Bike Blog

How I suddenly came to own a bike with 32-spoke wheels 15 years ago
So, my bike has already had the wheels trued once, at 1100 miles. And the past week, it started to feel a little wobbly. Today, I called Performance Bike, seeing if I could get it brought back to true, but they wouldn't be able to do it until next Thursday. Today, the bike felt a little awkward…

My new favorite web comic 15 years ago
I'm not sure which is more pathetic. That I think a cartoon about a bunch of avid cyclists is fun reading.... or that I get every single joke, even the fairly obscure ones. Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery is brilliant. It manages to make fun of all comers... Grant Petersen fans, road bikes…

New record: 50 miles 15 years ago
One of the standard routes around here that cyclists take for their training rides is the loop around the Stevens Creek reservoir. It's got everything you'd need for a training ride. A hard climb. A fast descent. Some flat sections here and there. Pretty scenery. And some switchbacks and other hard…

Gearing up for the rain... 15 years ago
Given how quickly my weight goes up and my mood goes to shit if I stop biking, so I'm stick with my carfree lifestyle. People think I'm even weirder than before. Most of the summer, I was able to get away with no extra gear because it was going to be warm enough and not raining for months on end…

Fall 2008 Bike Portrait 15 years ago
I had my father-in-law take some portraits of me with my bike. Those of you who've seen me often, notice how much smaller the gut is. :)

Fun with the GPS 15 years ago
I've managed to activate the GPS functionality in my phone, so I can use it as a GPS datalogger. This is super-cool and exciting for me, especially because there's already a nice program called TurboGPS that does pretty much everything I'd want it to do on the data recording side... and Google…

Starting to keep a weight chart 15 years ago
I spent most of the summer pegged at about the same weight. I wasn't weighing myself very often, but I also wasn't worrying about it too much. I have a dim view of attempts at breaking down being healthy to simple logical clauses. Things like "Get your BMI below ___ and you will live longer" tend to…

How I get un-rewarded for not driving 16 years ago
My brother and I are very different. But I'm realizing that sometimes we end up doing the exact same thing. Take, for example, the car situation. At my brother's place, they've got a Honda CR-V... which is really more of a Civic with a higher roof so the dogs don't bump their heads on the ceiling…

The story of the accidental 24.86 mile ride... 16 years ago
I had intended to spend Friday evening setting a personal distance-covered record. So far, two of my many bosses over the years have been triathletes. And my current boss always tosses out tidbits like what a "good" time for something would be. Apparently the record is doing around 25 miles in under…

So how's the biking going? 16 years ago
I was chatting with my boss (a competition-grade triathlete with several bikes who is much more hardcore than I am) about my average commute speed now that I've got a speedometer to measure it with. And on a flat segment of pavement, I can usually maintain 19-22 mph, which is allegedly impressive…