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.

What’s the hold up?

One of the rest stops.

And here’s the map:

View Larger Map

Total distance: 120.4 miles
High/low temperature in Central Park: 63/50
Maximum speed: 34.7 mph
Average speed (including stops): 9.9 mph
Money raised for the National MS Foundation: $572

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.

On balance, this was a good ride and I had a great day. This century ride is different than others I’ve ridden (Bike MS NYC, Bike MS Maryland, and Livestrong Philly). For starters, this one benefits Transportation Alternatives, my city’s bike lobby. This an organization near and dear to my heart, but not the kind of thing that motivates me to fundraise the way cancer and MS do. I didn’t solicit donations for this one.

On top of that, this course is all-urban: It stays entirely within Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. They don’t close any roads for it, so you’re dealing with city traffic for much of the ride. This a much more mentally taxing ride than others; you have to constantly watch for cars, signs, and traffic signals. There are ride marshalls and first aid people, but no vehicular support. If your bike or your body fails, you’re supposed to find your way to the nearest train station.

Fortunately, I saw very few problems and experienced no setbacks myself. This ride attracts a crowd of well-prepared riders who are skilled at biking in city traffic. The tour through the 4 boroughs is just what you’d expect: Scenery varies from the canyons of Midtown to the marshes out by the airports, passing a whole lot of chicken restaurants and auto body shops along the way. We also passed through a lot of parks, packed with New York’s fabulously diverse array of people having cookouts and playing sports. The ride through the South Bronx was especially cool—taking me through neighborhoods I would have no inclination to visit if not for this ride.

Along the way, a lot of New Yorkers going about their days were curious what we were up to. Most people who asked had heard of the New York Century. The best moment was probably in Rockaways, when we rode by a group of people standing in front of a church, and one of the men called out, “Did you start in Brooklyn?” I shouted back, “Central Park!” The man replied, “Jesus Christ!”

Last but not least, the map. I tried out a new GPS mapping program for tracking this my ride, called GPSed. It’s significantly more complicated to embed a map on a blog using this program, but it has the advantage of plotting more points with greater precision than Instamapper. Here’s the mega route I rode today, beginning at my place in Brooklyn, heading over the Brooklyn Bridge to north Central Park, heading back over the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn and all through Queens, into the Bronx over the RFK/Triboro Bridge, back to Central Park, then back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. Whew!

View Larger Map

Start time: 5:03 a.m.
Finish time: 4:27 p.m.
Duration: 11:23
Distance: 127.7 miles
Average speed: 11.2 mph
Weather: Cloudy, with a little drizzle, turning to full-on rain by the time I got home.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Personal thank-you’s are coming soon. First I want to share a few photos and a map.

Me and my friend Liz, a lung cancer surviver. Liz rode 70 miles today, because she is that awesome.

Here’s Lance Armstrong. I thought it was so cool that he did the ride with the rest of us.

The weather was lousy. Small gaps of sun interrupted by torrential rain.

Here’s me taking a break during a rare moment of sun.

My feet, after the ride.

And here’s the map. You’ll notice some gaps, which seem to be places where my cell phone was unable to transmit my location. I think that accounts for why the total mileage clocks in at less than 100. Trust me, it was 100, and it felt like 100.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.

In my quest for speed, I ran into slowness in a few places. This included a stretch around Plum Beach where part of the bike trail has washed away and I had to carry my bike over sand! (Repairs are underway.)

I decided to tack on an extra hop to Atlantic Beach, Long Island, to get in some extra miles and a bridge I’d never biked before. The Atlantic Beach bridge has an absurd number of stern signs insisting people walk, not ride, their bikes over it—enough that I assumed the town is run by the sort of cranks who would actually make good on the threat to issue you a $250 ticket. So that slowed me down to walking speed for 5 or 10 minutes each way. (An aside: In my experience, towns that post a lot of signs usually suffer from deeper problems below the surface. And Atlantic Beach has a lot of signs: About parking permits, beach regulations, special warnings to drive slow, etc. I don’t know what displeases the BMW-driving population of Atlantic Beach so much, but I tread lightly when I visit a place like that.) On the return trip, I did a lap around Floyd Bennett Field, the abandoned airport, to rack up more miles and increase my average speed. But in the end, I fell short of my average speed goal. Total miles: 64.3. Average speed: 13. Still one more week to train before my century ride on the 22nd.

A map follows. (If you want to see a unique look at my ride around Bennett Field, switch to satellite view and zoom in close on the cluster of dots right in the middle of the ride.)

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“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?

F. Scott Fitzgerald disguised the setting of “The Great Gatsby” with the fictional town names of West Egg and East Egg, but he included enough information that anybody in the know can place them. The town of West Egg where Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby live corresponds to the real-life place of Great Neck. More specifically, the characters live in the village of Kings Point, at the end of the neck. (According to Wikipedia, Fitzgerald modeled Nick’s home after his own home at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, though in the story Nick’s house is much closer to the Sound.) The Buchanans live in East Egg, which in real life must be Port Washington, right across the Manhasset Bay, in the village of Sands Point.

I decided to hit East Egg first, pedaling my bike ride along Northern Boulevard/25A. (This is a crummy place to ride a bike, but it’s about the only non-expressway option around there.) After a few wrong turns I found my way to West Shore Road, where I passed a business called Buchanan Marine. Any relation?

Eventually I ended up at the water’s edge in Sands Point, home to meandering cul-de-sacs of discreet mansions surrounded by woods. Some have grand views that reach all the way to the Manhattan skyline.

This was satisfying. I could easily see Tom and Daisy choosing this elite alcove for their home.

From there, I pedaled on to the main event: Great Neck, or West Egg. Nick calls West Egg the less fashionable of the two towns, and it rings true when you see the homes out in Kings Point. Compared to the ones on Sands Point, they telegraph the idea of new money. Here you’ll see a lot of fake columns, decorative masonry and gilded gates. I saw one mansion with a Benz parked in the curving driveway and two oversized concrete statuettes on either side of the front door—one of Mickey Mouse, one of Minnie. Another typical Kings Point home has a grand staircase leading to the front door, framed by huge, rainbow-mirrored glass windows.

At the very end of the Kings Point, I was delighted to find that there’s actually a Gatsby Lane!

One house on Gatsby Lane in particular caught my eye—and ear. It sits facing the bay, as Gatsby’s does in the book. A line of luxury cars crawled around the driveway, just like Gatsby’s place. A party was underway there; I could see people milling around on a deck overlooking the water, possibly by a pool. “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz was playing as I rode by. Over the thumps of summer dance music, I heard a live DJ making announcements to fire up the party. A sign by the entrance said “Park on one side of Gatsby Lane. There will be big fines if you don’t!”

Wow. When I planned this bike ride, I felt mainly like a tourist/voyeur gawking at the playground of the rich. I had no expectation of finding anything this similar to Fitzgerald’s story!

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.” — The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3

This was it—a 21st-century Gatsby mansion in mind, heart and spirit. I’m sure people familiar with Great Neck know whose place this is, and who inhabits the other mansions around it. I have no idea who lives here, but I do wonder, morbidly, if they’ve read “Gatsby” all the way to the end.

But wonders aside, my curiosity was satisfied. I biked back to Queens through downtown Great Neck, passing the Long Island Railroad station probably used both by Fitzgerald and his narrator Nick Carraway.

Related post: See a Google Map of this bike ride.

This was a satisfying ride that scratched my literary tourism itch. There was one moment, in particular, when I felt a mysterious echo of the book. On a wooded stretch of road in Port Washington, between the golf courses and mansions, I heard the rattle of an old car approaching. I reached for my cell phone to snap a picture of it as it whizzed by. The picture turn out poorly, as if I were photographing a ghost. But that could be him—The Great Gatsby himself.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.


GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.