We built this Evergreen SL (with S&S Couplers) for our good friend Tony at Velosmith Bicycle Studio on Chicago’s north shore. Tony wanted it for an annual ride he does with some friends. That ride involves a pre-dawn alarm clock, a train trip and a long, rambling food-filled ride back home.
Tag: Evergreening
On the Road – The Blayleys in Ireland, Part I
John says, in his ever-softening Irish lilt, “I am always trying to describe Ireland to people, and one of the things I say is ‘it’s just a rock, stuck in the ocean.'”
John Bayley and Pamela Blalock, collectively the Blayleys, are fixtures here in our Boston cycling community. We know of no couple who log more miles in a year than these two, everything from the Mt. Washington Hill Climb to Dirty Kanza to rambling tours of John’s home country. This fall, they spent three weeks day-tripping around the Emerald Isle, riding out and back from John’s home in Dublin, before heading to the west coast and then north to Donegal, a pilgrimage of sorts to many of Ireland’s natural, national treasures.
This churchyard sits in an idyllic corner of County Meath, north of Dublin. Many of the old buildings in Ireland can be hard to date just based on appearance. Some are quite old. Others are classic reproductions built in an older style by the wealthy landowners of the 16th and 17th centuries. Some are ruins. Some are museums. And they are all beautiful.
This is Ducketts Grove built in 1830, near Carlow, 60 miles south of Dublin. Surrounded by farmland, the approach to the old estate house is flat, if the road surface leaves something to be desired.
John says, “The riding there, it’s like mountain biking, but on tarmac. The roads curve and twist and undulate.” Over the years, he and Pamela have had good luck with the notoriously wet, Irish weather, but this trip delivered on all the damp, gray promise of that reputation. Pamela rode her Axiom SLX with S&S couplers, a bike we might call an Airheart SLX now, while John rode an Evergreen SL.
Here, Pamela climbs up a forbidding steep alongside a farm. Fenders can be a good idea here, if only to keep the ever-present manure off your backside. The Evergreen’s disc brakes, she reported, keep the bike cleaner, given the conditions, than a traditional rim brake.
John says everything about Ireland is “elemental.” The rain, the wind, the sun, the shift between them, constantly testing your mettle.
It was in their first week, while still based in Dublin, that Pamela encountered her first ever tail wind. Up to that point, she maintained, she had never felt the wind at her back. Sure, she had ridden miles into steady breezes, turned and felt fast on her return, but that was just well-earned speed.
Then, while riding the coast north of the city with their friend Declan on another “elemental” day, she finally felt it, a wind so strong she was able to pass miles without pedaling at all.
Come back to see more from the Blayley’s Irish adventure, and their pilgrimage to the west of the country, or read more of their adventures on their own cycling 7.
Evergreening – The Friday Morning Epic
This time of year, if you want to get a longer ride in before work, you’re leaving in the dark, so we charged up our lights, plotted and planned with GPS and a map, and rolled out while the rest of the world was still listening to the gurgle and pop of their coffee-makers.
We are riding trails all the time right now, Evergreening our commutes, slithering and snaking through every suburban patch of woods we can find, and it’s so much fun, that we find ourselves wanting to do more. So it was with eyes bigger than stomachs perhaps that we planned a 23 mile off-road gambol that we had little hope of completing and still getting to our desks/workbenches by work o’clock.
Optimism is priceless in the first week of December.
Cold weather riding (it was 25F at 6am) demands a little sacrifice. To get your temperature right over the length of the ride, you have to know you’re going to be a little cold at the start. In the dark, this is an even bigger challenge to surmount, but today we all held fast.
Through the woods behind the middle school, around the Reservoir, through the Great Meadow, then Vine Brook and Willard’s Woods, out to the Paint Mines and up the power line cut to the Landlocked Forest, the narrow boardwalks all glinting with frost, slick as fresh pond ice, leaves frozen in clusters with mud and sticks, the banked turns crunching under our tires.
It was just that kind of morning. We were too far from home (work), but having too much fun to turn back early. That led to an exhausting hammerfest once we’re back on paved road, each of taking our turn on the front, until we were here at Seven, hot coffee steaming, smiles all around.
Cold Season Adventure – Evergreening Vermont
There is no off-season when you love to ride bikes. We were in Vermont over the weekend, and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to put our tires on dirt, even though it was 19° F when we rolled away from the house, a fresh inch of snow on the ground.
This seemed a good test for our Evergreen SLs, set up with disc brakes and file-treaded 32mm tires. The dirt roads were packed hard in the cold, and traction was challenging in the steep up and down of our route. The funny thing about riding a bike in Vermont is that distances don’t mean that much. There are few stretches of long, level ground to travel, so you are almost always either going up or coming down.
Even in the bitter cold, we worked up plenty of heat by the end of the first climb. The challenge then is to stay warm on each descent, where any sweat you’ve managed to generate amplifies the freezing wind of your hard-earned plummet.
You’d be far better off gauging the difficulty of your ride based on total climbing feet.
We had been eying these roads for a while, driving by, wondering where they went, whether or not they connected. This is evergreening in its purest form, exploring what’s in front of you, looking for trails, cobbling together long, dirt routes that take in the scenery and shut out the traffic.
We were sure we could find some trails that connected us all the way north to Lake Whitingham without having to touch the highly-trafficked Route 100. Google Earth yielded some clues about where we might find those trails, and our Garmins banked the info to make the search more efficient.
We found this Corgi Crossing just before heading into the woods for the first real off-road section of the ride. We came around a corner, nearly at the end of a dirt road, and there it was, a small wooden bridge over a creek, proudly maintained and serving almost no purpose. Beautiful.
This sign was reassuring, although we wondered for a minute whether or not we qualified.
This part of Southern Vermont is crisscrossed by trails for cross-country skiing and snowmobiling, and we picked up on some markers shortly after entering the woods. Then it was a case of keeping our bearings as the snowy path dipped and swerved along, crossing small streams half-a-dozen times before spilling us out by the lake. You have to tip-toe across these crude bridges. Covered in snow and packed with leaves, they’re dangerous, and we thought ending up with one or both feet soaking wet at this temperature was maybe not a great idea.
Finally at the lake, we stopped to toast our first victory and realized we needed to drink quickly, before our bottles froze.
After the lake, we climbed up and over a dirt road lined by farms, before plunging back down into the town of Wilmington. From there it was up, up and up over another steep rise on the way to Mt. Snow.
The last turn on this route was a merciful right-hander onto this trail. The alternative was to continue up still another pitched climb. Instead we smiled like idiots, our tires crunching softly over the snow until we were rolling into Dover, the town clustered at the mountain’s base. We’d covered only 15 miles, but packed in 2000 ft of vertical, discovered some useful new trails, and spent 90 minutes in the woods, evergreening.
Matt Roy and the Art of Endurance
Matt Roy is a different kind of bike rider. Most of his exploits transpire in the middle of the night, alone or with a single partner, down a road not likely to show fresh tire tracks. He’s an ultra-cyclist and the other half of MM Racing with his wife and current single-speed cyclocross World Champion Mo Bruno Roy. High points of this season, for Matt, included completion of a full brevet series, 200km, 300km, 400km, 600km and 1000km. He rode from Bremerton on the western shore of Puget Sound near Seattle, down the Oregon coast and up to Crater Lake in Oregon, and then beyond that to Klamath Falls, a three day, 625-mile odyssey undertaken with close friend David Wilcox.
Riding a bike for three days is not a thing that most cyclists, even the most ardent feel inclined to do. The thing that’s hard to fathom is how you avoid the late night crisis of confidence and keep riding. Matt says, “Part of it is built on desire. Part is practice. You build up to it in palatable chunks, basically four hour units. You can ride for four hours, and then stop and assess what to do next. On the way to Crater Lake we were super-tired, but we were never not having fun.”
He laughs when he says, “All great art requires suffering. Seriously though, there are peaks and valleys both mental and physical, but if you didn’t fall asleep on a picnic table in a park at 2AM because you were so tired, they wouldn’t be worth doing. What keeps me going is that you see so much cool stuff over the miles. Nature changes so much from place to place, from urban to boreal forest to farm land to rushing rivers.”
If the Pacific Northwest provided Roy’s high point, the Green Mountain Double Century served as counter point. He was riding the GMDC with the aim of setting a new solo rider course record. He was, he says, “racing to prove something to myself,” and after 13 hours of hard work he was on track for a 15-16 hour finish. In spite of the rainy morning, the roads were fast and dry.
And that’s when it happened.
“I had just gone up Tate Hill Road,” he says, his tone foreshadowing the crash to come, “basically a wall of a road, so steep, and I was thinking ahead to the next flat section, the next 30 miles, bombing down Chunks Brook Road, and I just hit something. My right hand came off the bar, and I swerved into the sand at the edge of the road, and the front wheel went out and I flew. I ripped both levers off the handlebar. I laid there. I was sure I had broken something. My elbow was wrecked.”
At this point, Mo says, “I went into paramedic mode. I saw his elbow and knew it needed a dozen stitches. We cleaned him up, put him in the car, but the thing about GMDC is that it gets into all these remote corners of the state. Phones don’t work a lot. Eventually we found our way to the hospital in Bennington. It took them an hour to clean out his elbow, and he ended up with 16 stitches, four of them internal.”
The crash left him with severe whiplash. Some weeks later he saw a chiropractor who performed a “life-changing adjustment.” His elbow had hit the ground so hard in Vermont that 1000km into his west coast ride, a small abscess formed and later gave up a further small handful of rocks and soil. Can you imagine it? And he was “never not having fun.”
The crash cancelled a lot of Matt’s plans, but if anything, that seems to have made him more intent on finding a different way to ride.
He says, “I have this amazing bike (Seven Evergreen PRO), and I want to sort of throw as many stupid ideas at it, as I can. I rode the length of the aqueducts between Waltham and Wachusett. I want to do more adventurous, absurd riding, rather than structured events. I’m finding those unique adventures far more attractive now. I want to make some wrong turns, plan less. Mo and I have both said, ‘Let’s make more mistakes.'”
We should all fail so beautifully.
GMDC photos by Dave Chiu.