Off Their Rockers

This just in from Bob Mionske’s “Legally Speaking” on cycling website Velo News. Minoske got it from Andy Cline’s piece (”Two-Wheeled Wonder”) in Sierra Magazine, March/April 2008. It’s not for the over-50 crowd, specifically, but great for everybody with a bike, so I’m passing it along:

What if there was something you could do to improve your health and fitness, save money, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, and reduce your carbon footprint, all at the same time—would you do it?

The idea is simple…Draw a circle with a 1-mile radius around your home. Try to replace one car trip per week within that circle by riding a bicycle or walking. At an easy riding pace you can travel one mile on a bicycle in about seven minutes. Walking takes about 20 minutes at an easy pace.

As Cline writes: “nearly half of all trips in the United States are three miles or less; more than a quarter are less than a mile” Short car trips are the easiest to replace with biking or walking, and they are the biggest polluters, per mile: “Engines running cold produce four times the carbon monoxide and twice the volatile organic compounds of engines running hot. Smog-forming (and carcinogenic) VOCs continue to evaporate from an engine until it cools off, whether the engine’s been running for five minutes or five hours.

Cline cites a recent study: “the transportation sector accounts for about one-third of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Within that sector, travel by personal vehicles accounts for nearly two-thirds of those emissions.”

Try the one-mile solution a few times, Cline hopes, you’ll soon be biking or walking to the store twice a week, then ditching your car for most of your trips inside the circle.

Source: VeloNews.com

 

Dear Lance,

Your comeback news is a shocker. We had a great relationship when you took a boring Europe sport and got us non-Euros excited—everybody thumbing a ride on your glory.

I bought your bike: a $5,000 Trek! Mostly thanks to you, geezers in the top age brackets are the biggest market for top-end bikes. I guess you know that.

You’ve seen us out there, straddling carbon frames that give us a whiff of extra speed, wearing your team jerseys—or jerseys worn by other teams that look like our grandkids. Entre nous, you’re the Tiger in our cycle fantasies. When the biking topic comes up, say over cocktails, I put you and me in the same sentence as much as possible.

My Lance ego transference hasn’t happened with any other pro—maybe in Europe it would, but here, with Leipheimer, Hincapie, you drop those names, nobody cares. So, for awhile it was sad when you retired: no more amazing guy to brag about in the present tense.

In another way, your retirement strengthened the you-me bond. We had more in common: weekend group rides, noticing the countryside. You were around Aspen this summer, where I might have seen you riding up Ashcroft or the Maroon Bills. A couple of my buddies reported Lance sightings, where they hoped to sneak up on you and get ahead of your front wheel for a couple of seconds. “I beat Lance in a sprint!” If you’d stayed retired, gained a few pounds, got hangovers, got older, eventually you’d slow down at a faster rate than me, since there’s a limit to the slow I’m approaching already. So we’d be more equal.

Now you’re back in the saddle, training for the Tour, what about our relationship? I heard what you said: your comeback is all about funding and publicity for cancer research. I’m with you there, but in the coverage from old Tours, I read a lot about your stage wins, Sheryl Crowe in the team car, and lab controversies—less and less about your cured cancer and almost zilch about fund raising. Anyway, the Tour is three weeks and in the eight months away, what can you do besides speed intervals, strategy sessions, and wind-tunnel immersion?

I know nothing first-hand, except what I read from you in “It’s Not About the Bike”, but lately, the blogospherians are saying it’s not about the bike or the cancer research, it’s about the ego: accustomed to being fed massive doses of adoration and column inches in the papers, craving a refill. Speaking selfishly, for my own ego investment, I’ll feel better as soon as you finish the next tour with your reputation intact. Now that you’re headed back to Gaul, it’s random samples all over again, analyzed by the testy Gaulers who’d love nothing more than stat the allegations.

Already they’ve trotted out the urine bottle from 1999, and threaten to open and retest it. Seems like deja Berra to me: you saying no to the decanting—by the way, does urine improve with age, like wine, or weaken and lose its incriminating qualities? Is there a statute of limitations on it?

Should we have one? I’m sure you’ve pondered these questions. I’d hate to see you and me dragged through the next inquiry.

British retiree (’pensioner” in Britspeak) Bert Brett logs 250 miles a week on the bike–or so he claimed in a recent media report. Even if he exaggerates the mileage (I do, when I’m in brag mode) it sounds like he’s got a bad case of OCGBE (ob/com geezer bike disorder). Anyway, he’s 73, and in perpetual training for time-trial races. His wife Elsie pedals at home on a stationary bike. As of this post, she’s 90-plus.

At 20 years her junior, Bert’s the boy toy. He took up cycling a decade or so ago; does he bike to avoid things? Avoidance is a big part of the geriathletic revolution–endorphins make us feel good and compulsion takes us away from grim subjects. Anyway during the day he bikes to Cardiff and back home to Merthyr; then walks four miles and lifts weights. “I don’t see age as much of a barrier”, he said. “I sometimes beat men in time trials who are half my age, but we don’t tend to dwell much on how old anybody is.” He credits a vegetarian diet and his spartan regimen for “still feeling as though I’m 18 or 19 in my mind.”