This is a blog about bikes, and as such I do my best not to bother you with my personal non-cycling affairs–unless of course they directly impact the publication of this blog. So it is for that reason I mention to you know we’re having some work done on our home. I won’t trouble you with the specifics of this work, but I will say it’s involved enough that we’ll be staying somewhere else for a few days, and if anyone asks we’re absolutely not installing a giant hot tub in the living because that would be against building rules and we’d never do that, now would we?
Of course we wouldn’t.
All of that is to say that in the coming days I may be preoccupied with the giant hot tub we’re not installing so if I’m even more remiss than usual that’s probably why.
Anyway, when you’re preparing your home for a team of laborers to not install a giant hot tub in your living room, you have to move a bunch of stuff around that you haven’t touched in years, and whenever I do that I come across the only thing I ever won on a bike:
I realize I probably should have included something for scale, but rest assured it’s quite formidable, which is why I have yet to install it on the hood of my car, and here’s what it represents:
I don’t remember what year it was or which BMX league I was in when I won that (there was the ABA and the NBL at the time), though I do remember every turn and berm on that track, and I even found video of it from exactly when I would have raced there, though I’m fairly certain none of those kids is me:
I’m not sure whether it’s comforting or disturbing that 35 years later I’m still riding one-speed bicycles on Long Island, and I suppose in a profoundly sad way I’ve been futilely chasing that trophy around for decades:
Eh, whatever, personal growth is for “woosies“–though in my defense at least I’m also riding a grown-up bike now:
I’ve been quite happy with the “mountain bike” tires on the Platypus, and I even used the bike for a little video project on Friday:
That’s Terry Barentsen‘s filming bike lurking behind the ‘Pus, and here’s where we wound up:
Obviously that says “Staten Island Fertility Clinic,” so you can probably guess that this video will be a deep dive into what happens when you spend too much time soaking in giant living room hot tubs and riding bikes with leather saddles.
Here’s the view from the fertility clinic, by the way, it’s almost enough to take your mind off what they’re doing to you:
Almost.
I also made some time over the weekend to visit River Road:
Usually it’s teeming with Freds on the weekend, but on this particular day there were few in evidence, so either there was some big Fredly ride happening somewhere that I wasn’t aware of, or else all the newly-minted Pando Freds hang up their bikes once the temperature drops below 50 American Freedom Degrees.
Probably a little bit of both.
Speaking of “personal growth,” even though I exist in a state of arrested development I’m at least aware that my body is slowly falling apart, and one aspect of this is that my tolerance for drop bars is increasingly diminished. Yes, I still enjoy them, and yes I can and do still ride them for hours at a time, but my hands aren’t terribly happy afterwards, and I sometimes feel like they’re gradually turning into claws. Certainly this may be a sign that I should change my position on my road bikes to better reflect the reality that I’m no longer a young park racer, but it’s a lot easier to just ride a bike with bars like this instead:
Bars with generous back-sweep make me sigh audibly with relief, like I’m sliding into a hot tub, and today I even caught myself thinking about putting something like this on the Eye of the Tiger bike:
But that’s dangerous, because once you start swapping bars then before you now it you’re rebuilding the whole bike.
That’s how you wind up with a hot tub in the living room.