The new year

I feel uncertain about making resolutions for the new year, not being a resolution-making kind of person and especially having just read Bloglily's very sane post on the topic. But I do want to think about what I'd like to accomplish this year, if only to try something new. So here are some goals, but I won't beat myself up if I don't reach them. Mostly they have to do with reading, although I'll end with some cycling goals.

First of all, back in October I made a list of 13 classics I'd like to read in 2007, and I'd like to complete that list, with one change. Here's the list again, with James Boswell's Life of Johnson substituted for the Burney novel, either Camilla or Cecilia, I'd had on there originally:

1. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained.
2. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall.
3. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson.
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote.
5. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out.
6. Virginia Woolf, The Years.
7. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks.
8. Gertrude Stein's Three Lives.
9. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and/or Wives and Daughters.
10. Balzac's Cousin Bette.
11. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
12. Thomas DeQuincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater.
13. James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

I'm determined to finish Don Quixote, Buddenbrooks, the Woolf novels, the William James, and the Proust novels; the others I'd really, really like to read but if I don't, that's okay. Considering my reading pace, 50-60 books a year, this list is pretty ambitious.

After that, I really don't want to get specific about what I want to read, as I like room for spontaneity. But here are a few things I'd like to do:

• Read more poetry than I did last year. As I read 2 1/2 books last year, this will mean 3 books, plus finishing up the 1/2 I have left in my current book -- Jane Kenyon's Otherwise.
• Read more plays than I did last year. As I read no plays at all last year, this will meant reading at least one. We have a copy of Angels in America around the house I might pick up. I just realized, however, that I'll be teaching a play this spring -- as yet unidentified -- and I suppose that will count. It kind of feels like cheating, though, in a weird way. If I'm reading it for work, it shouldn't count for my New Year's resolutions? That's silly.
• Read more short stories. I managed one collection (Alice Munro) and some individual stories for A Curious Singularity, so this means I'll try to read two collections and probably more individual stories for the short story blog.
  
• Read more books in translation. Last year I read 8. If I read all the books listed above, that will be 7 (Balzac, Mann, Cervantes, and 4 volumes of Proust). Any other books I read in translation I'd like to be non-European. (I'll check out Book Traveller's posts for inspiration.)
• Read one science book. I love reading science but I haven't done it lately. I have Brian Greene and Bill Bryson on my shelves; one of those will do nicely.

Okay, I'll stop there. I could on, but the fewer goals I have, the likelier I am to reach them.

Before I begin all this, however, my first order of business is to decide which blog I want to use, the Blogger one or the Wordpress one. I can make the big, life-shaping decisions almost instantly, but the little decisions take me forever.

As for cycling, I'm not sure what goals to set, as I'm really still not sure what I'm capable of. But here's an attempt:

• This past year I rode somewhere between 3,656 and 3,700 miles (depending on how far I ride today). For next year, I'd like to ride at least 4,000 miles but preferably as many as 4,500. The 3,656 number counts only outdoor rides on my road bike; I rode a few more miles on the indoor trainer and on my mountain bike, but those I can't easily count. I'm aware that when it comes to preparing to race, I should probably focus less on the number of miles I ride and more on the level of intensity with which I ride those miles, but one of the things I learned last year is that I don't have enough of an endurance base, so reaching a certain base level of miles ridden seems valuable.
  
• I'd like to ride in more races than I did last year. Last year I did 16 -- not all of them were official USCF races, but the non-official ones were just as challenging. I did 13 criteriums and 3 road races. I wimped out on a few races in May and June and then I got burnt out toward the end of the summer and stopped racing, so this coming year I'd like to complete more and stick with it longer.
• I'd like to stay with the pack longer in each race and not get dropped as often. This goal should be more specific, but I don't know how to make it so. So I'll just have to say that I'm going to train harder so I'm stronger and therefore won't be quite as easy to leave behind.
  

We'll see how I do. Chances are I'll accomplish some of these things, but other, maybe better, things will happen and the year will turn out differently than I expect.

I'm back!

The Hobgoblin and I returned yesterday, and we're mostly settled back in. It's nice to get away, but just as nice to return home again. Yes, I know, it's a very cliched thing to say, but I feel it strongly anyway. I like seeing my family, but unfortunately, it only takes a few days before I begin to return to my irritable, annoying, obnoxious, I-can't-stand-the-world-and-my-parents-drive-me-crazy 13-year-old self. Will that self ever die away? I'm beginning to doubt it.

I had a very nice trip, all irritability aside. I got to see 4 of my 6 siblings, one brother-in-law, one sister's boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend? I can't quite figure it out and didn't get a chance to ask -- to ask my mother, of course, as I wouldn't have asked my sister. That would be awkward), and some acquaintances at the Christmas Eve service. I was able to keep up my tradition of complaining bitterly about the awfulness of the Christmas Eve service, as it was suitably awful this year. Sometimes it's awful in a "let's have a birthday cake for the baby Jesus" kind of way, but this time it was awful in a "let's draw on as many offensive gender stereotypes as we can, even if they are irrelevant to the sermon" kind of way. I made sure not to ride home from the service with my parents, as I wasn't feeling irritable enough at that point to want to offend them and hurt their feelings. Traditions are nice, aren't they?

Christmas itself was nice, and I got a lot of cool things -- the Hobgoblin gave me a copy of Michael Dirda's Book by Book, which I've now read a little in, and it promises to be interesting. It will feed my current interest in books on books and reading. My mother-in-law gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card, so we went there on Tuesday, and I found Lawrence Weschler's Vermeer in Bosnia, which has been on my TBR list for a long time, and Jeffrey Robinson's The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image, which will feed my other current obsession with books about walking. I was happy to find some good nonfiction books; I love novels, of course, but often the books that get me most excited and fuel multiple long blog posts are nonfiction ones. And Christmas isn't quite over yet, as I know I have a box coming from a friend who always sends me books. Yay!

The Hobgoblin also got me a new pair of cycling shoes, which are black and very cool looking:







Oh, and he also got me a sticker with my new "photo" or avatar or whatever you want to call it:









A couple of people have asked where it comes from -- it's from one of my favorite novels ever, Tristram Shandy; it's the narrator's rendering of his story's plotline -- very digressive. I like the picture because I love the novel, of course, and ... I like digressions.

I read a little bit, more in Proust and Richard Holmes's Footsteps, and a little of the Dirda book, but mostly I sat around and did nothing. I needed a few days of that. I sat around and did nothing, and I also watched a lot of episodes of "The Office," which was great fun; as we don't have TV, we miss a lot of crap but also some good stuff, and I was happy to catch up on some of the good stuff.

So -- I'm happy to be back reading your comments (thanks!) and catching up on blog posts and posting once again myself. I hope to do some goal-setting around here soon, and maybe some more summing up of my year, and definitely some more raving about Footsteps, and I might finally get around to beginning Buddenbrooks.

My year in cycling

This year has brought almost as many changes in my cycling as it has in my reading -- this is the year I began racing, right about the time I began blogging, in fact, which, I suppose is what inspired the name of this blog, even though I write about reading much more than riding. I'm already gearing up to train for this coming season, which makes it a good time to look back to last year's season, I suppose. My racing results were mixed, but I'm happy I began racing and pleased at the progress I made.

My very first race I stayed with the pack about 5 minutes and then I dropped off the back as they were going just way too fast. I remember my heartrate was up above 180 and I felt like I was going to get sick. I'm not sure I ever felt so bad on a bike before. But it really does take a while to get used to riding that hard -- I often got dropped in races after that, but it happened later and later in the race until finally I was able to stay with the pack until the very end. Well, in some races, that is.

I learned a lot about what kind of rider I am -- at least for now, I'm much better at criteriums, the shorter, more intense races where you do laps of a mile or less over and over, than I am at road races. In the road races I did, I'd get left behind on the hills pretty quickly. One thing I need to work on this year is becoming a better hill climber. I do think the endurance road races require takes a while to build up, so I'm hoping I'll improve at these, but I think I might be built more like a sprinter than an endurance rider or hill climber. I tend to put on big muscles that can generate some power -- and I'm most definitely not the skinny type that can fly up the hills seemingly effortlessly.

I learned a lot about riding in a pack too. I've talked to a number of women this fall who are interested in racing but who talk about being afraid of riding with a large group of people, and it is a little scary. There's nothing like riding at 25 or 30 miles an hour in a group of 30 or 40 or 50 people packed closely together. But you do get used to it; it just takes a little practice. I still need to build up some confidence in my ability to do it, and I need to work on things like riding around corners fast, but I've learned that these are things I can work on.

The hardest thing about racing, I think, is showing up the first time. I do sympathize with those women I talk to who are interested in trying it but still fearful and uncertain. That's exactly how I felt last year. But once you get the courage up to give it a try, you realize that you can do it and there are things you can work on to get better and it's not as impossibly hard as it once seemed.

So this fall and winter I've been trying to take my training more seriously than I have in the past. I still wonder about myself if I'm not the type who enjoys the training part more than the racing. Last summer I started to feel burnt out with racing, but I was still interested in going out to ride on my own. But I think since it was my first season, feeling burnt out is understandable, especially since I spent so much time riding with people who were noticeably stronger than me. I got tired of working so hard to keep up with a pack of people who could leave me behind easily if they really wanted to. I'm very curious to see what happens to me next year, how much I change, or don't change, how much better I get.

Mountain biking

I haven't done a cycling post in a while, not because I haven't been riding but because the riding hasn't been all that terribly exciting. But yesterday I did something I haven't done in quite a while: rode on my mountain bike. I've had one for 3 or 4 years, but it generally sits out in the shed; I don't think I'd been on it for almost 2 years. But the Hobgoblin got them out on Saturday and cleaned and repaired them, so yesterday we took them out to a local park and rode for an hour or so.

I'm not a very good mountain biker, but I shouldn't be surprised or upset at this, as I have done maybe a dozen off-road rides in my life. But I'm always surprised at how different road and mountain bike riding are; they feel like two completely different sports. Mountain biking is much more intense, I think; I'm worn out after an hour, whereas on the road, an hour is about the shortest time possible to make the ride worthwhile. That the mountain bike is much heavier than the road bike is part of the reason, but also the hills tend to be steeper, and you have to guide yourself over rocks and roots, which takes extra power. A short hill that takes less than a minute to climb can leave me completely out of breath with my heartrate sky-rocketing.

Yesterday was a beautiful day, although cold -- cold compared to what I'm used to at least; the last week has been in the 50s and 60s, but yesterday it was barely 40 when we left home. We drove to a park about 5 miles a way, one that is well known among local mountain bikers for having excellent trails. I like the park because it's got a variety of trails -- lots of carriage roads for the unskilled like me, and even more single-track trails for the experts.

As I got on the bike for the first time, I realized that I'd forgotten how, exactly, to fit my shoes into the pedals, and once I'd figured that out, I saw I was heading down a hill steep enough to make me ride the brakes the whole way down. It took me a long time to get back in the groove of mountain bike riding; that hill was actually insignificant, but I forget so easily what I'm capable of and what the bike is capable of, and so I spent quite a while riding around the easiest trails getting the hang of it again.

By the end of the ride, though, I felt skilled enough to try a short bit of single-track. Here things got a lot more interesting, as all the sudden I had to maneuver my way between trees terrifyingly close together and over jagged rock gardens that took up the entire space of the trail and up little hills where I felt my front wheel was in danger of lifting off the ground.

No, I'm not a very good mountain biker. I didn't crash, but that's because I got off the bike and walked it over anything too dangerous. Good mountain bikers crash now and then because they try risky things. I even walked my bike around a few menacing puddles and mud patches because I didn't want to get wet and dirty, which is totally not in the mountain biking spirit.

But I did get an excellent workout. I'm hoping if I keep mountain biking now and then over the winter, I will build up some power that will help me out with racing in the spring. At any rate, it's nice to do something a little bit different. Okay, it's not all that different; I was still on a bike after all, but different enough for me.

Bike repair class

I think I'm a poor student. Or maybe it's that I'm an obnoxious one. I've been in a number of classes lately, short, half-day things, and each time I find myself resistant, rebellious, and generally annoyed at the procedings. I don't know if this is simply my (not very nice at times) personality, or if my years as a teacher have made me extremely sensitive to less than perfect teaching. Not that my own teaching is perfect, by any means, let me be clear; it's just that I'm very tuned in to what's working and what's not.

Yesterday evening I went to a bike repair class and had a mixed experience. I think I learned some things, so I'm not unhappy I went, and I got a pretty cool bike repair book, but there's a lot the class covered that I didn't really learn because I had a hard time seeing what was going on and I didn't get the chance to try it out for myself.

The class was at the "novice" level and some of it was review for me; I already know how to fix a flat for example, although I did learn some tricks to make it easier, such as shifting the chain into the smallest cog to make getting the rear wheel back on a bit easier. I had a bad moment when we were practicing fixing a flat and I was struggling to get the tire off the wheel and the instructor, trying to be nice and help me out, took the wheel from me and took the tire off himself. That's exactly what I don't need! But he was just trying to help out. And as a teacher, I know it's hard to figure out when to let students struggle on their own and when to have mercy on them and provide assistance. But as a difficult student, I got irritated at this.

And then we went over some maintenance things like making sure the stem is on tight and adjusting the brakes and the cable tension. This part really irritated me because I didn't get a chance to try it out myself. But then again, it would have been very hard to have everybody try these things out without enough instructors to really keep an eye on each person to make sure nobody did any damage. We didn't really have enough time for all that.

The Hobgoblin has very nicely tried to teach me some things about bike repair over the years, and I've learned some things from him, but if I was a bad student in the bike repair class, I'm a truly awful student with the Hobgoblin -- for lots of complicated reasons, it's probably best that we not try to teach each other things. It just doesn't work.

But the good thing about the class is that it's motivated me to continue to learn more about bike repair and maintenance. I think I really do enjoy working with mechanical things when I have some sense of what I'm doing; up till now I've been reluctant to learn much about bikes because how they work seemed so mysterious.

I'm also very bad at regular maintenance; I just don't like the constant cleaning and fiddling and adjusting and testing that keeping a bike (or a car or a house, for that matter) in good shape requires. This is one area where I'm decidedly lazy. I know that good maintenance can extend the life of bike parts and save me tons of money, but it's still so hard to drag the bike outside for regular cleanings and to check the tires for wear and do all those things I'm supposed to do.

Anyway, there will be follow-up classes to this one, which I am going to try, partly because I heard they will have only 4 students in them, which will make it a lot easier to really learn stuff.