heat

Good lord. It's on the way to 100 degrees today, which would seem to be a perfect occasion to give in and take the climate-controlled subway to work. And yet, I rode. And it wasn't bad at all. Here's an incomplete list of tips for biking in ridiculous heat.

First of all, leave early. I have a day job, more or less, so I leave my house about 8:15am and arrive around 8:45. This morning, I left closer to 7:45, knocking a half-hour of sunlight energy from the day's heat. It's the morning commute you need to stay cool on. In the PM, I know a change of clothes and a shower awaits, so who cares about staying cool?

Second of all, start cool. I took a cool shower and stayed close to our little AC unit while getting dressed, so my core temp was as low as possible before leaving the house. This gave me about a 10 minute jump on the real heat, which is a good chunk of my 35 minute commute.

Next, GO SLOW. I've already written that commuting is not racing, and that goes double for crazy hot days. Strangely, it takes practice to go slow. You need to know your body and your route well, and lay off the gas twice as much as you think you need to. The only "hill" in my route is the Manhattan Bridge at about the halfway mark, and if I can stay cool (read: dead slow) while climbing it, I'm in pretty good shape. If I try to keep up with some punk on a fixie, I'm screwed. If, like me, you get competitive when people pass you, just try to turn it into a game in your head: "if I sweat less than you I win". I was in my granny gear this morning going up at about 5 mph. Leave early, relax, enjoy the view.

Then, find shade! I pay a lot of attention to where the sun is, and try to ride on the side where it's not. In the city, frequently the middle of the intersection is in blinding sun, but there's shade a couple of car lengths back. I found myself stopping well before certain intersections today, in some cases forty or fifty feet before the light, just so I could stand for a moment under the shade of a house or a single tree.

Avoid the backs of buses. They throw off a ton of heat in about a 10 foot radius. If you try to draft trucks and buses to save a bit of effort on most days, drop that habit when the mercury gets above 85.

In addition, all the normal stay cool things apply: drink lots of fluids, wear light fabrics in light colors, and for god's sake, pull over if you think you're gonna pass out.

way faster.

Bicycle wins the Commuting Challenge once again. Not even close.

lotus

Been trolling ebay looking for a good used road bike for Deb, and have been paying particular attention to mid- to late-80s Japanese bikes. This was the height of Japan-manufactured bikes before production moved to Taiwan. There are some great marques still floating around: Miyata, Fuji, some Nishikis, Bridgestone, and so on. I think I've got a bike or two lined up for her... more on that to come.

But while surfing, I found this achingly beautiful Lotus (a brand for which I've always had a soft spot), which was in my size, and didn't appear to ever have been ridden. Incredibly, no one placed a single bid on it, and I got it for the minimum bid. Despite the fact that I wasn't really shopping for me, I couldn't resist.

The frame is clearly quality (though I'm going to have to research the tubing), and the parts have some charm, too. That Sugino GT crank is haute sweet, as is that vintage leather saddle. I'm going to steal some parts off of it for Deb's new ride, and turn this into a single-speed bar bike (not a fixie, though). It's way too pretty to call it a beater.

I'll post pix when I get her, and document the build.

car

I have a new car. It's a 2008 Honda Fit Sport. I have had it for four months, during which time we've put on... wait for it... 842 miles. That works out to about 210 miles a month, at which pace we'll reach the first scheduled (100,000 mile) tuneup in about 39 years. Now we do need a car for some longer trips. My family is (mostly) about 3 hours away, and my girlfriend's family is (mostly) about 2 hours away, at which distance Zipcars are impractical. We did the math, and there was no combination of Zipcars and traditional rentals for frequent trips of that distance that came out any better than owning. So we started looking for a used car. The Fit was my first choice, but they have only been available in the States for about 18 months, so there was a dearth of used stock. We drove some other cars, but the Fit is ridiculously well designed. It's very Japanese. The designers started with a full-size, practical interior and wrapped the minimum amount of car around it. It has a tiny footprint for city driving, but a rather tall roofline, so the space you lose on the sides you gain to to bottom, for about the same net interior space as many midsize wagons. There's a very small class of things that would fit into an SUV and not into this car. The rear seats fold perfectly flat for a huge usable area; no weird bumps or seams. Plus it's way fun to drive.

I know I sound like I'm shilling for the car company, but it's not that... I just love when tools are well put-together and well thought-out. The Fit is such a success as a practical design object, you wonder why there aren't more cars like it.

The whole "new car" thing got me thinking about carbon footprint and the like. The Prius is a great car in this regard, but expensive. And at 37mpg, the Fit's got near-hybrid mileage for a lot less than a Prius (in fact, it's one of the cheapest new cars on the market). We're intending to keep this car for a long time, and gas doesn't look like it's getting any cheaper or cleaner.

But the biggest impact on my carbon footprint is that first number: 220 miles a month. When our old car died, we sorta became involuntarily car-free, and it's been pretty remarkable how few trips really need a car now that we have one that works properly. Here's where we've driven so far: a couple of visits to my dad in a town ill-served by mass transit, hauling a new computer home from the store, grocery shopping on winter days when the weather really sucked, and taking a bunch of my framed art to a show.

Here's the lesson: it's not suffering, or dogma. On any given day, I pick the best tool for the job. For most trips (commuting to work, getting groceries), that's the bicycle. Second choice is the subway or walking. The car fits in where needed and I don't really have a lot of guilt about that. It just struck me, after 4 months with the new car, how natural and easy it is to work with less. I honestly can't imagine ever needing more car.

spotted: cbgb's bar

My commute takes me up Bowery from Houston St. to Cooper Square, which incidentally is the shittiest stretch of pavement in the whole 6.5 miles. This morning at Bleecker, I spotted about a dozen or two workmen struggling with a long, bulky object... and then I realized hey, that's the CBGB's bar! It was like spotting the sheet-draped corpse of a famous drug overdose being wheeled out the back of a hotel.

They seemed to be taking great pains to remove it in a single piece (it was about 40 feet long, at least) and onto a flatbed trailer, so perhaps it's bound for the rumored CB's Las Vegas.

No pix, sadly. I lacked a camera today.

slow down

One of my pet peeves about the perception of bike commuting is that it requires a) a aerobics-class level of effort, and b) a shower at the end to clean up the stink from said effort. This is really counter-productive, since the benefits of commuting by bicycle can be achieved without (and even run counter to) sprinting your ass off.

This misguided perception comes first of all from the positioning of bicycles in the American marketplace, where they are still largely marketed as sporting goods, akin to a elliptical trainer or a set of running shoes. In a store where the top of the line bikes are the racing team models and "light light light" is the mantra, those who invest in a non-crappy bike are made to feel that if they're not attacking the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge as if it's the 21st switchback at Alpe d'Huez, they're doing it wrong. To those, I say: slow the hell down.

In European and Asian countries where cycling is taken seriously as a form of transport, most people ride in their street clothes on practical, upright, slightly heavy bicycles. It's understood that you only get sweaty enough to require a shower if you are making an exceptional effort. On hot, muggy days, you'd need a shower if you ran to work instead of walking. So we walk. It's no different on a bicycle.

So, how to slow down? Here's some things I've learned:

1. Practice. Yes, it takes practice to go slow. My natural tendency (especially riding in New York City) is to go faster than I should. I want to beat other riders to the end of the block. I want to outsprint taxis. I get competitive. It has taken me a while to tell that impulse to shut up and enjoy the ride.

2. Constant effort, not constant speed. I don't have a heart rate monitor or anything, but I've gotten pretty good at listening to my body. If I feel the flush of strenuous effort coming up, I dial back. The idea is to stay below the sweaty threshold. If I'm only looking at my speed (and lately I haven't even been riding with a cyclocomputer), I'll miss the signs that I'm making too much of an effort. The difference in wind (especially on the bridges) means that a 10mph average might be laughably easy one day and brutally difficult the next.

3. Gears: use 'em. I could never commute on a fixie for this reason. Maintaining a constant effort means constantly cycling through the gear choices to find that sweet spot. I find it easier to keep my heart rate down by pedaling faster with lower effort than by pushing hard on a big gear.

4. The ride home. It's cooler in the morning on the way to work, and my mellow, non-sprinty, Zen commute works better on the ride to. Coming home, I may feel the need to blow off steam, and I have a shower there. If I feel a sprint coming on, the return trip is the time to indulge it.