Cooper Jackson

Corn fields making me hungry

Wonderful ride with lots of summer corn

What an amazing ride this morning. Another training ride except this time going kicking the moving speed up to 14mph. The corn fields are looking great I can’t wait to sink my teeth into fresh local summer corn. Just something about a morning ride to make the day that much better. My current route is about 25 miles which is just about right. I have a goal to do it at 15mph with bags. I have found that I notice the bags when I am trying to average anything above 12mph and it was really noticeable today. I had been thinking for the longest time that even after being on the bike for a while you still feel every hill. This is kinda true because I am hitting some steeper hills than I am use to with Mt. Olive road but the other hills seem to not be as hard. I guess that is what you call getting in shape. If I can only convince my belly that it is in shape….

Getting back into the 50′s! I was looking at a new year resolution to ride 200 miles in one week. I think this is the year for that. I have been riding inside 30-60 minutes a day. And I am thinking about riding a good couple hundred miles to New Bern from Concord this year. So time to get to it!

Amazing how out of shape a 40 mile ride will make you feel. After the 75 mile hike I thought I was going to do 40 miles easily. However that was completely wrong. After about 27 miles I hit a a wall that I couldn’t seem to recover from. However I made it and next time will be a lot easier.

Melissa's New bike Trek 7.3

We just got a new bikes. Lateef’s was damaged in shipping but Melissa’s is here and she has been test riding it! We decide to get matching Trek FX 7.3 (Red). We where going to get 7.2 but they couldn’t get Lateef size so we decided to upgrade a bit. We are excited to get out and rideQ

Was picking up some bamboo for tomato stakes with Aaron Newton when I saw a bicycle on the side of the road. We noticed they had a bunch of other stuff piled up for trash pickup. So we though it in the back of the truck and I pumped up the tires, adjusted the seat and took it for a spin. Now I have one extra cruiser..

The Blue Bullet

Yep, I rode 5 times 20 miles this week. In fact, I rode Wednesday 22 miles in 1 1/2 hours (that is 14.5 miles an hour), which doesn’t sound like much but with traffic it takes almost an hour to drive. Ironically, Friday Melissa met me in Charlotte so we could return to Concord Halloween early, this however did not work out so well. With traffic it took 2 hours to drive home, it would have been faster to bike!

Lucky we built the house with a double door in the back because my head would not have fit though a single door. I strutted for 12 hours before I was smacked down to a pin head. I bumped into Aaron Newton at the farmers market and he pointed out that there is a guy in Washington State who rides 30 MILES EACH WAY TO WORK!! In the rain! Glory is short lived.

What is next? What other goals could there possibly be? Well there are two I can think of. The first is to do the route in 1 hour which would mean biking 20 miles per hour, including stop lights and traffic. The second is to do 200 miles. Both of these will probably not happen in the cold winter months but I can see spring time being fit enough to bike 200 miles. Might even get a better bike by summer so I can pick up the speed a bit.

Some time in February we decided to start cycling for our food. We have surpassed the 6 month mark without even noticing it. Some strange things have happened over this time. First let me clarify we are not getting paid to cycle with potatoes or anything. We just decided if we needed food from the grocery store we would ride our bikes this year to get it. So far it has worked pretty well. Side effects include we are buying less food. The constant reminder to buy healthy food is also hard to avoid since you think about the performance of your various muscles and body parts for the 15 minutes it takes to get there. It takes maybe a couple extra minutes at this point to get to the store and back. There have been a few times that we have thought about taking the car and I think one time we bought some food on the way back from a long trip. At this point it is habit to bike. We are also in better shape for it, I would suspect.

Some friends and neighbors somehow feel we have an opinion or judgment on them because they use the car to get groceries. The truth is we don’t care… we have done this for ourselves and it is great that grocery shopping is actually a pleasant experience now, not just a chore. We generally think guilt is not a motivator.

Our original goal was to go to the grocery store via bike for one year straight. Its been 8 months now, but Melissa is getting a little wary about the final 4 months. This week represented the first dip in temperatures – mid 30′s at night, house temperature hasn’t been above 62 degrees for the last week (house temperature is a different goal, we’ll talk about that some other time). However fun (or not) the last few months may be, I think this activity has permanently changed the way we will be getting groceries from now on. The first, automatic choice mode of transportation has changed from car to bike. Oh yes, and we calculated fuel/car costs savings for the year: $468. That’s a lot of groceries!

Today I rode over 40 miles. And broke a spoke! Am I to heavy? Ok yes that is partly why I need to ride my bike. Are the roads that bad? Yep I hit a massive pot hole which I couldn’t avoid in all the traffic. So Melissa and I have been talking about a new bike maybe better suited for the kind of riding I am doing. However first on the list was to get Melissa a bike so she could ride with me to Charlotte also and start training up. Also my butt still hurts I haven’t figured out that at all. Today it pretty tough I think maybe extra milage and had some rough riding on bad roads in Charlotte. Well passing out now so tired..

View Larger Map

Last Friday I drove in because the weather was so rainy. I decided to track the milage since I had the truck. 20 miles each way! So yep a 40 mile commute. Right now I am going for 2 times a week because I am a bum, wimpy, lazy and generally need a day for my body to recover. With the Charlotte gas crisis (or lack there of gas) you would think less traffic. Well I haven’t noticed it yet and I think it is because the price of gas has not increased very much. Today I broke a spoke so I hope to get that fixed tomorrow maybe a new rim the old one this has been the third spoke that has broken.

This morning I felt like the ride was easier. Not sure if it was anecdotal or because of the big pasta meal I had the night before but I think that it was easier. On the way back I didn’t feel like crying on the last hill to my house like last time but I was defiantly useless once I came home. “Feed me Melissa please!” And now at the ripe time of 8:30pm I am thinking about going to bed soon (old old man). Let hope I can get my bike fixed and get over 100 miles in this week on my bike.