Hanging with Dwan from Co-Motion

Dwan Shepard's title on the Co-Motion Cycles website is co-conspirator. Dwan, along with his fellow co-conspirator, Dan Vrijmoet, founded Co-Motion back in 1988. Dan seems to be the shy one, and we've only seen him once, ducking behind a frame jig, while Dwan was taking us on a tour of the factory. Dwan is more of the public face, representing Co-Motion on various social media sites and at bike shows and such. This is how we've been lucky enough to get to know him.

Do you want the Good News or the Bad News?

"Do you want the good news or bad news?"

This is what Fear Rothar said as he came upstairs just before we were to load the tandem into the car to drive out to Westfield for the Bash-Bish 300km brevet.

A few weeks before, while cycling out in the Catskills, we noticed that the rear tire on the tandem was rubbing the fender a bit. These darn aluminum fenders are such a pain. We supposedly have the right sized fender for our tires, but like Dr Who's Weeping Angels, if you look away, bad stuff happens! Or if the tire isn't perfectly round... or seated just so, bad stuff happens. The Grand Bois Hetres that we use on the tandem seem to have a reputation for fiddly mounting, so the plan was to remove and remount the tire, or just put on a completely new tire. I was supposed to do this, but my brand new belted fixed gear bike showed up a few hours prior, and I had to go for a ride first. I mean it would just be inconsiderate to the builder not to take the bike out for a ride as soon as I got it, right?

Two Chicks on a Tandem do the Great River Ride

This week my Tuesday ride had 4 riders of the female persuasion and one lone male. When Bob joined us en route, I commented to him that he was lucky to ride with 4 chicks. He agreed that we were delightful company, but commented that while we were allowed to call ourselves chicks, he probably was not!

Ah well, I've never been one to worry much about political correctness. I love telling the story of one of our fleche rides. We had three gals riding fixed gear bikes, and our team name was "Fixie Chicks".  But that's not the story. My two teammates were 10 or 20 years younger than me. We were close to the end of our 250 mile/24 hour ride, when we came to an intersection. I must have been slightly ahead and crossed safely, but the other two stopped and got a kick out of watching the guys passing by on Harleys, who apparently twisted their heads around quite noticeably checking me out! So now I call myself a post-feminist, because my reaction to that was to think that this was pretty cool!

Kearsarge Klassic

The New Hampshire Cycling Club did a great job with their inaugural Kearsarge Klassic, a new event taking in lots of dirt roads around Mt. Kearsarge State Forest Park, an area of NH that we haven't spent a lot of time in before. We found ourselves on lovely lightly traveled scenic roads with some pretty awesome support, as well as a great after ride dinner of homemade chili. The ride was a fund-raiser for the Ausbon Sargent Land Preservation Trust to support its work preserving and protecting the natural beauty of New Hampshire. The club donated over $5,000 with proceeds from the ride!

We'd heard about the ride a few weeks ago from friends who know our love for dirt, but we had not seen any publicity about it. I was reminded of the ride when I noticed a link on bikereg.com last week as I was registering us for the Burke race. I mentioned it to John and we decided to give it a go. As you can probably tell from the blog, we've had a very busy year, and when Friday evening rolled around we were having second thoughts about loading up the car yet again to go do yet another event. Frankly, we are worn out! Not so much from riding, but loading and unloading the car, driving and laundry!

Laboring Up Burke Mountain

After discovering the Burke Bike Barn last summer, we tried to reserve it for every Labor Day and every Memorial Day forever. Fortunately Doug accepted our reservations for Labor Day this year. Hopefully he has us penciled in for the next 20 years. We love it here! It is a magical place.

It was made even more magical this year by the presence of a rare blue moon Friday night.

Followed the next morning by some brilliant sunshine and crisp blue skies.

Quadzilla - Day 4

The final day, and there I was checking the weather again. Initially the forecast had looked good, but now I saw a big swath of green and yellow headed our way on the radar. What a pity we still haven't mounted the fenders. I'm ashamed to admit this, but we've been doing so much dirt road riding and simply had not wanted to risk damaging them. Oh well, I'd have to suffer the indignity of a wet bum. We put our rain jackets into the seat bag, and headed out trying to get as far along as possible before being overtaken by the storms.

We passed through the charming looking town of Skaneateles at the top of its eponymous lake. It looked like a lovely place to spent a night, or at least have a coffee, but the storm brewing behind us kept us on the move. The rain caught us in earnest as we began the first real climb of the day, and the thunder and lightning were almost of top of us when we reached the summit, where Chuck and Crista were waiting in their van offering bananas and encouragement.  I quickly put on my jacket, while John took a banana and we apologized for not hanging out due to the lightning! We just wanted to get off the mountaintop. We got down as quickly as we could, while still showing some caution for the wet and steep roads, and those ever-present stops signs!

Quadzilla - Day 3

After two hard days with over 10,000 feet of climbing each day, we were looking forward to this easy day with a mere 6,000 feet. There was even a little temptation to make it easier, by riding directly to Auburn, without taking the dogleg up to Lake Ontario. Fortunately Mark had emphasized that the ride up to Fair Haven State Park was beautiful and the views of Lake Ontario would be well worthwhile.

Still we were pretty tired. We rolled out of town with MaryBeth and Vida, and enjoyed getting to know them better as we rode along, chatting away. Shortly before reaching Waterloo, I heard comments about stopping for coffee, so I kept my eyes peeled as we passed through town, and we found a lovely coffee shop just at the edge of town. As we sat down to enjoy our find, Robert pulled up with the same idea. He had sprinted off the front, but had missed a turn, resulting in some bonus miles. Great minds think alike though and he was also ready for a break in Waterloo.

Quadzilla - Day 2

Cyclists seem to be more obsessed with weather and weather forecasts than anyone. Inevitably when gathered among a group of cyclists, discussion turns to weather, weather apps and weather forecasting tools. We've all got several weather apps on our smart phones, ipads and laptops. Some of us are on a first name basis with the local TV weather reporters. I will even admit I subscribe to a weather twitter feed. We obsessively check and compare and sometimes shop around to find the most favorable forecast - being optimistic creatures and all.

Conversation at dinner Wednesday night kept turning back to the weather. We'd had an absolutely glorious day for riding Wednesday with crystal clear blue skies, although the humidity had started to rise a bit late in the day and some clouds were rolling in for the final climb.  It was just starting to sprinkle a bit as we walked down to dinner.

Quadzilla - Day 1

Early in the season, when we looked at various events on the calendar, Quadzilla-Staged was to be one of the target rides for the Ride Studio Cafe Endurance Team. In previous years, Quadzilla was run as a 400 mile, 28,000 foot ride around all 11 Finger Lakes with a 40 hour time limit. The new staged format added 100 miles, another 10,000 feet of climbing, and expanded to four days with 200km routes each day. This would allow for proper meals and full nights sleep in comfy motels each night.  It would also mean all the scenery could be enjoyed in daylight! Maybe I'm just no longer a proper randonneur, but for some reason this format appealed to me. The initial plan had been for QZ-staged ride to also serve as a team photo shoot, so we would bring both the tandem and single bikes, since we'd have the photo car to carry the extra bikes. But at some point, the expense of a full week on the road caused the other team members some concern, and they decided to conserve resources. I'd already registered and booked all the accommodation and to be honest, I was fairly stoked about doing the ride. Now without the photo car to carry the extra bikes, we decided to just bring the tandem. Mark Frank, organizer extraordinaire, told me that Crista Borras and Chuck Wood would also be on their tandem, so this was even more incentive to bring the tandem. That and the route profiles... Woohoo, look at those downhills!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Mt Ascutney Hillclimb Race

Sorry it's taken me so long to get a new post up. I know that I won't get any sympathy for saying this... I've just been too busy cycling (aka creating content for the blog) or more to the point, too exhausted when I'm done cycling to be able to do any blogging!

After a fabulous weekend in Northampton doing the Grand Hundo and seeing RT in concert, I faced a dilemma. Strava was having another climbing challenge, but this one was pretty ambitious and only a week long. It started on the Sunday after the climbing-intense Grand Hundo, and ended the following Saturday - or so I thought.  We had a race up Mt. Ascutney on Saturday, to be followed by a pretty hard week doing Quadzilla - Staged. We were also in the midst of a heat wave. The logical thing was to ignore the challenge and get some rest. But I can't seem to resist a challenge and I decided to try to fit in a few extra climbs during the week. I did at least pass on the temptation to try to do more climbing on Wednesday than any other female in the world. This was enforced by some pretty violent storms in the area that day, not to mention the brutal heat wave.

Jelly Beans!

I love jelly beans. In fact, jelly beans are my favorite post ride snack. I am especially partial to the cinnamon flavored ones! So it's no wonder that I am a fan of Jelly Belly, who not only make the best jelly beans, but also sponsor a bicycle racing team.

In addition to a bazillion flavors of regular jelly beans, Jelly Belly also make Sport Beans. These are electrolytes, vitamins, and calories in a nice tasty jelly bean shaped package! Some even have caffeine! My friend Cristine got me hooked on the caffeinated ones while we were climbing Monte Grappa a few years ago.

So naturally when I saw that Jeremy Powers,  a member of the Jelly Belly road race team, was putting on a fun dirt road event in one of my favorite places, I had to check it out, knowing that there would be jelly beans on offer. As a US cyclocross national champion, he'd also include some great dirt roads, along with lots of climbing, which of course would bring us up to lovely scenic vistas, followed by some screaming descents.

The JAM Fundo Grand Fundo/Hundo ride takes in some amazing beautiful, quiet, steep dirt (and a few paved) roads in the Berkshire foothills, starting in Southampton, MA. This was the third running of the event. We missed the prior two, because we were away, but this year, the timing was perfect. Earlier in the year I'd bought tickets to the Green River Festival, mainly to see Richard Thompson perform on Sunday. The ride and festival were on the same weekend, and in close proximity, so we decided to combine some riding with some music.

We decided to take the tandem because we've just been having so much fun bombing around dirt roads with it. We also figured we've been doing enough long hard dirt road rides this year that we'd just go for the full Hundo experience.

We booked a room at a fabulous solar-powered B&B, the Starlight Llama, not too far from the start. We'd stayed here a while back and had a wonderful time. John and Dee are fabulous hosts and are quite happy to share a wealth of information about solar power. The llamas, goats, peacocks and other assorted farm animals are cool too.

After a great breakfast, we headed down to the ride start, about 5 miles away and started bumping into loads of friends, and what seemed like everyone in NECX. I haven't seen official numbers, but it appeared there were several hundred riders. I saw that they made over $30K to help out some lucky, hard working young local cyclists, which is very cool.

It was a brutally hot day and while we planned to do the long route, we also planned to take it easy in the heat. So we started at the back, and got to enjoy the sight of cyclists strung out on the road for a long ways ahead of us!

The route is a little lumpy and has quite a bit of dirt. We flew through the first section past lots of ejected water bottles and folks pulled off to the side repairing punctures.


We were feeling pretty chuffed with out fat tires as we rolled along, that is until we hit pavement again and noticed the rear tire was going a bit soft! We had just caught up with Gary, who I'd ridden with on Green Mountain Double, and he stayed with us while we stopped to put in a new tube. We couldn't find anything obvious in the tire, but did discover that our brand new pump was either defective, or that maybe we needed to have a pump designed for high volume, low pressure. It took forever to get air back in, and even loads of pumping, we still had fairly low pressure. We'll have to look closer at the pump before the next big ride.

Anyway, shortly after getting back on the road, Jeremy Powers came riding by and taking note of the tandem, slowed to chat a bit and warn us about the upcoming climb on King's Highway. We had a great climb but managed to lose Gary on the descent. I knew we had a jelly bean, uh, I mean rest stop ahead, and figured we'd regroup there. 

We arrived at the stop and I filled my pockets with more Sport Beans and had a 1/2 banana. We also tried to locate a pump to top off the tire. There were two SRAM neutral support vehicles on the course, but they were still behind helping all the other folks who'd had punctures. Fortunately they rolled in shortly after we did and we were able to get the pressure back up to a comfortable 75 psi (Grand Bois 650BX42 Hetre tires).

While this was going on, Gary slipped past us. We managed to catch back up to him before the famous ice cream truck stop, where he also found one of his teammates.  Cooled a bit by some frozen treats, we headed out for more climbing.

The scenery continued to astound. The sun continued to bear down. Before the ride, Matt and David had talked about stopping at swimming holes, but try as we might, we didn't see any! They would have been littered with hot cyclists!

 

We continued along, enjoying quite a few new roads, with loads of dirt, mostly smooth and fast, until we hit one section where the organizers had painstakingly put orange paint on the various large rocks poking up. We were bombing along this section when we noticed the rear tire seemed soft again. This time we were able to find a small piece of flint. Hopefully we would not have any more issues. We had now used both our tubes, although we could patch if necessary. John again struggled to get proper air from the pump. But we again managed to top it off at the next rest stop, thanks to the SRAM support. 

After doing the extra Hundo loop, we rejoined the Fundo course at the final rest stop. While chatting away about tandems with the lovely ladies handing out jelly beans and cold drinks, John commented how it would be awesome and fun-scary to ride a tandem with Jeremy Powers captaining, especially on the screaming descents. It was at this point that they told us they were Jeremy's mom, aunt and nieces! They joked about having t-shirts made up with these labels next year.

We arrived back at the start hot, thirsty and hungry. It was around the time that I was inhaling the bar-b-q that I realized I'd not had much to eat for 82 miles other that Sport Beans! I think I was supposed to supplement with them, and actually eat some other stuff, but it's good to know that I can survive on them. We made it back in time for the raffle, but sadly did not win Jeremy's cool bike from last season or the Rapha shoes. We did have a great time chatting with lots of folks and talking up tandems.

We were pretty hot and tired and ending up passing on the music festival that evening. And just to give an idea of how hot it was on Sunday, I plotted a nice easy ride up and down the shaded Green River Road, getting us back to Greenfield in plenty of time to see RT!

Richard is awesome live, and did not disappoint.

It was another fabulous weekend. No rest for the weary. We are off to race up Mt Ascutney next weekend before heading out to the Finger Lakes for Quadzilla!

Magic Faerie Dust

Magic Faerie Dust is that elusive substance that sometimes comes with new bikes, making them seemingly effortless to ride. It doesn't accompany every new bike, since it results from a combination of good experiences, including the excitement of placing the order, the pleasure of working with the shop, the joy of seeing the results, and the thrill of riding the bike.

Fortunately for us, we had a great Magic Faerie Dust experience last year when we got our custom Seven single bikes from Ride Studio Cafe. So much so, that even after 10,000 miles and numerous rides in heavy rains that really should have washed the substance away by now, I still feel its presence on every ride!  John says the same about his Seven.

So we really should have known that it was risky to our bank account and retirement plan to take a Seven tandem out for a test ride last December. We instantly fell in love with both the concept of that bike and its sublime ride.

DROVES - Days 2 and 3

We had a fabulous Memorial Day weekend in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Vermont has such an amazing network of lightly traveled scenic, and yes, hilly, dirt roads.  We've been taking trips to various parts of the state for years, and are always delighted by what we find. Late last summer Hurricane Irene did significant damage throughout the state, but the residents and authorities responded quickly. Areas with homes were top priority, and it was amazing how fast many of the roads were repaired. I think one of the things that helped is that so many of the roads are dirt, and is  much easier to go out and regrade these roads than to repair the paved ones.  Our hearts ached for the people affected, and we hesitated to go up last fall amid the devastation, but the word went out that tourists SHOULD come. So we tried to do our part to help out the local economy. We had a hillclimb race up Burke Mountain over Labor Day weekend, and took the opportunity as we always do, to ride as many of the dirt roads in the area as we could do in a weekend. We were happy to fond very little damage in the area. With so much uncertainty about the roads on the original route, and needing to book accommodation early, we decided to move DROVES to East Burke. This gave us the opportunity to share even more parts of this wonderful state with our friends. Also by changing to a single location, it would make it easy for folks who wanted to do shorter rides. A few folks took advantage of that opportunity this year, but we still had plenty of company on the longer rides.

DROVES - Day 1

A few friends joined us in East Burke over Memorial Day weekend for the 2012 version of DROVES - Dirt Roads of Vermont Epic Sojourn. As noted in the previous blog entry, DROVES is an informal gathering of friends who like exploring Vermont's dirt roads. The crowd this year included several past participants, Jake Kassen, Emily O'Brien, Dominique Codere, Cristine Lamoureux, David Lafferty, Emily Searles Lafferty, David Wilcox, Ted Lapinski, and first-timers Matt Roy and Mo Bruno-Roy. Brian and Andreas joined us for half the day on Sunday.

Some folks stayed at the Village Inn, while the rest of the gang stayed at the Bike Barn. We met each morning in front of the general store for our rides.

The gang on Day 1

Why Tandem?

I always enjoy the chance to tell the story of how I used a tandem to snare Fear Rothar. We were both participating in a cross-USA bike tour on single bikes, but due to our speed difference, we rarely saw each other on the road.

We had met a year before when Fear Rothar came from Ireland to do BMB in 1992. We had emailed occasionally, and he was the first person I told when I decided to do PAC Tour the next year.  I really didn't remember that he had previously told me of the same plans. Whether it was fate or accident, or some plan on my sub-conscious' part, we ended up on the same trip.

Waffling on about the weekend

On a bitterly cold December Sunday, Patria and Rob of Ride.Studio.Cafe were kind enough to entrust a Seven tandem to our (ab)use on their Sunday morning ride. It wasn't just any Sunday morning ride, however, but the prelude to their Waffle Wonderland seasonal celebration.

A tandem photograph?

And, did I mention it was the coldest ride of the season thus far? Considering the temperature, an impressively large number of people turned out for fun and frolics. We rolled out the bike path to Bedford and then popped out into the wind as we headed towards Carlisle. There are no prizes, dear reader, for guessing that this wind was chilly, to put it politely. This had a few effects. One, our extremities begged for a little more blood flow. Two, the shiny tandem seemed to invite spirited pedaling. And three, ride leader Geoff, who was kind enough to supply hand warmers at the start of the ride, was also eager to appreciate the tandem from the point of view of its slipstream. The result was us putting said tandem to a very good test and warming everyone up!