Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Finishing Up the Finger Lakes Tour

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After six days of riding 376 miles around six "finger" lakes, about 21,000 vertical feet of climbing and more than 28 hours on a skinny yellow bike seat, the InMotion Finger Lakes Fall Frolic is over. Today's ride, 59.1 miles (but it was really 60 since I forgot to turn on my Edge 305 after one stop) covered the same extraordinary scenery from just south of Ithaca, up through the Newfield State Forest, down to Watkin's Glen and then up along Seneca Lake back to where we began on Sunday, along the shores of Keuka Lake.

From this Motionbased.com photo, you can see that the route was bumpy today. 4117 feet of climbing in four hours and thirteen minutes of moving time.

At Watkins Glen, Ellis, one of my favorite characters on the ride, was just taking off. (He and his friend Bob had hitched a ride in the truck from the camp ground to the first rest-stop.) Ellis joked that he would ride with me until the first hill. Well, thirty miles later we pulled into the Keuka Lake campground together. Ellis really rode well today, far better than he thought he could on the eve of his 60th birthday and carrying 40 extra pounds. It was great to have some company riding today, particulary on the final leg and through some particularly lousy weather as a thunderstorm soaked us on Chubb Hollow Road, north of Dundee and south of Milo.

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So, this evening I'm in the Holiday Inn at the Rochester Airport and will be heading back to New York City tomorrow morning, certainly with a new appreciation for the Upstate region of this state.

Here is a map of the entire tour over the last six days. Lots of blue lines!

60 miles between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes

Today, 27 September, was an optional riding day on the Finger Lakes Tour. Some of the group was going into Ithaca to visit museums, shop, tour the campus and others were going to stay in the Robert H. Treman State Park to hike up in the woods. However, since I had missed part of my ride with a broken spoke the day before, I took off early for a sixty-mile loop, running counter-clockwise from Ithaca, up along the western shore of Cayuga Lake, across the gap and down along Seneca Lake.

After some heavy rain and a few close lightening bolts during the night, the morning was damp and foggy but the rain had stopped. With some help from Accuweather.com, it looked like the major green blobs had passed on there was at least a six hour window with good weather.

I rode alone all day, listening to Rhapsody's "The Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" using my new Shure SE530 earphones. The totals for the day were 61.4 miles, 4486 feet of vertical climbing and 4 hours and 15 minutes of moving time. 

Finger Lakes Ride Day Four - Broken Spoke Close Call

Today was another hot day, with morning temperatures starting at above 70 degrees and climbing through the upper 80s before the thunderstorms hit in the early evening.

For the first time in two days, I started feeling better and had a big breakfast at Barb's in Locke, NY (about three miles from camp.) Then, it was a big climb up West Hill Road, which was not the thing that I wanted to do just after a big breakfast.

As I was climbing later in the morning, I felt a pop from my back wheel but didn't pay it much mind until my mileage calculator magnet, which is attached to one of the spokes, started clicking on the receiver device attacked to the frame. When I checked out the noise, I discovered a broken spoke. The wheel was badly out of true, but I opened up the back brake so that the wheel spun ok and rode with Tom, Chuck and Gary into the town of Aurora.

We all stopped in a little ice cream parlor in Aurora and I figured that I was going to limp down the road to the first rest-stop and then get a ride into Ithaca, about 30 miles south. However, Bob, driving the sag wagon, saw our bikes out front and stopped into the store. I loaded my bike in the truck and we headed off down to Ithaca while he swept the route, making sure other riders were OK.

The close call was that Chuck, Tom and Gary took off south and Gary was hit by a car just three miles away. A woman driver didn't see him and hit him squarely from behind. I'm not sure if he was all the way on the shoulder or not. Gary was thrown up over the car, breaking the windshield. He was pretty banged up, had some short term memory loss and was transported to the hospital to spend the night. His tour is over but he was hoping to come by and visit the other riders on Friday, to let us know that he is OK and to say goodbye to the others.

I got my bike fixed in Ithaca, where I found The Bike Rack, which had a drawer full of exotic spokes, one that fit my Mavic rims. I finished the ride to the campground, where we are staying for two nights.

 

Finger Lakes Ride Day 3 - Bailout on the Century

Today's ride (Tuesday, 25 September) was a tough one! My plan was to do a full Century ride (100 miles) from Cayuka Lake State Park up through Auburn, over to Skaneateles and then down to Homer, back to Skaneateles and down to Millard Fillmore State Park.

On the evening before the ride, there were going to be four of us who were going to ride the full 100 miles. We all agreed that we would work together during the ride. Four riders, working in a rolling pace line, all helping to break the wind for the group, can reduce total energy consumption over a long ride by about 25%.

However, one of the four riders dropped out before the start in the morning. That left the three of us, myself and a young married couple with little group riding experience but lots of energy. They started out fast, couldn't maintain a pace line and the woman in the couple would speed up on her pulls and pushed too hard up the hills. So, at about 35 miles, I asked them if they wanted to continue to cooperate and they said, "no." So, I was on my own, not what I had planned.

For the first 60 miles, I was averaging 15 mph but as the temperature hit 85 degrees and heading upwards in the early afternoon, I decided to bail out in Homer, NY and head directly to Locke and into the Fillmore Park. The ride was still a long one, 77.59 miles with 4490 feet of vertical climbing over 5 hours and 21 minutes.

The Slime Tube worked, as I picked up a piece of glass about a mile from the end of the ride. Although it blew green gunk up onto the frame, the Slime stopped the air from escaping from the cut and I was able to ride into camp with about 35 pounds of air pressure left in the tire.

I was exhausted after what turned into a long, tough ride. With three straight days of riding in some pretty warm temperatures and sleeping out on the ground in a tent each night, I'm feeling a little worn down. Tomorrow will be an easier ride, for sure.

Keuka to Cayuka - Finger Lakes Day 2

Monday, 24 September and today's ride was a more easy ride after a long climb before breakfast. The weather was warm, but we got to the next campground by early afternoon and I stopped by Seneca Falls to see the National Women's Rights Museum and pick up a Subway sandwich, which I carried in my jersey to the Cayuka State Park to eat for lunch.

The ride was just at 48 miles with 1838 feet of vertical climbing. It was certainly an easy day before the long ride planned for the next day.

This is a picture from the first day, looking toward the northeast across Keuka Lake over the vineyards.

Riding the Finger Lakes - First Finger (Keuka Lake)

After four weeks of absolutely no physical activity (other than limping around Europe and Japan), I've started a six-day tour of the Finger Lakes area of Upstate New York. This event is organized by InMotion Sports and there are about 35 riders taking part, camping each night in state parks and riding each day. The organizers cook breakfast and dinner and schlep (we are in New York) our gear from camp ground to camp ground, where we set up the tents on arrival and load the gear in the truck after breakfast and before our ride.

Today was a ride around one of the finger lakes called Keuka Lake, located about an hour by car southeast from Rochester, up close to the Canadian border.

It was a splendid day, blue skies, 20 knot breeze from the north blowing down the lake. The ride was just under four hours, covering 58 miles and and 3741 feet of vertical climbing. The temperature was sleeves in the morning, but climbed into the low eighties (28 or so, for the farenheit-challenged.)

It felt good to be back on the bike, almost as great as not working out for a month. That long season, from February 2006 until August 2007, with no winter break since we had gone down to New Zealand and into summer just as the weather turned cold last January, had taken its toll. Not that my off season has ended, but I'm back working out, taking it easy, enjoying this lovely country and the company of a pack of fellow cyclists. This week is about campfires in the evening after long rides, hot coffee at dawn while the first sun dries the dew on the tent and finding sandwiches in small country stores for lunch.

It is coming up here to Upstate New York to understand why they really hate people from Manhattan. Those of us who live in the City have no idea that civilization does not stop at the East River and the Hudson but that this State is really mostly about this kind of countryside where we are riding this week... rural, pastoral, relaxed and definitely NOT Manhattan.

Fourteen time zones in eleven days

Pushing the limits of the body to cope with circadian rythym shifts, I've been moving just a bit faster than one time zone per day from New York to Vienna, Madrid, Rome, Bangkok and now in Yokohama. However, somehow, I actually slept  from midnight to dawn here the last two nights. I'm always happy to get to sleep in Japan, since I've spent a lot of sleepless nights here over the years.

This is a fast moving business trip, with meetings with the Austrian and Italian governments, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, two UN meetings (Climate Change in Vienna and Desertification in Madrid) and yesterday morning I had a meeting in the Prime Minister's office in Tokyo to discuss plans for next year's G8 and TICAD meeting to be held in Japan. Following that meeting, I presented a lecture, "Environmental Negotiations at the United Nations; Current Trends and Future Prospects" at the United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies as part of their lecture series, "Biodiplomacy Discourse."

This trip ends tomorrow, when I fly from Tokyo to Chicago and on home to New York.

Today's meeting was at the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), located in Hiyama, about two hours south of Tokyo by train. On the left, Hideyuki Mori, Vice-President of IGES and on the right, Aoi Oride, responsible for IGES outreach.

Gout: Not just for despots and philosophers

I'm limping around Madrid, walking very gingerly up and down stairs. My knee is swollen and hot to the touch.

About four years ago, as I was training for the marathon one season and increasing my mileage, I suddenly acquired a pretty painful spot on my left foot. My diagnosis was "stress fracture" and I did all the things to cure what I thought was a simple injury due to increasing my mileage too quickly. For three weeks, I limped around and even asked Dorothy, Sam and Kai's babysitter from the neighborhood, if I could borrow her late husband's cane.

Pam said, call Jeff, our physician, and have him take a look at it. "No," said I, "it is just a stress fracture and rest will heal it." But it didn't. The pain got worse and worse. Pam said again, "Call Jeff."

So, I finally called Jeff. His first question was, "where is the pain?"

"Oh, right at the intersection of the first metatarsal and first phalangeal bones." (At the base of my big toe.)

The second question was, "Have you changed your diet?"

"What in the world does that have to do with my stress fracture?"

"Have you started eating anything different recently?"

"Well yes," I said, "I have been adding protein powder into my fruit drinks since I've been lifting a lot."

"Well," said Jeff, "you have gout."

Seems my kidneys are not so good at getting rid of uric acid, which is a result of the breakdown of a type of protein called purines. Also, carrying some extra kilos is linked to high uric acid levels. By adding protein powder to my diet, I had upped my purine intake and boosted my uric acid level to the point where it was crystalizing into glass-like shards in my joints.

Over the last years the bouts of gout have become more and more frequent, now occurring in my knees. The problem is that if I don't change my diet and lose some weight, these gouty attacks can turn into chronic arthritis and the uric acid crystals actually destroy the cartilage in my knee, requiring a knee replacement.

So, henceforth, no organ meats, no alcohol, no sardines or mussels and extra water each day. It is time to start the off-season, long slow weight loss. Hopefully in the next few days my knee will stop aching. No beer? No wine? I hate it when health matters steal a little joy from life. Anyway, I'll save discussion on the long off season weight loss plan for another post. 

UN Desertification COP8 Opens in Madrid

Gregoire de Kalbermatten (UNCCD Secretarit) greets His Royal Highness Felipe de Borbon at the opening of the 8th Conference of the Parties. I'm here in Madrid today and off to Rome tomorrow.