Fixpert

Alright, let’s make this quick so I can get back to posting regularly. Here’s a quick catch-up list of what I’ve been doing for the last 3 weeks:

• Amazing trip to Maui for friends’ wedding
• Drawing a LOT
• Playing guitar a LOT
• Struggling to adjust to the lack of seasons in SoCal (more about this below)
• Lots of extra hours at work
• Caught a cold or something, better now
• Getting treatment for shoulder injury from my accident a few months back
• …which means, not a lot of exercise
• …which means, me not riding bikes much and feeling a bit sad about it
• Current soundtrack: Bobby Womack

I’ve generally been feeling a bit sentimental lately, and I don’t really like to post when I’m emotional. It’s like drunk-dialing, you just regret it later. Unlike drunk-dialing, I can go back and erase any posts which I regret, but I’d rather just save myself some time and skip it altogether.

SoCal: Where are the Seasons?

As much as I feel like the Princess and the Pea complaining about the perfect SoCal weather, I am finding myself missing the East Coast Autumn. I’ve moved around a lot in my lifetime, but I’m mostly an East Coast soul. I’m a Georgia Peach for cryin’ out loud! My body, mind, soul are all hard-wired to the seasons.

I’m used to adjusting my whole mode based on the time of year. Winter is the time to buckle down and work on some projects inside since the weather is crummy. Spring is rebirth, your soul is thawing out, everything is alive and green again — including you. Summer is the fun, child-like play outside in the sunshine time.

And Fall?

Fall is full of natural beauty, but a bit of sentimental sadness, as you know you’re headed into Winter. The look, sounds, and smells of Fall are so distinct — the color of the leaves, and the crunching of them under your feet. The way your nose tickles with the dry air. Staticky hair after pulling a sweater over your head. Orange. Rust. The weather is starting to get cooler, so you pull out some favorite clothes that you haven’t seen in months. The rain, the cold, the wind. The air is so crisp and clear, the colors of the sky and leaves are brighter and seem to be more saturated and vibrant than any other time of the year. It’s like you just took a windshield washer to your eyeballs.

But…in SoCal? It’s…I don’t know, about five degrees cooler than it was during the Summer. Otherwise, it’s the same. My biological clock is telling me to start switching into Fall mode again, but nothing else around me is triggering that feeling, so I’m feeling a disconnect. It’s terrible to complain about such beautiful weather, I guess I’m just surprised that it’s an issue at all.

Oh, haha, one more thing, I saw some employees stacking pumpkins outside of the local grocery store and I muttered to myself “Posers!” Haha, that is just ridiculous, but I thought I’d share.

Holler if you hear me!

I drew this sometime in 2003. This is a guy Andrew that I took a printmaking class with in college.

Here’s a crappy-quality sketch I put down in my sketchbook a few years ago. I think this is from 2003, I was feeling a bit cynical about Bush, oil wars, SUVs, American urban planning, lack of good mass transit, and the troubles of being a cyclist. At least there’s a happy ending!

I’ve put a transcript down below, since some of the handwriting is hard to read.

OILFIELD’S ABLAZE!

America’s jowels drop as gas prices soar!

(hugest SUV ever)

Family’s gaze in horror at the terrifying images of war.

America’s highway system seizes and becomes a vast network of parking lots.

Suddenly, the absence of a functional public transit system becomes apparent.

The economy buckles as fearful (and sluggish) consumers cling to the safety of their sofas.

Ok, it seems weird, but all of a sudden everything switches up and people start riding bikes all over.

This morning I went to Ladies Track Day at the ADT Event Center Velodrome in Carson, CA. It’s an indoor velodrome, made from wood (Siberian Pine to be exact) with 45° banked turns. It’s the first and only permanent indoor cycling track of international standard in North America. You can read more about it on the official web site for the Carson velodrome.

Yep, track cycling. Single speed, fixed gear, no brakes, no coasting.

This morning’s clinic was for women of all ages and experience levels, but the focus was mostly on experienced cyclists (road, mtb, etc) that were new to the track. I fell into this category. I have been a serious cyclist for 5 years now. I have done fair amount of road riding, some mountain biking, and lots of single speed and fixed gear riding through city traffic. But today was my first day riding on a track, and let me tell you I immediately fell in love with it.

We started the morning with a presentation by Roger Young, the venue’s Track Director. He has a ton of experience racing on the track and coaching riders and so we were pretty lucky to be learning from someone with so much expertise. After Roger walked us through the terminology, rules and etiquette, and equipment of track cycling, we went down onto the track to try it for ourselves.

The center was nice enough to let us use their rental bikes for free! Some ladies brought their own track bikes. I have a fixed gear, but it’s set up for urban riding and not suitable for the track — although after today, I might see if I can switch it up to meet the track requirements. So I was outfitted with a rental bike, a nice 54″ Felt frame which was about 5″ too big for me, but surprisingly it felt fine. One of the gentlemen helping out at the track put my Time mtb pedals onto the bike for me, and I was ready to roll.

I spent the first 5 or 10 minutes rolling around the apron, the flat area at the bottom of the track that is best suited for slow riding. Looking up at a 45° bank is a bit intimidating. It seems to defy your intuition and your understanding of physics. I guess the closest thing I’ve done to this is single-track mountain bike stuff, riding off camber trails - which means riding along on a bank — not down or up a bank, but along a bank. Here’s an example photo, this dude is biking on an off camber trail:

See? It’s sloped and makes for some challenging and slippery mountain biking. There is a great visual explanation of off camber mtb riding in this blog post. The key is in shifting your weight and pushing the frame upwards towards the slope. This is totally different from what you’re supposed to do on a track. On a track, you just pedal like hell, make sure you’re going fast enough and ride as straight as you can. Don’t shift your weight, don’t do anything funky with the bike. Your goal is to just make sure you’re going fast. You’re shooting for a minimum of 15mph, but the faster you go, the better you’ll stick to the track and decrease your chances of sliding out. Also, the higher up you move on the track, the faster you need to go to stick to it. Incidentally, in our training today I think they said the world record on a track is 47mph.

A nice guy there named John saw me riding timidly along the apron this morning. He was an experienced track rider, and was nice enough to let me follow his wheel around the track. First, we moved up the bank on the straight-aways, where it’s not as steep, then we’d move back down again for the turns. After a couple laps of this, he checked to make sure I was comfortable, and then he started leading me up the bank and into the turns. This was a great way to learn because he showed me how fast I needed to be going, and it just generally gave me confidence to be riding behind someone that knew what they were doing.

Riding on a 45° bank is awesome! The first time I did it, I had to just ignore my brain which was telling me it wasn’t going to work. I trusted John and followed him around the turn, and somehow it worked! I stuck to the track. John peeled away after a few laps and let me go on my own.

I spent most of my time on the blue line, also known as the Relief Line, or Stayer’s Line. You can see the Relief Line in the first photo, it’s the blue line that goes just under the ADT Event Center banner. I did maybe 10 laps there on the Relief Line, and then decided to leave it at that. It felt really good, and I wanted to maybe keep going forever, but I thought it might be good to spend some time observing the more experienced riders. It seems that one of the trickier parts of track riding is learning the rules of moving around other riders, and other riders moving around you. I’d like to get comfortable enough where this stuff becomes second nature, a lot like passing cars on the interstate.

One of the craziest things is when you are passing a rider below you, and they are literally below you, not beside you. Also when the faster riders are passing you, then are above you, not beside you. Sometimes you have people on either side of you, above and below, it’s a crazy feeling!

If you’re a lady cyclist in the LA area, you should definitely check out this clinic. It’s free and it’s the second Saturday of the month from now until January, from noon to 2pm. I had such a great experience because of the helpful friendly folks running this clinic. Maybe I’ll see you out there in November!

I finally created an About Fixpert area of this site. Check it out and let me know if you have any feedback on it. Just leave a comment here on this post, since the About section doesn’t have comments.

I’ve been tweaking the site this weekend. I’m still working out some kinks of this new design that I released earlier this year. You’ll notice on certain pages, multiple tabs are selected, and some other weird random stuff like that.

WordPress is an awesome platform, but I’m still learning some of the deeper features of it. Haha, haven’t looked at the site on a PC in a while, but it’s looking pretty good on a Mac.