Bubka

/ personal

Bubka and Masha

Gwen and I adopted Bubka (left) and her sister Masha in November 2008, when they were about three months old. When Gwen and I got together, she had two cats and I had one; by the time we adopted the girls, old age had taken two of our old cats and the surviving cat, Kevin, was lonely.

On our way to the cat-rescue place, Gwen said, “I don’t want to get a kitten.” We wound up with two. They were both so easygoing and affectionate it seems inevitable in hindsight. We named Bubka after the famous Ukrainian pole-vaulter, Sergey Bubka, because she was such an energetic jumper when she was little. She grew out of that eventually and became mostly placid.

Bubka took to Kevin immediately. He was initially stand-offish toward both the new kids, but she wore him down after just a few days, and her companionship made his remaining years much happier.

Because they looked so much alike, it was hard to tell them apart at a glance, and we took to calling both Masha and Bubka “kitten,” especially when they were being naughty. And because they were separated from their mother before they were weaned, they continued to exhibit kittenish behavior all their lives. We never stopped calling either of them “kitten.”

Gwen insists I was Bubka’s favorite person, and she’s probably right. She would jump up on the bed in the morning and swat at my nose or bite my ear to get my attention. Once I was up, she would insist on being carried around for a few minutes. If Gwen and I were watching TV from the couch, she’d often be perched on the back cushion behind my head.

Bubka had been diagnosed with kidney disease years ago, but her condition had been stable up until about March, when she had a health crisis. She spent a few days at the vet and we learned that her kidney function had declined suddenly. We managed her health aggressively with drugs and subcutaneous fluids we administered at home, but we knew her condition was only going to get worse. For a while, it seemed she was getting worse very gradually, but by the time it was ready for us to go to Flipside, we could tell her decline was accelerating. On the Saturday of Flipside, Gwen came home, and the day after, I returned for the day so that we could euthanize her. It was clear the moment I saw her that it was time. She was very weak—she couldn’t walk more than a few steps at once. She had no interest in food. Her meow was all wrong. Her life wasn’t as long as it should have been, but it was the best possible version of her life.

Masha and Bubka were inseparable, cuddling together or tussling in what we called “pillow fights” due to their well-cushioned physiques. I have no idea how Masha will cope with her sister’s absence, but she had been avoiding Bubka as she declined over the past couple of months, perhaps out of some instinct to avoid disease.

Gwen and I are both wrecked. We’ve had a fair amount of practice with this. It never gets easier. I’ve been thinking about grief a lot, and why it is that we feel it so intensely with the death of a pet. I don’t know that I have the answer, but maybe it’s this: we’re responsible for everything in the lives of our pets. We make all the decisions, and want all of those decisions to be in their best interests. In this respect, they’re like children. But unlike children, we generally outlive them, and when the time comes to make the last decision—to euthanize them—there is no option that doesn’t feel like a betrayal. They’re constant presences in our lives for a long time, and love us uncritically, and when the end comes, there’s nothing we can do for them.

Universal follow-up

/ Uncategorized

I recently read The Case for ‘Mark as Unread’ in Messages at Daring Fireball. It seems like a reasonable idea, but doesn’t go far enough.

I have used “mark as unread” in Mail as a signal to come back to a message for further attention, but I prefer not to. I want unread status to indicate that something is, you know, unread. I do use the intensely nerdy Smallcubed Mailsuite, which lets me tag messages for future action, and Mail natively has flags. Either of those seem like a better option than “mark as unread.”

But also, we use a lot of different messaging-type apps in this modern world, and we need a way to remind ourselves to follow up on messages in all of them.

So here’s an idea: a universal follow-up queue. Apps would give you a command for sending a message to your follow-up queue. I imagine this would be implemented as a special view in the Reminders app. Here’s my idea of what it would look like:

Universal follow-up queue screenshot

The list gives a few sorting options seen at the top.

Each card shows the name, avatar, subject line/channel/conversation name (as appropriate), source app, the time added to the queue, and some preview body text. A red dog-ear in the corner indicates that a “time due” has been set.

Hovering over a card shows actions that can be taken. From left to right:

  • Set a time due (shows time due if already set).
  • Send to a different follow-up queue. This may be excessively fussy, but lots of people manage multiple to-do lists.
  • View the original message in the source app.
  • Share the original message.
  • Respond to the original message.

David Rice, 1935–2022

/ personal

David Rice at wedding

My dad died yesterday. He’d had a number of health problems over the past year or so, and had declined considerably. The last 10 days of his life were spent in hospice, doped up and dreaming restlessly. It is not how he wanted to go, and I’ve been very upset about that. I had time to grieve him while he was still alive, and now his death is more of a relief.

I always had a good relationship with him, but in some ways I feel like I didn’t know him very well. He never spoke about his interior life. He occasionally revealed tidbits about his life as a child and young man, but these paint a very fragmentary picture.

But I do feel like I knew him on an intuitive level—what was important to him, how he’d react to things. And I know that in a thousand ways I’m not even conscious of myself, I am a lot like him. Gwen sometimes stops me when I say something and tells me that what I just said was exactly what he would say, as he would say it.

In the last few days of my dad’s mother’s life, I said something like “she can’t die, she’s a force of nature,” and he agreed. I’m feeling that way again—it’s as if I’ve had a view of a mountain out my window every day of my life, and that mountain has disappeared. It’s disorienting. It affronts my sense of how the world works. I’ll have to get used to it.

I’ll revisit this post and fill it in as ideas come to me.

Pace Bend Ultra 2022

/ cycling, Pace Bend Ultra 2022, Ride Report

On February 5–6, I competed in the Pace Bend Ultra. There were a number of divisions: 6-hour, 12-hour, 24-hour, solo and teams, men, women, and mixed (for teams). The idea is you ride around a loop as many times as you can until you reach your time limit. I competed in the 24-hour solo division. This was my first attempt at anything like this.

This would have been difficult under ideal conditions, and the conditions were not ideal. The overnight low was forecast to be 25°F; I had the temperature displayed on my bike-computer app, and when it was showing 31°F, I heard that the actual temperature measured on the course was 27°F. That’s really cold. I’ve commuted at roughly that temperature, but my bike commute takes 22 minutes each way. I was very anxious about the cold in the days before the race, and I wasn’t sure if my preparations would be adequate.

The course is a 6.2-mile loop inside Pace Bend Park, about an hour’s drive outside of Austin. Apparently the course used to be notorious for it’s “meteor impact” pavement, but a couple of years ago it was resurfaced, and is currently pretty nice.

The race started at noon on Saturday, with all the 12-hour and 24-hour riders departing together. This being a time trial, drafting is not allowed, but because of the relatively crowded mass start, we had a pass for the first lap.

My first two laps I was running hot—the trick with distance riding is to keep your level of exertion in a limited range—not too high, so you don’t burn all your matches prematurely. I was a little worried about that, but by the third lap, I was able to get it under control. I later heard from another racer who felt the same.

I had looked at the course elevation profile beforehand, and was not too concerned about the hills: 312 feet of climbing per lap, or about 50 feet per mile. No big deal. What I didn’t realize until I was a few laps into it is that while none of the hills are particularly difficult, you’re never not on a hill. You never have a chance to hunker down and motor. I was constantly finding I was in the wrong gear.

My fueling strategy worked pretty well. I spent a fair amount of time researching that, and while I learned a lot, I ultimately went with my gut (sorry). I made up a batch of big oatmeal-raisin cookies, and a bunch of small chicken-salad tacos. Every 2nd and 4th lap, I would eat a cookie, and every 6th lap I would eat a taco. I would need to pull into my pit station to eat the taco, which was fine—on the advice of a more experienced ultra rider, I planned on taking a pit stop every six laps anyhow; I’d refill the cookies I was carrying when I did that. Eating the cookies while riding was a little more difficult to manage than I anticipated, but I’m sure I could solve that problem. My hunger went up and down—there were points when I was really hungry, and then later, not too hungry. I was able to stick to this eating schedule pretty closely for all my time on the bike, but once it got dark, I decided it would be better to stop to eat my cookies than to eat them on the fly. I thought about using liquid fuel, and ultimately decided against. During training, I experimented with some liquid options, and they didn’t sit well in my stomach. I also tend to under-hydrate, so even on a hot ride, I wouldn’t get a lot of calories that way. According to the Training Peaks estimate (I don’t have a power meter on my bike), I burned 10,500 calories, which sounds about right. About half of that probably came from stored fat (which would be less than 2 lb).

At 6 hours, I felt like there was a turning point in the event. It was getting dark and cold, everyone had burned off the last shred of nervous energy, and we were all settling into the pace that we’d maintain for the rest of the race. It was at about this point that I started adding layers for warmth. I started out wearing a high-tech base layer, a jacket, cold-weather shorts, leg warmers, cool-weather gloves, insulating wool socks, and lightweight booties. At around this point, I added a beanie under my helmet and a wool base layer. Later I would add a fleece neck buff, my rain jacket, and a pair of running tights; I also swapped my gloves for warmer ones.

At 11 hours, I discovered the warming tent. It was not especially warm—I could see my breath in there—but it was warmer. It wasn’t provided by the event organizers, but by a team: there were some people helping their teammates providing de-facto neutral support, and they gave me soup and hot chocolate in addition to a warm place to sit and socialize with other racers taking breaks.

At 12 hours, I had all my extra layers on and still couldn’t get warm—I was shivering uncontrollably in my core. One of the guys in the warming tent who was there in a support capacity lent me his jacket (which was big enough to fit over the 4 layers I was already wearing) and it made a huge difference.

At 13 hours, I was riding a little erratically on the road, and I was really worried about my ability to ride through the coldest part of the night. When I stopped in the warming tent, I realized I could take a nap and just sleep through that part, and I gave myself permission to do that. My attitude and riding improved immediately.

At 15 hours, I decided to take that nap in the warming tent, where there was a cot. I had a sleeping bag with me, but I never really got comfortable enough to sleep. It was miserable. At some point I moved from the cot to a reclining folding chair, and while I didn’t sleep there either, I found it more restful.

At 20 hours, just before 8 AM, I ended my pretend-nap, at which point the sun was out and the temperature had risen to the freezing point. I was not very refreshed, but I was riding a lot better than when I had stopped for my so-called nap.

At 21 hours, the 6-hour division started. While there were obviously some hardcore time-trialists in the 12- and 24-hour divisions, the 6-hour division had a higher percentage—I think that was the only division where people were using disk wheels. They would rocket past me on their TT bikes like I was standing still. There was also one hapless guy in the 6-hour division who must have seen an ad for the event and thought “that sounds like fun.” He was riding a hybrid, wearing basketball shorts and knee socks. It was clear he was not an experienced rider. I think he rode two or three laps and packed it in. I can only imagine how he felt lining up at the start with guys who looked like they were riding spaceships.

Gwen also showed up around this time with food. She crammed a homemade biscuit with gravy in my mouth. I was glad to see her.

At 23 hours and 15 minutes, I packed it in. At that point, my lap time was about 30 minutes (partial laps are not counted), so I could have squeezed in one more lap, but I was starting to ride erratically, and decided it wasn’t worth it.

At the end of the race, I learned that I was one of only two competitors who didn’t have a car to warm up in. I think that made a difference. There’s no telling how I would have fared if I had been able to warm up every few laps, or if I had been better insulated, but if I had ridden through that five-hour pretend nap at my last-lap pace, my distance would have been right around 300 miles, which I had predicted to be my “realistic-optimistic” distance.

I knew, but kind of forgot, that my body cannot regulate its temperature when I’m exhausted: if it’s the slightest bit cold, it’s hard for me to warm up. I definitely experienced that in the race. Part of the problem is that as I get worn out, I can’t push myself as hard and can’t raise my heart rate, so I’m generating less heat, but there’s something else at work too. I’ll need to be careful to be better insulated if I do anything like this again.

Final results: 241.8 miles, 39 laps. 2nd place in the men’s solo 24-hour upright-bike division (out of five), first in my age group. My actual time in motion was 15:34.

Get Out

/ current events

A couple of days ago, Democrats attempted to pass voting-rights legislation. They failed. They failed because Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema hate freedom, and because the GOP has become an openly anti-democratic party. During GWB’s administration, the party openly defied their own president and doubled down on racism as a party position. It’s only gotten worse since then. They know that demography makes it impossible for them to win in democratic elections, so democracy must go. And with trump, the party has gone from merely evil to evil and crazy.

Thanks to widespread efforts in state legislatures, we can expect that future elections will not represent the will of the people in those states. The 2022 midterm elections will be a trial run to see how far these new election-subversion laws can go, and depending on the outcome, more states may pursue these measures, and existing measures may be pushed further. The current Supreme Court has shown it is not overly concerned with defending voting rights. The 2024 election will be the big show. What happens then?

Timothy Snyder, a scholar who studies tyranny, writes that the USA will collapse into civil war. Another scholar, writing for Canada’s Globe and Mail, warns Canada to be ready for its southern neighbor to slide into full-blown fascism. This, to my mind, seems like a more likely scenario.

In either case, I won’t stick around to see it happen. I’ve obtained Irish citizenship, thanks to a grandparent having been born there. I’ve started researching the practical details of moving there (or somewhere else in the EU), with an eye toward being ready to leave by 20 Jan 2024.

I was raised with the Holocaust looming like a distant mountain visible in the rearview mirror. I imagine this is true for most Jewish people my age.

The car is turning around now.

I know I am lucky to have the escape option that I do and the means to make use of it. Not all of my friends do. But I urge all my friends to think about whatever escape plans might work for them.

I have been thinking about this for a while and have been putting off setting these words down because that makes it more real, and that has upset me too much. But it is time.

Experiments mounting a phone to clip-on bars

/ cycling, technology

I’ve been playing around with the best way to mount my phone and headlight on the aerobars of my distance bike. This is a weird setup: most cyclists use bike computers that are considerably smaller than my iPhone 11, most don’t also have a bike light hanging from the same mount, and most definitely don’t have both of those mounted to clip-on bars instead of their regular handlebars.

I started with this bridge-style mount I found on AliExpress. It’s a mixed bag. The aluminum parts—the bridge, the computer-mount base, and the GoPro mount—are well made. The plastic parts—the bar clamps and Garmin mounting “biscuit”—are worthless: both the Garmin base and clamps quickly cracked. I like the bridge design, and thought it might give me more flexibility to mount other stuff, but in reality, it gets pretty crowded on the bars, and having two clamping points just makes it harder to adjust the clip-on bars.

I wound up getting Kevin Brown to machine a couple of very skookum aluminum clamps to replace the original plastic clamps, and I used the business end of a QuadLock intended for a motorcycle to replace the original mounting base; this is reinforced with some Sugru to stabilize it on the bridge.

This works. This is the setup I used in my abbreviated attempt at TABR 2021, and it didn’t give me any trouble. It is absolutely stable, but it is kind of heavy for what it is: 124 g.

The QuadLock mounting mechanism is excellent. I tried using the QuadLock mount by itself, but couldn’t quite get the phone positioned right, and in any case that didn’t give me a way to mount my headlight. There’s an articulated arm between the Quadlock mechanism and the bar clamp with toothed interfaces at each end, so that the angles between parts are stepped; the arm also has a little rise to it. The mount is all injection-molded plastic, and is probably adequate but nothing special. In hindsight, it looks like using a QuadLock out front mount pro sideways on a clip-on bar might work.

I then tried out this mount from 76 Projects. This is all 3D-printed and shot-peened plastic (a manufacturing method I’ve never heard of before), except for the screws that hold it together. It clocks in at 47 g. It uses velcro straps to mount to the bars, and comes with a set of spacer tubes to make up the space between the central mount and the strap blocks. Getting the spacers exactly right is fiddly, but you only need to do it once. The spacers and central mount fit together with toothed interfaces, and this is the only clip-on bar setup I’ve seen that lets you adjust the angle at which the phone faces you.

The 76 Projects mount is made of a much higher grade of plastic than came with my AliExpress mount (I also ordered a Garmin stick-on adapter for my phone from 76 Projects, which is similar): despite also using a Garmin mount, I haven’t had any problems with that. The problem I do have with this mount is that it it’s not rigid: either the velcro straps have a little play, or the stacks of spacers do, so the whole assembly wobbles a bit, probably exacerbated by the weight I’ve got on it. This is more of an issue for me because I have a headlight hanging from the GoPro mount on the bottom, cantilevered on a short extension, and it’s distracting to have the beam wobble up and down.

I backed a Kickstarter project from Peak Design and wound up with their out front mount. This clocks in at 101 g with the GoPro attachment. Normally I wouldn’t use an out front mount with clip-on bars: it would need to be located between a clip-on bar and the stem; this would force the bars to be moved outboard, which I don’t want to do. This one, however, comes with 7/8″ shims (which fit clip-on bars); the mounting surface works when rotated 90°; and by a stroke of luck, when mounted to my clip-on bars, this almost perfectly centers the mount: my clip-on bars are spaced 124 mm OC, and the Peak Design’s mounting surface winds up being 65 mm inboard. That 3-mm deviation from center doesn’t trigger OCD for me; for anyone who wanted to use this system on bars spaced much differently, their motorcycle bar mount puts the mounting surface on an articulated arm (somewhat like the QuadLock one), so it should be possible to center. The out front mount is pretty beefy, and the motorcycle mount is heavier still.

This mount is nicely made and well thought out, with all the major parts being aluminum. Everything feels very precise and substantial; the GoPro mount fits in place of a little conical washer and snugs up just so. The attachment mechanism is clever: magnets snap the phone to the mounting surface in exactly the right position, and two spring-loaded claws click into recesses in the phone case/adapter. It’s very satisfying and easy to clip the phone on. Two buttons on the underside of the mount retract the claws for removing the phone (only one claw really needs to be retracted). I found that the release buttons were easy to operate with thin gloves on, but might be a problem with more heavily insulated gloves.

I did find that without having the clamp really tight, the mount did rotate slightly after riding on rough roads. It would probably be a good idea to put a strip of helicopter tape on the bar to provide a little traction, especially if you’re using carbon bars that shouldn’t have too much clamping force applied.

This is the first one-sided mount I’ve really used on this bike, and once I got it set up, I realized that my clip-on bars are splayed out slightly, so in addition to being slightly off-center, my phone winds up being angled parallel to one bar. This will be easy to fix, but using a bridge design sidesteps the problem. I really like this attachment mechanism and will probably wind up tinkering to see if I can improve the connection to the bars.

None of these weights include the cases/adapters that goes on the phone, but those weights are minimal.

For a while, I have been noodling over the idea of an accessory mounting plate that would secure to the clip-on bars at four corners. All of the loads could be attached inboard of the corners rather than cantilevered, so each attachment point could be lighter—perhaps just a velcro strap and rubber bumper. Bikepacking racers frequently have a bunch of stuff on their bars—some combination of two headlights, two bike computers, a water bottle, a Spot tracker, a GoPro camera. If you could get even half of that stuff on a single plate, you’d be ahead of the game.

New Mac adventures

/ technology

I recently bought one of the new Macbook Pros. This is the first time I’ve bought a new computer that I knew was way more computer than I needed. But I tend to hang onto computers for a while, and by the time I replace this, it will probably be showing its age. I realized when I bought this that Apple has now been through 4 processor families (Motorola 68K, PowerPC, Intel, and now Apple Silicon), and I’ve had two daily-driver computers in each of the previous families (plus a couple of laptops that were secondary computers), starting with the original 128 KB Mac.

I had been waiting on the announcement of the new series of Macbook Pros, and ordered one as soon as it was announced. There was a considerable delivery delay (it travelled from Shanghai to another city in China, waited there for about a week, then in rapid succession to Incheon, Anchorage, Louisville, Austin, San Antonio, and Austin again), so I had plenty of time to prepare for the transition, and had a document where I gathered notes.

Setup

I made the decision not to use Apple’s Migration Assistant. It’s excellent, but I had years of cruft on my old drive and wanted to be more deliberate about what ended up on my new drive. In the end, this worked pretty well, but did take some work.

This post on using a shell script with Homebrew was very useful and saved me a bunch of time with setup. I’d already been using Homebrew, mostly for command-line programs, but I am happy to use Homebrew to manage desktop apps too. I did need to go through the list of desktop apps that can be installed with Homebrew, and make my own list of apps that I wanted to install.

One thing that didn’t work for me is inheriting my old Time Machine backup. I followed these instructions, but the process failed. I’ve still got the old Time Machine database and can navigate it in the Finder, and I have a lot of room on that drive, so I’m using it for the new Time Machine database. This is less than ideal, but I’ve nuked old Time Machine backups before without losing sleep.

One thing I overlooked in the migration process was some of the fonts. I have most of my (non-system) fonts managed by Rightfont, but there were a few third-party fonts that were installed with my system fonts, and I still need to recover those.

Other than that, I manually copied over everything in my home folder, except that I intentionally did not copy of the Library folder. I did copy a few specific items inside it.

Problems

One weird problem I had was with my trackpad. I have been using one of Apple’s older freestanding trackpads for a long time, and I think there was an incompatibility between the old trackpad and the new trackpad software (which enables “force clicks”), possibly exacerbated by the excellent BetterTouchTool: I was seeing a lot of “ghost clicks,” which was not something I could live with. I replaced my old trackpad with a new one and the problem disappeared.

As a test, I tried plugging in the Mac to a third-party USB-C charger with a third-party cable while it was running. This charger nominally supplies slightly less wattage than the factory original (60 W vs 67 W), but the laptop seemed to be staying at 100% charge. I need to do more testing, but this seemed to trigger a weird and seemingly unrelated problem: files I downloaded after plugging into that charger could not be opened or deleted. Plugging in the stock charger and rebooting solved the problem.

The new Macbook Pro has a fingerprint sensor. In theory, this is great, but in practice, sometimes it doesn’t want to read. I haven’t figured out what causes this.

Notifications stopped unexpectedly. Apparently this is a fairly common problem. Killing the NotificationCenter process via Activity Monitor seems to fix it.

Update

Two days ago, the new machine had a major freakout, showing the same symptoms described in this article: the screen would flash pink, then it would reboot; it continued rebooting at roughly 1-minute intervals. I managed to boot it into the recovery partition and ran Disk First Aid. No problem there. Tried doing all the finger-gymnastics to zap PRAM and reset the SMC. Initially this didn’t seem to help, but after a few more reboots, it seemed normal. This happened around noon. The problem flared up again around 7 PM. I couldn’t fix it, called Apple support, and the tech on the line couldn’t either. One of the problems with the Mac in this state was that it couldn’t see any networks or Bluetooth, so Internet Recovery was not possible.

Went to the Apple store the next day; of course it booted up fine, but we did a nuke-and-pave on the spot (which took longer than expected). If this doesn’t fix it, it’s probably a hardware fault.

Other observations

This thing feels like a tank, at least as Apple products go. It weighs half a pound more than the “Touch Bar” Macbook Pros (3.5 lb vs 3 lb, which feels like a bigger difference than it sounds like), and is very slightly heavier than the 2013-vintage machine it is replacing.

I haven’t gotten used to the Globe key–which also acts as the Function key. An unexpected consequence of it is that the Function key on my external keyboard also acts as the Globe key. I do need to toggle between Japanese and English inputs sometimes, so I can see the benefit of it, but command-space is hardwired into my fingers, so I don’t imagine using it. In playing around, I discovered that I can make a quick tap on the Caps Lock key toggle keyboards–again, I probably wouldn’t prefer that, but it might be a handy option for some.

Epoch-Caldwell 300K

/ Epoch-Caldwell 300K, Ride Report

After scratching in TABR 2021, I decided I needed more experience with distance riding before I attempted it again, so I joined the local randonneuring group. Randonneuring has two kinds of ride—brevets, which are organized date-and-day events, and permanentes (or perms), which you can ride whenever you want. There are certain standardized distances in either case, and yesterday I rode a 300-km perm. I covered about the same distance on Day 1 of TABR 2021, although that was cold, rainy, and windy; yesterday started out cool and warmed up to be pretty hot, with a slight tailwind on the outbound leg and a stronger headwind (it certainly felt stronger) on the return. In any case, this was only the second time I’ve ridden this distance.

I started out at 6:00 AM in darkness and rode for about an hour before there was any sunlight. After that, the morning was very misty, and whenever I would ride through a low-lying spot, visibility was probably only 50′. The mist burned off by 8:30 or so. Riding through that was surreal. I was mostly on roads I know well up to that point, but not being able to see around me made them unfamiliar territory.

I pushed on past the first control in Taylor, about 40 miles in, without stopping. After that point, the route took me on unfamiliar roads to get to a familiar place—Apache Pass—and then to Rockdale, where I did stop for a snack at the second control. Pushed on from there through the community of Black Jack, which I had never heard of, to Caldwell, where I discovered I had crossed from the burnt orange zone of football allegiance to the maroon one. Stopped at a Subway for solid food, topped off my hydration pack, had a Snickers bar for good measure, and headed back.

I had been making pretty good time to this point for relatively little effort, but knew I’d be facing a headwind on the way back. I can see now that my average heart rate for the first half was 120 bpm, 125 bpm for the second half. In hindsight, I think I could have pushed the pace on the outbound leg a little more, but I was mostly concerned about having enough in the tank to make it home.

When I made it back to Apache Pass, at mile 132, I was dealing with hotfoot and stopped to give my feet a break. That helped a bit, but not enough, and not for long enough. I stopped again in Taylor to fill up on water, even though I probably had enough to make it the rest of the way back. I wanted to give my feet another break, and I wasn’t sure how long the next 40 miles would take, since my speed was dropping steadily.

Sometimes I can ride through hotfoot and get comfortable again. That didn’t happen. I just toughed it out. Apart from that, and being generally sore and tired in all the ways you’d expect, I felt pretty good when I finished. My left knee felt a little tweaked over the last 30 miles or so, but was not concerning. I didn’t feel any of the Achilles’ tendon trouble that I did in the TABR. I ate half a family-sized King Ranch Casserole from Central Market for dinner, and went to Bobo’s for a beer.

This morning when I woke up, I did not feel pretty good. I had a headache and nausea, in addition to fatigue. I can get by for a long time on a deficit of water, electrolytes, and calories—I rode the recent 200K brevet on four Clif bars, one Snickers bar, a bottle of Gatorade, and the water and electrolytes I was carrying from the start—and I think I set a personal best for 200K. But clearly my limit for riding on deficits is somewhere short of the 300K mark, and I’m pretty sure it was the insufficient water and electrolytes that did it. I took in a couple glasses of electrolytes (I use Vitalyte, fwiw) and felt a lot better.

This was a lucky shot. The light was changing very quickly, and as soon as I stopped moving, my glasses fogged over.
You don’t usually see a lot of longhorns. Unlike most cattle, these guys were curious about me and were approaching as I shot this.

Wildcard Bicycle Novelties

/ cycling

wildcard bicycle novelties headbadge

Something reminded me of a website I visited years ago, Campy Only, where Campagnolo aficionados would congregate to rejoice in their shared disdain of Shimano. I always thought this was silly, and when I built up my Bob Jackson (more than 20 years ago now), I made sure that it had one Shimano part mixed in with what was otherwise Campy parts, just in case I ever ran across one of those guys. That website is long gone (its creator went on to start a blog, which seems to be abandoned), but I got the idea of recreating the old Campagnolo oval logo, but with “Shimano” in its place, thinking it would tweak any Campagnolo purists out there. I noodled around with that and was pleased with my results, so I kept going, reimagining some other logos.

I decided to do something with those designs, so I had them printed up as stickers, set up a Threadless shop for print-on-demand t-shirts, and set up Wildcard Bicycle Novelties as a storefront. Any profits I make before the cease-and-desist orders roll in will go to World Bicycle Relief.

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