The Blasphemous Bicycler

I ran out of cash today, and rode the Diamondback the entire 1.25 miles to the ATM and back. So, that’s 2.5 miles. I rode 5 miles yesterday, and I commuted once this week (12.3) miles.19.8 miles for the week.

One my buddies finally got tired of hearing all my brouhaha about how great bikes are, and decided to get one for himself. I drove out to his neck of the woods (about 100 miles), and we went to the LBS. He and his wife tried out several bikes before settling on the Trek 7200Once we were all done, we went for a ride to his sister’s house (about 5 miles away). I rode one of the 7200s. It was way to small for me (I ride a 25″ and this was a 17.5″), but it got me there. I was kind of surprised to see Trek speccing SRAM gripshifters and Tektro brakes. I thought Trek was all about Shimano.

All in all, I think the 7200 is a pretty good bike for people who are just getting into cycling. They are pretty cheap ($400.00), and have the comfy, upright position and low gearing of a mountain bike, with easy rolling 700c road tires. I’m not too sure about the suspension fork, but if you don’t like it, the 7200fx line is pretty much the exact same bike with a rigid front end. The 7200 has eyelets for fenders, but not a whole lot of clearance if you want to run fat tires with them.

Genesis isn’t exactly what I’d call a bobish store, but they do carry SKS fenders, wald baskets, and I saw one bike with a b17 on it.

It was one year ago today that I dug the old Diamondback out of the shed, threw a pack of smokes in the seat pack, and went for a 14 mile ride.My stated goal was to get in shape by quitting smoking, and riding my bike 100 miles. My longest ride so far was 41 miles, and I haven’t had a smoke in 49 weeks.It would take a serious butt-load of self-deception to think of myself as “in shape” today, but I can ride 41 miles without hacking up a lung now, and that’s something I couldn’t do a year ago.Many thanks to all if you, my Jihadis, and many thanks to the pagan elder gods, for a successful year.

After two trips to the eye doctor, I now have spiffy new glasses.I am still plugging away trying to learn Python for my program. I was digging around on sourceforge, looking to see if anyone had done anything similar. I found several projects that were started, but not finished (as is typical on SourceForge). I also found a project called sportstracker that records endurance exercises (cycling, running, etc), but not weight lifting. It looks like a neat project, and it will run on Windows. Sadly, it depends on Mono/.NET which is an evil I’m not sure I can live with.

So, I will press onward, learning XML, Python, and GTK+ at my own slow pace.

Here is my version of the PyGTK “Hello World” program:

Ride In:

I broke my glasses over the weekend, and my eyes are too funky to put contacts in immediately after waking up. So, until I get some replacement glasses, I’m riding blind. I pretty much have to, because I can’t legally drive without my glasses.

We got one hell of a thunderstorm around 3:00 this morning, so it was still good and sloppy out at 6:00 for my ride in. My computer wasn’t working today, and I didn’t feel like getting off the bike to screw with it, so I have no statistics for today.

Distance: 5.8 miles

Ride Home:

I got my contacts in. Having periferal vision is really handy! I use one of those clip-on rear-view mirrors that sticks on my helmet, and it was much more useful with my contacts in.

I got my computer back in effect. The thermometer read 110F on the ride home. Riding is not even any fun when it’s that hot out.

Elapsed Time: 00:34:03
Max Speed: 22.4mph
Average Speed: 11.4mph
Distance: 6.5 miles

Total:

12.3 miles