Orny's Cycling Journal

With over 25 years in the saddle, that’s long enough to divide my cycling career into eras. And having just begun a new era in Austin, it might be interesting to see what a typical year looked like in the past, how my riding pattern has changed over time, and what it might look like in coming years.

You probably know that I’ve long tracked the daily variations of my cycling Fitness using a metric that is usually called Chronic Training Load, as explained here.

Looking back over the Fitness data I’ve collected, I’ve grouped the past 12 years’ riding into four “eras”. Those are:

• 4 years from 2012 to 2015, when I was living in Boston
• 3 years from 2016 to 2018, when I was living in Pittsburgh
• 4 years from 2019 to 2022, when I was still in Pittsburgh, but riding the indoor trainer through the winters
• And my best guess for how things will change here in Austin

The following chart plots my average/typical Fitness over the course of a year for each of those eras. Commentary follows, below.

Let’s start with the bottom, orange line. It shows my average Fitness over my last four years in Boston. Things to note:

• I did essentially zero riding from December into March during the New England winters.
• Every spring I started from near zero, rapidly building Fitness back up.
• With nearly all major events crammed into a short 3-month summer, my Fitness peaked from June until PMC weekend at the start of August.
• With my major events done, my Fitness dropped rapidly in the weeks following the PMC, before stabilizing at a lower level during the relaxed rides of autumn.
• As the temperatures fell, so did my Fitness, declining rapidly over the holidays and long winter.

The next-higher, green curve represents my first three years’ riding in Pittsburgh. It’s extremely similar to the previous one, with some subtle differences:

• With a slightly improved climate, I was able to do a bit more winter riding, especially in December and in March of the following spring.
• My major events were more spread out, going from late May through September. And with no PMC ride, my Fitness didn’t spike at the start of August or drop off right afterward.
• Thus I did more riding in August and September, and had a longer period of peak summer Fitness before ramping down in the autumn.

Now look at that almost flat blue line at the very top of the chart. That’s my average Fitness for my next four years in Pittsburgh. Although it looks radically different, the only change was using my new indoor trainer to maintain my Fitness over the winters. Here’s what jumps out at me from that line:

• My Fitness held steady over the holidays, rather than its usual decline. This allowed me to start the new year with dramatically higher Fitness.
• Starting from a higher base and being able to ride throughout the winter meant my buildup to peak form could be more gradual, running 5 months from January through May rather than 2-3 months.
• My summertime peak covered the same duration, but my head start allowed my Fitness to peak at a noticeably higher level.

That brings us to last year’s move to Austin, Texas. How will my annual riding pattern change? Well, if you look at the red dashed line, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.

• I’ll still be using my indoor trainer, and milder winters will allow me to ride outdoors more often, so I expect a very flat pattern, without any huge seasonal dips.
• I expect my Fitness will decline a little bit overall. There seem to be fewer long rides and routes in this area, and I’m also losing capacity as I progress into my seventh decade.
• I expect January and February will continue to be my annual minimum Fitness, mostly because cold weather will make it unpleasant to ride the indoor trainer in our unheated garage.
• And instead of summer being a single plateau, I expect my Fitness will peak once in late spring and again in early fall. In the middle there’ll be a noticeable dip, since Texas events tend to happen in spring and fall. I definitely won’t be riding as much during Texas’ brutal summer as I used to back in New England!

From all that, here are the factors that have shaped my annual riding pattern:

• My acquisition of an indoor trainer at the end of 2018
• The realities of seasonal changes and weather at my home locations
• The number and schedule of major organized rides, especially the Pan-Mass Challenge
• The availability of routes suitable for long solo rides
• The lowered capabilities that have come with aging

It might be a tad early to write a retrospective on the 2015 cycling season, but my imminent departure from Boston is a more logical breakpoint than the arbitrary calendar change a month hence.

So, 2015: it was very much a tale of two seasons.

I was on a normal springtime trajectory for the first five months of the year, with training focused on ramping up for my first Cape Cod Getaway MS Ride, with my new coworkers from Buildium.

Those months included solo centuries to New Hampshire and along the Bikes-Not-Bombs route, plus my perennial favorite 130-mile Outriders ride to Provincetown. I obliterated my coworkers in a corporate fitness challenge, then led two of them on a 70-mile jaunt up to Ipswitch for our company’s summer outing. I got to say goodbye to favorite rides including Outriders and Boston’s Hub on Wheels, and I was able to attend a goodly number of Landry’s Green Line Velo rides out of Cleveland Circle. About the only disappointment was that I didn’t get to bike commute anywhere near as much as I had anticipated.

The Cape Cod Getaway MS Ride itself was an awesome experience, moreso because it was the first time I’d done any charity ride as a part of a team. Wearing a Buildium jersey was a point of pride all year, as you can see in all my ride photos, which I began attaching to my Strava GPS logs. Though I was disappointed that Day 2 from Bourne to Provincetown was called off (wisely) due to ludicrously bad weather.

The MS Ride was the inflection point for my year. In the five months from February through June I rode 117 hours or 1,791 miles (including indoor riding on the trainer). After the MS Ride, I had no more events to work toward, and preparing for my move took precedence over riding. The five months after the MS Ride, from July through November, I only rode 46 hours or 674 miles, a 65 percent drop-off.

Because of that, I only got 2,200 miles in this year and only did four centuries: both of those are my lowest tallies since 2008. That’s less than half the riding I did in 2009 and 2010!

And I can’t talk about 2015 without commenting on my first year away from the Pan-Mass Challenge, which had been the focus and highlight of my season every year from 2001 through 2014. It was so nice to take a break from the fundraising! While I did miss the ride, I was okay with it, and did my own little PMC remembrance ride from Sturbridge Street in Mattapan to Truro Street in Quincy. And I was tickled that—even though I wasn’t there in person—I appeared in a video shown at the PMC’s Opening Ceremonies, clapping as I rode no-hands past the camera during the 2014 event. That was a really nice way for the PMC and I to say farewell to one another.

In summary, 2015 was a mixed but memorable last year in Boston. I wish I could have gotten out more, but I’m really happy with the riding I did do. I changed things up a bit, and enjoyed some memorable rides with my new coworkers.

For myself, I’m a little concerned that I’ve lost some of my previous power, whether it’s due to age or too little training or both. And I’m a little concerned about next year, after moving to the arguably the hilliest city in the nation. Which is the perfect segue for looking forward to next year…

It’s unfortunate timing that I arrive in Pittsburgh just four days after their premier event: the Dirty Dozen, which climbs the thirteen most brutally steep paved roads in town; one of them is 37 percent grade, which is the second steepest street in the world! Well, maybe it’s not so unfortunate that I missed it, since I’m in no shape to take it on right now; but there’s always next year, right?

2016 will be a huge transitional year, as I try to learn the roads and the rides that Pittsburgh offers. Naturally, I want to get out more than I did this year, but I’ll have to balance that not just with another new job, but also with a relationship… And we know that cycling and relationships tend to have repelling polarities.

Aside from those things, my 2016 goals are fourfold:

First, I need to buy a new indoor trainer. That will be especially interesting, because the technology has changed radically in the past couple years, with features like using your GPS logs to mimic your real-world rides, and interacting with other riders through connected platforms like Zwift.

Second, I want to find and do more century rides. I think that’ll be a challenge, both because of the challenges presented by hillier terrain, and there just don’t seem to be many organized centuries in the area. On verra.

Third, Pittsburgh has a half mile paved outdoor velodrome track, and an indoor velodrome in the works. I’d love to check those out. I might even take the field for a race, just to say I’d done it. It’s gotta be safer than those goddamned criteriums, right?

And finally: the Dirty Dozen. There’s no sense being in Pittsburgh and not at least attempting it. I want the proverbial tee shirt.

With that, I say goodbye to Boston. I gave you my best, leaving a half billion breathless heartbeats strewn along your potholed but beloved scenic roadways.

Henceforth I hope you’ll look for me on Strava, laying down new PRs in a different commonwealth. I will truly be blessed if I can share the road with as many friends there as I rode with here in Massachusetts.

Pairing deep natural curiosity with the desire for a new programming challenge often produces great results. Such was the case with my recent addition of a Cycling Heatmap page to the biking section of my website.

I’ve always been a map geek, going all the way back to the neighborhood street maps I drew when I first started grammar school. I got my first handheld GPS back in 2000, well before such things were common, and before the government stopped intentionally inserting a random offset in order to make civilian GPS unnecessarily inaccurate.

Naturally, that interest also manifested in my career as a web consultant, where I used the Google Maps API for one client to display the locations of warehouses, delivery trucks, and customers, so that they could optimize their delivery routes.

As a cyclist, when I first saw the Strava Global Cycling Heatmap, I was pretty excited. For the first time—and for any location on the planet—we can see what roads cyclists (as a class) actually prefer to use!

Great data, but it also spurred my curiosity about my own road use. With years and years of cycling GPS files on hand, I have plenty of data; all I had to do was figure out the technical details of extracting it, summarizing it, and displaying it.

That’s where it got hairy, firstly because my cycling GPS no longer outputs user-friendly, text-based GPX files, but compressed binary files in Garmin’s proprietary FIT file format. It took a while, but I was able to hack Kiyokazu Suto’s Garmin::FIT module and fitdump perl script to get the latitude-longitude points I needed out of Garmin’s obfuscated FIT files.

Then I had to find software to generate a heatmap. That seemed easy enough, but it took several tries to find one that could handle anything more than a minuscule quantity of data. I gave up on Google Maps API Heatmap Layer, because their heatmap layer is limited to a pathetic 1000 data points. I looked at Leaflet, Highcharts, Mapbox… Nothing looked promising.

Finally I went back to Google and discovered that if you pair the Google Maps API with a Google Fusion Table in just the right way, it will accept up to 100,000 data points, which is closer to what I needed. So we gave that a shot. Even though the documentation for the known-inadequate Google Maps API heatmap layer was incestuously interwoven with the possibly-useful Google Maps API Fusion Table heatmap documentation, which caused a lot of unnecessary confusion.

Unfortunately, 100,000 points was only about one month of cycling data, so I had to write a script to further summarize my data before feeding it into a Fusion Table. Basically, I rounded my lat-long values from seven to just three decimal points and threw out consecutive duplicates, which reduced the dataset quite a bit.

It also had a side-effect of cleaning the data up. Since my GPS logs location once per second, points were more densely-packed when I was moving slowly, and more sparse when I was moving quickly. Plot that on a heatmap, and it would look like I rode more often in places where I went slowly! But rounding the lat-long values abstracted all those low-speed duplicate points down to one, which fortuitously made tracks display more evenly no matter what speed I rode at.

Finally I had to load my data into a Fusion Table. In the end, by rounding my data I was able to get 14½ months of rides into 98,870 points, representing all 122 rides I took from July 1 2013 through September 15 2014.

How pleased am I with the resulting map display?

Well, it satiated my curiosity about where I ride, and it also was a fun way to brush up my technical chops in terms of cartographic programming skills. I don’t know if any other cyclists will care or benefit from looking at my usual routes, but it would be neat if that were true.

Overall, I’m happy with the result, but it certainly has some externally-imposed shortcomings, all ultimately traceable back to the fact that I had to squish all my data down into 100,000 points.

Because I had to round off my lat-long values, the tracks I only rode once can be seen when the map is zoomed out, but the points nearly all disappear when you zoom in!

If I had more control over the heatmap’s appearance and color-groupings, I could probably fix that, but because those heatmaps are generated on Google’s server rather than the browser, they have provided virtually no options for customizing its appearance.

The rounding also becomes painfully obvious when you zoom in, as what appear to be linear tracks ultimately separate into evenly-spaced individual dots, just like looking at a halftone print under a magnifying glass. At high resolution, it becomes so painfully ugly that I had to programmatically restrict the user’s ability to zoom in!

Ugh! The tradeoffs and limitations give me the shivers. But at certain zoom levels, the result is pretty usable.

Did I learn anything new about my riding? Not that much, since I’m already pretty familiar with the roads I use.

I already knew that I spent a lot of time in Back Bay, on Mass Ave out to Lexington, doing the Quad loop around Concord and Carlisle, and also heading out Charles River Road to Watertown, or Beacon Street to Weston, and Glezen from there out to Sudbury.

I was pleased to see the presence of some new roads that I’ve added this year: the whole Dover loop, the Mystic Lakes route up to Winchester, and both Trapelo and Concord Ave through Waltham and Lincoln.

Of course, I’m equally amused by some routes that I haven’t done this year, but which appear thanks to the older 2013 data. That would include my former commute down to Quincy, which included climbing Dorchester Heights; hill repeats on Summit Ave in Brookline; and Virginia and Mill Street in Concord, a part of the standard Quad loop that I now usually skip.

I guess the only big, new revelation is that although I live within half a mile of the ocean, I never ride along the north or south shores! To find good seaside riding, I either have to go thirty miles north to Cape Ann, or fifty miles south to Cape Cod!

In addition to last year’s ride data, I would love to incorporate my GPS logs that go back another five years; that would change this map quite a bit. However, the rounding that would be required to jam all that data down to 100k points is so extreme that the map dots no longer correlate with individual streets, so the display winds up being completely worthless.

But for this exercise, I’m pretty happy that I was able to overcome the technical hurdles and produce the reasonably good result you see here, based on a good-sized clump of recent data. It’s a victory and an accomplishment in and of itself!

Time for an update on all the news since the PMC.

First was Jay’s annual Labor Day BBQ and ride up Mount Wachusett (GPS log). The ride was pretty fun; after the hill climb, we rode out to Comet Pond and back, but we didn’t stop because Jay was (as usual) stressed to get home before his party guests started arriving. The downside was that I started feeling horribly sick toward the end of the day, which was made all the worse because I was dependent on Jay for a ride home.

The following weekend was the Flattest Century, down in southeastern Mass. While okay, it’s never been my favorite ride, and this year it was made worse because I was sick again: this time *before* the ride. Despite a completely emptied stomach, I managed to finish the ride (GPS log), but it was a titanic struggle. Like CttC, I’m not sure whether I’ll be back for this one next year or not.

Then came Hub on Wheels, the city of Boston’s big organized ride. The weather was almost perfect for this 50-mile ride (GPS log). I only wish some of my friends would come out for this one, since it covers a lot of the parts of Boston that I love riding in, and most of my buddies never ride in town.

And a week after that was my final big ride of the year: a 115-mile jaunt with Paul and Noah that began in Wellesley, then ran southwest into Rhode Island, then crossed over into Connecticut before returning home again (GPS log). The upside was that I realized two longstanding desires: to do my first tri-state ride, and to visit the place known as Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. The downside was that we had sporadic rain, and my GPS ran out of juice toward the end and stopped recording data. But overall it was a good way to get in the mileage I needed to close the year.

Details of that can wait, as I’ll do a whole separate post summarizing my 2010-2011 season.

One odd thing was how the last two rides ended. After Hub on Wheels, I came home, passed out on the bed for about an hour, then got up and went into the living room. I was doing something at my desk when I heard the characteristic sudden hiss of an inner tube bursting. When I investigated, I found a puncture near the valve stem. Thankfully, it hadn’t let go during the ride, but waited until just afterward, while the bike was just sitting idly in my apartment.

Then, after our tri-state ride I loaded my bike onto Noah’s car and we set out toward Boston. We hadn’t left the parking lot when we heard that same noise. Another tube burst, and again it was at the valve stem (although my rear tire, rather than the front). And again, it was just after I’d finished an important ride, when the bike wasn’t being used or even touched. Ironically, only five minutes earlier Paul had observed that we’d gotten through a 115-mile ride without anyone flatting…

So that’s how the last bit of summer trickled away. Stay tuned for my end of season summary coming up next!

I want to report on two recent rides of note.

A week ago Saturday, Jay and I drove up to Laconia, New Hampshire and did a 65-mile ride around Lake Winnipesaukee (GPS log). Although there were no large hills, the route was constantly rolling up and down. That, combined with a strong wind and bad legs, spelled a rough day for me. However, it was late season, so my cycling form really didn’t matter, except for frustrating Jay, who is in the best form of his seventeen-years-younger-than-me life.

The route we selected stayed mostly to large main roads, which meant a lot of speeding traffic, and not many views of the lake. However, when the road did dip down by the lake, the scenery was quite nice, even if the leaves had only just begun to turn at that time.

We stopped for lunch at the Yum Yum Shop (a bakery) in Wolfeboro, and called our riding buddy Paul to make him jealous; he grew up in that town.

We were fortunate, because although the forecast had originally predicted a temperature around 70, it actually climbed above 80, which was a rare late-season treat. Near the end of the ride, Jay was warm enough to request that we stop at Ellacoya State Park for a brief swim, despite the strong wind and chilly water.

All in all, it was a mixed expedition, but it had its rewards, and it’s always good to explore new rides. If I do it again, I think I’ll look for more lakeside deviations from the main roads, especially on the northern edge of the lake.

The very next day was another first-time ride: Boston’s annual Hub on Wheels cycling festival, which includes a 50-mile ride around town. I did this one alone (GPS log), which I figured would be good, since I could take it easy and ride slowly, without having to worry about slowing my buddies down. Really, I was mostly interested in getting a little closer to my mid-October mileage goal, as well as participating in a ride I’d hoped to do for several years.

It didn’t work out that way, though. In an effort to avoid getting stuck in the mass of 4,000 riders, I lined up at the front, then set a quick pace on the first leg down the length of a car-free Storrow Drive and back. Getting off at the Bowker overpass and circling the West Fens, I surprised myself by leading for one of the front groups of hammerheads.

As we tracked down through JP toward Dedham, we gradually shed weaker riders, particularly on Peters Hill in the Arboretum and Bellvue Hill, where I took great pleasure in cracking a poseur in his little Lance Armstrong Radio Shack team kit.

While we weren’t the absolute front of the ride, I was proud to be only person who stayed in contact with one guy who went off the front of our pack. Eventually we re-formed into another small group before getting briefly hung up in the crowd of people doing one of the shorter routes.

When we got to Pope John Paul Park at the mouth of the Neponset River, the route signs directed us into a never-ending circle within the park. Knowing my way around that area, I bailed immediately, but because I happened to be at the end of our paceline at the time, none of the other riders in my pack saw me, and I rode alone the rest of the way back to the finish.

I was extremely surprised at finishing the 50-mile route in less than 3 hours clock time, averaging about 18 mph despite the strong wind, the many stops and starts in the urban street network, some extremely rough “surfaces”, and (of course) having worn out legs from the previous day’s hilly 65-mile ride. It was a very strong performance, which was very rewarding after sucking so badly the day before.

Although the ride took place almost entirely within the confines of the city of Boston, the route was actually surprisingly scenic. While I was already familiar with about 80 percent of the route, there were a few new bits, which kept things a little interesting.

It was a fun ride, and one I’d recommend. But if you’re a regular rider, make every effort to get there early, so that you can line up at the head of the pack, which is probably 60 percent recreational riders. Oh, and I don’t suggest pre-registering, since the Hub on Wheels ride has historically had pretty foul weather. 2010 had the best conditions in years, and it was only partly sunny and struggled to break 70 degrees.

Yesterday I rode the Boston Marathon route for the first time, first from Boston out to the Hopkinton start, and then back the same way the runners do it.

While it wasn’t the most scenic ride, I did get to visit two former residences of mine in Natick. Although I’d never thought about it, I’ve lived within a block of the marathon route for the past 20 years. I also threw in an over-and-back of Summit Ave in Brookline, just to further work my legs.

I timed my return trip, which took 92 minutes, a little more than half an hour faster than the record pace set by Monday’s winner. In the end, it was a decent ride, and I definitely stressed the legs.

Then last night I attended a hastily-organized Boston Bike Safety Summit, which was held in response to three recent accidents involving cyclists.

In attendance were top-level brass from several city and state departments, who all echoed the same message: that cyclists are going to be heard and taken into account. While we’ve heard such messages before, I was encouraged to see the heads of the MBTA, MassDOT, and BPD all making some firm, on-the-spot commitments to improving conditions for cyclists.

After the obligatory feel-good political speeches, the majority of the evening was devoted to hearing the opinions and suggestions of the cyclists in the audience. Although there was some chaff, I was very impressed with the diversity and thoughtfulness of the suggestions.

For myself, I spent my one minute of allocated microphone time as follows:

To increase safety on Boston’s roads, you need to do two things: identify risky behaviors and then control them. Identifying them is easy: for drivers, it’s aggressive driving and distracted driving; for cyclists, it’s running stops, going the wrong way on one-way streets, and not being visible at night; for pedestrians it’s crossing against the light.

There are actually laws currently on the books to control all of these behaviors, but they historically have never been enforced. People will continue to die on the streets of Boston—particularly cyclists and pedestrians—until those regulations are taken at least as seriously as writing a ticket for someone parking on Comm Ave without a resident sticker. Thank you.

And after the session ended, I cornered MBTA GM Rich Davey and told him about a cool idea I saw in the May issue of Bicycling magazine. One reason why Minneapolis won their award for best cycling city in the nation is that they provide a standalone replica of the rack found on city buses, so that cyclists can practice putting their bikes onto them. To support my point, another cyclist standing beside me commented that it was very nerve-wracking the first time he had to put his bike on a bus rack, while the driver and other passengers all waited for him. So if you see or hear about these coming to the MBTA, remember: you heard it here first!

Here’s hoping, anyways.

UPDATED: I’m (mis)quoted in this article.

Finally found the photo of me that I'd mentioned in this post. It appeared in the Boston Metro newspaper on 5/12/2009. It was taken at Christopher Columbus Park, where I was attending the kickoff speech given by Mayor Menino at the 2009 Bay State Bike Week celebration.

You can see the full image here (or by clicking on the thumbnail), or you can see it in the context of the newspaper here.

I attended several of the public sessions of the Boston Bikes Summit, a gathering of bike experts sponsored by the mayor’s office, and I thought I’d share a few things I learned that might be of broader interest. Note that I have no knowledge of what went on in the closed-door meetings, nor do I have any more information about any of these topics than what I’ve shared here.

One of the things I’ve heard from several angles is an emphasis on implenting tangible, demonstrable results. In the past, there’s been a lot of plans and strategies, but they failed in the face of typically obstinate bureaucratic resistance. What I heard at the Summit is that the people involved are focused on actually making something happen, which I find encouraging.

Most of what I have to share has to do with specific projects outlined by the MAPC and DCR. The most noteworthy of those (IMO) included:

• 2008 reconstruction of Mass Ave from Huntington Ave to Albany Street
• Ongoing reconstruction of Comm Ave from Kenmore to BU Bridge
• Planned extension of Charles River paths to the Newton Marriott. Do they presently go any further than Prospect St in Waltham?
• Planned extension of the Neponset River Greenway north to Boston and west to Paul’s Bridge in Milton/Readville. This would *totally* rock.
• Planned Riverway to Kenmore/Charles River path connector (yay!)
• Planned Charles River to Minuteman connector around Grove St to School St in Watertown (yay!)
• Several recently-completed path reconstructions by the DCR, including Nonatum Rd, Daly Field, Soldiers Field, Watertown Square
• Presumably the DCR will be shutting down the Paul Dudley White path to perform a wholesale reconstruction of the path on the Boston side of the river from the BU Bridge to Cambridge Street. Sadly, it sounds like this will not include the awful stretch from Cambridge St to Western Ave, but it may include rebuilding the terrible BU Bridge underpass.
• Deer Island has a bike path around it; that’s new since I was last out there and was prohibited from getting anywhere near the waste treatment plant

I was surprised and delighted, since I had no knowledge of many of these developments. I think one of the things Nicole Freedman and Massbike leadership could do that would have an immediate positive impact is to simply actively share this kind of information with the public, so that we can both understand and celebrate upcoming enhancements as well as make plans to circumnavigate expected disruptions.

Now for the negatives:

• There was no visible participation by the MBTA
• There was no news or information about the planned extension of the Minuteman from Davis Square to Lechmere
• One of the “quick wins” was the installation of more bike racks, which—unless they’re somehow made more secure than a simple rack—will discourage riders from ever cycling again after the first time they get their ride stolen
• I feel that changing drivers’ attitudes is the single most important factor in cyclist safety on the roads, and I heard very little about that during the presentations

Finally, I’d like to echo comments I heard at the presentations that if you value the attention and effort that Boston, the state, and other public and private agencies are devoting to cycling, please take the time to send a letter of thanks, starting with Mayor Menino and Nicole Freedman.

Well, things didn’t get much better after my last rant. The rain continued until yesterday, which was only the third day of sun all month. It has been, in fact, one of the four coldest Mays in recorded history.

Last week the Garage de Velo, a messenger-oriented bike shop near South Station, went out of business, and I swung by to see what I could scavenge. It actually wound up being pretty profitable, as I picked up a “compact, ultra-light” CarbOne mini pump to replace my hated Blackburn frame pump (saving 140g), as well as some minimalist SPD pedals to replace my bulky SPD-and-resin-platform ones (saving another 115g). I haven’t had occasion to try the pump yet, but the pedals seem to be solidly functional, despite being beat up and one-sided. Well worth the twenty bucks.

A few weeks ago I also broke the frame on my very pricey Rudy Project sunglasses. Not having the spare cash to replace them, I followed a pointer in a MassBike posting to http://www.safetyglassesusa.com/, which sells, as you might expect, industrial safety glasses. Now, safety glasses have come a long way in recent years, and I wound up buying a pair of polarized Radians Revelations ($10), a pair of Revelations with clear lenses for nighttime riding ($5), and a pair of stylish Crews Tremor with a blue frame and mirrored blue lenses ($6). Three pairs of glasses for about one-sixth of the purchase price of my old Rudy’s, and these, too, seem to do the job pretty adequately.

While I was at my writers’ summit I also had the bike in the shop, which included replacing the headset.

Of course, none of these purchases have helped my riding any. Friday I went out and did 40 miles, which was probably my first decent ride in a month. I was checking out a potential new commute, and I was really impressed by our Massachusetts roads. Having lived here for sixteen years, I understand the road system, but I swear I got lost a half dozen times by trying to follow a road (the Mystic Valley Parkway) which occurs in at least four distinct, non-contiguous segments in different areas! That’s gonna take a bit more scouting.

Then, yesterday being the only nice day of the month, I went and joined the Quad Cycles group ride, which went well enough until my legs simply gave out approaching Carlisle. From there on, I was the slowest rider in the group (and there are some real slow people on that ride). It was pure lack of muscle power and excess lactic acid buildup, undoubtedly because I haven’t been able to start my training yet. Very discouraging, but at least I don’t have to peak until August.

I haven’t said much here in a long time, so maybe it’s time for a “state of the state” posting. But first…

Ten thousand miles.

Of course, it might sound even more impressive as 16,000 kilometers.

That’s the distance from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami, Florida and back.

If you were driving a car at 50 miles an hour, eight hours a day, that would take you an entire month to cover.

Now imagine doing that on a bike.

Today I took an easy little ride from Quad Cycles with Jer & Sha (and made my first stop at Kimball’s Farm this year), but along the way, on the Minuteman bike path, my cyclometer tripped 10,000 miles. That’s an event worth observing.

Amusingly, in this very journal I wrote: my four-year goal of 10,000 miles, which I predict eclipsing around next June. That was written last October 9. I guess I have quite a good handle on how much I ride!

That accomplishment took me three years, seven months, and three weeks. That’s how long it’s been since October 15 2000, when I bought my Devinci Monaco. The most miles I’ve done in one year was 3400, but my average is about 2850. I always do the most miles in July, when I average about 475 miles for the month. My biggest single month was July 2001, when I put 558 miles down.

That’s a total of 191 weeks, during which time I biked all but ten weeks, and half of those were due to my 2002 bout with pre-patellar bursitis. An average of 55 miles per week, every week, throughout the entire year. My longest single week was 221 miles, which was over the 2002 Pan-Mass Challenge.

That’s 707 hours on the bike—about four hours per week—at an average speed of about 14 MPH (23 kph). The most time I was in the saddle in a week was 13 hours 40 minutes. The best average speed over a week was 17.25 MPH, again on the ’02 PMC. The top speed I ever hit was 44.9 MPH (72 KPH), at Purgatory Chasm on the ’03 PMC.

So those are the numbers as my odometer clicked over to five digits.

Since I’ve written so little thus far this year, here’s a snapshot of how I’m doing in 2004.

For no particular reason I can point to, I appear to be noticeably stronger this year than last. I started upping my miles about a month earlier than I did last year, and even got a long 80-mile ride in last month. It’s been an uphill fight, though, as we’ve again had a long stretch of cold, rainy weather throughout April and May.

I’ve been doing all the local hills repeatedly: Great Blue Hill, Prospect Hill, Summit Ave, Bellvue Hill, Bussey Hill, Dot Heights, the Dinosaur, and many more, all with no problems. At the same time, though, my goal of climbing more of the larger mountains in the region is sadly stalled due to lack of transportation.

Looking forward to this year’s PMC, I forsee no problems other than the fundraising, which needs to start in earnest next week.

Assuming the job hunt is productive, I will be looking for a new bike, but I’m certain it won’t happen before the PMC. But if it does come this year, then next year I’ll be considering participating in the Boston Brevet Series, at least the 200k, and quite possibly the 300k. But we’ll see about that.

But for now I’ll take satisfaction in breaking the ten thousand mile barrier. That’s one hell of a lot of road, and I remember many of those miles very well. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s really impressive to think that I have been capable of transporting myself that distance, powered solely by my legs, my lungs, and my heart.

Ten thousand one, ten thousand two, ten thousand three…