More Important Training Tips, Recent Training Activities

http://www.bicycling.com/beginners/bike-skills/rough-road-ahead

Bicycling magazine has published this very helpful and informative guide on how to ride and race your bike on gravel.  I encourage all aspiring gravel riders to read and take this information to heart.  I have some changes to make to my training plans!  While you are at it, I also recommend this helpful training tool:

http://www.bicycling.com/whattowear

Next time you head out on a training ride, this can help take the guess work out of what clothing you should wear.  Thank me later!

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Here is a dump of photos of spring training efforts so far.  Right now I am at about 700 miles for the month of March.  Looks like I will fall a bit short of the 1,000 mile goal, but I am not too discouraged as my riding has been of high quality and I have been running consistently as well.  Rides out in Franklin Grove, a trip down to the Ozarks for a week, a solo century, commuting, and other rides here and there make up the miles accumulated so far.  Training is going well, the weather at the end of April remains the unknown and unforeseeable variable.  Hope for the best, and keep at it until then.

Take Refuge In Clean Living

The journey to Trans Iowa V10 begins to draw to a close.  The day will soon be here when we gather in Grinnell to face the challenge we have been preparing for.  There is not much time left, but that doesn't mean we should panic.  If you are serious, it is time to dedicate yourself.  Find the time to ride, run, or exercise.  Figure out your bike, your clothing, your equipment.  Keep your thoughts positive.  This one can be harder than it seems, but it is important.  Take refuge in clean living.  How long has it been since you have had alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and other drugs completely out of your system?  There may not be room for these things and Trans Iowa in your life at the same time.  Stay balanced.  There is still work, school, relationships, and family for most people to consider.  It can be done though, people prove that every year.  Two months remain, make them count.

Brief: Short Training Weekend in Jo Daviess Co.

Temps have tipped up a bit over the past few days following the sub-zero "polar vortex" we experienced through early January.  Agatha and I took advantage by making a get away to secret training HQ and did a few fun rides out in Jo Daviess county.  Friday we rode a 30 mile loop up and around the Apple Canyon Lake vacation area, and then on Saturday we did about 25 miles northwest of our location.  Conditions on Friday were pretty ideal, all things considered.  Roads were slushy, and even the paved roads felt like gravel due to the sand/gravel mix applied to give traction on the snow and ice.  The above freezing temperatures felt amazing.  After we finished riding on Friday, some freezing rain started up and then temperatures dropped below freezing overnight.  Against better judgement, we drove over to Galena Friday night and dense fog and freezing roads made for a pretty unpleasant drive.  Coming back to HQ, we had to be pretty strategic about parking our car, as the hills combined with frozen road surfaces and a shitty 4 cylinder compact car could have left us stranded.  We awoke to glass like frozen road surfaces on Saturday and knew we weren't going anywhere until they started to thaw a bit.  The morning sun had thawed the roads by about 12:30 PM and we embarked on a short route.  Towards the end of our ride, the sun had disappeared behind clouds and temperatures had dropped below freezing, resulting in the slushy road surfaces beginning to refreeze. We faced a pretty nerve wracking descent down the gravel section of Clark Rd. at the end of our ride, but managed to keep the bikes upright, laughing afterward about how badly it could have turned out.  This was a good little getaway, with about 55 miles and 5k-6k ft of climbing over the two days.  Would have been great to get some more riding in, but considering the time of year and conditions we were pretty happy with our efforts.  Jo Daviess is magical for riding in all seasons, get out there and get pumped on those relentless hills and valleys.

Agatha aboard Karate Monkey equipped with 2.3" tires, bar mitts, and single speed.  She walked zero hills, very impressive.  Everyone said a 29'r wouldn't fit her so she said "fuck you" and rides this bike everywhere.  The Karate Monkey is a classic.

Me aboard Casseroll equipped with 700x32 Paselas and full fenders.  Fenders kept me so clean, I don't even need to wash the clothes I rode in.  Agatha was laughing about how my skinny little tires were cutting such deep ruts into the soft roads.

Images from Friday only.  Felt like I needed to keep both hands on the controls with the road conditions on Saturday.  A beautiful palette of white, gray, brown, snow and fog.  ALSO thank you JBJ for full fenders.

Study: Cycle Touring Through Southwestern Wisconsin, or Nine Days Driftless, or The Only Cool Thing I Did This Summer

Realized I never really made much mention of the tour Agatha and I went on this summer.  We spent nine days riding our heavy ass bikes up and down the hills of the Driftless Region in Southwestern Wisconsin. We passed through towns like La Crosse, Trempealeau, Richland Center, and Dodgeville.  Weather was basically perfect, aside from a hairy night at Perrot State Park featuring wind, rain, and hail, culminating in a flooded tent and the fun associated with such events.  The Driftless region itself is a place that resonates with history and intrigue for me.  If you live nearby, you owe it to yourself to go spend some time out there.  The roads and sights will blow you away.  Views up the Mississippi River Valley at sunset are certainly unmatched by anything else in the Midwest.   This wasn't really an "adventure" for us per se...  More of a bike vacation.  We had no set route, just a timeframe in which to operate.  This is a fun approach to touring, as you are sure to get tips from locals or find stuff you didn't know about before the trip that you are going to want to check out.  We took it easy, lingering where we wanted and moving on when we felt like it.  The long lazy days of summer are perfectly suited to the attitude of bike touring.  We ate delicious local produce whenever we could, and being the end of summer there were plentiful roadside fruit and vegetable stands selling squash, zucchini, onion, green beans, peas, etc...  I don't think we had any mechanicals at all on this trip.  It was just a plain old wonderful time living outdoors with someone I love and doing things that I love, and reflecting on it really makes me wonder what the hell I am doing with my life that it does not allow me to do things like this more often.  Bike touring is not expensive, it is not scary, you don't have to be an athlete. If it feels too hard, you are doing it wrong!  If fulfills all my ideals pertaining to simplicity.  It is the best way to travel and I hope everyone who has ever dreamed of taking a long bike trip gets to do it some day. Someday I will leave on one and never come back.

Nelson Dewey State Park

Dugway Rd., best road of the whole tour.

The mighty Casseroll, master of all terrains and tasks.

Amazing gravel hill, count 'em--1, 2, 3!

Navigation... Don't worry about it, you'll get there.

...

Yellowstone Lake State Park

I want to enter this picture in a llama photo contest

Yeah, that seems pretty good to me!

Part 1: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/3076489

Part 2: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/3076584

Nine days, 558 miles (according to web mapping, more like 600 by our count), 32,306 feet of climbing.

Brief: Rock Climbing in Shawnee National Forest, Southern Illinois

A few weekends ago, Agatha and I made a break for it to one of my favorite places in the whole world--The Shawnee National Forest.  At the southern tip of our long, long state lies a beautiful reserve of public land that bears no resemblance to the rest of our geologically infantile home.  Almost seven hours by car from DeKalb, it feels a world away and might as well be for how different and beautiful it is.  I have been going there with friends since high school to camp, climb, and generally fuck around out in the woods, and places like Giant City and Panther's Den are the places I learned to love the outdoors when I was younger. Agatha and I were feeling the grind of daily life and the and the cold onset of winter, so we set our sights south to Jackson Falls, a climbing area located in the National Forest.  Jackson offers no amenities aside from a pit toilet, which is a good thing. Camping is free and visitors are expected to practice Leave No Traces ethics.  We spent three days climbing, hiking, and relaxing out in the woods and had a spectacular time.  We definitely can't climb as hard as we used to, but we gave some old routes a try and survived to tell the tale. We did a lot of hiking around less traveled areas of the canyons and found some neat spots.  The Shawnee is an overlooked gem and the people who live in the area don't seem to mind one bit.  Very few published guides to the area exist, and I imagine "locals only" spots probably compose a lot of the potential climbing in the forest down there.  I love it, and if/when I make it out of the midwest, I will still come back to this place for the fun and memories it holds for me.

Agatha cleaning up after finishing a route

Bouldering the "Yosemite Slab"

Collapsed cliff overhang

Exploring under the collapsed boulders.  Pretty scary once we realized how precariously some of the house sized rocks were balanced.

I am the speck up top.  Climb known as Venom, 5.10a.  One of my favorites in the area.  Fun moves on small holds over the small overhang to delicate slab moves to gain the top.

Route-finding error resulted in some stupid climbing here.  Agatha laughed at me for looking like an idiot (which was deserved).

Beautiful cliff lines everywhere.  So much to explore.

Till next time...

Brief: Starved Rock S24O (actually more like 26 but who's counting...)

This past weekend Agatha and I ticked off a ride I've wanted to do for a while now; an overnighter down to Starved Rock.  Saturday we woke up late and were moving at a snails pace due to the previous evenings activities.  The revitalizing properties of black coffee and hot miso soup helped us get going, but still we did not manage to get on the road until a little before 2PM!  I wasn't worried one bit.  Our experiences touring together have taught me not to worry and just enjoy the ride.  I knew we would be able to cover the sixty miles to Utica in adequate time despite our late start.  Our ride south was nice.  Once into LaSalle county, you enter what I like to call "The Grid".  Roads are organized by number and laid out in a grid format in many central and southern Illinois county, making it impossible to get lost.  You just point your bike the direction you want to go and if you miss a turn, you just take the next one (there are exceptions to this generalization of course, but you brought a map right?).  I find this type of riding to be unique in the way it relaxes the mind.  Agatha commented on how riding "straight shot" roads like these channel your thoughts to ideas of forward momentum and the future.  Conversation flows easy and the miles cruise by.  Differences in terrain result in different cycling experiences, both physically and mentally.  These were the things rolling through my head as we rolled towards our destination.

Our night at Starved Rock was uneventful.  We had a big one-pot dinner of quinoa, diced tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and tuna fish, all paired with bottle of malbec.  I would advise if you ever decide to camp at Starved Rock that you reserve a campsite in advance, as some are much nicer than others (you most likely don't want to end up on a concrete pad surrounded by RVs).  If I do this trip again, I think I will do a little more research and just find a secluded spot along the I&M Trail to camp for the night.  We woke up early with the sun and packed up after tea and oatmeal.  Before leaving, we stopped to hike around one of the sandstone canyons in the park, enjoying the sights and morning sunshine.  Having delved in to some Edward Abbey books again as of late, I was left thinking a lot about what good our parks really do when we just pour asphalt all over them to accommodate hordes of RVers.  How much nicer would the places we are trying to "preserve" be if they were a little harder to get to?  Maybe St. Louis Canyon wouldn't be scarred with so much ugly graffiti if you couldn't drive your car right up to it.  Maybe I wouldn't have had to pick up a bag full of glass bottles, cigarette butts, and other assorted trash if there weren't paved roads for automobiles, electrical hookups, and resort lodges in every corner of these beautiful places.  Who knows? Not the state and national park system, that's for sure.

Not to cyclists.

How much more midwest could I cram into this photo?  Maybe a barn?

Thankfully we avoided drowning in all those deadly vortexes.

Stealing apples! Good thing no cops read this blog.

New dog friend we met while chilling in a shady ditch.  Airedale Terrier?  Really nice.

The ride home brought more gravel and bit of a headwind, and we made it back to DeKalb right around 4PM.  If and when logistics allow, spontaneous trips like this are a lot of fun. Get your bike camping system dialed, and you can do them off the cuff like we did here. Go ultralight, go for the Surly "maximalist" approach (in hindsight, it would have been fun to tow the Burley), use what ever style you like.  I probably cannot say anything new about the sub-24 hour-overnight trip.  However, I can say it is a great way to get away with minimal planning/preparation, and a great way to practice the cycling and camping skills I love to use.  Here's to pulling off a few more before winter arrives.

Brief: Allerton Park

     August has been a good month so far.  A few days ago, Agatha and I returned from a nine day tour of Southwestern Wisconsin and the Driftless Region.   I will get around to posting some photos and stories of that trip at some point, but for now I will just say we had an excellent time with nice weather and no mechanicals.  I could easily see myself living up in the La Crosse/Eau Claire/MPLS area someday.  

     Currently I am home visiting my family before things get busy with school again.  My younger brother heads off to college next week and my parents will finally have succeeded in getting both kids out of the house, so I'm just spending some time helping pack things up and move stuff around.  I brought my bike with me as I knew I'd be home for a few days and at this point in life I find it difficult to function without the conveniences of a bicycle even for short periods.  Yesterday I headed out to Allerton Park, a location I have mentioned before.  The park is only about four miles from my front door, and this time I went there with extra time to spare and rode just about all the trails in the park, close to fifteen miles in total.  They were a little rough on the Casseroll with it's 700x35 tires but still fun, and I imagine with an actual mountain bike they'd be a blast.  The trails are intended for hiking so they are nice and wide but full of rocks, bumps, and roots.  Allerton Park is a wonderful piece of natural history tucked away in the middle of nowhere, Piatt County IL.  It contains undisturbed river bottoms, flood plains, upland forests, and even some tall grass prairie remnants.  The Sangamon river, which lazily flows through my parents backyard, also passes through Allerton.  It is a beautiful snapshot of what the landscape where I grew up would have once looked like.

Prairie restoration project

Big Bluestem, a now rare native prairie grass.  

Double track and big trees in the bottoms

Spotted some vibrant orange shelf fungus not far off the trail... Could not ID it, but I think this stuff is close to what some people call Chicken/Hen of the Woods?  I did not take my chances by trying any.

Allerton is also home to some pretty eclectic art collections.  The story is that the original owner and namesake of the park, Robert Allerton, made his fortune carpet-bagging in the south following the Civil War.  He then returned to Illinois and bought the property on which the park now stands.  Aside from the natural beauty that has been preserved in the park, he built a huge mansion, many formal gardens, and filled the park with various statues and sculptures.  It is kind of eerie when you are just riding through the woods and come up on a clearing with some pagoda or life size centaur.  Very cool place.

Fu Dog

Cool cut banks and small bluffs along the Sangamon.

Once a paved road, now abandoned and nature easily begins the process of reclamation.  Water in soil freezes and expands, cracks form, plants grow... The cycle continues.

The Sun Singer

All the trail maps in Allerton are oriented north.  That seems like a really smart idea, but one I don't think I've noticed in other locations.

     Riding around Allerton was a good use of the beautiful weather we've been having.  Riding offroad like that just always reminds me how much use I think I'd get out of a mountain bike.  Hopefully a nearby shop will build up an XL Surly ECR for me to test out sometime soon.  That bike gets me really excited.