New Years Day 2016

Day One, Ride One
The Gates of the New Year

Welcome to Shad Rides, the 2016 Edition, home of Team Shad and the words of team leader, head glutton, and lapsed Russian novelist, Dubstoevsky. Allez!

Team Shad has high ambitions for the coming year, namely the Trifecta, the Big Three gravel grinders: the Rasputitsa, the Tour de Heifer, and the D2R2. Starting in mid-April and paced two months apart, the Big Three events are the exclamation points punctuating the nine month season (April to December).

Team Shad successfully completed the Trifecta in 2014 but only managed to participate in the D2R2 in 2015. The goal is all three again in 2016, and that goal shapes the team's schedule and training approach. Basically, the training approach is to maintain a modest riding schedule in January, February and March, as the weather allows. Last year, of course, the Snowy Winter From Hell set in in late January and shut the team down until late April; we had to withdraw from the Rasputitsa 2015 because we were unable to train in the two months prior (and you do not want to enter that race out of shape).

We can't control the weather, of course, and this is New England where anything can happen. Last year in the Woo, it was the snowiest and coldest winter on record. But some years there's been literally no more than a few inches of snow every month or so, mild winters with temps in the mid 60s on New Years Day. All we can do as cycling shad is keep our bikes ready, our spirits up, and our goals in mind. The rest is up to Jah.

Today, Jah abided.

Setting out past the Greek Orthodox Church, Russell St, Woo City
January 1, 2016

A steely, gray day, low 40s, slight breeze, a holiday, roads mostly clear of traffic. The inch and a half of slushy snow from three days ago is mostly gone from the roadways, though there's already plenty of loose sand strewn about. No lax riding! Must pay strict attention at all times.

Which is fine, actually. Paying attention is one of the great aspects of cycling, the need for constant vigilance, the necessity of staying in the moment. Sure, your mind can wander but your senses must stay focused, you must be constantly aware in 360 degrees, you must know what's behind you, what's ahead of you, what the surrounding area is in either side of the road, you must never take the road surface for granted but instead treat it as though every turn of the wheel presents the chance for catastrophe. And yet even with obsessive compulsive attention, a distance cyclist remains at the mercy of circumstance and must trust that a drunken driver, a texting driver, a fooling-around-at-the-wheel teenager will not interject their death karma into the day's journey.

Today, 23+ miles of road, keen attention paid all the way, and the result is a safe return and the first ride of 2016. A road ride to boot. Whizzing along empty pavement, the New England countryside bare, rocky, hilly, thick with stands of hardwood forest, punctuated with gray, icy-looking reservoirs, black crows cawing from the tree tops and lopping along on the wing, dark silhouettes of prophecy against a somber sky.

The spillway for the Kettle Brook reservoirs
Cherry Valley, MA (a part of Leicester)

All of life is a chance, really. We can take every precaution, educate ourselves, watch our health, be vigilant when traveling, wear seat belts, avoid war zones, but there's no guarantee that we'll wake up tomorrow morning. We just trust we will. And so I trust that I will ride again. I don my helmet in a gesture of Wise Precaution, but I also bow low in humble recognition of Fate's fickle intentions.

The old Cold War maxim regarding arms control was "Trust, but verify." A cycling maxim might be "Take nothing for granted, be fucking careful, and hope for the best."

Holden Reservoir from the northern end
January 1, 2016

New England style

Dubstoevksy sends a big HUZZA and a Happy New Year bellow to the Mighty Virginian, dependable Shadmate and decades-long cycling companion; to Master Scrod in Frankfurt, and his Ventoux Calls compadre Meister M recovering from Fate's angry bitch slap; to I Ward, recovering from shoulder surgery; and to all cyclists the world over.

And last but not least, an OM AH HUM to the memory of the Mighty General, long time Director Sportif of Team Shad, tireless supporter and raconteur extraordinaire whom we lost in 2015. Allez, great friend!

The trusty mount
January 1, 2016

Ride # 56: Picture Perfect Day, Tempered By Disastrous News From Germany

Backyard Style, Sunday, June 1
70 degrees and dry

What a day. Perfect weather for cycling. 70 degrees, sunny, clear sky, dry air, not hot, not cool, just right. So what to do? Go to the mountain.

Today I opted for a slightly irregular approach. I headed out Pleasant St which presents a more gradual climb west than Elm St., the other option. But instead of going all the way out & up to Sholan Farm and down the other side, at the 3 mile point I took a right on Wachusett St, a road that climbs sharply upwards toward an eventual connection to Elm St just past Bartlett Pond. Wachusett St sets the stage for much climbing to come.

Because really, doing a mountain summit is all about climbing, though not the obvious climbing you'd expect. The mountain summit road is, yes, a challenging ascent, but (as mentioned previously) getting to the mountain's base involves serious climbing. Done regularly, it sort of becomes a badge of honor, like "yeah, another circuit up to Wachusett and back" the tacit understanding being that, holy crap, coming from the flats of Lemonstar, that is A LOT of uphill work.

At the 8 mile mark, you cross Redemption Rock Rd and head up a short and very steep Hobbs Rd extension. Then, at the 10 mile mark, it's the ridiculous uphill of the gutted, sandy, potholed Pine Hill Rd. Both climbs are savage, merciless, exquisite.

Today I spied a rabbit ahead on Pine Hill Rd so I went for him. Slew him in short order. Turns out, though, he was an older rider, (10 years older than me?) and obviously hasn't been riding much this year. He inched upward in slow motion. It was an easy conquering. I rode up to him, said hello, we chatted as I cruised by, and then I was past and gone and powering forward, upward, gone.

Pine Hill Rd.
There's a red dot rabbit up the road
but you have to look close
to see him

Shortly thereafter I dispatched the vicious Pine Hill Rd and then I was on the mountain and climbing. Being a gorgeous Sunday afternoon there were many hikers, walkers, occasional cars, numerous motorcycles, all either using Summit Rd for their activity, or crossing it as hikers who ascend on rocky, wooded trails from all sides. You can't lose focus, even ascending.

No worry of that or me today, I was dialed in and feeling Huge. I attacked the slopes repeatedly. I wended my way through walkers and picnickers, rode all the way to the left when cars or motorcycles came up from behind, and hammered straight up the center line the last half mile to the intersection where you turn left for the last 100 yards to the summit. And I hammered up those last 100 yards to boot.

Contrails over Wachusett Summit

Glorious view. Massachusetts unfolding in the four directions. Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire clear and sharp in profile to the north. Worcester a cluster of pointy buildings rising away to the south. I've seen it all before. So a quick turn around the crown and allez! back down the mountain I zoom (my speed hindered by a pickup truck, a senor driver in a Camry and a motorcycle).

I push it hard on the way back; I can do that now because I'm conditioned, I'm honed. I'm not thrashed on the last five or ten miles, I'm not knackered on the return climbs. Now it seems that I'm limited only by how much power I can muster.

Today, I managed enough power to sail along roads like this:

With the niceness
Heywood Rd

An over all day of great riding, tempered by disastrous news from the Mighty Scrod of Ventoux Calls that he has fallen and broken his arm while training. Garment rending and lamentation! A cruel and wicked and inexplicable occurrence! All of Team I Shad mourns tonight and sends collective positive vibes to our wounded comrade across the Atlantic.

Ride Summary: 36.4 miles (57 K), 14.8 mph. 3,560 elevation. Strava details.

Road Kill: A savaging. One big snake, two chipmunks, a gray squirrel, an opossum, a bunny rabbit. I only took a photo of the bunny.

Fresh dead bunny

Charly Gaul and "The Rider"

Just finished Tim Krabbe's "The Rider," a book that the Mighty Scrod suggested we read together. Given that he finished the book over a week ago, that means that I'm the Lantern Rouge of this non-competitive collaborative effort.

Of many, many things I enjoyed about the book, one was coming across the role that Charly Gaul plays in it, Charly Gaul being one of the great climbers of all time. He died in 2005 and I made mail art from his New York Times obituary (which was written by the great cycling sportswriter, Samuel Abt).

Charly Gaul Obituary Mail Art, 2005, front

Charly Gaul, Obituary Mail Art, 2005, rear

Note to Scrod - will take up the discussion of "The Rider" on Ventoux Calls soon.

Shad Rides, November

We're entering the dark period. The days are shorter, the light fades early on an overcast day and a rider, to keep riding, must increasingly settle for short forays stolen from wan afternoons and frigid weekend mornings.

But we're not quite there yet. In central Massachusetts, in early November, remnants of autumn remain. Classic New England landscapes, glaciated, a tumult of granite. Old worn down mountains covered in maple, oak, white pine. Orchards, dun fields, farms with leaning out buildings.

Princeton, Ma, Ride # 82, November, 2013

These are fantastic roads for cycling, they climb through forest, spill down hillsides, roll across farm land. They pass cows, rivers, ponds, village greens. Soon all the leaves will have fallen and a sense of Bruegelian peasant somberness will spill across the land.

Ascending Mt. Wachusett, November, 2013

A note about this blog. The American shad is a short tenacious fish that lives most of the year in unknown regions of the Atlantic Ocean but then rushes up freshwater rivers along the eastern seaboard to spawn. Shad do not ride bicycles.

But Shad is also a nickname, one I acquired from another piscatorially-moniker'd rider, Scrod. In New England, a scrod is another name for cod and while the rider Scrod spent plenty of time on Cape Cod, and though he and I came to know each other in western Massachusetts, he currently lives and pedals in Frankfurt, Germany. In fact, it was his blog, Ventoux Calls, about training to climb the fabled Provencal giant, that provided inspiration for this effort.

My intent is to chronicle my cycling practice for the year 2014, though I'm beginning almost two months early. Consider these first few entries a sort of wind-down of the present biking season. And a fine season it's been. Eighty-three rides to date. I managed to get out the first time on January 15 but then not again until March 16, the day I bought my first cyclocross bike, a Specialized Crux Elite.

The Crust Atop Mt. Wachusett, May, 2013

I rode the "Crust" (as a friend dubbed it) until late into May when I got out my road bike and that's taken me through to the very latest ride two days ago (Nov. 5th), a 24.95 mile late afternoon jaunt through local towns Lunenburg, Shirley, Groton, and Devens.

Final note. For variety's sake I'll define the term "cycling practice" quite broadly so that anything cycling-related that interests me, as well as personal fitness notes, health stuff, food & diet topics are all fair game for the entries ahead. Bon velo!