Sunday Moring Ride

Click for big. There's a nice view hidden in grayness.

Joe, Brent, and I took a nice little loop from downtown, up Greenwood, across Rimrock towards Garden Springs. There's some neat roads out there that look interesting for future exploration. Trainor is one. There also appears to be some old rail grade out there and a potential power line road. 

Reunited

Mobile post

Review: Lake MXZ301 (CXZ302) Winter Cycling Shoe

Bottom line: these are great winter cycling shoes for sub-freezing winter conditions. They're not great for super wet/all-weather commuting.

I've been holding off on buying SPD winter boots/shoes for years. And every year I have at least one ride that is ruined or cut short because my toes have frozen. So this year I decided to drop some coin on real winter riding shoes.

The MXZ301s are the 2007 model. They retailed for about $250. I got them last summer on close-out for $175 from Spoke-n-Sport. This year's comparable model is the CXZ302, which retails for $270.

The Lake Winter Cycling Shoes seem to be the standard, and for good reason. They're warm. My coldest ride was a few weeks ago when it was about 4 F with a good wind. I was riding for about 30 minutes and my toes were fine. I wear these boots with two pair of "liner" wool socks.  Liner socks are the ultra thin ones. These boots kick booty in serious cold. I've never had such happy feet in those conditions.

In extreme wet and not-as-cold conditions these boots are not as great. They have neoprene cuffs that basically absorb water. You must run flaps on your full fenders to keep the water from kicking up on the cuffs of these boots. Otherwise, the water will soak in and then drip into the boot. 

Over the last couple days, where gobs of snow has melted, I am riding and tromping through deep slush and puddles over a layer of ice. These are just sucky conditions, and these boots don't keep out the water, and I'm being mindful of not tromping through the deep stuff. For the cost of these boots, I would expect them to keep my feet dry in this muck. 

One thing that has always bugged me about these boots are the lacing mechanisms. They don't work any better than normal laces, but they introduce a level of fussiness and point of failure that renders the boots unwearable if the laces or the mechanism breaks. After a couple weeks, one of my knobs popped off. It's held in place with a tiny screw that requires a special tiny pin spanner, which is not included with the boots. So after reassembling the little mechanism, I tightened the screw down with the point of my knife. It failed a couple more times. I finally put some blue loctite on the screw and that's held it for the last month. Cheesy.

These laces are like dental floss. And they will break. The good news is that Lake is very quick about getting new laces to customers. Mr. Blaine had one break on him and they over-nighted laces to him. That's great, but I think they should include an extra set of laces when you buy the boots, so you don't have to potentially miss a ride or two waiting for the Lake proprietary laces to arrive. I also think they should include the impossibly small pin spanner tool to open the knob too. Actually, I think they should just use traditional laces and forget all this fussy over-engineered knob lacing system. 

In the end, if I were buying again, I think I'd get the Lake MX265 Cycling boots. 

They are billed as 3-season, but I'm thinking if you bought big you could put some beefy wool socks on, and lather them up with some Proofide and be ok. They won't solve the crazy muck wet scenario, but they retail for about $100 cheaper. And they look relatively normal. Which I like. The MXZ301's have a Jetson vibe going.

Skiing to work

My first run. My second time on xc skis.

That's a lot of work. Fun too.

Mobile post.

Sunday Fun

We did the Sunday morning DeLeon's ride. I think we had 8. If you're interested in joining us for casual rides, check out the forum for updates. We'll try using the forum again.

That's Pat and his white basket. He gets the best winter bike award: Karate Monkey with stupid fat knobbies at 25PSI; internal-gear hub with disc brakes (Alfine... bling!). If you have to do one bike for winter this would be it.

This is the hill that won Pat the best winter bike award. This is the second hill that goes from 5th to 7th Ave next to the Ronald McDonald house. He popped it down to 1st gear and just cruised up both hills. Of course, as Lance would be quick to remind us: it's not all about the bike. Pat is in that picture by the way. Top of the hill on the left. The little dark dot. Craig and I were walking.

Ice bike. Good for cruising. The gear is a bit tall for climbing steep stuff and hauling Liza around on the sled.


We ended up having a beer on the way home from DeLeon's. That's Joe.

On Illinois Ave. Illinois is a great street on a clear day. Looking south-west you can see downtown and and the south hill.  It was a beautiful amazing day this morning. Bright, clear, blue, cold. Lovely ride.

After the morning DeLeon's run, Maddie, Liza and I went sledding. We dropped Maddie off at a friends and then Liza and I tooled around the south hill. 

We've decided that we like this winter and if they keep coming like this, we're going to embrace it and enjoy it. According to the news, we'll have up to 9 inches of fresh powder tomorrow morning. If so, I'll be trying the new x-country skis on my commute. 

Kickin it - Liza's kicksled

The conditions are perfect for Liza's kicksled.

All the side streets are compressed snow and ice: smooth and slick. And there is a high of around 10 F today so it's staying hard and fast.

A couple weeks ago, I rigged up a sled pulling solution for Maddie by hooking onto my favorite little REI backpack. I find it sort of funny how overly technical the back pack is. It's got hoops and loops and straps and such. And it's just a wee little thing. But by hooking a carabiner into one of the overly reinforced little grommet hoopy deals, I can make myself into a sled dog. The pack has chest and waist straps, so when I pull, I'm pulling with my shoulders and chest. It really makes hauling Maddie around on her sled nearly effortless.

So today, while Maddie was out with Grandma, Liza and I tried out this dogsled routine with her kicksled. I rode my fixed, studded 720 Ice Bike and we were in business. We covered a lot of ground in no time. 

First we hit the Scoop for some caffeine, then we went to Fresh Abundance, then we dropped off the groceries at home and went up to the Rocket on 43rd. We picked up a couple items there, then we came down Arthur to Super 1 for the mega jug of cinnamon (it should be against the law to make oatmeal without cinnamon).

We were having so much fun and making such good time, we detoured down Manito Blvd to the park and took the long way home. 

It's amazing how easy it is to pull Liza with this set up. It was a good work out, and much more fun that just climbing hills alone. We're hoping for a prolonged cold spell now.

Cycling Spokane in Aught Eight

Last year I did a year-end wrap up about my year cycling in Spokane. It was too long. My first resolution this year is to make the year end wrap up shorter. We'll see how that goes.

Bike Advocacy and City Stuff

Another banner year. Looking at the goals from last year (finish Master Bike Plan, hire a bike/ped coordinator, and do at least one infrastructure project), we did good. We hit two of three.

Although we didn't see any big projects complete, we made critical progress on laying the groundwork for real future progress. 

The master bike plan is nearly done. It will likely go before the city council in the next month or two for adoption into the Comp Plan. The MBP is a big deal. It's a hard requirement for any real money to flow into Spokane for bike infrastructure. Here's my first post on the MBP about a year and half ago.

The other important milestone is that the city will now have a paid FT position for a bike/ped coordinator. Although the Bicycle Advisory Board has been pushing for this for many years, you can thank Richard Rush for pushing this through. Having a FT person in the city whose job it is to watch out for bike-related opportunities and to help the engineering folks do the right thing will be a huge benefit to the city. 

Goals for 2009: secure money and do stuff. Now that we've got the plan, it's time to build. There may be some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to get funding for infrastructure next year: either through the stimulus package that Obama is proposing and/or SmartRoutes. 

The Bikes

I could copy-paste this section from last year into this space and just change the bike models/names. When it comes to the comings and goings of bikes, I'm a predictable bastard. 

I wrote up a post last week that pretty much lays out the bike plan for the up coming year.

Here are some lists --

Bikes that went away in 08:

• Maddie's tandem: She's all solo now. I'm hoping Maddie will be game for the Burley in a few years. The Bike Friday tandem went to a family in Missoula.
  
• Schwinn snow bike
  
• Liza's Schwinn
  
• Bridgestone RB-1: bottom bracket cracked. I'm not sure what to do with this frame. I kind of want to save the forks for something someday. 
  
• Shogun: This is just such a great frame. It went to Patrick, but it's coming back. I have neat plans for it. More on that in 09.
  
• Garyized Trek 520: It's not gone yet, but it's no longer ridable as I'm already stealing parts from it. It's a fine bike, and will suit somebody perfectly. I want a bike that can haul a bunch of stuff, but I can just about haul the same amount on my RB-T "urban" bike. So the 520 overlaps too much. 

New (or repossessed loaner) bikes in 08:

• RB-T urban bike: About the perfect all rounder for me. I just wish it could take fatter tires. It's the hacked version of this beauty. 
  
• Lyon 747
  
• Rawland
  
• Burley Tandem: the webpage that this links to says the tandem is for sale. It's not. I need to update that page.
  

2009 Goals: stick with the current crop of bikes the year through. I can't imagine unloading the 747, Rawland, or the RB-T. But I may build another bike or two. I already have a plan in mind to bring back the Shogun. 

Last year I had a goal of not buying as much crud. I didn't do so well there. This year, I'm going to go again at that. The bike projects Liza and I have queued up don't require a ton of new parts. And we're going to try and buy used where ever we can, especially now that Liza is no longer wrenching at REI, which means our sweet 30% discount goes away. Ouch.

Community

In the community arena, it's been a great year for cycling in Spokane. The participation numbers for Bike-to-Work week and SpokeFest were both a huge surprise to organizers. These were fun events. I'm looking forward to SpokeFest especially this year.

Pedals2People continues to grow. We ended our Village Bike Project by shipping 200 bikes to Seattle to combine with BikeWorks for a shipment to Ghana. Our garage DIY community shop took off this year. We did a bunch of free bike tune ups. And we got our 501c3. There's a bunch of stuff in the hopper for next year. Mainly: getting our free bike tune ups dialed in and getting another DIY community space up and running.

Cyclocross racing community. This is a great community of people. More on that here. 

Jeff's FBC took off this year; it was cool to see over 70 people turn out for the prom ride on a warm spring night, buy it was just down-right amazing to see nearly 40 turn out for the Festivus ride through the cold snowy December night.

Bike writing. There are a bunch of Spokane blogs that are mostly about cycling: Jeff, Pat, Derek, Taylor, Jason, David, Ben, Joe, Joe, Jacque, Barb, Joe Blogger, Spokane Fixed. And some that have frequent cycling posts: Hank, Lazy Eye, Jon, and John.

Joel at the Inlander wrote a nice piece last summer on the state of cycling in Spokane.  And if you're a careful and diligent reader of the Slice, you'll see pretty frequent bike-related thoughts from Paul Turner in the Spokesman-Review. But it's Jon at OTM that continues to treat cycling as a mainstream topic. I'll continue to write my monthly column for Jon in 2009 and I think we'll probably see even more cycling content in his pages over the next year.

Goals for 2009

1. It would be great to see the bike community and community at large work together to do some in-town bike races. There's talk of hooking a criterium into the Garland Street fair. If I had a buck for each time I heard someone talk about how cool it would be to have a down town criterium, I'd be a millionaire. Maybe this is the year to push that? Any takers?

2. Continue to bring in new riders. If you are on a bike already, smile and wave to the newbies, especially those that are clearly replacing car trips. If you know people that are the fence about cycling for transportation, help them make the leap by offering to help them learn about routes, gear, cycling in traffic, etc. 

Riding

This has been probably my best riding year ever. The highlights:

• Midnight century. I can't stop going on about this ride. It was the best of the year. 
  
• Cyclocross racing. Same deal. I just can't shut up about it.
  
• Spokane - Everett run. Although this wasn't the most fun ride I've ever taken, it was epic for me and I enjoy going back and looking at the pictures and remembering the ride. 
  
• Alex visit:  Alex is a great friend. The majority of our interaction is online and a few minutes a month having lunch when I'm in Redmond for work. In the last few years we've taken a couple tours together, but this year we didn't have a plan. So it was nice that things sort of fell into place for a quick Alex visit. We rode, drank beers, and did an over nighter out to Badger. A nice weekend.
  
• Trail and dirt road riding.  I've always sought out the dirt roads, but the Rawland inspired me to do a lot more trail riding. 
  
• Hills. My relationship with hills is continuing to evolve. I think my favorite hill right now is Sunset Highway to WW drive(?) -- up to Indian Canyon, the back way. It's a weird route, but I like pushing from Gov't Way and seeing how well I can maintain to the top of the route. It's strangely satisfying. I like that Hill because it's not stupid steep and it's pretty steady. And it's just the right length. Maybe 2 miles?
  
• Riding with Maddie. Since she learned how to ride on her own, it's really been fun to watch her pick up little skills: signaling, braking, maintaining a straight line, etc. 

Goals for 2009:

1. Race cyclocross again. In 2009, I'll attempt to race B's. That's a big jump for me. We'll see how that goes.

2. I'm not going to make an overnighter goal this year. I'll take what I can get. Same with a long tour. I'd love to take off for a week, but that's a hard sell right now. 

3. I've got to the the long way to my Dad's. It's the Springdale-Hunter-Gifford-Barstow route that I've not done for almost 2 years! And it's a great ride. 

I think I broke my first new year's resolution already. Damn.