Spencerport

Total for this ride: 31.8 miles
Total for this year: 1129.6 miles

RIT group ride... plan was to start at Genesee Valley Park and ride along the canal towpath to Spencerport.  My buddy Bob suggested that he and I pick up a few extra miles by riding from the office to the meeting point in the park.  It was a good idea.

The ride was fairly uneventful...  Only eight of us all together.  I think the fact that I had advertised it as a 24 mile ride scared a few people away.  Good.  We had a little bit of a wind working against us on the outbound leg, but of course it worked in our favor on the way home.  By the time we hit the park I was actually getting kind of cool.

Only real excitement came on the last leg of the ride between Genesee Valley Park and RIT on the Lehigh Valley Trail.  At one point we spotted a young buck on the side of the trail, about 30-35 yards away, just staring at us.  We stopped, took a picture, moved a little closer, took another one... the whole time the buck just stared at us.  It wasn't until he realized that there was a woman with a dog coming from the other direction that he decided to take off.  Wish I could have gotten a little closer for a better picture.

Seneca Lake Loop

Total for this ride: 78.7 miles
Total for this year: 1097.8 miles

Let me start by getting something off my chest.  Geneva, NY, sucks.  It's a pit, a hole, a cesspool.  It is the most bike unfriendly town I've ever ridden in.  The toads who planned this wart of a town took one of the best east-west routes for cycling in New York state (Rts 5 & 20) and totally destroyed it.  Anyone trying to ride through Geneva (no one in there right mind would want to make it their destination...) is literally playing Russuan Roulette.  5&20 in Geneva has a 6 inch "shoulder" if you could call it that... it's little more than a white line painted up against a curb on a 4-lane road where the speed limit is 45 mph.  Now, typically a 6 inch shoulder wouldn't bother me, but 1) butting it up against a curb leaves no margin for error (hope the pedal doesn't clip the curb...) and 2) what little shoulder you do get has more craters than the face of the moon!  I think you can tell a lot about a town by the condition of its roads.  In my opinion, Geneva is worse than scum on the bottom of the ocean.

I feel better...

So... except for the fact that today's loop around Seneca Lake started and ended in Geneva, it was a good ride.  It's a ride I've been wanting to make for a long, long time.  I tried to do it last year, but cut it short when it became very apparent that the weather was turning foul.  The weather threatened all day today, but except for a quick 10 minute downpour at about the 63 mile mark, it was OK.  Hot and humid - one time/temp sign flashed 88 degrees - but I kept well hydrated and didn't have any problems.

Things I learned on this ride:

1. There are about 14,723 wineries around Seneca Lake.  But I may have missed a few.  Some are large, elegant affairs with worldwide sales and snooty tasting rooms.  Others are little more than Mom and Pop operations set in an old storage shed on the side of the road.  My favorite was the Ashley Lynn Winery because they had a Port-A-John in the parking lot right in front of their building.  Such amenities occasionally come in handy on a long ride...

2. Traffic in Watkins Glen is bad even when it's not race weekend.

3. The town of Hector has more New York State Historic Markers per person than any other town in New York (I suspect).  They have so many that some of them are literally a few feet apart.

4. If you want to get the Raspberry Chardonnay ice cream at the little place where I parked the truck in Geneva, you need to get there before 4:00.  By the time I got there, all that was left was Chocolate Cabernet.  Which was OK... (it really is made with wine - you have to be over 21 to buy it), but after a long sweaty ride I really had my heart set on some thing a little fruitier.

Picture below: Hector Falls, on the east side of the lake, a few miles up from Watkins Glen.  You don't get a chance to appreciate something this cool when you're speeding by in a car.

Another Commute...

Total for this ride: 27.7 miles
Total for this year: 1019.1 miles

Nothing special about this ride, other than it put me over the 1000-mile mark for the year.  I'm 19 days ahead of the pace I set back in 2008, which has been my best riding year up to now.

Brockport

Total for this ride: 16.0 miles
Total for this year: 991.4 miles

Nice little ride with a few colleagues from work.  Started in Spencerport, rode west (against the wind) to Brockport (where we stopped for ice cream), and then back along the same route.  It was really cool - I was wearing my Beatles bike jersey, and the little candy/ice cream shop in Brockport was playing a Beatles album over the sound system.  It was kind of like... wow...  After the ride Jill met us at a Mexican restaurant in Spencerport for dinner.  Just now got home at 10:30.

Frontier Field

Total for this ride: 16.9 miles
Total for this year: 975.4 miles

Closing in on the 1000-mile mark.  Probably Friday.

I hadn't been on the bike since last Friday, so since the Univega was sitting there in my office, and I had all the gear I needed, I decided to just to go for a solo ride after work.  Didn't initially have any route or destination in mind, but eventually decided to head into town, and eventually found myself at Frontier Field.  It was a nice ride with a little variety.  Of course there were the trail segments, where I can mindlessly pedal along with my brain in neutral.  But there were also the segments on the streets of downtown Rochester, which, although they weren't clogged with rush hour traffic, still demanded some attention so as to avoid getting killed in a grusome and painful fashion.  Needless to say, I succeeded.

I half expected Frontier Field to be empty.  For some reason I thought the Wings played a day game today, but in fact they were scheduled to hit the field against the Columbus Clippers at 7:05.  Folks were lined up at the gates waiting to get in as I rolled up.  Since there was indeed a game scheduled, I figured my son AJ might be there.  AJ is an intern with the Wings this summer, and typically provides audio-visual services at the games, most often working one of the TV cameras on the field.  I took a quick look in the employee parking lot and saw my Civic (the car AJ is using this summer) so I knew he was around somewhere.  Thinking he might be busy getting ready for the game I decided not to call him but rather just to head back to RIT.  As I was riding past the stadium on Morrie Silver Dr. I noticed that just inside one of the fences separating the stadium concourse from the outside sidewalk there were a group of people sitting at a table eating.  One of them was wearing a red shirt that looked smilar to one which AJ has "borrowed" from me since the filming of his major production in the late winter.  I slowed down, rolled up to the fence, and saw that it was indeed AJ.  I called him over, we chatted for a while, and I took a quick picture.  Then it was back to RIT.

When I got back to campus (minutes before the rain hit...) I checked the GPS and was surprised to see that my average speed was under 13 mph.  I was consciously trying to keep the rate up, since I needed a workout.  After taking a look at the data it appears I did hit 14-16 mph on the straight trail segments.  I guess my speed dropped off a little in town.  Oh well...

Full Commute

Total for this ride: 21.1 miles
Total for this year: 958.5 miles

This is what a full-length, one-way commute from home to RIT looks like.  This was the first time I've taken this particular route when riding all the way from home.  Normally I'd either go up Victor-Egypt Rd to Rt 31 and then west to the canal towpath at Schoen Place, or I'd ride down to Rt 215, then west to Pinnacle when I'd start winding my way up toward campus.  But for this ride I decided to take the stretch of Rt 96 which runs by the mall, since it's the most direct route.  Really not that bad... at least at that time of the morning.  Nice wide shoulder all the way to Bushnell's Basin, where I hop on the canal towpath.

Still no bear...

Bear Hunt

Total for this ride: 12.2 miles
Total for this year: 937.4 miles

Took the CIS group on a ride along the Erie Canal, right through the area where there have been numerous black bear sightings over the past several days.  Didn't see the slightest trace of one.

Cool Stuff

I wish I had ridden into work today... at exactly the time that I would have been riding along the Great Embankment in Pittsford a bear was spotted on the canal towpath.  Check out the story in today's Democrat and Chronicle.  Take a close look at the structure over the canal in the picture of the bear, and compare it to the structure in the picture I posted last Friday (June 11th).  That's the same guard gate in both shots, just taken from different directions (I was shooting toward the east, and the person who shot the bear was looking to the west, on the same trail).  There's also some video posted on the WHEC TV web site.

Also... one of my colleagues pointed out today that it's possible to post all of the GPS data I've been collecting on the Garmin web site, which shows not only a map of the route taken, but also the elevation and speed at any given point along the route.  You can even play an animation which shows all of this data in an interactive fashion.  It's hard to describe, so maybe it would be best to just click on the links below and play around with the stuff that's posted there:

Ride to Weedsport
Bike New York 5-Boro Ride
Tour de Cure Century

Obviously these are only a few of the rides I've taken this year. Maybe I'll upload a few others as time and energy permit.  Oh, yeah...  After going to one of these sites, if you happen to have Google Earth installed on your computer, click on the "Details" link in the upper right portion of the page, then click on the "Google Earth" button directly below the map.  Very cool...

Tour de Cure

Total for this ride: 101 miles
Total for this year: 925.2 miles

Good ride today.  Supposedly 400 people signed up to do the century ride at the 2010 Rochester Tour de Cure - a fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association.  Three of those 400 were part of the RIT Tigers TDC team - computer systems administrator Brett, 2nd year undergraduate Eric, and myself (the other members of the RIT team were riding shorter routes).  After getting registered (I scored the very cool bib number 1111) we took off at 7:30 sharp, which made me happy.  I like it when things happen on time.  Eric was gone and out of sight before we even left Mendon Ponds Park where the event was being staged.  Figures... him having 19 year old legs and all.  But Brett and I set what I thought was a pretty good pace as we did an initial loop around the park and started heading west on Rt. 251.

Things were going well until we hit the 10 mile mark, at which point Brett got a flat in his rear tire.  He was behind me when it happened, and he yelled out for me to stop.  I was just far enough away that I probably could have pretended that I didn't hear him and kept going.  I am getting old you know, and my hearing isn't what it used to be.  But I did hear him and I would have felt guilty if I left him stranded on the side of the road, so I stopped.  Maybe he was surprised that I actually did, because he almost ran into me as I waited on the shoulder, and in the process, crashed into the vegitation on the side of the road.  But he got up immediately so I figured he was OK.  He asked if I had a pump.  Normally I would carry one with me, but since I had these fancy bullet-proof "hard case" tires put on the new bike when I bought it, and since I knew a marshall would take me back to the start if something happened and I did get a flat, I decided not to carry one.  This was bad news for Brett, becuase there was absolutely nothing I could do for him.  He had a new tube to replace the flat one, but he didn't have a way to inflate it.  That's not exactly true - he did have a pressurized CO2 cartridge, but for some reason he couldn't use it to blow up the tire.  Anyway, after pulling the tire off and checking to make sure there wasn't something still stuck in there that would pop the replacement, a marshall did roll up and offer some assistance.  Fortunately he did have a pump.  Unfortunately, it was a tiny 6-inch emergency pump which would never get the tire inflated to the pressure Brett would need to finish the ride.  But he started pumping anyway, and as he did, one of our students, Dave, who was working communications at the event, drove up and called in for a better pump.  It eventually showed up and we got the tire inflated, but not after losing about 20 minutes of precious time.  It's not that this was a race, but we had been told that the course would be swept for stragglers at 4:30.  That's what I was worried about - not the hundreds of people who were streaming by as Brett fixed his tire.

Anyway, we eventually got going again and settled into a nice pace.  I only stopped a few times at the tops of some hills to let Brett catch up, since he didn't have low enough gearing on his bike and needed to walk up a few of the steeper slopes.  But when he finally caught up each time, we took off again and made pretty good time.

Much as I wanted to keep the momentum going, I needed to "go" so we made a quick pit stop at the 20-mile rest area, and two more at the 40 and 60 mile marks.  By the way, the food at these rest areas was excellent - not only were there power bars, fruit, and Gatorade at each one, but at the 60 mile mark they actually had bag lunches from Tom Wahl's restaurant.  I had what was advertised to be a BLT but was in fact some wrap thing with chicken in it.  No matter.  It was good.  Too bad there was more than I could eat.

By this time I was pretty wet - it had been misting all day but when we rolled into Avon the mist turned into a definite rain.  The kind that makes splashes on the puddles on the side of the road.  I could feel the water running down my legs and into my shoes, which I knew would be wet for the rest of the day.  So after wolfing down some food at the 60 mile mark Brett and I hit the road again.  The next 20 miles would take us on a loop around Conesus Lake.  The route hugged the shoreline so there were few hills and Brett decided to pick up the pace.  I was still feeling pretty good, but didn't feel like pushing too hard.  After all we still had 40 miles to go.  So Brett eventually got a good half a mile or so ahead of me.  Usually within sight, but still well out of earshot.  If I had any kind of problem, he would never know.  At one point, heading north on the west side of the lake, not too far from the completion of the loop, I noticed that Brett had stopped on the side of the road.  He appeared to be talking to somebody.  I rolled up and saw that he was chatting with Eric, the student who took off at the start of the event several hours earlier.  Not only did Eric have a flat, he had TWO flats.  I expressed my sympathy, and explained there was nothing I could do for him.  That was OK, since a rider ahead of us had stopped and offered to send help once he got to the next rest area.  Since all he could do was wait, Brett and I decided to take off.

We passed the rest area at the 80 mile mark (the same one used as the 60 mile rest stop) and once again Brett started to pull away.  I figured that meant we weren't going to hang together, since there was only another 20 miles to go.  So by about 85 miles he was once again a good half mile ahead.  But then I noticed something in my rear view mirror.  There was a group of five guys hammering in a paceline, coming up on me fast.  "What the heck," I says to myself.  "Let's see if we can hitch a ride."  So I picked up the pace a little and as they passed me I dropped in behind the last guy in the line.  Now if you've never ridden in a paceline, it really is an incredible experience.  With virtually no effort (except for the guy in front) it's possible to absolutely fly, and indeed, these guys were pulling me along at a speed I'd never be able to sustain if I were riding solo.  As I cruised along with the group I noticed we were quickly gaining ground on Brett.  Before long we had caught him, and passed him as if he were standing still.  As I pulled even with him I just turned in his direction and gave him a big Cheshire Cat grin and kept going.  I hung with the paceline for maybe 2-3 miles, but that was all it took.  Now Brett was a half mile behind me, and fading fast.  He must have walked up a few of the steep hills we hit during those last 10 miles, because he eventually disappeared from sight and I didn't see him again until I had reached the finish, had some thing to eat, and was getting ready to head out.  And oh, yeah... the food at the finish was excellent.  I had a Red Osier roast beef sandwich and the Wegman's equivalent of a 7-Up.  Nothing ever tasted so good.

So the final stats on the ride were as follows:

Total distance: 101 miles
Total moving time: 6 hours 44 minutes
Average moving speed: 15 mph - "No WAY!"  "Yes, WAY."  Not only was this the fastest pace I've ever done for a century, it was the fastest pace for ANY ride I've done this year.  Blew me away.
Total elevation gain: 4313 ft - the most climbing I've done for any ride this year.

So all in all, a very good ride.

Happy Kamehameha Day!

Total for this ride: 27.8 miles
Total for this year: 824.2 miles

Just another commute.  Would you believe I had to layer up on the ride in because it was so cool?  Weather on the way home was perfect.

Downtown

Total for this ride: 14.2 miles

Total for this year: 796.4 miles

Small group ride from campus to Court St. in downtown Rochester.  Took the Lehigh Valley Trail north to the UR campus, went over the footbridge to get to the west side of the Genesee, and rode the Riverway Trail up to the Freddy-Sue Bridge.  Got temporarily derailed because of the monthly "Party in the Park" which blocked our path to Court St, where we planned to cross back over to the east side of the river.  But it was only a temporary setback, since we were able to take a sidewalk on Exchange Blvd up to Court, then over to the trail on the other side.  Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful ride.  The kind where I don't even break a sweat.

Lock 33

Total for this ride: 15.4 miles
Total for this year: 782.2 miles

A SLOW ride with the RIT group to the Erie Canal Lock 33 in Henrietta (with an emphasis on SLOW).  The group of 17 riders took two hours to cover as much distance as I could have covered in one.  Admittedly, part of the reason we took so long was because we got to the turn around point just as three boats were pulling in to lock through.  Watching the locks operate is always kind of fun, so we hung around until the three dropped 25 ft to the lower level of the water on the east side and proceeded on their way.  But even if we hadn't stayed to watch the show, it was an exceptionally slow pace today.  I didn't get back to campus until almost 7:30.  If this keeps up, we'll never be able to do a ride any longer than this.  It would just take too long...

Mumford

Total for this ride: 60.1 miles

Total for this year: 766.8 miles

Last long ride before next week's Tour de Cure century.  It was not fun...

I'd originally planned to drive to Geneva and do a lap around Seneca Lake, which would have been a 75-mile ride, but the weather forecast was calling for thunderstorms and I didn't want to get stuck in a downpour 35 miles from the truck.  So at about 11:30, when it looked like there was going to be a long enough stretch of clear weather to get in a shorter ride, I changed my plans on the fly and decided to do a loop from home out to the west, toward Caledonia and Mumford.

Having ridden parts of this route before, I knew where I'd be doing most of the climbing, and rode in a direction to get that out of the way early.  That was clearly the right decision, but unfortunately, since my loop would take me west, I would also be heading directly into a stiff 15-20 mph wind during the first half of the ride too.  (Uphill + against the wind) X 20 miles = no fun.

Knowing I needed to get home for a dinner with friends, I minimized the number of stops.  One five minute break in Avon to fill the water bottles and empty the rider, then a few brief stops to snap pictures of some historical markers.  By the way, if you haven't checked out my online collection of geolocated historical markers I've seen on my rides, CLICK HERE to check it out.  There are over 100 posted there now.

So although the ride was moderately miserable there was an up-side... this was the first ride I'd taken since getting the Trek back from its initial tune up.  And I must say the boys at Full Moon Vista did a pretty good job.  Most importantly, the insanely annoying clicking from the bottom bracket is gone.  Apparently it was the crank arms, and not the bearings as I initially suspected.  Had no trouble shifting into the small ring on the front (although shifting up wasn't as smooth as I would like).  The sticky shift lever on the right was fine.  Only thing they totally dorked was the tension on the back break cable which caused it to ever-so-lightly rub the rim every time I turned the handlebars to the left.  They completely tubed this and made it even worse, but fortunately, it's something that's easy to fix and I was able to make an adjustment myself to solve the problem.  So all in all, I'd say it's good enough to ride in the TDC next week Sunday.