Then, suddenly, it’s 55, 56 degrees out. It’s still January, yes. The last day of January, in fact. But warmer than any day in January in New York City has any right to be.

As I started out for home from Central Operations I could think only of the pit in my stomach (hungry), the kettle bell workout from last night (tired), and the gift-wine I’ve been thinking about for DAYS (thirsty), accumulating in the Chinese cabinet. But as I got closer to my apartment’s coordinates, the nearly forgotten feeling of being HOT began to take over. Bodily desires still beckoned, but they were overshadowed by a mantra, growing louder the closer I got to home, inspired by the weather: Carpe Dium. Or Carpe Nightum, as the case may be.  At any rate, It felt like spring was here, and there was little choice but to kit up and head for the park.

I rode against the flow until I saw Zoltan’s training ride coming at me. Then, even closer, I saw the TT Guys. I’ve seen them assembling in the park. I’ve seen them out on 9W. Now here they were, in their aero bars, in a paceline, at speed, bearing down on me. I did a quick 180 and picked up my pace so I could snap a few pix.

Who are they? What do they want?  Are they here to help us? Or are they some sort of renegade triathlete menace (to risk being redundant)? Can they be stopped? Dear reader, if you have answers, please let us know.

I eased off. The pointy helmeted, Zipp-wheeled posse group-time-trialed up the road, and Zoltan et al came by. I fell in to the double line. Warm. An easy pace. Familiar faces. Mmmmm.  The wine could wait.

How many hundreds (thousands?) of laps have we done in Central Park? This is a ride so familiar to most of us that we can do it with our eyes closed.  Zoltan has even worked this into the ride plan, along with Harlem Hill repeats, “from the bottom to the top with out the saddle low cadence, hard muscle work.”

I opened one of the wines when I got home. And it WAS good, but I think it tasted better for all of this. All seemed right with the world, if you could avoid nagging thoughts about climate change, or that TT Posse- still out there, somewhere.

Only the hard-core hit the roads this past weekend. The rest of us hit the trainers, or the rollers (or the bar). Personally I went to the basement of my building, where my man-cave is, and set up the Habitrail:

Meanwhile, up in Toronto, Our pal Marty gathered up a bunch of riders and made for Kleinburg (even further north), as he has for the last ten years on a Sunday around this time of year. Ten years ago Marty did this ride with D.D. and Stuart Moore. The week before, Stu and D. had been riding through and over and across Cuba. Now, as they headed up the hill into Kleinburg, Stuart fell over. He never got up.
It turned out that, while most of us have 5 (or so) coronary arteries, Stuart had only one.
And so, Stuart from Red Deer, with the piercing eyes and the finely tuned bullshit detector, widely and well-loved, would no longer walk among us.

Every year since, Marty has led this memorial ride in Stuart’s honor, often enough in numbing cold. I’ve only made it to one, on which we were blessed with temps near freezing, and just a half hour or so of rain to keep everyone honest.Here’s what it looked like that year:

I was sorry not to be able to make the tenth year edition. I’m on travel lockdown in NYC this year, waiting for baby number 2 to make his appearance. I had told Marty I would lay some flowers for Stuart on River Road, probably around the time Marty was laying a bunch on the spot where Stuart came to rest. But even that didn’t work out. Too slushy.

It does seem that they had what, in Ontario, amounts to ideal January conditions. Marty summed it up later: “I was thinking during lunch why this day seems like a good way to remember Stuart. The components are camaraderie, being out of doors, having some food and maybe a beer, and the mild recklessness needed to assume that it is reasonable to plan this kind of activity for the depths of winter. It was a lot of fun.”

It still looks pretty frigid (Marty’s pix).

Long Live Stuart Moore!

BMX dudes at the Magellan monument in the main square, Punta Arenas, Chile. The Strait of Magellan is about half a kilometer down the street; Tierra del Fuego is on the opposite shore.

We met on the Jersey side of the bridge this morning, got some instructions from Zoltan in his Hungarian accented English, and headed up Hudson Terrace. I was at the front with Zoltan when a truck passed us spewing a thick, grey, pungent cloud that doubtless shortened our lives. He said, in his old-country brogue: “Smells like communism, dude.”

Windy again today, but never quite a tailwind.  Colder, too.  Not so bad, but I did sort of envy this getup as we went past:

Mmmmmmm, fur.

Up the Rocket Ride route we went, and then up Little Tor, as if to confirm for everyone that my legs are cooked.

Virtually all Zoltan rides end at the Hungarian Coffee Shop, back on the island. After getting spat out the back when the hammer went down on 9W (my legs are cooked), it was all I could do to catch what was left of the group- and get a little shelter from the wind now screaming up the Hudson- going down Riverside Drive. I was out of gas, and cash, too, but I knew we were headed for this, and I wanted IN:

Smells like strudel, dude. You betcha.

Continuing on a tear to repent for holiday indulgences, and with a concerned eye towards the upcoming racing season, we have been riding every day this week.  The legs are cooked. There’s more scheduled for tomorrow.

During stretches like this, especially during the winter, the prospect of getting on the bike can seem pretty bleak from the vantage point of the sofa. But then I get out- duty? Guilt? Fear? Compulsion?- and I remember: It’s beautiful out there.

Besides, here in NYC, as in many places, we’ve been getting a pass on real winter this time around.  Twenty degrees further south and I’ll be whistling (whimpering?) a different tune (in the basement, on the rollers).

Babysitters are hard to come by at 7am on New Year’s Day, so I couldn’t make the CRCA’s annual Bear Mt. Century this morning. But the wife came home from the factory, eventually, and I got to head out with a few other hungover types.

It’s funny, this time of year, to be out in a team kit that will soon be replaced, to be worn again only as nostalgia; to see other teams whose sponsors, and kits, will soon change; and seeing riders in kits you know will soon be jettisoned for that of a new squad.

Securing a place on a team can be like getting a date to the prom: rounds of gossip and speculation and shifting alliances, and needling feelings you thought you’d left behind in high school. Personally, I’ve always been suspicious of that hot chick who winks at me in the cafeteria. I’m stickin with my date from last year. She promised she’d shave more often, and get those teeth fixed.

Anyway, prom season is over now. Team rosters are pretty much set. New kits are designed and ordered- or they’d better be if you want them to show up before that first frosty morning of racing in February or March (depending on your preferred poison). It’s 2012 officially now. That morning is not so far off.

++++

Really?
I am speachless.

Today I rode my bike. I finally rode my bike.
Holiday sticky toffee puddings are just a sweet, guilty memory. Brother in-law’s bourbon collection left with him in his Baltimore suburb. The bottle of birthday single-malt was polished off last week. Mother’s Birthday, sister’s birthday, other brother-in-law’s birthday, mother-in-law’s birthday, Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday, and my wife’s Birthday are all behind us. The nanny came back and went off to story-time with Junior. The last Jaques Torres bon-bon has gone down the hatch, as has the last amoxicillin: Gruesome eye infection (I WAS NOT beat up!) conquered. The big computer is in a plastic bag: Office under renovation. Obligatory chocolate covered everything gifts from my wife’s unimaginative or exhausted professional acquaintances have been re-gifted or consigned to the circular file. Countless presents opened. Our Maltese super’s English wife’s still-warm, delicious (oh, delicious) mincemeat pies were done away with hastily. Pastry chef next-door’s impossible brownies we categorized as acceptable sin. Seconds (& thirds, yes) at dinner have been sworn off. The fridge is respectably empty, relatively speaking, free of relative’s buttery cakes and pastries and mysterious “foods” that people seem to like in the South. I swear them off, I swear I swear! Tasty looking gift-wines are now stowed in the cabinet, yes, but I’ll save them for later, later (post-Battenkill? I swear, I swear!)! For today I rode my bike! Cold be damned, gale-force winds be damned, blossoming gut be damned, splinted thumb be damned, creeping caffeine immunity be damned, laptop computer-Siren, iPad, iPhone, be…. well, gotta be careful what you wish for. Damn! Today I rode my bike!

I cramped when I hit Central Park. At High Noon I was at the proscribed Grant’s Tomb meeting point. No takers for this ride, so I soldiered on alone. Over the bridge and up River Road, with a very front-loaded effort on Alpine hill. And then up to College Hills in nor particular hurry. The wind was leaving garbage cans strewn all over the road. It was on the nose (mostly) heading out, and then behind me (mostly) all the way back to NYC, but squirly as hell by the hospital in Washington Heights. I nearly got blown onto any number of gypsy cabs.

I never stopped, except for a coupIe of snapshots. I forgot, save for a couple of sips, to drink water. More remarkable, though: I was never hungry. Just chugging along, livin off the fat, I guess. Maybe there is something to sticky toffee puddings after all…..

The day after Thanksgiving, my brother and I set out in matching jerseys from our mother’s house in Connecticut, looking to find a Buddhist shrine he’d spotted on a previous trip.
As we were getting close, the driver of a red pickup truck nearly ran us off the road, and then slowed, glaring at me an my brother in the rearview. Then he slammed on the brakes. He was pointing and screaming at me through the closed passenger-side window as I rode by– something about “my road” I think. Then he gunned it and sped past us towards the stop sign fifty meters up the road, where I caught up to him for an awkward moment. He still looked hopping mad, but I was giving him the blankest stare I could muster– what had we done?– so he just drove off. I didn’t want to provoke him, but I did want to ask him if everything was alright at home.
My brother had drifted way off behind me. When he caught up, he told me he had let the word “asshole” escape his mouth when the truck first went by. He also mentioned that, after the truck’s tires screeched, he had nearly let a turd escape into his fancy English bibs.
We reached the shrine shortly thereafter, a lonely stupa in the middle of a field, surrounded by some mangy prayer flags. We read on a sign that a stupa is meant to radiate harmony and good will, that this is the only stupa in Connecticut, and that, for maximum benefit, one should walk around the stupa in a clockwise direction. My brother wasted no time in doing so.

Riding home over the Manhattan Bridge tonight, I had to stop and bust out my new camera. It is always grand, in some way, to ride over the bridges in NYC. But moments like this are exceptional.

Here we are again in the off-season.

It’s time to lay off the bike for a while, drink some beer, and maybe even have brunch on the weekend. Extra credit for having brunch with non-cyclists- but only if you can hold a conversation with them.
I took fewer pictures this year, I think, The muffin run up to Piermont was so common an occurrence, I sometimes didn’t bother to take any pictures. I did shoot, though, on countless training rides over the season, and even once while racing. Some of the photos ended up posted on this site, or elsewhere, but many never saw the light of day. So here they are, the otherwise forgotten, thrown together in a heap. It feels like it’s gone by fast, but they tell the story of a long year.