Bike couriers vs commuters

I like to think that riding to work every day makes me a bit healthier and maybe even a little tougher. My co-workers even reinforce this idea. There are days when I get to work and people say, 'Dude, you are HARD CORE!' meaning that it was sprinkling outside and I must have gotten wet. This is obviously more of a statement of how easy it is to avoid going outside rather than a reflection of my inner Grizzly Adams. If you ride daily you are going to have days that are uncomfortable and, yes, sometimes really unpleasant. The unspoken secret among year round commuters is even the lousy days can be fun because...you are riding a bike. But I digress.

The true hard core folks in my mind are the bike couriers. These are professional bikers although they don't have the tight pants and workout coaches you are thinking of. These are people who haul stuff on their own two wheels, year round, hours a day, come rain, shine, or hail. If they have been in the job for a while they tend to look like a Grizzly Adams who has spent a few years living at your local bus stop.

This is a bit different in Minneapolis. Probably the most common courier you will see here is the Jimmy John's sandwich delivery guy/gal.

They ride year round but seem more numerous in the summer. These people often look like a cross between  a fixie-riding hipster and your typical midwestern college student.  This is probably because they are fixie riding midwestern college students. Still, they are out there in all kinds of weather delivering small orders of sub sandwiches. It is probably busy during lunchtime, quiet the rest of the day, and I can't imagine what kind of tip you get for delivering a sandwich and a soda. So, from a bike commuter: you may not be leathery and scarred, Jimmy Jane, but you are still a bike ridin' hero to me.

No tire will stop that

I ride with tires that claim to have some type of teflon material embedded in the rubber to help prevent punctures. This presumably works since I haven't had a flat since last fall, about 1500 miles ago. The difference between the winter and other times of year, however, is people. It seems that no one is out smashing beer bottles in the winter (do they just bounce?) or shingling their roof. This must change in the summer since this is the time when I get flats. Meet the enemy:

I don't know when I ran this over but only heard a click...click...click coming from the back of the bike. I didn't see anything stuck in the spokes and figured a flat would eventually make itself known so I kept riding. I made it over the Lake street bridge and up the hill on the St Paul side before the back end of the bike started giving me the classic wobbling feeling of a flat tire. I pulled over and started to remove the tire when I saw the nail was so far into the tire that it poked through the rim tape and into the underside of a spoke nipple. This got me thinking: what would the best way be to demonstrate how good is a tire's flat protection? You really don't know until it fails. In this case, probably only the solid rubber tire of a tricycle would have stopped it. I wonder if they make those in 700c wheel size?

30 Days of Biking - Cool off

We have had a wonderfully warm Spring this year in Minnesota, almost a month ahead in terms of temperature. I was looking back at some of last year's posts on this blog and we had snow on April 20th last year. Yikes. I would hate to give up the shorts at this point so when the forecast was calling for 'snow showers' last night I got a case of the hives. I am in a Summer biking state of mind already and the Winter bike is put away (well, in the garage awaiting the ritual tear-down and clean-up). When I woke up this morning, I saw that the forecast was more the weatherman getting his undies in a bundle than reality. It won't snow at 45 degrees! Right??!

30 Days of Biking - Cycling in Old Japan

Several years ago I spent a week in Japan and somehow the opportunity came up to rent a bike. We were in Kyoto, a city packed with old temples, gardens, and palaces. You could spend months seeing everything. I am into that kind of stuff and we were running out of time so using a bike to get around seemed like a great solution.

It turns out that it was. Many of the old parts of Kyoto are great for biking. The narrow streets lend themselves to slow cruising without fear of traffic. And you get attention as the gangly American cruising around on this little Japanese bike. My wife,  7-months pregnant, was riding behind and took this picture. We got a few friendly waves and probably a couple of chuckles.

30 Days of Biking - Mystery tunnels

Biking along the Mississippi - especially before the leaves come out - you can see mysterious inlets, ravines, and the dark entrances to caves near the waterline. Some of these are real caves and others are man made. In either case it isn't everyday that something new shows up on the cave map.

So, I was quite surprised to see that some new caves were being dug into the bluffs right along my bike route. Equipment started showing up a few weeks ago and they cleared two areas. Here, there was a need to excavate more above grade so they built a gravel driveway up to the site.

I assume the corrugated metal tubes are to stabilize the entrance. The limestone in the cliff is very convenient for free landscaping mater...I mean very loose.

At the second site (below) you can see the shattered rock around the entrance. Once past this initial stage, they started tunneling into the cliff. I will get some better photos since the work is pretty cool to watch. The tunnel itself has a rectangular profile and so far it looks like they are going to leave the walls natural stone.

I have tried to ask one of the construction workers what the project was about but they aren't too responsive over all of the drilling noise. My assumption is that since these two tunnels are just below the East Bank of the University of Minnesota campus that they are meant to service the buildings on top of the cliff. In fact, just upstream there is an underground archive that does just that. This stuff is quite cool! And, all on the bike route to work...

30 Days of Biking - April showers

We have had light rain showers yesterday and today during the commute. In the morning there was just enough rain to make greens greener and bring out an earthy, damp smell in the air. Crossing the Lake Street - Marshall Avenue bridge between St Paul and Minneapolis there was this really dramatic sky as the rain moved off to the East.

I took a pic and then just stared for a minute as those low clouds cruised by. By the time I arrived downtown (you can just see the buildings peaking over the trees about 4 miles away), the sky had changed completely. It was bright, windy, and the ground completely dry by the time I returned in the evening.

30 Days of Biking - Bike switching

I rode the same bike year-round when I started commuting, come rain, slush, snow, salt, and all the other gross stuff that messes up a bike in Minnesota. I would go through a few chains a Winter and usually burn through a set of brake pads, rust through a fender bolt, and cause other sundry damage. This isn't Iron Man, this is just grubby streets takin' it out on the machine. I finally figured out that having a separate Winter bike would allow me to spread out the wear and give me time to get the main bike in shape for next season.

This year, my Winter maintenance took much longer on the Bianchi since it is 6 years old and there were quite a few things that needed cleaning and replacement. Here is an odd picture I took last year showing, in part, how chewed up the bar tape was getting on my handlebars. (The bike is standing still but I took this to show how my wireless bike computer would go haywire near this particular building on my ride.)

So, this year the Bianchi got: new front derailleur shift cable, brake pads, and miscellaneous bolts (not chainring, although I noticed later it could use a new set). The bike got a thorough cleaning. 

And...drum roll...new bar tape.

A few of these projects were new for me so certainly the next time I go through this I will be faster.

A quick job will be to hit the Brook's seat with proofide. You can see where the seat got banged up on a bike-car incident last year downtown. The proofide doesn't seem to take out the gouges...oops.