I over-reveled. Still, the wind was blowing hard out of the south, and I was working on other things (including Wednesday’s year-end round-up ). I also was waiting for my winter gear to finish winding its way through the wash. As the day wended on it got easier and easier to imagine not riding. I started to negotiate with myself, reasoning that I’d ridden the day before, and I’d have opportunities to ride on Friday and Sunday, and wasn’t that still pretty early in the year...?

Ultimately I negotiated with myself to set up a new, shorter route - all over familiar territory, but a slightly different pattern - so that it would be a limited commitment but still get me out on the trike.

Once the dryer stopped it’s cycle I pulled the gear out and made myself go. And five minutes into it I was enjoying myself and pleased to be out on the machine, out in the elements, embracing the day.

By the time I got back I felt much better, and I was very happy that I’d pushed myself into it. It wasn’t a long ride, or particularly adventurous, I was on the board for day one of 2020.

This is, I think, a familiar experience for many of us, even folks who exercise regularly. But it is helpful to have a periodic reminder of the phenomenon - that even when you don’t really feel like it in the moment, you will feel better if you just go ahead and do it. That reminder will hopefully help bolster the resolve for the next time you just don’t wanna...

2019 Cycling Year in Review

So it’s that time when we look back at the year that was and consider where we’ve been, what we’ve done in regard to our goals, and consider where you’d like to go from there. And here at Applied Life it’s now an annual tradition. You know, cuz I did it once before, last year.

We’ll set aside the fact that there’s nothing actually special about the end of the month of December, and further set aside the fact that a more reasonably designed calendar would end the year either on the winter solstice or the vernal equinox. But that’s what you get when you have a calendar designed by committee, so, you know, I won’t even bring that up here.

As always, it is always important to remember to compare oneself to oneself, not to others. I periodically have to remind myself of this, particularly when undertaking something like this. With that in mind, what follows is a look at _my_ year in cycling.

Distance

My goal for this past year was to get to 1500 miles. This seemed a reasonable, achievable increase from my ultimate 2018 total of 1372 miles (well, technically 1372.14, but who’s counting...).

That won’t seem like a huge increase - 1372 to 1500 - for some people, I realize. In the cycling groups I follow there are people who literally have tens of thousands of miles per year. But keeping in mind that adage of comparing oneself to oneself, it seemed reasonable at the time.

I may have undersold myself. I met the goal this year, and then sailed past it a bit, to hit a year end mark of 1722.34 miles.

In terms of the how and why, according to Cyclemeter I rode both more often, and for longer distances per ride on average. Last year I managed 106 rides, with an average distance of 12.94 miles. For 2019 I came in at 121 rides, with an average distance of 14.23 miles.

That may seem pretty elementary, and in some ways it is. But rides and distance both take up time, and it can be challenging to squeeze additional riding into my schedule. But I did make a conscious effort to increase the length of my Sunday rides, which seems to have had an effect. I’ve also tried to do a better job of taking riding opportunities where they present - for example, riding to my mailbox on days when I am working from home (it’s a 16-mile round trip to a PO Box - I’m not just riding to the end of the driveway).

It also helps sometimes when you have a new toy, which brings us to...

Machines

I know that a lot of cyclists are N+1 types (as in the right number of bikes to own is the number I have now - _N_ - plus one more). I am not. I think new bikes are cool and all - they sure do look pretty sitting there on the showroom floor. But I’m really much more the sort of person who establishes a long-term relationship with a machine. I rode my 1987 Cannondale for at least a decade before getting the Catrike Pocket, and I was set to ride off into the sunset with the little blue machine.

But I didn’t.

At the end of July I took possession of an Atomic Orange Catrike Expedition.

To be clear, was absolutely nothing wrong with the Pocket, and I’d been happy riding it for the past two years or so. But I’d purchased the Pocket as my entry into the world of recumbent trikes, a chance to see whether or not I liked it. My selection of it as a particular model was one of convenience - it came up as available on eBay, was in my price range, and was only an hour away.

It’s worked out well for all of that, but when I felt like I was finally in a position to consider getting something different, I decided to take a more considered look at what I thought would work for me and my cycling goals, and the Expedition seemed to fill the bill. I’m liking it a lot, as anyone looking back across the posts this year can see. And I suspect this will be a long-term fling.

And this doesn’t hang the Pocket out to dry. I resized it for MLW so she can have her own triking adventures.

Trips

This year, as usual, most of my rides started and ended at my driveway. But between opportunities offered by work travel, and some additional general adventurousness, I did get out to a few new trails, as well as revisited some more. Those included:

• The month of May offered an opportunity to drive down to the pointy end of the state, so I took a ride on the Tunnel Hill Trail, riding from Vienna to Karnak.
• In June I made the trip over to Sterling to tackle the Hennepin Feeder Canal trail. I managed to get very wet. Incidentally, the feeder canal provides the water supply for the Hennepin Canal. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Illinois gateway trail for the Rails to Trails coast to coast path project.
• In July I returned to the I&M Canal trail and learned a thing or two about what the rainy season can do to a trike. And then I returned again to go hunting for my lost flag (ugh).
• In August the opportunity to ride the Des Plaines River Trail presented itself.
• I rode in the Farmondo again in September.
• On Black Friday this year I decided to give the Expedition a shot at the Military Ridge Trail in southwestern Wisconsin. I did not distinguish myself in terms of either speed or distance, but I did learn a thing or two about the rolling resistance provided by wet sand, and got quite a workout in the process.

There were a couple of others that I returned to or tried but didn’t find the muse to put them down here, including two return trips to Rend Lake (one on the Pocket, one on the Expedition), and a late day adventure riding north to the titular Tunnel on the Tunnel Hill Trail (that one may still get its own post). One of my goals for last year was to explore more trails and, all in all I think I managed to get there.

Miscellaneous

I had a couple of other areas of more technical exploration in 2019:

• When I ordered the Expedition I also ordered up a pair of Shimano Spd sandals and decided to give being clipped in a try. That experiment was not successful, but I did learn some things along the way; and
• My desire (okay - need) to sometimes have coffee along for the ride led me to add a Terracycle Adjustomatic Bottle Mount to my Expedition. Besides having a product name that is just delightful, it also works very well; and
• The addition of a second trike required me to rethink the storage setup in our comparatively tiny garage. And finally
• Serendipity brought along the opportunity to get a new mobile trike garage in the form of a Subaru Outback. That experiment is more successful than the spd shoes thus far...

Next Year?

The end of the year is also the time to set goals for the new one coming.

In terms of mileage, last year I set my goal at 1500 miles. In retrospect, that seems like it may have been too safe a number, but I also find myself mentally wanting to make excuses about how I’m not sure where or how I would fit much more riding into my schedule. I’m sure I’m not the only person that struggles with that issue - as I said before, distance equals time. Still, I think I need to at least shoot for a 2000 mile goal.

There - I said it. Now we’ll see if I can actually _do_ it...

Last year I said I wanted to explore more trails. I’d like to do a little more of that for 2020 - I think there are a handful of routes in areas I visit that I haven’t yet taken advantage of. But I’d really like to manage a couple of options that I didn’t achieve from last year:

• I would really like to finally make it from LaSalle to Ottawa along the I&M Canal Trail. I tried this year, but was stymied by mud and... well... just so much mud. And I didn’t make it back later in the season, when the rain finally had tapered off.
• Similarly, I didn’t make that trip further down the Hennepin Canal Trail. I did, as noted above, take a ride along the feeder canal, but I didn’t make it back down for the main event. Portions of the Hennepin Canal trail were closed during the rainiest parts of this spring (this is something that, hopefully, Rails to Trails has a plan for sorting out), but again, didn’t take the opportunity to return to it later in the season.

And along these lines, I’d like to see if I can’t find a way to fit the occasional stop in at restaurants or taverns along those routes. This is a thing that I’ve often considered, but with one exception - the Lodi Tap in Utica, following my struggles with the mud along the I&M canal trail (did I mention the mud?) - I usually just keep going (I’m a fairly solitary soul by nature). But I think that would add to the variety along the way.

And finally, I need to finish my trailer project. I’ll be honest here and admit that part of the issue is that working on the trailer directly competes with riding - both are spare time activities, and faced with doing one or the other, I’ve generally chosen to ride. I may need to bring it inside and do some work when the winter snowstorms rise up.

So: that’s it for 2019. Come on 2020 and show us what you’ve got!

Grocery Getter

A couple of weeks ago MLW announced that it was time to make a chuck roast. This is always a moment of celebration in the house - My Lovely Wife is a magnificent cook, and when she applies her skills to a large item like a roast it means that the goodness lasts across several meals. I am a particular beneficiary of this, as I love leftovers, and I seem to be of a singular preference for that in our household.

My role in these things is often to fetch items, and this meal was no exception. I was beginning to gear up for my Sunday ride when she asked if I could run to the store and pick a few things up. It was a short list, and so my first thought was that I could quickly run into town, grab the items on the list, and then go for a ride upon my return. And then it occurred to me: maybe I could kill two birds with one trike...

Ok - so the metaphor there needs a little bit of work, but you can probably see where I am going with this. I asked her if she needed the things on her list right away, or if it would be okay if it took an hour or so. She agreed, and didn’t even roll her eyes at me (or if she did, she was kind enough to do it when I wasn’t looking - either way, I’m a very lucky man).

So I decided it was time to set my Catrike Expedition to work as a grocery getter.

Now I realize that people in urban areas have been using their bikes to run to the store for several years now, and that those numbers are increasing as the amount of urban cycling increases overall. In that respect, this idea is not a new one, and in fact, when I lived in an urban-ish area in the 2000’s I used my Cannondale and a repurposed child trailer to do periodic grocery hauling myself.

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But we don’t live in an urban area now. We live about six miles out of town on the open prairie, and getting to the grocery store is a 12-mile round trip. Comparatively speaking, my trip to the store back in our urban-ish days was less than three miles all told. This is not a complaint - we actively chose to live out here, and this is not a decision I regret - but it does mean that a ride to the store is a greater time commitment, and that it requires planning - there’s no running back again for "one more thing".

In this case, it also meant that I needed to do some planning in terms of carrying capacity. I reviewed the list that MLW provided:

And determined that I should be able to carry all of that in my pannier bags if I emptied a few things out of them first. Mostly this meant that I wouldn't be carrying additional insulating gear (which I’ve been keeping in there as the weather gets colder), and that I would have only one spare tube for the front and rear tires. So, you know, if I got two front flats I’d have to call for help. None of that would have been necessary if I had a trailer to pull behind my trike, but some jackass has been dragging his feet at getting that project finished...

That all set up, I double-checked to make sure I had my wallet along with me - there are few things more frustrating than riding 6-8 miles to do an errand just to find that you have not brought along a vital component to completing said errand; or, you know, so I hear... - and started riding my way into town.

This adventure occurred on the 15th of December. The temperature was right around 20°F, but it was sunny and the wind was blessedly, atypically still. In short, it was a perfect December riding day.

The ride in was uneventful, and the shopping itself was, you know, shopping. I’m sure I attracted a bit of attention with my riding gear. I’m not a MAMIL - I’m middle aged, but I don’t go in for specialized riding clothes. However, I was wearing Columbia noisy pants (nylon hiking pants) and a bright orange insulated jersey (Lycra I don’t need, but visibility I do). But as is true of midwestern small town life, if people took notice they whispered about it amongst themselves.

The challenge came in when it was time to pack my produce on to the trike:

Fortunately I had calculated correctly, and everything fit. But once it was in there, I could certainly feel it.

While celery and herbs don’t add much by way of weight, the wine and the beef broth - two containers of each - certainly did. I packed the broth on one side and the wine on the other in order to balance things out. This wasn’t exactly perfect - the broth was about 4lbs (2lbs per container), and a 750ml bottle of wine is about 3lbs, for a total of 6, but I put the broth on the side with my spare tubes and tools, so it was probably pretty close. Once I was all loaded up I zipped the bags shut and hit the road.

When I say that I could feel it, I mean that I could definitely tell that there was more weight on board for the return trip. It wasn’t unreasonable, and I’ve carried far more weight on the back of the trike without significant issue. But you definitely knew it was there. And it shows on the stats for the ride as well. My ride speed from Cyclemeter is in the graph below:

The ride in is 6.36 miles, and that sharp drop-off in speed around mile 6 is almost certainly my arrival in the parking lot. To even things out, I compared the first five miles to the last five, leaving out miles six and seven. My average speed for the first five miles on the way in was 15.4mph, while on the way out it dropped to 12.3mph. So the extra 10-11lbs of groceries dropped my average speed by about 3mph.

This was, all in all, just about a perfect day for this comparison. Usually wind is a significant factor in riding on the prairie. The fact that the day was essentially still means that the difference in speed can largely be attributed to the difference in weight. One could argue, I suppose, that I might also have been more fatigued on the way back, but this grocery run was shorter than my average ride for the year thus far (14.27), and I often find that my speeds either maintain or go up as I get warmed up, so I don’t think fatigue was a significant factor.

To me, that 3mph drop seems a reasonable trade-off for the utility use of the trike. When I put together my argument for recumbent trikes being the ideal rural bike, this was exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. The Expedition handled the weight well, and I was able to manage the load at a reasonable return speed. 12.3mph isn’t going to set any speed records, mind you, but it’s pretty good for managing an additional 10-11 lbs over and above what I carried in.

And, as always, I just love it when I get the opportunity to use my trike as transportation. I don’t have the illusion or expectation that I will ever be in a position to cycle for most of my transportation, but on this occasion, at least, I used no fossil fuels, put no wear and tear on my car, and managed to get some exercise. In my book, all of that comes together for a win.

And incidentally: the roast was excellent!

Trike Transporting - The High Seat - Getting on Top of Things Revisited

One of the things that goes with getting a new mobile trike garage is learning how to work out the different aspects of carrying the trike. Most of the time, of course, I plan on just carrying it inside. This is really the safest option in multiple ways - keeps my Expedition out of the elements and keeps it away from prying eyes and touching hands.

And while I chose the outback because it would carry the trike and a couple of people, sometimes we have to carry multiple people and their stuff.

A notable example of this occurred over thanksgiving. Apparently my wife and child want not only to be transported over the river and through the woods, but they also want to bring along other ridiculous items like, say, pajamas, toothbrushes, and changes of clothing - so demanding.

I’d dealt with this before, setting up the rack for the Pocket for the same trip last Thanksgiving, but that was on my Honda Fit. For that car I’ve used an entire separate Yakima rack that mounts to the roof (no particular allegiance to Yakima here - it’s just what I already own). The Outback comes with its own roof rails - specifically swiveling roof rails (it took me a little while to figure out what that meant) - so I’d need a bit of different equipment.

As you might expect, Yakima makes mounts for factory roof racks as well. I spent a little time on their website, and it appeared that all I would need was the Mighty Mount 23H to hook the wheel trays to the Outback’s factory rails. I ordered them up. They come in packs of four, and I needed six (two mounting points for three wheel trays), so I ordered two packs.

I was a little puzzled by the warning on the box - where exactly did they think I was going to put these?!? But then again, those silica packs look pretty tasty too...

Once they came in, installation was pretty straightforward. Of course, on the Outback the first thing you have to do is swivel your roof rails. I said before that I had read this phrase several times when I was researching the Outback, but didn’t know what it meant. When you look at the car, the roof rails run parallel to the sides:

On most vehicles this means that the rails essentially serve as a mounting point for crossbars, which you will have to purchase separately - e.g. from the manufacturer or from an aftermarket company like Yakima or Thule. That’s initially what I expected to have to use as well, but I already have two separate sets of crossbars (I’ve had to mount bikes and skis to a lot of different roofs over the years. Anyone need crossbar mounts for a 1994 Nissan Pathfinder...?).

What I learned is that when they say "swivel" what they mean is that the bars unhook from their parallel mounting and swing around (swivel) across the roof to a perpendicular position.

Why I am spending so much time writing about this aspect? Honestly, it just tickles me. I’ve spent years putting racks on cars, some of which had no factory rack, some with just side rails, and some with full racks that I just wouldn't trust. In every case part of the problem is putting on and taking off the rack, storing it, etc. You can’t just leave it on because it plays havoc with mileage and presents a noisy intrusion. Subaru has solved at least part of that problem by keeping the rack (or at least the crossbars) always on top, but out of the wind until you actually need it. It’s just elegant. Maybe other car companies have similar systems, but none of them have ever been on a car I’ve owned, and I’ve had a few. So I’m a fan of this solution. But now I’ll stop gushing and move on.

Everything else is pretty much what you’d think - line up the mounting points so they are straight, put the wheel trays on to them, and tighten everything down.

One’s (my) natural tendency might be to try and center the rails on the roof, but you want to keep in mind that you have to lift an entire Catrike Expedition up there. I try to mount it as close to the driver’s side as I can get it, since that’s where I’ll be lifting up from.

The wheel trays I’m using are Yakima Copperheads. What you see are the wheel tray part of those with the fork mount head removed. For the trike what I needed was the ratchet straps that would go around the rear wheel of an upright. This is all the same system and equipment that I used with the Pocket last year.

The trike is awkward to get up there, but it gets easier with practice.

I supplement the ratchet straps with bungees (the heavy duty black rubber ones)...

...And I always put my cable lock around the seat frame and crossbars. I think of this last part as a bit of double security. Hopefully it will keep people with wandering hands from contemplating taking my trike, and also will act as a final safety catch if other parts let go.

How did it all work? I love my Honda Fit for a lot of reasons, but you can tell that the Outback is designed with the idea that people will carry things on top. It’s relatively quiet even with the trike on the roof (the Fit was not), and where the Fit struggled to maintain speed in a headwind the Subaru (with its much larger engine) managed just fine.

I’ll still carry the trike inside most of the time. The following morning in Wisconsin illustrated the reason why quite nicely:

I love a fresh dusting of snow, but I don’t love it being on my trike... You know, unless I put in there myself.

Ok - time to ride...

Frostbike - A Review

One could be forgiven for thinking that a book about cycling in the cold months of the year would have a very narrow field of interest. After all, it’s a pretty small group of people who even want to venture out to do anything in winter’s chill, much less spinning pedals on a decidedly weather-exposed machine. Indeed, for myself I first heard about Frostbike: The Joy, Pain, and Numbness of Winter Cycling by Tom Babin through the Winter Cycling group on Facebook. This is an excellent, and well moderated group, but it’s group that exists in part because a relatively small number of people share the interest. And, of course, those folks are nuts, right?

It turns out that this perspective is, in fact, a distinctly North American one. As Babin notes, here in the US and Canada...

What usually happens when winter rolls in is that the number of cyclists tumbles, and those who do it are seen as zealots or oddballs.

As the book makes clear, however, there are other parts of the world that do not share our way of thinking. Babin explicitly describes arriving at the airport in Oulu, Finland, and finding that the bike routes not only came directly to the front door of the airport, but they were being actively used. And he was there in February.

That’s right - Finland. in February.

But none of that was what I expected when I purchased Frostbike and downloaded to my Kindle last spring. I bought it last March, at the end of the winter riding season, purposely planning on holding off reading it until things got chilly here at the end of the year. I was anticipating a book about the author’s personal journey towards becoming a winter cyclist, and I figured that would help me with mentally gearing myself up for the next season. And the book does include that journey - I suspect Tom Babin’s beginnings with the world of cold-weather pedaling will be familiar to many winter cyclists. But Tom Babin is a journalist and cycling advocate from Calgary, and Frostbike extends well beyond his personal journey.

Frostbike explores the bigger picture of understanding where people have been historically with respect to cycling and winter, as well as literally journying to cities around the world to see how other cities - cities where there is actual, real winter - handle cycling.

It’s not too big a spoiler to say that they handle it well. Of Oulu, Finland, Babin writes:

I realized I had probably, in just a few minutes, seen more people riding in the snow than I ever had in my life.

From Finland he also travels to Copenhagen to keep his perspective from being too narrowly focused, and finds a similar picture. And when he asks people there why they ride in the winter the answer is both surprising and simple:

The reasons people ride bikes in the winter, he said, are the same reasons they ride bikes in the summer–doing so is quick and convenient. You just have to dress for it.

The book also takes time to investigate why we seem to have such a different perspective in North America from Northern Europe when it comes to winter cycling and, frankly, just winter in general. Where he arrives is illuminating, and for myself placed the finger finally on the nose of a phenomenon I’ve been trying to mentally sort out for years. I remember, as a kid, enjoying being outside in the winter weather, and having friends routinely joining me. I still enjoy it, but I no longer have company in those pursuits. He hits the nail on the head with his observations and conclusions in this area. I won’t give it away here, but I will offer this quote as a teaser:

For Canadians, and perhaps many North Americans, complaining about the weather has become second nature, our default way of relating to each other.

You will see the cycling advocate in this work as well. In particular, he does an able job of outlining whether, and why, cycling infrastructure should be supported and maintained in winter months, and it involves a hard look at whether there are other facilities that municipalities develop despite not having year-round applications...

Going in, it is good to be aware that the book is very much focused on learning about and developing winter cycling for urban settings. This should, perhaps, not be surprising - that’s where the bulk of cycling focus seems to be, where the majority of people are to be found, and arguably urban areas are where cycling has the most benefit to offer in terms of reducing congestion. There is some discussion about the development of fatbikes, and it was interesting to read the history in that area, but it’s ultimately in service of the author’s efforts to determine which type of bike will work best for his (urban) winter commute. I would have liked a little more about the broader world of winter riding. Still, my hope for more on the wider world of winter cycling was an expectation the author did not promise, and was not obligated to meet.

There is also a section at the end of the book, styled as an addendum, offering up tips for winter cycling. It’s brief, but practical, and will be helpful for new adventurers. I’m certain that the existing, died in the wool cool kids will have disagreements with the author’s recommendations, but then again, they don’t really need the tips either.

If you have an cyclist on your holiday shopping list, or if you are just interested yourself in looking into winter cycling around the world, Frostbike (I love the play on words with the title, and iOS autocorrect, incidentally, hates it) is an excellent read. It’s available in hard copy and Kindle through Amazon. (Regular readers will be aware that I usually listen to my books, but Audible doesn’t (yet) carry this particular tome).

Enjoy. Now it’s time to ride. In the cold...

New Mobile Trike Garage...

For much of the past two years or so, my car has largely functioned as a mobile trike garage. While I went through a fair amount of thought and effort to figure out how to store my trike by hanging it from the ceiling in the garage, the reality is that it spent relatively little time on it’s perch. The Pocket, being a relatively small machine, fit nicely behind the rear seats in my Honda Fit, and since I most frequently drive alone or, on rare occasion, with a single passenger, it was simpler to leave it in the car much of the time. Besides, you never know when an opportunity to ride might present itself, and you can only capitalize on that if the trike is present, so...

When I got the Catrike Expedition this summer I knew that it’s increased size was going to complicate things a bit. I love Honda Fits - they are extremely flexible, efficient and, with a stick shift at least, fun to drive. But the Expedition is both wider and, notably, longer than the Pocket. I expected it would strain the Fit’s capabilities as a trike transport.

Strain was correct. While the Pocket fit behind the front seats with the rear seats folded, I was not able to find any way to carry the Expedition without encroaching into the front passenger area. Ultimately, the best arrangement turned out to be sliding the passenger seat all the way forward and then leaning the seat back forward. With this done and the Expedition put in the back at an angle I could just barely get the rear hatch closed. (I also quickly discovered that I had to remove the passenger headrest because it now sat directly in my line of sight of the right-side rear view mirror).

As I mentioned, most of the time I’m in the car by myself, so this wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. However, it does decrease flexibility. Say your child needs you to swing by and pick them up on the way home, for example. Unless they are going to ride in the seat of the trike, there’s nowhere for them to sit. Oddly enough, passengers tend to object to this option.

Yes, it is possible to carry the trike on the roof - I’ve done this before - but that puts it out in the elements and in view of prying eyes and wandering hands, so I prefer to have it inside whenever possible. And besides, the roof rack has a negative impact on noise level and gas mileage, so I don’t put it on unless I’m planning to carry the trike up top in advance. It’s not there on the car to be used if I encounter an unexpected passenger need.

All that aside, it’s been workable, if occasionally inconvenient, for the past several months, and I’d been prepared to work with it for the longer term. However, events transpired such that the family was going to need to get a different vehicle. Given that, it made sense to pass down my trusty, but well used, Honda Fit to the aforementioned offspring and look for a vehicle more suitable to trike transport.

Of course, the ability to transport the trike was not the only criteria I needed to meet (believe it or not). We live in the hinterlands in northern Illinois, and I travel by car a fair amount for work. A vehicle for me needed to meet the following criteria:

• Have real all-wheel drive - we contend with a lot of snow
• Be comfortable for distance driving
• Sporty and relatively fun to drive
• Get relatively decent gas mileage
• Have room for the trike and at least one other passenger to ride in comfort; and
• NOT be a truck or SUV

It’s the last one, of course, that really narrows things down, given the rest of the list. While we’ve had a truck or three in the household over the years, I prefer the handling characteristics of a car. Plus, since I drive a lot, the greener side of my nature struggles with the mileage hit of, say, a Suburban or Tahoe (which would otherwise easily meet the other criteria). To boil it down: I can’t help myself - I’m a car guy.

This list frankly left me with, as best I could determine, two potential choices: Subaru Crosstrek or Subaru Outback.

I like them both, and I loved the fact that the Crosstrek could be had with a manual transmission (car guy, remember?). However, I’ve parked next to many a Crosstrek with my Fit over the past few years (well - mostly the same one many times- a friend in my martial arts class drove one, also in orange), and the Crosstrek appeared to be bigger than the Fit, but not by a lot. So I posted a question for the folks in the Catrike Owners Group on Facebook to see if anyone else had experience with Expeditions and Crosstreks and, well, they had (groups are really the best part of Facebook. Maybe even the only good part...). The upshot: it’s about the same situation as with the Honda Fit.

So that left me with the Outback.

I spent a few evenings searching online for something in our desired price range, and then MLW and I set a day aside to go have a look. Besides identifying a dealership and mapping a route, my primary act of preparation was shoehorning the Expedition into the back of our 2011 Honda CR-V. My logic here was that, given my primary criteria was being able to carry the trike and people, the best way to test that would be just to bring along the trike and try it out.

Brilliant, right?

What followed was a phenomenal testament of just how good My Lovely Wife is to me. When I say "shoehorned", what I mean is that it does not fit comfortably in the CRV, which is taller, but not really that much longer than the Fit. So, in order to fit it inside, I had to slide the passenger seat forward, set the seat back bolt upright (but not forward - yay!) and push down on the trike against the tire pressure in order to slide it back because the rear cargo rack was pressing against the ceiling.

After I had accomplished all this MLW looked at it and said: "so - that’s right against the back of my seat."

"Yeah" I said. "Is that ok?"

"So" she says "I can’t lean back or, you know, move or anything?"

"Umm... I could take it out. I could just bring along a tape measure and do measurements..." I said.

"How far is it?" She asked.

"About an hour and a half".

And then she sighed and said "it’ll be fine. Let’s go."

I’m quite certain I don’t deserve her.

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I’m pleased to say that the salesman at the dealership appeared completely unphased by my request to cram my trike into the back of a car I did not yet own. I’m sure that part of it is just due to wanting to make a sale, but I suspect that it was also helpful that the car, though used, happened to be for sale at a Subaru dealership. Given the target market for these cars I suspect I’m not the first person they’ve encountered bringing along equipment of one sort or another to see how it fits.

And: it does. I’m pleased to say that, with the back seats down and the front seat moved slightly forward the Expedition fits and allows for two passengers in addition to the driver - one in the front passenger seat and one in the rear driver’s side seat (in the "40" side of the 60/40 rear seat split). I did have to loosen the neck rest on the trike and tilt it forward to fit it in, but that’s a pretty easy adjustment to work with.

That sorted, it was just a test drive and some negotiation time before we settled things up and I took it home:

I’ve had it out and about a few times now with the Expedition in the back, and it all works out well. I did briefly try running the rear wheel in-between the front seats, but that blocked the central rear view mirror more than I cared for, so I switched to setting it in at an angle. That adjustment made, everything seems to work quite nicely. We’ll see how it works out over the longer term, but at the moment I’m pretty optimistic.

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I have no doubt there will be readers who will quibble with my conclusion here on various fronts. If that’s not you, feel free to stop here. But if you are thinking something like:

"You know, this [type or brand of minivan/crossover/panel van/Conestoga wagon] does most of what you want and you can haul two trikes in it at once."

Or

"There’s nothing like a Suburban [Excursion/Escalade/full-size pickup/etc] for cargo capacity and four wheel drive. You live in the country - it’s time to step up to a truck."

Or

"They make rear hitch racks/you could use a trailer/did you consider [type/brand] of carrying system?"

Please know that I think these (and related ideas) are reasonable ones to present. But I think there are a few things that are important to consider when looking at vehicle solutions surrounding carrying a trike. Probably first and foremost is considering whether your transport vehicle is going to be your primary vehicle or whether you will use a secondary vehicle for that purpose. If you are in a position to have a vehicle oriented just towards your recreational activities I am happy for you. I have periodically considered that - getting an older truck of some sort just for hauling the trike. But I’ve done that in the past and it really didn’t work out for me. While I do have just recreational riding times - my regular Sunday rides, for example - in order to increase my riding opportunities I try to integrate riding into the rest of my regular schedule. If I’m traveling somewhere for work and it offers trails, paths, etc, I’ll bring the trike along and ride over lunch and/or after the work day.

This approach has worked well in terms of enhancing my riding time, but when I say "traveling", it’s often distances of two to six hours in the car - this really isn’t the ideal sort of situation for a utility vehicle. Hence the focus on comfort and gas mileage in the criteria.

It’s also the case that this decision point was triggered by having a family vehicle taken out of service. We weren’t in a position to get a secondary vehicle - anything added would have to serve full-time duty.

Finally, while I don’t care for SUV’s or crossovers as a general rule, I don’t have anything against minivans - I think a good minivan is a beautiful thing from a utility perspective (though they are not sporty or fun to drive, as a rule), and I’ve eyed the little Ford Transit vans closely in the past for similar reasons. But nothing in the class does what I’d call real all-wheel drive. Most of these vehicles, when they have all-wheel drive, have systems designed to aid in stability and traction under slippery conditions, and this is what is needed for most people in most situations. As far as that goes, that same type of benefit can also be conferred on virtually any two-wheel drive vehicle by adding a set of snow tires. What neither solution does well, however, is crawl their way through, or out of, a snow drift. We are rural enough that this is a periodic need - and I can tell you that my knowledge in this area is more than academic...

While it doesn’t quite have the capabilities of a four-wheel-drive truck, Subarus occupy that middle ground between being much more capable than the typical slippery-road friendly vehicle and a truck, while still operating like a car the rest of the time. They are, in a way, kind of an odd compromise machine that other manufacturers just don’t make, but which happens to fall right into my current sweet spot.

Soft is Slow

We gather every year with family in Southwestern Wisconsin for Thanksgiving festivities. It’s always a good time, and this year, in addition to a delightful meal, LB led a game of Dungeons and Dragons which added to the fun. The following day - Black Friday - MLW and her sister go off to Madison to battle the shopping crowds, and the rest of us seek our own fun in the Driftless Area. For me, for the past few years, that’s meant tackling the Military Ridge trail.

I’ve written about the trail itself before. You can look there for detail, but it’s a rail trail with a nominally crushed stone (but mostly packed sand and grass) surface. I was pleased when I looked out in the morning and could see that the Wisconsin weather gods had chosen to bless me with a bit of snow.

The dusting of snow really is a blessing - I enjoy riding in the white stuff, and it often has the additional effect of putting a hush over the world and of keeping most other people off of the trail.

When I woke the thermometer sat at 30°F, working its way up to a high of 35°. The main artifact of this is that, while there is a chill in the air, the ground isn’t really frozen. And that means that the snow and the sand conspire to provide a soft, resistant surface. This isn’t a problem, per se - I’m riding for exercise and to enjoy the countryside, after all. But it does have an effect on the speed and distance traveled.

In sum: soft is slow

When I loaded up the Expedition for the ride - its first adventure on this particular trail - I also included a growler in the saddle bags in anticipation of riding from Ridgeview to Mt. Horeb for a stop at The Grumpy Troll.

I knew I was probably being optimistic with that decision. Mt. Horeb is a solid 13 miles along the trail, presenting with a 26-mile round trip. The distance doesn’t scare me, mind, but I was looking for some exercise, not to spend the day on the trail.

As it all laid out the trail was reliable and consistent with past experience in terms of the ride through the countryside, albeit softer.

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Enjoying this post? Check out our Cycling page for links to other cycling articles on Applied Life

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What became clear, as I rode along the trail, enjoying the scenery, was that it was not going to be a speedy trip. I do most of my riding on the big ring when I’m on pavement, especially on the relatively level roadways of northern Illinois, but it quickly became clear that I was going to need to drop down to number two.

And then, as the ambient temperature rose, down to the little ring.

Ultimately, as I entered Barneveld - the first town East from Ridegeway along the trail - and I was already an hour in, drenched with sweat, I knew I was nearing my endpoint. I rode to the far end of town and turned around.

I came out of ride at 12.27 miles and an average speed of 6.75 mph (but with a blistering top speed of 12.18, so there’s that...). But the landscape and snow more than made up for the lack of distance. I’d also been looking forward to seeing how the Expedition managed one particularly soft uphill portion of the trail - one which has required me to get off and walk both with the Pocket, and with MLW’s Schwinn years ago. In other, similar things the Expedition’s larger footprint has seemed to provide an advantage, so I was curious.

Here, too, it shined. That section appears on the return trip and, despite the softness of the trail, the Expedition crawled its way up the sand on its decidedly road-oriented Schwalbe Marathon Plus’s with little slippage. Riding that ride this time actually made me wonder what had made it so difficult in the past...

And I was once again very pleased with the presence of the fenders on my Expedition. I’ll probably get tired of bringing them up at some point, but it really is amazing what a difference such a seemingly simple technology can make. Without them the climactic conditions and season would have conspired with my wheels to throw untold amounts of a conglomeration of sand, snow, ad leaves into my lap. Instead they were arrested at the wheel level.

Soft or not, because of the snow I was able to see, and thus follow, my original track on the return trip. Although the effect was likely small, there did see to be some benefit to remaining in the wheel path, perhaps from a bit of compression gained on the way in. And besides, it’s neat to see that evidence of where you’ve been (and the trike makes a pretty unmistakable footprint).

Of course, some cleanup was needed upon arrival back, but this is not an uncommon component of winter riding. And given that the trail isn’t cleared, there’s little by way of road salt to be concerned about.

Probably the only other downside is that Cyclemeter, which I generally like, seems to track calorie expenditure based upon speed and distance if you don’t have supplemental sensors attached. The assumption, then, seems to be that my slow pace means I only worked through 584 calories. My dripping sweat begged to differ with that assessment. But I’m far too cheap to pony up for the additional equipment to rectify that situation, tho, so here we are, and here we remain.

Harvest Roads

Here in Northern Illinois the harvest season is well underway. This means multiple changes to the landscape - both figuratively and literally - from a cycling perspective.

Country backroads are a boon to cycling because they are typically quiet thoroughfares with minimal traffic. As a bonus, in my area at least, they are mostly paved, and so offer that solitude of cycling without having to contend with the evil of gravel. But when the corn and beans start to come down things change. These once quiet byways become busy, occupied with trucks and machinery as farmers go about plying their trade.

And when I say trucks and machinery, the and is somewhat important. On most days out my way you’ll perhaps occupy road space with a full-size pickup or the occasional box truck (think UPS or FedEx). But this time of year you may also encounter a variety of farm implements - combines and tractors pulling grain wagons, along with the grain trucks themselves - that are not typically present the rest of the year.

If you think you feel tiny cycling by a full-size pickup, a couple of minutes riding side-by-side with a combine or tractor with wagons in tow is a real eye-opener. And I say “a couple of minutes” because they aren’t fast-moving vehicles. When they pass you it takes a while. It pays dividends to simply slow down and let it go by more quickly.

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Enjoying this post? Check out our Cycling page for links to other cycling articles on Applied Life

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The composition of the roadways changes too, in a way. The process of harvesting produces a lot of botanical detritus that often ends up scattering across the roadways. Mostly this is in the form of portions of corn cobs, husks, and stalk that eventually just blow away in our prevalent prairie wind. This year, however, it’s been unusually wet - both rain and our early snow for the year - and so the detritus mixes with the prodigious amounts of mud pulled up and then dropped from the treads of machine tires. This makes for some new challenges...

Each time I come up to one of these sections I am very pleased to have fenders.

The rest of the changes are in the literal landscape. What has been a world of roadways walled with corn interspersed with breaks of pasture and beans and occasional houses is now mostly open rolling and flat. For a brief period of time the cornfields, in particular, look to display the aftermath of some great battle (which, in a way, I suppose they do). The world is now open and, from some angles, virtually endless off to the horizon.

These changes also change the nature of the wind patterns. For a substantial portion of the summer and early autumn you can count on the stands of stalks to function as a windbreak from some angles, and as a channel from others. Now, as they get cut away, the wind is increasingly diffuse and ever-present.

One of my favorite parts, visually speaking, is the in-between time. As the combine starts cutting its way through there are suddenly openings, apparent pathways through the corn that, however, briefly, give the impression of new worlds to find if one were just to follow down them.

(One does not, of course, because one does not wish to become a farming accident. It’s interesting and momentarily a little romantic, but you gotta live in the real world...).

These patterns of change are part of the joy of riding out in rural roadways here in the midwest. Every time of year has something to offer, something to see.

Now - time to ride and see what’s different today...

Rural Bike - Part Two - my Candidate

So - a couple of weeks ago I laid out my thoughts on what the criteria were for identifying the ideal Human-Powered Vehicle (HPV) for rural life. If you are starting here, you may want to go back to that post. I will admit, tho, I got a little lost in childhood nostalgia and youth shaming, so if you are looking for the TL:DR on the criteria, they were:

• The machine must be capable of covering long distances - 10-20 mile round trips - comfortably on open secondary roads.
• It must be a human powered vehicle. It’s fine if it’s amenable to electric assist, but it cannot rely upon battery power.
• It must be able to contend with varied weather and road conditions. Generally this is going to mean:
  • Some type of effective fender system.
  • Being stable and functional with a load under high wind situations.
• Be capable of carrying cargo - the Bike Design Project specified their urban guidelines around a gym bag or a single bag of groceries, which makes sense for their purposes. For a rural lifestyle, a larger carrying capacity would be needed - I’d say the ability to manage 3-4 full paper grocery bags (or equivalent volume), with those groceries including at least one full gallon of milk. The machine should be able to manage that load on all rural road surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and hills.
• Be capable of remaining stable and upright under load. This criteria is borrowed from the Bike Design Project, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Your machine has to be able to stand safely on its own if you have to get off of it when it’s fully loaded. Otherwise you’ll break your eggs, have to chase your oranges down the road, and cry over your spilled milk...
• Must be capable of a reasonable average speed over flat(ish) terrain when operated by a rider who rides regularly. Here let’s say reasonable is an average of at least 10-12mph. I think any slower and it risks even dedicated riders avoiding use in favor of a car.
• Be a durable machine capable of many years of use with basic maintenance.
• Be capable of using aftermarket lighting and visibility systems for effective forward and rearward visibility.
• We are looking for a type of machine here, not a specific brand or new design. What sort(s) of HPV meets these criteria?

At the risk of offering up an early spoiler, I’ll freely admit here that my candidate for meeting these criteria will likely be unsurprising to regular readers:

The Recumbent Trike

"Oh, well of course," you say. "You see here, Martha, I told you last time that’s the way it was going to go. He set this whole damn thing up to justify his love for those gorram three wheeled contraptions."

"You did say so dear," Martha replies. "You did say so".

"Harrumph!" you say. "That’s it. It’s clear now: He’s in the pocket of big trike."

Ok - first, good on you for pulling out an actual "harrumph!" That’s a word that really doesn’t get its due nowadays, and deserves a comeback.

Secondly, I am not in the pocket of big trike. I’m not actually sure that such a thing exists, and if it does, I am quite noticeably not in their pocket. Noticeably so because I’d happily jump into the pocket of big trike and roll around in those lovely big trike dollars. Hello? Anyone out there in the great trike conglomerate listening... anyone...?

Ahem. Anyway, yes, my response is somewhat predictable, but let me defend myself. First, I want to clarify and add some detail and distinctions. I wrote "the recumbent trike" above, but what I really mean to say is:

A Recumbent Trike with a Trailer

There, see? It’s a lot different now. Right?

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The thing is, although it may seem somewhat like I’m leaning towards the thing I’ve already chosen, the reality is that rural transportation was a big part of what I had in mind when I chose to get a trike. As I mentioned last time, I grew up riding around the countryside, and when we moved back a decade or so ago I realized that, while I enjoyed riding my road bike around the area, there were a number of factors for which it was not ideal. This came into clearer and clearer focus particularly as I began to expand my riding "season" into a year round enterprise. You only have to have an upright bike disappear out from under you once or twice on a January morning before you realize that, although you rode all over the place as a kid, you only did it in the summer, and that you didn’t need much carrying capacity to bring home a half-dozen comic books.

Taking a look back in my journal verifies that this has been on my mind for quite a while. I wrote about the Evo and The Bike Design Project back in August of 2014. While that work was specifically for Applied Life, it really got me thinking about the rural bike question. Three of the four subsequent entries in my journal touch on this topic (yes, I also write about cycling for myself. It’s a thing, ok? I’m not proud...). On August 3rd of 2014 I wrote:

The demands for country and small town biking are certainly different than they are for urban settings... On first blush, frankly, I think something like a tadpole trike with a trailer would likely be ideal - essentially the pickup truck of the biking world.

And a week later, on the 13th, I wrote:

The more that I consider it, the more useful a trike and trailer seem to me for the type of transport need rural biking presents.

Why am I taking you down this trip thru my journal entries? Mostly because these were from 2014 - three years before I actually got a recumbent trike.

We moved out to our Homestead in the late spring of 2009. By summer 2014 I’d been riding as an adult out in the hinterlands for five years, and been thru my first year of winter riding. I’d had a fair amount of riding time on an upright across the open prairie to consider against for thinking thru what might work better out here. And of course, I’ve been testing that idea over the past two years or so.

So - all that said - here’s my rationale against the criteria to explain why I think a recumbent trike (with a trailer) is possibly the perfect rural HPV approach:

Long Distance in Comfort

I’ve been riding most of my life, and I’ve ridden a lot of different types of diamond frame bikes. I spent most of the decade prior to getting the Catrike Pocket riding a 1987 Cannondale SR400 - an aluminum road bike.

The furthest I ever rode the Cannondale in a single outing was just under 27 miles, and that just once. Otherwise rides were more typically in the 8-15 mile range, with occasional jaunts in the 18-22 mile territory. I started tracking mileage with Cyclemeter in 2011, and my best year with the Cannondale was 2014, where I managed 752.47 miles over 69 rides, with an average distance of 10.91 miles per ride.

My first year with the Pocket - 2017 - I rode 937.51 miles; 83 rides with an average distance of 11.30 miles per ride. To put that in perspective, I got the Pocket in early June - nearly halfway thru the year. 808.31 of those 937.51 miles - 86% - are on the Pocket. I rode further on the Pocket in its first seven months with me than I’d ridden for the entirety of 2014, my best year on the Cannondale.

I loved - and still love, at least in concept - the Cannondale. It’s a sleek and elegant machine; it’s lovely, lightweight, and fast. It’s also beastly uncomfortable, and has become progressively more so as I’ve gotten older. This includes both the creeping pain on the backside during the ride, and the tension across the back of the neck that would start on the bike and continue for the following day or two. That factor absolutely limited my riding time.

For a while I thought it was available ride time that was limiting me when I was on the Cannondale. Longer rides - 20-30 mile and further jaunts - can eat up a couple of hours on a precious weekend day and really cut into the time available for other things. But that limitation seems to have just dropped away with the recumbents. The Pocket is slower than the Cannondale, and yet I started to routinely ride further. I think to some degree I was kidding myself that the discomfort wasn’t an issue.

I’m certainly not the only person who has reached this conclusion. Matt Galat at Ja Yoe! writes and talks about comfort over time being a primary factor in his choice of a trike for his world tours.

I think sometimes we have a tendency to set aside comfort - when it comes to cycling we may feel like we should be willing to sacrifice that for the other benefits. But the reality is that when the activity is less comfortable it becomes less desirable, and as a result we tend to engage in it less. And the purpose for this thought experiment is to look at using the machine for at least semi-regular transportation in rural settings. Rural riding for transport means distances, and particularly choosing to cycle rather than to drive. Cars have a lot to offer here - choosing a less comfortable option to ride out of misguided principle is likely to result primarily in just choosing to drive.

Contending with the Weather

Rural riding often means contending with less than ideal weather conditions. Here I’m not talking about rain - we can probably all agree that, if it’s raining, the rural transportation cyclist is going to opt for their car. But the reality is that in much of the world, and especially in the US Midwest, rural means wind.

Drive through the rural midwestern countryside for any length of time and you will repeatedly come across stands of white turbines, pointed into the breeze, propellers spinning slowly, but inexorably. It’s a view I’m very familiar with - I can see it from every window in my house.

Though I have, believe it or not, had people ask me whether the turbines make it windy, the reality is that there’s a reason there’s so much focus on wind power out on the prairie and plains. It’s always been a little surprising to me that harvesting wind power didn’t start sooner out here. Of course, the impact from the cyclist’s perspective is that, as delightful as it is to have a 15 or 20 mph tailwind, it’s a bitch-kitty when you are riding into it headlong. If you are riding for purpose - to the store, say - the extra weight of your cargo and the oppositional press of the wind will seem to have a multiplying effect against your effort.

While the wind doesn’t go away when you are riding a recumbent trike, the lower profile of the machine does make a difference. What’s more, the stability of having three wheels under you means that there is no risk of falling over when the wind brings speed down to a crawl; and equally so, little to no risk of blowing over when dealing with an oppressive side wind. Dealing with the wind like this was a key factor in Maria Leijerstam’s choice of a trike for her successful ride to the South Pole, a ride in which she started after two competitors on upright bikes, and arrived ahead of them. She also cited the stability of the trike allowing her to successfully manage a shorter, but steeper route than the other record hopefuls - she didn’t have to worry about falling over.

Being in a lower profile to the wind is also just more comfortable most of the time, especially when it’s cold. I detailed my own experience with the difference between riding upright and recumbent in the cold and snow a while back. Getting down out of the wind, relatively speaking, makes for a warmer - or at least less cold - ride in chilly times.

Stability

That reference to snow brings up the other important advantage - stability regardless of conditions. While it’s not for everyone, there are absolutely people who ride year round. When the ground gets slippery - whether due to rain or snow or dirt or gravel - three wheels are going to be more likely to stay under you than will two. I’ve ridden both upright and recumbent in the snow, and read the accounts of many other like-minded souls. There is virtually no one who rides on two wheels in the white stuff who hasn’t had the experience of a bike just... disappearing out from under them. For just a moment you are like Wile E. Coyote, right after he’s run off the cliff - you hang there in mid air.

...And then: pain.

Fat bikes and winter tires make that better, but they don’t eliminate the issue of falling the way that third wheel does. I’m not saying it’s not possible to wipe out on a trike - I have it on good authority that it can be done. You know, from... other people. But it’s still more stable.

Carrying that Load

The relative stability makes a difference here as well when conditions - weather or hills or weight - cause the going to be slow. On an upright machine, when the speed drops below a given speed it becomes harder and harder to keep the bike vertical. Maintaining balance is a non-issue on a trike. This can become vital when hauling things - remember, our criteria is to be able to carry four full paper bags worth of groceries, including at least one gallon of milk. The jug of cow juice is eight and a half pounds all by itself, and a paper grocery bag can supposedly hold up to 25 pounds, so those four bags could conceivably come out somewhere near 100lbs of groceries.

I don’t think for a second anyone is actually going to fill those bags up to a full Benjamin, but the reality is that the weight, particularly when combined with hills, wind, or both, will potentially slow things down considerably. The tripod position, combined with the very low gearing most trikes have on the bottom end, can make the distance between continuing to pedal up the rise or falling over (or having to get off and walk it).

I had a little experience with this without the use of a trailer earlier this year, hauling an empty LP canister into town and bringing back the full exchange. A full canister comes in around 34 or 35lbs, and my trike managed it well. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it on an upright bike, but I suspect it would have been considerably more challenging.

Speed

I set a minimum speed criteria for this thought experiment because I think its a relevant detail - if the trip to and from the destination is too slow, I think folks are going to go for motorized options. Trikes aren’t the speediest form of HPV available, to be sure, but I am certain there are models that can meet the 10-12 mph average I set here - when I hauled that LP canister back and forth with my Expedition I had my slowest time ever on that route, but my average speed still came in over 13mph. Would an upright cargo bike be faster? Maybe, but I think there’d be some question about that when dealing with a full load.

But there are limits. Just as there are trikes, there are quads out there, and they would also have many of the advantages of a trike - stability and comfort, for example. But I suspect the additional weight would risk bringing such a machine in below the speed criteria.

The Other Stuff

The first four points - comfort, weather management, stability, and ability to manage load - are ultimately the reasons I look at recumbent trikes as being the ideal candidate for rural human-powered transport. It is also important that the machine chosen be something that is durable and can be expected to last many years with basic, and the trikes that I own and have looked at seem to fit this bill. They are more complicated than a standard diamond frame bike, to be sure, and there are areas you need to attend to when owning and riding them. These are not significantly more complicated than with an upright machine, however, and well worth the trade off in capabilities.

The one primary difference out in rural areas - and admittedly a potential limitation - is that if you have a local bike shop, odds are that they have limited experience with trikes. You will want to learn a thing or two about bike maintenance under those circumstances. However, I suspect this is ultimately a reality of rural cycling in general. My "localest" bike shop is twenty miles away. The folks there are great, but it’s an hour round trip to have them work on my machine. I’d imagine a lot of other folks in rural settings are in a similar situation.

In terms of lighting and such, most trikes provide an abundant number of locations for placing such equipment and can be made to work with standard bike items with little to no effort. The wider frame, particularly in the back, arguably provides a more visible profile to attach lighting to, and provides the option a more varied lighting pattern for motorists to see.

Rearward vision is different on a trike. You have to have mirrors to see behind you - you cannot just look back and easily get a gauge on what’s behind you. However, for rural riding on an upright I’d argue that you really need to have mirrors as well. Looking back is uncomfortable even when you are up in the wind, and I found I felt much more aware of my surroundings once I put a mirror on my road bike back in the day. This is doubly the case for the trike.

Disadvantages

There are a couple of potential disadvantages to using a trike for rural transport, though I think they are limited. Probably the biggest thing is that they are more challenging to move around and park. They are sometimes heavier, and always bulkier than an upright bike, so it’s harder to simply pick one up and move it around. They take up more ground space, so they don’t easily just plug into a standard bike rack and you can’t just lean them up against a building or post. It takes some creativity to figure out how to securely lock them to things.

These same factors do affect storage, and while many rural folks have a fair amount of space to keep things, those who do not will have to be more creative in that respect.

However, none of these things are insurmountable, and I don’t think they take away from the overall advantage of the platform.

Summing Up

So there you have it - my candidate for the ideal type of rural human powered vehicle, or, more colloquially, rural bike. As I’ve said, I’m certain regular readers will not be surprised where I fall on this, but the reality is that rural riding is a large part of why I got a trike in the first place (the rest of it was because I thought they were really cool).

Others, I’m certain, have other ideas for what works best and/or their own thoughts about why I am wrong here. There are certainly other styles of cargo bikes out there, often with a rakish, military-look to them that can certainly be attractive. But this one is my choice, and one that I’m finding works well for my version of rural transportation.

Ok - time to ride...

Winter Cycling Unpreparedness

The introduction of November has been pretty chilly for us here in Northern Illinois. Over the first weekend of the month I was riding with snow accompanying me along the sides of the road:

The irony is that, looking at the weather conditions that accompany that ride on Cyclemeter, it was about 51° while I was out and about. The snow, in the relative protection of the ditch, hadn’t quite gotten the message.

But the reality is that most of our days over the first third of the 11th month have been in the unusually cold category. This doesn’t stop the cycling, of course, but it does mean some changes have to be made in terms of gearing up for the rides.

And there lies the struggle.

Now begins the time when I realize that I may not be fully aware as to the location in which I stored all of my cold weather riding gear. I mean, I’m certain that at the end of the last use I put them in a perfectly logical location to make them easy to find the following season. Unfortunately, November Erin is not in the same mindset as April Erin, and I think that guy might have been a bit squirrelly anyway...

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So then comes the internal discussion: did you put your balaclava and gloves in with the rest of the family gloves and hats? That would make sense, right?

But one pile of hats and gloves on the floor later, and they are nowhere to be found.

"Perhaps" you say, "perhaps you left them in a pocket or a sleeve of your winter coats or vests". And then you nod knowingly: "perhaps April Erin didn’t put them away at all". Because that guy can sometimes be a bit of a slacker.

And this can be kind of interesting because you then realize that you have cool and cold weather items that you had forgotten about in the intervening months:

"Yup - gotta break out that light leather jacket while it’s still in the reasonable temperature range".;

And:

"Oh - I forgot about that down vest." And then gaze admiringly at the color.

(Yes, it’s orange - specifically burnt orange. No points for guessing that one).

All of this to finally think "is it possible I just put them on the closet shelf with my other cycling gear? Could it be that simple?"

Yes, dumbass, it’s that simple. Heaven only knows why that wouldn't have been the first place you’d look, but now at least you have a mental inventory of all of the rest of the winter gear for the house. Because you needed one of those. For some reason...

The struggle continues, a bit, with what to wear when. It’s a tenet of cold weather riding that you want to be layered and, if possible, vented, so that you can open things up and/or remove them as you get warmer. But there are areas where that’s harder - particularly your feet. And so I’ve had one outing over the past few days where I decided to go with wool socks and sandals - committing a fashion crime to split the difference on foot warmth. As to my level of success, well, I’ll report back when I can feel my feet again.

All kidding aside, once it’s all out and I start using it regularly, there really won’t be any difficult with it. But fall in the midwestern US is an ongoing struggle where what was appropriate clothing this morning is too much by afternoon and simply inadequate by night. That effect is amplified when riding.

But, regardless, now that I’ve finally found my stuff (dumbass), it’s time to ride...

The Nemesis

I love riding through the countryside - the majority of my time cycling is done on rural thoroughfares, viewing the grass (yes - and corn and hay and soybeans) of the open prairie. But there is one part of rural riding that I simply cannot bring myself to love:

Gravel.

When I was young many of the roads out here in northern Illinois were gravel, including the one upon which our homestead currently sits. As time has gone on, however, gravel has progressively moved aside in favor of tar and chip, resulting in fewer rocks thrown, fewer dusty cars, and fewer bikes disappearing out from under you due to an errant stone.

It’s that last part that has always been the primary problem with riding on gravel for me. As a kid I had a friend who lived about three miles away by gravel, and the challenge was always getting myself to mentally work past the fear of struggling with the treacherous rock surface in order to get there. Most of the parcels are about a mile square, so after a while I solved this by riding the other way around the block to his house (hey, I was a kid - give me a break!). It was technically further by about a quarter mile or so each way, paved, and so far more comfortable, and likely faster, because picking your way around the rocks is usually very slow going.

As an adult I’m riding longer distances and can, with some recon and the help of mapping software, lay out routes that avoid the gnarly substrate. And typically this is exactly what I do. About the only time of year that I routinely embrace the gravel roads is in the winter, when their evil has been rendered impotent by dint of a layer of fine white powder. But there are times, on a few routes, when brief bits of gravel figure in and I have to weather my way through the stone. I typically avoid those routes, but it’s nice to add in the variety from time to time.

The challenge of gravel was somewhat tamed with my transition to primarily riding recumbent trikes. One of the primary difficulties - the sudden vanishing of the machine - is eliminated with this change. And that does make it more pleasant. While the ride is still rough, and the going is slower, a route with a mile or two of gravel connecting one point to another is often workable.

But there is one exception. Not far from my home is a mile or so of gravel that is, quite possibly, the most hateful bit of pathway in the tri-county area. This mile of jagged rock and stone is the Sauron to the simple orcs of the other chipped stone byways.

Yup - that’s an actual picture of the road right there.

Ok - so no, not really. This is an actual pic of it:

There are two factors that make this road stand out. The first is that the surface seems to be made up of unusually large and rough stone. I don’t know if this is just the first surface they treat and so it gets the extra-large substrate off the top, or whether this is just so lightly traveled they don’t think anyone will notice.

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The second factor is the hill. There are a couple of them on the road, but the one at the East end, just before it rejoins the pavement and the twentieth century, is relatively steep. Now it’s not that I mind climbing a hill or two when I’m riding - this generally just adds to the challenge, as any cyclist knows. But the combination of the angle and the very loose gravel means that it’s extremely challenging to maintain purchase with the rear wheel. This would be a problem on an upright bike, where your back end would be slipping sideways out from under you, risking a topple. It’s a slightly different issue on the trike. The couple of times I’ve ridden this road on the Pocket what I’ve found on this hill is that I end up sitting there in first gear, functionally immobile while my rear wheel spins free in the rock. Sometimes the rear wheel throws away enough stone that it gains purchase for a move forward of, say, six inches, before then repeating the sequence over again. Each time I’ve tackled this on the Pocket I’ve ended up getting off and taking the ignominious step of walking the trike up the hill.

So, you might ask, if you hate it so much why would you ride on it again? And I would say that’s an excellent question, and one that could probably be answered by the simple admission that I’m a bit of an idiot. However, not wanting to make that admission, let me now try, perhaps a little to hard, to suggest that there are reasons:

• First, taking this road alters two of my favorite routes by cutting the longer one shorter, and adding distance to the shorter - it makes for a 25-mile ride while going longer would be 29, and shorter would be 20; and sometimes 25 miles is the distance you want.

• Second, the quality of gravel roads changes with time and wear, and I was wondering if this road had perhaps now been used enough to make it less hateful.

• Third, while this mile or so of stone demon had been a severe struggle on the Pocket, I’m now riding my Expedition, which has a longer wheelbase, wider track, and bigger wheels. I wanted to see how the new trike tackled it.

Ok, if I’m being honest, it’s 98% the third option there, and 2% of just throwing in the other two so that I could make a list and seem a little less dumb. The Expedition is a different machine. I’ve ridden it on less severe gravel roads and gotten through just fine - I wanted to see how it managed this... thing.

This section of the highway to hell essentially constitutes mile 23 of the 25-mile ride I have laid out. That means I’ve already expended a fair amount of energy once I get to it. I could reverse the route and tackle this very early into the ride, but that erases the challenge of the hill at the east end, and that was part of what I wanted to learn about for the new trike, so there we were.

The first thing that I realized when I pulled on to it is that it hasn’t worn down since the last time I saw it.

It’s still full of large, blocky stone, with very little by way of tire ruts to offer softer purchase. There are only two houses on this stretch of road, and one of them is just off the pavement, so I suspect there’s just very little traffic here to make for that wear and tear. Good for the road crews, but no so much for me. I did briefly wonder, just as when I was a kid, how bad, really, I wanted to do this, and considered whether just going another four miles or so around it wouldn't be better. But no, dammit, this is what I’d come to do.

The fIrst clear impression I got from it was that it was just going to be painfully slow going. The resistance from the rock and tire slippage, along with the jarring nature of the ride, meant that I was going to need to pick my along in low gear even on flatter portion of the road. And that lack of wear and tear meant that, although you could see evidence of automotive travel within the stone, tire ruts were very shallow, and still mostly covered in rock. They helped where they were present but not, you know, a lot.

And slow it was. On Cyclemeter’s speed graph you can see the portion where I seem to have slipped into a pool of molasses:

The slow pace really does a fine job of prolonging the agony and allowing a person to reconsider their choices in life. Not just the choice to take this section of road, mind you, but all of their choices. Because it took me three and a half weeks to traverse this mile of roadway. Three and a half weeks! Or about 15 minutes, but I swear it sure felt like a lot longer than that.

I’d like to tell the hero’s tale of how I persevered through grit and determination here, but mostly I just felt sorry for myself as I pressed on, working my way up to that stupid hill so I could see if the difference in layout would make a difference in climbing up it. And more than once it occurred to me that I could have approached from the other side, just ridden down the hill, and then ridden back up it to answer the question. I didn’t have to ride the whole distance.

Of course, it occurred to me in the middle of the ride down that road. Because I’m an intrepid explorer. Or an idiot.

But here’s the deal: when I got to that hill, I was all prepared to find myself needing to dismount and shamefully walk my trike up over the rise.

But I didn’t.

The Expedition, in its lowest gear, crawled its way up that slippery hill and crested the summit. (Yes, it’s still northern Illinois and no, there aren’t really any summits, but come on - it was a lot of work - allow me some creative license here).

I was pretty pleased and duly impressed. The difference in geometry, and maybe the fact that the pannier bags are directly over the rear wheel as opposed to in the frame like they are on the Pocket, seems to have made the difference.

So what this means in practice, I guess, is that I don’t have to have quite so much trepidation about approaching the average gravel road. If the Expedition can pick it’s way successfully along this detestable behemoth of a “road”, it should be able to handle the other, far less problematic sections that I encounter on my other routes. I’d already seen a bit of that, of course, but until this I couldn’t be sure about the more problematic surfaces in the area.

Gravel riding is a thing, now, and some people just love it. Gravel bikes are out there, and there are various ways to fit out machines to make them more suitable for tackling the rocks. For myself, having mostly moved on to machines of the three-wheeled persuasion, there are fat trikes out there and many brands of trike can have their wheelsets converted to allow for this. For my part, I encounter gravel infrequently, and so I’d rather not deal with the trade offs - heavier wheels, slower machines - that come with specializing in gravel. Instead, I prefer - and am pleased to find - that my primary machine be suited to the road, but be able to manage the rocks on rare occasion. Fortunately, as this otherwise painful ride has shown, it seems to be up to it.

Okay - Time to ride...

Rural Bike Part 1

The ideal urban bicycle is a recurring theme in the overall cycling world. Comb through bike magazines and websites and you will see it come up periodically. Generally the discussion and debate centers around the features that a bike needs for the urban cyclist who will be using it as their primary means of transportation. There has even been a contest or two towards designing such a machine. I put forward my vote on that front as well.

You can understand why this comes up with respect to urban settings. Traffic congestion paired with a growing interest in alternative transportation makes the question a poignant one, and the needs of the urban lifestyle offer an interesting puzzle to solve in this respect. For example, because the inner-city cyclist may have to carry their machine up multiple flights of steps you want the machine to be relatively lightweight, but it still must be durable enough to manage the reality of city streets, and ideally not be constructed of a material that will make it costly to build or repair. And, of course, that’s just one bullet point; there are multiple other factors to consider.

Back when I became aware of the contest and this theme in general I began to wonder about the other side of this: what makes for an ideal rural bike?

It’s not a question that comes up in magazines or on websites often, and I suspect that’s for a number of reasons. Rural areas don’t have the traffic congestion issues that urban travelers contend with, of course, nor the population strain that suggests impending limits on the use of motor vehicles. Travel down any city highway during rush hour and you can see that we really are approaching our limits - if we haven’t already reached or exceeded them in practical terms - for the ongoing use of independently owned and operated automotive travel in those areas.

But out in the country? There’s no rush hour. I mean, sometimes you have a stack-up of traffic while you wait for a train or get behind a tractor, and sometimes you end up with two or more people at the four-way stop at the same time (gasp! - who goes first? Think, think, mentally pull up the rules of the road book...), but otherwise it just isn’t a thing.

There’s also the realistic question that I suspect many people would ask: is it even practical to consider cycling as transportation in rural areas? The distances are longer, of course, and the travel is often for different purposes. The urban cyclist may ride to the store or market to get groceries, but the store is probably only a few blocks away, and the proximity means they can shop frequently for a smaller volume of product, making cycling a practical alternative. The rural counterpart is going to want to purchase things in larger amounts due to distance (I can tell you for a fact that no one out in the hinterlands ever allows the toilet paper to get down to a single roll in reserve...). And given all that, isn’t everyone living out in the boondocks just going to get a truck?

Well... no and yes.

Unlike city living it’s really not the case out in the country that you can go without owning some type of automobile. In urban and suburban areas there are multiple alternatives to draw on, from traditional taxis and buses to Uber and Lyft and car sharing services like Zipcar, when a self-propelled, weather protected option is needed. Versions of those services might eventually find their way to the remote climes, but they generally aren’t there yet (tho I did see a ZipCar in Dixon, Illinois this past summer, so maybe...). There are just times when the weather, or the mission, will make for the need to have a motor vehicle.

Still, that need for an automobile doesn’t mean that it wouldn't be possible for a substantial portion of routine travel in rural areas to be made via an HPV (Human Powered Vehicle). In fact, I can verify that when I was a kid my friends and myself did it all the time. Up until a certain age it was the only way to get around if your parents weren’t able or willing to take you. And they often were not:

Me: Mom, can you give me a ride to Matt’s house?

Mom: You’ve got a bike don’t you? Get on it. And anyway, why are you inside? Go outside, and don’t come back in until the sun goes down.

(I love ya, Mom!)

For you younger folks this may seem perplexing, so let me help you sort it out. Have you seen Stranger Things)? Of course you have. You know the part where the girl moves things with her mind and where monsters come out from the upside-down? - that’s fiction. The part where the kids ride absolutely everywhere on their bikes? that’s real. I know it doesn’t seem that way because your parents drove you all over the place, including to the school that was four blocks away, but I assure you it was absolutely true. I know - I essentially grew up a few miles outside of Hawkins Indiana except, you know, in Illinois.

And that was how it worked: Want to see a friend? Ride two or three miles down the road. The two of you want to get a coke from the elevator? Grab a couple of quarters (yes - 25¢) and ride another mile or so over to get one for each of you. Finished with the coke (or Fanta - they always had orange Fanta...)? Let’s go play in the creek (that’s pronounced "crick", incidentally) a couple of miles away.

And of course, eventually you had to ride home, ideally getting there before dark. All in all it was quite possible for us to ride 10-15 miles in a day from spot to spot, and most of that riding time it was on single speed bikes with coaster brakes and banana seats. We really didn’t think much about the distances, just the destinations. The bikes were freedom.

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Eventually I had a five speed Schwinn road bike with a light and dynamo on it, so then darkness wasn’t even a limitation. At that point I was a little older, and was allowed to ride into town, which opened the world up even further - I could go shopping for comic books and stop at The Kitch-Inn for a grilled cheese and a chocolate malt. I can verify that it is possible - though extremely inadvisable - to read a comic book while riding your bike back home. Hell - it was my primary motivation to learn to ride hands free...

Before I get too far down the nostalgia rabbit hole (I know - too late...), my point to all of this is that there was a time where neither we kids, nor the adults overseeing us, found the idea of purposeful travel across the rural countryside via HPV either impractical or unusual. That perspective, pervasive though it is, is an artifact of a much more recent sensibility.

It is true that distances to reach anything are further than they are in urban settings, but further doesn’t necessarily equal far. In the upper Midwest of the US, at least, the word "rural" doesn’t just describe houses sitting out in fields, alone. Rather, rural areas are a combination of country houses and fields and pastures and small towns, most of which offer some level of provisions - gas and food at least, and often an array of other services. Based upon life experience and a quick eyeball of the map I’d say most towns in northern Illinois are within 10-15 miles of another town, which leaves country residents always within +/-10 miles or so of supplies and, if they are lucky, within similar distance of their work (tho I suspect this may be getting less common).

So - while I’m not about to argue that people in these rural environs should move to a cycling only life for transportation, I would argue that self-powered transport is an option some of the time. I might also argue that, with the right type of machine, cycling could likely be an option for more of the trips than one might initially expect.

All of which leads us up to the question: What would the right type of machine be? What are the features that make for the ideal rural cycling machine?

Setting Criteria

As discussed initially, the urban bike contest identified a number of factors to be considered by contestants when developing human powered transportation for city settings. Some of the criteria for a rural bike may overlap, but there are definitely differences in the needs for a rural cycling machine. I would posit the following criteria:

• The machine must be capable of routinely covering longer distances - 10-20 mile round trips - comfortably on open secondary roads.

• It must be a human powered vehicle. It’s fine if it’s amenable to electric assist, but it cannot rely upon battery power.

• It must be able to contend with varied weather and road conditions. Generally this is going to mean:

  • Some type of effective fender system.

  • Being stable and functional with a load under high wind situations.

• Be capable of carrying cargo - the Bike Design Project specified their urban guidelines around a gym bag or a single bag of groceries, which makes sense for their purposes. For a rural lifestyle, a larger carrying capacity would be needed - I’d say the ability to manage 3-4 full paper grocery bags (or equivalent volume), with those groceries including at least one full gallon of milk. The machine should be able to manage that load on all rural road surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and hills.

• Be capable of remaining stable and upright under load. This criteria is borrowed from the Bike Design Project, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Your machine has to be able to stand safely on its own if you have to get off of it when it’s fully loaded. Otherwise you’ll break your eggs, have to chase your oranges down the road, and cry over your spilled milk...

• Must be capable of a reasonable average speed over flat(ish) terrain when operated by a rider who rides regularly. Here let’s say reasonable is an average of at least 10-12mph. I think any slower and it risks even dedicated riders avoiding use in favor of a car.

• Be a durable machine capable of many years of use with basic maintenance.

• Be capable of using aftermarket lighting and visibility systems for effective forward and rearward visibility.

• We are looking for a type of machine here, not a specific brand or new design. What sort(s) of HPV meets these criteria?

I’m excluding a few of the other criteria from the Bike Design Criteria. For example, they wanted their designs to incorporate anti-theft systems and built-in lighting systems. From my perspective there are multiple versions of both items readily available on the aftermarket, so it seems superfluous to require them here. I’d also worry about any such system that was incorporated into the machine in a specialized or bespoke fashion. One of the contestants for that competition had USB ports for charging lights, etc. To me, that’s a high tech solution that is really just built in obsolescence - cycling machines last for years, and USB-A is already on its way towards being replaced...

I’ve also not included the idea of being amenable to being carried up stairs. One of the things that rural settings generally have in abundance is storage space. Folks out in the country are likely to store their machines inside, but certainly not in the house. We can expect a garage or shed to be available.

Finally, you’ve seen me use the word “bike” here interchangeably with HPV and “cycle”. That’s intentional. I see no reason to artificially limit the number of wheels to two if there is a better option. Two-wheeled bicycles might be the best option for urban settings because of flexibility of movement and storage, but most of that advantage is irrelevant in rural settings.

So that’s it. Obviously I’ve got ideas of what might be the best candidate to fill this bill, and I’ll plan to let you know my thoughts about what and why in this space next time.

In the meantime, tho, let me know what HPV’s you think best meet the mark through the comments either on Facebook or thru Twitter. If you’ve got pictures of a specific machine I’d love to see those, or if you just want to describe it that’s great too. Maybe you’ll change my mind and, if there are enough of them I may take those suggestions and put them together in another post for everyone to learn from and enjoy.

Ok - time to ride...

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I write about cycling a lot here on Applied Life, but it’s not the only topic here. I also consider broader issues on the topic of transportation, discuss the effect of science and technology on daily life, and periodically review or discuss books and music. Very occasionally I just write about Things That Actually Kinda Suck. I also live in a 150-year old farmhouse that my Great Great Great Grandfather built, and periodically I and My Lovely Wife write about updating the house and about country living in general over at Prairie Homestead.

If you enjoy reading these posts please feel free to check out the others. If you want to know when new posts go up, please feel free to follow me on Facebookor on Twitter: @ErinJWade

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Trike Storage Revisited

Back when I first got the Catrike Pocket I fairly quickly realized that I would have to re-think storage. As I mentioned then, for my uprights I’ve long relied upon the basic and traditional hang from the wheels method. That approach has a lot to say for it. It’s extremely cheap and easy to set up. A couple of lag hooks from the local hardware store, 30 seconds with a drill for a pilot hold, and a minute or so with a hammer using the handle to screw the hooks in. Bam! Bike storage.

I adapted this approach for the Pocket and it worked well for me. Yes, it did involve doing a clean and jerk with the trike to flip it over and lift it up, but it’s only 33lbs and, to be honest, it spent the overwhelming majority of its time in the back of the car. I didn’t have to hang it up much.

Part of the rationale behind getting the new trike was because MLW was interested in riding. At about 5’1" tall she’s the perfect size for the Pocket, and so it made sense to pass that on to her and order the Expedition for myself. But while her height fits the Pocket well, it also means that she can’t even reach it when it’s hanging up on its hooks, much less get it down. If she was going to be able to use it whenever she wanted it needed to be stored in a fashion that wasn’t oriented explicitly towards an almost-average height American male.

For a large chunk of this past summer that just meant that the trike sat down on the garage floor to keep it accessible. That’s fine, as far as it goes - for much of the summer if the choice is between protecting the trikes or protecting the car, well, the trikes are going to win. But as the weather turns more crisp I begin picturing the act of scraping windshields, and while I love being out in the winter weather, that particular activity is not one I treasure. I needed to be able to get the car into the garage. It’s not a large space, so that meant the trikes had to be able to be stored _up_, above the cars. But it had to be stored in a way that allowed MLW to get her Pocket up and down without gaining 7 inches in height or developing a talent for Olympic weightlifting.

The old setup just added the Pocket to the existing bike storage in the garage:

This approach reflected the idea that I was adding the Pocket to our existing stable. I imagined, at the time, that I would be alternating use of the trike with my Cannondale, and perhaps occasionally using MLW’s mountain bike when the situation called for it, as I’ve done in the past. The reality turned out quite different, and I pretty much rode the Pocket all the time. In addition to that, some time ago MLW had indicated that she no longer found her upright bike comfortable, and the little Specialized hanging there belongs to my child, who has since outgrown it. It seemed that some rejiggering was called for.

We have a large machine shed on one corner of the property, and I relocated all of the uprights, except for the Cannondale, out there. I suspect I’m mostly being sentimental about the old girl, but I’m telling myself that I’d like to keep it at hand because it is the machine I ride when my trike is out of commission.

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Once the old guard was retired the next step was to sort out how to hang up the Pocket in a way that MLW would be able to get up and down. At the risk of being somewhat unoriginal, I decided to look into bike hoists. I have seen other people hang up their trikes using these, so it seemed likely it would work for us. The trick was getting one mounted high enough so that the trike wouldn’t be a noggin knocker for people when doing other work in the garage.

Now, I’ve referred to the hook system that I’ve typically used as being cheap - inexpensive - and it is. Lag hooks usually run less than $1-$2 or so at your local hardware store here in the Midwest. But it’s been a long time since I’d priced bike hoists, so I was surprised that our local-ish big-box store had them for less than $10.

To accomplish the height I built a mounting frame out of 2x4’s and attached it to the top of the garage ceiling joists. This raised the height of the hoist by about 3 1/2", and of course would raise the rest of the trike that same amount relative to just attaching it to the joist. While assembling and mounting the hoist itself is somewhat more complicated than putting in a couple of hooks, it’s still pretty straightforward: measure the distance between mounting points and set your pulleys at that distance apart (and make sure you have leave enough space between the pulley and the wall for the wheels and/or boom).

Determining mounting point was a bit of a question. On an upright bike the mounting points are generally going to be the handlebars and the back of the saddle. The hooks that the kit comes with are sized for that approach, and so equivalent positions on the trike have to be identified, and they have to be far enough apart for the trike to hang stable. I used the horizontal crossbar on back of the seat and the center of the front crossbar as the mounting points. I had considered the possibility that I’d have to do something to widen the front mounting point - e.g. set up a rope or similar across the handlebars but decided I’d try its without first. I could always add it later.

(I used the Expedition in these shots to make the hooks easier to see - the orange provides better contrast than the blue on the Pocket)

Mounting the hoist and getting it ready to lift was a matter of setting the two brackets at the measurement between the two mounting points, and then threading the rope through the pulleys. When I started screwing the brackets in to the 2x4’s I think I discovered why the kit was only $10 - the mounting screws it comes with looked substantial, looked like they were made from hardened steel, but might as well have been constructed of cheesecloth and spit. After I snapped the heads off of two of them I switched over to my own supply of screws.

Once it was all put together and mounted overhead I gave it a test run with the mounting points I selected. As might be expected, it does sway just a bit from side to side when being hoisted up and down, but the movement was easily manageable, so I left it as is, mounting to the front crossmember.

The additional height of the frame I built proved to be enough to get it over my head. Substandard screws aside, the hoist works exactly as advertised, including the vitally important catch and lock system that means when you stop pulling on the rope, the trike stops moving up - it just locks in place. The pulley system makes it little physical work to raise and lower - it’s not just doable by Olympic hopefuls. Probably the only caveat is that, I think because the pulleys are attached to the trike at different vertical locations, it doesn’t want to come down level, and so you have to periodically correct it so it doesn’t come down boom first. It’s a little fiddly in that respect.

I originally figured I would use the hoist for the Pocket and perhaps move the Pocket’s old hooks around a bit for the Expedition. However, with this working so well for the Pocket, and with the kit coming in at less than $10, the prospect of doing a clean and jerk with the slightly heavier and more considerably more awkward Expedition suddenly seemed considerably less attractive. I went back and bought a second kit and repeated the process (though I just went ahead and used my own hardware this time). So now what we have is this:

(If you peek in the back, you can see that the Cannondale was narrow enough to hang in a space against the garage wall. That narrow profile is a true advantage of upright bikes when it comes to storage. Which is good, because it’s likely to sit, stored there, for quite some time).

I’m expecting the Expedition, like the Pocket before it, will ultimately just spend most of its time in the car. But now both of the trikes can be stored up out of the way when needed, and the car can be put back inside ahead of scraping season.

Ok - it’s time to ride... (my trike).

An Experiment Ends

When I ordered my Catrike Expedition this summer I decided to give clipless pedals and shoes a try. Although I’ve been cycling off and on for most of my life, I’d never used them. I have a personal resistance to specialized cycling gear (clothing, specifically) in general, as I’ve discussed here a time or two before. Still, you really cannot judge a thing until you’ve tried it, so I ordered up some Shimano SPD sandals and decided to give it a go.

This weekend finds the end of that experiment, at least for now.

I ordered a second Terratrike Comfort Pedal Conversion Kit for the Expedition (I already have them on on my Pocket) a few weeks ago in anticipation of the change in season.

I ride year round and, although my feet absolutely run hot, I knew there would be a time in the not-too-distant future where even committing the fashion crime of wearing socks with the sandals would not be enough. Part of that personal resistance to specialized gear is that, were I to continue to use the SPD side of the pedals, I’d need to buy at least one, and probably two additional pair of cycling shoes to get through late autumn and the winter. That can get spendy in a hurry and, frankly, I’m somewhat skeptical that I’d be able to find winter cycling boots that would be sufficiently warm for riding on the open prairie.

I’m also finding that I’m getting knee and ankle pain with the SPD setup, which is not an issue I’ve ever had before. I’ve tried some adjustments in the length of the boom to alleviate this, but without success. I suspect that the static position of the foot is part of the issue there for me. We’ll see if that resolves with the switch back.

I’ve found that, for whatever reason, every time I’ve looked for the heel slings on the TerraTrike site they are out of stock. When I purchased them for the Pocket I got them from Bicycle Man, and went to do so this time, but they also did not have them in stock (they are in stock there as of today, however, if you are looking). So I looked and was somewhat surprised to find that they are also available on Amazon.

I described in detail the process of installing them on the standard Catrike pedals back when I put them on the Pocket. The biggest part of it is realizing that you will not be able to use the little backing plate that comes with them - it does not fit on the Catrike pedals. You can get nuts to replace that plate however, and then it works fine. Being aware of that this time made putting them on a lot faster (and a lot less frustrating). I also sorted out a way to do it without removing and leaving off the inside Allen screw on the pedals. I was able to block off the nuts sufficiently with a screwdriver blade to hold them still while I tightened them.

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The TerraTrike heel slings are designed to be used alone, but I push and pull on pedals when I ride, and the design doesn’t support that. On the Pocket I used inexpensive Velcro tie wraps, and I’ve found them to work quite nicely for that purpose. This was my plan this time as well (the Velcro tie wraps come in big spools - I’ve got a lot of them), but when I was looking up the slings on Amazon, one of the related products was a basic toe clip - the Evo Double Quick Strapless Toe Clip (I’m not sure what quality is supposed to make it "double quick"...). They were less then $10 bucks for the pair, so I figured they were worth a try.

The reviews for the toe clips on Amazon suggest that some people struggled to install them on their pedals for different reasons - sizing of the clips, or length of the hardware. I did not find any of those difficulties applied for the Catrike pedals. In fact, the only challenge was the same one you get with the heel slings - the otherwise very cool double-sided pedals give you a tiny space to work in when it comes to putting nuts on to bolts inside the pedal space.

My trick for this included a couple of things:

• I put the heel slings on first, which meant that the weight of them kept the pedal upright while putting on the toe clips. I’d like to say that I made this choice because I am a brilliant strategist, but it was just simple serendipity. But being upright held the pedal in the perfect position for installing these.
• I put the nut in the box end of a hand wrench, which was small enough to hold it in position while I got the screw started. I say held in position - I didn’t turn with the wrench - there’s not enough space for that. And only to get it started - if you screw it all the way in you won’t be able to pull the wrench out.
• I did the same trick with the screwdriver blade inserted between the nut and the side of the pedal to hold the nut still while I screwed it in the rest of the way. I really wish this had occurred to me back when I was working on the pedals for the Pocket...

The end result is here:

The design is a little less elegant, perhaps, than using clipless pedals and shoes, but now I have a foot retention setup that will work with just about any pair of kicks. They are easier to get the foot into than the setup using the Velcro cross straps because I can rotate my foot into the clips sideways. The cross straps require you to reach forward and put them on by hand. An initial test ride - about a quarter mile down the road and back - suggested they work more or less like you’d expect, including supporting pulling back on the pedals in addition to pushing.

I was a little concerned that the clips might not allow enough room in the toe area for my big winter boots, but that was a question easily tested:

The clips stretch a bit with the boot in them, but the give allows them to fit. Probably the only remaining question will be whether that give still works when it is very cold out - plastic can get brittle in winter. I always have a spool of the Velcro tie wraps in the pannier bags on the trike (they are useful for so many things!), so I’ll have a backup if they break.

I’ll be trying this setup out over the next several weeks to see how I like them, with the maiden voyage likely to occur a little later today. Details to come in the future.

Now it’s time to ride...

Practicality with a Side Order of Good Luck

As I’ve mentioned here a few times before, I really enjoy it when I get an opportunity to use my trike for actual transportation - for a practical purpose. There’s nothing wrong with riding for pleasure and/or exercise, of course, and that’s what I do most of the time, but there’s a special, bonus level of satisfaction when one can achieve that exercise and enjoyment while doing something that actually needs to be done. One of my more frequent ways to do this is when the opportunity presents to ride to my PO Box. This is especially true because the box is often empty, or just full of junk mail (does anyone want the penny saver paper any more?), and when that occurs, I can at least feel like I got some exercise out of it.

I was gearing up to take advantage of this very opportunity when a thought occurred, a realization that maybe, just maybe I could stack up that practical ride accomplishment by killing two birds with one stone!

Ok - it’s the little things, right? That, or maybe I’m just a little dull...

But bear with me. A weekend or two ago I ran out of gas for the grill. This is one of the firstest of first world problems, I realize, but it was my problem to solve nonetheless. As you’d imagine, this typically involves throwing the cannister into the car and going into town to one of the half-dozen locations that allows you to do an exchange. And it’s been a couple of weekends since it happened because I keep forgetting to grab the empty and put it in the car. But maybe, I thought, just maybe, I could take it with me on the trike...

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There were a couple of potential problems with this idea. First, I’d have to figure out exactly how to attach the canister to the trike. If I had a trailer for the trike that would be a simple thing. But while I do plan to have a trailer for my trike, my progress on that project has been somewhat less than rapid. So I’d have to find a different way.

The other problem was that I wasn’t actually 100% sure there would _be_ a place by the post office to exchange the canister. When I mentioned taking it into town above, I was referring to Mendota - a small town, to be sure, but a big enough place to have a grocery store, a few gas stations, a CVS... you get the idea. But that’s not where my PO Box is. It’s in a little slip of a village that’s considerably smaller (but where the post office offers 24-hour access to the PO Boxes so, you know, a dork on his trike doesn’t have to worry about arriving before it closes).

I decided this second problem was a minor one - if I came up short on LP opportunities, and least I’d have had a ride; and, in fact, I’d have a ride with a bit of extra weight to enhance the workout.

So I set to strapping the tank on.

A 5-gallon LP tank doesn’t seem like a very big thing, really, when you are just setting it in the back of your car (even when that car is a Honda Fit). But like a moose, they are bigger than you think. I used the three strand elastic strap that comes with the Utah Trikes rear rack, supplemented it with a couple of additional bungee straps, tied it all to the rear rack on the Expedition, and headed out.

Shortly into my ride I realized that I had not brought along my wallet. However, I do always try to bring along a small amount of cash so that I have options if, say, I ride past an interesting looking location that offers adult beverages. It’s usually about $20, so I mentally crossed my fingers and kept pedaling.

Thomas Jefferson apparently did not say "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it", but I’ve always identified with that saying because it’s typically rung true for me - as a general rule if I just strike out doing nothing but hoping for the best, I generally just strike out.

Which is to say that I was expecting to find either: A) No LP tanks available at my destination; or 2) that the price for 5 gallons of LP was somewhat north of my $20 budget. Not to mention: iii) the very real possibility that my tank attachment arrangement might fail and leave me pedaling furiously trying to catch up to a runaway canister...

But I kept pedaling.

There’s a general store (yup - rural Illinois) a couple of blocks down from the post office, and sure enough, they had the telltale cage of cans out in front of the store. I double-checked the existence of my $20 bill and there was Andrew Jackson staring back at me (probably contemplating acts of oppression). So I went in and asked the young man at the counter how much I’d have to give for an LP exchange.

The price: $16.99

So I had enough, even with tax, and got a little change back too. The young man and I chatted briefly about the trike - he’d never seen one of them before - and the fact that another man in town has a Tesla, which also wasn’t anything he’d expected to see. And then I strapped the new, full canister to the back of the trike.

According to this site, an empty 5-gallon LP tank weighs between 17 and 18 lbs empty, and between 34 and 35 lbs when full. I could absolutely feel it over the rear wheel - there was a mild wobble to the back end that isn’t typically present. As you might expect, the additional weight slowed me down a bit as well - Cyclemeter tells me I brought in my slowest time for this route ever on the Expedition.

But I wasn’t trying to set any speed records - practicality was the name of the game for this ride. And there, I feel like we have a winner. The rack on the Expedition absolutely worked as designed, and the trike dutifully lived up to its name. I couldn't have been more pleased with that or with my luck for the day.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one more thing:

As I rode up into the driveway it started to spit just a bit of rain. And after I pulled the trike into the garage it started to pour.

So: bonus luck!

Thing is, I’m a little afraid to leave the house now, because I’m worried I may have used up my entire allotment for the year...

Terracycle Adjustomatic Bottle Mount

It goes without saying that the design and layout of a recumbent trike is different than that of a traditional diamond frame, or DF, bicycle. Many of those differences are exactly what the Tri-cyclist is looking for - different (I’d say better) seating arrangement, reclined position, lower profile to the wind, no need for a kickstand - and the list goes on.

However, while it does seem that recumbent trikes are gaining in popularity the reality is that DF bikes are still by far the majority. This means that while the cycling accessories world - which is massive, to be sure - predominantly develops its products for DF bikes, and that’s what we have to work with. Often this can be ok, but at other times it involves compromises. One of the more glaring examples of this that one encounters early on in the trike experience is the water bottle cage.

The cage in repose

The boom is an obvious location for the water bottle cage - it’s easily accessible, it’s visible, and it’s wide enough for the mounting point. But (you knew there’d be a "but", right?) it lays the water bottle down at something like a 5° angle - not perfectly flat, but close enough to it that a full water bottle with a drinkable spout is inevitably going to leak.

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This isn’t really a problem on most DF bikes, where the cage is put inside the frame either on the upright seat post portion, or on the forward front bar, which is at an angle, yes, but far more acute and thus less prone to bottle weep (and really, as we look forward, could we make the term "bottle weep" a thing - I think if we try it could really catch on...).

That angled position also means that the bottle cage is not suited for carrying other types of containers at all. For myself - though it may seem sacrilegious - an early-ish morning ride is made much better when accompanied by the presence of a nice cup of coffee. But if there is a travel mug out there that won’t leak precious brown liquid when laid at a 5° angle, I haven’t found it. And once you add cream and sugar to your beverage you have A) a delightful beverage, yes, but 2) something you really don’t want drizzling all over your machine.

I cannot recall whether I’d first seen the Terracycle Adjustomatic Bottle Mount on the the Terracycle website, or in a Facebook group (Facebook overall is kind of a dumpster fire, but the groups - especially when well moderated - are a relative shining light), but I know that I’ve seen pictures of trikes using this product. At $45 it certainly isn’t as inexpensive as just laying your bottle down at an angle, so I’d put off purchasing one for quite a while. Still, as I rolled toward the Farmondo this year, presenting (for me) an extended distance ride, it seemed a more justifiable purchase because it also allows for mounting two bottles or containers instead of just one.

The product itself is CNC machined, black anodized aluminum, and it looks just as good and sturdy as that description would suggest. It literally bolts right on to the bottle holder mounting point on the boom with little to no difficulty. All the bolts needed come with it, so you just have to supply the 3mm Allen wrench. There are multiple mounting holes on both sides for the cages, so you can choose the height that works best for you. The hardest part - and it isn’t very hard - is setting and deciding upon the right angle for mounting it. It has three preset points, or you can simply choose any angle you like. You can order it with bottle cages from Terracycle, or simply use your own. I’d purchased a pair of black plastic cages from Amazon back when I’d ordered my Expedition, so I used those.

You do want to be sure that you get the set screw for the angled portion set tightly - I was apparently too gentle the first time out and it came loose and started to lean. I’ve since tightened it and have had no further difficulty.

It works exactly as designed. I installed mine a few days ahead of the group ride, in early September, and have been out several times with it since. It holds my Kleen Canteen in an upright position so as to minimize issues from the aforementioned bottle weep, and does, in fact, do a fine job of carrying a travel mug. It rained for almost the entirety of the Farmondo this year - a low-level, but persistent drizzle - and it was comforting to have hot coffee at hand to warm things up a bit. It will be a nice addition to my winter riding as well.

I have clipped it - or rather the cage attached to it - a few times with my foot while getting on the trike. Because of the way it sits and where, I have to take more care when stepping into position to sit down. This has not been a hard adjustment to make.

As I noted above, the device does have multiple holes on each side, and the Terracycle site suggests that other things could be mounted to them - they note that they might be offering a computer mounting stub that would fit (though there is no link, and I don’t quickly find such an accessory on the site). I can easily see the more creative folks out there finding multiple additional uses for what device. For my part, it does what it is designed to do quite nicely.

I am slightly fond of orange…

Farmondo 2019

For my third consecutive year I decided to enter the Farmondo - the group ride put on by Tempo Velo bike club, based in Sterling, IL. The event is three separate group rides of different distances - 20, 43, and 80 miles. Each year I’ve participated in the 43 mile ride. It is not a race - not technically - just a group ride where you are timed, your time is rank-ordered against the other riders, and the information is then publically posted for the world to see.

I was excited for the ride this year because it’s my first year with my Catrike Expedition. I have been finding that the Expedition is faster than the Pocket that I’ve been riding the past couple of years, and I wanted to see if that would hold true over a longer ride (43 miles is the longest I’ve ridden thus far, and so far I only go that distance once a year - in this event), particularly over the hilly terrain that the Farmondo covers (if there is a hill around Sterling, they’ve found it for this ride).

So it was with that in mind that I headed out last Sunday morning with the trike in the back of my Honda Fit.

Knowing that there was rain in the forecast, and that the event ran regardless of weather, I’d purchased rain gear the day before and packed it up in the pannier bags. I also spent time the day before getting all of my lights on to the charger and setting up a new battery mount for my phone since I would be using it to track my ride stats and to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on the ride (in one ear only, of course).

Things did not go as planned.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

It’s about 45 minutes from my home to the starting point in Sterling. I gave myself plenty of time to get there, or so I thought. But while I was riding through Dixon - about 35 minutes from home - I realized that I had not taken any of the lights off of the charger. They were sitting at home, happily sipping electrons off the grid and, most importantly, not on the trike or in the car with me in any way, shape, or form.

After a bit of self-flagellation I mentally set this aside - nothing I could do about it at that moment; I certainly did not have time to go back - and continued on course.

When I got there I looked at the immediate weather, which was a light mist, and looked at the radar, which seemed to be offering more of the same going forward. I made the executive decision not to put on the rain gear (though I did keep it in the panniers), reasoning that I would get damp, but not so much so that I’d be uncomfortable, and not nearly enough to justify the trade-off against the bulk of the rain gear.

Then I hauled out the trike and started to get things set up - flag on (I almost always just keep that in the car, so I had it along) and went to hook up the battery for my phone and found that it was, well, also not there.

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I’d thought that I had put it in the mounting position the day before, but I must have set it aside while working on prepping other things. I say "must have", because finding it "not there" led to a search of the car to see if it had just fallen off, if I’d set it somewhere else, etc. But it was simply not present.

This offered up an interesting problem, given that it limited what I could do with the phone. I’ve got an iPhone XS Max, which has pretty good battery life, but GPS is a battery hog. I’d been doing longer rides without the backup battery tho, and it had come thru when I left the screen dark most of the time and just checked in on my pace periodically. This is what I determined I would do.

But processing that threw me a bit and, more importantly, slowed me down. So I found that, as I was walking the trike up to the starting line in the parking lot, they announced "riders ready?"

I was not.

I pulled the trike up to the side of the group and mounted. I did not have my helmet or gloves or glasses on yet. I reasoned thru my options, put on my helmet and clipped in, and put everything else in my sweatshirt pocket, figuring I could put them in as I rode. Because I was to the side and not in the pack, I let the entire group go by - I didn’t want to cut anyone off - and took my position in the absolute rear of the pack. It’s a timed event, so this didn’t seem like a problem. I’d be compared against my start and stop time, not my position in the pack.

All good, right? I rode forward down the first straightaway, just behind the rest of the group. I rounded the first corner, rode forward another hundred feet, and heard a "click" on the pavement.

I think anyone who rides regularly can tell you that you become accustomed to a certain array of sounds as a part of the experience. There is the sound of tires on water as you go through a puddle, of stones as the come up against a fender or the frame, and all of that occurs against the backdrop of the mechanical sounds of the machine.

The "click" was not a familiar sound.

I knew the sweatshirt pocket was not an ideal location for storing anything, being open on the sides. It’s not ideal in general, and even less so in the reclined position of the trike. But it was only going to be for a short time, right? Well, it was clear that I’d dropped something, though I wasn’t sure what.

I turned around and rode back. I passed the truck that brings up the rear of the group and said "dropped something" to him as he went by. Another couple dozen feet and I found my reading glasses (stoopid middle-aged eyes) there on the asphalt, miraculously undamaged. I picked them up and turned around and started pedaling back the other way, now behind that pace truck.

The beginning part of the race in Sterling crosses a four-lane section of Route 2 at a stoplight-controlled intersection. The police actually cordon that off for the riders. Unsurprisingly, however, when the pace truck went thru - visually signifying the end of the group - one of the two patrol cars, the one dealing with traffic to my left, or closest to me, pulled away. This left me stopped at the stoplight, and falling further behind.

The other officer had remained and saw me. After a cycle of traffic he very generously stopped and directed traffic to get me through the intersection ahead of the changing light and got me on my way (my enduring thanks to him!).

I was now far enough behind now that I could no longer see any of the group. After the stoplights they make a left turn through the neighborhood, which took them out of view. I’ve ridden this ride twice before, so I knew that was the case, but I honestly wasn’t sure which left turn the route took, and I’d been watching the traffic, not the group, while I’d been sitting at the intersection. That uncertainty actually caused me to briefly wonder if I should just pack it in and call it a day, but I took my best guess at it, and about four blocks later came across the pace truck, patiently waiting for me (my enduring thanks to him as well). A block or two later and I could see the tail end of the group having turned right at Challand Middle School and followed them. I felt much better actually having people in view.

I was also breathing pretty hard at this point, since my pace was a little higher than it might otherwise have been this early on, trying to make up for lost time and catch the group. And I don’t care how many times you tell yourself that your position in the group doesn’t matter because it’s an individually timed event, you still want to catch up to (and pass people in) the group. Plus, you know, I’d lost actual time by turning around and by sitting at the stoplight.

The Rest of the Ride

Once I got past that comedy of errors, everything started to level out and work just fine. To ensure sufficient battery life for ride tracking I opted not to listen to any audio on the ride. This made the ride a more meditative experience in some ways. I ride that way sometimes outside of this, but this was a long ride, and I usually like some entertainment as a part of things.

That decision allowed me a little extra battery life for some video and pics along the way:

The video is from mile 7 of the 43-mile group route. I’m probably going 14 or 15 miles an hour in that segment. And importantly, I think I’m gaining on someone (!).

If you like the scenery of the Illinois countryside (and I do) this is a lovely ride overall. It’s also interesting to me because your ride takes you past at least four cemeteries - one in the town of Sterling (where you turn left to stay on the route, I gambled, and turned out to be right, thankfully), and the others mostly tiny rural affairs that dot the countryside out here.

It did rain for the majority of the ride - you can see that the sky is steel gray pretty much throughout. My executive decision on the rain gear turned out to be a good one. I wore linen pants for the ride as well as a rash guard. Both sets of items have the benefit of drying quickly (linen is a great material for warm weather where you want to cover up rather than using sunscreen - I prefer it to spandex for riding). The only fly in the ointment was my cotton sweatshirt, which got very hot about four miles in, but I didn’t want to stop and lose more time taking it off. The upside to that was that by mile 10 it was so thoroughly drenched that it was no longer warm, so it ultimately worked out.

Aftercare

The folks at Tempo Velo always have a spread out for the end of the race - tacos made on the spot, beer and soda available (and the beer is always interesting - I had a Harp), and this year they had custard from Culver’s in the mix as well. It was a smaller group at the end this time, most likely due to the rain, but those who came and rode got to eat and drink well.

Results

After the ride the results get posted online. It takes a little while for this to all get done, but once it is, it’s there for you to consider. My goal this year, and every year, is to do better than last. And as I mentioned, I also wanted to see how much the Expedition seemed to contribute to increased speed/decreased time.

Obviously, my muck-up at the beginning had an impact on my time. I turned around, I got stopped at a stoplight that the event timing expects you to simply be able ride through, and I spent the first several minutes of the ride futzing around with getting gloves on and such, which is not an ideal path towards increased speed.

So here’s the deal: I was faster than last year.

That 3:17:53 for this year compares to 3:20:46 last year. I’ll grant that it’s not a lot faster, but it’s still an improvement of nearly three minutes (2:52), all with a series of unintentional self-induced impediments along the way.

In terms of how much of it is due to the new trike, and how much is due to me, I’m gonna chalk most of it up to the trike. I did condition my way up to the ride distance this year, but my training was fairly similar to last year. My average speed for the ride, however, was up from 13.09 mph last year to 13.29 mph this year (according to Cyclemeter), and I was definitely carrying more weight in terms of both the trike (which is two lbs heavier than the Pocket) and the rain gear in the bags.

And despite all of the chaos, Cyclemeter, which tracks stopped time (the race timing does not - it’s all event time) finds that I was sitting stopped for less time this year than last. I didn’t purposely stop this year or last, so all of the stopped time both years was in situations where traffic required it - e.g. waiting at road crossings and such. So apparently I did have some good luck in there, even tho it didn’t feel like it in the moment.

All in all, and the comedy of errors aside, it was (and always is) a fun event. I was once again the only trike rider in the 43 mile event, but I was not the only trike rider that day. Another gentleman, with a Villager he’d rode in the 20 mile event, and I met and chatted for a few minutes afterward. It was good to see and touch base with a like-minded soul.

And good to put this ride down in the books.