Honk my hooter, look at what happened last night on the ride home from work.

Yesterday, I was going to do the Sligo Creek to Capital Crescent Trail into work, and then do it again coming home.

Cledus was my weapon of choice, he’s a solid warhorse of a bike that loves the road and frolics on gravel. I felt good, the weather was beautiful, and once I got warm I started pushing on him, and then kept pushing harder. I hit pedestrian-free stretches on the gravel parts of the CCT where cruising in the 20’s was as easy and natural as the grin on my face, and towards the end I even took turns pulling and drafting another gentleman that was tearing down the last couple miles towards Water St. I realize this is not at all impressive by any objective measure, but averaging 16.5 mph for 20.6 miles is probably the performance highlight of my short, unremarkable cycling career.

When it was time to go home at the end of the day, I was pumped to get on the loop for another run… right up until I got on the bike. Half block into the ride home, I realized I had nothing left in the tank, nada, so I headed north to the shortest, flattest route home and tried to keep the stiffness and fire in my legs down to a manageable level. Progress burns!

Nevertheless, with that short ride home, and then a round trip to the pool to meet the family, the first half of the year came to a close with my first ever 500 mile month! Woohoo! Here’s some more numbers, as recorded by… BikeGame!:

• Finished June with 502 1/4 miles and somewhere around 14405 feet of climbing, though MapMyRide’s elevation stats are innaccurate, so that’s kind of an arbitrary measure suggesting only that some climbing was done. We’ll call those units “not-feet”.
• For the year, I’ve done 271 rides for 1962 miles and 59416 not-feet of climbing.
• Also, thanks to a few close friends and family, I’ve raised another $200 in donations for the Livestrong Foundation, and have now crossed the minimum fundraising line of $250 to clock in at $274.65

Now, I need to talk to y’all about something. The Team Fatty Philly manager has asked me about my donations, and I said, “I have just over $250, see? I made it!”

And she said, “$250 is the minimum, sure, but it’s up to you whether or not you want to do the bare minimum. Well, like, Oscar over there has raised $2740, and he has a terrific smile.”

So I said to her, “Okay. Okay, so you want me to do more fundraising.”

“Chiggins,” she says, “people can go anywhere to give money to fight cancer. They give to people doing the Livestrong Challenge for the thrill and the attitude. That’s what it’s about, okay? It’s about fun.”

“So you want me to raise more funds then?”

“Look, we want you to fundraise, okay? If you think the bare minimum’s enough, then okay. But some people raise more, and we encourage that, okay? You do want to raise more funds, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Great. Great. That’s all Team Fatty asks”

“Okay.”

So, um, I need to raise some more flair– er, funds, I don’t wanna be on the wrong side of Philly Jen. If you were thinking about making a donation, now’d be a good time to do it.

There’s 54 days left until the Philly ride, and we’re only five riders away from our goal for team members. Last I checked, I was the only representative from our nation’s capital. You really, really don’t want me to be the sole representative from our nation’s capital. So I’m calling out all you cyclists from the District, and asking you to join me in Philadelphia on August 23rd.

Also, our team’s about 30% of the way to our fundraising goal, so please consider making a contribution. With your help, we’ll hit our goal. Hopefully, we’ll surpass it, by a lot.

I mean, c’mon, what do you think of someone that just does the bare minimum?

Bikegame update: so far 2009 is lookin’ like 58 rides for 418 miles, and this morning I knocked off Level 2 with an early morning ride out to College Park and back. Despite the 25-35 mph winds I hit coming home, it was awesome. I’m trying to think of this little run of days in the 50’s and 60’s as a wonderful gift instead of an excruciating tease, we’ll see how I feel about it Saturday when it heads back into the high 30’s.

Also, the Nitto Noodle bars I put on Cledus are far and away the most comfortable drop bars I’ve ever laid hands upon. Until I’ve established a gear review category, I’ll just have to highly recommend them. I do.

After a full month of using Bikegame!, adding features and fixing bugs, the stats for January show that I’ve done 40 rides for about 288 miles. Not bad considering I worked from home 5-6 days.

Sadly, the elevation stats I’ve been getting from MapMyRide (and stats others get from every other ride-mapping site) aren’t worth the pixels they’re printed on, so they’re more of an indication that something was climbed. I’m not willing to explore the world of GPS cyclometers, so that’ll have to do for now.

But, those miles and the 8700-ish pseudo-feet climbed were good for 6 points on the road record, which worked out to Level 2 plus 2 points to grow on. I’m gonna set a goal of a 20% increase for February, for 345 miles.

This morning after dropping Ruby off at school, I was driving Nigel through Catholic University and headed for my regular commute when I decided to take a big, long way around instead.

Rather than take the direct northeast-to-southwest route, I cut west all the way to Mt. Pleasant and dropped into Rock Creek Park, where I offered a pump to a fellow commuter who was struggling on squishy, flattish tires. I continued down to the National Mall and rode along the reflecting pool, which is lined on both sides, the full length of it, with porta-potties. Evidently there’s a biggish event happening there soon, and they expect a lot of bathroom usage, perhaps it’s for a huge chili cookoff? Finally, I did a lap around the Washington Monument and headed to work.

None of this is remarkable, mind you, but it was about 30 degrees and gray, so it wasn’t that it was unseasonably warm and pretty and I just didn’t want to go inside. I was riding Nigel, so it wasn’t that I was in a zippy groove and didn’t want to stop racing. And it wasn’t that Washington Hospital Center was so stunningly beautiful that I was drawn to its charm. No, I suddenly decided to double my inbound commute because I wanted the miles, and the climbing feet, because I wanted the points, because I want to level up.

There’s still a ton of little things left to build and fix on it, but there’s enough there now to make me want to see those points add up and that level click over. If you want to play, or just poke around, feel free to join in.

Incidentally, the extra miles were pleasant all on their own, after all riding Nigel’s a good time and I would have enjoyed them whether or not I was scoring them. But that initial nudge at the corner of Michigan and Irving, where I chose the long ramble over the short commute, that came from my hunger for points and my desire to level up. It seems like BiKE GAME! is tingling, and that means it’s working. Pretty cool!

On Thursday, we were supposed to pack up and head to New York for some overdue visits and foodering. But Huck was uncharacteristically lethargic and threw up a few times in the morning, so we decided to hold off a day and cuddle the boy. After all, I’d taken Friday off, we still had a 3 day weekend and we were all packed. So we chilled.

Friday morning we were on the road shortly after 7 a.m. and headed north on 95. We were about 20 minutes north of Baltimore when Huck threw up for the fourth time. It was clear he wasn’t ready for this, we couldn’t justify bringing plague-baby into our friends’ homes, and then it occurred to us that we might be next, and we didn’t want to be visiting 5 hours from home if that happened, so we headed back.

Saturday morning I threw up. Rebbie tried, but didn’t. Both of us came down with it, Huck still had it. Ruby was the only person in the family not dragging their pathetic carcass around the house feeling like death, so she got a full free pass on as many movies as she wanted to watch. She kept asking us if we felt better, asking if we could go to Nyark City tomorrow. She took it pretty well when we explained that the weekend was shot, and we promised to take another shot at it soon. She’s a trooper.

Yesterday, we all felt a lot better, so we piled onto the longtails and headed down to the Dupont Farmers’ Market, then stopped by Big Bear Cafe on the way home, a little over 10 miles, which extrapolates to about 912 miles for the year.

We better pick up the pace.