Posted in Bikes

Dull lull in July

I’ve been going through a slow time in July and I haven’t been very active on my computer besides using it for work at work. At home, I’ve just been keeping away from the computer almost full-time. There is some good news because of this, I’ve started to spend more time reading, doodling, eating, and doing anything else away from a computer.

After getting away from my computer in June and ending my work on Bookends, I felt a weird sort of burn out, not exhausted by more like a relief and now I’m looking for a new project and trying small things here and there but nothing sticky yet.

Learning Ruby has been slower and less fun than I thought it would be. When I was messing around with Python on my own time, it was fun to create small projects and build things on top of them but…that’s not the case with Ruby. Javascript was always easier to learn and play around with since it’s one language to write for server side and client side code.

I’m writing this post after attempting to write a couple of other drafts which I just couldn’t get myself to finish and it has become a common case for me that I’ll start something and won’t want to finish it. I believe I’m either attempting harder than achievable projects or not being consistent enough to continue working on them. I learned something from Eric Barker’s Barking up the Wrong Tree recently, if you want to achieve something above your current skill level, make it slightly harder not impossible to achieve which will give your brain enough reassurance that it will continue as small, consistent wins are better than large one-off lottery-like wins.

I recently created the following graphic using CSS:

You can see it here: Stop War @ usmanity.com

A big surprise for my birthday this year was that Kristen got me a bike. The bike is great but last weekend, I decided to ride up Bernal Hill which is a pretty steep ride and it hurt my knee. I haven’t been riding my bike as much because of that but I have been very cautious about my knee and I’m looking for ways to improve my knee.

Getting my bike fitted by Pedro

Today, I went to get my bike fitted by Pedro and I wanted to share some thoughts about the experience.

I affectionally call my red Specialized Allez “Big Red” because it’s very bright red and it’s a beautiful bike. I bought this bike back in the end of 2012. It was my first bike purchase as an adult and I really didn’t know what I was doing. I rode a couple of hundred miles in 2013, then some here and there but from 2014 all the way until May of 2018, I pretty much just had Big Red hanging on a hook in my apartment.

With some help from my friends, big shoutout to Lokesh, I started riding again in 2018! Since May of 2018, I rode about 800 miles which brought Big Red’s total to about 1200 miles. So, more than half the miles this bike has came in the last 7-8 months. In that time, I fell in love with biking again. Most of the miles are from commuting and I did sneak in a few 15-20 mile weekend rides.

All this came to a halting stop at the end of December, with the holidays creeping closer, I was wondering if I was going to continue riding my bike in 2019, I surely was hoping so but I had to stop all of a sudden. This was because my knees started bothering me and I would just be extremely exhausted but not exhausted like a workout but more like fatigued to discomfort. This got me worried and at work some people mentioned that they got their bike fitted by Pedro. So I started looking into it.

Well, today, I had my appointment and I am so happy to say that it made me excited for biking again and I really want to ride my bike more and more now! He went over every detail of riding my bike to show me what things I need to change, what things needed adjustments, and if I could use some upgrades. The biggest adjustments were the saddle height and handlebars’ angle. After each bit of adjusting, I felt more “in tune” with my bike.

He did recommend I try clips and also to get a bike one size up from my I have and that was news to me because I thought clips were only for people who ride 50+ mile rides. And as far as size goes, I was thinking I was actually too big on my bike but after the adjustments, I could see that the bike was pretty much at it’s top end of adjustments to fit me today. Even with the size constraint, his adjustments have made me feel so much more confident on my bike.

Above all, Pedro is a very nice guy and a fun guy to talk to while he’s teaching you about riding your bike properly.

Please do check out his website for more details: https://fittedbypedro.com/

You can also check out my Strava here: Strava Profile

The race to 1,000 miles

In May, Kristen bought her new bike and we made a bet to get to 1,000 miles by the end of 2018. I’ve never ridden (rode?) this many miles before so this is a big undertaking. 

I’m currently at ~ 318 miles while Kristen is at ~ 375 miles. I set up a quick tool that helps me figure out how many miles I have to ride most days. I say “most days” because I wanted to be realistic about how many days I’ll actually ride, which won’t be everyday. 

This is a screenshot of a recent check. “Effective days” is a rounded down number of days that’s about 3/4th of the days left in the year. 

I’ve calculated at 6.8 miles per day which is doable because my current daily commute is ~ 8 miles. 

You can see the code here: https://github.com/usmanity/tools/blob/master/miles_per_day.py