100 KM

First off before I get into the actual year in review, I got my last short ride of the year in this evening after an embarrassing number of days off. Besides getting in a last few kms for the year it gave me a chance to test out the holiday lighting I installed on my Norco. The LED lit front wheel was definitely a success and I plan to leave the lights installed at least through January for occasional night time activation.

 Now onto the 2007 year in review:

 <strong>May</strong>
 180 km

 Through a combination of rising gas prices, some healthy lifestyle programs at work and discovering <a href="http://cyclingspokane.blogspot.com">John Speare's blog</a> I finally got motivated to start riding my bike to work occasionally for the first time in seven years.  Bought a cycle computer, a rear rack and a pannier-- the rest is history.

 <strong>June</strong>
 291 km

 My fitness level gradually began to improve and by the end of the month I was able to ride to and from work Monday through Friday without being completely exhausted.

 <strong> July</strong>
 391 km

 Rode from my house up to Mary's parents' house for the first time.  It's a 29 km ride that takes just over an hour since it's mostly downhill and flat in that direction.

 <strong>August</strong>
 523 km

 Rode my bike to High Bridge Park, participated in the Cycling the Bridges ride and then rode home.  I  was kind of surprised by the number of people that brought their bikes by car, but probably shouldn't have been.  I also was pretty sure that I recognized John Speare and his daughter on their tandem, but failed to introduce myself.

 <strong>September</strong>
 700 km

 Rode my first metric century on the Centennial Trail to the Idaho border and back home on my birthday.  Did it in just a little over 4 hours of riding time too.

 Finally met John when we met up to map my morning commute route.  Went to my first P2P garage night and started building up my Norco single speed snow bike.

 <strong>October</strong>
 609 km

 Got in my last long ride of the year while exploring some country roads out by Spangle and then looped back home via the Fish Lake Trail and the Cheney Spokane Road.

 Finished the Norco and started commuting on it to get a feel for the single speed life.  Really happy with the way it performed.

 <strong>November</strong>
 426 km

 Got to experience my first real winter riding (fun!) when the snow arrived, but never established a route that I was completely comfortable commuting on in snowy conditions and my monthly riding distance began to suffer accordingly.

 <strong>December</strong>
 123 km

 Snowy conditions, a new addition to the family and the holidays conspire to drastically reduce my riding.

 <strong>Summary</strong>

 Total 2007 riding distance: 3251.6 km (just over 2000 miles).  Total rides: 255.

 I'm disappointed in how things tapered off in December, but overall 2007 was an awesome, life changing year as far as cycling goes for me.   I'm excited about the growing Spokane cycling community and I'm excited to do a lot more riding in 2008.

We need more cycling patriots!

[via commutebybike]

Even though the front fender isn't on yet I finally took my Norco out for a snowy spin this afternoon. Overall I was really happy with its performance. The fat tires made for a nice and stable ride in the mushy stuff and the single speed gearing felt just right. I actually found myself riding faster than I've been going on my Trek lately, but that might be because it was daylight. I rarely shift on my Trek in snowy conditions anyway so having a single speed bike feels really natural on the roads we have right now. At any rate having confirmed how much I enjoy riding the Norco, I'm definitely going to give the Trek some time off.

Had a fun ride this evening after a four day break from riding. Yes, I finally broke my string of consecutive riding days on Wednesday when Mary and I welcomed our son Nathan into the world. The current record is 72 days– hopefully I'll get a chance to beat that early in 2008.

We had about an inch of snow today and that made enjoyable riding on my Nokian tires. I'm finding that riding on snow is pretty fun on my Trek until you get up over 3 inches than it starts to get tricky as you bog down. Still waiting to take the Norco on its maiden snow voyage. I need to knock out the front fender and get a dedicated tail light for it. The coroplast rear fender turned out pretty styling and the front one should be pretty sweet once I finish it.

The other cool thing about night time snow rides around Spokane is all the ambient light after dark. Tonight it was generally light enough that I couldn't make out the usual pool of light from my headlight.

No commuting to work for a while because I'm taking some time off to help Mary and the family to adjust to Nathan's arrival, but I expect to get in plenty of short rides.

Today during a rain-soaked morning ride I reached my distance goal for November. My odometer crossed the 3000 km mark somewhere in the vicinity of 49th and Crestline, but I didn't have a phone or camera with me to capture the exact moment. Here's where I ended up for the day.

 <img src="https://cdn.10centuries.org/saacki/2f620d01a8b3a7898ead87b560ec47c2.jpg" alt="3000 km" align="middle" height="480" width="360" />

 Now if I can get in a little over 200 more km by the end of the month I'll have logged 2000 total miles since my cycling renaissance began in May. Getting those last kilometers could be tougher though as we're expecting our first snow of the winter this week and I'm going to be dealing with those conditions for the first time.

Now that daylight savings has come to an end my ride home after work is a night time ride. I haven't found it to be a particularly big deal, but I'm glad I got in some night riding practice during October to ease myself into it. Climbing the South Hill at night time seems a little harder, it should really get interesting when it's a cold snowy night.

 Morning rides have definitely been quite cold lately. My wool gloves work well down to freezing, but don't provide quite enough warmth below that range. I have a pair of ski gloves that should work for colder weather though (should have used them today). I'm also going to need some additional neck and face coverage down the road, but I can get by for now.

 I've been running my studded Nokian Hakkepeliitta tires on my Trek since November 1st and I've been very happy with their performance. They're a little bit heavier than my original set of tires and they're noisier because of the studs, but they still run great on dry pavement. They have a kind of reassuring sticky feel, but I don't feel like they're significantly slower than the tires I was running before. I'm looking forward to having that extra traction and peace of mind when the temperatures stay below freezing all day. I've heard that studded tires can have less stopping power on wet roads, but they've been fine on the couple days that it's rained this month. I think the key is to ride at sensible speeds and avoid situations where you have to do a hard last second stop.

 Today was actually the first day I rode into work this week as the scheduling demands of <a href="http://saxonsports.com/basketball.htm">Ferris basketball practices</a> have forced a change in my commuting routine. To compensate yesterday I threw my bike in the back of my Element and got in a nice hour long lunchtime ride on the Centennial trail. I'm definitely going to go that route with some regularity this winter depending on the game schedule and winter road conditions. I'll still be bike commuting pretty regularly, but it will probably be limited to three days a week. My number one riding priority at this point is still just to get at least one ride in every day. 52 days and counting!

I've wanted to make a bike commuting video of my daily ride for almost as long as I've been riding, but I've never taken the time to rig up a good camcorder mount. Since it's kind of a low priority, but fun hypothetical project to do at some point down the road I decided to hit up You Tube and see what other people had done in that regard. It turns out that there are quite a few daily bike commute videos out there (but none from Spokane yet). Here are three that I found for New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

New York

 <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CjR0iNT10kI&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed>
 Good music, crazy lane splitting action and an urban environment that is completely foreign to my commuting experience.
 <h3>San Francisco</h3>
 <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PBh71VQcjfY&rel=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed>
 Not quite as crazy as New York (but still somewhat daunting at times) and quite a few actual bike lanes/markings.
 <h3>Seattle</h3>
 <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OCmDpfIMjUM&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed>
 Pretty low key and much closer to my daily ride.

October turned out to be a pretty good riding month for me. It's gradually been getting colder, especially in the mornings and I've been figuring out some layering techniques and combinations that are doing the job pretty well. I finally came up with some wool gloves that should do the trick in the 45° t0 25° F range ( 7.2° to -3.3° C) and I've also got some thicker more conventional Thinsulate winter gloves for anything below that range.

 <img src="https://cdn.10centuries.org/saacki/f8b9fae2f73431bd87643229823929c2.jpg" align="middle" height="360" width="480" />

 I still need to figure out better face and leg coverage. I'm okay for the moment, but when the temperatures start to hit the 20° F mark or lower I'm going to be hurting when you factor in the additional wind chill of normal riding pace.

 Getting back to my October riding numbers, I was able to get in at least one short ride (generally at least 5km) every day and averaged just under 12 km per ride for 52 total rides. Despite much slower morning rides down the South Hill and doing more night riding I still managed an average riding speed around 21.6 km/h for the 28 hours worth of riding that I did during the month. I didn't get in much long riding (my two longest rides were <a href="http://100km.us/19/80k-day/">80km</a> and 30km) but averaging almost 20 km a day allowed me to reach my second highest monthly total to date of 610 km.

 At this point my two goals for the next four cold weather months are to continue riding a minimum of 500 km a month and to get in at least one 5km ride every single day. As of today I'm at 39 consecutive days of riding, so if I don't take any days off 150 riding days in a row should happen midway through February.

I felt like extending my ride home last night to pick up a few more kms before the end of the month so I headed west on Ohio Ave along the north ridge overlooking the Spokane River. The setting sun was in my eyes for most of that portion of the ride, but it made for some pretty lighting looking back towards downtown Spokane.

 <img src="https://cdn.10centuries.org/saacki/d0d1ef16dd28f46935eca5fa8199966e.jpg" align="middle" height="360" width="480" />

 My phone's camera doesn't really do this Maple Street Bridge scene justice, but I was just happy to have enough charge to snap a couple pictures at the time.

 <img src="https://cdn.10centuries.org/saacki/4e5e22842c77ffa93a49d645b4fcaf99.jpg" align="middle" height="360" width="480" />

 Further west along Ohio Ave looking back east and down at the Spokane River.

 <img src="https://cdn.10centuries.org/saacki/66c6fac13db09418a965d3ae1153b66c.jpg" align="middle" height="360" width="480" />

 Looking west and down at the Spokane River below.

 Once I descended off the ridge and crossed the river I saw some massive leaf piles in High Bridge Park, but I didn't stop to get any pictures.

There are a ton of mountain biking trails up and down the back edge of the South Hill in an area thatis generally referred to as "The Bluff." Up until this weekend I had never actually ridden on any part of it. Saturday I decided to try to rectify that a bit by doing some quick exploration riding of the upper most trails between Bernard and 29th.

 I had been riding my Norco single speed mtb all week since completing it last Monday so some real single track mountain biking seemed like a good way to really take it up to the next level. In retrospect my Trek hybrid could have handled the trails I rode just as well, but based on my experiences I'm loathe to subject it to the wear and tear (terror?) of my mtb learning process.

 I started off the single track portion of my ride by heading down a trail to the right of the guard rail at Bernard. Just barely onto the trail I discovered a quick fork in the road. One trail headed further down the hill while the other stayed roughly parallel to High Drive above. For some reason I was completely indecisive and flip flopped back and forth until I was literally right on top of the trail fork and then my bike slid and dumped me onto my side.

 <img src="https://cdn.10centuries.org/saacki/8f4fcc48922444a8dfc2fc4d720b36f5.jpg" height="360" width="480" />

 As you can see I picked up a nice set of superficial scrapes during my blunder.

 It turns out that the fall wasn't my only problem as I later managed to pull the drive side of my rear wheel forward in the drop out. That wheel alignment issue didn't manifest itself until just after I pedaled back up off the trails and onto High Drive. Everything seemed fine until I heard a weird rubbing sound and a block later the axle bolt slid further and my rear wheel came to a grinding stop against the chainstay. I was completely stuck without a wrench to fix the axle so I did the obvious thing and started walking my bike home.

 The walk home went pretty well, despite being slow going and requiring me to carry the tank-like Norco on my shoulder. I had one passing cyclist ask if he could do anything to help, but the real hero for the afternoon ended up bing a twenty something guy with dreadlocks, a <a href="http://surlybikes.com" target="_blank">Surly</a> bumper sticker and a van with enough room to haul my bike easily. He loaded me up and whisked me up to my house (saving me a good twenty minute walk).

 In the end I was able to get the Norco's rear wheel properly seated without much trouble once I got home, but the incident was a good reminder that I need to pack a wrench when I ride it again. Hopefully this weekend I'll get another chance to take the Norco out and explore the trails that run much farther down the hillside because I really enjoyed the upper ones.