Frozen Ponds, Tuuk Blades, a Cold Woo City Dérive

Left Team Shad HQ with the temperature hovering around 23 degrees F but the sun was high, the sky clear and blue, and there wasn't a whisper of a wind.

I dressed smartly and got it right so I wasn't cold at all, not even my feet or hands which, given all the layers that go to the legs and upper body, suffer from minimal layering. My feet get a pair of warm socks, the thin leather biking shoes, then a thin Gortex anti-wind pair of booties; my hands, a pair of cold weather riding gloves (no under layer). But today for whatever reason (solar flares? inner soul fusion? the cosmic fireplace?) neither hands nor feet nor fingers nor toes got cold.

No great ambitions for this ride, just an eagerness to pedal, to propel myself on rubber circles over frozen asphalt with the bright, unadulterated sun beating down on the sharp angles of architecture, all these magnificent buildings built over the last 150 years or so lining the roads for my eyes to absorb (when I'm not preoccupied watching the traffic, the road surface, the intersections, the dirty clumps of frozen ice). Brilliant weird buildings - warehouses, triple deckers, subsidized housing, fading mansions, unadorned vinyl-sided neighborhood slack homes, brick apartment buildings with dates and names in relief, huge municipal buildings like memorial sculptures to a time and place that, day-by-day, fades a little further into memory.

These neighborhood rides are coming into focus; they will almost certainly include an ascent to Bancroft Tower, a spin through the Worcester Art Museum area, and probably William St; sometimes George St (not today, though), and, if going to the hills on the other side of 290, a climb into Green Hill Park which I did do today, the pond there a massive sheet of ice at least 6 inches thick (I eventually rode to the pond's edge, got off the bike, and tip-toed out onto the frozen surface - why was no one skating?).

Oh, skating, yes. I bought new skates! My first new pair since the late 1970s. My first pair of skates with Tuuk blades. Unbelievable, what a difference! So with sharpened skates I forayed on the Elm Park pond on Tuesday and Salisbury Pond in Institute Park on Friday (yesterday). The Elm Park ice was mediocre but the Salisbury Pond ice was quite good in many places and there was plenty of room for skating backwards at speed.

The view from Elm Park Pond
Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Salisbury Pond in Institute Park, Friday
January 16, 2015

Today, Saturday, January 17, 2015 in the great city of Woo, I could have skated but opted for the bike. I opted for the demands of the tarmac, the paying-attention-to-everything, the certainty of breath, the rolling state of meditation, the pounding heart in the well-layered chest. And the beautiful, unexpected places you find yourself in when you're on a psychogeographical cycling dérive to nowhere-in-particular ("live without dead time").

Woo City

Dubstoevsky on a psychogeographical  dérive

Ride Summary: Ride #3 for 2015. The bike computer froze but the cell phone stayed alert and Strava logged the stats. Plenty of climbing even on a shorty ride of 10 miles around the 'hoods. Bancroft Tower and Green Hill Park (accessed by Catherine St), both solid blood-pumping climbs.