A full fall

Well, the days are definitely getting shorter and it is getting colder. After an amazingly nice day on Saturday and a "great for November" Sunday, I see some snow in the forecast. Which means that I hopefully will be ramping up my visits to the fancy new bike I bought and put in the decidedly not-fancy, nearly 100-year old basement. It (the bike, not the basement) has a screen and whatnot, and a variety of biking and non-biking classes, nearly all of which are really quite good. I should have visited the bike today after a long day at work, but instead decided to do some bona fide cooking for dinner, which was restorative in its own way.

What follows isn't a full report of what I have been doing since I last posted, but here are some highlights.

In early October, we went to NYC with our friends Kristin and Steve, while Haley had her first-ever (and successful!) slumber party over at Pierre's house. It really is noteworthy because we've worked really hard to make her less reactive around other dogs and, while she'll never be a dog park kind of dog, she can apparently stay in at least one house with another dog when we're out of town and peacefully co-exist. Many thanks to Susan and Eric for being amenable to that. Oh, NYC! It was a great trip, with really effective COVID precautions. The weather was great and we did a full-day bike tour of Brooklyn. Riding in NYC is pretty different than riding in MSP.

Little dog on the big bed,
big dog on the little bed. It never fails.

I did several rides with my friend Matt, did a western suburb ride with a guy I met through the Twin Cities Bicycling Club (TCBC) named Adams, sadly stopped doing weeknight rides with TCBC and the Major Taylor Bicycling Club, started taking Irish dance classes again, and had a fun trip with my friend Marcy (we don't get to see each other enough) to see Beth (my stepmom) and got to do a big nature hike and watch lots of Ted Lasso. That was a big sentence. I also took Haley for lots of walks at the state park after work.

For Halloween, I pulled out the lederhosen sweatsuit that I ordered during the fall of 2020 to make me laugh on dark COVID days, and ordered a hat. I got to wear my costume to Irish dance, on the TCBC Halloween bike ride that Matt and I did (he won third prize for his costume!), and when I handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. It was pretty chilly on Halloween, so I pulled the fire ring thing out front, sat by the fire with lots of clothes on under my lederhosen, and pointed kids toward a big bowl and said, "take 3 pieces." It was so fun to have a costume, and a decent one at that!

Matt's costume garnered lots of comments on the bike trails
from people coming from the other direction.

I am still laughing.

Jess is a TCBC rider and was the
most welcoming person when I first
started riding with the club in the spring.

Stacy always has her feet
lined up better than I do. 

Last week and this past weekend, I spent a lot of time consulting with Stephen from the Angry Catfish about new biking shoes and the bizarre placement of my old cleats. I rode about 60 miles with Matt on Saturday (beautiful weather!) on a really fun route he put together with lots of zigzagging and backtracking throughout the city. And then, on Sunday, I rode about 55 miles with Adams to show him the route to Grey Cloud Island. It was a colder day, which always makes my muscles more sore. It was also the first day I wore my new biking shoes, and with cleats in more normal spots. My back hardly hurt. I am wondering if half of my back pain was self-induced by not noticing that my left cleat was really far forward in my shoe. In a way, I hope so (even though that is annoying), because maybe that means my back will feel better down the road - provided I do all the core stuff I'm supposed to be doing. 

Matt's Saturday route. I made myself a cue sheet.
Thankfully, there was nothing resembling snow.
It was sunny and perfect. 

Grey Cloud Island on Sunday. It was chilly,
but still nice for November. Lots of birds.

Generally cleats (especially for a shorter person)
should be toward the heel of the foot (like on the right).
Regardless, they generally should be in the same place
on each foot. For some reason, I feel like this
was purposeful placement four years ago,
but Stephen says that seems pretty unlikely and
likely was something that was loose, shifted,
and undetected by me. Who knows?

And so we'll see what the conditions are like for the remainder of the year. Last year I rode pretty solidly into mid-December, but I'm glad to have an indoor option this year to supplement whatever I might do outside. October was a full month. I was packing it in, in anticipation of the change of seasons, and am grateful that I was so lucky to do so much.