In the last six months, I have...
...become professionally unemployed.
...become a core mechanic/volunteer at the Bike Church.
...broken up with my girlfriend.
...moved into a house with five other roommates.
...done a lot of riding.
...started subbing for PedX.
...done very little riding.
Uh, I think that's the right order.
Around Thanksgiving, I started doing a lot of riding. One week in particular, I did over two hundred miles worth of day trips around the area. The brother of one of my roommates was in town and the three of us did a few trips. That roommate, Jon, was doing an internship with Specialized, so he was able to borrow a couple of bikes from there. We went out and I rode my touring bike, which of course weighs about 28 pounds. The bikes they were on weighed 15.92 and 16.3 pounds and were geared for moving very fast. My bike is geared for carrying a lot of weight, so I struggled to keep up with them. It really made me want a lighter more aggressively geared bike.
Another roommate, Sasha, was moving to El Salvador the first week of December and I had promised to ride from San Francisco to Santa Cruz with her. We did a little "training ride" to Moss Landing, which included us killing a bottle of wine at the restaurant we stopped at before riding all the way back to Santa Cruz in the dark. Just a few days after that we took the 17 Express, Fremont Bus, and BART to Oakland where we stayed with a lovely friend of hers, Aubrey. 
Aubrey is studying music in between doing triathlons. She was going to ride with us, but had locked up her bike the day before and lost the keys to the lock. The next morning we had a beautiful, relaxing, uneventful ride back to Santa Cruz. Sasha seemed to really enjoy it, though unlike me, she enjoyed riding by herself a ways behind me (I like chatting while I ride).After all that riding and starting to feel like a pretty strong rider again, it was off to visit family and friends in Louisiana and Florida for the holidays.
Holidays = weeks without my bike = unhappy me
I need to build up an extra bike and send it to my mom's house so that I have something to ride when I'm there. It's too expensive to ship it back and forth with me every year (I've done it).
I got back to Santa Cruz and then of course the winter rains started. So, I spent another months and a half not riding my bike. On top of that, I've been eating lots of dumpstered bread. It's hard to pass up free bread, but not being on my bike and eating lots of carbs has had an expected effect on my midsection. I'm so skinny that most people wouldn't notice what I'm talking about, but I sure feel like crap when I put on 5-10 pounds in the winter.
The last two weeks, I've stopped riding my touring bike all together and I've started riding my fixed-gear again to get back into shape. I barely rode it in 2009 at all, and my knees were grateful. It is getting me strong again. My roommate, Leo, and I have been getting out on tour fixies quite a bit. There's been a lot of off-roading; I've had to hose-off it off twice now. It's the first time that cleaning my bike has ever begun with a water hose, but those farm roads north of Wilder Ranch get pretty muddy.
After returning from a mud ride this past Saturday night, I ended up on West Cliff Drive with another Bike Church volunteer, Thad. Thad is a machine. When I say machine, I mean he moves really, really fast, and he keeps that pace. I was able to keep up for a little more than half the time, but he lost me after that.
I think I'm going to go digging around for a larger chain ring. I've had a chill year of doing slow relaxing tours, which I'm still going to do, but I think I'm ready for moving a bit faster. Riding with Jon and his brother, and riding with Thad has given me a need for speed, I guess. It could only get me stronger, right? We'll see.
Next month, Leo and I are planning a three day ride to Los Angeles. I have a memorial service to attend and a chance to do some paid modeling. Doing it in three days is a little crazy, but I don't feel like I can commit a week to riding south when I need to keep up the job search. Each day will have to be 120 miles, and I don't think that either one of us has ever ridden so many miles in a day - much less had three days of it. We have a fourth day for either recouping from the trip or dragging it out for an additional day. I've got the occasional 50 mile day of bicycle deliveries with PedX to help prepare. We'll squeeze a training day or two in there, and hopefully, it won't kill us.
