Keith Snyder's Blog, page 12

Night ride

Is Lance innocent or guilty?



Clubbers do get the munchies, and the halal cart is positioned to intercept them. I'm on the sidewalk in bike shorts and reflective stuff, eating a $3 chicken kabob, and I assume without really thinking about it that the sight of a serious cyclist has sparked this walking conversation between the trim, fashionable guy and his date. I'm busy uploading a picture of the cart to Twitter with my other hand and I'm not really paying attention to the scatter of sexy peo...

Scenes from a brevet

At dusk the bugs were hitting me in waves, ratapat like lightweight shot. I didn't have my goggles on because fourteen hours earlier, I'd almost hit a parked car—the cue sheet holder blazing white in my forehead lamp, the world beyond it a black void, rain clinging to my lenses and refracting in drops and rivulets as I traced with a finger to find the next cue.



I blew bugs out of my lips; another few died when they collided alongside their swarm mates at 15 miles an hour and couldn't get out...

DNF

I thought as long as I was going to die, I should do it honorably, so I got as far as Schooley's Mountain General Store before pulling the plug. When the numbers say you need to average 14 miles per hour in order to finish, and you haven't averaged better than 11 all day, it's time.



But at least you can finish the biggest climbs first, and call it quits around mile 120 at a general store where they make pizza instead of, say, standing on some rural highway, dispirited, out of Gatorade, eyed ...

300K

This Saturday is the New Jersey Randonneurs' Princeton 300K, the second small step toward my year's goal of an SR Series.



As much as I'd prefer a Super Randonneur cape ("No capes!"), what I'll get from RUSA if I manage the whole series is a little medal and some bragging rights. It'll also help qualify me for next year's Paris-Brest-Paris 1200K, about which I decided that if I can't afford a week in France, I'll spend the same days riding from here to Montreal and back.



My last post, the on...

Century

I must have been 15 or 16. I had a ten-speed. I think it was white, I think it had thin, sun-bleached fabric bar tape, I don't remember anything else about it, and I could be making both those details up.

I rode it to school.

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Around that same time, I got a subscription to Bicycling, which looked like this:

and not like this:

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I liked bicycling (the activity) because I've always had these legs, and I liked Bicycling (the magazine) because it made me feel like I was...

Today's writing tip

You know how sometimes you're walking through the living room and somebody's watching something that already started, and you have to stop and stand there holding the dishes and watch even though you don't know everything that's going on? That's in medias res.

Outside the lines

Kathleen said later that I was very restrained, for me. I didn't feel it at the time.



"I see a cockpit," I said, tapping the drawing laid on the child-sized table. "I see a ladder at a pretty good angle, I see a door, I see wheels, I see... not sure what that is, maybe a hat--"



"Maybe the firehouse door," said the substitute teacher Butchie doesn't like, and she said it with restrained disapproval. I don't like her now either.



"Do you see this much detail in any of the drawings you did han...