I’m kinda exhausted after spending the day riding 100 miles through eastern Pennsylvania as part of the Livestrong Challenge Philly bike ride. This event raised over $3 million to fight cancer, including $1,310 from my friends and family. I was riding in memory of my mom, who died of stomach cancer in 2007, and in support of my friend Liz, a cancer survivor. This was a very hard ride due to hills and difficult weather, but also deeply gratifying.

Personal thank-you’s are coming soon. First I want to share a few photos and a map.
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Today I am traveling to beautiful Montgomery County, Pennsylvania for the 2010 Livestrong Philly bike ride. Tomorrow I will ride 100 miles to fight cancer. Wish me luck!

If you enjoy reading this blog, the best way to show your appreciation is to make a donation. The money goes to Livestrong, a support and advocacy group that helps people with cancer.

As of this morning I have raised $1,170. Will you be the one who puts us over $1,200? There’s still time to give! Go make a donation here now!

Important announcement: If you enjoy reading this blog, you should make a donation to the Livestrong Foundation. I will be riding my bike 100 miles in Pennsylvania on August 22 as part of Livestrong Challenge Philly. Your generosity will improve the lives of people with cancer.

The goal of today’s bike ride was to go 60 miles and average at least 14 miles per hour. I chose a route for smooth, flat, uninterrupted, wide-open riding: The Belt Parkway greenway, continuing to the Rockaways and back. Rockaway is an eerie place, consisting largely of an empty, never-realized street grid of overgrown fields. It’s oceanfront New York City property waiting to be developed. It’s where the city might push if we run out of space. But we aren’t out of space yet.
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“It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.” — The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1.

This summer I’ve been obsessed with “The Great Gatsby”. Yesterday I decided to ride my bike to the towns on the North Shore of Long Island where the book is set. How closely do these neighborhoods resemble the roaring ’20s kaleidoscope I see in my imagination when I read this story? Would I find Gatsby out there?

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Important announcement: If you enjoy reading this blog, you should make a donation to the Livestrong Foundation. I will be riding my bike 100 miles in Pennsylvania on August 22 as part of Livestrong Challenge Philly. Your generosity will improve the lives of people with cancer.

On this especially beautiful Saturday, I rode my bike 72 miles out onto Long Island and back. Out there, I cruised around the north shore villages of Great Neck and Port Washington. There’s a very specific reason I chose these two destinations, which I will explain in a future post. Regular readers of this blog can probably guess what it is.

Highlights of this ride:

• Passing the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
• Seeing the house on Forest Parkway where Betty Smith lived when she wrote “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
• Riding on the abandoned Vanderbilt Motor Parkway (where I hit my top speed of 30).
• Crossing Utopia Parkway, made famous (to me at least) by the band Fountains of Wayne.
• Getting a bagel sandwich in Manhasset and eating it on a bench with the turtles, dragonflies and egrets in Manhasset Valley County Park.
• Stopping for a beer with Leslie and Brian and friends at their new place.
• Witnessing the excesses of Long Island mansions and the depressing decay of northern Brooklyn and eastern Queens, just a few miles apart.

A map follows.
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Today I rode from Brooklyn, up the West Side bike path, over the George Washington Bridge, and up through the Palisades (pictured) to Alpine, New Jersey. On the way back I took surface streets through Manhattan; I had to dodge a street fair (annoying!) on Bleeker Street.

My goal of this ride was to rack up some mileage on a hot day in practice for my Livestrong Challenge Ride next month in Pennsylvania. (P.S. – Donations welcome!) Round trip: 51.9 miles. Average speed 11 including breaks. Top speed of 32 achieved twice on downhills in the Palisades. High temperature in Central Park: 96. Bottles of water/gatorade consumed: 6.

A map follows below.
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Special “heat advisory” edition. I need practice on hills, so today I rode over four bridges, in order: 1. Manhattan, 2. Queensboro, 3. Williamsburg, 4. Brooklyn. Not a perfect ride—I had to dodge some street fairs and got caught in Chinatown traffic trying to get from Delancey to Broadway during the last swing through Manhattan. Top speed: 31, achieved on the Queensboro bridge. Average speed: 10. Temperature in Central Park: 93. Map is below.

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A short, fast ride out to the water and back, favoring roads and paths with few traffic signals. Average speed 14.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

I hope you enjoyed your 4th of July weekend! I took Friday off, and had today off as a holiday, granting me a 4-day staycation here in Brooklyn. However, my weekend was disrupted somewhat by some scheduled dental surgery; I had my final two wisdom teeth extracted Friday. This wiped Friday off the map and made Saturday and Sunday an odd muddle of World Cup soccer, barbecues, beer, good times with friends and suffering from mouth pain.

Today, however, I’m feeling mostly recovered. I planned to spend the full day for a long bike ride. Unfortunately, once I woke up, I couldn’t muster the motivation to spend a full day outside in this heat. (It hit 98 today in Central Park.) Instead I rode a loop out to Coney Island and back.

On today’s bike ride, I used a free mobile application called InstaMapper to track my route on a map. I’ve tried InstaMapper before with limited success; the GPS on my Blackberry isn’t always reliable, and the program itself seemed to shut itself down randomly. Today, however, it worked brilliantly. Assuming it’s all still working, you can see an interactive map below showing my ride with pretty good precision. I find this kind of thing amazing.
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During the winter, the sun doesn’t rise in New York until 8. Right now, because of daylight saving time and the change of seasons, it’s getting light at 5. That’s three extra hours of light in the morning before the city (which likes to sleep in) really gets humming.

Lately I’ve started waking up early and taking long bike rides in the sleeping city. Some mornings I do a few laps around Prospect Park. This morning I rode the Belt Parkway bike path most of the way to Coney Island and back.

I find this so enjoyable that I’ve started pondering what it would be like to live at a lower latitude, where before-work bike rides were possible year-round. (I don’t mind cycling in the dark, but cold air, wind and ice make it unpleasant.) I bet I’d get tired of it. Something about the fact that it’s only possible to ride early in New York five months of the year—and even then, only when the weather behaves—makes it feel like a rare treat. It’s something to be earned by suffering through a grueling winter.