My morning commutes have been frigid due to a nearly week-long cold snap, hampering my ability to ride and leaving me quite unwilling to stop, take off my gloves, and snap a picture, so I’ve got very little to write about riding.

What I can write about, however, is fueling – I get the energy to ride from the food I eat.  Considering my daily commute burns around 500 calories (1/5 of my “normal” daily requirement), not changing my dietary habits isn’t really an option.  I’m starting to become quite aware of how food affects my riding.

First off, I can say with quite a bit of authority that dry cereal and milk does not cut it in the mornings.  There’s a joke about Chinese food that you’re hungry again two hours after eating it – that’s never been true of me, but I know the feeling; I can eat three big bowls of Corn Flakes, ride to work, and be absolutely ravenous when I arrive.  I get a much better morning start out of a big piece or two of good toast (such as The Bread Store’s Honey Wheat), maybe slathered with some peanut butter, a small bowl of home-made yogurt and honey and a glass of tomato juice.  It’s simple and quick, and if I throw in a couple of bites of cheese curds from the farmers’ market, I’ll be good until well past lunchtime.

For lunch, I’ll usually pack in a decently hefty portion of leftovers, including an apple or orange to snack on after a couple of hours at work. Most of the time, I’ve also got some of Morgan’s homemade granola bars stashed on my bike that I can tap into if I skimped on breakfast and my belly starts rumbling, so I’m in pretty good shape there.

I’ve noticed, too, that my desire for protein has just exploded in the last year or so, as I’ve been riding more consistently.  Oddly, I’m not getting a craving for big slabs of beef, though.  Meat and other protein sources mixed in throughout the day are serving me quite a lot better – hence the peanut butter and yogurt in the morning.  If I’m bringing stir-fry leftovers for lunch, I’d better have some chunks of meat in it, and I find I enjoy chili more these days than ever before.

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I’ve been told by past AIDS/LifeCycle riders that it’s not unreasonable to burn as many as 10,000 calories in a day, and I’ll probably work through 8,000 calories on the tougher days.  Fortunately, I’ve also heard that the food they supply is quite good (particularly the peanut butter and graham cracker snacks), but I’m not sure how much of that can be chalked up to hunger’s ability to improve any dish’s flavor.  Of course, the alternative is wolfing down a dozen loaves of Honey Wheat a day…

On the AIDS/LifeCycle ride, I’m going to be expected to do most of my own on-route maintenance.  Flat tires?  My problem.  Squirrely shifters?  My bag.  In the worst-case scenario, I can take the SAG wagon to the next rest stop, but for personal pride, I’d like to handle most anything I can on my own.  That means packing a few tools on the ride.

There are pre-made tool packs that get the job done (including some that fit into a water-bottle), but I’m a do-it-myself kind of guy, I made my own.  If you’ve seen my bicycle, the results are that little felt blanket burrito lashed under the seat.

My tool burrito

This is the burrito itself; roughly 6 inches long, 4 1/2 inches wide, and 2 inches thick.  If I cut the size down a bit and used a thinner fabric, it would probably trim out a fair amount of the volume, but there’s only so much I can shrink it down, given the tools inside.

WORST. CARNITAS. EVER.

The guts of the burrito are a bunch of tools all stacked together.  The wrapper is an 18 inch square cut out of a very thick felt blanket.  It keeps the tools warm (not that they need it), but more importantly, it also gives me a large work space when it’s all laid out on the side of the road.  When I’ve got somewhere specific and clean to put tools and parts as I’m working on them, the whole process of replacing a tire or readjusting my derailleurs is a lot easier.

All of the tools and other accoutrements

Here’s what I keep in the burrito for now.  Spare tube, cigarette lighter, patch kit, multi-tool of allen wrenches, swiss army knife, pen, paper, tire levers, and $5 in $1 bills.  The tube, patch kit, and tire levers should be pretty self-explanatory.  The lighter is a personal quirk – I like to keep at least a source of fire with me in case civilization crumbles while I’m on the road and I have to provide my own warmth for the night.  The swiss army knife and multi-tools are both temporary measures until I find a more compact way to carry a useful blade, philips and standard screwdriver, and 4, 5, and 6 mm hex keys.  The pen and paper are there in case I find myself needing to take some notes on something.  And finally, the $5 serves a dual purpose – in a pinch, a couple of dollar bills can be used as a tire boot (covering a hole in a tire), and $5 is the cost of a daily pass on RT.

This tool kit isn’t complete yet.  I have a collapsible pen I’m going to throw in instead of the oversized Uniball and I still need to put in the wrenches I need to work on my brakes, pedals, and hubs – an 8mm, 13mm, and 15mm, if memory serves.  But for now, about 90% of the problems I can fix on the road are covered here, and I should be able to get that last 10% ready before June.

If I can find a way to source some cheap tubes, tire levers, patch kits, and fabric, I want to make a bunch of emergency burritos that I can sell as a fundraiser.

In what is getting to be a standard event, I spent an overcast and crisp Sunday morning in the saddle with some of the other LifeCycle riders from the Bike Kitchen.  Doug, Danny, Mary, Emjay, Jim, and I met up at the Kitchen around 9:00 and we took off around 9:30, after Danny and I cobbled together a working pump to inflate his tires.

After debating whether to go north around the airport, west out to Davis, or east to Folsom, we settled on a simple ride out to Davis and back, starting with a little loop around the American River trail into Old Sac to add a couple of miles.  It turned out to be a good choice when we passed a cyclocross race going on out in Discovery Park.  Danny borrowed a pump from one of the club tents, and after that, we took off once more.

Danny walking to a cyclocross club tent to borrow a pump.

The ride itself to Davis is rather uneventful, and I’ve commented on it before.  What was new for me, though, was riding with a number of other experienced riders out on a rural road.  For most of the ride, I was in the middle of the pack with Emjay, with Danny and Doug in the lead, and I got to watch a lot of their behavior – pointing out hazards I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, telling us to get over so a car behind us could pass, and so on.  It was a welcome change, and when I started to get a little bit of chafing around mile 20, both of them were more than happy to give tips on hygiene and riding.

Emjay, Doug, and Mary chatting while Danny refills.

After we pulled in to Davis, we took a pit stop at Crepeville, which mimicked (at least mileage-wise) the pit stops on the LifeCycle ride itself.  Danny, Jim, and I made do with some simple snacks (and a beer), the others with a full-blown breakfast.  The stop gave us a chance to cool off a bit, and I was shivering again when we got back on the road for a brief run out to see Davis Bike Forth, a sister bike collective.  Then we headed back over the causeway, much slower due to the food and a headwind, and back into Sacramento.

You can see the little baggy of homemade granola bars I brought lashed underneath my tool kit.

One odd little note; riding through West Sacramento on the way home, some pigeon decided to reenact Luke’s destruction of the Death Star from Star Wars.  Out of nowhere, I look down and see this blob of white stuff drop on my knee right at the top of my upstroke.  I don’t know how he managed to sneak it past my arms and my large, helmeted head, and I hope he’s proud of himself for tagging my leg warmers the day after I did laundry.

We rode the 36 miles in roughly two and a half hours, giving us a decent pace of 14 mph.  Even with the rest stops, I was still home around 1:00 pm.  I took a few more pictures on the ride (though none while in motion) with my cell phone.  They’re available in my gallery here.

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Miles/time this trip:         36 / 2:30
Total training miles/time:   131 / 9:30