A Change of Plans

I had made plans to ride into work today, but to go the long way around, which would have given me about 30 miles. It's a nice ride and not difficult. Lots of rollers that let you work hard for 30 seconds, then ease off, then hard again.

Baby girl had other plans for me though when she awoke with a fever and chest cough. Since Cathy was scheduled to sub for an English teacher at Hoover HS today, it became my job to stay home with the sick one.

My wife surprised me though when she said "go ride for an hour and then I'll leave when you get back."

Heck yeah!

I hooked up with Russ and we did a shorter version of the route, it was still about 18 miles, but it was a good 18. Good weather, good roads, good legs.

We'll be trying for the longer route to work again on Wednesday. In the meantime, today's ride was perfect.

Not About Cycling

Last night we had friends over and during the course of the evening, one of them remarked that she liked to be around me just for all the electronics.

It's not that I have that much stuff. But I really do have a soft spot for electronic toys, and all the stuff you need to go with them.

My Newest Toy

I just received (late last week) a new Apple Macbook Pro 17". Without wanting to gush, can I just tell you that this is the computer I've waited all my life for. A fast Intel processor (2.16 ghz Duo) and 2gb RAM. But the specs aren't why I'm excited, at least not directly. To understand why I'm excited about this machine, I first have to tell you that I am a Macintosh fan. I'd choose a Mac any day over a Dell or a Gateway or other Wintel/AMD box. The hardware is elegant, and the OS is really really nice.

but...
You knew there had to be a "but" in here. I use two software programs (not for work) that are available only for Windows. Additionally, I developed and maintain a database which is cross platform, which means that I need both a mac and a windows machine.

The Solution
My new Macbook Pro is both machines in one. I have used Virtual PC extensively with my old PPC based Powerbook, but it was a kludge, and a slow kludge at that. The new Intel based Mac opens up a whole new world. Using Apple's "Bootcamp" I partitioned a small section of my hard drive and installed Windows XP SP2 on it. Everything that I can throw at it runs just as well as it does on my Dell. Nothing, nothing, fails to work. The speed is amazingly good, because this is not an emulation package...Windows is addressing all the hardware natively (except the Boot ROMs which are emulated, but doesn't effect performance in the slightest). It runs just as fast as the brand new Dell that a coworker just got, both machines are the same spec (2.16 duo/2gb ram, same video etc.). The drawback to this solution is that if I want to switch to Windows, or back to OSX, I have to reboot.

Parallels
Enter Parallels. This software package is more like Virtual PC, except that it doesn't emulate the hardware, it just provides access to it for Windows XP directly, largely bypassing the OSX layer. Just a keyboard command and I can switch back and forth, copy and paste from one to the other, all incredibly fast...especially compared to previous solutions.

Bravo to Apple for switching to Intel. It's what I've been waiting for forever.

My encounter with Bhams Finest

On my ride home today, the weather was particularly harsh looking, and with guests coming for dinner, I decided to take the shortest way home. Coming up the hill on Greensprings Hwy, I encountered a police car blocking all traffic and sending them back the other direction, on the other side of the road. Several hundred yards farther I could see a bunch of police cars with lights flashing etc. I asked the officer directing traffic if there wasn't any way I could continue up Greensprings, because to go around would add several miles and 25-30 minutes to my ride, and I really wanted to get home before all heck broke loose weather-wise.

The officer told me to go ahead. "You can get through, you're on a bike". So I went around his car and up to the other emergency vehicles in the road. Looking for a way past, I settled on going around the left side of the gaggle of police cruisers. Several officers were standing there and I could see a bicycle, circa 1970 something, all bent up and laying in the road. A car with a broken windshield was also sitting there. Obviously someone had hit a cyclist. (For my non-cycling friends who read this, that is a bad thing).

One of the police officers then offered this opinion: "If I were you", she said to me, "I'd find a sidewalk to ride on and stay off the roads." I was dumbfounded. This is an officer who is supposed to enforce the law, but she doesn't know the law. My response was "I appreciate your concern, but the law requires me to ride on the street, not the sidewalk, and even more, it protects my right to be on the road." Every one of the 5 officers that heard this looked as though it was their opinion that I was an idiot. Whatever.

It would be nice if our police officers, who we rely upon to protect us from the morons who think it's cool to run cyclists off the road, knew more about the laws they are supposed to enforce.

Try again folks

My Trek came back today. It's the OCLV frame that Postal rode in the 99 tour, with the team graphics. Unfortunately, it was pretty beat up and there were some funny splits in the paint that I felt uncomfortable riding with, so I had it sent in to Trek for a stripdown, x-ray, and repaint.

The bad thing (for me) is that I had to give up a nice paint scheme that I really liked. The good thing is that I like the new standard 5200 scheme (metallic grey with silver and blue highlights), and no one expects you to be fast on a grey bike.

Unfortunately, when we unpacked it, the paint had started to bubble along the top tube. Obviously that isn't acceptable, so it's on its way back to Wisconsin to be stripped and painted again.

My son is itching like crazy to get his hands on this bike, but he may have to wait a while longer.

I'm sorry, I didn't know this was a race...

The worst of days, was last Saturday. And while not quite the best of days, I certainly had a stronger ride today. The weather was tolerable. In fact, one could say that it was quite nice...mid 80's, low humidity, sunny skies, and a breeze to help keep us cool.

We left the BBC in Irondale and rode out to Odenville and back again. The pace was moderately quick, until we were 4 miles outside of Odenville, when Jeff Haines, and Dom Sutton came flying out of the pack and rolled off the front like we were standing still. Well, color me stupid, but I had no idea we were racing today...nevertheless, my legs responded and with the help of Paul Holsinger, we bridged the gap and dragged the group up with us. Then Jeff ended his pull and dropped back. Instantly, the speed went up 3 mph as Dom hit the front and started killing us. He faded eventually, and things settled down to a reasonable 25-26 for the rest of the way to the turnaround. The nice thing about this whole tale is that even though I thought the pace was tough for a few minutes, I was able to fight through it and hang until it slowed down again.

I finished the ride with 67 miles and actually feel good right now. The legs are a little sore when I go up or down the stairs, but that's a good thing. It means I worked hard and I'll see some benefit from the ride today.

Hurrah! It was just a bad day last week. I'm not the complete lame-o I felt like. And that's a good feeling.

Fitness and P-32

What do fitness and the radioisotope P-32 have in common? P-32 has a half life of 14.3 days. According to Greg Lemond, fitness also has a half life of 14 days.

I tested this theoretical commonality last night at the weekly TNPT.

Greg is right. He might even have been generous.

First, I haven't ridden but a handful of miles in the past two weeks due to scheduling and family and church and all the little things that conspire to get in the way of effective training. In fact, my last TNPT was the night I got shelled at the end of Ruffner Road by the big boys. Of course, that was my own fault.

Last night started off okay. Pretty good in fact. But you can't take two weeks vacation and hang with this crowd. I was fine down Ruffner and once again, halfway up John Rogers. But then the elastic snapped and I had no ability to turn a gear big enough to keep up. I chased back on just before 78, but slipped off the back again climbing up to Old Leeds, never to return. At least I wasn't alone. There were a bunch of us that had trouble last night. The common comment was about how hot it was. So maybe there are some of us that don't do well when the heat index is at 105.

But then we may have been blessed to have gotten spit out the back, as we came upon a full contigent of emergency vehicles responding the crash of one of our number on Shades Creek Parkway coming out of Mountain Brook.

The moral of this story, if you want to hang with the TNPT, you can't afford to take 2 weeks off. Since I've got classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays (one Tuesday on, the next off), I can tell it's going to be tough to keep up. Maybe it's time to look for a slower group for the rest of the year.