October Marathon Challenge! Dear Team Charity Miles, We love the fall! The changing leaves. The crisp air! The apple cider donuts! No better time to get outside and change the world! Plus, we know that lots of you are training for fall marathons like Chicago and NYC. So we think it’s a perfect time to innaugurate our first #Marathon challenge. Do at least one Charity Mile per day for 26 days in the month of October and you’ll win the T-Shirt shown below. We’ll also give some away to people who tweet out the #Marathon hashtag. So keep tweeting it You’re all doing great so far. Charity Miles is really catching on, and we’re starting a movement! Thank you for all of your enthusiasm! All the best, Gene #EveryMileMatters

So if you are interested in joining in download the app (iOS or Android) and get moving!

I went to my first bike race this past Saturday. The Cherry-Roubaix Criterium race. Much fun was had by all, including me. I also volunteered as a Course Marshal at the race which was kind of neat too. (Volunteering is big with us middle-age folks, so I hear) I’ve actually never been to a race of any sort before. I was going to be adding running races to my activity plan this year but it didn’t work out. (more on that in an upcoming post) I will definitely be attending and volunteering at more races/ events in the future. I also hope to add running and riding in races as soon as I can. I uploaded some pictures and a couple of short video clips of the race to the Facebook page for my blog. You can see them here. (If you’d be kind enough to “like” my FB page I’d appreciate it!)

I’ve been wanting to link to this article on Bicycling Magazine‘s website but I decided to wait until they fixed the link to the map data for the Michigan ride. (and a little pat on my own back for being the one to catch that there was an error in the first place.) Now that is is fixed – check this out!

“MICHIGAN
Old Mission
The fingerlike peninsula of Old Mission, which juts into Grand Traverse Bay north of Traverse City, is 16 miles long and narrows in places to just one mile wide. The loop around this sliver of land passes cherry orchards, vineyards, and stately homes. For maximum variety, climb up Center Road for 360-degree views, then coast the shoreline flats. Don’t miss Bowers Harbor, home of the Jolly Pumpkin Brewery and its Belgian ales.”

-From Bicycling.com

For the rest of the Article click here.

Hot on the heels of Bicycling picking Traverse City as one of the Six Best Cities for a Bike Vacation, having  them pick a ride right here in the Traverse City area as the best ride in the state is quite a coup.

From Governing.com (Article by Alex Marshall)

“At a street corner somewhere, a pedestrian, a bicyclist and an automobile driver enter an intersection. The person in the car turns and hits either the person on foot or the person on the bike, killing her.

Question: What happens to the driver? In most states, nothing. Unless the driver is drunk or can be shown to be speeding or driving recklessly, it is, in the words of Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, “a free kill.” The driver walks away without criminal charges, civil liabilities or administrative penalties.

This is crazy.”

Read the article here. Do you think that City/State/Federal Governments could do more to protect people?  Feel free to share your thoughts!

Endomondo

The new face of Endomondo (8.0)

My primary app is, and has been for quite some time, Endomondo. It didn’t used to be particularly pretty but its accuracy was as good or better than any of the other and it gave me my mile splits, a decent web interface to track my workouts and let me easily export my workout data so that I could use it elsewhere. (more on that later) Beyond that I didn’t really care. It does more but that was all I was concerned with.

Endomondo got a big update yesterday which makes me even more crazy about it. (Its also what gave me the idea to write this post in the first place.) It still does all of the same things that it did before but the interface is vastly improved and they added some things that I really like. First among the changes (for me) is the ability, much like a dedicate GPS device, to configure what information you want shown on the main screen. The app will show 4 of the 11 different metrics that are available (speed, pace, average speed, average pace, calories, heart rate, average heart rate, goal and cadence) on screen at one time in whichever order and combination that you choose. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive review so I am skipping over a number of functions that Endomondo also does very well because I simply don’t use all of its bells and whistles but I will say that for tracking my running and cycling (again, more later) I think that is the best all around option on the market currently.

Strava

I’ve been using Strava for the past couple of weeks when I ride my bike. I’m still undecided as to if I will continue or not. The app itself works very well for tracking my rides but that wasn’t my main reason for downloading it. I was more interested in the social aspects of using Strava. I am not a competitive cyclist of any sort at the moment so it is thus less compelling as that is the focus of the “social network” part of Strava. I will also say that I am also not really taken with the interface. Much as the original Endomondo interface, it works perfectly well but seems inelegant. Strava can be used to track activities other than cycling but I far prefer Endomondo for my running. I may very well drop Strava but not because it is lacking in some way just because I prefer Endomondo.

Zombies, Run!

This is more game than fitness app but it has some of that rolled into it too. Zombies, Run! is an interactive story game set in a post zombie apocalypse world where you are a “runner” or messenger/gofer/pedestrian rescue person/etc. for a small outpost. The story segments are fed to you in between songs from your phone. I am not particularly impressed with the accuracy of the GPS tracking but the story is fun and compelling and makes the miles roll by a little easier. I typically run it along with Endomondo. (Zombies, Run! for fun and Endomondo for tracking)

dailymile

Dailymile is my exercise related social network of choice. If you want a place to keep all of your hard work and get tons of positive reinforcement then this is the site for you. I record my workouts with either Endomondo or Strava, export the GPS files from them and then upload them to dailymile.

I will be playing with the recently updated mapmyrun/ride and the just released for Android Nike+ apps in the near future. I just can’t resist trying new toys.

I do nearly all of my running and cycling on these trails so I was excited to hear, earlier in the year, that a large unimproved section of the Leelanau Trail was going to be paved. I was particularly eager for it to be done because while I like running on all sorts of surfaces, my bike has skinny tires and only really works on pavement. 

Yesterday was the first day since the paving was completed that I had a chance to get out and ride that was cool enough for me to not spontaneously burst into flames.

I have to say that the ride was lovely. Visitors and residents in my rather pretty part of the world have yet another route to explore to enjoy the scenery. Here are just a few of the sights from my ride.

A cherry stand. Sadly not open for business. (I assume having to do with the cherry crop being ruined by the crazy weather this year)

A cool drink of water and a sit down. I took advantage of the drink but was too eager to explore the rest of the new trail to sit down.

I almost rode past this without even seeing it. Next time I may have to take a closer look.

What’s this? A bridge??

Cool bridge over the road! Yes, I’m a complete dork, I got excited. I’ve never ridden my bike over traffic before.

The prize at the end of the trail!

The charming little village that you see in the photo above is Suttons Bay. I think I will be making this ride a regular thing. I got in about 25 miles on my bike, got to see some beautiful scenery plus Suttons Bay has a number of good restaurants to add some extra incentive. Since this is already sounding a bit like a tourist brochure… Check out traversecity.com for more information on all of the cool stuff to do around these parts. The Grand Traverse/Leelanau Counties Area has gotten a number of accolades recently.  (I borrowed the following image from there.)

When I was 14 I got my first job. I was a dishwasher in a Polish restaurant that sadly no longer exists. (Great people and food!) One of the things that went along with me getting this job was that my parents got me a bike. My very first grown-up bike. (I was already over 6 foot at that point) For any bike geeks out there – it’s a 1986 Fuji Allegro 27″ Frame (equivalent to a 61cm) with 27″x1-1/8″ wheels. It’s actually a little bit too tall for me. (I didn’t keep growing as much as we thought I might have)

I got it both for getting myself back and forth from work and because I had hoped to use it for some touring riding with a friend. It did admirable duty for the first thing but I never got a chance to try it out for the second. After being used quite a bit from when I got it until I turned 16, my bike entered a period of dormancy. For a while, I barely remembered that I owned a bike, let alone actually rode it. What got me riding again was an irresistible force for a teen-aged me, a girl.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember her name anymore, but the spring and summer after I turned 17 and moved from my home town of Gaylord, MI to the somewhat larger Traverse City, MI, I rode hundreds of miles on my bike with her.

She was much more adept on a bike than I was and in better shape than me. I therefore was unprepared for the suffering I had ahead of me. To get to and from her house I had to ride about 4½ miles up and over a far larger hill than I had ever climbed on a bike. After our first ride, which I recall as being long, I went home completely wiped out. I woke up in the middle of the night in pain. My legs were so tight that I could barely move. I dragged myself into the bathroom, climbed into the tub and eventually fell asleep again in icy cold water. Things got better after that and after a couple of weeks I actually got to the point where I enjoyed my warm up climb. This went on through the summer and early fall until we drifted apart. The following summer I continued riding some on my own but I never got back to the kind of mileage that I had the year before. After that my bike went into storage.

More than 20 years later my dad mentioned to me that he had run across my bike, which was stored in his pole barn, and wondered if I would like to dig it out and do something with it. I couldn’t resist seeing what I could make of it.

As you can see, it definitely needed a fair bit of work. I mounted a new rear dérailleur, replaced the cables, put in new tubes and replaced a couple of spokes that had gotten broken. I had to get a new seat and post as the old ones had disappeared at some point and put on new bar tape. A tune-up and lubrication later, my old friend was roadworthy again.

25+ years after I got it, I rolled along on my bike feeling free again. (and a little scared at first, I hadn’t ridden a bike in over 20 years!) I started slowly. First 4 miles, then 6, then 8, then 12, then 17, and most recently 30. I was so pleased to see that it comes back far easier than I had expected. I’m sure the improved physical condition that I’ve gained from running has been a great help with that, but there is also a feeling of getting back something that I had lost that has spurred me on.

I’m not certain that my old friend will be able carry me everywhere that I now hope to go with my cycling, but it got me on the trail again to something that I can definitely see being a constant for me going forward. Plus, now all I have to do is figure out swimming beyond the doggy paddle and maybe I can add triathlete to my resume as an athlete!