In The Family

Got up late this morning to more rain.  Still felt sleepy throughout the day.  I have an excuse:  lack of REMs during the past three days.  Hopefully, I'll feel better and will be on my bike tomorrow.


I was just "flipping" through some photos I took.  Nobody'll confuse my work with that of Henri-Cartier Bresson, but I have a couple of pictures I like.  Here's one I took a couple of weeks ago when I was riding on the Rockaway Boardwalk:

It was interesting to see the two boys with their mother.  A woman I knew--a former co-worker--who used to live out that way sometimes rode with her daughters along that boardwalk.  I accompanied them a couple of times; I enjoyed the company of the mother and her daughters.  And, they turned out to be better cyclists than I'd anticipated.  


I can recall a few other times when I've seen mothers riding with daughters, or with their husbands and kids. However, I don't think I've ever seen a woman cycling with her boys, but not her husband or daughters, if she had them.  On the other hand, when I've seen boys on tricycles or bicycles with training wheels, the adult who was watching over them was a female--usually the mother, from what I could tell.  I've seen fathers or other adult males riding with young boys, but never accompanying or supervising them as the woman in the photo did.  


As I remember, my mother and grandmother took me to the park or watched over me as I toddered along the sidewalks in our neighborhood.  Those memories are sunny.  That's most likely because we went out only on nice days.


But neither they nor my father, or any other relatives, rode with me--at least as best as I can recall.  To be fair, almost no adults rode bikes in those days, at least in the US.  And, as I now realize, my parents may not have had enough money to buy bikes for themselves.  After all, the bikes I rode as a kid were gifts or hand-me-downs.  Worst of all, they were very busy, and thus very tired, so much of the time.


How involved were your family members in your childhood and adolescent cycling experiences?

To Ride or Not To Ride To Work In The Cold Rain

I woke up very early this morning, as I have been on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Although it was warm in my apartment, I could feel the chill in the air outside my window as I heard the rain thumping against the awning next door.  


Riding in the rain is one thing.  Riding in rain and cold is another.  Starting to ride in the rain and cold is less appealing still.  I realized there is yet another category for the kind of rain we had today:  grayness, almost pure grayness, dropping through the chilled air and bringing down brightly colored leaves that are turning have turned into shades of rust, and soon will return to ashes and dust.


If I'd been on my bike as the day broke, I suppose it all could have been pretty, if in a rather melancholy way.  I could have worn my raingear and changed clothes at work.  But I decided not to.  For one thing, with the health problems I've had recently, I didn't want to take any unnecessary risks.  For another, it simply wouldn't have been a whole lot of fun, especially in a couple of places where the drivers can be pretty whacky.  Why do agressive risk-takers become even more aggressive and live even more dangerously when the rain slicks the roads.  At least, they seem to.  

In the end, though, I simply don't care to start riding under the conditions I saw this morning, and throughout the day.  It's one thing if I get on the bike when I know that there's a risk that I'll encounter bad weather.  Sometimes I'll take that chance.  But to start riding in the kind of weather we had today is simply not too enjoyable and, frankly, isn't going to make a big difference in my conditioning, such as it is right now.

Typical Commute--And Commuter?

Sometimes I'm happy to have an early a.m. class.  Those sometimes are almost always on days when I pedal to work.  Now I'm on my bike just before sunrise; soon I will be getting in the saddle in the dark.  Until then, I can enjoy sights like this:

I saw tree from the corner of my eye as I turned from the cinderblock sprawl of Lefrak City onto a side street in Corona.  Yes, as in "the Queen of Corona," which Paul Simon immortalized in "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard."

A student told me that the ride to work brings out my "glow."  Another student--who's not in one of my classes now--captured me as I was ready to start riding home:

The parked bike is the Pinarello cyclo-cross bike I've mentioned in a previous post.  I've seen it every time I've ridden to my second job.  

It has Mavic Cosmic wheels, Paul cantilever brakes and an XTR crankset and derailleurs:  not what one normally sees in a college's bike rack.


Then again, some would argue that I'm not the typical commuter who parks in a rack like that one.