Talbot’s Syndrome

You made a mistake when you stole my bike. You are probably wondering how I tracked you down, where all this blood came from, and why there’s a severed deer head here instead of the bike you stole. I’ll explain, not because I owe you an explanation, but because I want you to think twice before you go out to steal another bike. You came very close to making a fatal mistake and I want you to know just how close you came. I’m a believer in second chances, I hope you’ll make the most of this one.

I know nothing about you, but I can make a guess. I’m not sticking around to see if that guess is right, I’ll be long gone with my bike by the time you read this note. I’ve got to get on with my life, I suggest you do the same with yours. It’s a gift, don’t waste it.

I’m guessing that you’re a junky and you didn’t want my bike, you wanted a fix. You figured you could stash the bike and take it to a pawn shop in the morning. I don’t think they’ll give you anything for the deer head.

OK, I get it, you’re fighting a hard battle. We all are. I understand that, it’s why I’m cutting you some slack. Now I’m going to tell you my story, so maybe you’ll understand.

We all get breaks in life, some are bad, some are good, and a hell of a lot of them are what you make of them. And we all get our share of obsessions, beats me where they come from, but sometimes they save you and sometimes they destroy you. When I was 16, I had a lot of buddies who got into street racing and drinking and I probably would have too if it hadn’t been for the fact I had one other buddy who got into mountain biking and he loaned me a bike for a ride in the woods. First one’s free, I bet you understand that. Anyhow, I got hooked on something that’s mostly healthy and I guess that saved my life.

I said mostly healthy because I don’t think anybody thinks of broken collarbones or Alpha-gal Syndrome as healthy things. I’m the guy who broke his collarbone and my pal Nick is the one who got Alpha-gal Syndrome. Alpha-gal is something I’d never heard of and it’s not some high-status chick, it’s a disease like Lyme Disease that you get from a tick bite. There are a hell of a lot of ticks in the woods. You probably want to be careful around that deer head I left you.

Anyhow, Alpha-gal Syndrome is a weird-ass disease. It turned Nick vegan. No shit, something changed in his blood chemistry and now he can’t eat meat. I thought it was about the damnedest thing that could happen to somebody. And then I got bit by something that makes Nick's dietary restrictions look like nothing.

It happened like this. If you’ve ever had a job then you know that it can really cut into your day. I was still very into mountain biking so I got myself some lights and I’d ride the trails at night. Some say it’s spooky, I say it’s peaceful. Yeah, there’s animals but you know they are mostly more scared of you than you are of them and riding a trail by the light of a full moon is pretty much a magical experience.

One night a few year ago I’m riding one of my favorite trails and a deer comes crashing out of the brush and slams into my front wheel. Right as we both go down a big gray dog jumps on the deer and tears its throat open. Because I’m an idiot, I try to smack the dog away and it takes a nip at me. Then it looks me right in the eye and I belatedly realize that this dog is a wolf and I figure I’m dead. But the wolf scowls at me and leaps away.

I was worried about rabies so I went to the doc and got the shots. Four shots over fourteen days and the doctor said I’d be fine. There’s a whole hell of a lot doctors don’t know.

It was a month later that I knew I wasn’t fine.

The first thing was the fever. I’ve had fevers before, but nothing like this. Feeling like I was burning up doesn’t even begin to describe it. I felt like I was baking in my own skin. I also felt like it was damn important that I get away from everybody. I ran out of the house and into the woods, tearing off my clothes as I went. That’s the last thing I remember.

I woke up naked, covered in blood and next to a dead deer. Physically, I felt fine, better than I’ve felt in years. Mentally, I was a wreck.

It turned out I’d run miles into the woods. It took me all damn day to find my clothes and find my way back home.

The same doctor who’d told me I’d be fine still said I was fine. I’d told the doc about the fever and running off into the woods, but I left out the part about the blood and the deer. I didn’t want to get locked in the loony bin.

I was pretty sure I knew what I had. I mean, I’ve seen my share of horror movies. It’s all just good entertainment until it happens to you.

I eventually found another doctor, an old guy from the old country. It turns out they actually have a name for what I’ve got and it’s kind of the inverse of that Alpha-gal thing that Nick has. They call it Talbot’s Syndrome and yeah, it’s transmitted by the bite of a werewolf. Doctor Simic tells me it’s chronic and incurable, that’s the bad news. The good news is that’s it’s damn predictable. Once a month, like clockwork, I turn into a wolf and have to kill. But I don’t have to kill a human.

So it really hasn’t changed my life that much. Once a month, just as it’s getting dark, I hop on my bike and head for the hills. I have a system and it works pretty well.

Except last night, I stopped at a 7-11 on my way out of town. I was thirsty and stopped in for a root-beer. I thought I had time. I didn’t think some junky would pinch my bike in the couple of minutes I was in the store.

Of course I was pissed. I’m still pissed. And I was running out of time, the moon was starting to rise. I ran for the woods and you’re damn lucky I made it there and found an unlucky deer. Once I got the bloodlust out of my system, I turned my attention to the problem of recovering my bike.

There are certain advantages to my wolf-state. It was an easy thing for me to track your scent and it brought me straight to the bike. Wolves aren’t exactly built for pedaling, so once I had the bike located, I went back to the deer carcass in the woods to finish eating and wait for the sunrise.

I decided to bring the deer head and leave this note as warning.

I don’t know how to get off junk. You’ve got a problem that I don’t have and I’m sure that’s a bitch, but dude, I suggest you stop stealing bikes. Folks tend to be quite attached to their wheels and not everybody has as much practice keeping their rage in check as I do.

The Evolution Of My Schwinn Fixed Gear Bike

 Last month I picked up what my lovely wife would call "yet another bike" and while I've typed various pages about it over on my other, more active blog at https://seldomspeedy.blogspot.com I figure it makes sense to post the full story of the bike's evolution here.

Now I should be clear, I didn't strictly need this bike. I'm retired, I have three perfectly good bikes and to be honest, one would really do just fine for the riding I'm doing these days. But here's what happened.

Christine and I get around town by biking and walking and in walking and biking around I'd seen this old Schwinn World Sport locked to a lightpost a half a block from our house. The bike had been locked to the post for at least a month. Now I should note that this is something that make Superior, Wisconsin different from Seattle or Portland or Eugene. Here in Superior, you can leave a bike locked to a lightpost with a flimsy lock and it will stay untouched for a month. In those other cities I mentioned, the bike would be stolen or stripped within hours.

Anyhow, after about a month I happened to walk past the bike in a course different from my usual direction and I saw this sign on the lightpost:

Holy crap! Fifteen dollars! A bargain I could not pass up. Even so, I ran the purchase past Christine and she said OK. It was a nice bike. I called the guy up, met him at the corner, took the bike for a test ride and bought it. I didn't even try to dicker on the price because $15 is a screaming deal.

This is how the bike looked when I bought it:

It was basically in working shape. The shifters and brakes worked and the (worn) tires held air.

The Schwinn World Sport was a not fancy but decent sport touring bike of it's day. The lugged frame was made in Taiwan for Schwinn and the main triangle is 4130 ChromeMoly tubing. The internet help me decode the bike's serial number and told me that it was made in 1984. The dealer sticker told me that the bike had originally been sold by Stewart's Wheel Goods, just over the bridge in Duluth.

I pretty much always wind up modifying my bikes to suit me and I have a big pile of bike parts and tools and I can usually do the modifications without having to buy much in terms of new parts. Since I'd gotten this bike for so little I wanted to keep that frugal trend going and see how little I could spend.

I knew I wanted to change the handlebars around and my first attempt was something I'd done with bikes in the past, chopping off the lower portion of the drop bars and then inverting them to make cowhorn bars, an operation known as the "clip and flip"

The two pictures above show my first cut at customisation. The mirror, the bell, the light, the yellow cable housing, the bar tape and the Jandd frame bag were all things I had in my bike shed. I really wanted to make the bike into a fixed gear, but it turned out the one thing I didn't have in my parts stash was a fixed cog. But when I posted about my initial conversion on my blog, my pal Steve in Minneapolis dug through his parts stash, found a 16 tooth Surly fixed cog and dropped it in the mail to me.

My initial riding with the bike still in its 12 speed configuration told me that I'm no longer as young as I once was and the cowhorns had me too stretched out. The bike handled great, however, very stable and I could go no-handed for blocks if I wanted to. One upgrade from my parts stash that's not obvious from the photos is that I upgraded the 40 year old brakepads to an unused set of Scott-Mathauser salmon-colored brakepads that had been sitting in one of my parts drawers for the past decade. I knew they'd come in handy some day!

I did have the proper freewheel puller in my tool kit to remove the freewheel, but I didnt have a bench vise for leverage. I did, however, have a big wrench and the seatmast from my Bike Friday Pakit that worked great as a cheater bar. A casual observer of the work in progress would think that I was building a unicycle.

Steve's gift cog came in the mail and I mounted it to the wheel using loctite. I'm not one of those hipster kid fixie riders who run no brakes and skid stop so the loctite should be sufficient. I have both front and rear brakes with really good brake pads and I use them PLUS my legs to slow down and stop.

I did have to swap a big spacer on the rear wheel from the drive to non-drive side and re-dish the wheel. There were just enough threads on the spokes to do this. I also replaced the flimsy rubber rim strip with a double layer of gorilla tape and I repacked both the front and rear hubs and trued both wheels.

I reached the point where I had to spend some more money on this project so I rode my Allant over the bridge to Duluth. The Schwinn has old style 27" wheels which are no longer a common size, but Twin Ports Cyclery had a variety of tires in stock because they know some folks like to keep the old things going. I got a nice pair of kind of knobby cyclocrossish tires for $20 each. I also needed a 1/8" single speed chain, but the ones at Twin Ports were a bit fancier (and fancier priced) than I wanted, so I rolled over to Stewart's where I got a chain and a spare tube for a total of $18.

Back at home I installed the tires and chain. I had already removed the derailleurs and shifters and they are now in my parts boxes waiting for some other project or to be traded away. The bike now looked like this:

I tipped the bars up a bit more and trimmed off a bit more of the cowhorn, but things still didn't feel right.

Then I got an idea:

I really liked the way the brake levers worked in this position, I can apply them with either my index or middle fingers or both, and with the bars swung back towards me I was in a more comfortable upright riding position. I was getting closer to having things dialed in.

Now things were really starting to come together. At the Goodwill store I found a perfect little blue bag for two dollars and I knew what to do with it, I made it into a handlebar bag.

I also found my Orp in my parts pile. The Orp is an electronic horn & light combo that I used to think was too loud but given how distracted everybody is these days I've decided it is damn handy.

I made the mount for the handlebar bag out of coroplast and zip-ties. I have a big stash of coroplast and zipties in my bike shed and I also made a set of mudguards for my bike. The rear is a full coverage fender and the front is a splash guard that runs along the downtube together with a small bit that extends over the front brake

 

I figured out that I wanted the portion of the handlebars that swung back towards me to be a bit longer and in my eclectic parts pile I had just what I needed to make that happen: an oak wood dowel and some JB-Weld.

I let the JB-Weld set for 24 hours and then re-wrapped the bars with innertube rubber for padding and then cork tape.

I was also chagrined to find that while I had various water bottles in my stash of parts, I had no bottle cages. Naturally I made one from coroplast, zipties, and a bit of plastic tubing I had left over from my backyard pond project.

I also figured out that the front bag would sag too much when loaded with my bike tools, but I fixed that with small support cords running from the front fender to the stem.

The last bit I added to the bike was a rear rack. I found this in the Bike Cave, a non-profit DIY free bike shop over in Duluth. I donated some of my extra bike lights and tools to them (I had way too many lights!) and I took this nifty rack home.

It mounted quite nicely to the bike with some p-clamps and rubber spacers. The toe-strap running to the straddle rails helps take some of the stress off the p-clamps.

The fixie Schwinn is currently my favorite bike to ride, For those of you who care about such things the gear ratio is 40*16 which seems just about perfect to me. And yes, I'm running stupid flat heavy rubber block pedals on it with no toe clips or straps and no my feet don't fly off the pedals and yes I can go up and down hills without dying.

I have a weird accounting method in that I don't count the cost of anything I already owned when tallying up what I've spent on a bike. So I don't count my bike lights and coroplast and zipties and other bits I had laying around. So by my accounting this what the Schwinn cost me:

The bike itself:            $15

Two new tires:              $40

Singlespeed chain:          $10

Spare innertube:            $ 8

Handlebar bag               $ 2

-------------------------------

                            $75

I think it turned out to be a pretty good deal. And oh yeah, the bike has a fair amount of what Grant Petersen calls beausage. It's a nice looking bike, but I don't have to worry about getting it dinged up.

Inexpensive Biomotion Taillighting

The other day I read an article on BikeRumor! about a Kickstarter project for a biomotion taillight. Basically, studies have shown that if you highlight the motion of a cyclist's leg motion, drivers identify the object ahead of them and register it as human faster than if they are just seeing a conventional bike taillight. This makes sense to me, and for years companies have made pedal reflectors and reflective ankle bands with this idea in mind. The new element is active illumination of the cyclist's legs.

While I am in favor of any innovation that will decrease my chance of being run over, the Kickstarter light is a bit beyond my price range and it won't ship until September/October of 2023. "I bet I could build something," I thought.

It turns out that I didn't have to build anything, I already had what I needed in my pile of parts. Back in March I'd seen a really good deal on USB rechargeable bike taillights on Amazon. I've gradually been replacing my lights that use disposable batteries with USB rechargeable ones. and these lights were very inexpensive in a batch of six:

They can be toggled to either flash or constant lighting of red or white LEDs and they come with a little rubber mounting strap. They are quite small and I mounted one on the back of my helmet and a couple of more on the back of a couple of my bikes. And I still had a couple left over.

All I had to do was cut a small rubber shim and I mounted one of these lights on each of my fixies two seat stays, pointing forward and just under the brake. It looks like this:

The white lights shine forward and down, illuminating my rotating calves and reflective ankle bands. I think the effect is quite eye-catching.

Kent Peterson

Superior WI USA

P.S. My typed posts on a wide range of subjects show up daily on my blog at https://seldomspeedy.blogspot.com/

2010 Tour Divide Call-Ins

Back in 2010, I was a rider in the Tour Divide Mountain Bike Race. I blogged about it extensively at the time and you can read my blog entries on this blog from June of 2010, you can pretty much get the whole story. The story actually starts in 2005 with The Way of the Mountain Turtle and concludes with The Return of the Mountain Turtle which I wrote at the end of 2011.

While the blog posts, write-ups, and pictures captured much of the experience, another part of the story was told in the racer call-ins, which, through link-rot have disappeared from the internet. I was unaware that all the audio was lost until yesterday, when prompted by a query from someone who had been quite moved by my final race call in and was looking for the audio, I started hunting around and realised that I didn't have those files either.

But, I am very fortunate to have a meticulous friend in Mark Canizaro who, together with my wife Christine, served as "Mission Control" for my 2010 ride. And Mark did still have audio copies of my ride call-ins and he sent them to me.

Blogger doesn't like MP3 files, so I spent this morning converting them to MP4 files, which appear below as seven pictureless videos. So now, in the interest of historical completeness, you can here a younger me dispensing advice I still stand by: Get out there and ride.

Kent "still answers to Mountain Turtle" Peterson

Superior WI USA

 

Back To Blogging

 

One Typed Page

Along with bicycles, one of my interests is old typewriters. I have several friends I trade typed letters with and for the past couple of months I've been contributing to the One Typed Page website at:

https://onetypedpage.wordpress.com/

It's an eclectic mix of things posted by various folks and my daily postings there sometimes include bicycles.

If you've been wondering what's the latest with me or what I'm thinking about on a given day, One Typed Page is a good place to check. I have basically given up on social media but One Typed Page is just social enough for me.

Kent Peterson
Eugene, OR USA

E-bike Range: How far can I go?

One of the most common questions anyone asks about an e-bike is "How far can I go on a single charge?" While this sound like a simple question, a variety of factors go into this calculation and the most accurate response anyone can give is "it depends".

Micah Toll is an e-bike writer and rider and he dives into the various considerations in detail in an article at:

https://electrek.co/2020/06/12/how-far-can-an-electric-bicycle-really-go-on-a-charge/

Now Micah is a very experienced e-bike enthusiast and he is a fan of going fast, powerful motors and throttles. As he admits, he's not a fit cyclist but he does a pretty good job in his article of trying to get into the fit cyclist perspective. But that is fundamentally not the perspective he comes from when it comes to e-bikes.

Alan Scholz, Bike Friday's founder, and myself do come from the fit cyclist perspective. We're both in our sixties now and have been lifelong cyclists. Our approach to e-bikes, and hence Bike Friday's approach, is to keep things as light as possible. We figure that the motor is there to be an assist to human muscle power, not a replacement for it. Therefore, Bike Friday builds Class 1 e-bikes (with no throttle).

Now much of the e-Bike industry has a "weight be damned, you've got a motor" philosophy and in the industry one quick rule of thumb is that they will quote an ebike as using about 20 WattHours per mile. Micah ups that number to 25 for his style of riding but in his article he does an experiment of riding at a very low assist level, laying off the throttle and putting in a lot of human power into his ride. Doing this he was able to only use 3.1 WattHours per mile on a 29 mile ride. But he admits he was exhausted at the end of that ride and doesn't recommend riding at that level every day.

Now Alan and I do ride pretty much every day we're nerds so we've used recording Watt meters to tell us how many WattHours per mile we are using. Alan and I have remarkably similar results. On a recent moderately hilly ride, with my e-assist set to levels 2 or 3 (out of 5), I used 214.7 WattHours to go 37.7 miles. My arage speed was not super fast but not turtle slow either, I averaged 13.6 mph. My bike has a modest 250 Watt motor and a 12.5 AmpHour 36 Volt battery. On my ride the maximum peak power the motor put out was 151.9 Watts (for a short time on the steepest climb).

Now let's do some math. 214.7 WattHours  total divided by 37.7 miles tells me that I used an average of 5.69 WattHours per mile. This was not at a "grind myself into the ground" pace effort. This is my standard, "I'm going on a bike ride" pace. My battery has total capacity of 36 Volts times 12.5 AmpHours which equals 450 WattHours. Therefore based on this sample ride I would estimate my e-bike's range to be 450 WattHours divided by 5.69 Watt Hours per mile which equals just a bit over 79 miles.

Now again, I can't stress enough that your mileage will vary. Going up hills takes much more power than riding on flat terrain. Heavier bikes and riders use more power than lighter folks.

Our Bike Friday travel bikes use airline legal LiGo batteries from Grin Technologies. Each LiGo holds 99 Watt Hours. Our bikes typically ship with 3 or 4 LiGo batteries. So let's say I have a customer who uses 10 Watt Hours for each mile they travel. That person would have a range of just under 30 miles for a 3 LiGo system or 40 miles if they opted for 4 LiGos. And some of our customers buy multiple sets of LiGos to increase their range.

The "How Far Can I Go?" question is a complicated one. A lot of folks trying to sell you something will give you an easy, optimistic and probably wrong answer. The longer answer is "it depends" and I hope Micah's article and this one give you the information you need to determine what the true answer is for you.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent Peterson
Eugene, OR USA