offtrail.guru

There’s not much snow left on our Jura mountains. Despite the mild temperatures, what was left, fortunately, melted only slowly during the week. Likely thanks to the dry air. It’s the end of January, and it has never felt wintery so far. If we don’t get any winter storms in the coming weeks, like other parts of the world are experiencing right now, winter may very well be over at the end of February or even before. I’m trying to make the best out of it by riding the still snow-covered hillsides in my backyard. It means that I have to ride my studded tires on pavement and gravel for a couple of miles to and from snow-covered trails. I do this carefully. Studded fat-bike tires aren’t cheap after all. At the moment, they’re very needed since a lot of the trails have ice on them.

As mentioned in my previous post, I recreated my Data Studio dashboard under a new Gmail account because Google’s G Suite legacy free edition, which became Google Workspace in 2020, will require a paid subscription this year. Three simple things needed to be done. First, I had to copy my Google sheet from the old account to my new account. Then, I had to create a new Zapier account, and share my zap from the old account with the new account. This was straightforward. Once logged into Zapier with my new account, I had to link the zap to my Strava account and also had to give the zap permission to modify my Google sheet. Pretty much the same procedure was necessary for the Data Studio report. I logged into the old account and shared the report with my new account. Then, I logged into the new account and had to replace the data sources to point to the Google sheet in my new Gmail account. Sounds complicated but was extremely simple.

My weekend routine these days follows pretty much the same pattern every weekend. I hit the sack between 10 and 11 PM to be woken up by my wife between 3 and 4 AM. She goes to bed, and I go upstairs, clean our cats’ litter box, feed them, and get some more sleep on the couch with the alarm clock set to wake me up at regular intervals to feed our kitties. Most of the time, I get up after 8 AM to make breakfast for myself and our cats. Since my wife is getting a few hours of rest in our downstairs bedroom, I spend the morning with quiet activities. Lately, this has been setting up my MacBook. There’s not a lot of software I need; Edge to browse, Spark to read mail, Photos for my large photo library, Atom, and Publii to maintain this blog, Office 365 and OneDrive, music players such as Sonos, Spotify, and IINA to listen to music. I have to say, macOS Monterey is a wonderful OS.

In 2021 I rode 128 times or 234 hours, totaling 4'218 kilometers and climbing 119'885 meters. I spent 87% of the rides on my Nordest Albarda allroad bike and did a single mountain bike all year. That's very unusual for someone who got into cycling on a mountain bike. 2020 and 2021 have been very unusual years, not just due to the continuing pandemic, but because our two old cats have chronic kidney disease. Maintaining a good quality of life for our two bugs has become the first priority. So, whenever I left for a ride, it was a 1-2 hour road bike ride, sometimes with a bit of gravel mixed in. My wife and I stayed home to take care of them at all times, and if one of us had to go out of town, the other stayed at home with them. We never left our cats alone for more than a few hours. A weekend trip or vacation? Impossible.

The numbers below are from Bike Insights, from Stooge and from Kris' drawings I imported into QCAD, an open-source 2D CAD system. While some people totally geek out about bike geometry and could hold a 2-hour monologue on head tube angles alone, I'm really not a numbers expert when it comes to cycling. Whether the topic is frame geometry or watts and whatnot, I'm not the expert to talk to despite 36 years of cycling. I don't sit on enough bikes to have an expert opinion on what a slacker head tube or longer trail do to a bike. Sure, I have an idea about it, but with the rather small number of bikes I've ridden over the years, I'm still far from having earned the degree of "armchair geometry wizard." The 36 years in the sport have given me the ability to know what works for me; no more, no less. Changes I've made over the years happened gradually. Being limited to riding only the bikes I purchased, my experience and knowledge of the sport are fairly narrow. I know nothing about suspension and bikes equipped with it. I know even less about bikes powered by motors and honestly don't care to know anything about them. When the time comes to look for a new bike, and it's not made to measure by a bike builder, I usually compare the geometry to the bikes I already own. Often, I draw the frames up in CAD and overlay them for comparison. This also helps to figure out what stem to select to achieve a similar position on a new bike.