Cold, Dark, Wet, and Flat

Today was my first truly cold ride of the season, 45 degrees with an effective temperature of 38F with the wind chill. I reluctantly broke out my cold weather kit which consists of wool socks and shoes instead of my Keen SPD sandals, full-finger gloves, running tights, a neoprene jacket, and new for this year - Under Armour "cold gear".

I bought the Under Armour in hopes that it would replace a bulky wool sweater from the Goodwill store that I used to wear under the jacket. What I learned today is that while UnderArmour is great at 50 degrees, it's insufficient at a wind chill of 38.

Riding in the cold isn't that bad; in some ways, it's better than riding in August. If you get too warm, you can open your jacket and cool off. You drink less water in the cold, and you don't get sweaty. There's no gnats. The trail isn't nearly as crowded when it's cold. Militants who obsess about their appearance (and followers of Rule 82), however, can find it difficult to ride in the cold.

I can ride in the cold, I can ride in the dark, and I can ride when it's wet; I'm just not wild about the combinations - cold and wet, dark and cold, etc.

When I was in my 30's, I used to say: Cold, Dark, Wet; I can do any two out of three. Back in the day my definition of "what sucks" was having all three factors simultaneously.

Now in my 50's, my definition of "what sucks" is any two at the same time. Today I added a new factor to the formula: Flat, as in flat tire.

I had ridden 18 miles of my planned 26 when the bike started handling differently and I realized I had a leak in the rear tire (my third flat this year). It was an eight mile ride to get back to my car, and the sun would set in +40 minutes. I had planned the ride to end at sundown, and now the flat tire presented a misadventure.

I was about to be Cold, Dark, and Flat, and I realized that would suck every bit as much as much as being Cold, Dark, and Wet. I didn't have a light with me, and I was leery of changing the tire for two reasons - I'd get really cold when I stopped riding, and the time spent changing the flat would move the rest of the ride into darkness. My lights, of course, were back in the car.

Fortunately, I had a potential silver bullet. I carry a gas-powered tire inflator, which usually runs on 25-gram CO2 canisters. Buried in my bag I also had a can of "Big Air", a 40-gram CO2 cartridge that I'd bought at REI. I had resisted the thought of spending $8 on a mondo CO2 cartridge but I thought that someday it might come in handy.

Today was that day. Three times the tire went flat as I rode back to my car, and three times the can of Big Air reinflated my tire. The $8 price was a bargain.

I got back to my car at 6pm, about 10 minutes before sunset. It was a good ride, and it showed me I wasn't really prepared for a flat tire in cold weather when it was dark out. It also gave me a new definition of what sucks: any two of {Cold, Dark, Wet, Flat}

Tomorrow I've got a few errands to run while waiting for the temperatures to rise before I ride: I've got a flat to fix, and I think I'm going to REI to get a new can of Big Air and maybe some wool.

Touring Pittsburgh via Bike Trails

The perfect time for a downtown bike ride is during an out-of-town Steelers game. Enough people are watching the game to reduce traffic and any crowds, and there's plenty of open parking spots at the trailhead. Sunday afternoon the Parkway West was gridlocked so instead of riding the Montour Trail, I rode my bike on the city trail system and tried to map the various routes with my GPS.

I started at the south end of the Eliza Furnace Trail (aka the Jail Trail), riding north. There's a well-marked detour where the trail has been excavated at Bates Street. I took the Jail Trail past the Golden Triangle bike shop to the Smithfield Street bridge. Eventually there's going to be bike access down to the Mon Wharf trail and into Point State Park, but that's a next-year project so I ended up riding in a few blocks of street traffic to Point State Park.

From Point State Park you can ride over the Ft. Duquesne Bridge (excellent bike ramps) and join the North Shore Trail eastbound along the Allegheny River. That leads you to the recently opened replacement trail on concrete piers over the river (photo below), and then to the Millvale Trail.



On the way back, you can take a spur onto the Washington's Landing Trail, which is very nice but maybe a bit overgrown - it's a pretty narrow trail with reduced sight lines.

Back along the Allegheny River to the stadiums and then north along the Ohio River via the Chateau Trail. This was my first ride along the Chateau Trail, running from the Casino to the Penitentiary. It's a very nice trail, there's both green sections and industrial sections, and the Penitentiary with its concertina wire is an impressive sight. The trail ends just short of the McKees Rocks Bridge.

South to the stadiums again, and then my favorite bike-mile in downtown Pittsburgh: across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, a brief touch down in Point State Park, and then across the Ft. Pitt bridge to the west bank of the Monongahela. It's an incredible bit of bike infrastructure, you go from the North Side to Downtown to Station Square in a matter of minutes.

Then it's the Station Square Trail, to the South Side Trail. This is as nice a trail segment as you'll find anywhere. It does seem like the trail isn't clearly marked between REI and the Hot Metal Bridge, resulting in people riding their bikes on the sidewalk in front of American Eagle's corporate buildings, to their corporate chagrin. The sidewalk has signs "sidewalk closed to bicycles" and "use the tunnel park", but it's not obvious what the Tunnel Park is. Instead of telling people don't ride here, I think it would be more effective if they told people "you should ride over there", and mark the bike lane so clearly that any Yinzer Yahoo could identify it.

Tunnel Park is the green median strip shown in the photo below. It's called Tunnel Park because there's a railroad tunnel underneath the grass, but I don't know how a transient bicyclist could possibly know that. It's completely unmarked.



Next year (2011) the railroad is going to dig up Tunnel Park in order to raise the roof of the underground tunnel by 18 inches, permitting the track to carry double-height train cars. By 2015 the Panama Canal is going to be widened to accommodate bigger ships, and the double-height trains are intended to carry the anticipated increase in freight.

Continued south on the South Side Trail to the Baldwin Borough Trail, which terminates just short of the Glenwood Bridge. This week's announcement of an agreement with Sandcastle and the railroad means that on 11/11/11 (so they say) the Steel Valley Trail will extend further south to Duquesne, and then all the way to DC.

Back north to the Hot Metal Bridge, cross the Monongahela, right turn on the Jail Trail to the trailhead, and then around the corner on Swinburne Street to the Panther Hollow Trail. (The image on the right shows the transition.) I've never been on the Panther Hollow trail in daylight before, and I was really impressed at how much green space there is so close to a congested urban area. Reverse course at the top, back to the trailhead.

Total distance is 32 miles, takes about two-and-a-half hours.

It's a world-class trail system, right here in Pittsburgh. The trails show a very different view of Pittsburgh than you'd usually see, and you see all sorts of 'Burghers out there - kids and students and seniors, runners and rollerbladers. It's really remarkable that people like Mayor Murphy and Linda Boxx were able to build these trails given the hodgepodge of municipalities, the Yinzer resistance to change, and the nature of long-term projects.

If you'd like a really great map of the downtown trail system, email Friends of the Riverfront at friends@FriendsOfTheRiverfront.org and they'll snail-mail you a very nice dead-tree map.

Here's a GPS record of the ride made with a Garmin 76CSx.

Living Two Dreams and Visiting the Burgh

Seth Werkheiser is a Web 2.0 kind of guy. He's developed several websites/blogs that were commercial successes - and then sold them. He's done significant work as a contractor for AOL-Music. He does a lot of work as a contractor (Web 2.0 generally doesn't involve Employees 2.0) for noisecreep.com/. He was living the geek dream - or at least, one version of the geek dream.

One of the key early tenets of web work is that location doesn't matter. The theory is, you can work from anywhere. (The reality is, to get the work you need to be in the right place, but you can do the work from anywhere.) This last summer he decided he'd had enough of Brooklyn winters, and that he was approaching the point where his possessions were owning him. So he sold or disposed of almost all of his stuff, left his Brooklyn apartment, and hit the road on his bicycle. His plan is to eventually ride to the South, stay with friends along the route, and work with whatever WiFi he can find. Now he's living two dreams.

(I should point out that the old saw of 'location doesn't matter' is starting to fade with the emphasis of the social web, the ubiquity of mobile web devices, and location-driven services. There's even a conference: Where 2.0.)

This is a photo of all of Seth's possessions when he started his adventure:


Seth rode west out of Brooklyn NY in July, spent some time living with friends all across Pennsylvania, and arrived this week in Pittsburgh. Being a Web 2.0 kind of guy, he's blogging the dream, and his adventures are on Facebook and Twitter as well.

There's a subtle line between a "nomadic bike geek" (as he describes himself) and a homeless guy with a Schwinn, but he's working, contributing, paying his bills and paying his taxes. (His tax return would be interesting - what state does he file in?)

His transient lifestyle, while romantic and intriguing, probably fails the test of Kant's categorical imperative - Would it be OK if everybody did it? It probably wouldn't work because then we'd all be homeless and have nobody to stay with. It doesn't scale. But it's fascinating to see one person working it.

Here's his blog: thebikenerd.com. I'm especially interested in hearing his "out of the box" perspective on Pittsburgh.

(This may be the perfect trifecta for this blog- Burgh, bikes, bytes all in one.)

Fortuitious Serendipity

Headline: Onorato announces resolution of Sandcastle-USX bike trail impasse.

According to the Post Gazette, gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato held a press conference to announce that a mutually amicable solution had been found to the vexing problem of advancing the Pittsburgh-DC bike trail from the Waterfront, through Sandcastle and some USX railroad property, and connecting to the Baldwin-Southside trail at the Glenwood Bridge.



Snarky blogger suspicions about the timing of this long-pending announcement in close proximity to election day notwithstanding, if they did the work then I'm OK with them timing the event to meet their political agenda.

The Curse by Josh Ritter

The general focus of this blog is "Burgh, bikes, bytes" and before I pursue what might seem an off-focus topic, I'd like to establish its firm provenance.

When I'm riding my bike I often listen to music, and IMO there's no better music in Pittsburgh than WYEP. Listening to WYEP while riding my bike is, for me, truly quality time and effective multitasking. So this post is a bike-n-Burgh thing.

While riding my bike over the weekend I heard WYEP play "The Curse" by Josh Ritter. It's an exceptional song that tells a story of relationships, discovery, love, change, and loss - definitely not a pop music song, which is why I heard it on WYEP and not WDVE. The song is about an archeologist and the mummy she discovers.

Liam Hurley (the drummer in Ritter's band) is also an accomplished puppeteer who created a video based on Ritter's song. (NPR story about the video). Hurley uses a new genre (music video) to present an traditional technique (puppetry) to tell an ancient story (The Mummy).

Without further ado, here's Liam Hurley's music video of Josh Ritter's The Curse: