Friday Inspiration 300
This film is called “Every Sport a Bowling Ball,” and if you’re like me, you’ll start laughing as some of the sports are introduced, even before you see what’s going to happen. (video)
This is about knitting but I think you can pretty much substitute anything that requires effort for “knitting” and it’s still true This comic perfectly captures my entire philosophy of doing anything, including art. Marcella Giulia Pace took photos the Moon in various colors (caused by differences in height, veils, dust, etc.) and put 48 of them in this print. How much time do you have to scroll through some vintage sneaker ads? Also, did you know Vans sold running shoes at one point? My friend Syd and I were talking about command center sets in movies (like bad guy lairs, NASA, etc.) and he alerted me to the presence of this incredible website that catalogs computers that have appeared in movies. I hope at least one person who reads this thinks it’s cool, but if not, I will be undeterred in my enthusiasm for it. I started following Josh Mecouch’s awesome and weird cartoons on Instagram a few months ago and I have no choice but to recommend his book, Conquer the Day: A Book of Affirmations, which I will be gifting to many people this holiday season. One more thing: You may have noticed I recently took a few weeks off, and these Friday Inspiration posts didn’t happen for a while. I know I say this a lot, but I am able to take the time and put in the effort (and spend the money on an email newsletter and this website) to create this stuff because people support me on Patreon. If you have $2 to spare per month, and you can take three minutes today to sign up, you can join them and help keep this going. And, you’ll get access to all the members-only content I make for Patreon (and some discounts to my shop). —Brendan
The post Friday Inspiration 300 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/09/friday-inspiration-300.html September 25, 2021 at 12:50AM
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The Rut 50K: A Race Report
High on the east ridge of Lone Peak, at about 10,500 feet or so, The Rut 50K started to feel like a cartoon, in which an idiot, me, runs and hikes up an incline at a fast (for me) but hopefully sustainable pace, as the grade gradually gets steeper and steeper, until, just before the summit, the idiot tips over backwards and rolls back to the start. This, of course, is not true. The elevation map of the race course actually looks like this: But right around Mile 20, I felt like I’d been carefully picking my way up Lone Peak’s east ridge for six hours, three feet in front of a guy from Eugene the entire time. With the steep terrain, fatigue, altitude, a decreased amount of readily available oxygen for breathing, and the mental exhaustion of climbing a neverending pile of rocks while trying to not dislodge anything onto people below me, many elements were coming together to crush my morale, and me. This is also not true. I was just one of 500 or so people to sign up for The Rut 50K this year. The Rut is an annual event that is essentially a European-style sky race held in Big Sky, Montana, designed by two American sadomasochists named Mike (Foote and Wolfe), with several events ranging from a Vertical Kilometer to the 50K. One way to look at the 50K race might be, “Hey, I ran the Chicago Marathon last year, and The Rut 50K is only five miles longer than that.” Here are some words and phrases from the website for The Rut 50K:
It’s probably good policy for mountain running race organizers to use strong language in describing their events, just so no one gets in over their head and then later says things like “no one told me would be this hard,” or “suddenly, there I was, staring death in the face,” or “[sounds of a person sitting on a pile of rocks and weeping uncontrollably].” But also, you could probably be forgiven for a tiny bit of skepticism as far as race marketing is concerned, i.e. “I don’t know, has anyone ACTUALLY died doing this ‘Death Race’ we’re signing up for?” There is at least one spot on The Rut 50K where you could legitimately fall, and possibly not stop falling until you were dead and/or have way more than 208 bones in your body. I did not, as may be obvious at this point, die doing The Rut. I did perhaps underestimate it a tiny bit. The race started at 6:00 a.m., a few minutes before sunrise, in three waves, five minutes apart, each wave a few hundred runners jogging uphill, a stream of headlamps, nerves, and chatter leaving the Big Sky Resort base area. Where should I start? Certainly not at the front of the first wave, where the elite runners and other super-mutants would be, ripping off three-minute miles uphill or whatever. Probably not at the back of the third wave, based on my previous race results. I really had no idea what to expect, so I did what I always do: Start way too far back in the pack, and then waste tons of energy frantically trying to pass people during the race. This is probably some combination of impostor syndrome and Midwestern over-politeness, or maybe I’m just not that smart. Another role I had signed up for: running with a younger friend, Devon, and theoretically helping him not go too fast for the first few miles of the race. Devon had finished an 18-day traverse of the Wind River Range literally 60 hours before the start, and is a full decade-plus younger than me, so for the first nine miles, we settled somewhere in between me holding him back and him dragging me up the trail. When the route went from fire road to singletrack, there were bottlenecks of single-file lines of people, where we literally stood waiting in line for a couple minutes. In the first nine miles, in any spot where the trail widened in the forest, Devon and I accelerated around runners in front of us, sometimes one at a time, sometimes a handful of people. I did have a small bit of anxiety knowing that at a certain point, the course would hit a 1.2-mile section climbing 2,000 feet up the ridge of Lone Peak, where it would be pretty difficult to pass anyone without them very graciously stepping off to the side of the path, so I was motivated to pass people early on, where it was easy and safe. But I had more anxiety about running myself into the ground in the first 10 miles of the race by going way too fast way too early. Just before Mile 9, I told Devon to go ahead without me, because although I am not smart, I am also not proud, and he shot off through the trees like a gazelle, finally free. I had thoroughly studied the course map and elevation profile in the days and weeks leading up to the race, but still found myself surprised at all the ups and downs as we tromped through the forest, popped out above treeline, then dropped back into the trees again. I had downloaded the GPX map of the course onto my phone and could open it at any time to see where I was on the course, but I decided to just keep plodding on in ignorance, following the flags. Somewhere around Mile 14 or so, the course went from what I would call “pretty normal” to “OK, this is not an actual hiking trail that anyone uses for anything not named ‘The Rut.’” At that point, I was thankful I had talked myself into carrying trekking poles, ignoring the advice of at least one friend, who was well-meaning, but who also drastically overestimated my VO2 max. I mean, they weigh 10.5 ounces, and are very handy when you want to lean on something and shed a few tears, instead of collapsing all the way to the ground to convulse with sobs. I managed to under-eat the morning of the race, and was hungry the entire day, shoving down Clif Bloks and Honey Stinger Waffles whenever I could, often chewing while mouth-breathing in huge gasps as I hiked steep uphills. I had packed something like 2,000 calories for the day in my vest, in hopes that it would keep me from wasting time at aid stations, because I often unintentionally spend more time gazing at the layout of M&Ms, chips, pickles, Oreos, etc. than most people do putting together a plate at the Sizzler salad bar, and then end up confused at how six people passed me in the time I took to fill one water bottle and walk away with a double-handful of Cheez-Its. At the 14.5-mile mark, we started climbing up steep talus. The pack had thinned out and I had found a pretty appropriate spot, every once in a while passing someone or letting someone pass me, but for the most part able to settle in, put my head down, and watch my feet. Surely, I thought—without actually checking my GPS app to see where we were on the course—this must be the big climb up Lone Peak. Here we go. Imagine my internal dismay 40 minutes later when the route started going downhill from a high point of about 10,100 feet. Going down always feels good, but not as good when you know you’ll have to climb right back up every single foot you descend. We dropped to 8,280 feet, hitting a fire road, which was nice for a few minutes, I guess. But the course’s high point was 11,166 feet, somewhere above us.
If you hit Mile 17 during a flat-ish 50K, you’re psyched! You’re more than halfway to the finish! If you hit Mile 17 during The Rut, you are … not as psyched! You are more than halfway to the finish … in mileage only! You are about to spend an hour or an hour and a half grinding up a steep incline, 2,900 feet in 2.5 miles! You will “run” a 40-minute mile! Your fancy GPS watch will, instead of showing your pace per mile, will display a series of dashes, basically saying “you are not moving—are you OK?” The good thing is, you eventually get to the top. Maybe you’re motivated by finishing the race, maybe because everywhere you look you’re surrounded by angular blocks of rock that would not be comfortable to sit or lie down on, maybe because finishing the race will be a visceral metaphor for other things you hope to face in life, or maybe because you know deep down that literally hundreds of other people have done the same thing so you can too, and some of those people have literally gotten a complimentary Run the Rut tattoo at the finish line, a real tattoo, not a temporary one, because that is a thing they do at this race. At the top of Lone Peak are some nice people handing out water and snacks, including, when I was there, a shirtless man wearing a full-length fur coat. The actual aid station we passed through was a solid 30 or 40 vertical feet below the summit of Lone Peak itself, and for a moment, my inner peak-bagger felt conflicted about getting this close to the summit after working that hard to get there and not actually tagging it, but I decided to keep moving forward, and down the mountain. The route down Lone Peak is steep, starting with dinner-plate talus, then scree, then steep trails. I had seen people wearing running gaiters at the beginning of the race, and as I made my way down and kicked rocks into my own shoes, I thought this might be the one place I could have used them in my life. Alas, I did not have any. Nor did I take the time to do proper self-care/self-preservation practices, like, I don’t know, emptying the rocks out of my shoes at any point during the final 11 miles of the race. I enjoy lying to myself during races, a tactic I believe is a form of positive self-talk. I do not enjoy it when I catch myself in the lies I have told myself earlier. Such as “You’ll start feeling better when you only have five miles to go,” or “That weird feeling in your lower intestine is unlikely to turn into anything remotely explosive before the end of the race,” or in this case, “That was the last big climb—it should be a cruise from here,” and “We’re back below treeline, so it’s probably just gently rolling from here on out.” I had read some race reports from previous years, so I should have been well aware that the last 10 miles or so seemed to be generally demoralizing. True, all the “big” climbs were out of the way, and most of what was left was below treeline. But before the finish, we still had a 500-foot climb, a 900-foot climb, and a 400-foot climb. I started up the beginning of the 900-foot climb, on a steep trail that I’m pretty sure I heard had a rope on it at one point for runners to use to pull themselves up the incline, and found myself surrounded by a glut of people in various states of mild to extreme discontent: our pace slowed to an uphill crawl, some people muttering half-jokes about how terrible they felt, others hunched over with their hands on their knees or leaning on a tree, maybe about to throw up. I kept going, thankful I had trekking poles, both as life support and security blanket. This, I think, is where many people start to hate the Rut. You start to ask yourself what the point of going up and down these hills is (as if the whole idea of the race isn’t also contrived and pointless, in the grand scheme of human existence), why they would send you this way instead of a route that’s more friendly (or even just flat), and maybe why you didn’t sign up for the 28K or the 11K instead of the 50K. The singletrack gave way to a road, which started to ease up as I inched closer to an aid station. Spectators waiting for the runner(s) they knew to come through dotted the sides of the road, cheering everyone who came past. One woman yelled, “Nice job, you’re almost there,” and I said “Thank you, existentially, we’re already there, aren’t we?” I power-hiked into the aid station and a young gentleman named Dash filled my water bottles and I grabbed a couple half-bananas and gulped them down. The course wound mostly downhill through intermittent forest, finally topping out on the last climb a half-mile from the finish line, where a couple guys sitting on the side of the fire road told me Nice job, you’re really, really done with the last climb now, and then another guy 100 feet later said “Those guys are lying,” and I laughed as I jogged past, the ski area base within view, and around the corner from that, the finish line. Which is where, I think, people begin the transition from hating the Rut to loving the Rut. As is common in this sport, the same person who, at 1 p.m. one day carries themselves along a trail on fumes of motivation and curses everything that brought them to that point, 24 or 48 hours later will earnestly tell people who ask about their race, “It was great.” Whatever that means. If you liked this story, please consider supporting my work via Patreon, which enables me to keep writing and drawing, and will also make you feel good (and get you a bunch of members-only stuff, including discounts to my shop). The post The Rut 50K: A Race Report appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-rut-50k-race-report.html September 23, 2021 at 02:50AM
Taking A Break
—Brendan The post Taking A Break appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/08/taking-break.html August 19, 2021 at 11:50PM
Friday Inspiration 299
A fun, quick portrait of Fay De Fazio Ebert, who at 11 years old is the youngest member of Canada’s national skateboard team (and apparently is also not too bad of a ukulele player)(video)
Even if you’re not that into flossing, I think you have to admit, this is some beautiful writing A really thought-provoking take from cartoonist Jason Chatfield on why he shares his creative work via email instead of putting it on social media I finally watched Bo Burnham’s Inside last weekend, so add me to the list of millions of people it resonated with. I have, however, not found a trailer online that shows much of the special at all, besides this bootleg of one of the songs in the special. A series of 36 illustrations, inspired by Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, but with views of London’s BT Tower This story about a parallel parking job causing a minor controversy on Twitter is interesting and all, but honestly, I’m just sharing it because it’s a really impressive parallel parking job The Freeflow Institute has a few spaces left on a couple of writing and creativity workshops this fall (and you can get $100 off the price if you mention Semi-Rad when signing up!) Also: A print of yesterday’s illustrated post about seeing the summit is now available in my shop, for those of you who asked (Ned!): —Brendan
The post Friday Inspiration 299 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/08/friday-inspiration-299.html August 14, 2021 at 01:50AM
Surely That’s The Summit Just Ahead, Right?
—Brendan
The post Surely That’s The Summit Just Ahead, Right? appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/08/surely-thats-summit-just-ahead-right.html August 13, 2021 at 12:50AM
Friday Inspiration 298
“We put so much time and effort into making sure that people who are perceived as different understand what it would be like if they were normal. But we rarely ever do the opposite: Pushing those who see themselves as normal to understand what it would be like if they were different.” I somehow ended up searching for all the The New York Times Magazine “Letter of Recommendation” columns, dug up this one on “Collecting One Book,” and I’m so glad I did. “Everyone has been creative at least once.” —Seth Godin (thanks, Abigail) The Oatmeal on why it’s so hard for your brain to take a compliment If you have not already seen this clip of Snoop Dogg commentating on Olympic events, please do yourself a favor and watch it I can’t say I’ve pressed play on a Sublime track in many years, but I definitely got hooked on this history of the band on the 25th anniversary of their Sublime album, including this paragraph: “To understand Sublime is to understand the telepathy of Nowell, Gaugh, and Wilson, which is to understand the cultural dialect of Long Beach. And as Northside LBC historian Vince Staples once told me: to understand Long Beach is to recognize its diversity, as embodied by Sublime, Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Warren G, and Cameron Diaz all simultaneously attending Long Beach public high schools in the late ’80s. As the story goes, the future all-American Mary bought weed from a pre-Chronic Snoop at Long Beach Poly.” I feel simultaneously personally attacked and validated by this satirical piece titled “Wow! This Woman Made a Terrible Meal For Herself” —Brendan The post Friday Inspiration 298 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/08/friday-inspiration-298.html August 07, 2021 at 01:50AM
Because You Never Know
When it comes to my dog’s favorite humans, I will never be Number One. In fact, if you handed him a piece of paper and a pen asked him to make a list of his favorite humans, and he were capable of such a thing, he would probably do something like this: If you said, “OK, but who else?” He might then say something like “I guess what’s-his-name, the guy who lives here, he’s all right.” I am fine with this. Dogs need an alpha in their lives, and Hilary is Rowlf’s. It is settled, and it is not a contest. But I still see it as my job to help Rowlf live his best life, so I try to do that when and where I can. Which is why he has been eating so well for the past six months or so. We kept his diet to just kibble for almost the first two years we had him, but every once in a while gave him a little bit of wet food, the *expensive* stuff in a can, that resembles something a human might actually eat. Rowlf is not what you’d call a food-motivated dog, and I have many times hand-fed him kibble while sitting on the floor, out of a sense of duty that he will not starve to death on my watch. But he seemed to really like the wet food when we added it to his kibble, an upgrade that seemed to me equivalent to sitting at a restaurant and letting someone order for you in a different language, and having a plate of raw carrots set in front of you—but then two minutes later having the server drop two slices of pizza on top of the carrots. Hilary, who is, and I cannot stress this enough, Rowlf’s favorite human, was of the opinion that we should use the wet food sparingly, partly to keep Rowlf from expecting it and then walking all over us, and partly to keep him from gaining too much weight and putting stress on his joints. I casually lobbied, every once in a while, for more wet food, more regularly, maybe even every day. At some point, after maybe a dozen conversations about the dog’s food, I presented my case thusly: When we adopted Rowlf, a veterinarian estimated his age at seven or eight years old, based on his teeth. That was two years ago, and who knows how accurate that sort of age estimate is? We really don’t know how old he is—he seems to be getting more and more white fur around his mouth. Wet food seems to make him happy, and if we have no problem affording food financially, we should give the dog the food that brings him joy as often as we can. And then, swinging for the emotional fence, I said, We just don’t know how long he’s going to be with us. Hilary nodded, and in her infinite wisdom, said, I guess you could say the same thing about you, or me, couldn’t you? Our dog currently eats one-third of a can of wet food with every meal. Sometimes a half can. —Brendan The post Because You Never Know appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/08/because-you-never-know.html August 05, 2021 at 11:50PM
The Last Doughnut In The Office
anybody want the other half of these last few nanoparticles or should I just, yeah, OK (More stuff like this on my Instagram and in my email newsletter, which you can sign up for here)
The post The Last Doughnut In The Office appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-last-doughnut-in-office.html August 05, 2021 at 04:50AM
Friday Inspiration 297
Well, this is 4 minutes and 35 seconds of some great thoughts about dogs (video)
With God As My Witness, I Will Not Pick The Restaurant Cartoonist Johnny DiNapoli is one of my favorite recent Instagram follows Agreed, the woman who gets the dance party started is the real hero here I honestly really hope this guy gets to re-launch his hydro pod thing into the ocean and resume his attempt to walk on water from Florida to New York I don’t know how much anyone else cares about the time a goose hit Fabio in the face on a roller coaster, but I just want to say I remember a magazine doing a caption contest of a photo of the incident and the winner was “I can’t believe it’s not bloodier” There have definitely been some hot summer days when I feel this hat would be appropriate
The post Friday Inspiration 297 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/07/friday-inspiration-297.html July 31, 2021 at 12:50AM
The Old Bike-In-A-Bag Trick
If you’re trying to sneak stuff onto public transportation, there are certainly many ways to do it—I mean, not that I would know about most of them. I’ve just heard of people, you know, smuggling drugs in various body cavities, or clandestinely bringing liquor in special bottles designed to look like tubes of sunscreen, stuff like that. But a bicycle is a little different. You can’t just shove it down the front of your pants as you board a train. If you could, this would not be much of a story. By the time fall of 2018 rolled around, Forest and I had spent almost seven weeks of the year together working on our camping book project, traveling and in the field. We scouted out more than a dozen locations, asked friends to join us, and had backpacked, car camped, skied, kayaked, and done just about everything over the course of the year, all across the country. By September, we only had two photo shoots/trips left: a quick bikepacking trip on the C&O Canal Towpath and a couple days at a yurt in upstate New York. I had been looking forward to the trip as sort of a final, mellow adventure at the end of our long year. The C&O Canal is kind of a dream of a bike route: a non-motorized path along the Potomac River, starting in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood and running 184.5 miles to its terminus in Cumberland Maryland, with campsites every five miles along the way. (And in Cumberland, it meets up with the Great Allegheny Passage for another 150 miles of bike paths to Pittsburgh). It sounded logistically easy, we wouldn’t have to carry heavy backpacks, and the biking was pretty much flat. We had been fairly fast and loose with planning for the trip, recruiting two friends who didn’t know each other: No. 1 being Forest’s friend Brett, a charming and enthusiastic lifelong vagabond whose story sounds something like Tangled Up In Blue, and who Forest had described to me as “an old family friend” and also “probably the person in my life who could most accurately call themselves ‘homeless.’” Brett had hiked all over the world and bicycle toured on a collapsible Bike Friday, which he would sometimes just ride to an airport, put the bike in a trash bag, and stash in some bushes for when he came back from his trip. No. 2 was my friend Will, also a storyteller and lifelong bicycle evangelist, at that time working as the transportation director for the Georgetown Business Improvement District and living in D.C. with his wife Karen and their three kids. Will arranged for the local REI Outdoor Programs to loan us a couple bikes so Forest and I wouldn’t have to fly to D.C. with bikes, and we planned on four-ish days and three nights on the C&O to get a nice sample of the scenery. We figured that would put us pretty close to one of a few Amtrak stops that basically parallel the C&O, so we could just hop on the train back into D.C. when we’d had enough. Before we started pedaling, Brett had wisely purchased an Amtrak ticket for himself leaving the Martinsburg, West Virginia, station, which turned out to be a very good guess of where we’d be on Day 4 of our trip. Forest and I had procrastinated the decision, treating the train more like the NYC subway system than Amtrak, figuring we’d just hop on at the last minute. This was a bad plan. At our final campsite of the trip on the evening of Day 3, we found ourselves a very short bike ride from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and a slightly longer ride to Martinsburg. Since Will was a busy family guy and didn’t get a lot of chances for a big day on his bike, Forest and I offered to carry all his stuff back to D.C. on the train so he could pedal the 63 miles back into town by himself. I had a couple bars of LTE service on my phone, and decided I had put off buying our train tickets for long enough, and walked along the bike path to see if I could get a little bit better service before trying to access the Amtrak website. I was able to buy two tickets leaving from Harpers Ferry, but when I tried to buy tickets for our bicycles, I could only buy one. I figured it was some sort of glitch in the system, and crawled into our tent and went to sleep. The next day, Brett left early to get to Martinsburg in time for the train, and we said goodbye, figuring we’d see him on the train or at the station in D.C. Forest and I rode our final miles to Harpers Ferry, got coffees, got a couple donuts, and waited for the train. I called Amtrak to see if I could buy one more bike ticket for the train, and the customer service representative informed me that it wasn’t a glitch on the website, and that there were no more bike tickets available. This, although completely preventable had we actually planned in advance, was not ideal. I ran the logistics in my head: One of us could take our bike on the train into D.C., rent a UHaul van, drive out to Harpers Ferry, pick up the other person and their bike, and drive back into D.C. to return the bikes to REI. We had planned on having a nice relaxing dinner at Busboys and Poets with Will and Karen and the kids, but with the extra driving time, that probably wouldn’t happen. Or maybe not. I called Amtrak back and asked: “Could we pay for one piece of oversized baggage?” Customer service representative: “There’s no charge for one piece of oversized baggage on that train.” Me: “Oh, OK, great, thank you.” As I hung up the phone, we had about 10 minutes before the train arrived. I have for years carried pretty much the same small bag of bike repair stuff: a patch kit, an extra tube, a Crank Brothers M17 multitool, and a very basic and cheap Leatherman that the can opener attachment broke off maybe eight years ago. Forest and I looked at both our bikes and decided that his looked easier to disassemble. We popped both wheels off, pulled the seat and seatpost out of the seat tube, and I wrenched the pedals off with the Leatherman pliers. Forest pulled his still quite damp bivy sack out of his bike bags while I used my multitool to loosen the hex screws on his handlebars and fork and pull them out of the headtube. Then we started cramming the whole pile into his inside-out bivy sack, not wanting to get chain lube all over the inside of the bivy sack. Then I got a text notification that our train was running a few minutes late. Hallelujah. The frame, fork, handlebars, and pedals fit in the bivy sack, and we stuffed the front wheel in as well, but that was the limit. We would have to carry one wheel, which was definitely something that would be weird enough to arouse suspicion from the train attendants and maybe to also derail our admittedly not-great plan. Fortunately for us: The train was late, which meant the attendants were in a hurry to get everyone on board and the train moving again—like you could feel them counting the seconds it took everyone to shuffle down the platform and onto the train cars. Forest tried to look as natural as a person carrying a bag filled with a disassembled bicycle can look, and the attendants guided us to quickly, quickly, thank you, take the bike into the bike car and then find a seat. We dumped my bike and Forest’s bike-in-a-bivy-sack in the bike car, popped back out onto the platform, and hustled to the nearest car. I wasn’t sure we’d fooled anyone, and as I heard an attendant ask, “why does he have a bike wheel but no bike?” For a few seconds, I felt the tiniest bit like Billy Hayes in the opening scene of Midnight Express, nervously waiting to get on the plane with all that hashish strapped to his chest. Except instead of years in prison we’d probably just a brief scolding. Thankfully, no one said anything else, and we hopped up the steps into the first car, looking for seats. I looked up to see a white-haired man in an aisle seat staring at us and smiling. It was Brett, who had gotten on the train in Martinsburg, and then watched out the train window as Forest and I sneaked our “oversize baggage item” in and had a good laugh. “I thought, ‘Is that what I think it is?’” he said. We sat down and watched the scenery roll by our windows. After a relaxing train ride into the city, covering our multi-day leisurely bike ride in a matter of minutes, we arrived at Union Station in D.C. Forest and I hauled everything onto the platform, and reassembled the bike right there, stopping for a coffee in the terminal before riding away. Now, I’m not advocating this as a method of saving money, or sticking it to the man, or something like that, because it’s not cool, and it’s also a giant pain in the ass to disassemble and reassemble a bike. I’d definitely have preferred to just be able to buy a ticket for the bike. But it did work, in a very specific pinch. [bike photo by Forest Woodward] The post The Old Bike-In-A-Bag Trick appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-old-bike-in-bag-trick.html July 29, 2021 at 11:50PM |