Kościuszko and Me

It’s been cold and wet this last week, but that won’t keep us inside today. The temperature has warmed up a bit and the roads have largely dried out. On the flip side, there is heavy overcast and the winds are 15 mph, gusting to 20 mph out of the west-southwest (that's 24-32 kph). This is far from ideal, but we are determined to ride! The winds, however, are a concern. The original plan was to go to the southwest, but this choice would have put us in direct conflict with the wind, so we decided instead to head to Gassy Ferry. A west-southwest wind would be something we could actually work with for most of the trip. That was the plan anyway. Kościuszko, my wife, and I arrived in Poland on Wednesday, August 1st. It wasn’t but a couple of days before I turned on the TV to begin my Polish language training with news and cheesy late afternoon serials. I certainly wasn’t able to understand much, but one thing was evident: a famous Polish rock musician and TV celebrity had died on July ...

We've been lucky, indeed. The weather continues to be quite warm and wonderful and we are taking full advantage of it. Rather than our normal exploratory ride, our plan today was to engage in fartlek training . I can imagine some English speakers chuckling just a bit. The word  fartlek  is not related to the English word fart ! It is, in fact, a Swedish word (pronounced nearly identically to the English) that approximately means "speed play". Linguistically, the Swedish word fart comes from the Indo-European root *per-, while the English word fart comes from the root *perd-. The former is a complicated root, difficult to write about, but the latter is very straightforward and gives all our familiar European words for the passing of gas, including: fart (English), furzen (German), fisa (Swedish), pierdzieć (Polish), prdět (Czech), péter (French), pederse (Spanish), and others. Do you want to know why the Germanic languages have the initial 'f' sound? Hint: Rea...

I had two interesting questions this week, not unrelated to one another. The first was: "What do you think about when you're on the bike?" The second: "How do you decide what to write about in the blog?" As to the first, I don't really 'think' about anything. Cycling is a moving meditation (usually) and, as such, on country rides I am focused on my breath, my heart rate, maintaining a precise power output or my pedaling dynamics. The choice of which depends on where I am and what aspects of training I'm interested in for that period of time. I also pay keen attention to the landscape and sounds around me, without fixating on any one thing. Focusing on these nuanced cycling details is much less possible in an urban setting where there are immediate road hazards, traffic and other things to respond to. That requires a different kind of outwardly focused, active awareness. Both types of environments give rise to thoughts, of course. I usually don...

Greetings, Dear Readers! I thought I would treat you with two posts this week, both posted today. Our ride this past Monday explored the crest line of the flood plain north of Konstancin-Jeziorna, and knowing that it extended south to Góra Kalwaria, it didn't take a rocket scientist to look at a map and surmise that there are two other accessible places we could expect to find a continuation of the crest: Turowice (south of Słomczyn) and Łyczyn (just north of Słomczyn). We were more familiar with the roads south of Słomczyn, and so opted for that exploration, and we weren't disappointed. It was mid-morning when we finally got organized, and out we went to partly cloudy September skies and a cool, but pleasant 16º C (60º F) air temperature. Winds were mild (to begin) and out of the North. It was on 24 August when I wrote about the summer crops in the  Słomczyn 40k and Agronomy post. Today's route was virtually identical, except that we hugged the Vistula rather than swi...

Last weekend we went to the city of Toruń. The initial plan was for Kościuszko and I to retrace the 65 km (40 mile) circuit of the VeloToruń , a road race of five different circuits that happens each May. Unfortunately, we found that our hotel could not safely accommodate Kościuszko, and so my fine steed remained behind. Although there was no ride, there was no shortage of thought and feeling that emerged from the experience. For five nights back in 1990, I intently watched Ken Burns' miniseries, The Civil War . In Part 9, "The Better Angels of Our Nature", the war had ended, the soldiers were returning home. One of the most poignant comments from that episode has stayed with me all these years. In short, most people in that time had never been more than a dozen or so miles from their homes. The idea of "country" was something of an abstraction. The soldiers that fought in that war, however,  knew they had a country. It was not an abstraction. They had walked...