Honk my hooter, look at what happened last night on the ride home from work.

I was just reading a post from a normally indefatigable friend of mine who’s struggling with motivation to keep racing. My guess is that, rather than a surrender, this is a small crisis of conscience that will burn off whatever doubts she has about taking it to the next level, because she’s a bad-ass and everything she’s written about it thus far has been excitement and fire and joy.

But it did get me thinking about my relationship to cycling, and the things I’ve accomplished this year, and where I want it to go from here. I’ve logged about 4000 miles this year, most of them commuting miles, but at least a thousand of them were training for and riding my first century back in August.

As I began training for that ride, I’d thought I might be taking my first step towards getting into serious road riding. I put in pre-dawn miles and went after hills and thought about how heavy my bike was and how thick my tires were. I ate little blocks of gummi caffeine and sugar, occasionally found someone else going fast to trade drafting duties with, and wondered if I should get serious and trade the pedal clips for real cycling shoes and clipless pedals. I thought about joining a club and riding a featherweight bike in a paceline on Saturday mornings, and derided myself for having a triple crank.

Some things have become clear to me since then, most notably that performance road riding’s not my cup of tea. Occasionally I take on something that seems big and challenging out of curiosity or to prove something to myself, or in the case of the Livestrong Challenge because I wanted to do something good and difficult. But the truth is that I just don’t have much of a passion for pushing the envelope, my competitive fire doesn’t burn all that hot, and that anything that starts feeling like Serious Business loses my attention. I’m bliss-driven.

For example, I’ve gone weeks without making it out to a disc golf course, but I’ll still get up at 5:00 a.m. a few times a week to head out to a field with a stack of Rocs or Teebirds for an hour or so before work. There’s a peripheral motivation to become a better disc golfer and a stronger competitor, but that’s not really why I do it. I do it because I love throwing discs, I love shaping lines in the sky and watching the disc follow them. If there were no courses nearby, I’d still get out to a field because I love the snap of the throw and the shape of the flight, and I experience a lot of perfect moments doing it.

The perfect moments I have on bikes are blissful and joyous, very few of them have involved much suffering. The best rides I’ve had this year have been on partly cloudy days in the mid-60’s, flying down brick alleys on 60mm balloon tires with my hands wrapped around a pair of Albatross bars. I love riding my Xtracycle with my daughter to her school. I love wrenching on our bikes and building wheels and tuning drivetrains until they’re quiet and smooth. I love bunny-hopping and off-street bike trails and saying Good Morning to crossing guards on my way to work and cranking and rolling and flowing with traffic and breathing the air and having nothing but the sky above me the whole time. My brass bell is one of the prettiest tones I can think of. Sometimes, I like to go slow.

There’s a hundred things that make me smile about being on a bike, but there’s not a single one of them that a heart-rate monitor would make any better for me. Sometimes I wish that weren’t the case. Sometimes, I think it would be awesome to be driven to achieve peak performance, to measure my effort by my perseverance and endurance, to conquer and win. And I enjoy watching folks with those qualities struggle and grind and endure, I’m amazed by their superhumanity (as well as their humanity) and take delight in their performances. But the only measures of my cycling experience that really motivate me are grins and laughs.

I realized that I wasn’t dissatisfied because my Long Haul Trucker was the wrong bike for how I wanted to ride, but rather that I wasn’t doing the kind of riding I truly love doing (for which the Trucker actually is perfect). I put the fenders back on, the clips came off the pedals (though I may pick up a pair of these or these for traction), and it’s getting mustache bars at the earliest opportunity.

I also picked up a beautiful Paramount Series 3 earlier this year, and had plans to outfit it for road riding. But I think I’m going to put riser bars, platform pedals, and 28’s on it instead. I may not have room for a serious road bike in my stable, but I can make room for a zippy street bike. Especially if it’s fun to ride.

Twilight comes late enough to feel like summer, but the waning daylight is evident, and it’s dark when we put the kids to bed. The transition from summer to fall, however, hasn’t been so much a cross-fade as a knife-switch. It took a while for summer’s dog days to arrive, finally coming in August, but in the span of the last 3 days, it’s gone from sleeping-on-top-of-the-sheets hot to it’s-a-great-day-for-football mild. I half expected to come outside this morning, watch every leaf on our street turn red in thirty seconds, and crash to the sidewalk all at once.

This year’s three-month bivouac at the pool is winding down, and once again the last days inspire both panic and relief. The pool itself is a delight, but it’s the grounds and the community that keep us in its orbit all summer long. We let the kids off leash to run with their toddler cohort, cook on community grills while our kitchen remains cool and un-thrashed, get to enjoy a beer (and sometimes more than one), and mingle with our friends in a pleasant meadow. We don’t even have to arrange to meet anyone. I mean, where else are they gonna go?

On the other hand, it tends to dominate the season. In early June, The missus was frantically trying to get the kids and I out the door. I hesitated, looked back, expressed my need to do something about our unfit-for-habitation living room and said I’d meet them later. “What are you talking about?” she said in disbelief, “The pool’s open! We’ll clean in September! Let’s go!” So, in that sense, we’re looking forward to blowing the dust of our project list and seeing what else there is to do.

One big project did get off the ground, though. The Wife’s other gig has been kick-ass this season. We’ve been blessed with berries and peaches and bread and all sorts of delicious local produce. She also came into this season hell-bent to realize a vision, a bike clinic, staffed with volunteers, who’d teach people about bike maintainence, do some repairs, and generally encourage people to get their bikes on the road. I have to admit, I was skeptical that it could work (and leary of being sucked into it since I already take over the kids on Saturday mornings while she’s market-managing). But lo and behold, smart, motivated people jumped right in, got folks signed up, and the results have been stunning. I worked one Saturday with 2-4 other volunteers, and didn’t stop from the opening bell until an hour after market closed. We’d helped over 30 people tune their bikes, and several of those folks have turned around and become volunteers since then. Meanwhile, some enterprising yoots down ’round the Bloomingdale Farmers’ Market have started up their own bike clinic, which we stopped by on Sunday morning, and it was totally hoppin’.

I gotta say, I’d be proud just to know my wife if I wasn’t lucky enough to be married to her.

Cledus and I had an incredible summer together, logging over 1700 miles and climbing almost 60,000 feet since Memorial Day, bringing my totals for the first two-thirds of the year to over 3100 miles and over 100,000 feet of climbing. Our many miles together culminated in my first ever century, which was far and away the baddest-ass thing I’ve done this year, and raising money and riding for Team Fatty made it even more meaningful. I’ll likely do more centuries, but I’ll always regard that one with a special fondness.

So into fall we go. With school starting, children to transport, backpacks to haul, and layers to carry, the swift-strike of a commute I make on Cledus will be replaced most mornings with the happy rolling melody of Nigel’s fat, creamy tires chewing up bricks, asphalt, and gravel with gusto. To tell you the truth, it’s hard to be sad about the transition when they both put such a big grin on my face. And while I’ve certainly enjoyed racking up road miles, the completion of the big ride and the crisp shift in seasons will mark a return to a more balanced palette of adventures. I’m itchy to throw plastic at metal, which I mostly gave up for training, and longtail camping trips up the C&O are definitely in order now that mosquitoes are no longer part of the experience and there’s enough snap in the air to make the first cup of coffee extra awesome.

Speaking of longtail projects, we’ve convinced more of our friends to take the plunge! They asked what it would take to make it happen, I pointed them towards a beautiful mid-90’s Trek 930 being sold nearby, they wisely jumped on it and pulled the trigger on an Xtracycle kit. And, get this, I’ve got the green light to make an appointment with the powder coater to make the whole rig Taxicab Yellow. (I’m trying to track down checkerboard decals, too, let me know if you’ve got a line on ‘em.) It’s going to be beautiful, and hopefully we’ll get it on the road quickly so we can get them out on the trail sooner than later. They’re excited. I’m excited for ‘em.

All this makes it sounds as if I’m done with road miles. Not so! In fact, another transition is in store as we ride into autumn. I had to face the fact that it’s just not the time or place for me to own a kick-ass single-speed mountain bike. I don’t ride singletrack here, as much as I think I’d like to, so the 4one5 has been relegated to the occasional urban assault, which consists mostly of delighting myself with bunny hops off speed bumps and tearing up the neighbors’ lawns. It needs to be on real trails, wearing knobbies, eating dirt. Meanwhile, I’ve developed an itch for a real road bike. Nothing too fancy, mind ya, but something a little more lithe and a little less linebacker than the Cledus. We’ll have to see what happens.

There’s one more big sunny barbecue left before it’s time to get the long sleeves and hoodies out (or, in the case of my San Francisco brethren, to put them back and get ready for things to warm up). And then it’s harvest and costumes and turkeys and reindeer from there on out.

So whatcha got planned for the end of summer?

My fast commute route takes me down southwest on Michigan Ave towards Washington Hospital Center, where I pick up some brick alleys that hug the stonewalls of historic Glenwood Cemetery. I cut west at Channing, turn south for a block on First NW, and then, if the light’s green, lean into the turn west onto Bryant St, which winds downhill below McMillan Reservoir towards Howard University. That little stretch is a real pleasure.

I followed that route this morning, the air was cool and misty, the streets wet from last night’s rain. I came down First, slowed substantially given the wetness of the streets, and I remember thinking as I approached the corner of Bryant, “Oh, neat, they repainted the crosswa–” That was right before my tires got quiet, then made the very quiet hiss of rubber squeegeeing water off glass.

I’d only been going about 10mph or so, but I probably dived 15 to 20 degrees into the off-camber turn, and that little bit of rain on fresh crosswalk paint wasn’t going to hold me at any speed with any significant lean. Fortunately, The transition from upright to laid-down was pretty smooth and not very dramatic.

My right shin’s got a nice strawberry patch, and I can feel the bruise on my hip growing, but otherwise I came out fine. I gotta say, the Trucker’s a well built piece of steel, it’s in fine shape. My two-day-old Nitto Noodle bars (graciously discounted by City Bikes since the old ones got bent in a wreck*) picked up some gouges on the outside of the drops. Certainly annoying, but I haven’t taped them yet, and a little wet-dry sandpaper will take the rough parts off okay. At least they’re still straight. Also: Dickie’s shorts, though they occasionally grab tall water bottles when you get out of the saddle, are indestructible. Mine show no damage, not so much as a frayed cuff.

The rest of the commute was uneventful, slow, and as uniformly upright as I can remember being on a bike. I rode the whole rest of the way like I was on icy steel construction plates. It also got me thinking about road racing, in that I have no idea how people come down mountain descents doing 40-50 mph, in the rain, on 23c tires, with 50-100 other people packed in tightly around them.

Score for this week: one crash, one wipeout. Neither resulted in serious injury or damage, and I was thankfully wearing my helmet for both. Nevertheless, I gotta say, only 6 days into August, and it’s got a commanding lead for 2009’s coveted “Month I Hated The Most This Year” award.

Incidentally, is there a reason crosswalk paint doesn’t have non-skid material mixed into it?

*It’s true! Saul at the downtown store told me they just instituted a policy by which you get a 5-10% discount on parts you’re replacing because of a collision or wreck! Another reason to love City Bikes, folks.

I had jury duty this morning, so I had to hit the road early to get down to the US District Court building down at 3rd NW and Constitution. I didn’t end up having to go though, because about a mile from home, where 9th St NE passes under the Michigan overpass, someone drove their car into me.

It was a bizarre collision, actually. I often cut through the CUA Metro Station on the way to Monroe, because it seems safer than crossing Michigan (which local motorists treat like a freeway) at 10th. But I’m rarely there at that time of the morning, when people are dropping train commuters, and it was pretty busy with people slowly making their way around the circle. I came up to the stop sign on 9th, and came to a stop. I freely confess that I don’t always come to a complete stop there, any more than the cars do, but I do when there’s shuttle buses and cars coming through. This morning, I full stopped.

And as I was sitting dead center in the middle of my lane, behind the white line, a woman in a red Corolla came up to the intersection and started to turn left onto 9th. At first, I thought she was making the turn a little too tight, but figured she’d correct and go wider, since I was standing there right in front of her. But she kept turning, and started to accelerate. I started yelling at her to stop her car, since I was directly in front of her, but she kept coming. And when it was clear that she wasn’t going to stop and I couldn’t get out of her way, I jumped up and right as hard as I could, holding on to Cledus with my left hand, and tried to dive.

I pulled it off to the extent that the damage was minimal. She thumped the bike but it bounced off her hood since I was no longer holding it down on the ground. I mostly got out of the way, but took a pretty good thump to the left knee. And once she’d hit us, Cledus and I, she finally stopped. More than half her car was in my lane, and the center of her engine was squarely over where I’d been standing.

Now, I didn’t know who was behind the wheel of the Corolla, but I had adrenaline shooting out of my eyes and was vividly aware that someone had just driven their car directly, head-on into me (at low speed, thankfully), and was um… upset. Furious. My flash reaction was to start punching the car as if it and I were in a bar and it had just taken a swing at me. I didn’t, but I did start yelling at the driver to get out of the car, with several profanities interlaced, loud enough to wake folks all over the Metro station from their Monday morning fog, screaming questions at her about what she was doing and why she was driving straight into me. She yelled back at me, “I didn’t see you! I didn’t see you!”

What followed was typical, and I made a bunch of mistakes. The only person who saw the whole thing was the Comcast cable guy in the van right behind me, who got out and calmed me down, and then got into his van and left (which I honestly didn’t notice him doing). One witness in the wind. I let her move her car out of traffic while I called the police without getting a picture of it, which was another mistake. There was no wreckage or skid marks, and once the officer arrived she claimed that I was in her lane, and I’d hit her car. Not only was she lying through her teeth, but she was yelling at me indignantly like she believed it. I was able to find 3 people who’d seen what happened shortly after I yelled at her to stop the car, and could positively place her car in my lane, but the one person who saw the actual collision wasn’t there to talk about it. I’m waiting to hear from Comcast to see if they can help me find the vanishing cable guy.

She didn’t get so much as a ticket.

The bike’s amazingly okay, the only thing wrong with it is that my noodle bars are a little lopsided, they’ll need replacing, and the mudflap on the rear fender tore away. But the brake levers are fine, the wheel’s true, the forks are straight, and there’s not a scratch or a dent anywhere on the frame so I suppose the dismount-and-dive worked out.

My left knee’s got some stiffness, but nothing’s torn or broken, and I have full mobility. The quart of cortisol coursing through my blood vessels probably did more long term damage than the actual impact, but I’m putting the knee on ice for the day and keeping an eye on it just in case.

The worst part of it, really, is having to re-evaluate whether or not I want to keep riding the streets of DC. My guess is that this won’t keep my off my bike, but Mrs. Higgins and I do a lot of riding around on the big bikes with the kids, we go the long way and keep to smaller streets, and ride as safely and defensively as we can. But that woudn’t have helped in this situation, and that’s really the scariest part of it to me. There was no sun in her eyes, the lighting was perfect, I was standing at a dead stop in the middle of my lane, upright, and she was headed straight at me. How am I supposed to drive and maneuver defensively when I’m stopped in the middle of my lane, directly in front of an oncoming driver? How do you account and compensate for a driver whose blind spot is 10 to 30 feet directly in front of her?

I love DC in ways that I could not have known I would when we moved here 3 years ago, but I can say without reservation, as someone who came of driving age in Southern California and lived with a car in San Francisco, that nowhere I’ve ever lived compares to DC for shitty drivers. (Its been pointed out to me that I’ve never lived in Boston, so perhaps it gets worse.) At first, I thought it was because so many of DC’s motorists come from other places, and bring the bad habits of their native roads with them, making it impossible to have a common road culture where everyone knows which rules to bend. But now I’m not so sure, the locals are dangerous too. Sure, most people drive pretty well, and every day I consciously take note of those drivers that acknowledge my presence, and give waves and smiles whenever I can. But the bad ones here more than compensate for the competent ones, and they’re dangerous.

I’m sure this isn’t an uncommon reaction, but I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about whether or not I’m willing to do that with my kids anymore, or for that matter, willing to risk making them orphans. I know this without lengthy reflection: Davis, Madison, Boulder, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and all of Holland are at the top of the list of candidates for our next (and perhaps last) move. And maybe sooner than later.

[UPDATE]: It was pointed out to me that if I’d gone ahead and rolled through that stop sign and either zipped across before she got there or slithered around her aft, I wouldn’t have gotten hit. How about that, Mr. Forester?

[UPDATE AGAIN]: After some initial anxiety, I did ride in today, on Cledus Jr. I figured a low-geared single speed would keep my top speed down, which would be good for getting back in the saddle. Also, his offroad agility would give me the opportunity to immediately jump a curb off the street and onto someone’s lawn if I freaked out. All in all, it went pretty well, and I smiled/waved at least 5 people on the way in.

[UPDATE YET A THIRD TIME]: Here’s an animated dramatic recreation, but without me yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop your fucking car!“, the subsequent crashing noise, or the raging river of profanity that followed.

My favorite moment during yesterday’s festivities came while watching the swearing-in and post-swearing-in speech, I realized I was needlessly bracing myself for cringes that weren’t going to happen. There were no ‘Nookyuller’ moments, nothing about putting food on my family, and I realized that I could relax a bit. Then, a little while later, I realized (again) that President Obama is not simply an adequate speaker that won’t embarrass us with his grammar and pronunciation, but that he’s an excellent speaker that leaves one feeling better than they did before he delivered the speech. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve enjoyed seeing a presidential speech delivered, that was really nice.

And you know, I thought my farewell feelings for Bush would have been angrier, but they weren’t. I just can’t attribute as much evil to the guy as I can to someone like, for example, Kissinger. There’s a lot of people in Washington that are sharp, informed, and experienced enough to know what kind of evil they’re unleashing on the country and the world, after 8 years I’m not convinced that George W. Bush is one of them.

Cheney, by contrast, I expected to be sent back to wherever he came from via a circled pentagram drawn with magic powder on the floor of a red-walled room in the White House’s deepest basement room. Ya know what I mean? Like the kind of room where the door is made with 8″ oak timbers, and has a small window with thick, wrought iron bars and a message carved into it in Latin?

But now that they’re gone, I wish them a pleasant retirement and beseech them both to resist any temptations to come out of it. For anything. Neither of them should probably do any vacationing near The Hague, for that matter.

So, the first real ride of this glorious new America, a seemingly routine commute in to work this morning, was in the 20 degree range, but the wind was light and the sun shone brightly. After I made egg sammiches for the family, Rebbie and I rode together to drop Ruby off at school, which was a rare treat, and then I headed in to work solo. I did add a quarter mile to the trip finding out why North Capitol was completely closed off south of Washington Hospital Center in both directions. Evidently there was a fire on the west side of North Capitol, just south of Adams, that required a bunch of pumpers and a lot of water. And you know what happens when you spray the street with a few acre-inches of water in the early morning hours of a 20 degree day? You guessed it, a sheet of ice between a quarter-inch and an inch thick for about 3-4 blocks, but with formations like you’d expect to see close to a recent lava flow. So if your north-south or south-north commute this morning seemed way, way worse than usual, don’t blame the out-of-towners.

After that, the ride was wonderful. Not just wonderful like, zippy and without confrontation. Wonderful like, just this side of Sister Maria running and singing across Austrian mountain meadows. You see, last weekend I replaced my old drop bars with Nitto Noodle Bars, and my first impression after riding them for more than two test blocks is that these bars are alive with the Sound of Music. They’re nice and wide, and the top section is swept back a bit, about as much as my wrists need to feel perfectly natural. The ramps behind the brake levers are almost flat and super comfy, and the drops are dreamy. Every place on them is a usable hand position, and all the ones I’ve found so far have been really comfy. Seems like something I should review after I’ve had more time with it, more on that later.

All in all, I gotta say, it’s been a great weekend, great couple days, and it’s so good to wake up in Obama’s America. I’m not a fanboy or anything, but at some point early in Bush’s second term, I kinda started believing deep down that it was never going to end, and that this day would never come. It’s here, and it brought Noodle Bars with it. Rad.

How were your Inaugural Festivities?

This morning after dropping Ruby off at school, I was driving Nigel through Catholic University and headed for my regular commute when I decided to take a big, long way around instead.

Rather than take the direct northeast-to-southwest route, I cut west all the way to Mt. Pleasant and dropped into Rock Creek Park, where I offered a pump to a fellow commuter who was struggling on squishy, flattish tires. I continued down to the National Mall and rode along the reflecting pool, which is lined on both sides, the full length of it, with porta-potties. Evidently there’s a biggish event happening there soon, and they expect a lot of bathroom usage, perhaps it’s for a huge chili cookoff? Finally, I did a lap around the Washington Monument and headed to work.

None of this is remarkable, mind you, but it was about 30 degrees and gray, so it wasn’t that it was unseasonably warm and pretty and I just didn’t want to go inside. I was riding Nigel, so it wasn’t that I was in a zippy groove and didn’t want to stop racing. And it wasn’t that Washington Hospital Center was so stunningly beautiful that I was drawn to its charm. No, I suddenly decided to double my inbound commute because I wanted the miles, and the climbing feet, because I wanted the points, because I want to level up.

There’s still a ton of little things left to build and fix on it, but there’s enough there now to make me want to see those points add up and that level click over. If you want to play, or just poke around, feel free to join in.

Incidentally, the extra miles were pleasant all on their own, after all riding Nigel’s a good time and I would have enjoyed them whether or not I was scoring them. But that initial nudge at the corner of Michigan and Irving, where I chose the long ramble over the short commute, that came from my hunger for points and my desire to level up. It seems like BiKE GAME! is tingling, and that means it’s working. Pretty cool!

I haven’t really had a bad ride yet this winter, which I often force myself to remember on mornings like these.

It’s not the cold, in fact it’s not really that cold and the miracle of technical clothing means I’m typically warm and cozy, kept dry from the outside and even from the inside. We haven’t even gotten snow yet. I’m hoping we do see at least a little winter weather so I can make and try out some of the homemade studded tire recipes on the internet. And after all, this is the Mid-Atlantic, it’s not Buffalo or Chicago or Minneapolis or even New York City winter. This is pretty easy as far as winters go.

But on mornings like this, 33 degrees and raining, I take a look outside and my first thought is, “maybe today’s not such a bad day to take the Metro in to work.” Thankfully, riding the Red Line is only a little more pleasant than hopping to work in a gunnysack with my shoes on the wrong feet, so that thought didn’t have long to live.

Rain that’s just this side of freezing initially gives me the kind of anticipatory dread one usually associates with a dentist holding a hypodermic needle. Of course, that wouldn’t get Ruby to school, we’d have to walk, though that might be nice too. I also haven’t ridden the Metro in something like 11 months, and that streak is starting to mean enough to me to stand up to my initial resistance. And without fail, every time I get to pedalling my trepidation falls away and I’m fine with it.

But Nigel’s still without fenders, which means we’re puddle stompin’. Yes, I ordered some. But, no, 26″ 60mm Planet Bike Cascadia ATB fender won’t fit over 60mm Fat Franks no matter how much you want them to. Frank’s Fat, and that’s that. 29’s have been ordered, but it didn’t help this morning. Sylvie’s got fenders but I didn’t want to leave Rebbie without them for the day, so Nigel it is and Nigel it was and I knew it was going to suck but I figured what the hell let’s go.

And it was great, it took all of about 3 minutes before my inner voice was chiding me for even considering taking the Metro behind a little rain. Wool is magic. Capilene is magic. You put the two of them together and it’s twoo wuv. I couldn’t help but get soaked down where the action is below the knee, but the magical wool socks and shpants joined forces with the magical Capilene long johns and I was never even chilly.

It is also double-plus-thumbs-up to have warm slippers and a change of pants stashed in the desk, I hope I don’t have any meetings today.