Slow down.

A coworker just picked up a 1974 Schwinn Breeze on Craigslist and another scored a free step-thru of as-yet indeterminate origin from a friend. Their excitement over the vintage "girl's bike" bike acquisitions renewed my interest in riding my '79 Schwinn Suburban and getting BeanSS back on her '74 'Burb.

In a fortuitous confluence of events, we learned of the Slow Bike Movement. We read the Slow Bike Manifesto and realized we'd found a new two-wheeled home for ourselves. Not everything in this world needs a name and not every gathering of two or more people constitutes a scene but whatever this riding style is or is not called, all four of us had lost touch with it to varying degrees.

Going back to cycling for its own sake without any greater purpose other than to feel the road surface beneath my tires and the wind in my face really appeals to me. It's too damned hot for anything right now, but this autumn, if you see a small group of riders lazily pedaling some creaking 1970s Schwinns along 4th Avenue towards the Hut or around Reid Park, maybe with iced coffees in hand, that'll be us. You're welcome to join in, just don't expect to go fast.

Rats!

I have no bike stories for this weekend, as I spent most of my time here at Baja Arizona Headquarters, with occasional trips outside to walk the dogs or lift weights.

Actually, I spent a whole lot more time in the backyard than I'd intended to. I wanted to bar-b-que some chicken so I uncovered the gas grill. As I suspected, woodrats had started to take it over, caching it with leaves and cholla joints and leaving their little feces all over. BeanSS started cleaning it with a disinfectant before I decided I needed to hose it out completely. I pulled the grill parts out and blasted away at the nascent woodrat midden along with more than a few years of scorched food drippings. I was doing all of this in a low spot in the yard, and so I suppose should have foreseen what was about to happen.

I found myself standing in 2 inches of water, rodent shit, sand, burned fat, and reconstituted oil. The whole yard smelled like the inside of the grill. Verging on a heat stroke as I was, I just wheeled the grill out of the fetid puddle, cleaned it the rest of the way up, took a shower, came back outside, and made the chicken.

After dinner, I went back out to find the puddle had settled into three fairly disgusting strata - a rainbow of an oil slick sat atop a layer of muddy water, both overlaying a substrate of charred food remnants. And shit. Bees had already found it and keeping the dogs away was a challenge. I scrubbed the whole area with a citrus degreaser and blasted it off with the garden hose, and I think I got it as clean as it was going to get. Of course, I overheated again and had to retreat to the house. Another shower, and then I was in bed by 8:00pm.

This is all just a roundabout way to bring up my excuse for not riding today - I am just plain exhausted.

Ironically, the whole reason I returned to lifting weights in the first place was that I noticed how fatigued I would get doing manual labor in the yard. I distinctly remember how sore I was after swinging a pick and levering a shovel to plant an ironwood tree in the fall of 2004. I decided right then and there to do something to gain some upper body strength and to date, it's been been reasonably successful. Nevertheless, having done the yard-type work (in the heat, no less) on a day where I'd already hiked around with the dogs and worked out left me completely trashed. I'll eventually learn to better schedule these things in terms of how much I try to do in a single day. I'll also take heed of the thermometer reading before I start.

And for the time being, what I really need to do is set my live traps (owning such things is one of the benefits of being a zoologist) and relocate these woodrats once and for all. If only the great-horned owls I heard hooting earlier this year had nested near our house...

Shifty

I rode my new/old gearie again, this time at Sweetwater. Having (and using) a bail-out gear or two (or twenty) is a surefire cure for singlespeed smugness. Veelz thinks I've had some more geared-bike Kool-Aid. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. I do wonder, if I were to leave for Flagstaff tomorrow morning, would I bring the singlespeed or the other one? I'd like to prove to myself that I'm a stronger rider than I was when I lived there in college, but I'm not going to drive all the way up there to push my SS up Mt. Elden. Whatever - it's nice to have options.

But first things first - we still need to be a two-car household before I can take our current pickup to a shop to get its myriad mechanical problems addressed. Maybe then BeanSS and I can bug out of here with less of a chance of coming home early in a tow truck. I've known this for a while and yet I ride my bicycle to work day after day, never bothering to look for this supposedly necessary second vehicle.

To be fair, free time has been in short supply lately. I took one of our dogs to a veterinary cardiologist in Gilbert (for a great big false alarm - whew!), returned to the office the next morning and promptly worked 10 days straight. A few more unplanned-for things went down at home and now it's right back to work, facing an enormous backlog at that. I'd feel a bit put off by being stuck in the Old Pueblo but mountain biking at high altitude during Monsoon season - which often features massive lightning storms - is a bit of a high-risk behavior anyway. Maybe being trapped here with the heat and humidity isn't so bad. No it is bad, but I just can't do anything about it right now.

Another thing about which I can talk but do nothing is the weather, which at this very moment, is bringing microbursts of rain and, more importantly, computer-ruining power outages and surges. And with that sentence, it is time to leave the Web and shut this thing down.

Sunday ride

The new hardtail is shaking out nicely. I rode it to work once last week but it took until this morning to finally get it on dirt - nothing epic, just a few loops 'round the local regional park. I'd set the fork's preload to the factory recommended pressure and it seemed perfect, though I did twiddle the rebound damping knob a bit. I expect a few more adjustments will be required as it breaks in. Most of the controls were already where I wanted them. I'd eyeballed the cockpit into a slightly lower and longer profile relative to my SS, and it came out really well. I felt like I'd been riding the bike for years instead of having let it sit for years. I finished the test ride with 7.77 miles (jackpot!) on the cyclometer though I have to admit I did derby around in the driveway a bit to obtain the numerically alliterative mileage.

You can read posts on one forum after another about how you have to learn to ride differently on a singlespeed. Well, it's the same sort of thing going back the other way, too. I'm hoping that all the time spent on the SS has given me a little bit better sense of momentum and flow and that I'll be able to take advantage of the 23 extra gears I have now. I say I'm hoping this will happen because that's not how it went down this morning. I didn't really ride any faster and I didn't flash any more climbs. All I did was ride all the same stuff with a steady cadence rather than alternating between being spun out on descents and stomping out low RPMs on the climbs. I used the gears to bail out my tired legs, not to speed things up.

I'd like to blame my inability to increase my velocity on the weather. The monsoon season arrived in earnest late last week, with Tucson's left side experiencing an absolute turd-floater of a rainstorm just before sunset on Thursday, followed by a second hard rain over the saturated soils on Friday night. This morning's air was dense and humid, like I was riding through soup. Unfortunately, the sweltering conditions were really no excuse because the moisture actually made the trail surfaces feel more consolidated and faster. Mud? No. The kind of mud that sucks at tires and accumulates on frames requires organic and/or clayey soil. The trails at Greasewood Park are more or less mineral, composed almost entirely of rocks ranging in size from sand to pebbles to cobbles to bedrock outcrops. No, as is typically the case, I rode slow because I ride slow.

I did have to thread a somewhat sinuous and therefore more lengthy path, as the rain got the millipedes out in force. I counted a baker's dozen on my first lap and I'm enough of a bleeding heart that I do truly seek to avoid running over them. There were also assorted lizards out partaking of the explosion of insects and the rodents were keying in on the rain-fed bounty of seeds and tender new shoots put out by the desert plants. There was an American kestrel on station in the middle of it all, and I flushed a lesser nighthawk from its daytime ground roost. Oh, and a coyote crossed the trail in front of me. I always enjoy watching animals, even if I have to do it through a pair of steamed-up sunglasses, with sweat dripping into and stinging my eyes.