Tour De Vitesse
Trying something new can give you a pretty clear perspective on how good professionals really are.
I've been riding the bike now for a week and a half. I've covered about 70 miles (on days I take it out, I usually cover between 9-12 miles). I know this because I have a small computer (I say "computer" in technical terms only, in truth it looks more like a stopwatch than a Dell) which gives me my current speed and distance covered. My fastest speed so far has been 33mph, which, if you've even clocked yourself on a bike, seems pretty darn fast. This was going down a relatively small hill on my highest gear (I haven't found any large hills in the city yet-- this isn't exactly San Francisco).
Wednesday's Tour de France stage was 113.7 miles. The riders finished in a pack, clocking in at 3 hours and 46 minutes. Saving you the math, that averages to be 30.2mph. Average. Over the distance of four full marathons (and then some).
Now, I realize comparing myself to the Tour riders is a little lofty. I mean, I wouldn't take one week of guitar lessons and expect to compete with Steve Vai. They have better training, better equipment, and they don't have to worry about being broadsided by a Subaru coming out of the Mobil station without looking (asshole). But still. That's impressive.
I'll keep working at it though. By which I mean, I'll try to find a bigger hill.
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On a completely different note, you'll probably notice how I tweaked the blog's page design. Nothing Earth-shattering, but I think it adds a nice aesthetic value. The funny part is, I used an HTML editor on my PC but forgot to comment out the part of the code that sends the page load to my hit tracker (in non-geek: I have a counter set up to see how many hits the page gets per day, so every time I previewed the page on my PC, the counter thought it was another hit from the web). And since I was tinkering with the colors in hex (non-geek: hexidecimal code gives you exactly 16,777,216 unique color combinations), I ended up doubling my previous per-day page load record.
To which I simply say, "D'oh."
posted by BJC @ 9:05 PM
Your thoughts (2 so far)
2 Comments:
Le Tour de France is an amazing race, I just discovered it a couple years ago and was surprised by how interesting it was to watch 189 guys ride their bikes.
i get winded running to the fridge between innings...
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