The options for morning rides when you live in mid-town Manhattan are pretty limited. Either you go to Central Park and ride laps before 8:00 am when the cars are let into the park on the western side. Or, if you don't want to ride over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, you can get on a train at Grand Central and head out of the city.
The MTA (buses, trains and subways) has a regulation that bicycles are not allowed on trains that leave Grand Central Station after 7:00 am. So, this morning I was up early and out of the apartment at 6:15 for the fifteen block ride to catch the 6:41 Hudson Line train that goes up along the eastern shore of the Hudson River, all the way to Poughkeepsie. However, this morning's train trip was only up to Ossining, home of the famous Sing Sing Prison, just 48 km and about 45 minutes from New York. This is the closest station from Manhattan where you can escape the urban environment and, within 10 km of the train station, be riding in rural New York State.
So, at 7:31 am I was on my bike, riding past the prison and up towards the New Croton Reservoir, where part of the NY City water supply originates. The plan was to ride just far enough to make it back to the Croton-Harmon Station in time to catch the 10:27 am express non-stop train back to Grand Central, so that I can be at my desk by 11:30 in the morning and still get in almost three hours of riding.
Unfortunately, I flatted during the ride and the new tube stem was too short for my rims, making it real difficult to inflate with the tiny hand pump in my frame bag. After a half hour on my butt by the side of the road getting the tire up to about 70 psi, I had enough to get me down the road and I asked my trusty Garmin 76Csx mapping GPS on the handlebars to route me, by the shortest bicycle friendly roads (no freeways or dirt roads), back to the train station and I was off. The GPS has this particularly useful, albeit sometimes painful, feature that can prove to be an awful taskmaster. By taking your average recent speed and the upcoming route to the final destination, it can calculate your estimated time of arrival. For the first few kilometers, it showed an ETA at the Croton-Harmon train station of 10:40 am, meaning that if I wanted to make the 10:27 (or the non-express 10:33), I had to pick up the pace. Anticipating a long wait at the station if I missed these two trains, I cranked up my speed to about 35 kph average and 160+ bpm for the last forty minutes, pulling into the station at 10:25 and making the train by about 45 seconds... totally wiped out. Not the ride I was planning, but a good solid accidental workout nonetheless.
Comments