Interesting bikes

Peter Egan is a writer with regular columns in Road & Track and Cycle World magazine.  I've been reading his columns and features in R&T on and off for over 20 years, and while I feel like the overall quality of R&T is not what is was, Egan's writing continues to be of high caliber.

His latest column talks about 'cars of occasion'.  He rattles off a number of factors that can take a car from just transportation to something that is a little bit more interesting.  After reading it, I started thinking about what makes a bike interesting and stand out from the crowd.  Bikes are generally pretty unique just by default, next century or big group ride you're at, try to find a bike like the one you're riding... you likely won't find one.  But, what makes for an interesting bike?  In my (perhaps not so humble..) opinion:

1.  You're bike is not made in Asia.  This may not be politically correct, and it's not to say that there is some really cool stuff coming out of China and Taiwan.  But... there is an awful lot of volume coming out of China and Taiwan, so if you've got something made in North America, GB, France, or especially, Italy... likely you've got an interesting bike.

2.  Steel and titanium frames.  Bikes made out of steel and titanium are made by working with fire.  These bikes are welded together, metal softened and flowed together, a very primal method of making frames.  This is how bikes were made 100 years ago and great frames can still me made with metal.  Extra points for lugged, brazed construction.

3.  Have a frame that is made by hand.  Workmanship is something that still exist today, perhaps not as much as years past, but it does still exist.  Handbuilt bikes are still a way to celebrate personal pride and workmanship.

4.  Campagnolo drivetrain.  You've got to really want a Campagnolo drivetrain to have one, it's not just going to land in your lap on the next bike you happen to buy.  Shimano and SRAM may be on every new bike sold in NA, but the history and heritage behind Campanolo is not going to be duplicated.

5.  Rare brakes.  Campagnolo Delta, Shimano AX, Mavic SSC, or any Magura rim brake.  While some of these older brakes can't match the power of modern stoppers (the Magura's a definite exception), these all have a mechanical beauty that only the most observant company will truly appreciate.

6.  Single speeds.  Doesn't really matter if it's a track bike with a front brake, a purpose built SS, or a converted geared bike, show up to a ride on a SS and people will be interested.

So... not a huge list, I'm sure I'll think up more.. but for now, it will have to do.

After the rain

Took the dog for walk after the rain tonight.  Beautiful sky, spend most of the walk looking up.  Most... but not all. 

Bleh...

So...  as I look back over my vast body of blogging, I see that it's only been 5 months or so since my last post.  Life is full, it takes a lot of time.

In the last 5 months it seems like my free time has shifted a bit from spending time on the bike, to work.. and a little photography.  The fitness is not what it was, not bad, but not what it was.  I did the bike leg of the Mountain Madness 1/2 Ironman a couple weeks ago and that was a real eye opener.  Never been a triathlete, have done a relay before on an Olympic distance, but the level of fitness and equipment at a 1/2 Ironman was surprising.  Big money bikes and bodies that look like they don't have a full time job, unless that job is training.

Kind of the 'average' bikes.  Wheelsets = my whole bike.

Pretty nasty weather for the weekend, seems like Atlanta has been channeling a little of the Pac NW.  Or Belgium...  After 2 delays the swim was canceled, from the shore you couldn't see any of the buoy's.  It would have been pretty easy to lose people, not good on the water.  The day or two leading up to the event I was trying to decide if I wanted it to rain or not.  Figured that rain doesn't really bother me, apparently it doesn't bother the average 1/2 Ironman either.  Which is good, because it rained.

Yep... it rained a bit.

I haven't even looked up my time, suspect I'm not missing anything.  Lesson learned.  Fitness is OK, but it's not great.  Time will come back to me, at some point.

Bleh.

gear acquisition therapy

Society seems like it is always pushing people to be consumers.  Any hobby, sport, or problem you have can be improved or solved by simply buying something.  This means that marketing is doing it's job, but I don't believe it leads to actually improving at whatever you're doing.  It can also tend to drive you into the poor house as you fill your dwelling with more and more stuff.  I've joked with my wife that you get to a certain point in your life that for every pound (non-consumables) of stuff that comes into the house, one pound of stuff should leave.  While this sounds good in theory, I'm not sure it's completely realistic.

Photography is one of those holes that you could pour money into and never fill it up.  Even as technology improves and gets cheaper, 'real' cameras can still easily set you back way deeper into 4 figures than I'd like to think about.  My progression back into photography has been a slowish crawl over the last 3 or 4 years that has honestly probably been too much time surfing the internet, listening to podcasts, and reading stuff and not enough time behind a camera.  I didn't go crazy with buying gear and the stuff I did get was all used, but I do have a fair collection of stuff and always was on the lookout for 'good deals' on Ebay and Craigslist. 

CJ Chilvers website has inspired me to try to make a tangible change.  Spend a little time running through his blog and read his manifesto (manifesto has such an ominous sound doesn't it?).  I'm not going to go quite as extreme as he did, but I am going to cull the equipment down to just one DSLR, one lens, one point and shoot (that lives in the car), and the iPhone... Oh.. and the GoPro.  My goals are going to be to learn, improve, and once I get some minor PC stuff sorted out, share photo's that I'm proud of.

So... we'll see.  I truly believe that putting together a single speed bike a couple of years ago and then riding it, a lot, make significant improvement in my cycling.  Maybe adding some constraint's to the photography will help it improve as well.

100 miles to nowhere

I've had the idea of a 100 miles to nowhere ride on my radar for about 6 months or so.  The thought came, of course, from the Fat Cyclist.  I don't really follow his blog but my boss does and we've been talking about it a bit ever since RAAM ended.  The rough 'rules' or guidelines for a 100 MTN ride can be found on Fatty's site.  There are a couple of places I had in mind for the 100 mile effort, Kennesaw Mountain, laps on the crit course, a couple of different routes I could do in Marietta...  Kennesaw would be tough, 100 miles would be about 20K feet of climbing(!) and would likely take close to 10 hours.  The crit course would be a lot faster, but both of those are almost an hour away from my house.  I decided on Stone Mountain because I could start early with lights, knew it would be relatively fast, and the laps of almost 5 miles would keep it from getting too boring.  

The idea of doing a century a month for however long has also been kicking around in my head for quite a while as well.  I've had some stretches of 3 to 5 months over the last couple years but that's about as long as it's gone.  Had a pretty good opportunity this year because of RAAM, but it kind of fell apart after the race.  Plus, even though I rode just over 500 miles during the week of RAAM, I actually never did 100 miles in a 24 hour period.  So... the century in Las Vegas got me 100 miles in September, last weekend was my last chance to get 100 miles in for October.  It ended up being a pretty tough ride.  Life and work has prevented me from getting as time in on the bike as I'd like and in the 12 days leading up to the ride, I had ridden once for a total of something like 16 miles.  Not exactly the type of lead up you'd hope for.  

The ride (link to Strava) ended up being about what I expected.  I didn't do it quite as fast as I would have liked, the climbing ended up being a bit more than I expected it to be.  There was some kind of charity walk at he park that day and some kind of art and craft festival that caused a bit more traffic than normal.  Both of these slowed me down a little, but honestly didn't make a huge impact.  It got tough towards the end to ride by the car every 15 minutes or so knowing that I could just pull into the parking lot and stop.  I'm glad I had tweeted something about the ride earlier that week, gave me some accountability to actually finish the ride. Of course I haven't ridden at all this week, but it's only the 5th of the month so I've got 3 more weekends to get 100 miles in this month.

doping sucks

A co-worker of mine has a brother who competed in the Collegiate Mountain Bike National Championships this last weekend.  I've never ridden with or even met the brother, but I follow him on Strava and have seen his results, he's a strong kid.  The winner of the cross country race finished with a time of 1:45, 7 min ahead of 2nd, and over an hour ahead of the brother.

For the last couple of years, and perhaps especially now with the news from the last month or so, anytime a person has a spectacular athletic performance, there is always the rumbling of 'what is he/she on?'  Most people don't say it out loud or talk about it, but I bet most people think about it.  What's sad about this is that we don't give full credit to people that very well may have just had a brilliant day, a perfect 2 hours on the bike.

I still think that bike racing, of all kinds, is the most beautiful sport.  With all the news of late it would be easy to just say "Dopers Suck", throw them all under the bus, and move on.  That's kind of the attitude I used to have.  Over the last couple of years and quite a lot in the last months, I've changed that a bit.  I don't know all the details of why or how the riders that have come out recently and admitted to doping.  For these guys riding a bike was (is) their job.  Who knows what or how or why they decided that the best, or only course of action was to take something that they knew at the time, or likely soon knew, was banned.  

I don't know if pro cycling can be cleaned up or if other pro sports can start getting some attention for the doping that I believe goes on there as well.  What I would like to see is that some time in the future extraordinary athletes to be able to enjoy success or failure without the specter of doping hanging over them.  In the meantime, I'm not going to hate the dopers.  It will likely make for some interesting theater over the coming months or years though.  

photodump

A lifetime ago my passion was cars.  Maybe it still is one of my passions.  Perhaps a persons passion isn't manifest only in the day to day decisions and choices that you make, but what's in your heart.  So... even though I spend my money on other things, cars still hold a soft spot.

Photography is something that I used to be pretty passionate about as well.  I'm slowly trying to integrate some photography into my pretty full life.  The hope is to do more than just let the pixels live as zeros and ones on my hard drive, I want to share them, print them, hope that others might enjoy one or two.

Since I've got a pretty good commute each day, I keep an old point and shoot stuck beside the seat in my car, you never know when you might see something worth taking a picture of.  Just recently I've started using an iphone, and I'm pretty damn impressed by both the camera and the amount of in device power available for processing the images.  But, it can't be brought into play and operated with one hand anywhere as easily as a 10 year old point and shoot camera.

So... here is about 10 months of the pics that have been marinating on the card, nothing here that has already been pushed up to FB or Twitter, all this is new.  In the interest of speed, none of these have any post processing done.  Enjoy... or not.

The DC2 Integra's are great little cars.  This one was clean, not riced up.  Looks good with the 15" Spoons (or fake Spoons).

Big trucks are cool too.  Interesting that this one has no sleeper.  Too bad the old Olympus picked up focus on the windscreen...

GM A body.  Pretty sure this one is a '69, if it is the vent windows make it pretty rare, if it really is an SS.  Too bad about the chrome mudguards...

'69 Camaro's might be a little cliched, but this one looked the part.  Vinyl roof, old plate, nice patina.

2nd generation Camaro's are the one's to have in my book, this one was really clean.

You're starting to see more 240sx / Silvia's.  Plenty of these things around and it's easy to like RWD and potential for plenty of HP.  Like the color on this one too.

 

Late model Ford Escape with semi flat over EVERYTHING.... kind of interesting, don't know...

 Nicely turned out EK Civic.  White wheels are a plus.

Seen this one a couple of times on the drive home.  Don't know where the bottle caps on the body seam thing started, but I've seen it on a couple of Type 1's in the last year or so.

Early '80s Corolla wagon.  Don't know why but I love wagons, especially RWD Japanese wagons.  Focus on this one didn't snap in quite fast enough.

Everything that is new.. is old.  Like the mirrors on the barends.

Right hand drive 70 series Toyota Land Cruiser.  Don't see one of these everyday.