It's All About Performance

Further to my post about Citi-Biking to the Icarus screening, a commenter commented thusly:

Anonymous said...

Good post, but 50 minutes to go 8 miles?

January 11, 2018 at 11:08 AM

Two days after a blizzard, 15 degrees, riding through snowed-in bike lanes, fighting icy headwinds along the waterfront and stopping repeatedly to call and text with my wife who was having train trouble?

Yes, that 8-mile ride took me 50 minutes, but sure, whatever makes you feel better about yourself.

Sometimes bike people really are the worst.

Speaking of stats, today I took a ride on Ol' Foodie:

Unfortunately this picture is misleading since that short section of trail is snow-free only because of some freak confluence of wind direction and building and tree cover.  Otherwise, it was very slow going indeed and I stuck mostly to the road.  Still, as aesthetically questionable as Ol' Foodie is, it's not so bad in the context of dirt, now is it?

Okay, fine, it's still ugly as hell.

Anyway, my brief dirt detour aside this was mostly a road ride.  Typically in these conditions (warm, wet, lots of melting snow), my choice of bike is a no-brainer:

Alas, as I am now committed to one bike for the entire year this was not an option, so Ol' Foodie it was.

Anyway, I know what you're wondering (especially if you're a Fred, and especially especially if you're the dork who left the comment I mentioned at the beginning of the post):

"Did you sacrifice any performance?"  

Good question!  Let's go to the Strava:

Shit, sorry, wrong link:

Sweet Fancy Lobster I feel like a douchebag embedding a Strava ride.

Anyway, looking at the steepest climbs on my ride, I did the one by my house in 2:12, which is my slowest-ever time by a pretty decent margin:

As for the one I do up in Westchester before heading back, I did that in 2:26, which one second off a personal worst (and that personal worst was set on a longer ride so I was probably tired by that point):

So yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say the bike is definitely slowing me down.

Fortunately however this doesn't matter, for a couple of reasons:

• Except in cases where it's too snowy or wet I almost always incorporate some trails into my ride so the bike's aptitude in those conditions should make up for the fact that it's slower on the road;
• I really don't give a shit how fast I go anyway.

Still, I'm not going to lie: it was hard not to reach for the Milwaukee today.  It's not hard to imagine I'll be desperately grasping for excuses to break my resolution, and in fact I almost did just that when I broke a spoke on the ride today:

"Oh well, that's it, I guess the bike is ruined now," I declared.  Unfortunately not only is it an easy fix, but I also have a drawerful of spokes, one of which will no doubt fit, so it won't even cost me any money.  Plus, it didn't even really affect my ride since between the 31 remaining spokes and the dick breaks, once I removed the offending spoke I barely even noticed a difference.

Of course the flipside of using this as an attempt to excuse my way out of my resolution is to use it as a pretense for getting some new wheels ("How can I ever trust you again, wheel!"), and it's not hard to imagine that sticking to one bike will end up costing me far more money in the long run than simply continuing to spread my riding across a whole bunch of bikes would have.

Ah, who am I kidding, if I stick to this resolution through March it'll be a miracle.