Bad weather and moral weakness

I had the day off on Friday and earlier in the week, when the weather forecast was looking good, had planned to spend a good bit of the day riding. By the time Friday arrived the forecast had changed to rain, ice pellets and snow. I probably could have salvaged a bit of ride if I'd been up early and out the door but laziness triumphed and I left it too late. Pretty much my sole cycling-related accomplishment was swapping the Nokian studded tire on my front wheel for a Pasela. Too busy the rest of the weekend for any riding but I did pump up the tires and lube the chains on the kids' bikes. I guess this means the family cycling season has started.

To make up for all this whining and excuse-making, a cheerful picture of a sidecar full of bananas (in Yangshuo I think):

Metrics

Today, for the first time, I wore my heart rate monitor on my ride to work. I’ve had a heart rate monitor for a while but I’m not a very serious user of it. I keep an eye on my heart rate when running (almost never when cycling) but I don’t carefully spend so many minutes in this zone and so many minutes in that zone. I don’t really “train” in any meaningful sense of the word. I suppose I should. Anyway, I was curious about what my resting heart rate is so I wore the monitor all night. As a result I was wearing it this morning and just left it on during my ride in. What did it tell me? The ride took 55 minutes, which means that even on what should be an “easy” day (not especially cold, no wind to speak of, no snow on the ground) it still takes me ten minutes longer than my usual non-winter time. It also told me that my average heart rate was 56 bpm and my maximum heart rate was 67 bpm, which calls into question the accuracy of the monitor. I suspect it slipped out of position and so wasn’t reading correctly. I tried again on the way home and had a more believable average of 115 bpm. I was also five minutes faster, in spite of a bit of a headwind.

Today's picture: cycle-rickshaws in front of the Red Fort in Delhi

Pingyao

A cargo trike in Pingyao

We rented bikes in Pingyao and I got to try out a Flying Pigeon, which had decidedly odd handling. Very floppy (if I understand what flop means correctly). The saddle was also too low. As with the bike I rented to ride round the city wall in Xian, I spent too much time trying to sort out the brakes, everyone else rode away and I jumped on my bike to catch up, realizing only too late that the saddle was too low and that my knees would not be happy. Most bikes in China seemed to have saddles set rather lower than I would be comfortable with. (That is, lower with respect to the people riding them, not lower than I would like them to be if I were riding those bikes.) Although I had thought of the rod-brake roadster Flying Pigeon as the typical Chinese bike we saw fewer than I expected. There were tremendous numbers of folding and small-wheeled bicycles and a lot of modern, lightweight commuters. There were also a fair number of "ten-speed" style bikes, i.e. drop-bar, derailleur bikes with cheap-looking components. Unlike the ten-speeds of my youth they had sloping top tubes. In some cities, Chengdu for example, there were loads of electric bikes and scooters.

A cycle rickshaw in Chiang Mai

How about that saddle? I can't imagine the handlebars are actually as close to the saddle as they appear in photo. It didn't strike me as being unusually close when I took the picture.

You could carry a lot of stuff in a box this big

Indian Cycle Snaps 1

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I haven't ridden my bike since Christmas, as I've been wandering around India and now Thailand but I do have a few pictures. This is a cycle shop in Bhubaneswar, Orissa.
















And this is a load-carrying cycle rickshaw on the road between Jaipur and Agra.















A generator on the back of a cycle rickshaw in Bhubaneswar