Author: Jerry

 

Dynamo lighting on Odette’s bike

.The bridge will be closed for up to eight (8) months of construction starting in late June 2024, after school has concluded for the academic year.

During construction, Ames Lake-Carnation Road NE, between West Snoqualmie Valley Road NE and NE 52nd Street, will be closed at the bridge location. .

This comes after the eight month closure of Lakemont Blvd.

• • • Lakemont Boulevard SE from Forest Drive SE to 155th Avenue SE: Full road closure 24 hours a day, seven days a week for approximately eight months starting Oct. 24. Signed detour via Forest Drive SE to Coal Creek Parkway SE, connecting to Newcastle Golf Club Road via Newcastle Way. Closure is necessary for emergency construction of a bridge to stabilize the roadway. Visit BellevueWA.gov/lakemont-culvert for more information.

Makes last year’s Woodinville-Duvall closure seem mild by comparison.

So here’s where I ended up on Strava:

That means that during the ten years since I stopped working I have ridden 134,970 miles with 7,114,013 feet of elevation.  (Due to the corruption of my Cyclometer database, 2014 elevation is calculated using the average gain/mile from the subsequent years.)

I’m pleased that both distance and elevation increased in 2023, the year I got diagnosed with Parkinson’s.  I haven’t locked into goals for 2024 yet, but I’ll be pleased if I can put in more than 12,000 miles again – and get a full ten years in the Strava database.

At the end of Q1 I have logged 3,212 miles in 2023.  From the beginning of 2014 (when I was done working) to the end of 2022 I logged 121,253 miles .  Together that’s 124,465 in a little under 10 years.

 

The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles – five times around the world is 124,507.  Should have pushed a little harder and gotten in the last 42 miles.

So, it appears that the annual recap Strava previously distributed is now only for subscribers.  Here’s where I came out:

I was actually on track for a better year, but in Novemer we had several travel / museum days, and the bike days in Mallorca were short.  Then we had Covid followed by snow.  December was recovery followed by more snow and Ice.

In better news, since October I’ve been using RWGPS to track rides with a sync to Strava after the ride is finished. As of today I’ve done 60 rides this way without a single GPS failure.  (That includes several trips through the Mt. Baker tunnel where Strava almost always failed.)  I haven’t figured out how to set which bike I’m riding so I have to do it manually in Strava, but I’m really pleased to be getting the whole rides now.

In October of last year I posted a list of 15-mile rides that I’d been doing because of the weather.

This year I was off the bike entirely for a week because of COVID and then it was cold and wet and Odette was still sick – so when I started up again I did a bunch of short rides.

One thing I noticed was that my repertoire had expended beyond Ravena and Wallingford. As much as I hate to admit it, the new PBL at Greenlake opens up some options – as does the light rail pedestrian bridge at Northgate. The RWGPS voice turn-by-turn and the bluetooth helmet makes it easy to remember street names.

Here are ten good loops (showing mileage / elevation) that each take about an hour and a half:

Wallingford (14.94 / 679)
Ravena (15.50 / 926)
Roosevelt (14.83 / 985)
Meridian (16.27 / 814)
Magnuson (14.72 / 832)
Third (16.97 / 874)
Blue Ridge (14.91 / 1152)
Woodlawn (15.25 / 763)
Stone Way (15.51 / 803)
Hamlin (16.73 / 870)

it’s official now – I tested positive

2022 Mallorca

I’ve been having problems with Strava pausing rides and not resuming.  It seems like it mainly happens when going through the I-90 tunnel, but not exclusively. It seems much more frequent since I got a new phone last year.

I figured I’d rule out the possibility that it was a Strava bug in handling lost satellites by running a different tracker that could synch to Strava.  I intended to go back to Cyclemeter, but I would have had to pay for an upgrade and I wasn’t very motivated.  We are preparing to leave on a short trip to Mallorca and the routes came as an event on RWGPS.  It was nice packaging and I’m already familiar with the route planning part of the app so the learning curve was short.  I had to pay for an upgrade in  order to get voice turn-by-turn, but I’d upgraded with them before (to get offline maps & routes) so even that wasn’t a problem.

I’ve done eight or ten rides on RWGPS now, maybe four of them with turn-by-turn from an established route and the rest freeform.  It works, it posts to Strava for me, it hasn’t dropped the satellite once.

Progress.