Events

On a day like this, when I'm slogging into the wind on Lawrence through heavy traffic and stopping...every...two...blocks for red lights, I just want to finish the ride. But then lately, even my bad rides end up surprising me. Today I did 80 km (50 mi) in unpleasant conditions and still finished in 3:11, more than a minute faster than my best 80 km time. Next weekend: 120 km (75 mi), which, should I complete it, will be the longest I've ever ridden in one day.

If you don't mind downloading 25 Mb, you can see the short video I took of the cicada who attached herself to my screen while I was working yesterday. To get the full experience turn your speakers up to 11. Those things are ridiculously loud. They start to come out in Northern Illinois mid-June, and by mid-August they're everywhere. Then, suddenly, around Labor Day, they disappear for another year. Someone has a cicada blog you might want to check out, if you're into cicadas. By the way, Chicagoland...

Pop something.

It's not every day that I set five personal records (PRs). This morning I rode 40 km (24.9 mi) in 1:29:19, beating my old PR (set Tuesday) by 2:29. The other PRs are in my expanded PR table on braverman.org. I attribute my increasing performance this season to three things: first, plain and simple, I'm riding more: 17.3 km (10.7 mi) per day on average (including days off) against 14.6 km (9.1 mi) the previous three seasons. Here's what I've done since June 13th: The little blue dots go against the...

It looks like the Democrats will hold the Georgia 4th after all: Rep. Cynthia McKinney lost her primary against challenger Hank Johnson. McKinney has found herself in the news more often for her antics than for her legislation, as in her recent altercation with a Capitol Police officer. Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman also lost against challenger Ned Lamont. Lieberman has supported the war and President Bush (895 days, 4 hours) more often than anyone else in the party—and more often than some...

I've put my biking stats (such as they are) on my personal homepage, http://www.braverman.org/. This morning I rode with Anne's Garmin ForeRunner 201, offloaded the XML with Garmin's free software, then downloaded shareware a German programmer named Martin Goldmann to convert that to Google Earth's KML format. The result: You can now download my track and plug it in to Google Earth.

If you live in the Central Time Zone and use American-style dates, it is now 8/7/06 5:43:21. (Thanks to Anne for this one.)

I have decided (by executive fiat) that the "weather" category includes "bicycling." Even though I biked hither and yon as a kid, I kind of lost my passion for it until recently. I'm getting it back, though I still haven't gotten anywhere near the performance I could muster 15 years ago. I just dug up some notes showing that exactly 20 years ago today, I rode 28 km (17.3 mi) in 48 minutes, averaging over 34 km/h (21.1 mph) the whole way. Looking at the other rides recorded in those notes, that was about...

Excellent op-ed today by playwright David Mamet. He argues that anti-Semitism, not the Jews, is the problem: There is no "cycle of violence." Israel wants peace behind the 1949 armistice borders, with some relatively minor variation. There is no indictable "disparity of force." Israeli civilians are being bombed. Hezbollah knows where the Israeli military bases are, but chooses to bomb civilians. Hezbollah puts its armaments exclusively in the midst of civilians. The Israeli aim is not to invade Lebanon...

As part of my training for the North Shore Century, I set out today to ride 100 km (62.1 mi). I went south, into the wind (so I would have a tail wind for the more-tired half of the ride), and for only the second time in my life rode to another state: Then I continued all the way to the bottom of Chicago: On the way back, only 3.5 km (2.1 mi) from home, a spoke broke. That doesn't sound nearly as bad as it is. When you lose a spoke, the wheel suddenly goes "out of true," meaning it's warped—badly. For a...