Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Last Vacation Ride in the Finger Lakes

So, I think that my favorite rides are as follows:

1. Cols
2. Loops of Lakes
3. Around New York City going from train station to train station
4. Riding to a winery

Today's ride was not only a loop of a lake (well almost), but also ended up at the Long Point Winery where the family was waiting with the car for a lift home.

Except for the first 10 km. this ride either went up or down (933 meters) for the remaining 67 km. Again, not a record breaking pace, but a wonderful hot (25-27 degrees) and hilly spin through the rural farmlands of the Finger Lakes.

Tomorrow, I'm off to Ghana for the climate change negotiations and then over to São Paulo to run in the Human Race 10Km run before flying to Chile and Argentina for work.

Up a Hill, Down a Bottle of Wine.. Cycling in the Finger Lakes

Fluffy white clouds, blue skies, cornfields full of two and a half meter stalks bound for the local ethanol plant, vineyards of grapes destined for the local wineries. I'm sharing the road with Mennonite farmers in horsedrawn buggies. No Tour de France speeds here.. just enjoying being in great shape, spending the hours riding the back roads and then heading back to our lake house to watch the Olympics and drink wine from those same vineyards.

Yesterday's ride was from home south, riding west, south, west, south, east, south down to Ithaca and then north, west, north, west and north on mostly farm roads to the Swedish Hill winery where Sam, Pam and Kai had just finished the taking the tour and buying bottles of their Doobie's Jack Ass Red (named for the local donkey) while I opted for a much nicer 2006 Meritage. No world records.. 110 km in four and a half hours. Sometimes you just have to ride for fun so that cycling doesn't feel like work.

Long Ride to Ithaca and Morning Loop of Owasco Lake

While on family vacation this year in the Finger Lakes, life is fairly simple. Breakfast, Olympics, cycle, lunch, swim in the lake, dinner, Olympics, sleep, repeat. Add local fermented grapes as needed.

Two days ago, I took off cycling out around Cayuga Lake, through the vineyards and cornfields to Ithaca.

Lovely ride of 112 km in just over four hours, mostly on lightly trafficked two-lane roads. The family was waiting in Ithaca where we lunched, explored Cornell University and drove back to our house on Owasco Lake.

Then, yesterday, in an easy no-chain ride, I rode around the lake in front of our house.

Just 50 km in two hours. No records broken, but it was a lovely, cool morning and always great to be able to ride from home and back to home.. and get in a loop of a lake. There are two things that I love to do while cycling.. riding up cols (gaps in the mountains) or looping around a big lake.

Bad Day.. Good Day

The Great Race is an Auburn, NY regional team triathlon that draws thousands of competitors to run, cycle and paddle along and in Lake Owasco. Several days ago, I checked online for cycling routes in the region and discovered that this classic event was being held this weekend, the day after we were arriving for our summer vacation just six kilometers down the lake from the start. Further clicking on the event's webpage and I found a team looking for a last-minute cyclist.

So, early Sunday morning I rode over, picked up my race number from my teammates and readied to take the wristband from our runner, pedal for 30.26 km and pass off to our kayaker, who would run down to the lake and head out around the buoys.

I just had a crappy day, starting out too fast and I blew up on the big hill that kept going up and up and up. Then, after a fast descent the course went up again, dropped down a hill, up a hill, down again and up again. I just felt heavy, slow and without any power in my legs or recovery after the short climbs. It wasn't until the last five kilometers when I started to feel better, but probably only because I knew that the day would be over soon.

The best part of the day may have been the sandwich after the race.. and then the bottle of Finger Lakes (King's Ferry Treeleaven) Merlot later in the afternoon.

So, yesterday with 426 meters of climbing, I averaged 28 kmph with a heart rate of 156 for the 64:42. Then, today, with no pressure and just having fun, I rode down to Barb's Diner for lunch. Just having fun for 24.22 km and 300 meters of climbing and a heartrate of just 127 bpm, I averaged 29.5 kmph. The difference? No pressure, started slow and built speed over time rather than starting fast. But then again, it could have been the Merlot.

Olympic Air Quality: My Beijing Marathon Experience

In October 2006, on a warm and very polluted Sunday, I ran in the 26th Beijing International Marathon with about 20,000 other local and international athletes. The course, like the 2008 Olympic marathon course, began in Tian'anmen Square and ended near, what was then, the to-be-completed Bird's Nest National Stadium. It was really a wonderful experience, particularly since there were not too many foreigners in the race (although I had been told that the Koreans and Japanese runners were warned not to wear running gear that signaled they were either Korean or Japanese due to tensions between their countries and China.)

One of the reasons that I had chosen to run in this marathon (other than being rejected again that year for the NY Marathon) was that I wanted to get a feeling for what the athletes might experience in Beijing two years later. (It also helped that I was attending a UN Conference on Land-based Sources of Marine Pollution that started the next day.)

On my arrival in Beijing, I was really shocked at the air quality. Although I had been in the city twice before, the previous times had been either before the industrial expansion around the city or in a good time of year. My first visit was in 1995 for the Fourth World Conference on Women and I stayed at the Beijing International Conference Centre and actually went jogging each morning with the cows along deserted country roads just outside the First Ring Road. Now you have to get to the Fifth Ring Road to find that kind of open-space, as Beijing has sprawled out in all directions and pollution levels have increased accordingly. The second trip, for the 11th Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol was in early December 1999 when the weather was very cold and windy, with bright blue skies.

However, in 2006 the row of light poles along the highway coming in from the airport disappeared into the thick brown haze less than two hundred meters down the road. And, as my friend Lao Xia explained to me, that persistent cough that the taxi driver had was due to the air quality. The thought of running 42 kilometers in this soup was, I admit, a bit daunting.

My rather stoic and flippant attitude was that at least there were no hills in the course! The marathon is an adversity sport and at least this was an adverse condition that affected everyone rather equally, although I had a feeling that I would be out there breathing it in for almost two hours longer than the Kenyan who I thought would (and did) win that day.

On the day of the race, it was the lack of preparation (not enough long runs and too much reliance on my cycling endurance training) and the extra pounds from weightlifting, pushing big cycle gears and a love for the fermented grape that slowed me down, not the air pollution. I did not feel any burning in my throat or lungs and my breathing was never labored and not a limiting factor in my athletic performance. The atmospheric particulate was certainly there but breathing it for four hours during the competition was not a factor.

So, when seeing photos this week of the US track cyclists Mike Friedman, Bobby Lea, Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed in the Beijing airport wearing breathing masks, my first reaction was, "Please.. it is not that bad." While I can understand the importance of separating sports from politics, I also think that athletes need to be a little more politic when it comes to perception and, well, common sense. Did they actually think that breathing Beijing air for the several minutes getting off the plane, through customs and immigration, picking up their luggage and into the team vehicles would harm their performance? Well, even if it might, they certainly didn't spend much time thinking about the perception of their choice to walk through the press gauntlet masked and the fact that they were obviously making more of a statement than protecting their lungs.

Healthy lungs are amazing pieces of bio-equipment! The cilia that line your trachea and move mucous out of the 600,000,000 alveoli are incredibly efficient, with each cilium sweeping back and forth ten times a second. As long as you are not inhaling hot smoke, like from cigarettes that will singe the cilia (ah, the alliteration), your lungs do a pretty good job of keeping themselves clean all the time. In the days following the marathon, I actually checked out whether I was coughing up particulate. What I could see against a white background was not different than what I would expect to have seen after breathing normally in any large city for a few days.

So, while I think it is a great idea for the athletes to wear masks, just like they would wear sunscreen or shoes, as protection against the elements, they should restrict their use to the twenty hours a day that they are not out in the public eye. Anything else is a political statement. To be honest, the best protection against fine particulate is to keep your mouth closed (for this and so many other reasons) and let the respiratory mucous membranes of your nasal passages do their job. Oh, but don't let them catch you spitting! There is a new 50 Yuan fine for that. However, athletes may find representatives of the Green Woodpecker Project who carry tissues around Beijing, offering them to people to use for their spit. Oh, let the no-fun games begin!

The Farm Ride 2008

The rural roads and extensive bike paths out and around Amherst, Massachusetts and alongside the Connecticut River are lightly traveled, flat and ideal for cycling. And so (but also because mega-bike ride organizer Glen Goldstein went to school here) a couple-hundred New York cyclists come up to the Pioneer Valley each year in early August to ride varying distances from 30-100 miles.

The rolling party started, for me, on Friday afternoon in the East Village with a bus ride out of the city and up through Connecticut to the campus of Umass Amherst. Riders were scattered between the inexpensive dorms (bring your own fan), the "deluxe dorms" and my digs at the Campus Hotel (with TV, Internet and a front desk.) Within minutes of our arrival and as soon as our bikes were unloaded, we pedaled like a heavier, slower and sometimes wider-tired version of the Tour de France peleton the two kilometers into town for a pre-ride dinner.

In order to try and keep an independent distance from the maddening crowd, about seven of us left our bikes with the volunteer bike guard (all details had been attended to) and slipped away from the dozens of riders lined up to eat at one restaurant and went down the street to a less crowded Italian restaurant for wheat beer served with oranges and mildly raucous conversation, pasta and foccacia. Clarence Eckerson, Street Films - maker and general life enthusiast, accompanied by the oh-so-level headed and delightful Fatima held court at one end of the table and I visited with two new friends, Jorge and Beverly down at the other. Sufficiently loaded with carbs, we retrieved our bikes and pedaled home.

Saturday's weather report should have been the signal to get out riding early to avoid the afternoon thunderstorms and if I had left at seven o'clock and followed the route programmed into my Edge 705 GPS, I probably would have made it to the end-of-ride-almost barbecue and cold beer before the heavens opened. But, I dawdled getting my bike ready on Saturday morning, panicked when I thought I had lost my wallet (it was in the bottom of my bike messenger bag) and had a second cup of coffee with lots of sugar before getting to the starting area at 8:00 and promptly riding off in the wrong direction. Rather than exiting the parking lot with other riders, I rode back to the hotel, dropped off my free pair of cow socks (part of the ride swag) and then fell in with a group of riders heading off down the road, following the several different colored road markers. I figured that if there were three routes and three sets of markers that I would ride for a while and then figure out why my GPS had me going off the other direction.

Well, at about ten kilometers into the ride, after going along a lovely bike path, I realized that I had not programmed in a bike path on the ride until about 100 km into the route, so obviously I was on the route but had skipped ahead by several hours. So, I used the GPS to route me back to a point that I KNEW was along the first part of the 162 km (100 mile) route and eventually found my way back to the florescent pink road markings I should have been following from the start. Later I discovered that there was a separate exit from the parking lot for the 100  and 162 km riders that would have put me on the right route rather than having ridden an extra 25 km at the start.

Total moving time was 6:55, which is not bad considering that I ended up 16 km (10 miles) over my goal of a Century (100 miles) and ended up doing 177.4 km. The rain hit hard after about four a half hours of riding. 25.6 km/hr average but there were times when I slowed to be sociable and ride with others... before dashing off at 30 km per hour again.

By about 3:00 pm, I'd finished up the ride (all but the last few kilometers into town) and dove into potato salad and inhaled two barbecued sausages with kraut on a roll, washed down with a few cold beers. Then, a fun group of us from the bus ride up to Amherst returned to the dorms, showered and met at Elements in downtown Amherst for a soak in the hot tub. Beverly and Jorge, Randi and Eileen, Sunsy, Emily from the same publishing company where Javier works, and myself. Really fun, in fact so much fun that the owner had to come ask us to quiet down since we were disturbing people getting massages inside. I had scheduled a 90 minute massage and left the group to have my glutes and hamstrings kneaded and those usual knots at the rhomboid and scapula junction elbowed away.

I'm amazed at the resilience of cyclists, who can ride for six to eight hours and still party way into the night. Faced with a huge calorie debt that must be repaid, the hundred and a half of us still standing refueled on margaritas (Glen had rented a machine), mojitos, cases of beer and dozens of pizzas. There was no one amongst us who said, "no, I really shouldn't" as the ice cream, cookies, cake and other decadently sweet or dangerously alcoholic were passed around. We were all sub-prime borrowers paying back the calorie mortgage on many miles in the saddle.

By 11:30, I'd had a full dose of life and needed to be horizontal and unconscious for at least six hours before getting up and hiking with Peter Haas the next day. Peter is an old friend and professor of political science and international relations at UMass Amherst. We climbed a mountain in the woods with his two dogs and ate lunch in Amherst, during which not more than a four second gap occurred in the conversation. As two members of Peter's famed "epistemic community" we did speak the same Wittgensteinian private language of international environmental politics and governance and may have not skipped a single acronym or failed to use a single bit of insider jargon over four hours.

The bus left at 3:00 pm, full of exhausted cyclists who were happy to consume more alcohol and gaze trance-like at an amazingly stupid Harold and Kumar movie on DVD. I really wish that someone had spoken up to veto the idea of in-flight entertainment, since the weapon of mass distraction effectively destroyed the chance of conversation, community and camaraderie for the drive home. That damn DVD had transformed the bus from a rolling living room into a movie theater and several dozen very interesting people sat transfixed as the video screens sucked the life out of them.

Just after seven o'clock we arrived back in the East Village, unloaded our bikes and scattered into the megatropolis. I hailed a cab, threw my bike and bag in the back and was home in minutes.

Great weekend, some new friends, a superb workout, tasty margaritas, no injuries, some highbrow and lowbrow conversations, generally cooperative weather and a good excuse today, Monday, to put my feet up, take a yoga class and bask in the afterglow of an excellent adventure.