Spoke N' Word Cycles
102 Plaza
Socorro NM 87801
(505) 835-9673

Tuesday to Saturday–10 to 6
Sunday 12 to 5
Closed Mondays for bookkeeping and riding

Fixed and Single

6/24/08

Coughing up a lung in June?

So it's June and I am down with Bronchitis. Coughing up a lung and sounding like I have a death rattle. Go figure ... So If I wasn't sick what would I be doing? Training of course. And so I decided to pull out the old training log and to look up what I was doing in say ... 1983. Now realize that 25 years ago I was: 1) young 2) in shape 3) an OK runner ..as well as a rider. So here is a mid-summer racing workout from Friday June 24, 1983.

Warmup, Run to West Valley Junior College (nice synthetic track) ~ 3 miles.
5 sets: 110yds (:15 to :16) 110 jog recovery, 220yrds (:30 to :31) 220 jog recovery, 330yrds (:47 to :49) :90 to :100 recovery.
Warmdown: Run Home ~ 3 miles,

I wonder where my times would be if I tried this work out today. Speed work always hurts.

6/16/08

A long time coming.

So stay with me on this one. The fixed part is coming and the single part has been around for a long long time, 1994 to be exact. That's when I built my first dedicated single speed; a little vehicle with a frame built by Todd Pugsley, and parts supplied by Vance Sprock and Mike Galeotto (and a nod to Thomas Frischknecht).At the time, Mike had just moved to the Bay Area, from Chico, to go to work for Ritchey and race on the Ritchey (anti-gravity) DH team. A team loosely made up of Mike G and Terry T (Terry Tennet), ridding on Santa Cruz Tazman's (re-labeled). Through some bizarre twist of fate, I got mixed up with Mike, and he let me in on this new and growing trend. It seems that the guys in Chico ... at Paul Components, Cool Tool, and Mountain goat/High Altitude had begun to strip the gears off there rigs and where building up lite ... fast ... sexy ... simple ...single speeds. I didn't need much convincing. At the time I was the Service Manager at Palo Alto Bicycles, and every day/week/month, the new "next great thing" would roll in our door. The simplicity of a single speed appealed to me. One bike for all rides. So I sketched out a frame on the computer and called up Todd to get it built. I matched the frame up to the best components Ritchey, Chris King, Koski,and Paul had to offer and I never looked back.

So .... fast forward 10 + years. I'm married, finished Grad school, and opened my own shop in a small town in central New Mexico. I still have the Single Speed, and still ride it daily though my racing daze are far behind me. One morning in walks a guy representing Genuine Innovations, he is on his way back to Tucson from The Nationals at Angel fire and he says that the Trek Rep, Mike McGary, said he should stop by and check out my single speed. So the rep ducks out to the van to grab some demo product and papers,and while he's gone one of my mechanics says "Hey ... was that DeeJay Birch," I shrug ... look at the card he handed me and say "yeah". The mechanic goes into a long discourse about the racing marvel that is DeeJay.

So now I have the Self-proclaimed SS Endurance World Champion standing in my store, asking to see my single speed. When I finally wheel the bike out, it was enough to get DeeJay to laugh and ask when I built it. When I told him "1994" it only got a head shake out of him ... and the suggestion that I look at some of the more modern single speeds, including the cult of 29.

Give it another year, and I was back training and racing in the Single Speed class, but this time on a disc brake runnin', Stan's no-tubes clad, shrunk down big wheeled 29er. How things have come through in one big circle, now I sit in my own shop and every day/week/month, the new "next great thing" for single speeds rolls in our door (or is posted to my email).

So what does this have to do with my "blog"? Well, I found that I wasn't writing anything on the old blog, mainly because I just didn't care about the mundane things that most bicycle bloggers write about. Really, I don't care who is doing coke between races or why the local pro won't go national or why NORBA holds a National Championship for "Beginners" (no really ... how can you be a "Beginner" and qualify to go to a National championship?)

So what do I care about? Fixed Gears ... Single Speeds ... Training ... Racing .... Trails ... and all sorts of other things, and that is what you will find here. Anyway, I plan to leave up the Cytomax Margaritas, and add to the trail maps. This section will have the newest information posted at the top of the page ... but below the Marg recipe. Lets see how this goes.

There was a time when a good search engine would cough up a half a dozen recipes for “cytomax margaritas.” I know that the cycling community hasn’t given up drinking, and it is the heat of summer here … So here we go.

Cytomax Margarita

One packet of cytomax
2 oz. of water
2 oz. sweet and sour
4 oz. Triple Sec
2oz. Sweet lime Juice
6 oz. Tequila

Water bottle
Gel Flask
Blender
Ice

Preliminary mixing is all done in the water bottle. Measuring the amounts is done with the Gel Flask.

Combine your favorite flavor of cytomax with water in your water bottle, and shake. Add Sweet and Sour and Shake. Add triple Sec and Lime Juice, and shake. Hopefully, the cytomax is completely dissolved by now; if not keep on shaking. Fill blender with ice, and pour the contents of the waterbottle over the ice. Fill the flask with 6 oz. of your favorite Tequila. I am one who believes that Marg’s shouldn’t be made with top shelf Tequila. For margs, decent tequila, like Cuervo 1800 is good enough.

Add the tequila to the mix in the blender, and blend on high until perfectly mixed.
Pour off some of the marg into your water bottle and enjoy the perfect Cytomax margarita.

1/31/07

So we were just talking about this 3d drape of trail 13. This is the sort of image that will be in the new trail guide ... if I ever get it put together. I like the 3d drape better than a map and vertical profile. Vertical profiles basically suck. Most people can't get their head around the concept that there is vertical exaggeration in the profile. That is to say that since you are generally working with a horizontal axis that is in miles and a vertical axis that is in feet. Yeah sure everyone gets that a vertical profile looks steeper than the real world, but do they really get that the vertical might be set up on 100 foot increments and the horizontal on 1 mile (5280 foot) increments. Really a 3d drape gets the point across much clearer.

But that really isn't the point. The point of this is that I was just thinking about the production of a 3d image. Back ... not so long ago, when I was in grad school, it would have taken a good day to day in a half to make an image like that. All comand-line, no GUI's. Convert the data from the GPS to a shape file or arc file. Display the file in some bas coordinate system. Project the file to the same coordinate system as the base map. Overlay the two layers by picking known points. Get hold of the proper DEM ... perhaps project it to a TIN ... make sure that map datum and coordinate systems for all layers are the same. Combine layers and drape over DEM.

So how did I come up with the trail 13 pic? 10 minutes off the bike and I had down loaded the GPS data to my laptop. Push the correct GUI ... BINGO ... 3d. So much for a grad degree and $20,000.