I'm not blogging here anymore, but you should read my current blog, Breaking Copy! - Daryl

Today I rode 100 miles in the annual Bike MS NYC ride. This is a very popular ride (as you can see above) and was especially challenging this year.

I ride in honor of my stepmom Joanne, who has MS. Thanks to those of you who gave to the National MS Society in support of this ride! I realize I’ve been doing a lot of charity rides this year, so I didn’t campaign hard for this one. If you didn’t get a chance to give to this one, I’ll hit you up in the spring to donate to the Bike MS Chesapeake Challenge.

This is the same ride I did last October, but this year they changed the course. It got a lot harder! Last year all the riders opened with a fast, flat, traffic-free 30-mile loop around Manhattan; this year (for reasons of scheduling traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel) the 50- and 100-mile riders skipped the Manhattan portion of the ride and rode directly to New Jersey through the tunnel. The 100-mile course then rolled over a lot of hills almost all the way to Bear Mountain. It was also windy and a little brisk. Furthermore, I apparently ran over something sharp and punctured my rear tire around Nyack about 1/3 of the way through the ride. I was able to change the tube without any trouble, but it slowed me down. This was a tough ride, but I finished and I had a good time doing it! Here are a few more photos and a map of the route.

The ride started by the cruise ship terminal.

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Today I set a personal record for the most miles biked in a single day: 127. I rode the NYC Century Bike Tour today—all 102 miles of it—and biked to and from the Central Park start/finish line from my apartment in Brooklyn. There are a couple of ways I could have made this ride easier—including choosing the alternate start location of Prospect Park, rather than Central Park—but I wanted the challenge of the extra miles. As a bonus, I got to enjoy a pre-dawn, solo warm-up ride through the empty city at 5 a.m. on Sunday.

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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.

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