SpokEasy

SpokEasy

Author name: CAL

Cyclus Domesticus?

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Cyclus domesticus? Hold on, isn\’t that a \”domestique\”? This is where you\’d think a domestique would be, wouldn\’t you? The word sounds like a household servant of days gone by. In the world of two-wheeled racing, domestique means \”servant\”, but those folks aren\’t scrubbing floors, or polishing the woodwork, or carrying water. Wait a second. I\’ll take that last one back. Carrying bidons of water and sports drink from the team car to other team members certainly is one of the tasks of a domestique. They also fetch food from the team car. They\’ll even carry items of clothing, such as jackets, back and forth. The job of the domestiques is to help their team\’s leader to win. They\’ll create a slipstream for the leader so he or she can conserve energy until it\’s time to make the crucial move. They\’re there to help if mechanical issues crop up; a domestique might even give his/her bike to the team leader if necessary. I\’m not sure whether I\’d rather be the team leader, or a domestique. I suppose that the leader feels the pressure to perform well, even to win. A domestique might well want to win the race, and might be completely capable of doing so; but domestiques aren\’t there to win. You could call them the \”supporting cast\”, aiding their leader home to the finish line. I\’ll never be in the pro peloton; I just ride for the joy of it. The small, everyday stuff, you know. I\’m for sure a Cyclus Domesticus.    

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Power Cranks

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Power cranks? Why not? Power meters seem to be a popular way for cyclists to train nowadays. The rationale is that other aspects of riding, such as speed, vary too much according to factors beyond the rider\’s control. Let\’s take a look at speed. I\’ve seen that my average speed on any ride can vary quite a lot according to wind conditions. I seldom get to ride in hill country, but when I do, my pace really suffers. Training by power, it is said, does away with these variables. Regardless of your forward speed, if you can consistently crank out X more watts than you could two months ago, you\’ve made progress. Power Cranks are designed to let you work your legs independently of each other, even while riding a bicycle. They\’re said to be good for developing the core. Power Cranks even let you pedal both legs in the same direction at the same time! The downside to power meters, by all I\’ve heard, is their cost. A few years ago I was considering buying one of the least costly models, and even that was about $800. Before I made my move, I had to have a root canal, and I was forced to put my money where my mouth is! Before starting to ride/train \”by instrument\”, it\’s advisable to do some tests to determine your heart rate zones and power zones. Otherwise, all these monitors are likely to me nothing more than \”expensive toys\”. I want more bang for my buck than that!

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Bad Match

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My road bike\’s fourth-largest cog and large ring are a bad match, all right. They just don\’t seem able to hook up. Today I tried to shift up to the big ring (50 teeth) while I was on the 24-tooth cog. I pushed the brifter; held it; and the chain rattled and clattered, but did not get onto the big ring. I shifted back to the small ring, or tried to. That was futile; the chain had fallen off. I had to stop and put the chain back on the small ring; then hold the rear wheel off the ground while I turned the pedal with one hand and shifted back to the biggest cog with the other hand. I don\’t know why that happens, unless it has something to do with the fact that the tooth-count ratio between my big ring and the 24-cog is very close to 50/50. If so, I say it\’s weird. Fifty-fifty is so often considered a good thing. I suppose it might be a quirk of my particular bicycle. I\’m glad the bicycle in general isn\’t a bad match. Later addendum: the problem turned out to be worn pulleys. I got them replaced, and now the shifting works fine.

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Product Report

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A product report isn\’t necessarily about something brand-new. Better Basics for the Home is, in my personal opinion, a wonderful book. I\’ve had a copy of it for many years. Just today I made the coming Winter\’s supply of hand cream, using a variation on Basic Waterless Wax Formula (pg. 76). Want to scrub the bathtub without having to inhale nasty fumes? No problem! Just mix baking soda with liquid soap or liquid detergent to the consistency of creamy frosting. Viola! This book even includes instructions for making soap, and I made my own soap for about five years. I stopped when the people in the unit adjacent to me started having children; I didn\’t want to risk having an an energetic, curious kid appear on the scene just as I was mixing up the lye solution (I always did that outdoors, per instructions). Sometimes I wish I could still make my own soap; it was the best bar soap I\’ve ever had. BBH, as I call it, was written by a woman who developed Multiple Chemical Sensitivities following accidental exposure to a gas leak, and then to pesticides. My guess is that the fumes from chain lubricants and such would be intolerable to her; thus BBH isn\’t cycling-oriented. But what does that matter? Sometimes I wish I had my own house to paint, so I could try milk paint! And then I could write a product report about it.

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Chopsticks

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Many an Oriental restaurant offers inexpensive wooden chopsticks to diners. Next time you go for such cuisine, you might want to bring home a pair of those chopsticks. Here\’s why: With the weather cooling off, my hands are getting chapped and dry. I need hand cream; and I make my own! Maybe you\’d like to try it , too. My \”recipe\” is derived from the formula for Basic Waterless Wax Formula, on page 76 of Better Basics for the Home. I use 1/4 cup of grape seed oil; 1-2 tablespoons of jojoba oil; 2-3 tablespoons of  natural beeswax beads; and 1 teaspoon of bleached carnauba wax. I put all the ingredients in an 8-oz Pyrex measuring cup, and set the cup in a 1-quart pot half-full of water. I let it \”cook\” over low heat until the waxes have melted, stirring now and then. Here is where chopsticks comes in. A wooden chopstick is a great stirrer for anything you\’re whipping up that has wax in it. After the waxes are melted, I pour the contents of the Pyrex cup into a coffee cup; and beat the liquid with a fork until it emulsifies. I don\’t leave it in the Pyrex cup for this step because the Pyrex holds the heat too well; and it takes forever for the mixture to cool and thicken. Meanwhile I\’m killing my wrist. The entire process, from measuring the ingredients to cleaning up afterwards, might take 45 minutes. It seems like a long time in today\’s rushed world, but if I went to the store and bought hand lotion, it would take about the same amount of time. This hand cream keeps for 3-4 months. I think it\’s well worth the effort.  

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Scaling Back

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YIKES!!! I sincerely hope that none of us weighs anywhere near this much. If so, some very serious scaling back would be required. Scaling back on what we eat, that is. Like so many people nowadays, I have a certain amount of concern with my weight. About 15 lbs of concern, and that\’s a lot when you\’re 60\” tall and have a small frame. There are oodles of books and other materials already out there about weight loss, so we hardly need to have me add my voice to the clamor. Besides, I couldn\’t say anything that we don\’t all know already. Some of my gain in the past 18 months or so is the result of my overly-zealous taste-testing of the various cereal bars I found at the salvage store. I\’m virtually always ready to go for anything sweet, whether I\’m hungry or not. Thanks to a sleep disorder, I\’m always somewhat tired. It\’s also been my experience that, once my stomach begins to growl, a major crash is imminent. Thus I\’ve become afraid that I\’ll get hungry. That\’s no help. When I get home from work, I often don\’t want to prepare a meal because I want and need to get to work on my web site. There\’s always something that needs tweaking, or even downright fixing. I need to be more careful to keep raw carrots cleaned and ready to eat, and do more cooking over the weekend so I won\’t have to cook during the week. My food intake really does need some scaling back.

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Print or Kindle?

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Which do you prefer: print, or Kindle? From the start, I included cycling-related books in my Shop. It took me over a year to get around to stocking their Kindle counterparts. Personally, I much prefer the tactile sensations of holding a print book in my hands to reading something on a screen. I\’d rather have paper pages to leaf through, than to have to scroll up and down a screen, which my bothers my wrists. But whether I like it or not, Kindle seems to the the now and future wave of reading. And Kindle does have the advantage of taking up a lot less room than a collection of print books. As long as you have a nook for storing your Kindle device, you\’re good to go. On the other hand, drop  your Kindle device and it could be the equivalent of having your entire collection of print books burn up in a nanosecond. There\’s also the fact that electronics change rapidly. It is said that, by the time the \”new\” generation of any electronic device hits the store shelves, it\’s already obsolete. Who can keep up with that? Any electronic device needs, well, electricity. What do you do when the power is out for more than a brief time? With print books, you don\’t need to worry about that; and you don\’t have pesky charging blocks and cables cluttering up your space. Maybe someday I\’ll have a Kindle. Meanwhile, I\’m quite happy with good, old-fashioned BOOKS.

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In the Velodrome

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What goes on in the velodrome? I remember hearing a Boy Scout song when I was a kid that said something about, \”The horses run around, their feet are on the ground\”. Want to see cyclists ride around (and around and around!), or try it yourself? Track cycling might be your thing. The track cyclist rides a \”fixie\”.  Getting used to a fixie would take a bit of doing. If I understand what I\’ve read correctly, fixed-gear bicycles don\’t allow coasting. It would take a while, and possibly a couple of falls, for me to remember that. I guess that riding on a smooth, wooden, indoor velodrome track is a welcome change from outdoor events, where riders never know what Mother Nature might throw at them. I suppose that an indoor track also makes it harder for over-enthusiastic fans to create hazards by getting in the way of oncoming riders. The only velodrome in my state is located in a city about 80 miles away, so I don\’t suppose I\’ll get to try track riding any time soon. But if I can get there with my bicycle, maybe I\’ll see you in the velodrome.

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On the Wing?

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A cyclist on the wing sounds like flying down the road at 25 mph. Riding like that would leave scant time for birdwatching. My father always enjoyed the outdoors. I never saw him ride a bicycle (although he may have done so when he was a kid), but he was quite a one for bird-watching. A slow-motion trip to see and hear our avian citizens would have thrilled him. In fact, I\’ll be he would have preferred to take such a journey on foot. That way he could have gone even more slowly, with more time to look around and keep his ears open for birdsong. Daddy was absolutely amazing. He could see a bird on the wing from a block away, and identify it: its relative size; whether it looked dark-colored or lighter-colored; whether its wings were pointy or rounded or squarish at the ends; how it flapped its wings; whether it flew low to the ground or higher up; whether it maintained a consistent height from the ground or \”swooped\” as it flew. Next time you\’re out for a long ride, keep any eye peeled for what\’s on the wing. I\’ve seen bald eagles, kingbirds, and more. Incidentally, what would Walt Whitman have a thought of this?    

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Thinking It Up

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Thinking it up, and a great deal of it, is behind our present-day bicycles. Their precursor, the Draisine, was invented during the notorious \”Year without a Summer\” following the eruption of Tambora. Crops were failing, and it was hard to get feed for horses. The \”hobbyhorse\” didn\’t need either feed or stabling. But what of the inventions that we don\’t hear about? Let\’s take a look at some of them: The Mavic Mektronic sounds peculiar to me. Shifting the rear gears via radio frequency? With the plethora of electronic devices these days, I imagine that such a shifting system would suffer endless interference! That banana hammock looks too \”load-specific\” to me. That is to say, I get the impression that the only thing it would be good for is to carry a single banana. I\’ll stick with my top-tube pouch. WHAT is that Cyclomer thing? If I had to cross a pond, I\’d rather have a pirogue. My arms need more exercise, anyway. FLIZ? That\’s the Draisine upside-down. Bird of Prey looks like something for stunt riding.  I don\’t think I\’d be comfortable with my stomach pressing against that saddle. Maybe some of these, like the Draisine, were invented out of need. \”Necessity is the mother of invention,\” it is said. So let\’s all keep thinking it up!  

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