City Cycling

I've had my bike for about 2+ weeks now and have been making pretty good use of it. My longest rides have gone for 37.5, 33, and 29 miles - though I probably average 20 per ride (including the first one). I've been on probably about ten rides for 220 miles, and it's pretty good exercise. It's cheaper than a gym membership ($75 once) and I'm outside for a few hours. I also get to check out the city: neighborhoods, beaches, and whatnot.

I've ridden all 18.5 miles of the lakefront path and have started moving inland on occasion. Riding along the streets, I get to see stuff that I wouldn't in a car. Plus, I get to stop whenever without having to worry about meters or zoned parking. As for being in the streets, I feel pretty safe riding along them. The only place where things are kinda dicey are downtown's lower level streets (pic) (a lot of them have multiple levels). Traffic moves pretty fast and it's a dark, confined space - just not very pedestrian/bicycle friendly. (On a side note, it does clear up a lot of delivery trucks topside. NYC's traffic flows pretty well, but trucks stopped on streets would get annoying after awhile. Also, there are *no* alleys in Manhattan...meaning that trash is literally piled up on sidewalks. Never realized that before.) Aanyway, I digress...

So, the Schwinn's the counter to my diet of unhealthiness. I've been noticing a difference in my hill power and biking distance the past few times, so that's gotta be a good sign. Or in the words of Tobias Funke, analrapist: "Huzzah! This is joyous news!" One weird thing though, for the first few miles of a ride my quads are not that happy. I've found the longer I keep going, the less complaining comes from them. After this, fluids and food are the main issues.

Below I threw in a map of where I've been. Like I said, I've been heading off the lakefront trail and am trying to check out different neighborhoods. Hopefully I can keep this up to some extent during the school year. Winter might be a different story. Currently though, the man upstairs just turned up the heat. Went for a morning ride today to beat the heat and still ended up going through three large McDonald's Gatorades and two regular ones.