Getting priorities straight, working on bikes, and vegetable gardening.

   By now, everyone is probably as tired of hearing about injury-related blah blah as I am of thinking about it.  Let's just say I tried to increase activity levels a bit too much just over a week ago, and experienced somewhat of an epiphany as a result along with an achy head.  This mental re-set reminded me me that everything happens for a reason, and this long drawn-out ordeal might have something to tell me.  Partly influenced by the opinion of my massage therapist and friend, I have finally come to realize that the overall priority of this process should not be to try and get back riding bikes or training for any sport ASAP (you bonehead!).  There is no timeline aside from hopefully being ready to race early next spring.  Instead I need to work toward overall health by taking care of my body and letting it get as much rest as it needs, and take this opportunity to relax and lengthen those angry tight overused muscles I have cultivated through years of pushing my limits and accumulating stresses.  Plus, it's not like I'm going to turn into a lazy couch potato or anything.  There is no better time than now to break down the scar tissue from past injuries that may not have been properly rehabilitated, and make them more flexible and receptive to building strength.  Later on this fall I'm hoping to find a strength trainer to address any remaining issues and bring things into balance before seriously getting back to business.  It's a great time to address muscle imbalances and focus on correcting postural problems (like climber-biker shoulder hunch) before they become major issues.  Just like my brain, I only get one body in this lifetime, and I'd like it to continue being as functional as possible for a long time.

   I highly recommend my friend Emily Quinn as an amazing massage therapist, as well as a knowledgeable, nurturing yoga instructor focused on therapeutic methods here in north Lake Tahoe.  I can't thank her enough for helping me finally realize that putting the time and money in for healing bodywork will pay off in the end.  It has taken me 3 or 4 years of seeing Emily usually once a year, and every time she sighs and shakes her head and always says she needs so much more time to work it all out.  And do your stretches more often!  Ok, you win, and I will too in the end.  Instead of paying for race entry fees and bike parts, my poor beat-up muscles finally get an upgrade.  And when I've done my time getting the worst of the tension worked out, I really hope to do some kind of massage maintenance schedule, every 1 or 2 months, to avoid letting things ever get that bad again.  This week I'll try to venture out to a few mellow yoga classes like Yin, restorative, and therapeutic to help things along.  I'd like to think I'm strong enough to stay with this program without deviating and hopping on a bike other than a beach cruiser too soon, but just in case I may lock both of my mountain bikes together and give the key to a friend to keep for another month or so.  I'm way too easily swayed by the idea of hitting the trails, and my "bad idea alarm" seems to be malfunctioning lately, or I just have a really bad bike addiction.  Must…ride…now…aaaahhhhHH!

My old XC racing rig, now converted to SS

   Even so, I've continued to put together my single speed project, and it's now close to being done.  Nerding out on building bikes is still pretty great!  It is only in need of one more tiny headset spacer to compensate for a slightly smaller stem clamp.  For the drivetrain I decided to experiment, using an online chain length calculator which uses inputs of chainstay length and cog sizes, to figure out if I could use a half link to achieve proper tension without using a separate tensioner.  With the vertical dropouts on my frame I presumably only had 2 choices: a tensioner or an eccentric hub like Kit has on his SS; the hub looks the cleanest but it would have meant trying to figure out an eccentric disc brake adapter situation that would work with my brakes, or buying a new rear brake that worked with post mount adapters.  In the end my plan worked out perfectly, and the chain is tight enough to stay on securely but not so tight it doesn't move freely.  The parts I used are an old XT crankset, an extra fat 16t stainless steel rear cog and Surly 32t stainless front chainring, and a burly single speed chain.  Some other small parts I used are a new set of aluminum cassette spacers, which I decided would look classier than the old plastic ones I had, and some shorter chainring bolts.  After having Kit try to grind down some longer bolts with varying degrees of success it seemed a lot easier to just get a new $5 set of bolts.  Finally I added some new cockpit bits: a set of wider riser bars for better leverage and a new Loaded Precision Ti stem to accommodate the fatter diameter bars, and some fresh new grips from Loaded.  I'd like to find out how much it weighs now, because it's pretty darn light.  I'm dreaming of cranking up some gnarly climbs on that bike!

Mmmmm...looking slick!

Shiny new parts

 



















  With bikes no longer the center of my existence this year, now I turn to my other favorite thing: food.  Cooking is my favorite indoor activity, and I find myself in the kitchen for hours at a time making an exotic feast or paging through cookbooks looking for dinner inspiration.  Thanks to my gathered resources and a good helping of internet browsing, I've had no problems dispatching approximately 10 lbs of vegetables that we receive every week in our CSA box, sometimes even wishing for more and winding up at the
farmer's market to fill the produce bins partway through the week.  I have fallen hopelessly in love with vegetables since starting the CSA two years ago; the roots and leaves, colorful and plain, they all are so tasty when cooked in the right way.  Rutabagas, turnips, celeriac, and other oddities disappear quickly with stews, soups or roasting.  Striped chioggia beets are one of my all time favorites, looking so lively in cole slaws and shaved raw onto salads.  Crispy lemon cucumbers that can be eaten like apples on a hot day…ahhhh, yum.  The irony I have discovered this summer is that an innocuous herb, parsley, is becoming my undoing.  Parsley goes easily in so many things, but since a small amount goes such a long way, getting parsley in the box two weeks in a row is proving to be an insurmountable challenge.  On top of that, I have a parsley plant in my garden happily growing away untrimmed.  What to do with so much parsley?  Feeding it to the chickens comes to mind, although that seems like a cop-out, and maybe that much of a strong herb will make the eggs taste funny?  Help! I'm buried in mountains of parsley!!  Oh well, I guess I could always freeze it…

Garden as of July 27, notice the squash exiting to the right.

   The garden has gone nuts in the past few weeks, loving the warm temps, and one of the squash plants has exploded out of the raised bed and ventured out into the yard, growing at the rate of nearly a foot a day.  The squash in the middle has numerous flowers, while the one on the left is struggling a bit with being eaten by something at night, requiring some pepper spray application once in a while.  It looks like a totally different variety than the other two and I'm curious to see what it ends up being.  Some baby snap peas are coming out already, not quite ready to pick but maybe in a few more days.  The cherry tomato has tiny green fruits already and one of the giant heirloom plants is flowering.  I'm not sure what will happen with the corn since it's behind schedule but still going pretty strong; it might end up just providing the chickens with more shade in their pen.  I'm kind of surprised at how easily this gardening thing is turning out to be overall, not a whole lot of weeds to pull or maintenance other than daily watering.  Hopefully I should be overrun with veggies within the next couple of months, how exciting!!

   I'll leave you with this particularly applicable quote, shared today by a Facebook friend, who is always coming up with the most inspiring things to share and post:

"Your life, with all its ups and downs, has molded you for the greater good. Your life has been exactly what it needed to be. Don’t think you’ve lost time. It took each and every situation you have encountered to bring you to the current moment. And every moment of your life, including this one right now, is a fresh start."  -Spiritual Awakenings

Ponderings on a passion for bikes

   Lately, life feels a little bit like a repeat of my last backcountry ski trip in Washington; the mountain covered in a few feet of fresh snow, struggling to follow a steep skin track the whole way up.  Now and then my skins will lose grip and I slide backwards a ski length or 2, maybe tumbling over into a small tree, filling my pants with snow.  Eventually I have to cut off and break my own less-steep trail.  The going is incredibly slow and frustrating, but despite minor setbacks I'm picking myself back up and climbing steadily at a turtle's pace and can finally see the top getting closer.  As good an analogy as any for coming back from an injury; for every three steps of forward progress I'll slide back a step or so every week after getting too excited and overdoing it again.  Generally things are much improved from week to week even though day to day can vary if I spend too much time in the sun or don't rest enough between active days.  This past week after being cleared for more moderate activity I was able to ride to the beach in Tahoe Vista, about 10 minutes away.  Along with several other rides of similar length and effort this was a small victory, but considering where I was 2 weeks ago, or a month ago, it's something to get excited about!

   Being able to ride even for such short distances feels great, partly because I'm able to pedal on a bike again, and partly because I am becoming less dependent on my truck to get around.  Driving in Tahoe in the summer really stinks dealing with tourist traffic, road construction, parking, and all this to get just a few miles away from home.  When I bought my truck after living car-free in Tahoe for 4 years I continued to pretend I didn't have it for much of the time, using it mainly to shuttle downhill bikes and get to climbing crags some distance away, or make backcountry skiing excursions.  Working at Alpine Meadows got me free bus passes to further save on gas, and if I planned right I could snag an extra 10 rides toward the end of the season to use in the summer.  Everything else within the north Lake Tahoe area, from grocery shopping to work I was able to ride a bike and get exercise while running errands all summer long.  Even now with my summer job in Truckee, I had planned to commute 10 miles each way by bike 3 days a week or more over Highway 267's Brockway Summit.  Being trapped in a car for such mundane activities is borderline painful compared with the thrill of flying down pavement on two human-powered wheels at 6:30 AM and arriving at work more awake than ever.  Then a pedal down the Truckee River bike path to Tahoe City completes the triangle and makes a 40-mile bike sandwich day, fun for variety instead of climbing back over the pass.  Wow, do I ever have a bike problem!  I'll have to put in some smaller road rides before attempting to ride to work, but I hope that at least this late summer-fall will be filled with more bike commuting and less icky driving.

   My mom gave me a book about cycling in Amsterdam for my birthday,  In the City of Bikes, by Pete Jordan.  After eagerly tearing through it in a couple of days I'm convinced that I had to have lived there in a past life to develop such an unusual addiction to pedaling.  It was fascinating delving into the social aspects of cycling's evolution in Amsterdam, and how cars very nearly took over the city at one point but were fought back by an overwhelming number of cycling advocates, with the extra help of a gasoline shortage.  Most interestingly, I also found the correlation between one's vehicle and social status doesn't exist to such an extreme degree in the land of bicycles, with all walks of life pedaling the city together from students and nuns to politicians and successful businessman.  As someone who watches Hummers and Cadillac SUVs with chrome wheels cruise up and down my street before parking in front of a trailer or dilapidated motel, I am puzzled by this.  Sure, you drive a fancy car, but you live in a shack and eat cheap garbage food in order to feed the monster with gas?  If gas prices went up to $10 a gallon, would you move out of your trailer and live in the car?  Convincing people to ride bikes where it makes more sense is looking like a lot more work than just making safe places to ride; it entails changing the cultural view that bicycles are for kids and poor people, and why should one ride if they can drive instead and make a bigger impression.  That kind of change can take generations, and I wouldn't expect to see it happen in my lifetime, barring a drastic event such as running out of oil...but then we would have much larger problems to face.  I just can't imagine any way to make a majority of average folks get out there and ride bikes for some part of their daily routine.

   I can only dream of living in such a place where cyclists are accommodated with as much space and respect as cars instead of being relegated to a 2-3 foot (if even that) shoulder with RVs and boat trailers zooming past with inches to spare, or squeezing past cars parked IN the bike lane.  While some parts of Tahoe are lucky enough to have a separated bike path to ride on, much of the north and east shore is devoid of such luxury and leaves one to ponder how much less of a mess parking and traffic might be if the lake was completely surrounded by a bike path and bike rental shops in every town.  Tons of people probably would still drive, but at least riding bikes would be much safer for the rest of us who like to pedal.  Who can complain about cutting down on both pollution and traffic in this amazingly beautiful mountain lake basin?

And now, for something completely different:

Porky with a baby chicken. He is actually terrified of them and ran upstairs to hide after this.

A happy garden. No vegetables yet but the squash are ginormous! Most of the plants survived an invasion by the chickens one afternoon, though I lost the cucumber (WAAAHHHHH!) and one tomato plant.