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I
do a fair amount of bicycling, both touring and short road rides.
My annual mileage totals are irregular; some years I've done more than
6,000 miles, and some years just a couple of hundred. Those
slacker years happen when I'm a little bored with riding, and take up a
running regimen instead. There's not really much to say about road riding. Wherever I've lived, I've generally had a standard ride on a standard route for exercise, supplemented with random longer rides on weekends. When I was in New York, I would do twenty miles in Central Park (that's three loops around, plus the distance back and forth to where I lived on Riverside Drive) a few times a week in the summer, when there was enough light to get the mileage in before leaving for work. In Oakland, I had a fixed twenty mile ride up into the hills, along Skyline Drive, then back down to where I lived near Lake Merritt. In San Francisco, my standard ride is to go over through the Presidio, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and up along the Sausalito bike path to Blythedale Road and back, for a total of 25 miles. I've done a fair amount of touring on a standard touring bike. This involves carrying camping supplies, clothing, and sometimes food in panniers, front and rear - although on some rides I've stayed in motels a lot - and I have a fixed list of what I carry to keep things simple. I've done two trans-US rides, the first in 1990, with my friend Chris, from New York to San Diego, and the second, in 2005, alone from San Francisco to New York. They were very different experiences; partly because the routes were different but mostly because travelling alone is not the same as travelling with friends. |