Bikes of Cuba

I love bicycles:  as machines, works of art, emblems of sustainable living that encourages activity and community, economical transportation, envrionmentalism, sport, leisure, history, travel . . . .

Langston Hughes has that famous poem entitled "I've Known Rivers," and I think I could write one on bikes.

I prefer to bike to work when I can.  I love being in shape to ride 3-4 hours at a steady pace on my road bike in countryside surrounding Athens. I like to ride to the farmers market and load up the bike with healthy provisions for the week.  Getting around campus by bike beats every other mode of travel: 7 minutes from my office to the Ramsey Center for a mid-day workout. Bikes are just cool.

And when I travel, I look for bikes: Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Germany, Austria, Uganda, Portland.  In Uganda, a bike can be the difference in having a livilhood or not (which reminds me of the centrality of the bike in the old Italian film "The Bicycle Thief"--no bike, no job).  Or it meant the difference between a health care worker seeing just a few patients a day to seeing a dozen or more.  I think that if I were to start a country, I would have a bicycle on the national flag.

So I zeroed in on bikes as soon as we landed in Cuba.  Like the cars, the bikes of Cuba are mostly old.

 

 

And they are utilitarian.  The first one below is serves as a mobile cart for the predominant kind of onion that was available.  But there were a wide range of utility bikes such as the three-wheeler below it.  Last in this set is the mobile bakery.  Older gentlemen would wheel their bikes through the streets of Gibrara crying out "PAN!" and people would step out their front doors that open on the sidewalk and buy the cheap white loaves that constituted the only kind of bread I encountered during the week.

 

 

 

 

 

The best bikes seemed to be the ones that had been built over time from parts the home mechanics could procure.  Roberto, seen here on his way to the market with his wife, built this sturdy, ridable bike with the best components that I saw in all of Gibrara, and he was diligent in taking care of it.  I was suprised to see the northern European-style bike complete with fancy kickstand and padded seat on the rack.  While not as common as in Uganda, folks in Cuba will still hitch a ride on a bike rack sitting side saddle.

 

 

 

 

Adaptations and retrofitting are always interesting too.  Here's a bike that I encountered out in the country when we were visiting the more far-flung missions.  While I doubt it was functional, this bike is an example of the ingenuity and inventiveness of Cubans to make something out of what is available.

 

 



And as Holly and I wandered the streets of Gibara one afternoon, we happened upon this handcycle.  As we were admiring it, a gentlemen with an obvious disability walked out of his "flat" and graciously posed with his government-issue bike.  He was proud of it and spoke of his plans to repaint it.

 

 

But always, the proof is in the riding.  I asked a gentleman out in the country if I could ride his bike and he obliged.  Evidently, I rode a bit farther than he expected and he expressed concern about me stealing it.  Me: un ladron de la bicicleta. And at the Gibrara library, in the back courtyard, there was this bicycle go cart that just begged for me to play in.  Note the old school-type seat backs, the bread rack on the back, and the "front lights" made from old speakers. 

 

 

 



I think I spotted one "road cyclist" while I was travelling about.  The roads aren't exactly conducive for road cycling even if bikes were affordable for such a frivolous activity.  But perhaps one of the real limiting factors in cycling for exercise is the lack of calories.  Last year, one of the group members had the opportunity to visit a home gym that consisted of weight equipment made from old car parts and engines:  Cubans do repeat sets of transmission lifts.  When he asked about cardiovascular exercise, the reply was that nobody in Cuba runs;  there aren't enough calories for that kind of exercise. 

Thunder Road Half Marathon

Last Saturday I ran the Thunder Road Half Marathon in Charlotte, the race that I have most consistently run since I started doing distance racing again back in 2006.  I like this race for a number of reasons:  one is it is in Charlotte, which is kind of a second home to me and one of the handful of towns that I've ever lived in besides Durham, Detroit, Chapel Hill, and Athens.  Erica's family all live there.  I like Charlotte, especially relative to Atlanta, though to be fair I only stay in the very nicest parts of the city--Myers Park and Dilworth.  My friend Eric Whiteside lives in Charlotte so I always get to see him.  It's close to Athens, and the course is interesting.  They've moved it from December to November, evidently for shopping reasons (!) but I'm just as happy because the last time I did the race back in 2010 it was gonad-numbingly cold.

I've run three 1:35s in this race (2007, 2008, 2010), one magnificent 1:32 (2008), and a respectable 1:34 this year.  That was good enough for 80th overall, 14th in my age group, a 7:10/mile pace.  It's a amazing to me that the difference between my 1:32:07 and my 1:34:01 is a measly 7 seconds/mile. It all adds up.  I ran Thunder Road one month after a slow 1:36:10 for the Athens Half in October.  What I learned from the Athens Half is that I really do need to start conservatively.  I think I could have run Athens faster, but I started slowly and cautiously sped up to a low 7-minute/mile pace.  Actually, given the training that I did, I was suprised to get a 1:36 in Athens.  So I took the same strategy to Charlotte and I like the results.  Below are my mile splits for the Charlotte half.  Mile 2 is a bit of a mystery and the 6:57 was a bit of a shock.  The last mile is uphill. Overall, the negative splits suggests that this is way that I run as a middle-aged athlete.

Splits

1. 7:13
2. 7:42
3. 7:16
4. 7:08
5. 7:12
6. 6:57
7. 7:07
8. 7:07
9. 7:05
10. 7:03
11. 7:05
12. 7:05
13. 7:17

I'd like to find another half marathon in December or January or Februrary that is close but the only ones I'm finding are suspicious looking.

Cuba: Coches de Caballos

There's a lot to say about my trip to Cuba, and not all of it will eventually make it to the blog, but to start out with I'd like to talk about the cognitive dissonance that Cuba causes a "yuma," un estadounidense, an "American."  ("Yuma" is the Cuban term for Gringo, "estadounidense" is Spanish for a person from the United States, which is much more accurate--I learned in Chile last year--than calling ourselves "American").

When I saw the coches de caballos (horse cars), which most Cubans seem to call just "coches," I didn't think of Charleston, Savannah, or any other historic city that has the twee phenomenon of horse-drawn carriages, but upon reflection those seeming anachronist tourist conveyances in US are a powerful juxtaposition  of the basic needs of Cubans that highlights the difference between life in the two countries.

This is not a tourist trip; this is a local taxi taking, among others, kids to school. Gibara wakes up with crowing roosters and squealing pigs being carts off at the end of "la madrugada," the time between midnight and dawn, and the rumble of the coches is not far behind.  Coches are a cheap way to get across town, and like taxis anywhere, they congregate where people look for a ride--the bus station and the crossroads of crowded, bleak Soviet-era apartment blocks.  Cheap and plentiful, these are the yellow Checker cabs of Gibara.

But it gets more complicated.  Horses need feed, and there's not a whole lot for them to eat in these densely packed village streets.  Where there's a need, there's someone willing to do the tedious work to fill it.  As we rode a truck made in Detroit in the early 50s and retrofitted to look like a military personnel transport vehicles, we encountered men on the side of the road with machetes hacking, gathering, and hauling grass to town to sell to the drivers of the coches for their worn-own steeds.

This fellow was pretty far out from Gibara.  As Holly noted at the time, relative to the horses in town, this one looks well fed, grazing while his master hacks at the roadside grass.  Median grass, shoulder grass, gutter grass:  a raw, natural material that estadounidenses wouldn't consider as having any value, as being a nuisance requiring state maintence:  in Cuba, it is a way to make a little money using what resources are available.  Backbreaking.  I can only imagine how little this guy gets paid for harvesting and transporting grass back to the towns.

And while these guys take a wagon load to market, they get passed by a late-model Korean car,  a rental driven by tourist.  The smoke in between is from the exhaust of our 1949 Plymouth truck.  The disjunction is jarring.

Windsor Mansion Ruins, Port Gibson, Mississippi

To those who read and especially those who commented to my first post ever linked to Facebook, a big thanks.  I'd been meaning to do something with the picture of the Ugandan charcoal bike for a while and had been thinking about it for a maybe an article to send to Bicycling magazine, but--alas--along with all my other big plans for writing, it has come to naught.

Here are some pictures that I took at the ruins of the Windsor Plantation mansion outside of Port Gibson, Mississippi.

I headed out there one late afternoon.  The owner of the Isabella Bed and Breakfast advised me not to bike out there because of the nature of the road and terrain, and I was very thankful for that advice.  I got out there when the light was still harsh but hung around by myself (with the exception of a brief visit by a young couple) until it got kind of spooky dark.  As a result of the changing light I kept walking the perimeter of the columns essentially taking the same pictures over and over again hoping to get at least a good one or two.

I think columns have interested me since I learned about them back at Cranbrook.  With the different orders and the rules about proportions, I think it is mixture of art and math that appeals.  I remember as a kid looking at Greek and Roman columns and thinking that they were chiseled out of monolithic chunks of marble.  Seeing the quotidian brick exposed beneath what is left of the stucco exterior seems like an apt metaphor for the Old South.

As I mentioned in early post, I planned on visiting Windsor because of a photograph taken Karekin Goekjian.  We have a print of the photograph signed by Goekjian in our upstairs hallway that was part of the High Museum of Art's "Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present" exhibit during the 1996 Olympics.  However, the first picture I remember of the Windsor Columns was a black-and-white photograph by Eudora Welty that included her back-lit shadow taking the picture before the full complement of columns that was standing at the time (it's remarkable in that picture of few and small trees surrounding the site.   For that picture and a history of the house, the Architecturalist blog has a nice post.

The ruins are an artifact of the Old South, especially the flush, booming years right before the Civil War that led to delusions of grandeur about southern civilization that lead to succession.  Beyond the moral blindness the South had with regard to slavery, the foolish Romanticism of the Old South seems embodied in these structures based upon some vision of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though this house actually survived the war only to be destroyed by carelessly thrown cigarette in the 1890s, the remaining ruins remind me of the wrecked steamship, the Sir Walter Scott, in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is typically read as an emblem of the wrecked Romanticism of the Old South run aground.

And then there's Faulkner, who so masterfully used that failed society and turned used it to build upon the Southern Gothic literary tradition that Poe sorta-kinda started in the nineteenth century.  For as much as Windsor is evocative to me because of the photographs that have come before, it is stark and powerful and sobering because I can't help but recall Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner's Jay Gatsby from Absalom, Absalom!

When I think about the trip I made from Athens to Oxford to Port Gibson to New Orleans and back, I think maybe the 90 minutes I spent at the Windsor Columns will stick most powerfully with me.

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

This is known as the first rule of ecosystem ecology.  In terms of my foot, I went to see Jimbo today and he placed the blame for my foot ailment not only the perodeal tendons but on the cuboid:  "Your cuboid is locked down."  The cuboid is truly a hunk of bone.  The value-added was that he got me on the treadmill to study my running form.  My cadence is perfect at 180/minute, but . . . I've got to work on keeping my arms low, driving through, and using my arms to leverage my hips muscles that will result in a heel kick.   And I'm one of the few people whom he tells to wear "less of a shoe."  That took me straight to Athens Running Company where I got a new pair of Brooks's Pure brands.

Athens Half Marathon Report

Elemental Thing #1:  running.
Ran my first half-marathon of the season.  I love the Athens Half or AthHalf:  running on the streets I know so well, being greeted by friends along the route, being super close to home.  This year's weather was perfect for a race.

I felt that my training had been modest so I was modestly hoping for 8-minute miles.  So I went out and decided not to let the runners passing me in mile one lured me into chasing.  Even holding back the horses, I ran a 7:38.  At that point, I didn't know what that meant.  After my last two disastrous marathons where I bonked at 18 or 20 miles, I didn't trust that I had gone slow enough.  So I made plan and revisions of plans for the race as I was racing, all considerations on the conservative side.  I finally decided that if I felt good running 7:30s up to mile 7 or 8, I'd pick up the pace.  Ended up running a bunch of sub-7:30s but waited until 10 to really try to run harder.  Started running 7:08s, then a 7:02 for God's sake.  Finished very strong running negative splits.  Ended up running a 1:36, which ain't anything to write a blog about (even for me that is about four minutes of my PR) but it is better than expected.

Too bad I've seriously pissed off the peroneal tendons in my right foot.  Because exercise is essential to prevent me from killing other humans, I scheduled an appointed with Horizon PT yesterday and met with Brett today. He hooked me up to all kind of cool things that plug in: ultrasound, a thingy attached up high on my calf that made my foot rhythmically twitch with another thing that make the foot area of the tendons tingle.  And a tuning fork to check for a stress fracture.  Anti-inflammatories in a patch with magnets is strapped to my foot as I type.  I ran for 45 minutes today.  I'll see the King of Horizon tomorrow, Jimbo, for him to look at my running on slow mo.

So here's Jane Prater's idea for my blog:  posted selected pictures from my travels and comment on them.

This is one of my favorite pictures.  I took it in Kampala, Uganda, back in 2008--hard to believe it was over four years ago.  Given my penchant for bicycles and my admiration for them as the most energy-efficient form of human transportation ever created, I tend to always be on the lookout for how people are using them.   Movement, transportation, sustainability, physical activity, mechanical beauty, and the implications of the bicycle for urban design:  all of these things are tangled in my head.  So here I am in freakin' Africa seeing these bikes that none of the other Americans on the trip even seem to notice.  And one of the first ones I see is this bike carrying an impossible load of . . . what?  One of our Ugandan hosts enlightened me that those are sacks of charcoal--the fuel of choice among the poor brought in from the country by the even poorer folks who have the one of the worst jobs in Uganda.  Father Stephen told me that one of the lowest positions in the country is charcoal maker, a backbreaking and lung-blackening job sure to lead to early grave.  Charcoal making:  responsible for the widespread deforestation but necessary to fuel the subsistence living that seems to be large swaths of Kampala's population.

This picture could be entitled "Energy."  The energy it took to produce the charcoal.  The energy represented in the charcoal.  The energy it took for the cyclist to bring this product of the country to the city.  The energy of the city itself.  The glow of the charcoal fires at night that cook the meager meals and provide spectral light for those gathered around red penumbras in the pitch dark of night.

The bike represents a means of the semblance of a livelihood that the cyclist relies upon.  It is not for speed, for "green" commuting, for weekend leisure.  It's essential, like the bike in "The Bicycle Thief."  No bike, no job.

I had the chance to ride one of these heavy steel beasts.  They are awful single-speed monsters made in India or China.  They are ill-designed for the rigors of Africa--the "roads" and the loads that life in Africa demands.  So the first thing that a new bike goes through is Africanization:  rebar is welded to the front fork and rear triangle.  The meager rear rack is removed and replaced with a homemade steel rack which can support a passenger, jerry-cans used to transport water from wells, furniture, or impossible huge sacks of charcoal.  When we went up to Gulu in northern Uganda, I had the opportunity to see how this African retrofit happens with the most improvised of materials.  It was an exhibit of ingenuity that was cut short when the boss bruskly said,  "You go now." 

Technology makes me feel old: blogs and blogging

So, I have done this whole blogging thing in fits and starts.  I think I first blogged when I went to Uganda and that was one way the team was able to keep folks back at home informed about what we had seen.  I think I associated that blog with one of accounts and then had a hell of a time separating out that blog from my personal blog on blogspot http://psquick.blogspot.com. I could have sworn that I had figured it out but low and behold this blog, also called Elemental Things, is completely different. 

And my mother-in-law (and friend) Jane Prater has urged me to write, though I wonder if anybody else but her will read.

She has a very widely read blog (merelyasuggestion jpknits:  google it), which is heads and shoulders superior to anything I'll every produce.  It is a real blog.  It is the kind of blog for which blogging was invented.  It has features.   It has readership.  It has a purpose.  Jane says that blogs are first drafts.  Actually, I think my paper journal is my first draft.  I'm still trying to find my raison d'etre to blog.  I've blogging at work www.ctl.uga.edu, and I've enjoyed that and gotten a real kick out of people saying that they have read the blog.

Elemental Things is really just about the kinds of things that I like to do.  So maybe now that I've sorted out which blog goes where, I'll come back more often.  Next up:  pictures from my Southern Tour, though really you could just go to my Facebook page if you wanted to see those.

Oh, and there's a new car commercial out that makes fun of cars with cassette decks.  That makes me feel old too.

The Southern Tour 2012

I'm heading to the land of my imagination--Mississippi and New Orleans.  As a guy mesmerized by Faulkner in the abstract and in the concrete since before undergraduate days, Mississippi has always represented the real south.  North Carolina was, well, north.  Not far enough south to be south. Even moving to Georgia didn't seem to qualify because it touched North Carolina, and therefore was contiguous with, well, north.  Stupid, I know. That's never stopped me from thinking so.

I'm heading to Mississippi and then on to New Orleans for work.  I actually may come out ahead financially on this expedition, thanks to the University of Georgia's First Year Odyssey Seminar program. An friend from grad school, Bob Cummings, has made good in the academic world, and as the director or the Ole Miss Writing and Rhetoric Program has asked to come down to talk to the faculty.  Now, there are very few things that people ask me to talk about:  actually only one--teaching portfolios.    How this happened I'll never know.  But I'm going down to talk to the faculty of Ole Miss about how to encourage their graduate students to create teaching portfolios.  I will be wearing a suit, or at least the pants and a vest.

From Oxford, I plan on heading down highway 61, which snakes down the Mississippi Delta.  An old road made famous from the true Blues era, I don't know what kind of Wal-Mart crap they'll have thrown up over any vestige of the past, but there are plenty of towns with Blues history.

I originally thought to spend a day in Natchez because that was the starting point of the Natchez Trace Parkway of bicycling fame, but I'm leaning toward Port Gibson because I want to see the ruins of the Windsor plantation house.  I've got a spooky print of the columns from a photograph by Lebonese Karekin Goekjian.  My buddy Eric Whiteside visited there during a summer program on Faulkner at Ole Miss.  It's 10.3 miles off of Highway 61. I want my own photograph of the place. 

From there it is on to New Orleans, a new city for me and one that I've always wanted to visit.  It is another South entirely. 

Let's see what the week has in store for me.

Elemental Things redux

Somewhere in digital black hole there is the failed first version of "Elemental Things."  It's not great lost to the world given the scant content that I posted, but the idea is that I find myself doing elemental things such as reading, running, writing, swimming, cycling, thinking, and teaching.  I see myself as an elemental guy--some more interested in what it is that people live for as opposed what it is people do for a living or what they do for fun.  So here is where I want to talk about what I'm learning through those gerunds.