Re: Riding through the years.

On 1/5/2025 11:01 AM, AMuzi wrote:

On 1/4/2025 6:12 PM, Tom Kunich wrote:

I ride almost 4 times a week and until recently with a fair sized group.
Now there are about 6 of us that ride together on and off. But a lot of my
riding now is solo. This largely because the group is aging and losing the
ability to do the rides that I still do. Saturday rides are easy rides but
on the way out to the coffee stop, they ride harder than I care to, and
then on the return trips they are riding a lot slower having burned
themselve out.
>
Perhaps one of them is capable of doing my North Palomares route but if he
did he would drop me like a stone since he is 20 years younger than me.
And he would freeze to death at the top waiting for me. So the group id
sging out from under me. Or too young snd too fast to ride at my speed.

 Four degrees at dawn today. I skipped; too damned cold.

Warmer than that today, but still too cold for me. I took a walk in the forest preserve instead.
I saw someone had ridden a bike through there, based on tracks in the packed-down snow on one gravel roadway. His tires weren't wider than 32mm.
It got me thinking about the old puzzle of trying to determine the direction a bike was going from its tracks. It's not easy! I could tell the front tire track from the rear because the front track has a sharper radius of curvature. But which direction? (Arthur Conan Doyle got this puzzle wrong in one Sherlock story.)
I'm pretty sure I was able to work it out eventually, but from extra information. The tracks were straight on one short steep hill, which seemed to be a clue that he descended it instead of climbing it. (In addition to wobbling a bit on a climb, I think his rear tire might have spun a bit climbing it.) I was also looking for an obstacle that he would have swerved a bit to clear, which would have given another clue, but didn't spot one.
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- Frank Krygowski