Category: Biking

…and that’s two-thirds down.

With almost six and a half miles to spare!

I started the “ride every street of the San Fernando Valley” project years ago. It was easy to pick up new streets at first- there are a lot, you know- but I burned through all the closest streets when I had the most time to ride. Now I have to ride ten miles just to get started.

Today’s ride was about 40 miles. About sixteen and a half of those were new miles. It pushed me past the two-thirds mark and put me in second place for most new Valley miles. It’s not very likely that I’ll get the “Most miles in a month” award again, since anyone new to riding in the Valley can get 40 miles just going up and down the Orange Line bike path.

6000 Miles – February 6-18

The quest to ride 6000 miles in 2023 continues! This video features versions of:

  • a cat with sunglasses!
  • an old woman in a fairytale!
  • a disturbing medical facility!
  • a terrible driver!
  • a terrible cyclist!
  • a failure of jingoism!
  • Not Liam Neeson!

…and slightly more!

Also: if this video amuses you, why not check out the rest of the series?

6000 Miles on a Mastodon

Short post to test if this WordPress-to-Mastodon thing works.

I have a plan: ride 6,000 miles this year. that’s 600 miles a month, around 16 and a half miles a day. Totally doable… except it’s not shaking out that way quite yet. I have less than 300 miles so far, putting my average daily ride just over six and a half miles. Summer’s going to have some long ride days!

But at least I’ve added 20ish miles to my coverage of the San Fernando Valley!

Seriously? AGAIN?

Apparently declaring “this time I’m REALLY starting over” is an excellent way to get derailed. Rain, work, illness… whatever. So I’m declaring NOTHING other than that I’ll post rides here if I do them and something interesting happens.

Maybe I just need one of these so I’m not too fagged out after a ride.

and now… the Absolute Beginning

Today I started doing something about something, and soon I was doing lots of somethings.

Four months ago I was in my best biking shape ever. I did the AIDS/LifeCycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and (except for the the first rainy and freezing day, when I stopped early) I had no problem riding all day for a week. Even the hills we were warned would be challenging weren’t a problem. I felt great!

…until the day after I got back and COVID kicked in. I’ve had no permanent issues from it (that I know of), but it meant I went from a week of focused exercise to ten days of nearly not moving while I isolated and recovered. Since then, the world has been full of a range of inconveniences (including but not limited to: waiting for bike parts, Katherine’s health, heat waves, visitors, and going back to school) that have kept me from getting back into a regular routine. It all culminated with yesterday, a day when I did nothing physical and ate way too much tasty stuff.

Cut to yesterday, when a certain weirdo billionaire took over a certain short-form social media company and I decided that was a sign I should quit Twitter.

Completely unedited.

Then I thought that it would be a good idea to also quit the other social media company run by a weirdo billionaire and decided to leave Facebook as well.

Look how sad he was when I left.

Then I thought it would be a good moment to do a full reset and consider today a new start. So, today is officially Reset: Day One. I went for a nice ride that was comfortably within my current ability and ate a tiny bit better. The plan: keep doing that. Not pushing to do double century rides and eating only superfoods; just riding and eating reasonably.

Let’s see how it goes!