Understanding Hills

Like Eskimos are said to have many words for snow, it seems to me that cyclists ought to have many words for hills. After all, what does it really mean when terrain is described as "hilly?" There are the short city hills that only seem like hills when I ride my upright 3-speed, there are the long and annoying false flats, the rollers, the twisty hills, the mountain passes. My perception of hills also changes over time. Rides I considered hilly a year ago, I now think of as "mostly flat," in light of some other hills I've ridden. And then I get annoyed at myself, because I remember when others described those rides as "mostly flat" and I felt bad, because to me they certainly seemed hilly. Hills are a fluid concept.

The more hills I ride, the more I realise that steepness and duration alone are not what makes them easy or difficult for me. More than anything, the pattern of grade change can make all the difference between enjoying the challenge of the climb and hating it. On a hill with a consistent grade, I can "settle into" the climb, whereas a hill with erratic grade changes drains my energy much faster. In the picture here I am standing atop of a relatively mild, but much despised hill after just having climbed it. It's hard to explain why I hate this stretch of incline so much, but it messes with my head. Starting immediately after a traffic light near the center of Lexington, it initially acts like a normal hill and as I near the top, I feel a sense of accomplishment: almost made it. But just as I reach what appears to be the crest of it - and this gets me every time - not only does it continue, but suddenly it becomes steeper. That last stretch, usually with my gearing already maxed out, just always manages to drain my morale. By comparison, the nearby Page Hill is a more significant climb. But I find it easier to handle, because the grade transitions it goes though somehow feel more logical.

Lat week I got a new computer and it has this feature that shows the grade percentage. This little toy has made me ridiculously excited and I am finally getting a sense for what different grades feel like. It also allows me to quantify my suffering. A climb starts to feel effortful at 6%, difficult at 10% and when I got the "Mommy can I go home now?" feeling I glanced down to see 14%. I was also surprised to learn that the "flat" Minuteman Trail reaches a 4% grade in a couple of the false flat stretches. Are you falling asleep yet at this fascinating information?

I am told that lots of cyclists start out hating hills, but then grow to enjoy them more and more. It could be that I am in that category... how else could I enjoy making a game of guessing the grade?

You Ride a Bike, Don't You?

I was headed toward the subway platform, lost in my thoughts, when a construction worker shouted this to me as he walked past - rhetorically and with a good-natured smile, almost as if in greeting. "You ride a bike, don't you!"

For a moment I wondered how he knew. I do not carry a bicycle helmet around. Neither do I have a U-Lock sticking out of my back pocket. Nor do I wear t-shirts with pictures of bicycles or bicycle slogans on them. And then I remembered: I was "wearing" a wheelset. A full wheelset, with tires attached. I was bringing the wheels to Framingham - an hour long trip on subway and commuter rail - and rigged up a system inspired by carrying my skates around.

Having tied the wheels together with a rope, I then slung them over my left shoulder as if the wheels were a handbag and the rope was a shoulder strap. It was surprisingly comfortable and I could hardly feel the weight, which is why I forgot about the wheels when the stranger addressed me.

Something similar happened yesterday, when I wrangled a floor pump into my handbag and walked to my art studio with 1/3 of the large, orange pump sticking out. When I stopped for a coffee on the way, the person behind me in line startled me by saying "That's quite a pump you got there!" Once I realised what he meant, I considered explaining that my hand-held pump does not fit Shrader valves. But thankfully it was my turn to order coffee just then and the person was spared that narrative.

What is the most unusual thing you've carried off the bike that distinguished you as a cyclist?

Road to Trail: Speed, Skills and Bikes

Among the people I ride with it is popular to mix stretches of dirt roads, paths and trails into what are otherwise fast road rides (well, they call the rides "social pace," but there is a certain level you have to reach in order to be social at that pace!). At first I would only join the rides that promised not to do any off-road whatsoever, but now I am gradually starting to ease into riding stretches of dirt trails.

Doing this in the company of experienced cyclists has given me a different perspective than riding in similar terrain alone. The biggest difference is that they go fast, whereas on my own I used to see cycling off road as something to be done cautiously and slowly. Now I am noticing that going fast can actually make things easier. Riding on rock-strewn dirt and gravel requires more effort and lower gearing than riding on pavement, particularly when going uphill. Ride too slowly, and the bike can get bogged down. But maintain speed, and the momentum "carries" the bike through sections that might otherwise seem difficult or scary. It's counterintuitive for a beginner, because the natural inclination is to slow down if the terrain gets challenging. And this is where riding with a group is helpful: following their pace means quickly learning the "faster is easier" lesson through experience. Of course part of it is also psychological. When I am focused on trying to keep up with the group, I don't really have the opportunity to worry about every single ditch and rock and root formation - my instincts kick in and somehow I end up riding through sections I would have considered too challenging if given a chance to think.

As far as skills, I am finding once again (as I did with roadcycling earlier) that I improve quickly with others and very slowly, if at all, on my own. I've ridden on dirt trails before, but now I feel that all those rides taken together did nothing for me compared to the single stretch of off-road I did as part of a ride last weekend. It wasn't a long section, but it had a bit of everything that terrifies me: ditches, rocks, mud, a bit of climbing and descending, even a tad of residual snow and ice. We rode through it quickly, and afterward I suddenly felt like I "got it," whereas on all of my slow and cautious lone rides previously I wasn't really getting it at all.

It seems to me that a good bike for transitioning from road to trails and back needs to be fast, light, responsive, and ideally to have wide tires. Last year I would probably have started with "wide tires" and listed everything else as optional, but recent experience makes me reconsider. I have found it easier to "push" a faster, lighter bike through dirt, especially uphill, than a slower and heavier one. And I have found it easier to avoid obstacles on a quick-responding bike than on a stable but sluggish one. And while wide tires would make things better still, it seems to me that those other factors are crucial.

My impression is that for a while there was a tendency in the bicycle industry to associate wide tires with more relaxed, heavier and slower touring-style bikes - the reasoning being that if you want wide tires, you probably do not need to go fast. Therefore, it was difficult to find bicycles that both had clearance for tires over 25mm and were sufficiently fast and aggressive. That began to change with the rising popularity of cyclocross, and with people like Jan Heine reviving interest in the classic randonneuring bicycle. Races and other competitive events with both road and dirt sections have become more mainstream over the past several years as well. I am not sure whether in the long run any of this will be relevant to me, but it is an interesting development. More builders and manufacturers are starting to specialise in fast road-to-trail bikes, and locally this type of riding seems to be all the rage. Whether I have what it takes to take part in it remains to be determined.

Fiddling with Handlebar Height

I've been riding my fixed gear bike ("Mercy Anne") fairly regularly since we put it together in September. Not long rides, but frequent short rides. Unlike my geared roadbike, I never stopped riding the fixed gear over the winter. And of all my bicycles with drop bars, for whatever reason this one is the most ridable in regular clothing, so if I don't feel like wearing cycling clothes on a short ride I don't have to. I've even ridden it in skirts and semi-high heels a few times; it is surprisingly tame and versatile. 

Maybe it's because of that versatility that I find myself constantly fiddling with this bicycle's handlebar height. It's not that my positioning doesn't feel right, but more like all the positions feel equally right and I can't decide which one to settle on. When we first assembled the bike, I had the stem "slammed" and the bars considerably below the saddle. It felt perfectly comfortable, but over the winter I started riding in the city more and decided to experiment with being more upright. So I raised the bars to saddle height, and that felt great also. Then one day I lowered them again just for the heck of it, and that too felt good. 

Strange that on other bikes I feel a distinct "sweet spot" as far as handlebar height goes and on this one I do not. Not sure how many times I've raised and lowered the bars now thanks to the easy up/down adjustability of the threaded stem, but it's probably time to settle on one position and stop the madness. How do you decide on handlebar height, and do you tend to fiddle with it after the initial set-up?

Lost Lake, Found Courage

Yesterday I went on a stunningly beautiful ride  - a woodsy countryside loop with the fabled Lost Lake as its midpoint attraction. I'd been hearing about Lost Lake for some time, but could not quite picture what was being described. They said the road around the lake consists of dramatic "rollers" (short, steep hills) that keep coming at you until you don't know which way is up and which way is down. "There is a section where you will be braking uphill, you'll see!" explained the Blayleys gleefully.

After that sort of description, I did not imagine my first ride to the lake taking place on a day with more snow than we'd experienced all winter prior. But that is exactly what transpired. 

You know how sometimes you try so hard to avoid something you're scared of, only to end up doing that exact thing? That more or less describes my weekend. On Saturday morning I awoke to a downpour washing away the snow from previous days. The weather report said that the rain would end by mid-day, and that the temperature would rise to mid-50s. I believed it, and set out for a quick ride to Lexington at noon even though it was still drizzling. A few miles in, the drizzle became a downpour again. Then the temperature started to drop instead of rising. And as I proceeded North on the Minuteman Trail, I began to encounter stretches of snow and ice. It was supposed to all have been gone by now, and it was supposed to be warm! But, well, it wasn't. And since I was already en route and soaked, I kept going. 

The first couple of times I encountered snow on the path, I got off the bike and walked. But as the stretches kept coming and I got increasingly wet and cold, annoyance took over and I began riding through them - first cautiously, then more brazenly. My narrow tires cut through the slush and cracked the weak ice. The thicker snow was trickier, but I didn't panic and got through it. Before I knew it, I was riding through the very conditions I'd been avoiding all winter. Only toward the very end did the path become completely impassable, and I walked ankle deep in wet snow as freezing rain poured relentlessly.

Soaking wet head to toe, I finally limped inside the Ride Studio Cafe. They took one look at me and brought out space heaters and towels. I removed as much of what I was wearing as was acceptable and sat there shivering and drying my clothes, swearing at the weather.

After some coffee and quality time with the space heaters, my mood improved. Later that afternoon the weather indeed cleared up, and the sun even came out. When I was finally dry enough to ride home, most of the snow on the trail had melted - which made it logical to conclude that I'd be fine doing the Sunday ride the next morning, since surely the roads would be entirely clear by then.

What I failed to account for, is that the Sunday ride to Lost Lake would take us north. And in the North it's, you know, colder and consequently the snow takes longer to melt. Had I realised this in advance, I probably would not have gone. But then I would have missed out on some truly magical scenery and an extremely fun ride. The roads were not bad, but there was occasional slush and ice, and quite a bit of sand. Had I not gone on that hellish short ride alone the previous day, these road conditions at group-ride speed would have been out of my comfort zone. But because I did, I was now (just barely) okay with it. Very cautious on downhills, but otherwise fine.

There were four of us (Pamela, Dena, Emily and myself). We rode at a comfortable pace, the temperature was not too bad, and the scenery was just unreal - endless winding roads through snow-covered fields and pine trees, almost like a staged scene from some winter sporting good catalogue. Except of course it was March, and we were not cross-country skiing but riding bikes.

By the time we got to Lost Lake, I was so full of the day's impressions that I'd forgotten all about its roller-coaster reputation and did not remember until I was already doing the loop around the lake. I have to say it wasn't scary at all, just really exciting. The hills are so steep and short, that after you climb the first one there is really no need to do any work - you just steer the bike and hang on. The first downhill is so fast that you end up coasting all the way up the next hill and then it's downhill again, repeated maybe half a dozen times. And yes it's true that there is one particular section where you have to go leftish on an uphill - but you're flying up that hill so fast that you have to brake in order to make the turn. Fascinating.

I think this ride will stand out in my memory for a long time, not only because of how beautiful it was, but because I was less focused than usual on the aspects I found challenging or scary. I just kind of went with it, relaxed and enjoyed it. I am grateful to have experienced a winter landscape this perfect, and glad that fear did not stand in the way.