Ride around town

Just a few shots of my recovery ride around Utica this afternoon. Amazingly it was close to 50 degrees here today and it was just too nice not to get out at least a little bit. The last two days I have done two long cold rides, especially Saturday, when I rode 60 miles with my team. Yesterday I rode back from my in-laws house. After both of these rides, I was so cold that I had to curl up in bed to get warm.

Anyway, today was just a easy ride in the neighborhood (really a quick loop around town and then out to the end of the road and back a couple of times.

The first picture is of one of the old lime kilns that were the main industry in Utica for a long time, but those days ended close to a hundred years ago. The other two are just filler.

Cross photos from a few years ago

Here is photo of me after a cross race here in Louisville from 4 years ago that an old teammate posted on the Velonews website.

http://www.velonews.com/photo/html/photo2019.html

Merry Christmas - Feliz Navidad

We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Dan, Tomo, and everyone else:
Happy Holidays and we hope the best for everyone in the coming year.
Cheers!
Luke, Kate, and the dogs.

Merry Christmas!

To all the Lug Brothers and Company around the world we send warm Christmas greetings from Japan.

Here's a poem for Christmas day, borrowed with deep gratitude (and without permission, I confess) from The Writer's Almanac and the author, Gary Short.

Brothers Playing Catch on Christmas Day

Only a little light remains.
The new football feels heavy
and our throws are awkward
like the conversation of brothers
who see each other occasionally.
After a few exchanges,
confidence grows,
the passing and catching
feels natural and good.
Gradually, we move farther apart,
out in the field,
the space between us
filling with darkness.

He leads me,
lofting perfect spirals
into the night. My eyes
find the clean white laces of the ball.
I let fly a deep pass
to his silhouette.
The return throw
cannot be seen,
yet the ball
falls into my hands, as if
we have established a code
that only brothers know.

Da Jerseys are Here, Da Jerseys are Here

Sorry about the model, but here are the official, limited edition Lug Bros & Co. Worldwide Inc. wool jerseys.
Wear them proudly.

Stuff besides bikes (yes, I really did write that)

Here are some random pictures from the last couple of days. As it has gotten colder here in the Ohio valley, the dogs have taken to curling up inside and not really wanting to go outside much. They have also discovered the joys of nesting in blankets.

Here is Ben being shy after working really hard to get the blanket to cover him the way he wants after Kate just put the blanket on top of him because he wouldn't get off the couch.

And then, there is Molly who constructed this lovely nest out another blanket to sleep in yesterday after they had been forced to spend the afternoon outside since Kate was baking cookies all day and did not want dogs stealing the cooling cookies off the dining room table.




We have been having some serious rains here in the last week or so, and so the river is up, not close to threatening to flood the town, but still up probably about 10 feet from normal.

Thankfully the last few days have been dry, so it might start to go down a little.

Frozen Toes

Today marked the first day this winter that the daytime temprature was below freezing. So, smart guy that I am I decided to go out for a ride, yet again proving my idiocy. But I have an excuse, as I don't get to ride outside much during the week, and lately it has been so rainy and nasty on the weekends. This Saturday was no exception as it rained and sleeted all day. Parts of Utica were looking like they might start to flood last night.

I was going to do an organized ride, but when I got there no one else had shown up so I just ended up riding by myself. My ride totaled 32 miles and by the end my toes were nearly completely frozen, but it still felt good to be out on the road instead of sitting on my trainer just spinning.

Jerseys

I emailed Chad from Portland Cyclewear to see if he had sent out our jersey order yet, and he said that it had been sent on Dec. 10, so it should be here by the 17th.

Also, Dan, the old bikes are cool. I thought about taking some photos of the old bikes around Utica that people have in their backyards, but then I figured that if I did that, I would end up getting shot at.

Classics

A couple more Tokyo bikes...

New Team Kit

Here are a few pictures of my new team uniform for Bolla. We had our team party last night at the house of one of my teammates.

This weekend was also the last cyclocross race of the season and I skipped it. The weather was just terrible today and I did not feel like getting soaked and needing to clean my bike again, so that meant a hour and half ride on my trainer, but at least I got a lot of reading done.

With such bad weather, Kate and I did little more than veg out all day, though we did get our christmas letter done.

It should be interesting being on this new team next year, as it has been quite awhile since I did a road race, and now I am committed to doing at-least 10 next year.

I raced last weekend, but had to withdraw due to mechanical problems, and while my cross bike was still a 2 speed then, it is back to being geared. I am just not a strong enough rider to race on 2 speeds.

That bar!

 

old skool

 
 
 
 


Every once in a while you find a treasure of a bike on the streets of Tokyo, usually outside a noodle shop or a sushi shop. There must be something about the geometry--long lines, low seat, wide handlebars--that makes the bikes stable for deliveries. Now most deliveries are done by motorbike (and there are some old school scooters around town too) so you don't see these bikes being ridden all that often, but I sometimes see this one parked along the street during my walk to school. I love the double seat. Think I could do that with my Bianchi?

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

Photos of the Women's race

Start

First lap barriers

Railroad tie run-up

Katie Compton winning

US Grand Prix of Cyclocross

This weekend was the big one for cyclocross here in the Louisville area. The US Grand Prix of Cyclocross came to town. This series is as big as it gets for cyclocross here in the US, and is probably one of the biggest series in the world.

I learned a couple of important lessons this weekend. One, it is important to pre-register for big races, and two, starting in the last row of races that have 75 and 50 racers in them respectively sucks. My lousy starting position was due entirely to my not pre-registering.

Saturday morning I dropped Kate off at work and headed over to the old River Road Country Club for my 10 o'clock race. The categories for races this weekend were a little different from smaller races as the race that I normally do had basically been upgraded to the equivalent of a normal A race. I registered and was handed bib number 269 and headed out to warm up.
With warm up out of the way, it was time to marshall at the start line. When I got to the line, there was already a large group there, that was when they announced that we would be lining up by order of our numbers. So, I started in the very back (there were only about 6 guys behind me), and off we went. The start was the usual mad dash to reach the front as fast as possible and I think that I moved up about 20 places before we left the paved start area.

After having practically no rain for 3 months, October has been one of the wettest on record, due to all the rain we have had in the last week. This meant only one thing for the course, MUD, and lots of it (well, aside from the sand pits, but that is another story). There were a couple of crashes and a bottleneck at the barriers early on, meaning that the back of the field split off from the rest of the race really early.

I found that I was racing in my little ring up front for basically the whole race, the 44t chainring was just too big to push in all of the mush that we were riding through. The course had 1 set of barriers, two railroad tie runs up, and the Green Monster, which was a set of stairs on one side and ramp on the other that the races under under first and then over (it was really just a small bridge).

I was pounding away for most of the race until the last lap when I started to fade and was passed by a couple of other racers who had slowly been moving up during the race. In the end I finished 49th, which was kind of my goal of trying to finish in the top 50. Oh, and I did beat the one single-speeder in the race.

I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning my bike and changing the big ring from a 44t to a 42t.

Sunday I decided to drop down a race and do the cat. 4 race (mainly because everyone else from my new team (Bolla) was going to be racing this race), the only thing was that this race was the very first one in the morning, starting at 8:30.

Again I was handed a rather lousy starting position, 50th out of maybe 55 racers. At the gun we all took off and I was able to move up quite a bit on the outside. However, any hope of reaching the front was shot quickly as another racer went down hard right in front of about 2/3rd of the field.

The course had changed from Saturday, and while there was less mud, there was a lot more sand to ride through. There is not that much to say about the actual race, I tried to pass another racer on the outside, only to find that I did not have enough room, and being forced into the tape that marked the course. I hit a plastic stake holding up the tap snapping it.

Actually one thing I was happy about was that I did not crash either day, though Sunday I had a few bobbles that meant I lost my momentum and had to put my foot down to keep from falling.
In the end, I finished 14th, which was a pretty good finish, though I felt like I could have finished higher if I had gotten a better starting position. Changing my big ring helped alot as I was about to ride a lot more of the course in the 42t than I had been able to previously.

So, that wraps up the race reports, I will post pics of the elite races from Sunday later.

Virginia

Here are some photos from our trip east to the mountains of Virginia. We left last Saturday and drove out through eastern Kentucky, a small slice of West Virginia and then into Virginia. John and Sandy have a time-share at a resort named Massanutten near the town of Harrisonburg.

On Sunday we drove over to Barboursville to visit a winery where Jeremy, the son of a good friend of Sandy, is a chef. The winery is on the grounds of an old plantation that was the former home of a governor of Virginia (from the early 1800s). We did a wine tasting and took a tour of the winery. Unfortunately we were unable to eat at the restuarant there because it was far out of our price range.

The next day we went over to see Judy & John that the Schiavi's know from New Jersey and we all went on a hike along a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. It was quite a hike (at least for us), we hiked past a few vistas that were close to 4,000 ft high. The hike ended at a group of rocks called the Humpback, and I had some scrambling over the rocks.

On our last day, we went to Jeremy's house for lunch, and to meet his wife Grayson and their daughter Nora. Since we did not get to eat at his restaurant, Jeremy was kind enough to serve us a couple of dishes that are on the menu there. After that Kate and I drove into Charlottesville to meet up with Richard, who is a first-year student at the University of Virginia.

We had a little time to kill before meeting up with Richard, so I dragged Kate to a bike shop (hey, she had gone to knitting shop that morning, so it was only fair).

Richard gave us a nice tour of part of UVA's campus and then we went to a Japanese restaurant for dinner.

The next day, we packed up and drove home through the mountains in constant rain.


I did get couple of rides in while we were there, and while I did not ride up in the mountains (I only had my cross bike with me and the 2 gears on it were not low enough for mountain climbing), I found some cool back country dirt roads to ride on.

Another (Artsy-Fartsy) Beer Post

I promised more of my (in)famous beer photos and here are three, showcasing my fine precision forged Park Tools bottle opener and my fine German-made Stroh's mug. As for the beer, I'll leave the artsy-fartsy stuff for the photos (have you READ some of the beer reviews online? All sorts of talk about Madagascarian Vanilla Overtones and Hints of Saffron Hand-Plucked From Grenadan Crocuses (I'll have you know that ALL saffron is hand-plucked; that's why it's so frickin' expensive)). But it was good. All of the beer. Not great, but good. Kirin Stout's easy to find now. I even saw it in cans at the 7-11. And the Asahi Premium Draft was good, considering that it was the same price as their Super Dry, which is plain. Can you find those two in the States? If you can find Hitachino Nest Beer, it seems like you should be able to find those two. And how about Yebisu? That's still my favorite Japanese beer.