Leaving Long Island (January 13th - January 17th)

I mentioned a few posts back that I was falling behind on my mileage, but keeping up with my blog posts. The last week has seen just the opposite happen. For that reason, this post will be a bit of a catch-up. I won't go into much detail on any of the places that the ride took me. However, when I finished my ride on January 17th, I had now gone eleven straight days with 10+ miles of riding. Since my target pace is about 10 miles per day, that means I had a done a lot of catching up.

January 13th took me out of Nassau County and into Queens. My ride was only mapped out to take me through two of New York City's boroughs and Queens was the first. Fittingly, I ended my 11.7 mile ride in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which is a short walk from the home of the New York Mets (my favorite baseball team).

The 14th brought me 10.7 miles to downtown Manhattan. I was happy to be able to walk over to Bleecker Street Bar where I could play a few games of darts. The 15th brought me 10.6 miles to Newark, NJ. Newark is home to the New Jersey Devils and their modern new home, The Prudential Center, but the Devils were off that night. My sister, brother-in-law and nieces live ten miles northwest of Newark, so riding there would add two full days to my ride, but they were nice enough to come meet me for dinner. We enjoyed some ribs at the famous Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

C - New York, NY
D - Newark , NJ

The 16th put 14.2 more miles in my rear view, and gave me a night in the lovely Cranford, NJ. Cranford is best known for having a list of thirteen notable people that I have never heard of on their Wikipedia page (Wikipedia is the starting point for all research on this blog). One day and 12.8 miles later, I was in Middlesex, NJ. Middlesex was apparently home to Charlie Weis (former Notre Dame football coach) at some point. That made me think of my favorite Occupy Wall Street sign (it's funny because he is a large man).

C - Cranford, NJ
D - Middlesex, NJ

As mentioned earlier, I had now gone eleven straight days of 10+ miles of riding, so I was finally ahead of my target pace. If I can continue to stay ahead of pace during the difficult Chicago winter, I should have no problem getting all the way across the country.

Real Life: Mostly uneventful work commutes. On January 17th, I took my bike to Roll on Clybourn for a tuneup. They did an awesome job and I got most of my mileage on the 17th via Divvy. Daily mileage: January 13th - 11.7 miles, January 14th - 10.7 miles, January 15th - 10.6 miles, January 16th - 14.2 miles, January 17th - 12.8 miles. Total annual mileage - 175.8 miles (6.5 miles ahead of target pace).