Category: Ask Ken

Jon asks:

I am in the process of interviewing for a position in Miami. I’ve always wanted to move from NJ to somewhere in the Sunbelt. As I’m getting older (I’m now 49), cold is beginning to bother me more. I’ve been trying to locate bicycle clubs in FL, but they all seem to only offer racer paced rides.

I ride long distances 35-67 miles in NJ, but at an avg speed of 11-13mph. Where do I find southern FL clubs that have C and/or D paced rides? Also, even with nice weather, FL does not appear to offer a lot of riding locations. Am I correct? Any information would be appreciated.

I try not cross the south Palm Beach County Line

I may not be able to address your specific questions, because Miami is about 60 miles south of us and I try as much as possible not to go south of the Palm Beach County line. And, I’m pretty much a solo rider, so I don’t hang around the clubs. But, here’s some other info.

You’ll be trading cold for heat and humidity

If you live in New Jersey at this time of year, I’m sure Florida looks really attractive. I DID pass on riding this morning because the wind chill was down in the low 40s and the winds were 16 mph, gusting to 26.

On the other hand, summer’s heat and humidity cause me to shift my riding to the evenings and nights after about May. I’m a decade older than you and the heat kills me as much as the cold does you. Maybe my radiator isn’t working as well as it should, because a hot day will elevate my heart rate 10 to 15 beats per minute.

I’m not a club rider

You and I are about the same speed. My last century was done at about 13 mph. My last ride was into a 14 mph headwind where I worked to maintain 10.5 mph, but then cranked effortlessly at 16-19 mph for the all-too-brief time when the wind was at my tail.

My two kids are morphing into go-fast riders. I don’t know where I went wrong with them. Matt, the oldest, likes to get up at ye-god-o’clock in the morning and push himself with a group that rides the north end of Palm Beach County on weekends. It’s made him a stronger and faster cyclist.

I don’t like dragging myself out of bed early in the morning, and I’d rather ride my own pace, stopping along the way to take pictures and talk with folks I meet. Not knocking folks who like group rides, but they’re not my style.

How comfortable are you in traffic?

When I ride in South Florida, one thought keeps going through my mind: if Darwin was right, and only the strong and fit survive, how many N.J. and N.Y drivers were weeded out before they got down here?

A vehicular cyclist, who isn’t afraid to take the lane when necessary and who rides defensivly, will find riding OK. If you’re uncomfortable riding in urban traffic, you may have problems. There aren’t many traffic-separated bike paths in the area.

One of the most pleasant protected places is the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, a blacktop trail on top of the Lake O dike. It’s not paved the whole way, but I have ridden the whole roughly 117-mile lake, and only about 15 miles of it was on ugly road with broken shoulders. That stretch was under construction and may be fine by now.

Check out Everglades Bike Club

The Everglades Bicycle Club out of Homestead, south of Miami, is a fairly active group. I’ve done their Snowbird Century twice. What they call their Easy Ride is about 26 miles at 14-16 mph, so they may be a little fast for you.

There ARE pretty places to ride in South Florida, you just have to look closely.

And, if you are REALLY a slow rider, you should hook up with my buddy, Charles Keefer, webmaster for slowbikes.org. If he went any slower, he’d have to have one of those beep-beep warning horns on his bike. (He also tends to be a bit slow in updating his site, but that’s understandable. I think it’s in the charter.)

Keep in touch. If you make it down here, I’m sure we can hook you up with some routes, if not clubs.

That big stack of business cards that say Ken Steinhoff, Telecom Manager, Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc., lost all value except as book marks when I retired at the end of August.

I needed a new identity

I was headed out to speak at a telecom conference in October and decided I should have new business cards to hand out there and when I run into folks on the bike.

Matt, Help!!

One of the advantages of having geek kids is that you can call on them when you need help. Matt, older brother of propeller head Adam, shown here, said he’d whip something up if I could provide a logo.

I started to rip off Keefer

I started to rip off a logo used by Chuck Keefer, keeper of the needs-to-be-updated LOST website, but I didn’t think it was generic enough.

Velo Girardeau to the rescue

That’s when I remembered the illustration on the flyer for Velo Girardeau’s annual Tour de Cape. For a small town, Cape has an active cycling community with a lot of friendly and helpful folks.

Their Yahoo group has some excellent maps.

I rooted around in my file drawer until I found the flyer and scanned it for Matt. He came up with this as a business card. Because we were getting tight on time, he was going to have them printed and mailed to my mother in Cape so they’d be there when we arrived. For the record, www.overnightprints.com did a good job at a reasonable price.

There was one small problem

I didn’t know how to contact the artist to get his permission and I didn’t have a clue how much he might charge for the use of his work.

I figured my first challenge, when I got into town, was to track down some guy named Don Greenwood and see if I was out 10 bucks for cards that I couldn’t distribute.

It helps to have an artist in the family

Sister-in-law Marty Riley is an artist in Cape and not only knew Don Greenwood, but knew where he hangs out in the evening.

We tracked him down and he graciously agreed to let me use his artwork for an amount that I could afford: $0.

Thanks, Matt, Marty and Don.

Deeds asked Ken:

Ken,
I wondered when you started riding your bike? How did you get interested in bicycling?
Deeds

Despite the fact that my kids think my original bicycle wheels were carved from stone ala Fred Flintstone, my first bike was a Schwinn when I was about 13. I’m digging around trying to find some pictures of it.

My parents bought it for me to make it easier to deliver The Southeast Missourian.

Reflectors must have kept me alive

It had a massive front basket to hold the papers, a big headlight that put out minimal light, fenders (with mudflaps) and a battery-powered horn. Interestingly enough, even though my route kept me out after dark, I don’t recall having a taillight. It DID have reflectorized tape all over it, so maybe that’s what kept me from getting run over.

In the early days, a lot of the streets I delivered to were gravel, which didn’t make it any fun going UP or DOWN the steep hills on a single-speed bike.

I can remember a couple of times when the streets were covered with snow and slush that ice built up on the fenders between the fender and tires. The more you rode, the more water that was thrown up and the more the ice built up. That wasn’t so bad as long as you were moving, because the friction of the moving tire would melt the ice. When I stopped once, though, I found out that the tire was solidly frozen into the mess. I had to leave my bike at a customer’s house and continue the route on foot. Continue reading “Ask Ken: How did you start cycling?”

First off, if you got here looking for a formal tour of Palm Beach, we’re not there yet. We may not ever get there.

Here’s what happened along the way: several months ago, my two sons, their wives and my toddler grandson in a bike trailer, started doing weekend rides. It was convenient to meet at my house and ride Palm Beach. That riding group has grown to include friends, co-workers and the occasional tourist we’ve swept up.

Thirty-five years of working at the local newspaper, The Palm Beach Post, has given me lots of war stories and historical tidbits that I share with the riders. Some of them may actually be true.)

For my birthday, they set up this site and said, “You’re so close to retirement that you can taste it. (Why don’t you do Palm Beach bike tours and get paid for what you’re giving away for free?”The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. See if I could cut a deal with a local bike shop that already rents bikes; use FRS radios for commentary; convince the city fathers that we would emphasize safety, get a foodie friend to provide picnic lunches, etc., etc.

Then we had a larger than average group show up one Saturday. It was a mixture of hammerheads who wanted to go fast and newbies who wanted to ride 10 mph and who weren’t comfortable in traffic. That made me wonder if I really wanted to go into the cat herding business.

In the meantime, this site was already getting hits, even with nothing on it. I didn’t want to disappoint folks, so I thought about the hundreds of messages I’ve posted since the early 2000s to bicycling newsgroups and email lists about rides, equipment, technique and stuff that you think about when you’re on a saddle for hours at a time.

This site is going to be a distillation of those postings, plus some of the ramblings of friends and family. Instead of herding cats in the real world, I’m going to do it in the virtual world.

For those of you who are actually looking for good places to ride, I’ll have GPS tracks, Google Earth .kmz files and lots of pictures as quickly as I can put them up. It’s taking a while to edit the original postings and to learn the software that runs this site. Please be patient and visit often. There will be a lot of new (old) content posted in the next few weeks. Comments, questions and critiques are welcome.