LAF Century Austin!

Greetings!
I just can't seem to get to blogging regularly. Right now I am taking a much needed vacation from the store. Since I last blogged there has been a lot of stuff going on that is noteworthy including our "Women On Wheels" cycling work shops, the BMX Jump Jam with Dave Mirra, more "Yield to Fun" rides, and lots of other cool stuff, but would take up way too much time for you to take it all in.
So I am on my way to Austin Texas right now to participate in the Austin version of the LAF Century Challenge. I did the Philly version back in August but could only complete 70 miles after cramping up to the point where I could not pedal any more. But as one of the top fundraisers on my Pharma Fliers team (sponsored by the cancer drug “Eloxatin”), I qualified to get on the Austin team.
I picked Steve up from his house at 6:15 am. Our first stop at 6:20 was Smartworld coffee. I knew we were off to a good start when I saw that one of the girls working there uses a Van Dessel cyclocross bike to commute to work from Madison. Plus, they had fresh chocolate and almond croissants right from the oven. The trip has just been getting better from there!
Every person that I tell “I am driving to Austin” says “Are you crazy? Why?”
Well, let me explain. First, this is my vacation. I am using the LAF century ride in Austin as the anchor point for my time off but the reality is that I love to drive and see stuff. Plus, as I am discovering, Steve seems to know about all these crazy good places to eat. He says he has been seeing them a show called best eats in America or something like that. Sure enough I had some great Italian food at a 1960’s drive in (believe it or not-see photo) in Knoxville called the Pizza Palace.











See Day 2 for more!

Yield To Fun Video

Here is our first Yield To Fun ride in Morristown. Folks in cars and on the street did not know quite what to make of it all. We did manage to get one woman to consider riding her bike the seven miles to her job. One small victory-One less car on the road. Sweet.

Yield To Fun!

It's the simplest thing to do! Yield to fun. If you have a bike ride it. Enjoy yourself. Save some cash, improve your health, ease traffic congestion, save the planet. When you are not on your bike and driving in your car and you see someone else on their bike, slow down a little and pass them carefully. Give other riders some space. You know, yield to someone else having fun! And for goodness sake, when you hear a non-biking person rattling on about what a pain in the ass cyclists are, ask them to think about some things. Like, they are surrounded by a ton of steel and can very easily kill someone on a bike if they are careless. Remind them that a person on a bicycle is not really slowing them down that much, certainly no more than all of the other traffic congestion slowdowns they will encounter. Remind them that a person on a bike means one less car on the road and that improves their own life. How? Less congestion and less carbon dioxide in the air. Hopefully the non-biking public will remember that the planet is currently choking to death on CO2 and that we will all need to do things to change the course we are currently on. Maybe they will get it, maybe they won't. But we have to try. If you want to learn more about global warming and traffic congestion, look in the links bar for Environmental Defense and Commuters choice. Use your bike to make the world a better place and just yield to fun!

Global Warming Blah, Blah, Blah

So my brother and I were just sitting around talking about the global warming thing. There are lots of scary things being written, broadcast, talked about and on and on. One particular story I recently saw says that British researchers have surmised that the ice caps are melting faster than first thought. It could be that global warming is going to be a bigger problem for us sooner than we thought. The thing that is irritating me is that politicians and big business interests are standing in the way of anything being done quickly enough to avert the coming disaster. Make no mistake, just about everyone agrees the global warming thing is really happening. The thing everyone is disagreeing on is what the real impact and consequences are going to be and how to avert them. The numbers being thrown around about reducing co2 emissions 20% by 2050 seems to me like it will be too little too late. I think we could do it sooner if people would get a little creative and quit being so lazy and selfish. I mean honestly, does anyone really need to be burning gas at unprecedented levels driving energy guzzling vehicles like the Hummer? Yeah I know, "this is America pal, we can do anything we want if we can afford it". But just because you can afford it doesn't mean it is a good idea!
Okay, so lots of people can't use a bicycle to get to their job, or to the store, or whatever, but there are plenty of people who can! Here are some facts I picked up doing a little research:
The average American car owner currently burns 600 gallons of gas per year. The burning of the gas creates 12,000 pounds of Co2! There are about 232 million cars currently registered. Let's see, that's 2 trillion, 784 billion, pounds of Co2. That's a lot! Come on people, we need to do something about this. If we wait for political leadership on this your grandchildren will be buying beach front property in Pennsylvania and wondering how they are going to get food!
By the way, did you know that while the US makes up only 5% of the worlds population, we create 43% of the emissions?
While there will undoubtedly be technological solutions being created along the way, we are going to run out of time before they can get the job done. One of the answers currently available to us is to simply using less fossil fuel now. Right this minute. Don't wait for someone else to do it. You do it. Stop relying on your car and start thinking of your bicycle as more than just a recreational toy. If we could all learn to reduce our fuel consumption by 20% that would go a long way towards solving the problem. Imagine it. Regular Americans taking things in to their own hands and solving the problem in spite of the corporate pirates who are willing to mortgage the future of our planet for profits this quarter.

Here comes Spring!

Wow, September was my last entry. Winter bites. So, on the down side I didn't get any where near my mileage goal. In fact, since the Livestrong century I have ridden only about 60 miles! Oh well, so much for goals. On the plus side, I have been very busy getting the store ready for the new season, working on lots of new programs, getting more invloved in advocacy, sold my house... Yeah, I have been pretty maxed out. I just got a tasty new Mac book lap top so I will be spending little more of my free time working on my blog. Lot's of cool stuff going including a recent trip to Washington DC with the league of American Bicyclists to lobby for issues concerning all of us cyclists. I will be talking a lot about some of these things in the near future. In the meantime, the weather is getting nice so get out on your bikes! Use them for fun, use them for transportation, just use them!

Armstrong Foundation Century

I got reminded again by a friend that I should update my blog more often. Time flies when you're having fun. Since my last post I have been a busy, busy bee!
I think the highlight of my riding season has to be completing the Lance Armstrong Foundation Century Challenge back on September 10th. I have never actually done a century before so I was a little trepidatious before the ride. I finished with a 6 hour and 6 minute rolling time. I felt great! A special thanks to my friend Steve J who encouraged me to join his team the "Pharma Fliers", the club he started at Sanofi Aventis. Another round of thanks to all the folks who donated money to help me reach my fundraising goal. Our team of 15 raised over $20,000! Very cool. I must also say that the experience of riding in and around the city of Philadelphia was spectacular. It was also very cool have police at every intersection stopping all the cars so that the bicycles had the right of way. It's a refreshing change. After accomplishing this milestone as a cyclist I would encourage you to try it as well if you have not ever gone 100 miles. It takes a bit a training before hand but like thomas Edison said, "If we did all the things that we are capable of we would literally astound ourselves."

The Problem With Cars

Cars are the enemy! I have been thinking about cars and bikes more than usual lately because I find myself faced with the problem of not having enough dough to get my car through inspection which is coming up this month. I have often thought about using my bike to get everywhere and save the money I am spending on gas, insurance, upkeep etc. Now may be the time when I have no choice! The problem is I like driving. Maybe too much. I like riding my bike more though, when the weather is nice. When the weather is not nice I sometimes have difficulty getting myself outside. The other difficulty is that I live 33 miles from work. I think 70 miles a day on my bike might be bad for me. There really is no other obstacle to bike commuting for me. I have done the ride on a number of occassions. I realize now that bike commuting may be too impractical for many people. But on the other hand, bike commuting is probably very practical for others but they just won't do it!
I saw a "news" report the other night that showed people being interviewed about how bad the traffic congestion is in New York City. It was kind of funny though because one of the guys they interviewed was sitting in traffic, in a car, by himself. Hmmmm...One interviewee felt the city government needed to do more to find solutions to the problem. I laughed. Most folks don't realize that the answer to all the congestion is to stop driving so much! If the city just said "no cars in Manhattan" people would be up in arms and suing right and left. Lot's of that in the USA--"solve my problems for me but don't take anything away from me. Oh, and by the way, make sure it doesn't cost me any money either!"
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day and, based on our conversation, I have been labeled a communist. That's okay with me because I suspect my friend is a pretty staunch conservative. No, not one of those right wing, fanatically Christian, "Neo-Cons", just an old fashioned type. My friend has some money and it suits him well. He is also an attorney specializing in criminal defense so I suppose his ideology on politics and econmics is heavily influence by his contact with that world. He thinks I am a communist because I have the same viewpoint as H.G. Wells who said that "In Utopia, cycle tracks will abound". Wells was a hard core cyclist! From my friends perspective my perfectly reasonable ideas must seem radical. The point is that lots of the problems currently faciing this country could be improved tremendously through the use of the simple bicycle. Energy consumption, pollution, congestion in the streets, highway expense, terrorism (think about it, you'll start to make the connections), the obesity epidemic and it's related problems, not the least of which is the cost of treating them; these are all issues that would be addressed and improved if more people used bikes more often.
The thing that my friend and I could agree on was that people will not change their behavior until the situation becomes too painful. I wonder when that will be. Gas $6 a gallon? Homeland security eating up 50% of the federal budget? War with China as we fight for dwindling resources? More and more obese people dropping dead in the streets? Schools having to change the size of student desks because they are becoming too fat for the size desks available now? Health care being available to only 10% of the population? As human beings we have a bad habit of trying to stop things from happening after they have already happened. Closing the proverbial barn door after the horse has galloped away. Perhaps the muslim fundamentalists trying to kill all of us should save their explosives and just wait us out. We seem perfectly capable of bringing ourselves to ruin and getting there in our cars.