Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

33 Days Until Start of the Adventure Cycling Southern Tier

Four short weeks and a few days until we’ll dip our pedals in the Pacific Ocean in San Diego and begin riding east over fifty-nine days to St. Augustine, Florida. There will be fifteen of us (thirteen plus two tour leaders) and one van with trailer, riding and camping our way across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas (two and a half weeks getting all the way across Texas), Louisiana, Mississippi, a bit of Alabama and Florida.

The Southern Tier has been on my bucket list for many years. I was prepared to do it this year self-contained but Adventure Cycling Association is offering a van-supported version and I am happy to have someone else schlep my tent and gear, as well as provide cooking gear each night. We are still riding and camping our way across the US, but with just a dash of convenience for what should prove a challenging adventure.

Training during the winter for a ride that starts on 3 March is always a challenge in the Northeast, where snow, black ice, bitter cold and freezing rain (as well as living in the middle of Midtown Manhattan) are often impediments to outdoor exercise. So, I’ve been coping, stealing a week of cycling before Christmas while transiting through South Africa, spinning indoors at Flywheel, running at the YMCA and, like today, waiting for the moment when the temperatures climb above zero and the pavement is free of snow and black ice, to get on my bike and spin around Central Park.

Not a long ride today, but with temps hovering just above zero C and blustery winds, it was just enough to say that I’ve worked out and not killed myself doing it. Preparing for touring during the winter is much different than training during the offseason to be ready to race in March. There is no pressure to hammer up the hills in the cold, knocking out barf-inducing wattage intervals and going deep into the pain cave during long anaerobic mitochondria-producing climbs. To ride 100-130 km per day, day after day, with no real pressure to go fast, is not so tough and so my training regime is less than brutal.

One more week in Manhattan, meeting with the lawyers and winding down after twenty-five years of working in a high-pressure job, before heading off to put my head back in the game for a week at the United Arab Emirates World Government Summit in Dubai. One more week of spinning indoors (as the temperatures drop down well below zero again), time on the mat at Yo Yoga and some running at the YMCA if my back spasms will behave. 

Two-day ride from Beacon to Oneonta

My oldest son, Sam, took up residence yesterday at the New York Summer Music Festival at the State University College at Oneonta and, as Pam noted on Facebook, it was like dropping him off at college two years early. (And, for those of you who know Sam, he could easily handle the academics at any university already.)

Of course, as we live in Midtown Manhattan, we don’t own an automobile. So the opportunity of renting a vehicle to drive up and back to Oneonta to drop Sam off at the Festival, a couple hundred kilometers outside of New York City, immediately opened up some possibilities of combining the car trip with a bicycle ride. Pam suggested that I ride my bicycle up into the Catskill Mountains, where she could pick me up after dropping off Sam.

On Saturday morning, I took the 7:47 MetroNorth out of Grand Central, heading up along the Hudson River to Beacon.. about 80 kilometers north of Manhattan. The early Saturday morning trains out of town are officially “bike trains” so my Pinarello got its own padded seat for the 75 minute trip.

Here is the route and data for the first day, broken into two parts since my GPS decided to mysteriously re-boot after about 58 kilometers. This same thing had happened before and I had made the mistake of not saving my data into a separate file and had lost the entire ride. So, Saturday has two parts:

and

Saturday’s ride was relatively un-eventful after leaving Beacon and riding on roads that I had covered dozens of times. However, just as I was about to begin the climb up into Minnewaska State Park, while riding on a wide shoulder, I felt a car coming up right behind me and was suddenly whacked in the lower part of my left side, right where my jersey pockets are above my kidney. It didn’t knock me off my bike but scared me, particularly since the big yellow panel truck swept past me within inches. The truck pulled off to the side of the road about sixty meters past me and three guys got out of the truck, running towards me. I got off my bike and felt my left hip, but nothing seemed broken. Whatever had hit me had impacted right on my mobile phone, which I pulled out to find that it wasn’t broken but there was a nice dent in the battery cover. The three guys were asking me if I was all right and I said that I was and that nothing was broken. They were very apologetic and seemed nice although they had just come inches from killing me. I told them that, just in case, I would like to take down the license plate number and see the driver’s license, since I didn’t know if my injuries might not show up later after the shock wore off.

On examining the passenger side of their truck, I could easily see what had hit me in the back. The side mirror on the passenger side stuck out about half a meter and was one of those mirrors that easily bends back when hit from the front (thankfully for me.) I think that the truck was a rental and the guy driving it simply was unaware of just how wide his vehicle was.. and I got a glancing blow from a bendable mirror. Very, very lucky.

I took the opportunity to give the guys a lecture, having just narrowly missed being hilled by them. I told them that in life there are expensive lessons and there are lessons that don’t cost as much. I asked them to consider this a very lucky and very inexpensive lesson on how important it is to drive safely and to be aware of cyclists and pedestrians. They were sufficiently chagrined, chastened and seemed to appreciate just how lucky we had all been in this incident. They pulled off and I continued my ride up and over the Shawangunk Ridge.

The only thing to show from the accident is this dent in my Droid X.

It was a sweltering day and the high temperatures and big hills turned the day into a long slough, particularly since the end of the day included a long climb and the temperatures were above thirty degrees.

 

The picture above is the view looking north from Minnewaska State Park towards the Catskill Mountains.

I spent the night at the Catskill Seasons Inn in Shandaken http://www.catskillseasonsinn.com/index.htm

I really enjoyed my stay at the Catskill Seasons Inn and will certainly try and stay here again if I get up in the region. The owner, Chago, is a Chilean New Yorker, who recently moved from Astoria, Queens where he was a contractor for years. They served Keegan’s Mother’s Milk, my favorite stout, on tap (and I managed to rehydrate and replace some calories with a few pints) and the food was really good. I had a iceberg lettuce wedge salad with blue cheese dressing and fresh apple slices, followed by a penne with pesto topped by blackened chicken. They also have free wifi and a Verizon booster, providing the only Verizon phone coverage in the region.

I slept early and soundly after more than six hours on the bike… and rose at dawn to head towards Oneonta in order to meet up with Pam, Kai and Sam by noon.

Here is Sunday’s ride:

The morning started chilly and crisp. Here is a shot while crossing the Eastern Branch of the Delaware River:

The entire 100 km of the day was spent on State Highway 28, that runs from Kingston all the way to Oneonta and is either going up or going down but never, never flat. 1385 meters of climbing is one hell of a lot of up and down before lunch.

 

Pam, Sam and Kai arrived in Oneonta just about ten minutes after I pulled into Stewart’s for some ice cream. We dropped off Sam and spent the rest of the afternoon driving back into New York City, my bike safely tucked into the trunk and the air conditioner on full blast.

The Bon Ton Roulet begins in twelve days and, after this two-day trip through the Catskill Mountains, I think I’m ready.

Ride to Rockaway Taco II

Great ride today with Clarence, Fatima, Tom and Beverly (and Robert, who met up with us at the Terminal Moraine.)

The route took us out of Jackson Heights, through Astoria-Queens and through Flushing Meadows. This shot is at the Unisphere, where the new Men in Black was filming over the last few weeks. Then we worked our way past Kew Gardens and skirted Forest Park, Jamaica Bay, through the excellent topiary in Howard Beach and across the Jamaica Bay wildlife refuge to Rockaway Beach.

The famous Rockaway Taco was packed!!

The line stretched out into the street, but we had very welcome fruit icy treats while we waited.

Bev had two fish tacos!

I had a fish taco and a chorizo taco, however that chorizo visited me for the next forty kilometers. Love chorizo, but it’s not the food for heavy exercise while the stomach and esophagus are horizontally oriented down along the top tube of a bicycle.

We went down to the beach, which was absolutely packed!

 

 

So, Great RIde… my GPS stopped recording locations as we were heading up Bushwick and skirting the edge of Flatbush and over the  Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, where I worked my way up Second Avenue to home. All together, 80 km on a damn hot day!

Queens, Roosevelt Island and Randalls Island Ramble

Today was a total low speed, no pressure, six-hour two-wheeled ramble through Queens, over to Roosevelt Island, up to and over the Triboro Bridge to Randalls Island. After a picnic there, we took the Triboro (since in the pedestrian bridge is under construction) to Manhattan and went down the Greenway and side streets back to Midtown. Lovely long lazy ride on a gorgeous day in New York City, taking advantage of all the cool bike paths that are popping up in the city.

Perfect Croton-Harmon MetroNorth Loop

Living in New York City has its great advantages, however being able to pop out the door for a quick ride in the countryside is not one of them. Between the cars that whiz along down the West Loop Road started at 8:00 and the threat of quota-filling NYPD officers issuing US$270 tickets to cyclists for running red lights at 6:30 am, Central Park is only the best-least awful place to ride a bicycle hard and fast in the City.

But, beyond the training/health reasons that I ride my bicycle, are two fundamentally important parts that cycling plays in my creative and spiritual life: process and flow. The first has to do with the informational and stimulation overload that occurs each day, where some of us are bombarded with input from when the New York Times arrives on my computer screen fully formatted at 5:15 am and the BBC news begins to play on Podcastalarm.com at 5:30 through the day with dozens of emails per hour, Skype calls, Windows Live Messenger chats with my teams around the world, websites that need to be monitored and the constant back-and-forth that leaves little time to just sit back and take in the big picture. So, I like to spend an hour or three on the bicycle, like today, just processing it all. It is on these long rides that I can look at things strategically and plan responses to the patterns of information or actions that I see, like pieces of a mosaic being randomly assembled in my mind’s eye. It is this pause to process it all that helps me to break the pattern of knee-jerk nibbling away at issues and problems and formulate ways to deal with the small stuff at a higher, broader level.

The second benefit of cycling, for me, is that it gives me the time to experience “flow” as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. From what I understand from his writing, “flow” are those experiences where time is compressed, you are totally absorbed by the experience of the moment and you lose a sense of self, and by extension, any kind of self-importance. For me, this happens on the bike, particularly when I am overwhelmed by the total need to concentrate on breath, legs, irregular road ahead, managing the pain and those inner voices all speaking at once encouraging a slower pace. As much as the body needs sleep, it also needs a certain amount of “flow” time each day.

But the cycling environment needed to both process and flow cannot be found either while riding through the urban jungle of Mid-Town Manhattan or with the Cat 1-6 riders in Central Park, and for this reason, I like to invest some time getting out of the City and into the countryside. Surprisingly, it is not that far away from NYC by train.

This morning, I left our apartment at 6:15 am, arrived at Grand Central Terminal (about fifteen blocks away) at 6:25 and was pulling out of the station on the MetroNorth Hudson Line at 6:41, bound for Croton Harmon. Less than an hour later, at 7:34 am to be precise, I started my Garmin Edge 800 and pedaled out of the train station and through residential neighborhoods up and up around Croton Reservoir.

My route was just 60 km on mostly rolling backroads, the occasional two-lane highway (usually with broad shoulders, particularly along State Highway 100) up towards the northeast and then turning back to the southwest through thickly forested hills bordering the archipelago of lakes that make up one of the two major watersheds for water in New York City.

The GPS is my cruel mistress, calculating my speed over the last dozen kilometers and projecting my arrival back at the Croton Harmon train station. The non-stop train to 125th St and then Grand Central leaves at 10:34 am, and today the Garmin reported that if I continued to laze my way up these hills, I’d arrive back at the station at 10:37, narrowly missing my fast ride home (although there is a second train that makes more stops leaving at 10:40, but there is a time penalty for taking that train since the ride takes 54, rather than 47 minutes.) As my pace increased and wattage soared, the ETA on the GPS began to drop to 10:30, then 10:25 and today I though that I had just enough time to spare to take a photo:

 

This picture was taken just about here, looking north

In the end, I arrived at 10:25, with lots of time to spare.

So, this is one of the best early morning training rides accessible from New York City by train. You miss the hassles of navigating Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge and the traffic of 9W up through New Jersey and are immediately out in the country after a short ride up along the Hudson River, which is spectacular most mornings.

So, today was process and flow and back to the office by noon. All mornings should be so glorious and surprisingly productive, since not all work is done sitting in front of a computer or while in an endless stream of online meetings and answering countless emails.

The Full Rockaway Taco Experience

Is any taco worth a 80 km round trip adventure from Manhattan across the East River and through the wilds of Brooklyn all the way to the beach in Rockaway and back through the perilous “straits of Verrazano” and north through the failed financial district through the mean streets of Manhattan? Is there something so cosmically tasty about a deliciously fried filet of fish inside a hand-made corn tortilla with radish, gobs of guacamole and sprigs of cilantro that a gaggle of friends would gather from three different boroughs to feast at the beach on a sunny Sunday in New York City? Did someone fiddle with the saturation settings on this photo or is this taco really magically colored? 

Today we rode to eat at the shrine of the Rockaway Tacos! It was the full Rockaway Taco experience that I had been promised for more than a year and had longed to experience for myself. Others had gone before and had feasted at the Rockaway Taco, returning to sing the praises of “taco de pescado” and the “el pastor.” They gloated… Yes, and in their hubris they scoffed at those of us who had not made the pilgrimage across the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge to the Land of the Rockaway to the site of ultimate taconess.

Today, we were led by Clarence the Junior (and his faithful companion, Nossa Senhora de Fátima) to dine at the shrine! You can see by the photo, we are all in a state of post-consumption, gluttonous bliss

Here is the full ride, plus ferry from Rockaway back to the tip of Manhattan, and back home.

This Timble Outdoors version has the version that is easily downloaded to any GPS and will get you through Brooklyn along the best bike-friendly streets (thanks to Clarence) and out to the absolutely best tacos in all of the tri-state region. (Photos and video attached to the Trimble Outdoors version)

My ride took me across the 59th Street bridge and down through a little bit of Queens to meet up with Clarence and Fatima at the Pulaski Bridge, which connects Queens to Greenpoint Brooklyn across Newton Creek.

Thanks to our wonderful New York City Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, we have “sharrows” (bicycle lanes with arrows that are separated from the street) almost all along the streets that lead from the Queensborough Bridge through Brooklyn to the beach. Below is a photo of Clarence checking his messages to see where everyone else would be meeting us along the way.

From there we headed south down to Grand Army Plaza

The photo above is Fatima standing in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, which is at the northern end of Prospect Park.

Just to the west of the Plaza is the terminus of the infamous Prospect Park Blvd bike lane, which runs from here to Bartel Pritchard Square. What a wonderful addition to the community that has sparked considerable controversy, particularly from those who may not be able to to drive or park their their personal vehicles in shared city space. All we saw today, on the many bike lanes, were many more cyclists than cars sustainably enjoying the streets of NYC. Build it, Janette, and they will come!

As we entered Flatbush we were joined by Ann Pope, the founder and Executive Director of “Sustainable Flatbush”, an NGO that brings “neighbors together to mobilize, educate, and advocate for sustainable living in our Brooklyn neighborhood and beyond.” In this photo above, Robert Eberwine is probably explaining some sort of high level nonsense about something and Ann is being both attentive and diplomatically interested.

If you ride due south through Brooklyn, you will eventually end up at Sheepshead Bay or crash into a Russian in Brighton Beach. The photo above is taken at the Sheepshead Bay Piers, where it looks like you can either take a boat out to go fishing or bring back your fish and nail it to a big post.

As you ride along the Sheepshead Bay there is a place called “Plum Beach” where the ocean had washed away the bike path. Above is a photo of Anne and her friend Keka Marzagão, who are making the best of a stretch of sandy bike path by smiling as they are forced to dismount and walk their bikes. The infamous Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge can be seen the distance.

We crossed the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge and I spent a few moments reflecting on the Brooklyn Dodger’s great catcher, who started playing for the Dodgers in 1943 before joining the Marines and serving in some of the big battles in the Pacific arena during World War II, earning a Bronze Star. He was discharged from the Marines in 1946 and then went on to play for the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, eventually joining the expansion Mets in 1962. His career batting average was 273 and he should be in the Hall of Fame… but he does have a bridge!

Mela Ottaiano, Keka and Anne in Jacob Riis Park, named for the famous NY journalist and photographer who wrote about the poor of the city. The park stretches along the the ocean and was designed by Robert Moses. I’m pretty sure that Mela, Keka and Anne are blissfully unaware of this and simply enjoying the sunshine and the art deco bathhouse to their left.

Just after mid day we arrived at the Shrine, otherwise know as Rockaway Taco! Above you can see the bike parking jam! We were there early enough so there was no wait to worship at the counter and request divine guidance from the menu. What??? No El Pastor today, sorry. I settled for un taco de pecsa, un taco de chorizo and went back for un taco de carne. Yes… I ate the trinity! Nossa Senhora de Fátima personally assured me that she would not think less of me for having consumed mass quantities.

Clarence does not like loves the radishes! He has graciously offered to share them with anyone who wants a consume anyone’s used radish. However, Clarence does not eat fish, which everyone thinks is particularly weird. But, we like Clarence because he knows the way to the Rockaway Taco and he led us successfully on our pilgrimage today. Our friend, Ann, looks on in bemused indifference. Fatima is obviously entranced with her taco and can’t be bothered with Clarence’s nonsense.

My plan for the adventure was to head back to the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge and take the 2:30 ferry back to the tip of Manhattan. Since we finished the official “Munching of the Tacos” at 2:00 pm, I had a quick ride back to make it on time.

My fairly famous “taxi bike” (because it is colored and stenciled like a NY City taxi cab) sat in the stern of the ferry, while I busied myself on the upper deck with the observance of the revered Dutch post-cycling tradition by having a Heineken and watching the cityscape. OK, maybe I had more than one Dutch treat. But then, I’d just ridden a long way and needed to restore my glycogen stocks and there is only one happy molecule difference between alcohol and glycogen, which makes beer just sugar with benefits. Anyway, it was a lovely trip by ferry and a good a place as any to have a few beers.

The ferry runs only on weekends now, leaving the Riis Landing and circling past Coney Island and under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and up the Hudson River, around Governor’s Island to the tip of Manhattan. This, below, is the stunning shot of the city.

However, no matter how often I see the city on a lovely day in September, there is always something missing from the skyline.

Docked in Manhattan and steeled by Dutch courage for the ride uptown on Third Avenue.

So, it was a great ride (boat trip) and ride. The itch to have a Rockaway Taco has now been fully scratched and I’m wholly satisfied by the entire Rockaway Taco experience. For those who may want to follow in our footsteps, here is the Rockaway Taco official map:

 

(Photos here and below courtesy of http://rockawaytaco.com/)

Their menu is

What.. no lines?? Must be a weekday.

Asked by Son to Vacate Apartment .. Went Cycling in the Catskill Mountains

Early in the week my 11 year-old son, planning his slumber birthday party for Friday night, circulated a single sheet of paper with rules for each family member. My portion included:

RULES FOR KAI’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Rules for Dad:

· If going on bike ride must leave by 3:30 or earlier

· If home must be confined to room or “The Chair”

· Do not bother any of the guests

· Do not join party guests for dinner

· BE NICE

My first anti-authoritarian inclination when confronted with “rules”, is to find a way to challenge them. I asked Kai if maybe I could teach the boys juggling, do some magic and maybe even make animal balloons for everyone. Kai was not amused and kept reminding me all week that the weather was looking good for a long bike ride out of town on Friday and Saturday. Pam also thought it might be a good opportunity for me to vacate the premises and take Kai’s advice to “leave by 3:30 or earlier.” Oh, the indignity of being kicked out of my own home… Oh, the joy of a fully sanctioned opportunity to get away and ride my bike! So, I presented Kai with his birthday presents (a new Sansa Clip MP3 player, headphones, his own Rhapsody subscription and a cool T-shirt from the last climate change negotiations in Bonn) and took off on  MetroNorth at 2:52 pm up to Poughkeepsie to get in a full-day’s bike ride on Saturday.

After a long cold winter riding the Tacx Fortius indoor trainer, talking trash with Joe Barton over Skype on virtual group rides, this was a chance to put those hours of RealLife video training behind us and go for a real life bike ride. Joe’s wife, Wendy, kindly offered to put me up in the guest room at their home in Stone Ridge, about 35 km northwest of Poughkeepsie.

It is Full Forsythia weekend. These shaped hedges were gorgeous on my ride through Highland, from the Mid-Hudson bridge up along the Wallkill River, at the base of the Shawangunk ridge and then towards Rosendale.

Nice ride in the late afternoon: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/3895916 

Wendy cooked muffins for breakfast and we headed out at 8:30. Two weeks ago there was snow. Now, it’s jerseys and sleeves with shorts. Spring is here. This is our ride.

 http://connect.garmin.com/activity/3895901

 

Above photo in Woodstock at “Bread Alone” having espresso and snacks after those 40 km/h pulls on the flats blasting along Wittenberg Road.

20 degrees, riding south along the Hudson on River Road, south of Port Ewen.

At about seventy kilometers into the ride, we climbed up off of River Road, crossed 9W and headed back over to the west, hoping to parallel the highway along some peaceful, flat, country roads heading towards Highland and the Mid-Hudson bridge (where beer and lunch awaited.)

The Garmin 705 is a lovely but stupid piece of equipment, which knows nothing about contour lines. Is it asking too much to make a GPS bicycling computer that understand contour lines? Not too difficult, I would think. So, when the miniscule brain of the cycling GPS computes a route, it looks at the little elevation lines and when they are all bunched up next to each other bisecting a road, it says, “Oh, shit, that is one big ass hill. I don’t think I’m going to send my owner pedaling that way… maybe there is a way around the big ass hill.”

Oh, and yes, Joe, when you suddenly remember that you have heard about Popletown Road because you drove it once in your car and thought, “Oh, that is one big ass hill” you should say, “Kimo, maybe we could turn around here and NOT go up this big ass hill because it actually turns into one seriously steep unpaved mother up ahead.” Either my riding partner or the GPS should be smart enough. We climbed the big ass hill.

At 80 km on the map is Popletown Road. This is NOT what you want to ride after several hours on the bike. The sign, “Seasonal Limited Use Highway” is another clear signal that you do NOT want to go any further up the road.

So, we did 101 km in a little over four hours with 1495 meters of climbing. Moving average 24.1, which is not bad for a pair of grey beards through the hills.  Beers and food at Cliffy’s River Station in Poughkeepsie and I took the 2:41 train back to New York.

So, this is what I missed… Kai and his friends having pizza. Much better decision to vacate the premises.

Central Park in Early Spring

This morning, just before dawn, I was riding north on the East Drive of Central Park just past what is called the East Green when the early blooming Kwanza cherry trees, crabapples, cherry and magnolia fragrances brought me to a stop on my bike. With fallen blossoms carpeting the ground, the pink glow of morning Manhattan rising above the blossoms and hundreds of people out far too early exercising, the experience was overwhelming. The photo can’t even come close to capturing it… you had to be there.

These are those unpredictable weeks of early springtime when cycling in and around New York City is hit or miss. Too many rainy days, mixed with periods of cold, which make planning and then dressing for rides an adventure in meteorology. Today the rains are predicted at noon, so I braved my first early morning ride with the temperature hovering around 9 or 10 degrees. It turned out lovely and the much safer riding in the Park than I have been experiencing recently when doing laps at noon while dodging clueless tourists.

Here is the Garmin Connect GPS and ride data: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/3232143

After the crazy traveling in January, February and March, I’m mostly home in Manhattan for almost two months, enjoying the pleasures of a single time zone. Life is work, ride, yoga, family, repeat. And now, as the mornings warm and this end of the planet tilts toward the sun, making the dawn come earlier and earlier, I’ll be in the park most mornings riding hill repeats, cranking out the 350-400 watt climbs of the Great Hill and Cat Hill alongside dozens of other aging lycra-clad urbanites on overpriced carbon steeds.

But this morning, at that particular instant, the whole experience was so overwhelming that life just gob-smacked me and I stopped riding, got off my bike, inhaled all the prana … and took a picture.

No Crocuses Yet During Croton Ride

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/2697869 

Spring arrived here in the New York area this week during a freak snow storm, further reinforcing my feeling that my friend, Tariq Banuri, is right when it calls it, “climate chaos” rather than climate change. But, this morning with the temperatures going from just above freezing at the start of this ride and climbing to almost nine degrees, it was starting to feel like Spring weather may be coming soon.

There is a great MTA Hudson Line train that leaves Grand Central Station at 0750 on weekend mornings and gets into the Croton-Harmon station forty-one minutes later with only one stop at the 125th St. Station: a straight shot from mid-town Manhattan to the edge of the urban sprawl. US$15 round trip and there is a perfect train heading back to town at 1225, which is also one-stop to GCS. Fit in between the trains’ arrival and departure is just enough time for an 80 km ride through the hills and reservoirs to the east and northeast.

This ride was a full 80 km, but for some reason that I forgot to turn on my GPS until about seven km after leaving the train station. On the map, here was the ride:

At least, this map was the plan. however my GPS decided about 60% into the ride to stop auto-routing and directed me right into a large body of water. So, I had to improvise my way back to the Croton-Harmon station, discovering some really nice cycling roads in the process. Although I do not think that my Garmin Edge 705 is smart enough to direct me to good cycling roads, it accidently does a fairly good job. Sometime in the future, I look forward to an intelligent cycling computer that actually knows some of the better routes for bikes, with low traffic rates, <7% grades and (hopefully) tree-lined and scenic.

The memory of the Argus is still fresh and it felt good to get in a good ride after that bad day. My fitness is still there and I can tell that the first 60 km of the Argus, albeit not the full race, was a great training ride and I’m feeling the good effects. Now, the challenge is to drop those few kilos gained in the last two weeks while I ate and drank my way around the world from Cape Town to Köln/Bonn, Rotterdam, the Hague, Frankfurt, Istanbul and Seoul. Far too much time sitting on airplanes and not enough time of the bike, that’s for sure.

However, I’m back in New York for almost nine weeks and can’t wait to get back into some normal rhythms of cycling, yoga, minimally-shod running and healthy eating from my own kitchen.

On today’s ride I was looking for the first signs of Spring. Unfortunately, no crocuses and no forsythia. It may be officially Spring, but it is not springtime. There is a difference.

Winter Thaw Ride Along the Hudson

First of all, I’m weary and probably over-trained.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you string together three weeks of hard riding on three continents, throw in twenty-four time zone changes, and combine with several overnight plane flights, that at some point the body’s ability adapt will reach its exhaustion point. Yesterday, after an hour and a half yoga class with Noam Renov, I came home and crashed out.

My theory is that while your physical body might be able to travel multiple time-zones in one day, your body-clock is only capable of changing one or two time zones per day. Which means that on a fast eighteen-day round-the-world trip, my poor body clock was lagging behind me for most of the trip. Just as soon as my circadian rhythms got to Thailand, I was off to South Africa. When I left Cape Town, my body-clock has just cleared customs in Johannesburg. Then, yesterday, when it finally arrived in New York, it knocked me over the head in utter frustration and laid me low for the entire afternoon. I slept, sometimes off but mostly on, for about sixteen hours. I would wake to eat, pour a glass of red wine and then fall back to sleep. Now, at fifty-five, it takes me longer to recover and sometimes I just “hit the wall.” Usually, when the body says, “that’s it”, it takes the form of a sudden flu, some kind of nasty bacterial infection (like a bad eye stye), or a physical collapse. Yesterday was the latter.

But still the legs are not back to normal. They say that multi-stage race cyclists train on off days, just to keep the body from shutting down and going into repair mode. After my long ride on Monday in Cape Town, I didn’t ride on Tuesday but did spend about an hour on the indoor trainer both Wednesday and Thursday, and did tough yoga classes on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. For some reason, I didn’t have the power today in my legs that I had last week and my heart rate was climbing too fast up into the 160-175 range. So, I’m going to take two full days off the bike, see if I can get past this “over-trained” stage and start feeling normal again.

All the said, I just had to get out and ride this morning. Yes, there is a fine line between discipline and compulsion and today I did slip over into the dark side of that line. But this morning at 6:00 am it was 10 degrees on the 8th of February. This is so unusual and it doesn’t look like there will be another chance to ride outdoors during the coming two weeks, so I took my bike out of the Tacx cycle trainer, pumped up the tires, layered up and rode across town to the 38th St. NY Waterway Ferry station for the ride across the Hudson River to Port Imperial on the Jersey side.

Every cyclist in the New York/New Jersey area was riding on the 9W bicycle route this morning. There were hundreds of cyclists, all taking advantage of the weekend thaw. Packs of no-joking-around A23 riders went whizzing past, in both directions. I ended up riding for a few dozen kilometers with a group of triathletes from New Jersey who were doing my A19 pace (30 Kmph). This was good for company, but with the ice melt-off the roads were wet and dirty and there was a lot of wheel spray. At the Runcible Spoon in Nyack there were two dozen cyclists, who all looked like jockeys, covered in mud splatter, having coffee and sweets. No one could believe that it was warm enough to ride this early in February, particularly after the cold temperatures and heavy snows of late.

So, here is the ride, with GarminConnect:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/2049706

And with Motionbased:

Just south of the Bear Mountain Bridge, looking north the ice floes were almost touching across the river.

So, after 84 km and 3:44 of riding, I pulled into the Garrison MetroNorth station for the train trip home. 1,160 meters of climbing and 3,231 calories burned.

Yes, there is a lot of ice in the Hudson River!

The Cape Argus Classic is exactly four weeks away. The next two weeks are crucial for training, particularly in dropping a few kilos and doing those ten-twenty minute 300 watt intervals, pushing my maximum heartrate for longer periods but foregoing the long two-four hour rides for shorter sub-hour long sprints.

The Cape Argus Classic is a seeded start, with groups of riders going off in heats based on previous race times from 0600 until after 1000 on race day. Last year, without a race time for seeding, I started with the unseeded International riders at about 0845. This year, with my fast time from 2008, I received a start time of 0718, starting in the “R” Group. This is nice and early in the seeding and I should be riding with others who will be keeping my pace, which will avoid having to ride around slower riders like last year. Also, I should be able to get into a large drafting pack, which will help with my time.

So, now for two days off the bike and a little rest.