Illinoistocht

Over the season, I noticed a many cycling enthusiasts with high end bikes sporting white bar tape, white saddles, and even white shoes.  I was out browsing a local bike shop last evening and noticed that now even the entry level road bikes came with white saddles and white bar tape.  On the other end of the spectrum, In this year's pro cycling events, it seemed most of the teams had white bar tape.  To each his own, but for us amateurs who don't enjoy the an entourage of mechanics to nightly make our bikes perfect, the bar tape turns grey with patches of black over the season.  I had white bar tape on a new bike and it got dingy from sweat and from grease after I'd had to put the chain back on or make other adjustments.  And as far as bike seats, I think the only thing that really truly looks good in white leather or white pleather would be cowgirl boots on a country girl going dancing.  I sensibly replaced my bar tape...but if you have an opinion be sure to see the poll. 

Otherwise its time for more topics and another round at the Village Bar. 

Looks like Natalie Coughlin got voted off Dancing with the Stars Tuesday night.  Kind of a bummer as I was rooting for her (my girlfriend has worked with her on a sponsorship) and she had been dancing well, but lesser players got more call-in votes.    I did hear through the grapevine that she and her cohorts were sad.  She's still a "golden girl" no matter what. 

Not sure what this winter holds as far as skating the Illinois canals.  It's supposed to be an El Nino year, and that may mean that it will be warmer in the northwestern part of Illinois, according to a recent forecast from the National Weather Service.   But there's always room for a cold snap followed by a spell of cold weather to make for good ice.

Be sure to vote in the Google Trike / Street View for the Hennepin.

Good luck to all the long track speed skaters this weekend in Milwaukee at the Petit Ice Center.  The meet runs from October 21 - 25 and serves as the qualification for long track speed skating in the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics.  And finally, given the emphasis on endurance sports, good luck to all the runners in the upcoming New York City Marathon on Sunday, November 1.

Google just released information about its addition to the "Street View" on its website.  If you haven't used this feature, in addition to a drawn map of an area, there is an option to toggle to a 360 degree photographic image of a specific spot on a map.  How Google did this was they had special cars that drove every inch of a set of roads, continuously taking 360 degree photographic images.  The problem was that of course they can't drive cars on trails like the Hennepin Canal trail, or the I&M Canal trail.   But that changes with the inspired, trail-ready "Google Trike".

This is a great use of technology, note how I had to "manually" make my own survey of the Hennepin Canal and its trail and bridges (to assess the the canal's waterway for a marathon ice skate) see the other tabs of this website for more information and photos, or follow the link to the Flickr show
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35710734@N05/sets/72157621940514333/show/
Google's off-road, trail addition to its "Street View" is a better solution. 

Check out the video about Google's new trike, and then follow the link to "vote" for the Hennepin and / or the I&M Canal trail.  Voting continues until October 28, so vote now!

Although I have still been riding my bike, its time to start thinking about the fast approaching winter.  While the elite speed skaters trained over the summer with more skating specificity, have been on the ice for months, and have been competing in world class events since last month, for us amateurs, it is time to start skating. 

Besides skating on ice, a variety of options exist.  I commented a bit on training for a marathon skate last spring.  Dryland training is great because some of the exercises can be done indoors in a gym, and an added bonus is that if you have to travel, these exercises can be done nearly anywhere (I once did a set of exercises on the grassy areas of a hotel parking lot). 

Here is a pretty good link to a representation of some dryland training exercises from the skate boot maker, Bont.  Another source is Diane Holum's book, The Complete Handbook of Speed Skating. 

Following on my somewhat off-the-topic post (off-topic of outdoor skating, canals, and endurance sports) about the Olympics being awarded to Rio de Janeiro over Chicago, I'm following with a further off-topic post urging everyone to vote for 11-time Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin on Dancing with the Stars.  That's in part because she's a genuine person and also because my girlfriend has recently worked with her in a public relations capacity and she found Natalie a joy to work with.  So vote for Natalie! 

I normally stick to the occasional post about skating, trails, or endurance sports topics, but since this website is focused on the Illinois canals, I'll weigh in on the fact that no 2016 Summer Olympic events will take place alongside or in the vicinity of the I&M or Hennepin canals (not that other than a cycling road race any events would have been anywhere near the canals) as Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro.  While winning the Games may end up being more of curse than a blessing for not only the host city but the host country as well, and not everyone thought it was a great idea to be host, that said, the process sheds some light on the US' Olympic management.

With the choice of Rio, the Olympics, having already been to Latin America before, now comes to a geographic continent for the first time ever (although the other countries in South America speak Spanish, not Portuguese, so do the Peruvians really relate more to Brazilians than to 1968 host Mexico [City]?), and we'll wait-and-see about the concerns of Brazil being overextended (hosting the 2014 World Cup) and the much discussed crime concerns.  Let alone a history with bouts of hyperinflation although their economy is okay for now.  I guess the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been mirroring the theme of global economic growth and specifically the ascendance in the global economy of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China)--woops, where's India and its billion residents in the Olympic mix--in rewarding recent summer and winter games (Beijing 2008, Russia 2014, Rio 2016).   

In the post-mortem, I noticed a few things, one was a statement by a Swiss IOC member that "it was a defeat for the US Olympic Committee (USOC), not for Chicago" in a New York Times article.  The article noted issues that the IOC has had with the USOC, "most notably over their stalled plan for an Olympic television network and their share of the Games' network and corporate sponsorship contracts."  Further, its unclear the USOC ever really got behind Chicago's bid.   

The USOC should be more of an administrative, support agency that governs and guides the individual sports that it represents, the Olympic movement in the USA, and most importantly, the athletes themselves.    Instead, watching Peter Ueberroth hobnob with media bigwigs in Sun Valley and fumble through an interview about starting a television network made me wonder if the executives of the USOC are more interested in empire building and making themselves feel important rather than provide service to the sports and community they are supposed to represent.   The USOC has other challenges, notably that major Olympic sponsors are being hammered by the recession (Bank of America, GM, Home Depot), and the USOC felt the need for a special ad campaign to raise funds for its programs--the "America Supports Team USA" print and tv ads.  Nonetheless, in this challenging economic environment, the USOC decided to go forward with the major distraction of its risky plan to launch a television network devoted to Olympic sports (at the height of a recession).   The rationale was that it would promote the Olympic sports to have them on television more often.  In years past perhaps this was an acceptable argument as the only outlet was maybe ABC's Wide World of Sports, but today with Universal Sports available free over-the-air in much of the US (and cable in many locales and everywhere with streaming over the interent), as well as occasionally the major networks (particularly NBC), Versus, and the ESPN family of networks, there are plenty of outlets for the Olympic sports.  (Why not spend the management energy leveraging, expanding, and prodding these relationships?)  It would have been one thing if, for some reason the USOC didn't truly feel the time was right for the US to be host and wouldn't have supported ANY city in the US hosting the games in the near term and didn't get behind Chicago's bid, but the aborted effort of empire-building with a television network used up any sympathy the USOC might have gotten from me on that score. 

The Peter Ueberroth show at the USOC has ended as has the recent David Lee Roth Radio Show, both men now live in our memories of things big in the mid-1980s, and it may be time to take a look at the direction of the USOC, as pointed out by Alan Abrahamson in his blog, Olympic Insider.  Let's hope the USOC puts more energy into productive tasks such as helping the honest athletes cope with byzantine nutritional supplement rules and the Orwellian 24/7 drug policing while actually punishing the guilty dopers. Or focus on running the competitions, adding/maintaining/upgrading sports facilities, and developing junior athletes.  But we'll have to see as I guess its a lot more fun to talk to Erin Burnett of CNBC about being a tv mogul instead.

The journey began with a flight to Vancouver, Canada for which, while I got a great price on the ticket, United charged more for the bike (as luggage) than they did for my own ticket.  Oh well, maybe if I do this again I’ll try to pass the bike off as a trade show display but the total price to fly with the bike wasn’t too bad.  I stayed near the airport and got the bike ready for the journey to begin the next day.
 
I set out the next morning from the hotel and made a short detour over to the Speed Skating oval, newly built for the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympic games.  It’s a gorgeous facility, but unfortunately they won’t leave the ice oval after the games as the building will be modified for other uses.  It was a grey day and I started pedaling away.  For the first hour or so, the route followed the Fraser River, heading west, and then continued through the suburbs of Vancouver for the next few hours.  I was using the Adventure Cycling Association's maps and had downloaded their route to my Garmin Edge 705 GPS training device, which reassuringly beeped and had an arrow for every turn or route change.  The nice view with the mountains in the background changed as I began to head south, and I decided that the Vancouver suburbs are pretty boring.  Worse, it started to drizzle and then steadily increased the further south I went.  By the time I got to the US border around early afternoon, it was raining pretty hard and I had my rain gear on.  I rode past the line of waiting cars to the booth, but unfortunately the border patrol person made me go inside as I didn’t have a vehicle with a license plate.  After a miserable 30 minute wait in my wet gear, they took a quick look at my passport and gave me a piece of paper to give to the guy outside and I was on my way.  The route went on through a pretty boring rural area and then I finished the day in Bellingham, WA, just happy to find a budget motel and get out of the rain.

The next day was arguably one of the more scenic days, and excepting the Oregon coast, certainly the most scenic in Washington and it was further helped by sunny skies and no wind.  From Bellingham, there were 20 or so miles of hillside road, meandering on a forested shelf overlooking the bay.  As the scenery leveled out, I rode through flat farmland punctuated by the occasional slough.  I encountered some road cyclists flying by on a weekly training ride complete with aero bars, which was quite a contrast to my Mack truck of a bike.  The road then went on to Whidbey Island, and had a pleasing mix of bays and rolling terrain—the fishing villages brought coastal Maine to mind.  Finally, it was time to take a 30 minute ferry ride to Port Townsend, a Victorian era town with many historic buildings.  I felt like riding a little more, so I went another hour or so on to the next town, Port Hadlock.

Day 3 was a long day travelling south along the western side of the Puget Sound down to Shelton.  From there, I left the route and utilized Old Highway 101 to get most of the way to Olympia where I stayed with an old friend.  I lingered a bit the next morning before getting out of town.

Now off of the Adventure Cycling route, I headed south on a combination of rail-trails and eventually crossed the route at Centralia, WA, but instead headed towards a bed and breakfast at Winlock.  This was my shortest day, and also the least climbing, so my legs and other parts of my body had a chance to recover.
 
The next day had a few highlights but also some lowlights.  It was a foggy morning, and the rural area was complete with a few snarling dogs that emerged from houses / compounds that had an unruly, sprawling appearance such that I wondered if they might be meth labs. The sun eventually broke out and there I was at the Columbia River.  I went westward on the Washington side for an hour or so, then took the ferry across to the Oregon side at Cathlamet.  I expected the ferry to run continuously, but it ran only every hour so I had to wait a bit.  The next 30 miles or so westward to Astoria was unexpectedly hilly, and by the time I rolled into Astoria I was quite tired.  I made a lousy selection for a hotel and decided that Adventure Cycling tends to rely on campgrounds and non-chain budget motels.

I left Astoria the next morning and headed out to the nearby coast.  I first rode with a German couple for an hour or so until they stopped at Cannon Beach; they weren’t going as far as I’d be going that day and their approach was much more leisurely.  Maybe next time for me.  After many days riding alone, I’d continue to encounter touring cyclists the next two days, including two “funemployed” women, an older guy from California, and two younger guys who probably hadn’t packed a razor for the trip.  At some point, though, I decided that I wasn’t “funemployed” (despite not feeling carefree, I was having fun this week, though) and hadn’t planned to be gone for very long, so remembering that I’d started at the Vancouver speed skating oval, I decided that I could make it to Eugene, OR, and the legendary Hayward Field track by Wednesday afternoon, making it a weeklong tour bookended by symbolic nods to other sports I’ve participated in (running and speed skating) rather riding further south to California (or spending several more weeks finishing the entire route to the Mexican border outside of San Diego) on a full-fledged bicycle odyssey.

The Oregon coast was amazing.  It looks a lot like the rugged coast of Northern California, but my impression was that the coastal hillsides have more pine trees and less chaparral, and there seemed to be more sandy beach than in California.  Much of this route was on a wide shoulder on US 101, but parts of it went on scenic roads, especially the first afternoon where the course put me on the Three Capes Scenic route.  I was happy to roll into Pacific City, OR and stay at a great hotel with a brew pub across the street.  The weather had been warm and sunny so the beach was full at check-in time, then the sunset was amazing, and later the stars were gorgeous.  The next day was going to be a big push to get to Florence and the weather and scenery continued to be excellent.  From Florence, the final day into Eugene was pleasingly mostly flat, rolling along side a pair of rivers.  After ceremonially concluding my ride at Hayward Field, I rode the few miles to the Amtrak station and boxed up the bike and checked it for the ride home.  As the scenery rolled by out the train's windows, I reflected on the past week's journey of over 650 miles (1050 km) by bicycle with a feeling of satisfaction. 

This URL has the photos from the trip:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/35710734@N05/sets/72157622330965197/show/  The first set of photos at the oval was actually taken the afternoon of my arrival in Vancouver as I rode there to test my reassembly of the bike.  I chose the hotel for its proximity to the airport as well as a bike shop, to which I did need to make a couple of trips for some last minute adjustments.  At the end of the trip, I didn't get a picture of Amtrak's box, but it was much easier given its larger size than the standard size box I used for the airline (from a local bike shop).