The commuter bike, a Giant “Tran Send”, has received some accoutrements over the course of the year: storage, improved lights, and winter rubber.

The panniers I had purchased in April ended up being returned since they were too small to fit my laptop and gi. In their stead was a plastic crate lashed to the rack with zip-ties. The crate wobbled a bit when piled high, but sufficed for most of the summer until I had the chance to augment it with some old panniers that had been stored in my parents garage since a Boyscout bike-hike many years ago. The old panniers didn’t fit the laptop either, so to fit both them and the crate I fashioned a wooden riser-platform to allow the crate to sit a few inches off the rack. While difficult to attach, this arrangement has the benefit of enhancing that stability of the crate as well as providing as much storage as I care to fill.

The second upgrade was the addition of several more blinking tail lights and the CygoLight Mity-Cross headlight that I had purchased for the 24 Hours of Great Glen mountain bike race. A reflective vest also joins the lights for what I’m hoping will provoke a reaction along the lines of, “Is that a Christmas tree ahead?”.

Last week brought the latest update, studded snow tires. I purchased the Schwalbe “Marathon Winter” tires from Peter White Cycles in New Hampshire (mail order), with 240 tungsten-carbide studs in each tire. At this point they’ve only seen a bit of snow and ice, but they remove the hesitation I built up after a tense, snowy commute with my slick summer tires.

Now that winter seems to have started for real, my plan is to bike as much as I feel comfortable with and car-pool with Sarah or take the bus if the weather is bad. I’d like to push myself a bit to continue through the winter, but would rather not take any risks of being hit by drivers who might be sliding around the highway in a storm.

The blue line is our GPS track, the purple are the trails (provided by LocalMotion.com).

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It was a bit damp and cloudy, but the trails weren’t too muddy the woods were beautiful. A fine time was had by all (especially Hudson, the pooch).

The goal of the race is for a team to ride as many 8-mile laps as they can in 24 hours with everyone doing at least one lap at night (with high-powered helmet and/or bar mounted headlights). Teams are grouped in ‘classes’ based on the size of team (1, 2, 4, or 5 members) and by skill (pro, expert, sport, beginner). There were just two skill-levels for 5-person teams: “Open” and “Cruiser”. There was some confusion in registering and we ended up in the “Open” category instead of the more appropriate “Cruiser” category, so we got crushed in standings. We had a great time anyway though and ended up coming in in 55th place over all out of 156 teams.

The race had a pretty neat computerized timing system going which allowed us to instantly see our times and standings after finishing a lap. According to our results, we completed 22 laps, covered 182.6 miles, and climbed 26,070 feet. Of that, I rode 6 laps, covering 49.8 miles, and climbing 7,110 feet.

Photos by Sarah:

We had a great time both riding and just hanging out. Since only one person was riding at a time, we usually had 5 or 6 people in camp hanging out in camp by the fire. This was my first 24-hour race and I wasn’t really sure what to expect both with sleepiness and night-time riding difficulty. To deal with the latter, I ended up buying a headlight for my handlebars and borrowed one of Eli’s LED flashlights for my helmet.

This combo of lights worked amazingly well. The wide flood of the handlebar-mounted MityCross providing nice shadows for depth perception, while the spot-beam of the flashlight lit up the trail up to a hundred yards ahead. While some of the pits of mud were still dark, I was able to ride my night laps at full speed – I even maxed out my gearing on one of the carriage-road downhill sections.

Overall, I was pretty exhausted by Sunday afternoon, but waking up in the middle of the night to ride wasn’t so bad. Getting a lot of QT with great friends made the whole thing a blast. I can’t wait until next year!

Here are a few videos from Sarah to finish things off:

Start of the race, part 1:

Start of the race, part 2:

Me riding “The Birches” section:

I mostly rode with the light on my helmet and battery in my CamelBack which worked great on all of the trails from super-twisty handle-bar-wide singletrack to wider double-track. I certainly had plenty of light to see and I was pleasently reminded of mogul-skiing advise: Stop looking at your feet, observe strategically. Lifting my head a bit and looking 15-20 feet down the trail (on single-track) rather than at my feet helped my speed pick up measurably. There were a couple of time while I was exploring some new single-track that I came around a large tree in a hairpin-turn to be surprised by a drop or climb that I wasn’t expecting, but I don’t think more light would have helped shine through an obstacle.

I tried one short stretch of double-track with the light on my bars and found that while the the depth-perceptions is much better (as everyone says), it was really distracting to have the light twitching back and forth as I dodged rocks. With the light on the bars I was able to cleanly bunny-hop a series of 3, 6, and 8-inch logs, whereas with the light on my head I miss-judged the big one and clipped it in the air with my tires — praise-be to 6″ of suspension travel.

Overall the MityCross 350 is plenty of light to get out into the woods and ride after dark. More light would always be nice, but I had a great hour and a half ride with just this light. My plan is to get a high-powered LED flashlight to complement this light and provide depth-perception on the handlebars, but the MityCross was more than enough to get started.

On my ride home after leaving the woods I tested the “throw” of the light by riding down my dark road as fast as I could. I found that the beam of the MittyCross allowed me to resolve details about 100ft (30yards/meters) ahead which made me comfortable riding up to ~20-25mph. Beyond that, the road seemed kind of dim and fuzzy and I had to really strain to see further. While adequate for a leisurely road ride (or as fast as I can get the mountain bike), I wouldn’t want to bomb down a hill at 50mph with only this light.

(Note: cross-posed at MTBR.com)

Tran Send DX photo from the Giant website

I’ve been regularly bicycle commuting since 2002 — though only since 2007 has my commute increased to 3 miles each way up from less than one. I commute pretty exclusively on my Cannondale road bike, as the full-suspension mountain bike with downhill tires is way too slow and the unicycle is even slower.

The road bike is wonderfully fast and a blast to cruise through traffic with. What is less fun is carrying my laptop bag and a duffel-bag for my gi (heavy cotton Aikido training clothes). A backpack is a little better at handling the weight than the two smaller bags, but hotter due to more contact with my back.

After a few wet rides last week and increasing frustration with the weight of the laptop and sweat-soaked gi I decided it was time to get a dedicated commuter bike with fenders (for the wet) and a rack with panniers (to get the crap off my back). I test-rode a Trek at the Middlebury Bike Center and a Kona and the Giant “Tran Send DX” at the Middlebury Alpine Shop.

While the Trek and Kona felt like perfectly good bikes and were reasonably priced, the Giant felt wonderfully peppy and nimble for a pretty beefy bike. I really like how its geometry manages to maintain an efficient peddling position while still being quite upright. The other bikes didn’t feel quite so efficient. What fully sealed the deal was that the Tran Send came with a custom rack and fenders that felt really solid and fit well on the bike, all for the lowest total cost.

After riding the new bike home I mounted a set of head and tail lights for the bi-weekly rides home in the dark. The tail light will be much more visible on this bike than my road bike as I was able to bolt it to the back of the rack where it won’t get covered up by my coat or bags like the under-seat mounting position does. I also picked up some rain pants and ordered a set of panniers to complete my foul and fair weather setup and plan to ride rain or shine through at least November.

After getting several inches of snow on Monday, the weather has now warmed up and I was able to get out for my first bike ride of the season. It was a pretty blustery evening with west winds gusting up to 35mph, but was quite warm at about 50°F. I ended up going out for an hour and covering about 15 miles.

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After having the wind at my back for the first 20 minutes to East Middlebury I got it into my head that I wanted to ride up Route 125 to Ripton. Halfway up the first pitch my legs disabused me of that notion and I decided to ride down to the Shard Villa instead. I enjoyed the rest of my hills, but that first pitch was more than I was prepared for.

All in all it was great to be back in the saddle and I am looking forward to a lot of riding this summer. Last year I only covered 527 miles, we’ll see what this year brings.

Sarah, my dad, and I took a canoe and kayak trip down the Big Spring Creek in Newville, Pennsylvania. The creek is beautiful, with clear water, many aquatic plants, and much waterfowl.

Since the creek has a tiny drainage and is primarily spring fed, it does not flood regularly (if at all) and is hence heavily silted. For about the first 3rd of our trip, the canoe was constantly scraping the bottom and getting stuck. My dad in the sea-kayak had a little bit shallower draw and only got stuck once.

After the first 3rd of the trip the channel deeped, but was still quite narrow, requiring a lot of maneuvering of the large canoe.

In a few spots fallen trees block the channel, though we were able to gingerly maneuver over or under them.

Be aware that a State Boat Registration sticker is required on all boats.

• View the Photos from the trip
• View the route map in Google Maps
• View the route map in Google Earth

The Google Earth/Maps images are making use of two scripts that I have just written that generate a KML file from the Flickr photo set and then join the photo collection with the GPS track of our route.

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The map above was generated with a GPS track of our path (the blue line) and the photo output from my new photosetToKML.php script