Vintage Italian Bike Race

Dad emailed me about this last night. This is a race/ride in Tuscany called L'eroica (The Heroic). The best part about the race is that it is designed for vintage bicycles racing on the old dirt roads that still wind through the Tuscan countryside.

Sorry there is no commentary, but this is the best video on Youtube that I could find.

rose-colored glasses

It's been a long time since I've posted about a bike ride, since it's been a long time since I've taken a bike ride, but today I did and so here's a short post about it.

The weather's been beautiful--cold, crisp autumn days--but beautiful-as-viewed-from-the-train-during-my-commute and beautiful-on-the-bike are two different things. In other words, it's cold!! Before I dump three hundred bucks into a full winter gear kit, I thought I'd see what I could put together with what I had around the house. I pulled out my ski long underwear and the old Mapei winter jersey, and Tomo tossed in her leg warmers, which I thought made me look kind of sexy but she thought made me look just plain goofy. In the end it was a decent set of clothes, performance-wise, though my finger tips and ears were FREEZING for the first twenty kilometers or so. I'll have to get my ski gloves from Hokkaido, and ask Dad to send me the Cannondale headband I was going to bring back with me this summer but seem to have forgotten. But I still may have to spend a little money to be warm enough to ride if I'm going to keep going out. There was still a bit of fall in the air today. Soon it will be all winter.

The ride itself was just a leisurely cruise through the flat lands between Mt. Tsukuba and Kasumigaura, Japan's second largest lake. The crops are all harvested and the fields are settling down for winter. The leaves on the trees are turning and I just kept thinking how beautiful it all was. Then I realized that it was especially beautiful because I was looking at it through rose-colored glasses. Not in the sense of seeing the land at rest rather than barren, but literally through rose-colored sunglasses that made everything a little more vibrant than it might have otherwise been. I didn't notice it so much in the summer, but something about the autumn colors really looked good. Thanks to the kind folks at Briko for a fine day!

Japanese Cyclocross - 2 parts

Grey

Okay, so here is a post that is actually about a bike ride and not alcohol! Actually, this post should have been from yesterday, but I did not feel like carrying the camera on my ride then, so these pics will have to suffice.

Yesterday was a sunny bright fall day with the temps in maybe the low fifties. I was planning on doing an organized with my new team, but I was a little late in leaving the house to get to the ride, and when I got there, I realized that I had forgotten my shoes. Oh, well, missed that ride.

So I just came home and rode on my own. I rode out east of Utica on some roads that I have written before and some that I have not, so I got to do some exploring too, which is actually one of my favorite things to do on my bike. My route yesterday included some big hills which were pretty tiring. The last 10 miles or so were all riding directly into the wind. I certainly was pushing myself to my limit yesterday as in the last few miles I really started to bonk.

So, on to my ride today. I needed a recovery ride, so I just rode one of my normal loops, which is a 22 mile loop up to Sellersburg and back. I didn't ride much above 17 mph for the whole ride and when I tried to ride harder, my legs would not respond.


The first picture here is of the golf course that Dad and I haved played a couple of times, the grass is starting to die off. The next is of a minature horse that lives just outside Sellersburg that I see most days when I either ride or drive to work. He lives with two full sized horses, but today he was the only one out when I rode past.

The third picture is the backside of another farms pastures where a small stream runs under those tree trunks, it is a nice peaceful setting.


This final picture is of Indiana's equivalent of Mount Ventoux, except it is about 9,900 ft. shorter than the one in southern France.

Harvest Festival

Despite fears that you will all think this blog is marking my progress away from cycling and toward alcoholism, I wanted to post a post about our trip yesterday to the Ashikaga Coco Farm and Winery Harvest festival. I haven't been riding lately due to inclement weather and a tenacious cold I had a few weeks back, so I haven't had much material to post. We had so much fun yesterday, however, that I thought it would be nice to share.

Ashikaga is a town in the southern foothills of the mountains of Nikko. It is famously the hometown of the Ashikaga family of Shoguns who ruled Japan for a few hundred years beginning in the fourteenth century, but now it's not really famous for anything at all--just another post-industrial town in the hinterlands. Or so I thought. Apparently, it's also becoming famous for its wine. To be more specific, it's famous for the Coco Farm and Winery, a vineyard that was started in the 1950s as a project of a local junior high school special education class. I'm not clear on all the details of the story, but from those beginnings the project grew into a full fledged winery managed by an American vintner and a home and school for people with mental disabilities. The students and residents of the home care for the vines and do much of the wine making themselves, and the winery has grown into a sustainable business. This year is the 24th
year of the winery's Harvest Festival, and Tomo and I were invited by two of her good friends from university. None of us had been before and we didn't know what to expect, but within a few minutes of arrival we were already talking about making it an annual tradition! Basically, the Festival was just what you might imagine from the name and from the pictures--thousands of people getting together to enjoy good food and good wine under the vines. The vineyard is on a hillside that looks out into a picturesque valley. It's hard to imagine a more pleasant place to spend an afternoon. The culinary highlight of the day, along with a great loaf of country bread and French cheese, was the freshly fermented wine that reminded me of nothing more than the sidra of Asturias. Sidra of course is made from apples rather than grapes, but the wine had the same fruity earthiness and the same freshness that I have never tasted in any of the ciders bottled for export that I have tried. It's funny that when I was in Spain in high school and college and everyone else wanted me to drink lots of the sidra I wasn't interested and that yesterday I was tremendously excited to revisit that flavor. But more than the delicious food, it was just so much fun to be together with friends in a beautiful place, with lots of other people who were happy to be there (and much better behaved than a drunken crowd might have been anywhere else). I'm surrounded by crowds daily and the absence of any sense of community is draining. How good it was to be with people and to feel a sense of togetherness.

And good, too, to see the pride of the wine makers!

Sunday, Sunday

Sunday afternoon is among my favorite time to be out riding my bike, as it is usually quiet and there are few people around, especially during the fall. And this last Sunday was one of those days.

I decided to forgo doing a cross race this week and so instead of driving up to Cincy, Kate and I just stayed home and ran errands all day and baked 100 cupcakes.

Kate was going over to knitting a little early, so I decided to head out for my ride around 4. This Sunday was the first day after the time change, so it meant that the sun would start setting around 6 now instead of 7, which also meant that I needed cut my ride from the 40 miles I had hoped to do down to around 30.

The weather is finally starting to feel more like fall, and Sunday was a beautiful sunny, but nippy day for riding. I had meant to bring the camera along but forgot it. Weatherwise, the only problem was that a really stiff wind was blowing out of the west, and that just happened to be the direction I was riding for the first half of my route.

I rode up to Sellersburg and then past the cement plant out to Brick Church road (I know that these road names mean nothing to most of you reading this), and ultimately turned to come back on Charlestown Memphis road (which becomes Bethany Rd after a turn). It was nice to be riding some of the backroads again, as it had been a while since I had ridden them due to racing, loss of day light to ride in, and vacation.

Ultimately I had a nice hard ride, but I did not have the energy to throw in any sprints like I probably should have to keep my fitness up for cross, oh, well, I am not really worried about that.

More Pics

I have posted more pictures from the US Grand Prix Cyclocross race at our Picasa web album