Category: Biking

Current Conditions:  Piercing headache.  Long-term Forecast: Warmer with a  70% chance of bike commuting next week.

…compared to the ice on a watched bike lane. I’ve been patrolling the bike lanes on my main routes to get to work – Summit and/or Minnehaha Avenues – to see if the ice is anywhere close to receding far enough to make biking to work tenable. Not yet.  And I’ll cop to it; whatever…

It’s a strange time of year in Minnesota, weather-wise.  There’s enough sun high enough in the sky  to warm things up pretty well during the mid-day.  But there’s enough snow cover to reflect all that sunlight back into space, so nights still get pretty chilly – and it’s still a bit brisk when we get…

With yesterday’s “blizzard”, and today’s relative chill, I think it’s time to declare 2009 biking season closed.  (*) As I mentioned earlier, it was a rough year for biking; much of my summer got eaten up with family business that kept me off the road for most of July and August.  Biking in the fall,…

For the past couple of years, from whenever the snow’s been off the roads until I just can’t manage it anymore, I’ve been biking to work. Or trying to. 2007 was a good year.  After about 15 years of virtually no biking at all, I commuted pretty much daily from June through August.  And I…

Last year, I managed to commute via bike pretty much every day from late April to early October.  I managed to get into the best shape I’ve been in in decades.  It was great. This year?  Ugh.  Not so much. A family commitment left me driving to appointments early every morning for the past 11…

Somebody with a French-y sounding name – Bartleby Camembert or some other limp-noodle fake name – writing at Anti-Strib took yet another dork-fingered whack at bikers a few weeks ago. Unusually for a “conservative”, writing on a “conservative” blog, Mr. Chablis’ piece borrows from that great conservative thinker, Vice President Joe Biden, and is entitled…

Columbia, Missouri – known as “The Berkeley of the Ozarks” – has passed a law against road-raging against bikers.  My jury is still out on the law itself – stupid road rage is stupid road rage, no matter who it’s aimed at. But this op-ed in the Wichita paper touches on some preconceptions that need to get looked at: Imagine…

“Conventional Wisdom” among anti-bicycling conservatives is that as the number of bikers rises (as it has been steadily for some time, which accelerates as gas prices rise), the carnage on the road rises with it. Not, apparently, so, according to Quimby: …as bicycle ridership has increased in New York City, the absolute number of bike…

So yesterday was the first “round trip” commute – riding both ways – of the season.  Which means the first climb up Cathedral Hill of the season. Make no mistake about it; by June, I’ll be zipping up Grand Hill like it’s hardly there (although Ramsey Hill is kinda the great white whale for me;…