More winter cycling, Version 2o2o

Back in 2008, when I had a job as an overnight baker, a guy I worked with used to watch me biking home at 6:00 AM, sometimes through the snow, and he'd say, "I have to see this shit!!"

I think about that sometimes. More than ten years later, I get the same response from people.

I can't say I've ridden every day of the year, or what number of days ridden during the winter qualifies as having earned enough credit to call myself "a year-round cyclist", but I don't think it matters. When I sold my car it wasn't to save the environment or to influence people into advocacy. I wasn't trying to address the infrastructure of city planning or earn a merit badge in any glorified scout group.

I simply couldn't afford a car.

So now, when people try to encourage me by telling me how I'm somehow ethically better than the truck driver who cut me off, or the distracted woman who veered into the bike path, or the bystander who gapes in slack-jawed bemusement at my conundrum because I don't need a car, because I make ends meet without relying on fossil fuels, because I somehow cheated the system out of a stressful car ride into a daily workout that benefits my mental health and the environment, I remind myself I live in a city populated with more cyclists, more boutique cycling studios, more nationally recognized cycling wholesale distributors and more Tour De France champions than any other city in America.

It's not a responsibility as much as a privilege, and dealing with the expectations of that is as much a learning process as learning how to change a flat tire at 8:50 in the morning when you have a scheduled 9:00 AM breakfast meeting two miles away.

Anyway, this is my February 2020 winter cycling update.

Minneapolis Skyline from the North Cedar Trail, photo by Michael McKinney

Selfie on the Martin Sabo bridge, Minneapolis Greenway, Photo by Michael McKinney

Bde Maka Ska chairs, Photo by Michael McKinney

Winter sunset, Minneapolis, Photo by Michael McKinney

North Cedar Trail, Minneapolis, Photo by Michael McKinney

Lyndale Avenue bike bridge, Minneapolis, Photo by Michael McKinney

The inevitable mechanical issue

Awhile back I got into some trouble ... isn't that how all of these posts start?

"Awhile back I got into some trouble and yada yada yada, here is what I learned, I hope it is useful, take it or leave it, not to preach, etcetera etcetera, passive aggressive voice, should have learned my lesson but here I am" and so on and so forth.

So let's start with the Big Wheel. I didn't have a lot of toys as a kid. Star Wars figures in my neighborhood, and in my peer group, were the status symbol. I had a few, but also random oddities ... a Thundercats figure, a Tron figure, some Gobots; I was more Catholic in my tastes, you could say.

So the story goes I had a circuit I would ride on my Big Wheel, out my parents driveway, down the block, up a neighbors sloped driveway, skid turn, ramp down, back towards the parents driveway, over a grassy knoll, onto the concrete driveway of home, skid turn and start over. It was a dead end so how many times I could do it was more essential than watching out for passing cars.

Eventually, I got ambitious and tried a larger hill leading to my parents house. After a few tries I incorporated a skid turn, (remember the e-brake on the right hand side of the old all plastic Big Wheels?) and there begins a series of long and complicated crashes.

Skateboards, bikes, rollerblades, roller skis, skis, snowboards, cars ... just about anything that rolls down a hill I have crashed, with the exception of an oversized tractor tire. Don't ever try that. I strongly do not recommend that. Also wear a helmet.

Anyway, so what?, you crash and you get up and that's it. But not so with a decent working bicycle.

Sometimes the bicycle needs repair and then what? I have posted various DIY efforts on this blog before, and I am not sure anyone is really paying attention; sometimes I get it working sometimes not. I made a huge mistake in 2010, and therein lays the trouble I got into.

On a forty or fifty mile ride in Northern Washington County, past Big Marine Lake and William O'Brien State Park, I got a flat tire.

After breaking two tire levers, ripping two replacement tubes, cursing in frustration for forty-five minutes on the side of the road and eventually succumbing to a spiral of failure, I rode home on a flat tire. About nine miles on the aluminum rim of a new-ish wheel set.

Don't ever do that.

8 Years ... 8 very long years, with a lot of cycling miles later, I wore out a different wheelset. It took a little more than 10,000 miles over 5 years, but I needed to go back to that damaged pair of wheels, and I did. They were never right. The rear axle had been damaged and it occasionally oscillated so badly (usually going over 20 mph) that the rear hub would vibrate like a 1980s pager. So yeah, that was aggravating and embarrassing.

Couple that with trying to find out why it was not working without acknowledging I had ruined them made it worse, so here is an apology to those I harangued. The good news, and there has been a lot of it lately, is that life continues. Time passes. Sometimes the only person who rememberers how or why you came to be upset 9 years ago is you, and maybe explaining it isn't going to help anyone. What helped me a lot more was acquiescing and allowing someone to throw out that wheelset before I could try salvaging them one more time.

I enjoyed another 30 Days of Biking this spring, getting through another characteristically unpredictable Minnesota Spring with maybe a little less drama and fewer contradictions than how I came to be riding a bicycle year round to start with. The fishing has been a bit off due to high water (the Mississippi has set a record for being at flood stage for the longest period of time in recorded history, breaking the 1927 flood that shows up at the end of 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?').

To be certain the potential for crashing is greater while cycling in the Twin Cities than on a dead end street in the suburbs; bike trails and multi-modal commuting are real world alternatives to making a poor decision or applying a little too much ego sauce on your plans and failing gloriously, "...in a cavalcade of anger and fear."

Did you know that while pitching the only perfect game in World Series history, Don Larsen threw a strike outside of the strike zone, and the umpire called it a strike?

I guess there is a lesson there about ethics and standards of operation, perhaps deviation from accepted norms and even the normalization of deviance, somehow, but I don't follow baseball.

March 7th, 2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

April 5th, 2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

April 9th, 2019. Minnehaha Falls, MPLS. Photo by Michael McKinney.

April 10th, 2019, Nicollet Mall, MPLS. Photo by Michael McKinney

May 4th, 2019 at the Fulton Fondo. 

October 2018

With summer passing into a very abbreviated autumn, the bike riding has gotten chillier and more infrequent. Although I make use of NiceRide bicycles as much as I can, sometimes it is tough to beat the warmth and free time riding the bus or train provides. It is probably indicative of having grown up in a town without public transit that I am just learning how vital it can be to know the efficiency and usefulness a reliable public transportation system engenders to those who choose to, or can afford to use it. Sitting on the bus gives me a few extra minutes to look at the paper, or scan my email, or catch the latest news - those meaningful distractions that make up a working day for most people which I am not privy to when I am riding a bicycle.

So I should tell stories about losing my keys on the bus, or how sometimes the other bus riders are rude, or how sometimes the bus or train feels like a little microcosm, how the bus is packed with school kids sometimes, drunks other times ... maybe something about the homeless people trying to live on the trains, or the business people trying to save gas money with their daily multi-modal commute. As far as I can tell, the larger an urban area is, and the more people it caters to, the closer it becomes to an ecological presence of its own volition, nearly alive in the cement and steel that guides sentience through it.

Since my foot injury in 2015, I have gotten a NiceRide membership and accrued over 1,000 station to station commutes. I can't really vouch for how far each one was or how fast; I can add in the 190 I made in 2013 and the 145 I made in 2012, but an exact number doesn't exist. The better discussion is probably focused more on my health and my overall well being, the money and carbon saved from utilizing that resource, and the congeniality of a non-profit organization who made an effort to accommodate my needs. For which I am thankful. Thanks NiceRide, you rock.

After moving to Minneapolis from Saint Paul I have slowly adjusted to my new kitchen, which is smaller and has its own idiosyncrasies. There have been a few decent bicycle rides since May, and time for fishing as well as continuing to volunteer while hoping for a reasonable outcome to my ongoing employment crisis.

I did lose my keys on the bus once, last year. They fell out of my bag on a Tuesday morning, and I didn't notice until 9:45 pm the same night. That was a long day.

The next day I took flowers to the lost and found window at Metro Transit, to thank the driver or rider who found them and turned them in, rather than making my life worse. It took some phone calls and the landlords were not enthusiastic about my emergency maintenance call, but once the keys were found, buying flowers was the least I could do.

Lake Harriet, Photo by Michael McKinney.

Mde Maka Ska, photo by Michael McKinney

Cedar Lake, photo by Michael McKinney

Minneapolis Greenway, photo by Michael McKinney