An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

The BikeArlington community has people who organize some fun rides. Last Saturday Bob (a.k.a. Bobco) organized an Arlington History ride. I only participated in the first part of it . It was clear the ride was going to run far longer than the planned four hours, it was really hot, and I didn't want to be too wiped for going to the theater that night, so when it got near my house I drooped out and rode home. Of course, if I had stayed with the ride I wouldn't have gone home for that snack of ciabatta bread and I wouldn't have cut my finger open, requiring stitches ... Some of the places we stopped on the part of the ride I did included: Shirlington (a portmanteau formed from Arlington and Henry Garrett Shirley, former Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Highways)   The site of Arlington Mill (built in 1836 by George Washington Parke Custis) Carlin Hall in the Glencarlyn neighborhood (built in 1892) The actual springs in the Carlin Springs neighborhood (there wa...

Day 4 (Sunday) I wanted to make sure to get some exercise during the trip (above and beyond the walking we’re doing) and so on Sunday I started my day with a run. I screwed up in planning my route – not realizing that Google Maps was already showing me distances using metric units (since I was in Canada, it defaulted to km) I measured a route that was 3.1 km, thinking I was mapping out 3.1 miles (which would be 5 km). So, I did my run and felt pretty good at the end until I checked my phone. “What, only 2 miles?!” So, I continued my run in the other direction, then back, then a little bit more while watching the phone until I just hit the 5K mark. According to Strava, despite my confused route I clocked in at 39:33, which put a smile on my face – getting back under 40 mins has been a goal since I started being able to run (really jog) again. My run ended right near a Café Starbucks, but I Resisted. The. Urge. To. Get. Coffee. As it was, thanks to Philippe’s readily available high e...

Day 1 (Thursday) Our trip started with a bang. Valerie doesn’t have the years of business travel experience that I do and so gets nervous about traveling. So of course, when we tried to get to the airport we couldn’t get an Uber within a reasonable time. Then the taxi took longer to arrive than promised. Then we hit traffic on the way to the airport. Then we went to the wrong terminal. we had booked via United but it was an Air Canada codeshare and only when we showed up at the United counter did we learn that we needed to go to Air Canada to check in. Air Canada is one of the few airlines operating out of the old terminal at National and so we had to walk a Get Smart maze of walkways and tunnels to get there. We also then scolded by a frazzled ticket counter agent after we accidentally inserted ourselves into the middle of a large group that was checking in (while she as an Air Canada employee, it was clear from her demeanor that she was American). Fortunately, everything...

One of my real talents is my ability to drive myself crazy. No matter what I’m doing, I always think I should be doing something else, or should finish up what I’m doing so I can move on to the next thing. I do not by nature live “in the moment”. In that spirit, I awoke Sunday with a conundrum – bicycling or kayaking? I knew that I wanted to get some exercise – I need to keep building my conditioning back up. I really want to become a better cyclist. But, I have a week-long kayak camping trip coming up in September and I really, really, have to get in shape for that. I know that I am capable of feel that whichever I chose, I could make myself miserable for not having chosen the other. But the need to get into kayaking shape won out. Kayaking it was. Having finished agonizing over my choice of activity, I next moved on to agonizing over location. I wanted to launch somewhere other than my usual Columbia Island location. I thought about Fletcher’s Cove – close to home, free, and a...

I have written previously about the morning "coffee clubs" sponsored by BikeArlington. These weekday get-togethers are part of what fosters such an active cyclist community in Arlington. I started attending them during Freezing Saddles 2016. During the wintertime they are attended only by hardcore cyclists, mainly Freezing Saddles participants. Who else is going to get up extra early just to go riding to coffee in the cold, dark pre-dawn hours? But the warm weather is another story - bigger crowds, early sunrises so no need to ride in the dark, languid breakfasts outdoors, and supreme difficulty in tearing oneself away to actually go to work. This past Tuesday was Independence Day. The coffee clubs are mainly populated with bike commuters, and since most people weren't going to be commuting on the holiday, I wasn't sure if the Tuesday coffee club would even be held. But, I needed a destination for my morning ride and so I pointed my bike towards Crystal City . As...

I paddled out of Riley's Lock with Tall Tom today. I was running two GPS's - my Apple Watch and my venerable Garmin, the former of which is proving to be unreliable on the water and the latter of which is long known to give unreliable distance readings. Here's the tally of the distance of our paddle: 1. The Apple Watch went completely dark at some point during the trip. I was able to reboot it when we got back. At the end of the trip it read 2.1 miles . 2. When synched to Strava online the data from the watch still read 2.1 miles, but when I exported a .gpx file and then re-imported it (conceptually this should yield an identical result), Strava indicated a distance of  4.2 miles - but it still had only part of the track. 3. The Garmin's display read 8.74 miles . 4. I connected the Garmin to the computer, downloaded the track to Garmin Mapsource, exported a .gpx and then imported it into Strava. That showed the whole track, and read 8.3 miles . This is close to...