The Wallow Fire and Cycling!

As you may or may not know, the Wallow Fire in Arizona is sending its ash and soot into the New Mexico air.  Just tonight, the fire  is only 1/2 mile from the New Mexico border.  Here is a YouTube video about it for those of you that are not in New Mexico!  There are air quality warnings abounding...and so Cece and her friends were careful in deciding whether to ride this morning or not.  They noticed that the air quality is best in the morning...by afternoon it is intolerable.

 So, the friends decided to ride....well a few did...and a few decided not to given the smokey air.  Cece has not given up on the Leg Burner...and today she did curse a lot !  So it ended up that only Cece and Jamey rode this am.  Here is a picture of Jamey taking a picture of Cece who is taking a picture of her!  Girls!

OK!  Here is what Jamey really looks like! 
Of course, Cece always has to take a picture at the top of the Piedra Lisa Trail head...because she is thrilled that she made it up.  And today was no different...except that when she looked out onto the city from her perch on the mountain precipice, this is what she saw.....

SMOKE!  See that ridge of dirty smoke that is hanging over the city?  Although the air quality seemed good in the Northeast Heights, evidently it was not sooo good.  Within an hour of finishing their ride, Cece started coughing!  Her asthma was kicking up!  Inhaler time.  Cece learned that just because she cannot see the particles, they are still in the air.  Tonight she is recovering quite well and wondering if she will ride again on Saturday or if she will put her bike up on the trainer?

Chinese Dumplings And the Leg Burner!

Ah!  The Sunday Morning Leg Burner!  The famous ride that always makes Cece curse....although this time she just moaned and sang Johnny Cash out loud... and then  she sang it in her mind after she could no longer talk because she was breathing so heavy!  But she digresses....
It started out to be a beautiful early morning .....

This ride for Cece is just a "get up the next hill" kind of ride...with "little spitters"as she calls them...short steep hills that kick her butt.  But the route is up, up and more up and just as you think you will die from that climb...another begins.  Cece and Stephanie were rambling through the neighborhoods between the ups and greeted people out for their early morning walk and told people how cute their little "leashed" dogs were. (Last week when they rode, Cece was chased by a mean little dog biting at her heels...of course she was going uphill at the time!).

They smelled the fragrant flowers that lined the rich property in the north east heights and noticed their beauty.  Stephanie stopped to take a pic and Cece was huffing and puffing and knew she needed momentum for the next devilish climb to Piedra Lisa Trail head...so she hissed to Stephanie, "I'm not stopping!" and up she went.  4 or 5 people passed her going up and she did, remarkably,  have enough breath to return their greetings.  WHEW! 

AND YES!  That is the top of the Sandia Mountains that you see in the background!  We rested, had a drink and took a few pics.....and down hill we flew!  On the way down, Cece said, "Yun lives right near here....we should stop in, her dad is in from China!"    Well,  Steph  and Cece were up higher than they realized and made a few false attempts to find Yun's house...but they finally found it and in they rolled.  It was still early.  Yun opened the door and was surprised and happy to see her two friends. "Well come on in" she giggled, "this is just like in China!  People just drop in!"   

As Yun opened the door, there was her dad sitting at her kitchen table.  "Guess what he's doing, she asked,   He is making dumplings!" In they clip clopped in their cleats, sweaty, and with their helmets still on. Clip clop they went over the tiled floors....up the steps to the kitchen,  hugging the dad and bowing a greeting.  In came the boys...more hugs and talk about making a silencer for a spit ball shooter...go figure.

And then,  seconds later the cooking lesson!  Cece washed her hands and sat right down and talked to Yun's Dad...He speaks no English and she no Chinese...so you can  imagine the conversation!  But talk they did imagining that the other understood their every word.  Some was demonstration, but much was talking as if the other understood...perhaps the universal cooking language!

 In case you do not know, folding dumplings is a precise art.  Cece sat and folded dumpling after dumpling and Stephanie and  Yun talked.  Cece was in the zone trying to perfect her folding.She did not even drink her coffee!  Every so often she would show the dumpling to Yun's father and he would comment...and Cece would smile and say that this took a lot of trying to get it right.  Finally Stephanie was ready to continue the ride, but Cece had not perfected the folding yet...even after about 50 dumplings.  So a few more and Yun pronounced that she had received her Level 1 certificate in dumpling folding which allowed her to teach others to fold dumplings!  Much giggling was heard around the kitchen table.  More hugs were to be had...and off they rode into the early morning!

Cece had had enough but Stephanie had planned to extend the  ride to include her beloved Tramway hill. Not Cece.  She is going home to put her body in a hot bath of Epsom salts!

Cece and the Hissing Swan!!

Now that the weather is getting warmer, Cece is back to her early morning rides!    She arrived along the bosque at 6:15 am with her bike and her gear.  She pulled into the Open Space and was immediately stopped behind a car.  She looked and saw a man who was unlocking a gate.  She has been to this spot many times, but as early as she has been here, she has not seen a locked gate that would prevent entrance.  She rolled down her window and asked the man about the gate and what time generally it would be unlocked each day.  Actually he was early this morning.  He usually unlocks at 6:45!  He explained that kids had been partying there at night so they lock the gate to keep the party cars out.
The Alameda Open Space is  under renovation.  They did the trail now they are working on parking.  The bull dozers are out and they are flattening the earth.  Cece hopes that they will make a huge parking lot. Currently only about 1/3 of the people that used to park there can park there now.

In the meantime, they have moved the porta pottys to along the trail and now they are slanted down hill.  Cece feels that she has to hold on for dear life when she is in there…especially in slippery cleats…..but she remembers how much worse it was in a porta potty in Moab during the Century tour when one was precariously perched on a hill overlooking the river and when you shifted, so too did the porta potty…so in the long run, she is very thankful for just a down hill slant!  Ahhhh! The things we have to worry about!

Anyway,off Cece went along her beloved bosque trail.  She smelled the freshness of the earth and the wildflowers along the way, she greeted many animals…was blessed by a road runner .and she stopped to take in the beauty of water in the desert at Tingley Beach.  As she walked her bicycle and herself in, she saw many geese and swans.  A very large swan was right near her. As she walked by, Cece said “Good Morning Miss Swan…you are so pretty!”  Well, Cece had no idea that swans were mean!  This huge swan opened its big mouth and she saw tongue!  Not only that. but that tongue hissed at her!  Not only that, but the swan lunged at her….Cece was being nice….she was cordial….she was friendly…..Who knew that swans hiss?  She was very intimidated by this sudden behavior.  In retrospect and having searched about hissing swans, Cece realizes that this is very common when they feel threatened….maybe it was the wheels!
Here is a You Tube, you might enjoy about swans that hiss.

She thinks she is traumatized for life!
Even given the hissing swans, Cece had a wonderful ride in the great outdoors!

Please Check In!

Every now and then, Cece gets a certain  type of email from her women's cycling club Women Riding Well.  The email makes Cece's heart skip a beat. The email Cece got this past Thursday morning began like this:

"This morning a cyclist was killed on Tramway.  Please send us an email and let us know that you are ok."

This is the dreaded  email.  It make Cece think of how dangerous cycling can be and it also makes her worry that one of her friends...or someone that she does not even know has been killed by a car while cycling.  In
the case this past Thursday, a car seems to have jumped the median and hit the cyclist.

Cece and her friends have attended several ghost bike memorials.  A ghost bike is a bike that is placed at or near the crash site to honor the slain cyclist.

"Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists' right to safe travel.

The first ghost bikes were created in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003, and they have since appeared in over 150 locations throughout the world. For those who create and install the memorials, the death of a fellow bicyclist hits home. We all travel the same unsafe streets and face the same risks; it could just as easily be any one of us. Each time we say we hope to never have to do it again -- but we remain committed to making these memorials as long as they are needed."

Albuquerque has several of these memorials around town....and several.... is several too many.

The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

A few months ago, Cece was given a huge 600 page book with the above named title by Siddartha Mukherjee.  Cece discovered the other day, that he has won the Pulitzer prize for writing this book!  So, when she was asked to give a talk to the Leukemia Lymphoma's cycling team on Saturday, she immediately thought she might talk about this book.

Honestly, the book was overwhelming, emotional and very medical, and she was unable to finish it, but still it was one of the most fascinating books she has read in a long while....for the sheer fact that it informed her about where the field of cancer research has come from...all the way back to discovering tumors of cancer in Egyptian mummies!

This team in front of her and the ones she has ridden on in the past, are all  raising money to fund blood cancer research and leukemia was the predominate cancer in the book.  Cece wanted the team to hear about this book so they could "make real"  the efforts that the raising of money to fund research and their efforts on the bike were realizing!

As she looked to her right, as she spoke to the team, she saw THIS man, nodding his head in understanding.    This is Dr. Clark Haskins who is an oncologist here in Albuquerque.  He is one of the beloved  Dr.s that rides with the cycling team and is in the trenches every day treating people with cancer.  At a rest area, Cece commented on his "bones" cycling jersey and he replied, "You should have seen me on Cinco De Mayo!  I had on a big sombrero and a serape and I was all decked out."  Cece said, I bet you got people laughing."

He stated, "I have to make people  laugh!"

Loving Our Wheels!

Cece was out today being the support vehicle for Team in Training as they trained for their upcoming century in Lake Tahoe.  At a rest stop at the top of a long climb, she met these little boys and their sister and Cece thought, "Is this how we learned to love wheels?" 

The kids were fascinated by the bikes that came into the rest stop.  When they had a moment and stopped playing with THEIR wheels, they told Cece that they could pop wheelies and ride with no hands....ah the making of a cyclist begins to take form!

A Girl With Wheels!

On this beautiful clear Saturday morning before Easter, Cece, set off to revisit her beloved Bosque Trail along the Rio Grande River in Albuquerque, New Mexico.   She has actually been waiting all winter for this visit and she chose the most perfect day to do so.  The path had been re-paved over the later winter into early spring and she thought immediately about a post she had read by the Fat Cyclist called "Fatty's Inferno"  Fatty had a dream that he ended up in cycling hell  and had to choose certain paths with various  road surfaces.   Here is a short excerpt:

“This is amazing,” I said. “This is the most incredible pavement I have ever seen, much less ridden on.”
“And you shall never ride its equal again. This place has the best riding surface in the entire universe.”
“But I’m confused,” I said, with a confused look on my face. “You told me before that I was in hell, and then you take me on a place I’d gladly ride in for eternity. I can see there are long flats, curvy roads, challenging climbs, and fun descents. The road’s perfect and so is the weather. Everyone looks incredibly happy. How can you possibly call this ‘hell’?”

Cece would find that out later....but anyway, as she  was enthralled by the perfect pavement, she cruised along and got reacquainted with the land.  She was spinning away not concerned about much. She watched the Kenyan and Ethiopian runners grace by as they trained at altitude.  She watched the river glide by.  She was not trying to go fast or working on any of her skills...she just rode along and appreciated the earth!  It occurred to her that this is the zen of cycling....just going along effortlessly so that you felt you were not even moving at all....very still, very quiet...

She arrived at Tingley beach and took notice to see any changes since she had last been here...her favorite little train was in place,

the birds, the men fishing with their sons...check...all was in its place.

But then, in the silence, you know,......there is never a dull moment.  A man cycled by, "Are you the race official?" he asked Cece. "No," she replied, What race?"   "There is a triathlon along this course and they will be coming by at any moment.  I thought you were a race official."  Cece rode a bit farther along the path and was stopped by guess who?  The race official. She was told that she better go back north and try to out run the triathlon because after their run south, they were cycling north all the way to the Montano.

Off Cece rode, scurrying north to try to out run the triathletes.  She made it,  but ended up in a pile of runners from who knows where,...she thought she was in a crowd in Grand Central Station.  Runners going north and  south taking up the entire heavenly pavement...maybe this was the hell that Fatty mentioned?  She shouted  'Bike back, going North" and hoped the sea of runners would part....she  slowed to a crawl.  Where did all these runners come from?  The triathlon was the other direction.  No one had race numbers on.  Whew!  She made it without incident.

She crossed under a tunnel on a blind turn and all of a sudden she saw a cyclist coming at her looking over his shoulder  in the opposite direction......he was barreling right for her....no where to escape...only tunnel on one side, river on the other, She shouted " HEY<> HEY HEY" and the guy snapped out of it just in time to swerve and almost end up in the river himself.  Too close for comfort.

The day started out so quietly!  So restful.....well, she finally made it in one piece back to the Alameda open space parking lot.....and met friends and petted dogs and met a cute army paratrooper guy  who had just run 8 miles....and was a newbie cyclist...he said, "If you see me on the trail again, don't pass me by!"

Oh!  She won't!