Bicycling for Distraction

[hrj]

Because I wanted to avoid media stress as much as possible, and because I unexpectedly didn't have a podcast recording session Saturday morning, I finally achieved the next step in my "let's bicycle on weekends" program, which was to take the Iron Horse trail all the way down to Dublin. Well, sort of. I usually start my bike route along the Contra Costa Canal trail (which adds some additional distance) rather than picking up the Iron Horse Trail at the start up by Hwy 4. And somehow I missed the start of the trail after ducking under 680 at Walnut Creek, so I took the bike lane on Danville Blvd as far as Danville (where I had lunch) then picked up the official Iron Horse route from there.

My usual route down to Walnut Creek is old hat at this point, though I was feeling more peckish than usual and stopped for coffee in Pleasant Hill. That helped in deciding to go the extra bit down to Danville (which has some really great places to eat). I'd forgotten (or not previously noticed) how the leg form Walnut Creek to Danville is a steady upgrade. The previous times I've done it, I was on the actual Iron Horse Trail, which has a lot of stops for cross-streets, so I suspect there were more distractions. Over lunch, I checked the maps and mileage and confirmed that it was (substantially) shorter to continue on to Dublin BART than to return the way I came. (Although, of course, the long-term goal is to do a round trip to Dublin.) Past Danville the trail has no grade up to Bishop Ranch and then starts a slow but steady down-slope to Dublin. Important to remember.

There's no point to continuing on past Dublin since the trails peter out around the Alameda Fairgrounds. But if I want to continue extending the ride incrementally, there's always the choice to go to Dublin then back to Walnut Creek and BART back to Concord from there. Since I usually break my ride substantially at least twice, I don't have a good time estimate for the whole thing. Mileage estimate (very rough) is about 8 miles from my house to downtown Walnut Creek, another 8 miles to Danville, then 10 miles to Dublin. But all very flat, nothing in the way of hills at all, just some gentle grades.

Comments

[kareina]

You don't have one of those little bike computers that counts the number of times your wheels turn and converts that to distance while also recording how many minutes you were pedalling? I am kind of surprised at that, with your tendency towards keeping good records, I would have thought you would have gotten one of them years ago.

[hrj]

Actually, I have an app on my iPhone that tracks my location and elevation** and plots it out in all manner of ways, as well as comparing it to all previous logs of the same route. But that requires me to remember to turn it on when I leave the house. I lost all my stored data during some iOS upgrade (grrrrr) but I've used it a lot when I was first exploring the bike paths after moving to Concord. I think the only route I currently have logged was my ride across the bridge out to Treasure Island.

**My confidence in the accuracy of the elevation log was undermined back when I was using it to track dragonboat practices. You can guess just how my confidence in the elevation tracking was undermined when you consider what sort of elevation changes are even possible in a boat.

[kareina]

Indeed, I can! Reminds me of the tourists who would get off of the cruise ships in Juneau, gaze up in awe at the mountains, and, while standing on the docks ask "what elevation are we at here?"

I once had such an app on my phone to keep track of walks, but it used so much battery, and, occasionally, showed really weird routes (no, I did not walk back and forth in a random pattern across that open body of water before it froze) that I uninstalled it. For another year or so I still manually entered the walks into their web-based interface on the computer. This lasted till I got behind when we travelled to Germany for the Known World Dance event a few years back. Around that time the web interface changed somehow, making it harder to click on the map to enter in the route, and between both of those factors I just quit using it. It was really fun to see the graphs and data, but I don't feel I have the time/energy to maintain it.

I wish I still had that little contraption for the bike, it was very nice to see how fast I was pedalling, and to know exactly how many minutes I actually spent pedalling as well as how far. Sadly someone stole it off of the trike, leaving the attachment point and wires to the magnet that actually senses the wheel there, meaning that it wouldn't even be useful for whomever took it. However, I haven't had enough motivation to go shopping for a new one since.