• Category Archives the sporting life

  • Biking, running, weights, yoga…

  • New Bike!

    Posted on by Don

    My writer’s block continues, but I thought I’d pop in to announce that I finally got my new bike, a Kona Sutra SE. This is a bike seriously designed for touring: fenders, a triple ring, (mechanical) disk brakes, bullet-proof tires, bar-end shifters, a Brooks saddle, and a rear rack, with frame attachments for a front rack as well — and oh yeah, steel is real, baby!

    bicycle
    My New Kona Sutra SE

    I picked it up Thursday night from Cutters Bike Shop, where it had just arrived; they knew I wanted one, and they called a week or so ago to say one was on the way, and then it was there at the shop, and so was I… I gave it a test ride with panniers, then rode it home — it doesn’t fit on the roof rack. Yesterday was its real maiden voyage, a bakery ride up to Nazareth.


    tech talk the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • N+1

    Posted on by Don

    I knew it would come to this sooner or later — I’m in the market for a new bike. There’s nothing wrong with any of my other bikes, but none of them are really touring bikes, and I’ll be joining Anne on a trip this summer. Fully self-supported, front and rear panniers, camping in the Rockies — the works. (I hated “touring” every time I’ve ever done it, but I suspect that that’s really an equipment issue — I do enjoy our towpath “bikepacking” trips.)

    Anyway, I’ve been doing some research, and what I think I need is:

    • a bike with a “touring” frame — low bottom bracket, longer wheelbase and chainstays,
    • a triple chainring,
    • mechanical disk brakes, and
    • a few add-ons that would be nice if they came stock, like racks and fenders.

    There are a few bikes that I think might fit the bill, ones I found in several “best touring bike” listicles, namely the Trek 520, the Kona Sutra SE, and the Surly Disk Trucker. The Trek looks to be impossible to find anywhere right now, and the Surly only seems available (sight unseen) via the Internet, but I found a Sutra SE at a local bike shop, and it looks like my size. I need to do a bit more search and research — I’m also looking among the world’s used bikes — but I think I can already see how this will shake out.


    tech talk the sporting life

  • Some Recent Ride Photos

    Posted on by Don

    Two recent rides, three photos:

    I did a ride along the towpath a week or so ago on a beautiful, sunny fall day. I wasn’t feeling particularly mellow, but there were a few places where I just had to stop and soak in the view. This was one spot, The Chain Dam is usually a pretty dramatic scene, with the old Locktender’s House on the other side of the river, and the hills of Williams Township in the background.

    river flowing over dam
    The Chain Dam
    autumn leaves in sunlight
    Autumn Leaves Along The Lehigh

    A little later on the same ride, I came to this spot just to the east of Freemansburg, and had to stop to take a photo. I took a bunch but this one — the first I took — turned out the best. I think that this is now one of my all-time favorites.

    Another day (Wednesday), another ride: I went out on the towpath with Doug, and we took the Two Rivers Trail to Hackett Park. There’s a pretty good view of the western part of Easton, Wilson Boro, and in the distance the hill (really, the garbage dump, sadly enough) in Williams Township. Still, it’s a great shot of my old neighborhood — I lived a few blocks from that water tower, and was living there when they built it.

    vista of a town across a valley
    Wilson Boro Seen From Hackett Park

    day by day the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • One Day Like This A Year Would See Me Right

    Posted on by Don

    That’s the song that’s playing right now, and it sums up today for me. I met Doug for a ride at Jacobsburg, and we got in about 12 miles or so on some really beautiful trails — blue skies and fall colors, leaves on the ground rustling under our tires. There was still a frost on the ground when we started, though I can’t say we were particularly chilly either riding or standing around. Neither of us were particularly interested in going fast, we just enjoyed tooling around in the woods. Plenty of other people were out too, biking, hiking and riding horses, but the place was big enough that we weren’t on top of each other — there would just be a sociable moment every so often, when we came across some fellow trail users.


    It was an easy day to get up earlier than usual because of the time change, but also because Anne’s sisters were over for a visit, and we all just naturally got up early. They knitted and watched “The Great British Baking Show” yesterday, and while I was out riding they spent the day trying some of the “show stopper” recipes from the episodes they watched. Not a bad thing to come home to…

    Tomorrow is going to be a bit rougher: we have to go to the funeral for a friend’s grand-daughter, who died in a car accident the other day.


    the sporting life

  • Anabasis 2021

    Posted on by Don

    So this weekend was our annual bike camping trip up the D&L to Jim Thorpe. A total of seven of us rode up, and our friend Predo, who was on “injured reserve,” drove to the campsite with our extra gear. It took us about six hours, with plenty of photo ops and snack breaks, and a few snafu’s…


    We (Bill M, Jared, Sara, Anna Z, Ed, and Anne and I) started at CAT, and took the roads until we got to Northampton, where we crossed the Lehigh and picked up the trail. Lunch was the “Diggity Dogs” food truck at the Slatington Trailhead, and then it was another fifteen miles to downtown Jim Thorpe. A trip to the supermarket, then the long climb from the river to our campsite, and we were done for the day. Predo met us at the campground, and Rick & Shari arrived not long after.

    • Concrete Phone Booth
    • Ed and Bill
    • Bill, Ed and Me

    Saturday we rode into town — which was a madhouse, the Fall Festival was in full swing — met Shari and Rick (they are NOT into camping) and continued north along the trail, picking up Matt & Diet at the Glen Onoko trailhead. We were now eleven strong…


    The trail was fairly quiet at the start, but it was a beautiful fall day if a bit drizzly, and things became pretty crowded after a while. We got to Rockport, which was another madhouse, with bicycle outfitters dropping off cyclists by the busload, and that’s where we ate lunch and did some very entertaining people-watching… Our goal and turn-around was Buttermilk Falls, just a half mile past lunch and always a good photo-op.

    • A View of the Rockport Tunnel
    • Buttermilk Falls
    • Group Shot
    • Anne and Me
    • Looking Upstream
    • Me at “The Photo Rock”
    • Jared at “The Photo Rock”
    • The Crew
    • Sara at “The Photo Rock”

    On the way back we met up with Ben and Candace, which brought our group up to our full strength — 13 riders! One more photo session at the usual spot, and our excursion began winding down; we said goodbye to Matt & Diet at Glen Onoko, and rode back up to camp. Dinner was basically a pizza party, and we had one final addition: Gary L who was joining us for the Sunday return ride.

    • At The Campfire
    • At The Campfire
    • Mauch Chunk Lake
    • Our Campsite

    Sunday was the return. Ben and Candace took off for Philly, and Rick and Shari had gone home the night before, so we were now down to eight. The ride was pretty uneventful, but we did switch things up by taking the Nor-Bath Trail from Northampton over to Bicentennial Park, before finishing on the road.


    …AND I finally got a photo of that spooky “house on the hill” at Lehigh Gap.

    • The House On The Hill
    • The House On The Hill
    • At Slatington

    And that was our trip up-country!


    the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • This Old Video

    Posted on by Don

    Here’s the video I did of our memorial ride for Brian. I made this about eleven years ago and put it on Facebook, where it sort of languished ever since — FB “memories” just brought up some of that trip’s photos, and so I went rummaging for it. I just added it to my Youtube channel, where it will have a home — maybe a more accessible/discoverable one — with my other videos, if I ever actually make any.

    So anyway, there it is. I can’t say “enjoy;” it was a pretty somber moment but I sometimes like to look back at that day. I would love to know what happened to some of Brian’s own ride and vacation videos, he was a master at that sort of thing, and his videos were almost as much fun as the trips themselves.


    looking back the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • Working Man’s Blues

    Posted on by Don

    “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

    Dwight D. Eisenhower

    I did another stint as a bicycle guide over this past week — this time, and rather unexpectedly, as the “ride leader”. I think I did well enough and liked it for the most part, and I think the riders got a pretty good experience out of it, but I also think I’ll not be doing that again anytime soon. Lesson learned: I like riding, and riding with other people, but I am not as comfortable schmoozing as I thought I’d be, and I absolutely hated feeling responsible for people and situations over which I didn’t have much control.

    What I did enjoy, strangely enough, is what I always enjoy: planning bike rides using map and database software. I started this particular ride-mapping project a few years ago. Rides, routes and alternate routes; points of interest and local trivia along the ride; ride logistics like bathroom locations and transportation times between the base and the start/finish — I stuffed it all into a database and managed the whole thing with QGIS. That was all well and good, but then it sat moribund over the COVID hiatus.

    As this new ride season approached I cleaned up and updated my project. Maybe this was really just the “fantasy football” or cosplay of the bike-guide biz, but it did come in handy after some local trails got wrecked by recent storms: I had backup rides already on deck, and enough information in my head to make plenty of other sudden changes “on the fly.”

    It seems a shame that I no longer have a use for my toy. We’ll see, maybe it can be the basis for some other project.


    tech talk the sporting life

  • Eat Sleep Ride

    Posted on by Don

    Some recent rides:

    Yesterday Anne and I did a ride out to the “Snoopy Barn” in Nazareth with our cycling neighbors Mat and Diet, and our other neighbor Josh. Our true goal was Sweet & Savory Bakery in Nazareth; we stopped there for donuts and coffee on the return trip and had a picnic at the nearby park. We were out from about 10:00 to about 2:30, with actual ride time of just over three hours for our 33 mile round trip.

    Saturday we went with our friend Yani B, and Dwight and Rachel with their son Josh, up to the Game Lands in Jim Thorpe. We parked at the first Game Lands parking lot, rode out the the second overlook, then on the return trip we stopped to hike down to the big flat rock area at the top of Glen Onoko Falls, where we dipped our feet in the creek’s freezing water. We spent quite a bit of time at the overlook and the falls, and we also stopped for a picnic in town so it was a long day, but our total riding time was about two hours for seven miles on the old Broad Mountain doubletrack.

    These trails are, sadly, far less fun than they used to be, ever since the Game Commission put down ballast stones, but mountain biking was an exciting new experience for our friends, especially Yani (and Rachel — Dwight is an outdoorsman with quite a bit of MTB experience, and I’m sure he’s brought Josh on some adventures), so it was fun to share the general enthusiasm.

    Thursday was the make-up day for the Weekly Women’s Bike Ride, and I joined Anne and the ladies for a ride down the South Bethlehem Greenway and part of the Hellertown Trail. (Musikfest was in full swing, with Sand Island as ground zero, so riding the D&L was out of the question.) Thirteen miles total, about two hours at “conversational pace,” and then we stopped in at F&A Grog House afterward.

    Saturday a week ago I helped Anne run a Smart Cycling (i.e. LAB “road one”) course, with some classroom learning, skills training at a nearby basketball court, and a 5-mile “put our new skills to use” ride around town. I haven’t done anything like that in quite a while, and I was surprised at how much fun I had teaching.

    The Friday before was a road ride, just me and Anne, down to Milford for lunch. Forty-six miles, maybe five hours plus breakfast and lunch stops. It was a bit on the warm side (and we were out in the sunny hills at exactly the hottest part of the day), but what a beautiful day!

    Thursday was the Volunteer Appreciation Breakfast at the Canal Museum, and I rode there on the Iguana. Twenty towpath miles — two 10-mile rides really, with a breakfast in the middle.

    All of these events were followed, eventually, by an afternoon nap.


    day by day the sporting life

  • Twenty Eight Years Later

    Posted on by Don

    I visited my parents about three weeks ago, and before the visit I rode at Allaire State Park:

    The soil there is pebbly/sandy, and pretty smooth, and the trails are twisty but easy singletrack for the most part — though I was gratified to find a few more challenging sections. Here are a few photos from a trail near the entrance, a section I’ve ridden many times over the decades:

    A trailside selfie! The place has evolved a bit (new trails have been built, older trails have worn in), but it hasn’t changed all that much. What has changed is me.

    Allaire used to host a mountain bike race every year, an important one in the state race calendar — maybe even the NJ State Championship? — and it was an important part of my riding/racing life back in the day. My very first race was with Mike K, at the God’s Country MTB Classic (in Potter County, October of 1992), but here is a photo of me with Mike after our very second race, at Allaire that November:

    That’s me on the left, in my “lucky racing shirt.” I don’t look like that guy anymore, but sometimes I still feel like him.


    looking back the sporting life 📎and tagged