Bicycling
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Did you know that we only get about 4,000 Saturdays in our entire life? At my age, I only have about half of those left. Once I figured this out, I started to make as good use of them as I can, especially in the summer. It means avoiding spending the whole day in bed atoning for Friday. It means riding my bike, playing a rewarding softball game, shopping at the Farmers Market, or going to the beach or country.
For this past Saturday, I had signed up for a club ride into Ulster County, up to the Ashokan Reservoir, with the New York Cycle Club. It was a ride that I had anticipated for weeks. But I missed it. At a softball game on Friday, I strained something in my lower back. It was unprecedented pain for me, enough to drop me to the ground as I ran to first base on a clean single. A couple of teammates helped me off the field, and I began stretching my back to help with the pain. I blame it on sitting in an office chair for nearly thirty hours each week.
The pain lingered into the next morning. I was moving slowly around all morning, and it caused me to miss not one, but two trains. First, I missed the 7 train from Long Island City to Grand Central, and then the 7:44 train to Poughkeepsie departed as I was looking for Track 10. When I missed a spring training ride in May, I was able to catch them by riding the route by myself twenty-five miles in. Because we were taking a train, there was no way for me to do that. I either had to catch the 8:44 or just bail out.
Instead of joining the group for a ride around the Catskills, I decided to bail out. Whatever I did to my back on Friday was still bothering me on Saturday. Riding for almost eight hours with a questionable back would not be wise. Instead, I came back home, slept in, and rested my back for Sunday’s semi-final game with the Ball Busters in Central Park. The ride leader was nice enough to pass along a photo of the group.
This might have been the dumbest ride ever. It was a New York Cycle Club ride in Central Park using Citi Bikes. We were going to use our pacelining skills and see how quickly (or slowly) we can do a 6.2-mile lap on the Central Park drives. It was even listed as an “A” ride with a 10-mph pace. In a sense, we were slumming it, but it also an unscientific test of the Citi Bike equipment. And as silly as this ride seemed, I woke up at 6:00 AM today to ride this very casual “A” ride.
The ride must have seemed silly to a lot of other people because there were only five people signed up and one of them dropped out. But our diminished turnout was to our advantage because finding a bike near the south end of Central Park was challenging. The station at 6th Avenue and 59th Street was empty so we had to find bikes at the nearby station at Grand Army Plaza. I had picked up a bike near Grand Central Terminal and rode to the park. After checking my bike in and out, we headed into the park for our morning ride.
Things moved along pretty well. There was no shortage of roadies speedily weaving in and out at with no audible warnings of their approach. (Now I remember why I don’t ride laps in Central Park.) We handled the hills pretty well, except that we had to wait for a couple of riders after climbing Harlem Hill with a forty-five pound bike. One rider, who was a club member but was not part of our group, stopped and recognized that we were part of the Citi Bike Central Park Paceline ride.
The ride took us about thirty-two minutes to complete the 6.2-mile loop, including the time we spent stopped in the park. This is about eight minutes longer than what it used to take me when I rode around in circles there years ago. A typical “A” rider can probably do a lap in about 15 minutes.
After finishing my first “A” ride with the club, I pedaled down to Grand Central Terminal to catch a subway train back to Queens. I needed a shower and a nap. Waking up at 6:00 AM for a silly, 6.2-mile ride was just too early.
This photo accompanies a ludicrous article considering whether it is more dangerous to ride a Citi Bike or to take up Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighting. The caption that describes the photo, “cops respond to an East Village Citi Bike location June 19, after an accident involving one of the bikes,” implies that using the bike share program is dangerous because, you know, those pesky bicyclists!
However, the image on its own is pretty misleading. It presents a pretty good lesson for how photographs can be used outside of their fuller context. The cops had taped off the bike share station in this photo not because some reckless cyclist was riding the wrong way through a red light. It was because an alleged drunk driver ran off the road on Second Avenue and struck a few pedestrians and a Citi Bike rider. The collision sent debris from the crash site across East 4th Street to the Citi Bike station across the street. The bike-share rider was injured.
Evidently, MMA is also safer than standing, walking, and driving. Perhaps we should give that up, too.
For Bastille Day this year, I wanted to ride my bike somewhere I had never been, and as luck would have it, there was a club ride from Poughkeepsie to New Paltz to Beacon that was listed for Sunday, it was a “B” ride with a 17-mph pace, and it wasn’t full. So I signed up for it.
The ride began and ended outside of New York City so it required two trips on the Metro North train. Since the ride from New York to our starting point in Poughkeepsie was about an hour and a half, our ride leader recommended we eat two breakfasts, and I happily stopped by my local 24-hour grocery and bought two breakfast items before making my way to Grand Central to catch the 7:44.
The ride was splendid. The roads were gorgeous with plenty of tree shade, rolling hills, and very few cars and traffic lights. There was some hard pack through the woods on the Hudson Valley Rail Trail, which was great because it was a pretty hot day, and riding through the shade made things a lot more comfortable. There were some interesting contrasts on this ride. On the one hand, you would see icons of the country: houses on large parcels of land, covered bridges, and lots of farms. On the other hand, I saw a few less savory elements, such as some folks that would looked like they were cooking meth. There were some abandoned and shuttered houses that could be used to cook meth. Or maybe the countryside and meth go together more than I had thought.
My third breakfast of the day was at our lunch stop in New Paltz at Mudd Pile Cafe, in the Water Street Market. It wasn’t quite noon so lunch wasn’t yet being served. The highlight of the stop was that we came during the second annual Hudson Valley Chalk Festival. Although we didn’t look around much here, I was captivated by a guy performing a series of Johnny Cash covers.
Once on the road, we proceeded through Ulster and Orange Counties, and then over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, named for Hamilton Fish. In Beacon, we were planning on going to the River Terrace as our ride leader rides for beer, but to our chagrin, we found that it was closed. It was as if they had closed down for good and were under construction. As that door closed, four of us found ourselves at The Hop on Main Street. This place was new, and was clearly a better option to the place that got three stars on Yelp.
A small of group of friends came to The Hop, mingled with my cycling mates, and the Bastille Day celebrations were afoot in Beacon.
Determined to ride to Cold Spring at some point this weekend, I rode there Saturday morning, going through the Bronx, Tarrytown, Croton, and Peekskill. My friend John was headed to nearby Breakneck Ridge for a hike, ending his day in Cold Spring, so it seemed like an opportune time to ride there since I could meet up with him upon arriving in Cold Spring.
It was a hillier ride than I had expected. Ride with GPS reports that I climbed more like 4,688 feet over 66.4 miles. I was well aware that it was going to be about 4,000 feet of climbing over about 65 miles, but it felt much harder than that. It had been about three weeks since I ridden my road bike so I wasn’t in the best shape for a long-distance ride.
Hardest of all was the heat. My Polar reports that the average temperature throughout the ride was 92°. It’s entirely reasonable to think that the temperature was around 96° at the hottest time of the day. Ouch. I frequently stopped for water. My first water stop was in Riverdale at a Chase bank branch to fill up my bottles from their water cooler. I stopped again in Tarrytown at a 7-11 where the clerk gave me the stink-eye when I brought in my bike and bought a water bottle. (I should have paid with my AMEX to anger him even more.) I stopped again at a camp site called Tea Town where they let me use the bathroom and fill my bottles from their filtered-tap water dispensers.
The heat killed my appetite, and I didn’t eat very much on this ride. I consumed my first solid calories nearly forty miles after starting. It was a super hot L’Arabar, which wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be. Then I ate half of a Clifbar, and a couple of Clif Shot bloks. I ate a turkey sandwich at Mile 55, at a deli in Cortlandt Manor just north of the US-9 and US-6 junction.
When I arrived in Cold Spring, I was exhausted. I did get a little burst of energy when I realized that I was only four miles out of town. When I turned left from US-9 to NY-301 to Cold Spring, I was screaming down the hill at nearly 35 miles per hour. It was exhilarating.
I stopped at Whistling Willie’s in Cold Spring to cool down and rehydrate. They were reasonably bike friendly, letting me stash my bike in the outdoor patio where I could keep my eye on it. It was also a better option than the usual standby for hikers and cyclists.
After risking heat exhaustion and seeing only five other cyclists on the road once I left Manhattan, this might be a better ride for a day in late August than early July.
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Everyone’s favorite leather saddle company has launched their first non-leather saddle, the Cambium C–17, today. The saddle is made of rubber and cloth instead of cowhide leather, and it looks stunning.
Aside form a pre-launch splash page, where they solicited applications from people to receive a free tester, there were very few details about the product. Would it be available worldwide? Were any “Dealers of Excellence” selected to stock the saddle? How much is it going to cost? I was hoping to see it for sale somewhere in New York, and I even emailed a few places to ask if they were selling it at launch. Nope. The saddle is only available through their website for €145. Moreover, they are only manufacturing and shipping 300 of them by the end of July. After that, they’re shutting down production, taking their summer holiday, and resuming production in the fall, just in time for the end of cycling season in the Northern Hemisphere.
New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents our section of Queens, asking to expand bike share to Western Queens:
There are already 36,000 members of bike share (citywide)…and I want these members to be able to come to Long Island City, Astoria and Sunnyside. Bike Share will help drive tourists to Western Queens…and would help bring people to the world class cultural institutions and restaurants in the area.
Over the the two weekends since New York City Bike Share launched, I have seen a handful of cyclists hurriedly riding the unmistakable blue-and-white bikes around Long Island City. Sarah got her fob in the mail yesterday, and I’m expecting mine any day now.
At the moment, there are no stations in Long Island City or neighboring Greenpoint. The closest ones are at Metropolitan and Wythe Avenues in Williamsburg (2.5 miles away) or at Second Avenue and E 60th Street in Manhattan (2.8 miles away). With a 30- or 45-minute check-out period, these intrepid riders either misunderstand the concept of bike share, are incurring significant late fees, or are only passing through the neighborhood to get a few weekend miles. Imagine if these riders could dock their and hang out in the neighborhood. Our western Queens hamlet would undoubtedly benefit.
Getting to Central Park for my Sunday softball games is pretty easy from Long Island City. I just ride over the Queensboro Bridge and head west on one of the streets in the lower 60s until I reach the Dairy and walk under the drive to the ballfields. The ride takes less than a half hour.
But Sunday was the annual National Puerto Rican Day parade. This one of the biggest parades of the summer, and its route along Fifth Avenue, from 44th to 79th streets, creates a “wall” that is difficult to cross. (The Gay Pride Parade is also big but its route along Fifth Avenue doesn’t block Central Park from the east side, as its north end is in the upper 50s.)
To get to the field, I have resorted to some creative solutions. Sometimes just take my bike on subway to the west side and ride the rest of the way. I once took the subway the entire way to Central Park, but that took much longer than one would expect. Subway service on a Sunday is sparse compared to weekday service. Another time, I took the East River Ferry to East 34th St and rode the rest of the way, but it cost $10 round trip for a five-minute ride.
This year, I took the Williamsburg Bridge, headed north along Avenue A, then west along Ninth Street, and up to Eighth Avenue. The trip was about six miles longer than my usual crosstown trip through the Upper East Side, and took just less than an hour. But I was warmed up for the game, ready to go.
Glass in the Bike Lane
Glass in the Bike Lane
On 44th Drive in Long Island City, there is almost always glass in the bike lane. It’s troubling. Not only does this cause flat tires for unsuspecting cyclists as they commute down this important neighborhood arterial, it also bodes poorly for cars parked on the street. Presumably, someone smashed their windows.
After riding regularly with a spring-training group over the last twelve weeks, I decided to push myself and ride the full 150-mile route of the Ride to Montauk. This is my fifth ride along this course since 2008, but up to now, I have ridden only 100 miles from Babylon to Montauk. To get to Babylon from New York City, we put our bikes on a truck and take the train to the starting point at the Long Island Railroad station in Babylon. This time, there was no train ride for me nor truck for my bike. I began pedaling at 5:15 AM from Vernon Boulevard and 48th Avenue in Long Island City.
I started in Long Island City because I had already checked in the day before in Manhattan. My bike and I received our tags so I was set to start riding. Sarah was riding the 73-mile course from Mastic-Shirley, and since she had checked in her bike the day before, she offered to check in my bag at Penn Station. I was free to ride from home, hooking up with the official route at Metropolitan Avenue and Lorimer Street in Williamsburg. In all, it saved me four miles of cycling, which I easily could have done, but more importantly, it spared me the frustration of taking the subway into Manhattan before dawn on a Saturday. Getting to sleep an extra thirty minutes before heading east was a nice bonus, too.
The biggest highlight of the ride was that I finished just ahead of my goal. I set out to finish the 150-mile ride in 12 hours, and I arrived at the finish at 4:45, eleven and a half hours after I left Long Island City. It was more than thirty minutes earlier than my finishing time in 2012, when I rode 108 miles and arrived in Montauk at 5:22 PM, with a 7:00 AM start from Babylon.
For most of the ride, I kept an 18-19 mile per hour pace. I tried to keep my heart rate low, around 150 bpm, to ensure I had enough energy for the entire ride. But most of the time I was well under that, around 145 bpm. For most of the ride, I had about a 15 mph average speed, but conserving energy at the beginning and pushing harder in the second half made it easier to increase my average speed as I pushed towards the end. When I finished, my Polar indicated that I had a 16.1 mph average speed over the entire 150 mile route. Last year, it took me just over two hours, about 02:05 to 02:15, to reach each rest stop. This year, I was getting to each one in about 01:30 or 01:45. The early season miles had paid off.
No long ride is complete without bonking, at least for a while. I bonked around mile 70, a few miles after stopping at the Blue Point Brewery in Patchogue for the third rest stop of the day (and for a sip of Rastafa Rye). At that point, I became concerned about whether I would be able to finish. So drawing from past experience, I began to eat all the food I had stashed in my jersey pockets. After gnawing on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a small Larabar, and a bag of mixed nuts I picked up at the first rest stop in Lynbrook (mile 22), I came back to life and recovered for the rest of the day.
