Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

On the occasion of a record breaking ride

Most rides are for the ride themselves. Or for riding with others. A lot of them are for exercise or to enjoy the great outdoors or both. Take a break, unwind, race a friend you can’t beat, go somewhere. Indulgent as they can be, they always seem to carry at least some sort of purpose. But this ride, today, was just for me. I realized, just before I left, that this would be the ride where I broke a personal best for miles pedaled in a year.

It happened right in here.

After that spot, every turn of the crank arm, every loop the chain made, every time I shifted through the cassette would all be new, a record, a best, an achievement.

You don’t think about that over the course of a ride, but it’s there. When the legs protest, you remember it. They’ve stomped and danced and glided through more miles this year than you’ve ever asked of them before. When your lungs don’t ache, maybe it’s for the same reason. When the lactic acid takes a little longer to burn, maybe that’s why. Or all of it could be that you’ve learned a new kind of patience this late into the year.

All of this is racing the sun, trying to stay on the right side of daylight. I set off through town and out the other side, doubling back into the town again, where 10 miles had gone by in the blink of an eye, thinking about the possibilities of what this ride could hold, given the hour and the time of year.

Yesterday I wanted to do this same route, but started too late and wisely changed my plans. This afternoon, which became the early evening as I swooshed and whirred along, felt like a ride that could go on forever.

I thought about that when I stopped, to put on my windbreaker. I was close to home, but determined to take the longer way back, so I mounted the headlight and left the full finger gloves in my pocket, and riding down that three-mile straight stretch of chipseal. It goes on forever because I want it too, particularly today. And through this stretch I feel a melancholy, a paradox that comes up with the truly great rides. It’s going to end soon. And the season will end soon, which is unacceptable. I don’t want this ride to end, either.

Sometimes you want a ride to be over. You have things to do or somehow the fit seems off or you’re just not feeling it, but there are days when you want it to go on forever, and this was one of those days, evenings, now, because the sun has left me and I’m listening to the rubber on my Gatorskins shuzzzz away in the gloaming.

That’s a great road. No traffic, beautiful farm scenery, two little rollers that can make you feel powerful or humble, or a bit of both. I only want that road to end because of what’s waiting at the turn.

At the bottom of that road is the best part of the ride, a brand-new ribbon that you could soft-pedal at 20 miles per hour, but it only lasts four-tenths of a mile, far too short for something so luxurious.

I have to work my way through two parking lots there, and I become aware that my neck has tightened up because my fit is never quite right and, also, I’m a little bummed about how this ride is coming to an end — I have been out for about two hours and heard two voices in that whole time, a crossing guard in town, who told me to “Go ahead honey,” while she held up her stop sign and a woman two towns later who stepped into the crosswalk as I came through the intersection, she laughed and I apologized and she said “Oh, that’s OK,” and we wished each other a great afternoon and you could hear the smile on her face as I pedaled away through a sleepy small town block. It was those two people and me and road noise and the click click click of my bike and this rattle in my headset, a loose screw that I need to tighten — why should any of this end?

I realized I’d put my foot on the ground just three times during this whole ride. Sometimes the timing is right and that was today, and this turn weaving behind the small car dealership and the gas station beside it, I had the timing right, rejoining the highway and a bike lane with no one coming from either direction. The bike lane there sometimes feels huge and sometimes small. Today, it felt small. I felt big. I felt like I could do anything on my bike, even though I can’t. I felt like my machine was asking me to do more, but it certainly, by now, understands my limitations.

This is why you don’t want these rides to end, why you don’t want colder weather to run you indoors, because you eventually tap into something elemental about this. Something basic and cosmic and purposeful and purposeless. I don’t want to lose that. Not for a minute or four months. It takes too long to find again and would require years of continual study to understand or explain it. Besides, we’ve lost too much this year — family and friends and elections and car keys and cyclists and opportunities and remote controls — and how much must we lose? How much is the right amount? But we lose it all, don’t we? And that’s when I heard the Canada geese somewhere to my left, to the west. They’d blended into the dark blue-gray of the sky, making those incessant honks and barks, those beautifully chaotic, continual sounds. They stay over there to the left, in a wildlife sanctuary, between some pastures, harassing the cattle, adding a bit more to the soundtrack as I stand up and suzsh suzsh suzsh my way up the fourth-to-last roller on my ride. You know the one, it tells you how you’re feeling in defiance of everything else you’ve done, and without any consideration for what else is still ahead, three more little hills, in this case.

At the 4-way stop, the one with the haunted house on the corner, a truck hauling a trailer is waiting for me to pass, even though he has the right of way, and I think, not for the first time, it would be great if everyone understood the rules the same way. But he waited, and I did a track stand for a respectful amount of time and finally I went, even though it was his turn, and even here, it felt like I could have held my bike up for forever. But I could not. But it felt like it just then, and now I wonder, maybe my bike doesn’t want this ride to end, either. Is that what it is? We’re both feeling this moment the same way? The air in the tubes and the softness of the grips and the loose-but-tight grip of my cleats in their clipless mates have all made this tiny little magical moment, which is persisting, but also fleeting.

Down and back up again, just two hills to go. I’ve been thinking, for four miles now, about how I didn’t want this ride to end, about that girl I knew in elementary school, some friends from the 10th grade, a professor I once had, the work I must get to. How the mind wanders. How it can wonder in its wanderings! I thought about the incredible feeling I had on my first ride outside this year, the sweet joy and optimism that came with it, and the feeling of this one, right now. I’m starting to think I should write this down and one word falls out of my mouth as I pull the bidon away one last time: Elation.

Sometime, in December, probably, I’ll have to take my bike to the basement and put it on the trainer. I’ll ride away on Zwift for several months. I’ll pedal a bunch, I’ll sweat a lot. I’ll be breathless. I’ll go nowhere. It’s just not the same.

I saw someone on social media yesterday beaming with pride that their oldest kid had learned to ride the day before and she pedaled away yelling, “I feel freeeeeee!” And, kiddo, it never gets better than that. She’s an old pro by now, because you know she was riding yesterday, and again today. So she knows, but it bears repeating. Be home when the lights come on, or for supper, or whenever your parents tell you, but it never gets better than that. It doesn’t have to. How could it? It just stays that perfect. And you can’t get that feeling on a trainer, no matter how many endorphins you tap into.

My average speed fell away, because why would I want this to end? And I circled one of the neighborhoods, the road shaped like a horseshoe. My neighbor built that development. It’s his, and he thinks of it that way. He still plows that road himself if it snows. He probably contributed, then, to those potholes on the backside of it, the ones I dodged in the semi-dark, chin down to the stem, hands over the hoods like a Belgian champion, using the fullness of the subdivision’s road as I turned into the final length of that horseshoe. The flow of a bicycle in the diagonal is a triumph. You feel freeeeeee. And maybe I could do anything my bike wants to do, even if it is a bit slower.

What is speed, anyway? Today, it just seems like a way to end a ride sooner. That’s a fool’s racket. A hustle with no payoff. At the end of that subdivision, I did another reasonable approximation of a track stand to let the traffic clear, so I could turn left, and then quickly right again. Now a car is behind me, and it’s finally fully dark. I charge up the little hill, throwing my bike this way and that up this penultimate roller, looking like a French prima donna, feeling like a million bucks, thinking of those headlights on me, and wondering where they disappeared to. I glanced over as I switched my headlight on, and the car was gone. So now it’s the downhill and it flattens out to the 90-degree turn into the back of our subdivision, the last hill, then a right-hander and around the big circle to the house. Two cyclists we know live back there, but I don’t even think to look in their yards today. I was, I realize now, too taken with imagining the next ride.

I wonder where it will take me, and how my legs will feel about it. I remind myself, once again, to start earlier in the day next time. This ride was 40 great miles, without even that much fuel, or water, considering the temperatures. I could just as easily have done another hour or two, amused by the muses and the thoughts they bring, bemused by how much better this little tale was, because I was fully in composition mode, while my legs brought me home. Some days it feels like they could go on forever. You must take advantage of those, I said to myself for the 6,000th time in the last 15 years of doing this.

There are days when it never gets old, days like this one. Not the fastest or a technically superior ride, not the first new road discovered, but just a ride for me, filled, in that last little bit, with hopes and fears and love and dreams. My dreams never grow weary.

memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
07
Nov 24

I’m grading, so you get the simple version of the day

I made a Christmas present today. Can’t be talked about. You never know who reads this stuff. And another present arrived. Ssssh, don’t tell anyone.

Christmas? I am in no way prepared for the Christmas season. I never really am. But it doesn’t seem like that time of the year should be sneaking up on us. It never really should. But all of this happens every year.

If I wrote about that today, what would I do in the next six weeks? I should get back to grading, anyway.

I started the week with 148 items to grade, and I’ll finish those up tonight. It’ll be a fury. Or a flurry. It’ll probably be fuzzy.

Let’s return to the Re-Listening project. In the car, I am playing all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. And I’m writing about them here, occasionally, to pad out days like today. These aren’t music reviews, because who needs that. But they are sometimes a good excuse to dredge up a memory or two. They’re always an excuse to put some good music here.

And this good music is from Will Hoge. He’s from Nashville, and he fits the overlapping areas of Americana and country these days, but his debut was pure blue bar rock ‘n’ roll. He had a band that almost made it, then toured the South as a solo act with a supporting band. Dan Baird stood there and played guitar next to him, so it was basically a coronation. Carousel came out in 2001, and this song broke speakers all over alt rock stations.

I loved it immediately, it was the frenetic pace, the driving rhythm section, the desperate way he was screaming out the lyrics. Hey, it was 2001, but it was five or six years before I picked up this record.

It’s a debut album, which is great, but also limited. He was still growing into his craft. And I’ve yet to see him live, but it looks like a good time.

Here’s the title track.

Somehow, this was one of those CD mixes, one with a provenance I’ve forgotten. But whoever made this did me a real solid, or maybe I knew what I was doing, because there are five live Will Hoge tracks tacked onto the back, including this phenomenal Bill Withers cover.

He’s got a peppy little version of “Mess Around” that apparently no one has ever uploaded to the web. I’m not saying this version of the song being online would solve the web’s problems, but we can’t disprove it, either.

And there’s a sweaty bar version of one of the other key songs from this record, one I didn’t share earlier because I wanted to put it right here, in a live version worth hearing, in all of its clangy, brassy, Telecaster glory.

Since then Will Hoge has put out 13 more records, and I’m going to introduce his music to a relative soon, because some things just need to be passed down.

One day I’ll even get to see him play. He is doing some touring right now, just not close by. (Update: Turns out he was here about three weeks ago, and I had no idea. Come back, Will!)

The next time we return to the Re-Listening Project, we’ll go all the way back to 1992. This was a CD I picked up to finally replace an old cassette and I guarantee you that every time I’ve listened to it, I’ve wondered why I waited so long to do that. It’s going to be a great listen.

cycling / history / markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
06
Nov 24

Incomplete stories on two wheels

It was 80° on Nov. 5th, we have had three-tenths of an inch of rain since the end of August (and all of that in September).

The farmers are merely moving dust around in their fields. Nothing weird at all, here.

That was early in my ride today, and it looks over processed, but it’s an over-processed sort of day, isn’t it? Later in that same ride, when the colors were softer, and the breeze just a tiny bit cooler, and my legs a bit more tired and the sun challenging me to a race …

I’d gone down a road I usually come up, where I was passed by a giant ambulance and, soon after, almost watched a minivan almost drive itself into a head-on collision. I turned right instead of going all the way down that road, cutting across to another road that I went up this afternoon, rather than going down, as I usually do. I crossed a busy intersection and then had one long straight shot with a little breeze at my back. And then I took the longest, most sensible route home.

We won’t have too many more seasonably warm days this fall, best to eek every second out of it if you can. Anyway, that was today’s ride. Let’s talk about what I found on a different ride.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, where the historical markers search continues, because from time-to-time I ride my bicycle around looking for them. This is the 53rd installment, and the 85th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. And we’re at the Friends Burial Ground.

We’ll talk about the tree in the next installment. The burial ground dates back almost to the beginning of the white settlement. (A few Dutch had set up nearby, but they got outnumbered pretty quickly.) The English Quakers showed up in 1675, even before William Penn arrived. This was Fenwick’s Colony. A cavalry in Cromwell’s army in England, a Quaker convert and a lawyer, Fenwick advertised this place, “if there be any terrestrial “Canaan” ’tis surely here, where the land floweth with Milk and Honey.”

We learned about Fenwick earlier this year (here and here) and when people back in England learned about his vision, they started pouring in.

It’d take another decade or so for the settlers to build their first meeting house, but the people were firmly rooted. Some of the old names on these markers still have descendants around here. And a lot of the local names are repeated here in the stonework. There are more than 1,000 markers here now sitting behind this low brick walk alongside one of the busy modern downtown streets.

There have been three dozen interments here this century, the most recent in 2020. She was from right nearby, and had worked at Penn State for a quarter of a century. She started as a secretary and eventually became an assistant dean.

Not all of the notable stories are deep in the past.

The next time we return to the marker series, though, we’ll go back to the 17th century one more time, and we’ll learn about that Salem Oak. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

cycling / journalism / memories / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
05
Nov 24

New month stuff to distract you, also a new front page look

It occurred to me yesterday that this is the first presidential election cycle since 1996 when I haven’t spent all day and all night in a newsroom or at a campaign watch party.

So all day I’ve just been doing … normal stuff. Is that what everyone does?

My first election as a cub was a midterm election, where I interviewed a man immediately after he found out he was elected to Congress. You could hear the excitement and hope in his voice. He would become a two-term governor. I also interviewed a man who became a senator, who told me I asked too many questions and hung up on me. I spent some time at a watch party where a mayor spent part of her evening hitting on me. (She’d had a few beverages.)

My first presidential election I spent in the studio, and at two watch parties. A woman who was running for local office, who’d spent the entire campaign deliberately not speaking to me, lost that night. It was fun to catch her eye at the end. But I was also trying to localize the Bush-Gore race. That night I took a brief nap in my car before going back inside the studio to go back on the air the next morning.

I was in the studio for the 2004 election, but I don’t really have any strong memories about the night. By 2008 I was back on campus, and I had to convince the students I was working with that it might be a good idea to talk to people on campus about their votes and hopes, and report on their reactions to a historic night. I’d been on that campus for a little over two months at that point, and it was eye-opening.

In 2012, the initiative in that same campus newsroom was better. They were also putting to bed their paper on that Tuesday night, so they were excited, and it was another long night. All of these were long nights.

In 2016, on a different campus, in brand new facilities, someone got the bright idea that we should try the new equipment, all of it, at the same time, and turn that into a showcase. And, fortunately, most of it worked.

By the time of the 2020 election, we were used to all of that new production equipment, but we were working in a Covid environment, which didn’t make the day any shorter, just still-surreal.

And now I’m filling my day in other ways, which is satisfying.

Anyway, the normal stuff was very normal. I have a lot of grading to do this week. It’s all piped into a CMS and that interface helpful tells you how many documents I have to work your way through. Seeing those numbers pile up, it feels like having a headache in a dream. It’s a disembodied feeling, and you know it is supposed to hurt, but you can’t feel it, which somehow makes it more daunting.

So I have 148 things to read and assess. Most of those 148 things require feedback. You want that to be useful. And since I’m forever saying the word “substantive” it should be feedback that has some significant use to it. In truth, the feedback is a lot of fun. You can make all sorts of connections, try to help students make the next leap, introduce a new concept or two if a student is interested in it. And if a student is interested in it, I find that the feedback might be the most fun part of running a class. It just takes time and care. This batch take three or four more days to get it all in. And then the next round will roll in Monday night.

I’ve also done the monthly cleaning of the computer, deleting a bunch of files I no longer need, updating some templates and updating some statistics.

Oh, and I also updated the images on the front page. They look a lot like this.

Go check them out. We’ll wait here for you.

Those are from Monterey Bay, California. I took those on a March afternoon, while we were waiting for our lunch order to be called. It was quiet, but busy, and the waves were also busily doing their job, and also quiet. At least in my memory, now. It was a beautiful afternoon. We’d driven up the Pacific Coast Highway a bit to be there, in that old cannery-turned-tourist town, and we were about to go visit the aquarium.

That is the third or fourth set of photos I’ve put on the front page from that trip. And, it turns out, I took more photos from that beach than I realized. I could run another set easily enough. In fact I might! I saved those photos of sand and rocks and water until now, to get us through a bit of the colder weather that will be here, eventually, though it felt like a warm summer day here today.

I also need to add some new buttons to the front page. I’ll get to it at some point, when the grading gets done.

Since we’re in a new month, I updated my chart for the year’s bike mileage. This means nothing, but I think about it a lot. After each ride I update the spreadsheets — plural, because why just look at a little data when you can consider it in more than one way. This chart is the main way I consider my progress.

And as you can see from the lines, what I’ve actually done, in that blue line, is well above where I was at the same point last year, which is the red line. That green line is just an arbitrary number I use as a linear measure.

I wonder at the end of each month how legitimate this is. On those last few days I compare the miles again, and compare it to earlier iterations of that same month in previous years. And there’s a list where I have ranked the months I’ve ridden the most. And so near the end of October I saw that the month was my most productive October ever — humble though my productivity be — and it had a real shot to become the second most productive month of all time. There was no way I was going to catch February 2024. At the same time, September 2024, January 2023 and November, 2023 were all ready to be knocked down a peg. And so I started riding with that in mind. It seems disingenuous, somehow. To my brain, that is. The parts of me doing the work would argue it’s quite real.

Like I said, this means nothing.

Anyway, I went out this afternoon for an easy 20-mile ride. And because of the time change I was racing daylight to get home.

That photo is timestamped 4:43 p.m. Bring on the solstice, so the days get longer again.

Though this day and night have been plenty long. So much grading still to do …

Monday / New Jersey / photo — Comments Off
04
Nov 24

Did a democracy

We voted on Friday. Our polling place is in the annex of a small Methodist church four miles away. But we did early voting, because you can do that here. You can do that here for almost 10 days, something like 96 additional hours. Each county is required to put up and staff, I think, at least three early voting locations. The more populous counties, of course, have many more.

All of the early voting precincts we could use were almost equidistant, so we drove the 10 miles down to a rural fire department.

The town blocked off roads to minimize traffic for voters convenience. There is a sign out front offering you assistance in 10 languages, as required by law.

There is a row of three or four folding tables with the polling staffers doing their job. “What is your name?” and such. Lists are consulted, signatures compared. They give you an oversized hotel key card. Behind you are four voting machines, arranged in such a way that, at first, you don’t think you’ll have any privacy. When you get there, though, you realize that someone would have to come over to be awfully neighborly to see your votes.

You plug in that card, you work through the touch screen — vote, vote, vote — you verify your votes on the screen, and again on a printed receipt. You take the card back to the desk, and that is when they give you your sticker.

They also have mail-in voting here. They have drop box voting with each county again required to prominently locate three of those bins.

It’s a wonderful feeling to vote. It’s a refreshing thing to do it in a place where the state actually makes it easy for their residents, all of them, to vote. Though I do miss filling in those bubbles. And, just once, I want to vote somewhere behind a current, where you pull a lever. Touching one more touch screen doesn’t feel especially empowering, but that’s the least of it.

I’ve been telling my students for weeks about the several processes available for them to record their vote. Trying to encourage them to do so because politics, we know, are interested in them. And because, we know that they are now a part of one of the two largest voting demographics in the country. I’ve been giving them info on how to do so to cover three states, because we could easily have people from just over the border in these classes. Some of them will vote. Hopefully all who are eligible. Some of them are probably voting for the first time, and we are all tasked with being mindful of encouraging that process. It should be a powerful thing, using your voice, weighing in on the national conversation, and it’s nice to encourage people to use their voice so I’ll do it one more time.

Go vote!