Bayou Extensions

A new stretch of trail along Houston's White Oak Bayou, not yet ready for cyclists.

Things are hopping in the world of Houston Cycling. About a year and a half ago, our¹ Mayor issued a Complete Streets executive order. This means that when the city plans street upgrades and repairs, the needs of pedestrians and cyclists are taken into account, not just motor vehicle users. Houston has just begun a major revision to its bicycle master plan. Houston's main bicycle advocacy organization, Bike Houston, has new leadership and has become much more active. All of this is not just talk, contruction of new cycling infrastructure is everywhere. In this post, I will discuss progress on construction affecting two of my most frequent rides, Braes Bayou and White Oak Bayou.

Braes Bayou

The third bike ride I did after I restarted cycling in 2008 was on the Braes Bayou Multi-Use trail. Until a few months ago, the trail ended at its West end at Gessner Road. The west end of that trail is now being extended. The extension past Gessner Road is a nice underpass, avoiding the necessity to deal with the heavy traffic on Gessner:

Sadly, a short distance later, there is an unfortunate grade crossing at South Braeswood Boulevard. Traffic is heavy and visibility is less than ideal, leading to a difficult crossing. I have to assume that the City of Houston was simply unable to engineer anything better. I predict that many users of this trail will choose to turn around at this point rather than risk the South Braeswood Crossing. The trail is currently closed at this point, here is a photograph showing both the grade crossing with traffic and the cable blocking further progress down the new trail:

Because I was born to be wild, and because I am curious, I fought the law by riding my bike around the barrier to explore what has been accomplished so far on the new trail. (Tracks in the mud next to the barrier suggest I am not the only Houston cyclist with anarchistic tendencies.) So far, the trail has been extended west by about a mile and a half, with apparently more to come. Among the trail features are one of the attractive, steel bridges that are becoming a common feature of Houston multi-use trails, and side paths into adjacent neighborhoods:

The main trail goes forward on the path to the left, crosses over the dark colored bridge, and continues forward in the same direction. The trails branching off to the left and coming back in the opposite direction on the other side of the bayou to the right represent access trails for the adjacent neighborhoods.

White Oak Bayou

I have previously opined that the extension to the Braes Bayou trail, described above, is a bit underwhelming, in that it adds little other than a few extra miles. The same cannot be said for the latest extension to the White Oak Bayou trail. Usually, I am not a big fan of urban rails to trails projects because they involve a lot of grade crossings, resulting in a rather interrupted riding experience. The current extension to the White Oak Bayou trail is an enormous exception to that generalization. In this case, use of an existing rail route eliminates two of the busiest crossings on the way to the White Oak Bayou trail; Shepard Drive and Durham Drive. Because these roads are so heavily traversed, overpasses were built on these roads over the railroad tracks so that passing trains would not disrupt traffic. Now that this railroad line has been abandoned, these same overpasses mean that the bike trail passes uninterrupted, under these busy streets.

I first explored the potential of this route on a ride organized by the Houston Parks Board back in 2013. At that time, the only way to cross White Oaks Bayou was over an abandon railroad bridge, made unsafe by the ravages of time and vandalism:

Being the timid person I am, I ended up walking my bike over this bridge. After determining that this bridge was unsalvageable, the City of Houston demolished it and replaced it with this attractive, modern bridge:

This trail extension is not yet complete, as noted in the photo at the top of this post. Although the trail extends the existing MKT trail by taking it across the White Oak Bayou thus connecting it to a new set of neighborhoods, it does not yet allow me to get to the current White Oak Bayou trail without crossing Shepard and Durham. The dotted line on the map below shows what remains to be completed to realize the potential of this extension:

The current White Oak Bayou trail starts at the upper left corner of the above map, and continues for a gorgeous 7.5 miles past the edge of the map. Currently, I access this trail via the red route along the top of the map, crossing Shepard and Durham best I can. The new trail extension is shown in red along the bottom of the map. The missing link is the dotted red line weaving more or less parallel to the left side of the map.

Fighting the infamously aggressive Houston drivers is something I find somewhat difficult and that my wife finds extremely difficult, and we very much appreciate being able to bicycle on Houston's traffic free multi-use trails. Thus, we eagerly await each trail extension that lets us ride on more trails and fewer streets. Thanks to the City of Houston for all the progress to date!

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1) I actually do not live in the City of Houston. I live in the City of West University Place, a small community completely contained within the City of Houston. However, my opportunities as a cyclist are affected almost entirely by Houston rather than WestU, so on this blog, I write as an Houstonian.

20,000 Miles and Counting

"You should be proud of yourself for sticking to cycling so long" my wife told me the other day. I don't, in fact, feel all that proud. I know of too many people who have done so much more; I feel like my accomplishment is only impressive when compared to my otherwise miserable record of maintaining an exercise program. What I do feel is relief that I have found something I can stick with. Recently, I passed a minor milestone: 20,000 miles of cycling since I restarted cycling six and a half years ago; I know this would not be much of a milestone for many cyclists, but it is for me. I am using this milestone as an excuse for a retrospective evaluation of how my second cycling career is working out.

When I restarted cycling in 2008, I had two reasons for doing so. The first was that I had come to realize that my health was at risk due to my inability to stick to a regular exercise plan, and I was hoping that cycling would be the solution to that problem. The second was that I remembered the joy that cycling had brought me in the past, and I hoped to reclaim that joy. In my last post, I discussed my exercise history before I restarted cycling. I detailed how I embarked on exercise programs involving swimming, weight lifting, and running, and in each case, I abandoned the effort within a year. My dirty little secret is that the same thing happened with cycling. Although I restarted cycling in August of 2008, within eight months, I had virtually stopped and did not really restart until May of 2010. Granted, there were some very powerful forces that caused me to pause my cycling. My wife became ill at the end of 2008 and was in the hospital most of January 2009, so it is perhaps not surprising that I only got in a single bike ride that month. Her treatment continued for another year and a half, a regimen of treatment sufficiently debilitating to keep her from riding. The lack of her companionship, the distraction caused by my worry for her, and the time I spent with her while she was being treated discouraged me from riding as well. In addition, my beloved Bianchi Specialissima turned out to be unreliable. The main problem was the sew-up tires, but in addition, it seems to be something of a bad luck bike. The Surly Cross Check I purchased in 2010 has turned out to be, by comparison, an extremely reliable work horse. Knowing my bike will always be ready is a tremendously powerful motivating force to keep me exercising. Having said all that, when I actually look at my cycling history, it is apparent that my wife's health and my Bianchi's reliability issues only partially explain my lapse in cycling. Sometimes, I just loose motivation.

I have ridden 21,000 miles since I restarted cycling in 2008, but less than 1,200 of those miles were ridden before May of 2010; my cycling re-start in 2008 may have been a false-start. Yes, I got my bike repaired, but it turned out to be a bike I could not rely on long term. Yes, I managed a ride or two every week, but then completely stopped riding for a year. Perhaps I really restarted cycling in 2010, a re-re-start if you will. But even since 2010, my record has been far from perfect; I have gone as long as three weeks without a ride. The difference between cycling and all the other kinds of exercise I have tried is not that I never backslide in cycling, but that when I do, I have always managed to restart. Looking at it that way, 2008 might, in fact, be the correct start date to use, and in that case, it won't be much longer before my second cycling career will be longer than my first.

So how am I doing towards meetings my goals of better health and more joy? Joy is pretty much by definition entirely subjective, which makes it both easier and harder to evaluate. It is easier, because there is no math to do. It is harder, because it is totally unclear what an evaluation consists of. What I can say is that my joy is at constant war with the four horsemen of the spudocalypse: boredom, terror, misery, and despair.

War On Joy

Boredom: The joy I felt when I test-rode an inexpensive bicycle at a bike shop back in 2008 had two sources. The first was the physical pleasure of being on a bike, the sun on my face, the wind in my hair. The second was the fun of exploring a new neighborhood, in the best way that can be done, on a bicycle. In the last six and a half years, I have ridden over 900 rides. 273 of those rides have been around and around and around the ⅓ mile Rice track. The only thing more boring than that are the 4 rides I have done on my trainer. Even so, the wind in my hair, the sense of speed, and the sound of my tires is occasionally enough to bring joy to my heart, even circling the Rice Track. I also have ridden Braes Bayou 244 times, White Oak Bayou 132 times, and through Terry Hershey/George Bush parks over 100 times. The City of Houston has 16,000 miles of roads, not to mention the country roads in the surrounding areas, why do I keep riding the same routes? In a word:

Terror: As an old man, I worry about being attacked by dogs, murdered by brigands, but most of all, crushed 'neath the wheels of the iron behemoths with whom I "share" the road. The vast majority of the 16,000 miles of Houston roads are too busy or otherwise unsafe to use, or if not, there is no safe route to get to them. I ride the same routes over and over because they are relatively safe, relatively pleasant rides close to home.

Misery: Houston's humidity makes hot weather feel hotter and cold weather feel colder. On one of my trips to California, I failed to bring warm enough cycling clothes. An unexpected cold front had come through and when I got up in the morning to ride, it was in the mid-fifties outside, much too cold for the short sleeves and shorts I had with me. Or so I thought. I decided to give it a go, and to my surprise, it was quite comfortable. In retrospect, that is because humidity is low in California, dry air does not pull the heat from your body in the same way the humid air of Houston does. As I write this, it is 37 degrees out, and rather than ride in with my wife, I will wait until later in the day when the temperatures are more reasonable before my ride. While the residents of colder climes laugh at what a wimp I am, not riding when it is a balmy 37, Houston's hot and humid Summers hold a candle to none. And then there is rain. I read in my Randonneurs USA Members Handbook that, as a Randonneur, I should set my alarm for 3 am on the coldest night of the year, turn on my sprinklers, and sit under those sprinklers to practice changing a tire. If that is true, then I am not a Randonneur. Should I be trapped in a downpour, I will usually finish the ride, but I am too much of a wuss to start a ride in the driving rain.

Despair: A running theme on this blog has been how I had dreams of becoming a successful randonneur¹, earning an R12 award, completing a brevet series, and then flying to Paris to ride PBP, and how those dreams were crushed beneath the reality of my physical limitations. When I blogged about my previous exercise attempts, I described how in each case, I improved rapidly. That seems not to be the case with cycling. Within a few months, my typical "long" ride was 30 miles and on my best days, I could average 15 mph. Today, my typical long ride is 30 miles and on a good day I average 15 mph. There is much to be said about that, and I will say it in a future blog post, but the bottom line is that I have not felt like I have improved as quickly or as much as I expected, and that takes the wind out of my sails.

Joy: I don't know if it is apparent, but I did a lot of number crunching in preparation for this post. I was horrified but not really surprised at how often I had ridden the same old routes. What was a surprise is how many rides I had done that I had never done before, the kind of exploration that brings me joy. If you had asked me, I would have said there were 5 or 10 such rides. In fact, there have been 40; the back roads of Virginia, the river delta of California, the island paths of Martha's Vineyard, the Maine Coast. In the next section of this post, I am going to discuss how successful my more than 850 pure training rides have been at keeping me healthy. But besides keeping my healthy, they have kept me in shape so that when the opportunity for an exciting new ride comes along, I am ready.

Health and Fitness

There are more theories of exercise than there are athletes creating them. The good news is that, as best I can tell, there is a wide range of activities and training plans that adequately meet the requirements for healthy living. I have read the recommendations of the US Government, of the American College of Sports Medicine, and on the web pages from a variety of medical organizations, and fortunately, there is a consensus. For health purposes, exercise can be divided into three intensities; Light, Moderate, and Vigorous. Moderate Exercise is the equivalent of a brisk walk. Light exercise is less than that, perhaps a slow stroll. Vigorous Exercise is the equivalent of running. The recommendation is that everyone should get a minimum of 150 minutes a week of Moderate Exercise or 75 minutes a week of Vigorous Exercise or any combination of the two. (It is unknown if light exercise has health benefits.) Ideally, one should get 300 minutes of Moderate Exercise or 150 minutes a week of Vigorous Exercise a week. That exercise should be distributed over the week; cramming your 300 minutes of exercise into the weekend provides fewer health benefits than distributing it over the week (see below).

For purposes of this post, I made some conservative assumptions to simplify analysis of the cycling data I have been collecting since 2008. First, I assume that all the bicycling I do is moderate exercise, even though some of it is clearly vigorous. Second, because I track miles I ride, not time, I assumed an average speed of 13 miles per hour to convert miles to minutes. Over the past year (52 weeks), I have exceeded 300 minutes of exercise for 41 weeks and 150 minutes for 8 weeks; I have met or exceeded the minimum aerobic exercise guidelines 94% of the time. All of this occurred during a period of discouragement with regards to my career as a randonneur and in a year where I made 4 trips to California and spent 6 weeks there helping my ailing father. Since 2008, I have averaged 283 minutes a week of aerobic exercise, an average that includes approximately one year in which I did almost no riding. Since my re-re-start of cycling in 2010, I have averaged 362 minutes a week. Since beginning randonneuring in 2012, I have averaged 441 minutes a week. I think cycling is providing me with enough aerobic exercise for health.

How about the distribution of that exercise? I have already discussed that in terms of the percentage of weeks I met the guidelines, but how about days per week? Am I a weekend warrior, or do I properly distribute my exercise? That depends on when I look:

Before I retired, I was a classic weekend warrior; most weeks I rode on the weekends, but not during the week. Once I retired, I rode almost every day, most commonly 4 or 5 days a week. In retrospect, while I was working, I should have found some way to commute to work by bicycle. A 2004 study found that getting enough exercise, but getting it all on the weekend, provides some benefits to some people, but spreading that same exercise out over the week provides more benefits and provides benefits to all groups studied.

Randonneuring

Developing a training program to allow me to continue as a randonneur is clearly a work in progress, a work that I have discussed ad nauseum on this blog. I just want to discuss one statistic in this post. My Randonneurs USA Members Handbook says that I should be riding at least 5000 miles per year to prepare for randonneuring. As part of my compulsive record keeping, I keep a running average as to how many miles I have ridden during the previous 12 months. At present, that average is at 4636 miles, less than the desired 5000 but perhaps understandable given that I have not been preparing for a brevet during that time. At the peak of my brevet training, I hit 5572 miles from August 2012 through July 2013. At the time I rode my first 200K brevet in May of 2012, I had accumulated a mere 3522 miles during the previous year. Since starting randonneuring in 2012, I have averaged 4967 miles per year, not quite there but pretty darn close.

Conclusions

Preparing this post has been a very motivating experience. I have a dour personality and so, before I prepared this post, my overall impression was of a cycling career full of lapses and setbacks. However, when I crunched the numbers, I feel like I am doing pretty well. Pulling together this post also helped me remember and clarify why I am doing what I am doing; it is easier to drag myself over to the Rice Track for yet another ride when I remember that I am doing that to stay healthy and to be ready for a fun ride when one becomes available. Although I was pleasantly surprised by the number of fun rides I have taken, I feel like that is a number I should try to increase. How I propose to do that will be topics of future posts; stay tuned.

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1) Randonneur, randonneuse, brevet, R12 award, and PBP are all terms having to do with the sport of randonneuring. I have posted extensively on this in the past, and there is an excellent summary of that sport on the RUSA website.

A Rake's Progress

"A Rake's Progress" is the title of a series of 8 paintings (and 8 parallel engravings) by William Hogarth chronicling the fall of a young man. It begins with the first painting, depicting his inheritance of his father's fortune, and ends with the eighth picture, shown above, where he has lost everything and is confined to the Bedlam insane asylum. This series provides the title for this post, which chronicles my fall from fitness until I restarted cycling in 2008.

Perhaps I overestimate the importance of aerobic exercise, activities like running or cycling, for a healthy lifestyle. Other important factors include not smoking, moderating alcohol consumption, stress reduction, healthy eating, weight control, and regular medical care to name the most obvious. My personal healthy living scorecard is mixed; I have never smoked but I am 40 pounds overweight, for example. Even just considering exercise, aerobic exercise is supposed to be only one part of a plan that also includes strength training, flexibility training, and for a man my age, exercises to maintain balance. The press¹ loves to print alarmist headlines (that's what sells ads after all) and there is one headline that has been popping up recently stating that 80% of Americans fail to meet the minimal standards of exercise set by the US Government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It is always a good idea to go past the headline and read the entire article, identify the source for that article, confirm that the source is reputable, and even read the original source to make sure the press quoted it correctly. That is what I did when I encountered the "80% of Americans don't exercise" article, and the source is a study by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). What that study consisted of was to ask people about their activities in pursuit of two parts of the HHS exercise goals, aerobic exercise and strength training. It turns out that, as the headline reported, only 20% of people surveyed reported that they had met the minimum requirements for both, but that was mostly a deficiency in strength training; 29% of those surveyed met the strength guideline, 52% met the aerobic guideline, and 20% met both.

What are these guidelines from the HHS that we, as Americans, are not meeting? In the first place, the guidelines are considered a minimum; people are encouraged to go beyond them. Secondly, the minimum guidelines call for 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise (e.g. brisk walking) and two sessions of strength building exercises per week. I said at the start of this post that I may overestimate the importance of the aerobic part of this, but perhaps not. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that HHS agrees with me that the aerobic component provides more of a health benefit than do the other components, so perhaps my focus on aerobic exercise is not misguided. In this post, I will focus on the decisions and circumstances led me to become one of the 48% of Americans who fail to do enough aerobic exercise; a decades long journey from being an active cyclist to a couch potato. In a future post, I will provide an overview of my return to grace as an active cyclist in 2008.

Thinking back on my golden age of my cycling, when I was in High School and College, my cycling may not have been as perfect a source of healthy exercise as my rosy memories might suggest. Although it is likely that I significantly exceeded the minimum average of 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, a single weekend ride often exceeded 400 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity, the problem was that this exercise was not evenly distributed over the week. That said, I did bicycle to school every day, and between that and the major weekend activities, this was probably enough to keep me healthy. Although I have no records to back me up, I suspect I rode fewer miles in college than I did in high school, though I did go on regular training rides with the Berkeley Wheelmen and I suspect that, even in college, I got enough aerobic exercise for health.

Graduate School was much harder than undergraduate; finding time for regular exercise became more of a challenge, a challenge I did not meet. I have no records of any exercise I did while in grad school, I don't even remember if I walked, biked, or drove to school. I did go for the occasional bike ride, especially when I started dating my future wife, but I doubt it was enough to meet the minimum guidelines for aerobic exercise. Things got a bit better during my four years of postdoctoral training as I biked to work, but then collapsed completely when my wife and I got real jobs, moved to the suburbs, bought a house, and had our first child. Work was too far to bike and there were the logistics of day care, so for over 25 years, I did virtually no aerobic exercise.

In 1993, changing interests caused me to leave academic science to form a one man consultancy focused on bioinformatics, the use of computers to advance medical research. The increased flexibility that came from being my own boss should have allowed me to begin a regular exercise program, but somehow it didn't, a couch potato I remained.

In 1991, my older son joined Boy Scouts. At first, this had little impact on my (lack of) exercise, but as he got older, he became increasingly frustrated with the activities of his troop, finding them an inadequate challenge. When I asked the other, more experienced parents about that, I found that high adventure camps were available for older scouts, but that adult volunteers were necessary to make that happen, so in 1996 (at age 47), I volunteered to help lead a backpacking trip in the famous Philmont High Adventure Camp. I was appropriately apprehensive about a major backpacking trip after 25 years of sloth, so my son and I began a regimen of morning runs which, when supplemented by the weekly exercises organized by the trip leader, got me into good enough shape that I had no difficulty on the the trip.

In 1999 (at age 50), while vacationing in Canada, my older son and I borrowed mountain bikes from the lodge where we were staying and hit the trails. I was utterly embarrassed, I was not at all able to keep up with my 16 year old son, my legs gave out on me in minutes. I think the difference between my success in 1996 and my failure in 1999 was the difference in preparation; I prepared extensively for the 1996 backpacking trip, but then returned to life as a couch potato so was utterly unprepared for a mountain biking adventure.

By 2001, my former academic home had finally discovered the value of bioinformatics, and I returned, first as a consultant, but then as a faculty member. I worked under a fierce taskmaster who made sure that I had no free time; there was little opportunity for exercise. In 2003 (at age 54), my younger son wanted to attend a Boy Scout high adventure camp in California, and again I volunteered. Having been so successful in 1996 and under intense pressure at work, my preparation was much less than in 1996. I was also 30 pounds heavier, and I struggled to complete the trip. That should have been my wakeup call, but rather than rise to the challenge, I fell into despair. In 2004, my work situation changed such that I potentially had more time for exercise. In 2005 (at age 56), I was volunteered for a second high adventure camp, one which promised to be more challenging than the previous two, and I took it very seriously. Because this was a sea-based adventure, my exercise plan involved mostly swimming. I dramatically improved my fitness as evidenced by performance improvement during training, but was still woefully underprepared for the trip despite having made an heroic effort to prepare. Whereas some of my previous failures could be blamed on lack of preparation, this one had to be blamed on age and/or obesity. When I got back, I was determined to not return to my slothful ways, but found that swimming was a difficult form of exercise to maintain. Also, I had found that my major deficiency on the trip had been upper body strength, strength training had become all the rage, so I took up weight lifting. I kept this up for about a year, and my strength improved dramatically over that time, but it was always a chore, never a joy, and so gradually, I would skip a day, skip a week, and then found I wasn't lifting weights anymore. I then picked up a wonderful book entitled Daniels' Running Formula by Jack Daniels and took up running. I enjoyed running a lot more than weight lifting (I think I am an endurance athlete by temperament) and again, improved rapidly, but in this case, experienced over-training for the first time in my life. I had been gradually increasing the lengths of my runs. I managed a six mile run, and felt like I had a marathon in sight! However, the next week, I felt dramatically worse and had to turn back on my attempt to simply repeat those six miles. In retrospect, this was the result of over-training; my body needed time to recover after my push to work up to a six mile run, and I had not given it that time. The discouragement of the setback along with the essential tedium of running resulted in my abandoning yet another training plan.

So why did I not try cycling, the aerobic exercise of choice from my youth? A major barrier to my resumption of cycling was the lack of a working bicycle. After decades of hanging in my garage, none of my bikes were ridable. I had always maintained my own bikes, but was way out of practice, had lost any connection with a source of repair parts, and there was so much to do, that bringing my bikes back to rideability just wasn't getting done. I checked out a local bike shop and they encouraged me to consider purchasing a new bike rather than trying to repair my obsolete old bikes. They had me test ride one of their bottom of the line bikes, a hybrid that sold for under $400. I was entranced! Just exploring the neighborhood around the shop brought back all the transcendent joy of riding a bicycle. In the end, I opted to have my decrepit Bianchi Specialissima repaired rather than purchase a new bike and I was on the road again!

So, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. This post contains a lot of words about me, what's the point? The point is that Joe Friel, my favorite bicycle training author, just released a new book for older cyclists entitled Fast After 50: How to Race Strong for the Rest of Your Life. I haven't decided yet if I will be purchasing it, but if I don't, it will be because it isn't about people like me; Joe's latest book is about 1) older athletes who have 2) remained fit their entire lives and who 3) have the genes to be competitive amateur bicycle racers. Although I qualify for the first, I don't for the second and third. I have been posting to this blog for almost three years now, over 100 posts, and in my second post I said:

Everyone is different, of course, and we are each different people at the different times in our lives. In my research, I read many stories of cyclists who "never train" but ride 1200 km brevets with ease. I think I might have been one of those people, even into my 40s. However, I am not now one of those people, and you might not be either. I hope some of the things I found in my experimentation will encourage you to find something as enjoyable and as effective for you as this return to cycling has been for me.

I see this blog as a place for me to talk about one particular cyclist who happens to be me who is a representative of what is, in my opinion, an under-documented class: people with an average set of genes, not destined to be successful bicycle racers, who have neglected their fitness for much of their lives but who, at an older age, decide to improve their health by taking up cycling. Does this describe you? If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences!

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1) Like most people these days, I get most of my news online. Thus, for press read not just newspapers and magazines but the rich variety of sources on the Internet as well, and for headline, etc. read the equivalent parts of these online resources.

Faster, Higher, Stronger

From "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?" by Roz Chast, page 103.
The question the author wishes to ask at the end is "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?"

Once again, I have been in California helping my Dad. On the one hand, this interrupted my cycling. On the other, it gave me an opportunity for more reading, including a lot that ended up being related to cycling. The first book I want to mention relates to the most important factor affecting my cycling in 2014, caring for my 93 year old father. If any of you are caring for aging parent(s), "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?" is a must read! This biographical work of non-fiction uses the format of a graphic novel (see the cartoon at the top of the page for an example) and is both hysterically funny and deadly serious.

A second book I read was "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer. When I started this book, I assumed it had nothing to do with cycling. However, when the author started using cycling examples in the book and referring to his past as a cyclist, I realized he was the "Race Across America" Shermer, for whom the ailment "Shermer's neck" is named. Shermer's neck affects long distance cyclists, including randonneurs participating in the longer events such as Paris-Brest-Paris, and causes the muscles in the back of the neck fail, allowing the cyclist's head to flop forward so they can no longer see the road ahead of them, requiring them to abandon the event. Although "Why People Believe Weird Things" is a good book and the identity of the author is a lovely small world story, it is not about cycling.

The third book I wanted to mention, "Outliers", is also not about cycling in particular, or even athletics, but it does include some topics relevant to cyclists. This book is most famous for having popularized the "10,000 hour rule" which says that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get good at any skill, that people who excel at that skill are the ones who have the opportunity, inclination, and discipline to put in that many hours. I did not consider this the most interesting part of this book, a good thing because this rule has recently met with increasing skepticism. What I did consider central to "Outliers" is its thesis that people who are exceptionally successful, in addition to being genetically gifted and extremely hard working, are almost always present "at the right place, at the right time." One of the examples the author gives is that of amateur hockey in Canada, apparently set up as a pure meritocracy. Boys start playing at age 4 or 5, and the best players from around the country at every level are identified and funneled into elite teams where they have many more opportunities to play and receive extra coaching. The surprising finding is that at the top of this meritocracy, the very best amateur players in Canada are much more likely to have birthdays in January than in December. The explanation the author gives for this astonishing observation is that at the beginning of this process, at age 4 or 5, one year more or less in age has a huge impact on maturity and thus athletic ability. As a result, at the younger ages, players more likely to be selected for the elite teams are the ones who are born in January, almost a year older than their teammates born in December. Although the age advantage declines as the team gets older, the initial advantage of that early additional play time and coaching stays with these players who end up at the top of the pyramid.

And finally to the main book I wanted to blog about: "Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them" by Mark McClusky. Faster, Higher, Stronger builds on Outliers and quotes from it extensively; I found it particularly useful to have read Outliers first followed by Faster, Higher, Stronger. (Interestingly, Faster, Higher, Stronger is one of the voices questioning the 10,000 hour rule popularized in Outliers.) Though not just about cycling, Faster, Higher, Stronger is about athletics and has a substantial section on cycling. For example, major section of the book is devoted to explaining how the British cycling community went from being a non-contender in international cycling (no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France for example) to becoming a major power that helped not one but two of their riders, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, into the yellow jersey. Mr. McClusky is a writer for Wired Magazine, and as such this book shares Wired's "gee-wiz" prose style and emphasis on extravagant ideas over solid conclusions. That said, many of the extravagant ideas in this book do, in fact, have some evidential support, and as I result, I felt that it was well worth reading.

I find it particularly exciting when I read about an issue that is already on my mind; something I don't understand, or a tentative conclusion I have reached. One such conclusion is the effect of rate of maturation on performance among young athletes.

Me and some of my competitors at the end of a bike race in 1967. I am the rider to the far left.

Some kids mature earlier than others. Look at the picture above. The kid in the red jersey is the winner of the race shown, and in fact of many of the races in which I competed in the 1960s. (I raced in the under-18, Junior category.) I didn't notice it at the time, but in retrospect, it is obvious that he is larger and generally older looking than the other riders; he is an early maturer. He was also an extremely nice guy and was a hard worker, if memory serves, so he earned his victories, but being an early maturer certainly gave him an advantage. This phenomenon is discussed in Faster, Higher, Stronger which then further notes that being an early maturer gives one no advantage as an adult. Thus, many of the best cyclists in the Junior category did not go on to be similarly successful as Senior (18 to 40 year old) racers.

Faster, Higher, Stronger discusses many topics. One, for example, is the impact of equipment on sports results. This is a topic of great interest to us cyclists who lust after the latest bicycles and components. What I had not appreciated is that changes in the rules governing the equipment allowed in a sport can change who the best athletes are; using one set of equipment will favor some athletes, and using a different set will favor others. Among all the topics discussed in Faster, Higher, Stronger, the one I found the most interesting is how dramatically one's ability in different sports is predetermined at birth by genetics. This is a very complicated topic and the previous sentence is an oversimplification, so let me take a few lines to clarify. (The impatient reader can safely skip to the next paragraph.) First, there is the difference between phenotype (what you are) and genotype (what your genes set you up to be.) The genetics of hair color a is relatively simple example. If you dig deep, there is plenty of complexity in this topic, but at a basic level, it involves only a handful of genes. As many of us learned in high school, if both your parents are blonde, you will be blonde, and if both your parents have black hair, you might have blonde or black hair. In addition, if you know your parents genotype, and if they have a large number of children, you can make a pretty good guess as to number of children who will have blonde or black hair. As it happens, I am pretty sure that my wife has one gene for black hair and one gene for blonde hair, so her hair should be black, but it's not. It's grey. Some of you may be rolling your eyes, thinking "Yes, but it USED to be black" which it did. Nonetheless, my point is that phenotype (what color your hair is) is a combination of genotype (having one gene for black hair and one gene for blonde hair) and your history (living 66 years.) Perhaps height will be a more persuasive example. In contrast to hair color, the genetics of height is extremely complex. As Faster, Higher, Stronger discusses, there are over 1,000 genes that influence how tall a person will become. Even though we now have the ability to sequence a person's DNA and determine exactly which genes a person has, we are not even close to being able to look at that sequence and determining how tall a person is destined to be. What we can do, by studying families, and especially by studying identical twins, is determine that about half of how tall a person is is determined by those 1,000 or more genes, and the other half is determined by environment, nutrition being a big factor. That said, once a person has finished their growth (usually in their late teens or early 20s), their height is fixed; there is nothing that can be done to change it.

One of the most important phenotypes for a distance cyclist is VO₂ max. This is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can process. This can be thought of as the size of your "engine". According to Faster, Higher, Stronger, VO₂ max is like height in that it is about 50% determined by genes and 50% by environment. As far as I know, the environmental factors that determine VO₂ max are not known, but basically, whatever VO₂ max phenotype you have as a result of your genes and your history, you are stuck with.

VO₂ max actually can be divided up into two parts. Baseline VO₂ max is the VO₂ max you have without training. As most of you probably know, VO₂ max can be improved significantly by training. However, some people can improve their VO₂ max a lot by training (a 30% increase) and others only a little (5%). This is another fixed phenotype; whatever your ability to improve your VO₂ max you have, you cannot change, you are stuck with it.

It is not the case that if you knew the VO₂ max of every rider in the Tour de France, the rider with the highest VO₂ max would be the winner; other factors matter as well. In fact, above a certain level, increases in VO₂ max seem not to help that much. What does seem to be the case is that there is a minimum VO₂ max that you must have to be a successful bicycle racer, to have a chance at winning the Tour de France. To achieve that, you must train intensively to maximize your VO₂ max, but you also have to both start with an unusually high baseline VO₂ max and have a VO₂ max which improves with training much more than average. If you do not have these phenotypes, it doesn't matter how hard or long you train or what training protocol you follow, you are never going to win the Tour de France.

Although we are no where near being able to look at a person's DNA sequence and predicting what their athletic capabilities are, the day may be very near (according to Faster, Higher, Stronger) when, by doing a series of tests on specific phenotypes, things like body measurement (of which tallness is just one), VO₂ max, and muscle strength, we will be able to accurately predict what that persons athletic potential is, what their best sport would be and how good they can expect to get in that sport if they are disciplined, train hard, and train smart.

I have already mentioned that how much you benefit from training is a fixed phenotype. Another phenotype (which is most likely fixed) is the training you should use to maximally improve your fitness. A training plan which is training smart for me may be training stupid for you. Thus, the same training tests that might be able to tell us our athletic potential would, at the same time, tell us what our best training strategy would be. Relevant to this point, Joe Friel's latest blog post suggests that cross country skiers fall into two groups; those who improve most when they do many hours of training at a relatively low level of effort and those who improve most when they do fewer hours of training at a very high level of effort. I read the study on which the blog post is based, and I have significant reservations about its methodology, but it is clear that the idea of "personalized training" is of great interest in the exercise community. That said, the day of precise, personalized training may be near, but I do not believe it is here yet.

Besides ushering in personalized training, the imminent understanding of the relationships between measurable, simple phenotypes (e.g. VO₂ max) and athletic performance will make amateur athletic competitions much more predictable. At the Olympic or professional level, this will not be true; these competitors will all share the same optimal set of phenotypes and who wins will still hinge on effort, luck, and unknown factors, and suspense will be maintained. For the average, amateur bicycle racer, on the other hand, if they undergo a complete set of tests, they will have a pretty good idea about where in the pack they will be finishing. Won't this spoil the sport? It might! To restore the fun, Faster, Higher, Stronger suggests that athletes shouldn't compete against all comers, but rather against a group of competitors with similar abilities to themselves. Amateur bicycle racing in the US already has four or five categories based on performance to accomplish just this. Would it make more sense to base these categories on tested potential rather than performance? Faster, Higher, Stronger points out that, in one case, we already do that. The specific phenotype used to group virtually all athletic competitions happens to be one of the few where the genetic basis for that phenotype is known. Athletes with the genotype of two X chromosomes have the phenotype of "female", and compete in one set of competitions, and those with a genotype of one X and one Y chromosome have the phenotype of "male" and compete in another. The apparently radical proposal of grouping amateur athletes with similar potential is merely an extension of the centuries old, almost universal practice of having males compete against males and females compete against females. In fact, given a more extensive set of phenotypic classifiers, division into male and female competitions may become a thing of the past; one will compete against athletes of similar potential, be they male or female.

What does any of this have to do with me? As a spectator, a lot; I find all this new science about athletics fascinating and can't wait to see its impact on future editions of the Tour de France. As a participant, however, not so much. As I have oft said, my days of bicycle racing are long past. On top of that, Faster, Higher, Stronger makes another point. One of the optimizations the british cycling teams has started to use to improve their results is to spray their tires with alcohol at the beginning of a race to make them slightly tackier, to provide better traction. About this, the author says "the tiny percentage of improvement I might see in my weekend bike-riding speed by spraying the tires with alcohol pales in comparison to what I could see if I just, you know, trained harder and got myself in better shape." If I want to improve my bicycling, I don't need any advances in the science of training to take me most of the way there, I just need to lose the excess 40 pounds around my middle. Even that's not it, though. Even with the 40 pound handicap I give myself, I have demonstrated I can still complete a 200K brevet. The fact that I did not do so in 2014 has little to do with training or fitness and almost everything to do with having a life which includes 93 year old father who I love very much. As much as I might be looking forward to a particular bike ride, I will sadly pass it by when Dad needs help. But enough of that, can't we talk about something more pleasant?

Mapping My Way

Due to the need for specialized medical treatment, my older son, Michael, and his wife have been living with my wife and I for the past several weeks. Michael happens to be an exceptional computer programmer and more generally, has knack for getting computers to do what he wants them to. He has recently become interested in a company called Mapbox, which provides a more sophisticated alternative to Google Maps for individuals and companies who want to develop custom mapping products. Both to show me the potential of this company as well as to become familiar with their latest programming interface, he undertook the task of taking all the accumulated GPS data from my Garmin 500 cycle computer and displaying it on a map. This is what he came up with:



The above graphic is dynamic; all the controls on this map work. Most importantly, you can zoom in and zoom out using the + and - buttons and can move around on the map with your mouse. Feel free to play around with it, at any time you can go back to the starting version of the picture by reloading this page in your browser. However, for purposes of this blog post, I have created static versions below so that what I am talking about corresponds to what you are looking at.

I have posted maps of my rides before by using the Garmin supplied software, "Garmin Training Center", to "view" a ride in Google Earth. Garmin Training Center has its own built-in map, but it is rather crude. Here is what the Tour de Pink looks like on the built-in Garmin map:

If you view that same ride in Google Earth, you have a lot more options in terms of what you see and what you don't see. I pick a set of options to look as much like what Michael did with Mapbox as possible, and that looks like the following:

So what can Mapbox provide that Google Earth cannot?

1. Mapbox allows me to display ALL of my rides on one map. All three maps show the same Tour de Pink route with its characteristic arrowhead shape, but the Mapbox version also shows the overlap between that ride and my 2013 brevet, and where they all are relative to my regular training rides. This was our original motivation for undertaking this project.
2. Mapbox provides a much greater range of options than Google Earth, both in terms of the map background and in terms of how the ride data is displayed on that background. Michael tried several backgrounds before selecting the one he used, a nighttime-looking satellite image. What he and I like about this background is that it is subtle enough to allow one to clearly see my rides while still allowing one to see the geographical context of where those rides took place. 
3. Also possible because of the flexibility of Mapbox,  Michael was able to include an effect wherein as the same route is ridden again and again, the map displays the route with brighter and brighter lines.

This map is centered just west of the City of Houston, Texas, where I live. The "loop on a stick" image to the left of the picture represent my most recent 200K brevet (the "stick") and the Tour de Pink (the "loop".) They have similarly bright lines because each has been ridden twice, the brevet all in one day, as it is an out and back ride, and the Tour de Pink in two successive years (2013 and 2014.)  If you look closely, you will notice that the stretch where the Tour de Pink and brevet overlap is brighter than the rest of either of these rides. Much more obvious is how bright some of the rides to the right are. The two separated sets of rides represent Terry Hershey/George Bush parks in the middle and the White Oak and Braes Bayou trails to the right. If you zoom in on the active map at the top of the post, you can identify the Rice Track as an extremely bright oval. In addition to these very bright sections, there are many fainter sections representing rides done one or two times. If you zoom all the way in on the bright sections, you can see that they are made up of many close together lines representing individual rides along the same route.

To make the point about "all the rides on the same map" most dramatically, I zoomed out on the map until it included all of the United States:

I have been riding mostly in Texas, but when I would visit family in Washington DC or California, I would oftentimes be able to squeeze in a bike ride. I circled the rides in these three areas so you can see them more easily. If I then zoom in on the rides around my Dad's house in California, you can see my rides there:

Everything up until this point, Michael did without programming (except for some optional data cleanup.) You do not need to be a programmer to do any of this, any computer savvy person could create their own customized display and directions for doing so are given at the end of the post. But Michael wanted to do more. Rather than just layering all the rides together, he wanted to be able to look at single rides, subsets of rides, and what the pattern of my rides looked like over time. This required some programming. The result was the following three part graphic:



The top part of the graphic is a map with all my rides layered on it, similar to the first graphic at the beginning of this post. Just below that is another representation of my rides, as a bar chart with the horizontal (X) axis representing the date the ride was done and the vertical (Y) axis representing the length of that ride. These two parts are connected. If you hold your mouse over a ride on the map, all the days that route was ridden are highlighted in pink on the middle bar chart, and vice versa. At the bottom of the bar chart are two sliders. Only the rides ridden on the dates between the two sliders are shown on the map. This allows one to control which rides are shown.

The third and final part of the graphics are a series of controls on the bottom. By clicking on the words "Houston" or "West University" or "Antioch" (a.k.a. California) or "Washington DC" zooms in on that part of the map. (Because the graphic is limited to a small size in this blog post, it sometimes is necessary to zoom out with the "-" control on the map to see the rides.) Clicking on the words "Last 30 Days", "Last 90 Days", "2013", "2014", and "All Time" display the rides done during those times. (The last one, as you might guess, shows all the rides.) This has the same effect as the sliders below the bar graph. The last two controls, "Build the Map" and "Sliding 30 Day Window"are rather clever animations. The first adds rides to the map, one at a time, in the order they were ridden. The newest addition is highlighted in pink. The second shows all the rides ridden during a 30 day window, and the window slides forward in time. Honestly, playing with this graphic is the best way to understand it.

The above tiny window really does my son's program a disservice. If you have a large screen (and a fairly fast computer), you should really take a moment and play with it all on its own, in all its glory.

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How to Put Garmin Data onto a Mapbox Map

- by Michael Steffen

This blog post from Mapbox explains the basics of importing GPX data into Mapbox Studio and styling it.

This project required a few additional steps:

1. Garmin Training Center exports data as a TCX file, a format that Mapbox Studio doesn't support.  So I converted the Garmin TCX file into the more standard GPX format with the excellent free tool GPSBabel.
2. I wrote a little python script to clean the GPX data by (i) eliminating user-uploaded routes that aren't rides actually ridden -- Garmin mixes these in with the rides data; and (ii) removing segments that were clearly where the GPS had been left on after a ride for the car ride home (identified, in this case, as segments at the end of a ride where the average speed was >30 mph). The script is available here.  It uses Tomo Krajina's very nice gpxpy library. If we had wanted a completely programming-free version, this step could have been skipped.
3. I customized the Mapbox styles in Mapbox Studio, using the Mapbox satellite layer, the Mapbox streets layer, and the rides data. The styles I used are available here. The key to the rides style is that each ride is actually three lines -- a base line in semi-transparent blue, a "heat" overlay in a more transparent white, and then a wide, blurred "glow" overlay, in a yet more transparent white.  As the rides layer on top of each other, they build up the glow effect.

The inspiration for the final interactive graphic came from the "Urban Layers" website; I borrowed both concepts and some code. All the code used by the final graphic is available on Github.

Update

Blogging

My older son, at age four, readying a new blog post. (Or maybe he is just playing on the computer, an original 128K Mac running OS 1.)

It has been more than two weeks since my last post, and there are a couple of reasons for that:

1. Life continues to be complicated. As I mentioned in my last post, my Dad is doing better at the moment, but my older son continues to struggle with his health. Also, it has been exceedingly cold out, at least by the standard of spoiled Houstonians. All of this I find demotivating.
2. Last week, I planned a really cool post based on a project of my convalescing son that shows off my ride data in fun, new ways. However, my son continues to find ways to make it even cooler, so asked me to delay showing off his creation.

Thus, I decided to use this week to provide some miscellaneous updates.

Riding

My friend "Peter" and I, on a recreational ride back in 1966. The photo was taken by a third friend, "James", who was riding as he took it, which probably contributed to the blurriness of the picture.

Despite distractions leading to motivation problems, I have not given up on a brevet on December 13, but my fitness is not where I had hoped it would be. It has been a while since I posted any MAF test results, so I will make up for lost time. The picture below summarizes my MAF test results from the last 11 months.

I have previously discussed MAF tests ad nauseum, so all I will say here is that I am assuming they are a measure of fitness, that higher is better. At the beginning of 2014, I had gone a long time without riding, so I did several weeks where a daily MAF test was my training ride (MAF Test Only). For the first six weeks or so, I improved dramatically on that regimen, but eventually my results plateaued. In response to that plateau, I significantly increased the intensity of my schedule by replacing two MAF test rides with one long ride and one fast ride each week (Long + Brisk). That had the desired effect of effecting improvement beyond the previous plateau but the undesired effect of being exhausting; I could not maintain that schedule. When I backed off, my performance fell, and before I could experiment with a more moderate schedule, I had to take a break in training to visit my Dad in California (Overtrain, Calif). When I returned, I trained with my wife for the 60 mile Tour de Pink, and as a result , I reached the highest level of fitness of the year, a level of fitness I had only previously seen just before riding a brevet. This was very encouraging! Before I could take advantage of that, however, my son became ill and my Dad started falling, causing me to visit California again, but this time for three weeks and with little time to bicycle. Since my return, I have attempted to regain the fitness I had before I left (Claw Back Fitness) with some success but also some setbacks. I have just over three weeks to get ready if I am to ride a brevet this year, we shall see how that goes.

Exploring

Me during my snarky college years. My friend "ER" and I were out on a ride in 1968 or so and decided to take some posed pictures to prove how clever we were.

A while back, I posted about the growing extension to one of my favorite hike and bike trails, the Braes Bayou Trail. That extension keeps growing to the point where I am beginning to be able to guess where it might be going. The extension actually departs from Braes Bayou, which it could have continued to follow, to branch off and follow Keegan's Bayou instead. Looking at the satellite photos on Google Maps, there are existing dirt paths along parts of Keegan's Bayou, and if I imagined the longest possible extension that could be plausibly built, it is the segment in red on the map below.

For perspective, the part of the Braes Bayou trail I most frequently ride is shown in green. Sometimes I mention I ride this same trail to the east, despite some unfinished, rather dangerous dirt sections (that seem like they would be easy to fix.) That segment is shown in blue. As you can see, as appreciated as every bit of new trail is, this extension is not a game changer by any means. It is not that long, nor does it facilitate the crossing any busy highways or other significant barriers. I suspect its only effect will be to make my standard Braes Bayou ride a couple of miles longer, not a bad thing at that.

Home Again

Continuing construction on the extension of the White Oak Bayou trail connecting it to the MKT trail.

I have been back home in Houston for two weeks, after three weeks in California taking care of Dad. He is doing much better now, so I was able to cancel my return trip to California scheduled for last Saturday. In theory, I could have attempted a 200K brevet on that Saturday, given that I was not out of town after all, but I didn't. The reason I didn't is because I am far from recovered from that trip. Interestingly, I firmly believe that the biggest impact to my form¹ was not the interruption in training (though I was unable to do any cycling at all for the last 12 days of that trip) but from the stress of the trip, stress that has pretty much the same impact on me as overtraining. As regular readers know, I have been trying to do a version of Iron Rider's recovery based training. Unlike Iron Rider, I cannot use my resting heart rate as a guide to my state of recovery, so I have been detecting incomplete recovery by the subjective feeling in my legs, sleep disturbances, grumpiness, and susceptibility to minor illnesses. As always, I watch my MAF test scores as well. For the past two weeks, all of these indicators have been sending me exactly the same message; take it easy. So that is what I have been doing. It is not so much that I have not trained enough for a 200K brevet on Saturday, it is that a 200K brevet would not be taking it easy.

I am developing a long term fascination with the hows and whys of fatigue. When I first returned from California, subjectively, I felt pretty good. The day after my evening arrival, I went for a short, easy ride with my wife. The second day, I rode a MAF test. My score on that test (14.9 mph) was much below what I had been doing before the trip (16 mph) but I felt fine, "in need of speed" if anything. As a result, I rode intervals with my son and daughter-in-law on the third day. I then took a rest day, but after that I felt extremely tired, especially in my legs, a tiredness I have not been able to shake. If my exhaustion is due to my trip to California, why did it take a few days to manifest, at least subjectively? Perhaps relevant, my first MAF test was my worst. Although I continue to feel tired, my MAF test results have improved, almost back to where they were before my trip (15.5 mph). Maybe I was tired from the beginning, but the same stress-response that caused that tiredness was masking the symptoms; as the stress subsided, I both started to recover but also felt the effects. As of yet, I have no answer to these questions, but I am bowing to my feelings and taking things easy. As I have been cycling easily around my usual haunts, I have noticed some changes to the Houston cycling infrastructure, including progress on the extension of the White Oak Bayou trail, shown in the picture at the top of this post.

Rice Track

My daughter-in-law completed her first-ever triathlon while I was in California. Before I left, I rode with her on some of her training rides, including some intervals on the Rice Track. Just before I left, workmen moved the barriers around the track as we were riding, forcing us off the track. When I returned, I noticed the barriers were down. I asked one of the regulars if they knew why, and he told me that the workers had moved us off the track so that they could park equipment there, and when they did, they damaged the track. When I looked, sure enough there was a minor, dinner-plate sized indentation in the track, carefully marked (and obscured) by a traffic cone. The track was shut down as part of a dispute between Rice University and the construction company as to who was going to pay to repair the "damage." It was slightly scary using the track without the safety barriers, occasional Rice commuters would drive across the track on the way to their parking spot, but it was usable. That didn't last for long, however. First, Rice University upped the ante by placing barriers across the track to close it for good:

Then, the construction company repaired the dinner-plate-sized damage by replacing almost a quarter of the track:

However, all is well again, the Rice Track has now been returned to full functionality.

Braes Bayou

While waiting for Rice Track to be repaired, I took to riding Braes Bayou. I was most excited to see that the Do Not Enter sign had been removed from the new trail extension so I rode the extension to see what I could see. Unfortunately, at this point, the extension does not go far. Within 50 yards or so, I ran into a work crew completing the next stretch of trail. I will be curious to see how far this extension goes, once finished. This is what it looks like now:

The workmen are closing a short gap in the trail extension. I wonder what is on the other side?

Even more unfortunate than the short extension, at least for me personally, is that when I stopped to photograph the current status of the trail, I dropped my wallet. When I got home and found I was missing it, I was in total panic! I mentally went through the months required to cancel and replace all my credit cards, replace my drivers license, replace all my medical insurance cards, etc. Worse, at that point, I still thought I was going back to California; how would I board a plane without my drivers license? I rushed back to where I thought I had lost it and ask the work crew, who had not seen it. Fortunately, a wonderful (but anonymous) fellow cyclist found it, read my address off my license, and bicycled out of their way to my home to return it. And people say that the bicycle culture is dead!

In retrospect, I wonder if the trail was actually open for business, or if someone just turned the sign around? Look at these two pictures and decide what you think:

There used to be a sign here saying "SIDEWALK CLOSED". It is now gone.

Or is it gone? This is the same location from the other side. Do you think some enthusiastic user just turned the sign around?

I very much appreciate all the cycling infrastructure development going on in Houston, but I wish I better understood why certain projects are selected, and others ignored. Although I hope that the Buffalo Bayou extension shown above results in significant new riding opportunities, knowing what I do about the local geography, I worry that it won't. Towards the other end of Braes Bayou, there is an opportunity to significantly improve the riding experience, and for many riders, offer a much longer ride, at what I would have thought would be very low cost. (I have noted this opportunity before.) There are two dirt gaps in this trail as it passes by Texas Medical Center and Herman Park. One is a very short and very steep hill that might be difficult to fix economically. The other is longer and, to me, more problematic. This second stretch seems trivial to fix. While the Rice Track was being fixed, I decided to explore it, to monitor its status. When this stretch of trail was first opened, the dirt stretch was quite manageable. However, with use, it has become deeply rutted, make it difficult for me and impossible for my wife to navigate. In my most recent traversal, I noticed that someone had dumped gravel in the ruts, which helped a little. However, as the dirt transitions to a paved stretch, there is a major curb. I was approaching this curb riding into the rising sun, and noticed it only at the last second. Had I not noticed it, I could have had quite a spill. Why not just pave this stretch, I wonder? This is what the curb looks like:

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1) Form results from the opposite effects of fitness (how well trained I am) and fatigue (how tired I am.) Form is defined as my actual ability to ride, all things considered, at that point in time.