It would be early evening on the east coast. So I’ll stick with 3 pm on Mondays while I’m here in Alaska.
That’s 357.2 for those of you who can’t read upside-down. I’m unclothed and the last food I ate was several hours ago. We duplicated the result within 2/10 of a pound in two subsequent weighings.
I’m a little worried about my ability to find places along the ride to weigh while naked. I may need to figure out a way to work around that. I’d hate to frighten the horses.
David Edgren
A couple of days ago I posted more or less to the effect that I believed that shoe manufacturers, and bicycle shoe manufacturers in particular, were not being straight with us folks up in the “Bigfoot” sizes [linkie]. It is my pleasure to admit that the Specialized company [linkie] makes an EU 50 size shoe that fits me like a glove.
Yeah, I have to fudge my applause a little. According to Specialized, the shoe was supposed to fit a US size 15.5
Nuh-uh, I would say not. My size 13 foot is just perfect in there. I had an EU size 49 of these in the store to try on too… not even close. I would have had to have cut out the toe on each shoe.
So I am so happy, in any event. After trying on numerous EU size 50s and even 52s that did not fit properly, I found what I think is the perfect pair of shoes to start the trip in, and far enough in advance to break them in a bit.
I’ve been stationary biking every evening with them all week for six or so miles a shot at a challenging resistance. No hot spots. No pinching anywhere. No sore toes.
I think I’m good to go, shoe-wise.
David Edgren
330 calories for the burger patty, plus another 10-15 or so for the tomato and onion. Say round it off at 350. I had two yesterday while we were at an outdoor event in a club my wife and I are members of.
I’ve said before that I’m not dieting in the last days before I start my trip. I am counting calories pretty strictly, though, and am keeping a detailed food and exercise log on an iOS app called MyFitnessPal [linkie].
My dietitian recommended it, and it has proved both easy to use and an invaluable tool. Free!- there is a premium version you get nagged every so often to buy, but it meets all my needs at the basic level. It even has a “Friend” feature- you are welcome to be a friend if you would like to follow my diet on the ride- my username is “davidedgren”.
So here’s what I’m doing pre-ride. I’m about two weeks in to doing nothing more than counting calories very strictly. I set a daily maximum of 2,000 calories and have only exceeded that once by a little bit in that two weeks. Most days I’m around 1,500. My exercise each day burns about 300 calories- you’ll see more about that in my post about the new bicycle shoes that is coming up. My goal is to start the trip as close to 350 pounds as I can get. I will weigh myself every Monday both before and during the ride, probably in the late afternoon. I will post the weekly results here, of course. So tomorrow we will see- stay tuned.
In the interest of gathering as much info as I can, I went early this week to a local place also recommended by my dietitian that has one of these fancy body mass index calculating scales. The process took a couple of seconds and involved standing on a large scale while holding an electrode grip in each hand. Doing this, plus lightening my wallet by $30, caused the following report to be generated.
Now I’m not going to whine about how I shouldn’t have eaten lunch before I got weighed or that I had my heaviest pair of pants on. My home scale is reading about 5-10 pounds/2.5-5 kilograms lighter than this weighing myself buck-naked. But I get the message. I could drop about 120 pounds/55 kilograms and be a lot more svelte than I am today. Not to mention healthy. We’ll see.
David Edgren
But they’re my feet. I’m, err… kind of attached to them.
So several pre-ride appointments this week. Yesterday I met with a dietitian, and that will be the subject of an upcoming post all on its own. Today I saw the podiatrist. Not because my feet have any real issues, mind you, other than being gigantic and 63 years old along with the rest of me. Well, yeah- I do have some peripheral neuropathy, especially in the left foot, likely as the result of a car accident almost 30 years ago. So I took the doc’s time to describe what I am setting out to do in about a month and hear her recommendations. They were common-sense, but very helpful to have them organized all at once.
There was more, but those were the high points. If those feet are going to get me across the country, I’d better treat them right.
On a related front, we ran my feet through a Brannock Device during the visit. What’s a Brannock Device, you ask? One of these gizmos.
These are actually a pretty interesting part of American ingenuity, dating back to just after the First World War [linkie]. When it gets used by a shoe salesperson, well, that’s just part of selling you something. But when your foot is “Brannocked” by Trained Medical Personnel, hey- that’s the answer, right?
13B/C.
I can’t get my foot into a size 13 shoe at any store, even with a shoehorn and someone pushing the shoe in the other direction. And what about this?
Now, I allowed a one size fudge-factor, upping the Brannock results to a 14. There’ve been 14s I have fit my feet into. I don’t remember when, but I have. Follow the red line down, though, to where it crosses the EU adult sizes (which I have highlighted in yellow). A 49?
Uh-uh. No way. I’d have to cut off my toes. Same with a 50.
So do I doubt Mr. Brannock and his device? Not one bit. I think that my problem with finding bicycle shoes- any shoes, actually- can be laid squarely at the feet (DYSWIDT?) of the vendors that make the shoes for the various manufacturers. Like I said before, I think they take every hundredth EU48 shoe off the line and label it an EU49. Then they take every hundredth one of those and label it an EU50. It’s the manufacturers’ fault, too. My feet don’t magically turn into size 52s when I put on what should be a properly sized shoe. “They run small” doesn’t explain anything.
I’d like to see a single bicycle shoe brand that could prove me wrong, but I’m not too worried about that happening.
David Edgren
No, not quite. But it reads like one of those “Brain Puzzler” problems:
You live in Alaska, your bicycle is in Portland Oregon, and you need it in Jacksonville, Florida by the start of next month so that it can be ready for a ride across the United States. What do you do?
Well, as far as I’m concerned you get on the web and go to BikeFlights [linkie].
In about 30 minutes and for a very reasonable amount you’ll have it handled. Of course, that length of time and the “reasonable amount” part doesn’t include coordination with two bike shops and the cost of disassembly and boxing at one end and reassembly at the other, but hey. It is great to know that this part of prep is completely handled, and all I need to do is turn up at the Zencog store in Jacksonville [linkie]
on July 19th with ID and off I go.
David Edgren
My great friend and true Southern gentleman Kevin Slark commented on my latest routing post [linkie] over on my facebook page [linkie] to let me know that crossing the Mississippi River from Louisiana to Mississippi at Vicksburg might not be an option.
Real Life, as it tends to, intervened and I really didn’t have a chance to get back to this issue until today.
Here’s what Kevin is talking about. The 86 year old bridge that carried US highway 80 across the Mississippi River just west of Vicksburg
Image credit: Wikipedia
is currently closed to all traffic, vehicular, bicycle and pedestrian, except for a couple of days of the year when it is opened for special events, such as a community bike ride this year on October 1st [linkie]. The bridge carries a rail line and has very narrow vehicle lanes
Image credit: Vicksburg Post
and the railroad operating the line has repeatedly objected to reopening the bridge to regular bicycle and pedestrian use despite efforts by cycling and walking enthusiasts and advocates to have this done [linkie]. Unless I can get my crossing declared a special event, it does not look good for me to be able to use the bridge towards the end of August in the fourth week of my ride.
The old US 80 bridge was replaced as the primary Vicksburg area Mississippi River crossing in 1973 by the Interstate 20 bridge
Image credit: Wikimedia
which is now, interestingly enough, exactly half the age of the other structure. The two run parallel to each other,
Image credit: Vicksburg Post
and the pier spacing is exactly the same to facilitate the passage of barge traffic up and down the Mississippi.
But the bottom line is that the State of Mississippi does not allow bicycle traffic on any of its Interstate Highways, period, and my use of the I-20 bridge is thus not possible. I called the Mississippi State Bicycle (& Pedestrian) Coordinator [linkie] today and confirmed that there was no exception for this particular crossing. She said that there was not, but encouraged me to contact various groups concerning my desire to use the old US 80 bridge. I will follow up on that tomorrow but, as noted, I am not hopeful.
Kevin apparently anticipated this result, as he recommended an alternative crossing.
Crossing at Natchez would not involve a huge modification to the route I have planned. It replaces a 94 mile/151 kilometer stretch from MP 997 to MP 1091 with an 85.4 mile/~137 kilometer alternate. The red line is the current route and blue is the alternate.
The alternate is surprisingly (to me, anyway) about ten percent shorter, even though it doesn’t look it. Here’s the above map reversed, with the alternate in red and the current route in blue.
Most of the alternate route’s mileage is on the Natchez Trace [linkie], which is an amazing low speed (45 miles/~70 kilometers per hour) scenic national parkway in a beautiful right-of-way. Heather and I have biked this stretch in the late 1990s on our Burley Rock’n’Roll tandem [linkie]. I seriously considered incorporating it into the original route for this trip.
The reason I ultimately didn’t can be seen on the above map. Note that the terrain on the Louisiana (left) side of the Mississippi is smooth. East of the river, though, the landform changes pretty radically into low but steep hills cross-cut by deeply incised streams. Here’s an elevation chart of the current stretch
and of the alternate done at the same vertical scale.
Here’s the two superimposed. Click on any of the three charts to embiggen.
So that’s a little sooner than I’d planned to start doing hills. But I’ll have just about 1,000 miles under my belt before I get to them, so they shouldn’t be too bad. Hey- maybe I can still become an event and cross the old US 80 bridge. But if not, well… I have a plan!
David Edgren
A cup of green seedless grapes equals 110 calories.
We arrived back in Alaska on Monday evening. I have pretty much lived out of a suitcase for the past three months, after packing to accompany my wife down for the first 10 days or so of medical treatments expected to last for four weeks. Heh! That went well.
One of the things I planned to do after I returned home for the month during the month preceding heading to Florida to start the ride is to eat more frequently each day and keep the overall amount I eat within a set caloric limit. I’m going to start with 2,000 calories per day. That’s an arbitrary number, and I know I’ll require more when I start logging daily miles. So it’s not a diet- it’s just an effort to routinize what I eat and get used to many small portions over the course of a day. I’ll also be logging everything I eat or drink except water, and I may start keeping track of that as well.
I would be really pleased if the long-distance cyclists reading this would make recommendations concerning trip food- good stuff, stuff to stay away from…
..jalapeños, five alarm chili, food covered in Sriracha sauce…
any “dining out” suggestions (remember that I will not be taking anything to prepare or heat food with), that sort of thing. I don’t intend to make a Tour Gastonomique out of this ride- food will be fuel, and that’s pretty much it. That said, if you think a place is just too good to pass up, let me know.
More about the next month in a bit.
David Edgren
Yesterday I took the bike out for a second check-out ride before I return it tonight to Bike Gallery in Portland for disassembly and shipment to the ZenCog bike shop [linkie] in Jacksonville, Florida. I won’t see it again for a little bit more than another month. This is unfortunate, but bringing the bike back to Alaska for the next four weeks would cost me about $400 that isn’t in the budget. I’ll have to make do with the stationary bike and possibly a rental from a local bike shop for my continued prep rides before I head for Jacksonville around the 19th of July. I’ll keep you posted.
Everything went great on the ride, which was a shade under eight miles/15 kilometers in just over 50 minutes on a gravel path. I’d estimate that the loose surface on the path slowed my pace by about 20%. The loose gravel gave me the jitters in a few places, too.
The path was on top of a flood control dike along the Coweeman River, a minor stream that drains into the Columbia just south of where I started. If I looked to my left for the first several miles, I had down-at-the-heels industrial scenery. To my right I had the river, which is mostly a high-banked ditch, and Interstate 5. The last mile or so of the ride before the turn-around point was prettier- through a park on the left and with the river much more natural looking in the other direction. It rained big drops for a few minutes, but I dried pretty quickly. Each of my days the first week will be on average five times this distance on pavement. I’ll need to get up super early, as the July summer in north Florida will be brutal if I’m not done (or most of the way with a short evening ride remaining) by mid-morning. I figure if I’m sustaining 12 miles/20 kilometers per hour by the day I start the ride I’ll be in good shape.
I can do this.
David Edgren
Well, not quite. While I am looking for a bit of onboard power on my bike, it’s kind of impractical to be tethered to one of these.
Chief Joseph Dam, Columbia River, Washington* – Image credit: Wikimedia
A few posts ago I wrote that my ride was not going to be about how many tech gadgets I could bring with me [linkie]. I have to admit that I’ve found there’s a fine line, though, between bringing just what you need and going full Navin Johnson.
But I do want bright reliable LED lights front and rear without the hassle of carrying extra batteries and keeping up with them and enough auxiliary power to recharge small electronic devices, like my iPhone and Bad Elf GPS unit [linkie] on the fly. So I added to my bike build one of Schmidt’s P-238 filled hubs.
…heh, just kidding about the plutonium part…
You can read real facts (and probably more than you ever wanted to know) about the Schmidt dynamo hubs here [linkie]. The big thing for me is that the hub sounds bulletproof. I just need it to last about ten weeks without any issues. It sounds, though, like it will still be functioning after I’m not.
To pull off power to charge electronics I had one of these included in the build.
Yes, it’s an honest-to-gosh USB port on a bicycle. Swiss-made, too, by a company called Supernova. There’s more information here [linkie]. The little rubber cap hanging open in the photo covers the port, which delivers cleanly regulated 5 volt power at 500 milliamps. That just happens to be the spec power for USB 2. The only catch is that I have to be riding at least 12 kilometers/about eight miles per hour. Something about “engaging the flux capacitor,” probably.
But enough about tech. In the next post we’ll talk about why my ride is different from this guy’s [linkie], and how I intend to keep it that way.
David Edgren
* I have to admit that having the bike built in the Pacific Northwest, where pretty much everything runs off hydro power, put me in a “if they can do it, I can do it too” frame of mind. I love wild rivers as much as the next guy, but the hydro dams up here are, by and large, magnificent pieces of civil engineering.
Well, that’s out of the way.
Just a little less than 1/10th of one percent of the distance of my upcoming ride. In 20 minutes.
I can do this.
David Edgren
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