Bike blerg thread

80/90h group leaves in the afternoon/evening. 84h group leaves in the AM.

80h group is called the premier group and is the closest thing to the pbp “race”. I think it’s the first 3 or 4 groups

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The handful of rando events I’ve done have always been on my yellow Trek 360 with 25mm tires. If I took my low trail bike, I would have been hours slower

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right. like, my rando bike is probably the most fun bike i own over the widest set of conditions, but randonneuring doesn’t seem fun? type two fun, for sure, and i’m jealous of those who have the ability to do it. but if i’m gonna slow hammer that many hours of riding, i’m gonna take something that is slightly less comfy but slightly faster. pretty sure nothing’s gonna feel good by the end of a 300+

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It’s really odd that the common definition of a rando bike has become some sort of bloated all-terrain cruiser which isn’t appropriate for actual randonerdery.

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Ftfm

It’s just riding your bike all day

Randonneuring works out pretty great when you ride with other people on most of the course, working together and enjoying the company of your fellow eccentric characters. AFAICT this practice is rare in the western hemisphere outside of Seattle — most clubs have far fewer people going to all that trouble to ride alone inwardly on flatter headwindier highway courses.

I may be an asshole but I don’t experience “type two fun” at all, and find that typology to be self-destructive and regressive. I always have fun while I’m doing things, and any handwringing I do happens after the ride is over. I severely reinjured my ankle from stress twice at 600k and 900k into the ride, but that mindset still held true for me.

I did start crying while riding in the third consecutive dawn, I felt a chill descending into a misty riverbend and noticed that the terrain had changed. We’re not in Brittany anymore, I guess we’re in Normandy but why do I know that’s the next province? I started reasoning through the timeline of Summer 1944 and the waterworks began. Some hours later we pass through a tiny town and a large banner and flags were hung on the one public building, celebrating August 21st as the exact 75th Anniversary of their Liberation. I am a sentimental motherfucker and lost my shit all over again.

PBP is not ‘Glory Through Suffering™’ like Rapha’s original marketing

It’s more accurately a Passion, not just in the modern enthusiastic nerdy preparation sense but even moreso in the original religious definition — it’s literally a pilgrimage

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I guess it me

I hear you. When I am doing stuff like this i am in my happy place. There is nowhere else I would rather be. Sometimes I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I am not going into some “dark place” that people go on about. I’ve not done PBP, but for me, bikes and good company are what it’s about.

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PBP is just a really long ride through France with a bunch of other people who are either good at bikes or suck at bikes and get to do things that wouldn’t normally happen like sleep in a ditch or ride in a paceline from 3-5am

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Not sure where else to put this, but here’s a great article on the current reality and future of cycling in America

They do brakes/breaks a few paragraphs in. Entire article invalidated!

I liked the Paris mayor’s take on urban development. I’d be fine with a lot of buses, congestion charges, and mandatory pulls of driver cell phone usage records when they hit someone. The last of those might be hard to utilize in a criminal proceeding, but would probably be pretty great for the plaintiff in a civil case.

It’s also occurred to me more than once that every driver now uses gps to navigate, which means that there’s a record of every time they speed or run a stop sign or hook a turn without so much as slowing. Interesting. Innnnnnterrresssstinnnnngggg…

Cell phone records are already routinely used by US law enforcement. But of course I haven’t heard of them being used to disturb the sanctity of being a MOTORIST.

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Are they routinely used as strong circumstantial evidence that someone was not driving safely, and is it the opinion of experts in that area of law that the data gathered was persuasive in civil cases?

EDIT: fuckin editing while I’m posting! making me look like a bozo!!

I just want effing speed cameras. Everywhere.

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I also realize that there may not be a durable record kept (or maybe it’s just not shared) with end users of gps apps.

I wonder if this could become a way to discipline drivers: “it appears that in the five minutes prior to hitting the plaintiff, you sent twenty text messages, were streaming content from Pornhub, ran three stop signs, and were traveling at an average of 125% of the local speed limit. Can you explain your behavoir to the jury?”

basically you don’t need speed cameras if everyone’s phone is a better substitute for one.

edit: basically if we’re going to have panoptic surveillance capitalism, I’d like for it to work in my favor a litle bit.

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speed cameras aren’t panoptic surveillance capitalism tho

and google definitely has a durable record that it is more than happy to share with police.

I was talking about my thing not your thing re: panoptic surveillance capitalism. The little spy we all carry in our pockets. Your proposal is just an expansion of state surveillance capacity that’s really really hard to roll out in a way that’s not going to get really badly tangled up in citizen hearings.

I guess it’s a question of whether you’d rather have the forces of the state or the forces of capital as the primary agent being brought to bear on the problem

“would you tell the jury whether you plead TAF, JA, or just WTH”

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regardless of the panopticon conversation, speed cameras can be nefarious, in the case of Cook County where we had them taken away when it was discovered that they fucked with (shortened) the yellow light timing that was well established at camera intersections specifically to get more red light running fines. idk!

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I seem to also recall that red light cameras didn’t do much to limit the number of people running reds, but they did increase revenues as well as causing an uptick in accidents at intersections equipped with them.