500 Kilometers

On By StefanieIn Biking, Gardening

It’s been an uneventful week of vacation with one more week to go. Two weeks of vacation in winter is so different from vacation in summer. In summer I’m out in the garden every morning before 7 and don’t come indoors for three or four hours. In winter, I have nothing to do in the garden and can actually rest.

By Monday I was feeling a bit restless though, I needed some physical activity, so I decided I would take up the Rapha 500 challenge. Rapha is a UK cycling company and every year they challenge cyclists to ride 500 kilometers from December 24th through 31st. It’s all well and good if you live in a place where it’s not below freezing and there’s no ice or snow on the roads. But a couple years ago they began allowing “virtual” cycling miles to count towards completing the challenge.

I’m a cyclist who loves long rides. My longest single ride was 240 miles/ 386 km a number of years ago in a 24-hour alleycat-type race in which I came in second place in the women’s single rider category (you could also race as a team). I would love to do the race again but sadly, the COVID pandemic killed it. All that to say, riding 500 kilometers (310.7 miles) over 8 days is not intimidating. I never took up the challenge because I always had other things going on and no time to fit it in. This year for some reason, I have plenty of time and needed somewhere to direct my physical energy, so decided to finally do it.

I have been on a bike every day since Tuesday and decided to take today off as a rest day. I have 91 kms and 2 days to do it. No problem! Almost all the kms have been indoors on the trainer using Zwift, but I did go out grocery shopping on Friday and that counted too. So convenient when your transportation is an extra bonus. In case you are thinking I must be on my bike all day, not so. Riding the flattest course on Zwift, I am able to do 111 km/ 69 miles in three hours of constant pedaling–when there are no cars, traffic stops or wind I can go pretty fast! I have not done three hours every day or else I would be done with the challenge. A few days have been 90 minutes and grocery shopping day was just the grocery ride. I start riding around 6:30 in the morning and by the time I’m done and showered I still have almost a full day ahead of me. It’s been lovely.

As I mentioned, some of my kms came from grocery shopping. I got my cargo bike back from the bike shop on the 23rd, repaired and good as new. My bruises from being doored are still healing, but don’t bother me for the most part. And the driver’s insurance company has already accepted my receipts for bike repair and new rain pants and sent a direct deposit to my credit union. So that ordeal is all done. And when the bruises are finally gone, I can forget about it.

We’re having a big thaw at the moment and after almost 24 hours of light but steady rain, the snow melted away except for a few stubborn patches. It’s currently a warm and foggy 37F/ 3C. We’ll be back below freezing Monday night with the temperature getting colder and colder as the week progresses.

Meanwhile, I’m putting the final touches on my seed list and will probably start ordering in the next day or two. Well at least order from FedCo since I’m getting onion seeds from them and need to be sure to have them to start indoors on February 2nd. Last year I waited until the second week of January and ran into back ordered trouble. I ended up getting the onion seeds in time, but not without a bit of stress. So no stress this year! Most of the seeds I am ordering are herbs and flowers. I am excited about incorporating them in with all the vegetables. More to come on all of that soon!

In the meantime, I hope everyone has a happy New Year! Resolve to grow something next year whether it is vegetables, flowers, or some herbs on your balcony or windowsill. Nurture some seeds and bring some life into the world.

Reading

  • Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I first read this when I was 14 and only remember the babies in bottles and soma, the drug everyone takes to help them be happy. Re-reading 42 years later I was struck by how prescient Huxley was. Not about the babies in bottles, but about how dumbed down society has become and how everything has turned into entertainment all for the sake of capitalism. It’s unsettling reading.
  • Book: What the Chicken Knows by Sy Montgomery. A slim book about chickens, specifically Montgomery’s chickens, but sometimes stories about her friends’ chickens. It’s sprinkled with information about chicken intelligence and behavior, but mainly it’s stories. Having chickens of my own, I enjoyed the book. But for someone who doesn’t keep or hasn’t kept chickens, it might not be all that interesting. Unless, of course, you are thinking about welcoming chickens into your life, then you’ll get an idea of what you might be in for.

Quote

“‘But industrial civilization is only possible when there is no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.’”

~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Listening

  • Podcast: The War on Cars: How Cars Change Us with Tara Goddard. Why do people behave so badly behind the wheel of a car? How do the words we use to describe traffic violence make a difference to street safety? Goddard is one of the top scholars studying what cars do to our brains and the way we treat each other.
  • Podcast: Emergence Magazine: Practical Reverence: An Interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer. (Transcript also at the link in case you would rather read). Kimmerer talks about her new book The Serviceberry, which is expanded from what has become Emergence Magazine’s most read essay. The interview is a wonderful conversation about the gift economy and countering capitalism’s scarcity mindset with that of abundance.

Watching

  • Movie: American Fiction (2023). Based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. I haven’t read the novel so I can’t compare, but the movie was really good. All about the hypocrisy of white people and the publishing industry.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

We don’t buy fresh tomatoes this time of year but we’ve never thought twice about buying tomatoes in cans for some reason. But, as we continue to learn more about plastic in food and how it gets there, canned tomatoes are a giant problem because the cans are lined with plastic and tomatoes are acidic and the plastic lining leaches into the tomatoes. My food co-op sells tomato paste in a jar and also sells a jar of tomatoes, but these are almost twice as much as the canned. So, we are limiting our tomato intake as our frozen garden tomato sauce dwindles to almost gone. But sometimes you just want pasta. We are exploring different pasta recipes that don’t have tomato. This week was Spicy Asian Noodle Bowl. Since we can only get Asian noodles of any kind in plastic, we used regular spaghetti noodles that come in a box. And it was really good! We added mung beans sprouts we sprouted ourselves and some peanuts for some extra crunch. There are leftovers, and James will probably add some tofu to the second meal to make it a little different.

32 thoughts on “500 Kilometers”

  1. A indoor cycling project is a great way to spend this strange, in-between time we’re in until next week. Kudos.

    Do you know I’ve never read Brave New World? I think it’s on my Classics Club list (which is on the backburner.)

    I need to get busy with looking at seeds. Now is the perfect time to do it. I’m going to do cucumbers for sure and possibly green beans?

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    1. Thanks Laila! It was fun and since I didn’t have a bike commute to work I had much more energy than I otherwise would 🙂

      Oh, maybe Brave New World will come up on your club spin list for 2025. It’s not the best written novel and there are lots of offensive bits, but I think it still has some valuable things to say.

      I’m growing cucumbers this year too! They are round ones called Lemon Cucumbers and supposedly will not cause me any intestinal distress. If they do, it’s pickles! Green beans are so easy to grow and there are few things as tasty as fresh picked ones. Have fun choosing your seeds!

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    1. Are you saying I’m old Melanie? 😉 We do fine with the acidity of tomatoes, but I like variety more than James does I think. I do like pesto and am constantly pestering James to make some from all the garden greens. There might be some arugula pesto in the back of the freezer from summer. I will have to do a deep dive and look for it 🙂 Jigsaw puzzles are great too!

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  3. American Fiction is one of my top Ripples last year. And hopefully his newest novel James’s adaptation will live up to its source material as well.
    A wonderful New Year to you, Stefanie, more fruitful gardening and plump chicken, more delicious cooking, and all the best in all your household! 😉

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  4. Good for you, Stefanie! I think I was most impressed not by the fact that you rode 500km in eight days, but by the fact that you were not at all intimidated by it. I was intimidated just reading about it 🙂

    I think I read Brave New World at about the same age as you. It made quite an impression at the time, but I think it would be fascinating to go back to it now and see how it comes across to a (slightly) older version of me…

    I’ve downloaded that podcast to listen to later as well. I’ve always been amazed by how people behave in cars, so I’d love to hear more about it. I remember seeing a comedy skit years ago where they had pedestrians behaving like car drivers – cutting in front of each other, shouting abuse, etc. It was absurd, and it highlighted how people become totally different behind the wheel and do things they’d never do in person. I wonder if it’s something about the anonymity and the protective screen of glass acting like the computer screen enabling internet trolls, but I should just listen to Tara Goddard and find out!

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    1. Thanks Andrew! As the saying goes in cycling circles, miles are my meditation. 🙂

      If you ever re-read Brave New World I will be very interested in what current you thinks of it compared to teenage you.

      I hope you enjoy the podcast. Goddard doesn’t mention anything about anonymity being involved, but there are all sorts of other things that come into play that many cities are now trying to correct, for example, speed limits and street design.

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  5. I can’t compare with cycling, but I share your delight in seemingly effortlessly covering distance just while living your life (getting groceries, etc.). Moving around the city, especially with commutes but also just getting from A to B for any number of reasons, it was a no-brainer to reach that much-talked-about 10K steps/day. That kind of not-thinking-about-it activity makes it so much easier to make a little time for “actual exercise” on top of that. Still, that does sound like a phenomenal number of kms: I’m super impressed. Tomatoes were/are a huge thing for us. We were ordering case quantities via a local shop from Eden (amber glass, likely a staple at your coop too) but they had become very expensive (and, perhaps rightly so, because they’re Amn) but the one Cdn brand that had BPA-free lined cans, but still lined, became N/A. Now we have a local producer who preserves them whole and then accepts their jars to reuse. Perhaps if you can find a market that’s producing similar products (pickles, other veg), you could let them know you’d eat a lot of tomatoes if only you could. If you can find a local miso you really love, just miso with an oil/butter and garlic or ginger is a fab sauce and so easy.

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    1. Goodness yes Marcie! I am so down with the whole walkable city/neighborhood design movement. I am fortunate to live in a very walkable neighborhood–library, grocery story, post office, hardwares store, coffee shop, dentist, bakery, and several parks all within a 15 to 20-minute walk. And yet so many of my neighbors still drive. It’s baffling!

      Sadly, I’m not aware of any local tomato producer like you have there. So awesome! I think we need to grow more for winter preserving, but also be better at branching out past tomato sauce! We love miso at my house and can buy several different kinds in glass jars. James likes to use miso to make salad dressings but I will have to suggest a delicious sauce like you describe 🙂

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      1. Ohhh, you are in for a game changer if you haven’t ever tried “buttery” miso sauces when you already enjoy miso and have miso OPTIONS. You will probably have to give away your tomatoes now like stealth zucchini deposits. hee hee

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  6. Katrina Stephen's avatar Katrina Stephen

    Oh no, I use a lot of tinned tomatoes in pasta dishes, I’m sure that the plastic lining won’t be good for us too. I can’t see anything that looks like plastic, I’ll have a scrape at it next time. I’m very impressed with your long distance cycling. Do you ever do those cycle routes around different cities online? Happy New Year!

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    1. You won’t see anything inside the tomato can that looks like plastic. It’s a thin coating on the metal of the can.

      As for cycling, thank you! The online cycling platform I use has several UCI championship routes including Scotland! The visuals are “animated” though and not video of the route, which allows the designers to do fun things like add Nessie poking her head out of the water and other little surprises. Happy New Year!

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  7. I love hearing about what you can do because you have so much energy; I’ve never done any activity without thinking about it, as Marcie writes above, so it’s a glimpse into another world, like when you write about the lives of your chickens, which I also enjoy!

    I think I also read Brave New World when I was 14. Not sure I want to reread it now, as I’m trying to find hope in little things, like growing something this spring.

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    1. I’m glad you like hearing about my activities Jeanne because sometimes I wonder if I’m boring everyone 😀

      14 seems to be a popular age to read Brave New World! The book is certainly not a happy one, but I did find glimmers of hope in it. Yay for growing something in the spring! I know you grow flowers, are you planning on growing something new?

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  8. Good on you with your cycling project. Though being doored is horrible. Poor you.

    That Brave new world quote is – well, what do I say – but scarily true to the privileged way so much of western culture is currently behaving. I could start my looking more closely at myself.

    Now, tomatoes. I have been tomato-free since the mid-80s because I found they were implicated in my chronic eczema – they are high in histamines apparently, which might be the reason. Anyhow, I’m also wheat free. So, for the longest time I didn’t eat pasta. Those early gf pastas were pretty awful. Now however there are some good ones, so I have been looking for tomato free pasta sauces. One I’ve found contains zucchini, mushrooms, feta and lemon. You don’t do feta but I think something else that adds a bit of salt or spice would work. Even some chilli. (This recipe just has some grated cheese on top, unlike mine with cheese stirred through, so it is a good example of something that could work for you?)

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    1. Thanks WG! The cycling challenge was fun.

      Brave New World has a surprising anti-capitalism message. I was pleasantly surprised by it.

      I think you have mentioned being tomato-free before. Had no idea they are high in histamines. With all the allergies I have, I am blessedly free of food allergies. I agree with the GF pasta. We generally buy it when we aren’t buying noodles from the bulk section because the GF brand my co-op sells is the only one that comes in completely plastic-free packaging. We’ve had rice, chick pea, cassava, and there might have been another one that I’m not remembering. Yes, we could make something work with your sauce example. Thanks for the suggestion!

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  11. I’m hugely impressed by how fit you must be! We’ve been good the past two years with getting to the gym in winter, but this year has been dreadful. I’ve barely made it once a month. Really got to get on top of that. Glad you were having a lovely holiday, though.

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    1. Thank you! I work hard to get and keep fit. It’s not always fun but I really like the results! It’s hard to get to the gym when you have a lot going on like you have. Going to the gym can be a kind of self-care too. You’ll get there!

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