Cold Weather Training

Its not winter yet, but its been below freezing a couple of nights in a row now. Tomorrow should be warm for trick-or-treating, but in a few days it will return to some very cool weather which is not conducive to cycling. Sure, you can get cold-weather riding gear, but what about sweating while wearing layers? Gore-tex and other fancy fabrics are supposed to wick it away from you, but then you need to spend $150 on a cold-weather riding outfit... just to ride a few times when its not snowing or icy out. Nope... not for me. So what's the solution to get my biking fix? I need to get an indoor trainer.

Two options for trainers: a traditional magnetic (or fluid) resistance trainer or a set of rollers. The one type looks like this:



The way it works is you basically connect the rear wheel to the frame of the trainer and the tire is up against the resistance unit. They're usually adjustable (resistance) and some of them are magnetic based and others are fluid based.

The other type of trainer is the roller trainer -- here you have no fixed connection to the trainer and you must balance yourself on it at all times. This is said to help you improve balance in general, but others say its just crazy. I'd like to give it a go, but most people suggest wearing a helmet even while indoors as the risk of falling off is greater than normal riding! Here's what one looks like:



You can probably tell, but the rear wheel balances between the two closer rollers and the front wheel rests against the front roller. You can find bunch of info on roller trainers at the wikipedia site here. Wikipedia describes it this way: "Bicycle rollers are a type of bicycle trainer which makes it possible to ride a bicycle indoors without moving forward. However, unlike other types of bicycle trainers, rollers do not attach to the bicycle frame, and the rider must balance him or herself on the rollers while training. Bicycle rollers normally consist of three cylinders, drums, or "rollers" (two for the rear wheel and one for the front), on top of which the bicycle rides."

I'm hoping that on Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving when the big Christmas sales begin) I will be able to get a great deal on a trainer for my indoor winter biking/training. I will need to keep active in the winter in preparation for my planned tour of the Skyline Drive in 2009. You can read about those plans here.

Random Reading

No big bike rides to report on today. I did take my daughter on a tour around the town a couple of days ago but forgot to log the miles in Bike City. Oh well. Probably 6-8 miles on the Giant pulling the trailer.

I do spend a little time each day on Google Reader following various blogs and other RSS feeds, many of them biking related. Here's just a few of the sites I follow:

• Crazy Guy on a Bike -- Lots of long-distance touring journals, each with a RSS feed. I follow several of these, but there are thousands of journals to read.
  
• Chicago Bike Blog -- Lots of random stuff related to biking and bike-commuting in Chicago!
  
• Bike Commute Tips -- A blog dedicated to bike commuting tips
  
• Cyclelicious -- More of an aggregation of cycling related blog posts than anything else... a one-stop shop for biking news and interesting info!
  
• Bikescape Podcast -- Another aggregation of cycling related info with a west-coast bias.
  

There are more that I follow, but some of those are in-tour journals and their longevity is limited to the length of their tour.

Happy reading!

Skyline Drive Trip Plannnig

I'm beginning to plan a bicycle ride along the entire length of the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park. Its about 105 miles, all of it through the mountains. Sound crazy? It probably is! ...


View Larger Map

The idea is to take it easy and spend 2.5 days biking the Skyline Drive. I will have to work hard, but it won't be crazy-hard, or at least that's my intention. I may cover 40-50 miles the first day, have a really easy 2nd day and then the 3rd day will be 30-40 miles, but the last 20 miles is mostly downhill.

The Skyline Drive is through a National Park and thus the speed limit is 35 (bike-friendly) and also commercial truck traffic is prohibited (also bike-friendly). I originally wanted to bicycle the Blue Ridge Parkway (which starts where the Skyline Drive ends) but decided that the Skyline Drive would be easier due to its shorter length (105 miles -vs- 469 miles on the BRP) and its also mostly on a plateau, versus the wild and crazy elevation changes found on the BRP.

I'd be staying with the family at a couple of the lodges situation along the Skyline Drive: Big Meadows Lodge and Skyland Lodge. The family will go off and visit several of the Civil War battlefields in the Virginia area and then meet me at the lodge in the afternoons. After the trip ends, we'll all continue to the DC area to do the tourist thing as a family, including catching a couple of baseball games in Baltimore and in DC, part of our quest to visit all of the MLB ballparks.

Ride to Dundee - Oct 18 2008

Today I decided to head south on the McHenry County Prairie Trail and go to the Fox River. When I got to the river I decided to go a little farther.. and farther, until I ended up all the way down in East Dundee at IL-72 (There's a DQ there where the Fox River Trail crosses IL-72. The path becomes the Fox River Trail when you cross into Kane County, just south of Algonquin. I saw many squirrels -- maybe 15 or more, but never had my camera handy to snap a picture. I did take some other pictures.

Just south of Rakow Road in Crystal Lake, there is a large gravel pit operation and I snapped a few pictures of this operation.



Those conveyor belts run for what seems like a few miles, pulling gravel.



There are fancy contraptions to move the gravel from a belt at one height to a belt at another height also.



Must be doing some sort of processing of the gravel in this old building... or the building is just there to look pretty. Not sure.



Above you can see something strange. There are gates across the path and they detour you just around the gates through a crosswalk. Its unclear why they did this, except maybe to force bikes to slow down and/or stop at the road crossing. Maybe bikers were blowing through the stop sign and running in front of cars? Hard to say.



The Fox River Trail follows the Fox River south of Algonquin on its way to Carpentersville.



Another shot of the river above. In Kane County, there are several spillways that run right across the path draining into the river. All but 2 were dry today, and those only had half an inch of water in them running into the river. I suppose on a rainy day the trail would be a little more dangerous. One section of the trail actually went from blacktop to packed dirt as it was very close to the river and perhaps they'd lost the battle with the river flooding year-in and year-out and so they left this 50 yard section of the path unpaved.



As I came into Carpentersville I came across a couple of coffee/snack shops right along the trail. A bit farther south, at the Main Street crossing I saw this strange car in a parking lot next to the trail. It turns out the guy had a grill on the back of the car and was selling drinks, hot dogs and brats to hungry/thirsty trail riders! I only had my debit card, so I could not get anything.



I finally reached IL-72 and the Dairy Queen in East Dundee. Here I sat on one of the many picnic tables for a few minutes drinking some water before heading north on the return leg of my trip. On the way back, I saw the same sights again, including lots of squirrels and other bikers on the trail.

Total distance: 25.13 miles, ride time: 1hr 55 min, avg speed: 13.07 mph

Pondering the next big bike ride

Since I managed to book a flight to Houston on the day of the Udder Century, I won't be riding in that one next year. I'm still considering other options, and one of them that looks interesting is the Tri State Tour, sponsored by Bicycle Illinois. The ride starts in Hammond, IN and ends in Kenosha, WI. You ride on bike paths along Lake Michigan for 75% of the ride, which would be pretty nice, and the route is reported to be "very flat" which is also nice for long distance riding. Its about 85 miles with an optional 15 mile loop up in WI to stretch it to a full century ride.

I've contacted Intern John about the possibility of doing this ride and I've set a countdown timer on the right of this page to countdown to the Tri State Tour instead of the Udder Century! The tour is actually run on two separate days, but its a one-day event. You just have two dates to pick from: July 18th or August 1st.

Today is actually a bit chilly: only 55 degrees currently and a high of 59. It is quite sunny though, and tempting for me to go out on the bike for a ride to the river or something later today. But the grass also needs to be cut and tomorrow is the IL QSO Party, in which I will be operating... so tomorrow is shot for any sort of cycling or grass-cutting activities.

Prairie Trail Touring - Oct 11, 2008

Yesterday Kurt and I rode to the McHenry County Prairie Trail bike path and rode from Crystal Lake to the north side of McHenry and back. Total distance was over 31 miles for the afternoon -- my best ride yet in terms of distance. The terrain was more challenging than the distance itself...

The Prairie Trail goes through Sterne's Woods on the north side of Crystal Lake and you would not believe how hilly that area is. There are some signs suggesting that bikers get off their bikes because it is too steep -- but we carefully rode down those hills. Going up was another story. I am experiencing an issue on my Trek where the smallest chain-ring won't engage (it just goes clickyity-click) so I can't get into the granny gears. That made it a LOT harder to try and pedal up the hills and there were two of them that I made it half way up and then every push on the pedal was lifting the front wheel off the ground! I finally got off and walked up the rest of that hill as it was nearly straight up! Luckily, the hills were not too long -- just too steep! I think we could have easily added another 10 miles to our ride if we didn't have the extreme hills.

Most of the people you see on the trail are moving faster than us on this day as we're just trying to pace ourselves and not get worn out 15 miles away from home! There was one guy that we passed three separate times. The first time we were stopped getting a drink of water and he rode past but did not stop. Instead, he shouted "Is this the way to Ringwood?" I said yeah.... and 50 feet later he shouted the same question to Kurt who was just ahead of me getting a drink from his water bottle. I guess he didn't believe me. A couple of miles later we catch up to this guy who isn't going all that fast. I asked him where he started his ride from.... Ringwood, of course. Then he went on to tell us of the times in the early 80s when he used to ride on this same trail... with his car. That is until he got busted. It gets even more bizarre. He also started telling us about the time when he was in high school and took two girls (at the same time?) and parked his car on the trail to have sex with these girls in the back of his car but the cops showed up. It was an unlikely story to say the least. What made it funny was the way he emphasized that it was GIRLS he was busted with, so we wouldn't make the mistake of thinking he was taking his boyfriends there. After this bit of the story I laughed and then we decided to start pedaling harder and leave this guy and his stories in the dust.

We crossed over IL-120 and wound our way around on the trail and came to Peterson Park in McHenry. Peterson Park is on the shore of McCullom Lake. Its complete with a nice beach and some picnic areas. It also had a Gatorade vending machine that Kurt was interested in, however it did not accept $20 bills, only $1 and that's all we had between us. Kurt would later get a bottle of Gatorade at a gas station on the way back into town and downed the whole thing in about 5 seconds. Quite an accomplishment indeed! As we were riding back south towards IL-120 we once again saw the guy on his bike who for a 3rd time asked us -- "Is this the way to Ringwood?" Lets hope he found his way home eventually. :)

Since I'm writing this the day after the ride, I can report that the only ill effects from yesterday's ride is a little bit of stiffness in my neck -- but otherwise i'm A-OK. Maybe it was thanks in part to the steak dinner and ice cream from Coldstone that we enjoyed last night!

Total distance: 31.03 miles, ride time: 2hr 58 min, avg speed: 10.46