It's Time

It’s Time

Several years ago I flew to Vermont to visit my brother. He introduced me to a mountain biker who happily agreed to show me some local trails. This man offered me his spare mid-nineties GT Zaskar. I forget what he rode.

At trailhead I said, “Hey Lou, you have no cycle-computers on your bikes. So how do you know how many miles you’ve done?”

Writing it now, it looks like what it is: a stupid question. But he was a good guy. He took it in stride.

“Around here we measure rides in hours not miles,” he said.

“We.” So it was a cultural thing. It’s what the local riders did.

“Hours.” Once in, no one wants to leave those northern woods.

In intervening years I often thought about Lou’s reply. More precisely, as soon as I returned home from Vermont I stripped the cycle-computer from my mountain bike. That felt good. It felt two pounds lighter because a burden bigger than a six-ounce gadget had been lifted from my mind. But the road bike gave me pause. Although I kept the Cat-Eye on it, I recalled Lou’s words when three or four times annually I had to fuss with the settings on it.

Like when the battery expires—meaning it’s time to mess with the little plastic bugger, pinching at those tiny buttons, swearing at the designers of the device when you accidentally erase everything, hoping you’re keying in the correct wheel diameter code, that kind of thing. Forget about setting the clock, the equivalent of an advanced intelligence test.

When I changed over to 650B wheels, adjustment got trickier. The recorded distance of a test ride never seemed to match the same recorded distance on my 700C bike, the wheel diameter to which the odo-code defaults when a new battery is installed. So I would fumble with the reset buttons all over again, do another test-run, check it, reset, and so on until getting it right. Then I traded out my 32mm tires with 38mm tires and the recorded distance once more went awry, requiring another session with the Cat-Eye’s confusing instruction sheet, the illustrations helping little.

In group rides I see Garmins on six bikes out of ten. I wonder what it’s like to calibrate those units, which sit on handlebars like I-phones, huge wafers of technology almost the size of a pop-tart. All that weight too! I guess the benefits of a Garmin (every statistic available to and desired by aerobic man, plus maps; GPS; wind speed differential cued to RPM, age, temperature, shoe size, crank-arm length, favorite Starbucks blend, and hair color; maybe even a tip on oil futures) outweigh their weight.

In contrast, my micro-wireless Cat-Eye provides just five or six functions, unless you, unlike me, can figure out how to switch to the alternate B mode in order to double that number. Come to think of it, the second mode is probably intended for a second bike, which would call for a second mounting bracket and another recalibration. No thanks.

I do like knowing the two main basics of a ride, speed and total mileage. Average speed doesn’t interest me. Cadence? It’s fine as is. I don’t need a digital blip telling me I should be spinning faster. This isn’t a race.

Yes, I do like knowing these two simple stats; however, as midnight nears on this New Year’s Eve, I’m feeling the Ahab vibe. In chapter 118 of Moby-Dick he crushes the quadrant, the ship’s main navigational tool, underfoot. He’s sick and tired of waiting for technology to deliver the goods. He’ll go by the dead reckoning of intuition instead.

Granted, in anticipation of recalibrating my Cat-Eye for the New Year (in order to start 2015 at zero miles), I don’t literally want to destroy it with the heel of my boot—I’m not chasing to the death a whale that bit off my leg—but I do want to remove it. I can be like Ahab and Luke Skywalker too. There he is, attacking the Death Star in his space-jet, struggling to get a bead on the target, when the voice of Obi-Wan exhorts the young Jedi to “let go” of the scope and trust his natural gift of eye-hand coordination. It works! Luke makes a seemingly impossible shot that destroys the Death Star.

Do I need a measuring gizmo that obstructs the view of my engraved Nitto “Noodle” bars? Do I need this factoring gadget? Do the numbers it displays make me a better rider? A happier one? A faster one? A safer one? No, no, no, no, no.

No.

Ready?

Snip, clip. Done.

Much better.

Thanks, Lou, for the Yankee wisdom! I feel lighter, cleaner, a little more free today. Hope all’s well in Vermont on this cold winter night, the Old Year in its death throes, the New Year ready to seize the throne. Time, not distance, is the cycle of measurement by which we all age. Hours, indeed!  

Roadysseus

12.31.14