Brown Season: Flying High

Escape Route: Cedar River bike paths.

March came in sort of quiet, I guess. Clear, cold, and without much of any traces of Winter left. The air temperatures have recovered from mid-February's Arctic blast and now 40's seem heavenly. Spring cannot be far off now. 

I had a chance to get away on Sunday, so I grabbed that and ran with it. I did not get out until 2:30pm, but this was when the day was warmest, so I did not mind. The temperature ended up being about 44°F, and the wind was out of the South at around 15mph according to the weather folk. I decided to go Northeast of town because I hadn't been out that way in quite a while. 

You had to look pretty hard to find any evidence of Winter out here.

This glacial erratic seems to have been cut down a bit to my eyes.

I rode out on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to get to Newell Road and gravel heading East. There is a big glacial erratic South of the road which is not noticeable so much when crops are growing all around it. Now, with everything dead and down, it sticks out like a big wart in the middle of stubble out there. The Sun shone on a curiously flat Western facing part of the stone. Perhaps this stone was carved up a bit for building materials. This was not uncommon in the early days of the European settlement of this area. 

A few eagles soar over the barren plains.

There is another eagle high in the sky in this image as well.

Back in about 2017 or so I was out riding these very same roads at about the same time of the year. On Newell Road, just East past the intersection with North Raymond Road, there is a tall stand of trees on the South side of the road. It was here back then where I saw a couple of eagles. Well, on Sunday I saw eagles in the same place. Only there were over a half a dozen of them cavorting on the currents of the wind. 

I decided to go with the Honeman Flyer for this ride.

Bin it!

I decided to make a counterclockwise loop and so I went up to Big Rock Road and this would then take me back West over the North side of Waterloo. Then I'd only have to go two miles into a headwind to get back to town. 

This is the most snow I could find left out there.

I got in a good few hours of riding and came back into town from the North. It was very good to get back into the country again. Hopefully things will go so I can ride out in the country on a more regular basis soon. This will depend on the weather we get, but I am very hopeful this will occur. 

A Digital Infection Affects Cycling's Future

Younger generations find more enjoyment from screen related activities.

Most likely you have noticed something which you feel is true, but maybe you are not sure. It seems younger generations just do not spend a lot of time outdoors, and when you do see youngsters outside, more often than not there is a glowing screen reflecting off their faces. 

Am I dreaming, or is this a real thing?

Well, the National Football League, a multi-million dollar business, has been doing research into trends and fan interest to help them navigate the future. They have found, according to their own research, that younger people are not as interested in watching sports on TV or even live. Their interests are being more and more consumed by "screen time". 

I ran across this because I am a Green Bay Packers fan and I read about this on a site called "Cheeshead TV" here. I'm not certain the cycling industry has the money or is unified enough to accomplish a study like this one I referenced coming from the NFL, but you can safely assume that if the NFL is concerned about "screen time", we as cyclists should be as well. 

Let's be honest, it is hard to sell this over a digital game, unless "you get it".

I suppose it might be a little hard to understand for older folks like myself, but I happen to be a parent of two "Gen Z" people, and let me tell ya, they spend a LOT of time looking at screens! Television used to be The Devil when I was young. I recall a lot of hue and cry regarding how my generation was doomed to fail because we spent so much time in front of televisions. I recall there being concerns over how our generation was going to ruin our eyesight, be heavily influenced to be violent, and be uneducated because we sat in front of television screens. 

Obviously, that all was partially false, or mostly so. I mean, I think I turned out alright. Maybe not.... However; one thing is certain, I did not "fail" because I was born into a generation raised on television. So, perhaps all this hand-wringing over digitally infected minds is overwrought and unnecessary. But also, there seems to be an addictive factor to screen usage. 

According to studies recently published, (detailed in this article from Nicholas Children's Hospital) children are experiencing dopamine release effects similar to those of nicotine or cocaine users while they use digital screens and consume online social media content. That's alarming, and if this is true, it is pretty telling when it comes to the lack of youngster's interests in outdoor activities like sports and cycling in particular. 

We see the effects of this digital infection when we run across distracted drivers.  Even we cyclists are affected when we are consumed by our cycling GPS screens and all the information that gets shoved into our craniums while we are supposed to be enjoying being immersed in nature. It's everywhere, this digital madness! 

So, I hesitate to lay this all on our youth, because if we are honest, we all are being seduced by those glowing screens of doom and those electronic devices we all crave. But one thing is certain, we have a problem, and if we could peel our faces away from the screens to look in a mirror, we might find who to blame.

Headers

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

 The day is drawing nigh when this blog will have reached the milestone of 20 years of online existence with nearly daily posts throughout. The subject matter of the posts is paramount, of course, but there is no denying that the header, the image that leads you into this blog, is also important.

I started out with the Blogger generated header for the time which was pretty generic! This did not last long before my coworker at that time, Jeff Kerkove, decided this place needed something distinctive. Since Jeff was the one who had set the site up for me, he had the ability to get in here and change the template. I was totally unaware he had done anything until I opened up this blog to post one day and hey! There it was. (A modified version of the header can be seen above.)

This header was the one I called "The Fly Header" due to there being a house fly in the design. This header was a daily constant for probably a year before Jeff decided I needed another change. By this time I had become a bit of a "known resource" for 29"er stuff, so Jeff designed a header accordingly.

The second header Jeff Kerkove designed for this blog

 The second header lived up top for several years here. By 2014 I was transitioning out of doing mountain bike/29"er reviews and I thought the header was a bit misleading. I was far more into gravel stuff, and this precipitated my changing the header. 

Since by that time Jeff had been long gone to greener Ergon pastures in Colorado, I did not have the luxury of leaning on his expertise in graphic design. However; I had already figured out how to change a header, and honestly, Blogger made it dead simple by 2014 to do so. 

My experience doing website stuff with the 29"er site and my "Gravel Grinder News" blog made it a simple choice for me to swap out the old "29"er" header to a rotating header featuring scenes from where I actually was riding. 

One of the earlier headers after I changed from running the static "29"er" header. 

I thought it might be fun to feature some of my favorite headers from the past. There are a LOT of these headers I have saved, so in order to do this idea justice I am going to do two things. 1 - I am going to start rotating headers through the top of this page until May 15th, when the anniversary will be celebrated. 2 - I am going to go through all the headers I have saved and post a photo dump of the top ten, or maybe twenty - one for each year of this blog. I haven't decided yet. 

So, if you read this post, you will be in on the "secret". The header you see now up there is the first of this rotation. Each header you see up there through May 15th, 2025, will be one from the archives. On May 15th I will run the original "generic" header for a special post. Then I will return to "regularly scheduled headers"! Ha!

I look forward to digging through the old headers and posting them. The header dump of ten or twenty headers will be coming up soon. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading Guitar Ted Productions!