Weekend: Better Living Through Bike Fit.

You'll be unsurprised to learn we had another nonstop weekend. scrottie got back into town Thursday evening, so some of the busyness has gotten compounded, but in good ways, overall.

Saturday, J and I drove down to Houston for some Bicycle Fitment with a guy named Tad Hughes. After the 600k brevet, it became very clear that J needed to take action on that front, and I've made enough changes to Froinlavin that I wanted to re-confirm a few things about my cleat and saddle situations. So we booked ourselves for two, back-to-back two-hour appointments.

While I didn't require nearly as many extensive changes as J, it was still a worthwhile experience. Towards the beginning, T chatted about his position in the overall industry, which is a tricky one, because he sits somewhere between what bike shops do and what healthcare providers do. He said he won't touch the biomechanics of running fit for that reason. Also because in a whole lot of cases, runners with various issues have those various issues because either their shoes are worn out and they need new ones, or because they have selected their shoes based on their appearance and not on their function.

So, bike fits. This is an aspect of the bicycling industry where there is room for improvement, but also for better education and perspective on the side of how bicyclists approach the activity. This is basically the second fit I've gotten - the first one happened over the course of obtaining Froinlavin, at R&E Cycles, the shop where I got 'er. In a lot of respects, I think it's better to have a fit done at a place that specializes just on the fit, because many bike shops wind up having a conflict of interest between their goal of selling you something and positioning you to ride optimally. R&E was actually good in that department, largely because of their overall goal of selling you a bike shop, not a bunch of stuff.

Anyway - T had both a good, informative evaluation process, and a good process for making and refining adjustments. My favorite part of the evaluation process was his butt sensor, which sits on top of the bike saddle and measures pressure points. From that, I learned that my saddle is actually on the narrow side of what would be ideal for me, even though it's a fairly wide saddle. That might make you go, "Well, no duh, it's a unisex saddle and men have more narrow pelvises than women," to which I would counter, "Well, sure, except most women's saddles are too short for me." Regardless, I felt vindicated in my saddle choice overall, because my weight distribution was even and good.

The larger adjustment for me was for my feet. I got Froinlavin with platform pedals, but have been riding with Shimano SPD's and some Pearl Izumi shoes. I'm about to replace the SPD's with Speedplay Frogs, but my foot troubles made me wonder if I needed to make some changes to my shoes. T set me up with some insoles and cleat shims, and I can tell that they have changed my foot positions considerably. It remains to be seen whether that change will be beneficial over the long miles of a brevet, but I'm optimistic.

Getting a bike fit done can seem kind of expensive - Tad charges $250 for each two-hour appointment, and he said that he gets a lot of customers who walk in expecting him to be a miracle worker for that price. So he said that in a lot of cases, most of his job consists of trying to get athletes to understand how reality works - he can get a person into a more optimal position on the bike, but he can't guarantee him or her instant returns on speed. If anything, it can take time to adjust to changes in position, so initial gains will be minimal or nonexistent. Longer-term gains, however, will be in the right direction - the direction of avoiding repetitive use injuries and developing good biomechanical power on the bicycle. I also think my mom might have an interesting time talking to him (that reminds me, mom, next time I'm in town, I'd be happy to have you do a gait analysis on me).

Fortunately, both J and I have pretty good perspective on that subject, so T didn't have to convince us on that front - he just had to evaluate us and talk to us about the adjustments we needed (J even more so than myself).

My friends in Arizona encouraged me for a long, long time to go in for a bike fit, but I never did while I was there. I think I understood their reasons for encouragement at the time, but I was under so many different pressures on so many different fronts (including financial pressures) that it was just never high enough on the list of priorities. At this point, though, going in for the fit was a validating experience. I'm still doing things with the goal of preparing myself for another good run at Paris-Brest-Paris, and I feel like I've been making a lot of positive strides in that direction over the past couple of years.

It's challenging, though - I've also started reading a book on training for long-distance cycling, and there's a part of me that's still resistant to the notion of training for bike rides because I always also want to train for rowing, and the two activities are compatible, but only up to a point. I'm mostly hoping the book will give me better perspective to work from, overall. If the book could just make the Texas summers more bearable, that would be a huge start. We've got an overnight brevet coming up in the middle of July, but other than that I don't feel particularly motivated to go out for long bike rides when it's this humid and hot.

Weekend: The Tomato Plants Explodeth Forth

gfrancie will be pleased to hear that last weekend's peaches did indeed get turned into sorbet, and the sorbet was, indeed, AMAZING. I actually made a combination mango-peach sorbet because I'd frozen a bunch of lusciously good, ripe mango cubes, and thought sorbet would be the perfect use for them. On top of that, when I told J about the sorbet plans, he declared that they would require something with coconut, so he cooked up some delicious coconut rice pudding, and he was absolutely correct. The peach-mango sorbet was creamy and fruity, and paired beautifully with the warm coconut rice pudding.

So, if you have access to these things, I would suggest that you follow suit as well, should you come across some deserving peaches. I couldn't tell you everything that J put into the rice pudding, but I know it involved coconut milk, cinnamon sticks and cardamom.

The sorbet and rice pudding all happened at a housewarming party on Saturday night, where we all stuffed ourselves silly on a number of other incredible nibbling things. Good times.

Sunday was devoted to other cooking projects. First, waffles for breakfast, with more peaches and some of the frozen strawberries and a dab of whipping cream. Then I used up all of the corn flour in making mediocre corn tortillas (ah well). scrottie went out and picked the week's tomatoes - two enormous grocery bags full - and then cooked up a loaf of bread (in parallel with a loaf I made), a half-gallon of marinara, an enormous pot of black beans, a huge bowl of fruit salad, and a big batch of enchiladas plus enchilada sauce (with the tortillas). The marinara and enchilada sauce barely put a dent in the tomatoes. After he wrapped up his 7-hour cooking bender, I dove back in and made a luscious half-gallon batch of ratatouille.

Between the two of us, we've managed to cook up ALL of the squashes, and we have enough food for dinners for the week. The tomato pile, however, is still wonderfully big, and we'll be getting more CSA veggies today.

I'm glad to have had this much success with the tomatoes this year, although I feel like the success has much to do with the vagaries of the weather - a good winter freeze to kill a lot of insects, plus frequent spring rain, plus relatively cool summer temperatures. On the other hand, it's also very much a product of having invested a couple of years in learning how growing conditions work here, and how to manage the challenges particular to this place. As my friend T put it, you just have to plant and grow things while remembering that you'll be sharing a substantial fraction of your crop with other animals, no matter what you do. If you plant with that in mind, you CAN finagle things to ensure you get a meaningful harvest for yourself while the birds and squirrels and snails also have their fun. On top of that, it really does take YEARS to build up good soil fertility, but in some ways that just makes it even more rewarding to finally reach that point.

Hypoxia

Do you know about the "dead zone" that occurs at the outlet of the Mississippi River? It's an interesting topic to think about, from a range of different perspectives. Recently, I came across a news piece about projections for the size of the 2014 hypoxic zone, and that got me to wondering, well, but how does the size of this year's dead zone compare to previous years?

The EPA is a good source of information for learning about Hypoxic Zones in general, and also has historic information about the Mississippi dead zone, including a nice animation at the end that shows patterns between 2009-2013.

I think it could be interesting to use something like this as a starting point for introducing students to the concept of nutrient cycling, along with comparisons between cycles for water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Start with the end product and observed phenomenon - the dead zone - then ask why and backtrack to talking about inputs and sources of variation. It would also incorporate some discussion about physiological causes of the dead zone (algae blooms and decomposition).