Spider!

Here's a picture of an Argiope near our front door. Mechel came running in this morning from a flower picking expediation and said that there was a "huge igantic arantula" outside. Sure enough!

Sunday Stuff

Portland Refuge Baruch stayed with us from Thursday through today on his way from Jerusalem to Las Vegas. Baruch has what is quite possibly the world's longest commute to work.

Today I cleared Gutters, etc. I took Mechel on a ride in the late afternoon. The bike weighs about 100 pounds (40lb Linear + 40lb Mechel + 20lb Trailer) when he's in tow, so it makes for great hill climbing training. We rode around the pond at Willow Tree Park (a.k.a. the "Goose Park") and took a ride on the swings at Eugene Levy Park (a.k.a. the "Digger Park"). 13.23 Miles, 12.07MPH Average. Here's the map and cross-section:

Rockland Bike Club Ride

Today I drove over to Rockland lake for what I thought would be a 55 mile ride north to Cold Spring and back. Due to weather, the ride leader decided to head south instead. We left the parking lot at around 11am. I was riding the Linear Recumbent.

Had I known that two people on the ride were training for the Ironman, I might have had some insight into what was in store for me.

Things started going wrong almost immediately. I remounted my fairing last week to give it a more "aero" shape, but I guess zip ties aren't quite good enough, so when I got above 30 miles per hour the fairing would slip down and my feel would hit it. In the process of trying to fix it I broke the zip ties about 3 miles into the ride, so I rolled up the fairing, taped it to my bike bag and dropped it off at the Piermont bike shop (I'll pick it up tomorrow).

At mile 10 or so my chain broke while climbing the 10%+ grade hill on 9W. It took a couple minutes to get the chain fixed, but by then the 5 people on the ride were long gone. A fellow on a pretty fancy bike passed me about 12 miles into the ride, and I sped up and manage to draft him (we were going about 23 miles an hour) until I caught up with the group.

We rolled into Tenafly and stopped at the bike shop so the other guys on the ride to say hello to the people working there. We then stopped at a bagel store where the guys got stuff to eat and complained about "all those Orthodox Jews" in Spring Valley.

Guess they didn't notice the peyos. Heh heh.

Folks peeled off one by one until it was just the ride leader and I as we made our way back through Piermont. We rode on a dirt path along the river in Nyack Beach State Park. The map below doesn't show it because it won't do routing off the roads. Anyway, riding up this path I could feel my quads seizing up. I got off to walk the bike up the hill and found that I couldn't walk all that well. Most of my leg muscles were starting to spasm. I had to walk for a while before they recovered. This happened again as we rode into Rockland Lake park. I had to hop off the bike and stumble about for a couple minutes. Three charlie horses at once is three too many.

All in all it was about 40 miles. I had a really hard time keeping up the hills, since my bike weighs 10 pounds more than theirs did (mine was the only bike on the ride that cost less than $1500, I think) (or maybe it's that they're in much better shape), but on flats I was able to keep up just fine. Here's the map (East is up) and terrain cross section:

There should be a ride report posted soon.

Update: here's the ride report.

Behold, the tailbox!

In an effort to get ever higher speeds out of my bike, I modified the position of the fairing last week. Tonight, I built a cardboard mockup of a tailbox for the Linear. Instead of leaving a low pressure area behind the bike as the flat seat back is pushed through the air, the tailbox allows the air to flow past the bike in a much smoother fashion. It typically adds 1-2 miles per hour to the average riding speed.

Here are some other folks who have done this: link | link

Ultimately, the cardboard prototype will be replaced with Coroplast, the corrugated plastic used in making lawn signs.

After work ride

Doug and I set out on Rolling Thunder after work for a little riding. We ended up riding down to the GW Bridge and back. Here's a map (East is up):

Here's the elevation profile. Big climbs from Sparkill on 9W and at the end of Hudson Terrace. Amazing descents from 9W onto Hudson Terrace and on CR505 down into Englewood:

The cyclecomputer was acting up, so we don't have a good reading (it kept saying 0MPH when we were rolling along). Based on how long we were out, I think our average was a bit over 15MPH. Our maximum speed (during the descent into Englewood) was over 45MPH!

Under the sea....

I did a fairly major rework of the aquarium last Thursday. I tried my hand at terracing in the back right corner, and moved all my Bacopa and Ludwigia over there. I added a Red Crypt and a Pygmy Chain Sword as foreground plants, and a piece of Sawhala wood in the center rear. What do you think? Click on the image below to see a larger version:

I used Picasa and Hello to generate the image and link to the larger image. Picasa is much nicer than the Casio photo loader we've been using up until now, and Hello makes publishing images a breeze. I then came back and cleaned up a bit with wBloggar. So many tools!