S2 : Charity

If you are reading this blog you probably know that this past January 2017, 2 friends[ Shruti and Matt ] and I embarked on a bicycle trek down India’s south eastern coast from Puducherry to Kanyakumari. It was an amazing experience, and in the process we raised 157,000Rs for an Indian based charity called Bhumi which focuses on improving underprivileged children’s lives through education. https://letzchange.org/campaigns/cycling-for-children-steven-busiello

We have decided to kick off 2018 with another cycling adventure and have added two more members to our team. Another friend Eric and my dad. This trip, from January 6th to the 19th,will take us down the east coast of Spain from Barcelona to the tip of Spain [Parque Natural Del Estrecho]. We will be covering 780miles, 300 miles more than the trip in India in the same amount of days. As we did on the first trip, we want to give back to a charity that we believe in. After researching many organizations we decided to fund raise for World Bicycle Relief. World Bicycle Relief, is an organization providing access to independence and livelihood through The Power of Bicycles. The money raised through our fundraiser helps to provide specially designed, locally assembled bicycles to students, healthcare workers, and entrepreneurs in rural Africa; connecting them with education, healthcare, and economic opportunities.

You can watch this video to see how the donated bicycle made a difference in Lizzie's life.


Our trip is fully self funded and all of the money you donate will be towards putting bicycles in the hands of kids in Africa. Any amount of donation will go a long way and your help will be invaluable in touching these childrens' lives. For $147, we can provide a World Bicycle Relief bicycle to a student in need. Every donation helps towards our goal of donating 25 bicycles.

To know more about our campaign and to contribute to it please click here: http://fundraise.worldbicyclerelief.org/scorchers As we did on the first trip, we are going to document the trip on this blog so you can track where we are and we will post pictures and hopefully no embarrassing videos. Thank you for the support!!

What are you waiting for? Let's get rolling!

S2 : The Decision!

When the first trip was born, I knew exactly where I wanted to go. I had It all laid out in my mind. I had been to India 5 times previously and fell in love with the country, the people, the culture and the freedom you have there. If i want to drive on the wrong side of the street... ok... i will. :) It wasnt those freedoms I fell for, it was being able to disconnect from the rest of the world and pretty much get lost.

I didn't know what to expect in terms of results, but I pretty much knew how it would go. I learned a lot, the team learned a lot during the process of planning, looking at elevations, knowing to book hotel reservations in advance :) etc etc. It was a fantastic first trip, the only thing i would have changed was making it longer. 

So as we plan a second trip, it is quite different from planning the first one given the first experience and our expectations to do better, or at least as good. Lots of bits to explore. There were no real standouts in terms of places to go. I think we were all just looking at maps of the world seeing what looked interesting. Iceland kept coming up, Taiwan and a few others. So we decided to make our own top lists, fill out an overly complicated spreadsheet of road conditions, temperatures, sites to see, distance between us all and many other extremely nerdy dimensions. A few definite criteria were that it had to be in January and as warm as humanly possible.

Some questions and our thought process of how we were working them out:

Do we add more members? The first scorch, with just the 3 of us was quite comfortable, no arguing, all getting along, easy going, agreeable ... somewhat funny :) so it all worked. As you add people, you have to make sure they will fit and most importantly ... not murder you in your sleep. I swear this is a condition me and Shruti discussed multiple times when evaluating candidates. :P In addition you need to have people on the team who are going to add something, anything ... even if it is just another intelligent brain to help make decisions, or a person who can work and plan. Believe it or not we actually were up to 10 possible riders at one point. A block of 3 dropped out, then there was an injury induced drop out and then our final teammate dropped due to not enough training... and we are at 5. Up from 3 the previous scorch. 


Where can you go in January when half of the world is in the dead of winter and you want to try something new? There were so many factors we worked through. 10 years of historical temperatures, at least 12 countries, road quality, cost, scenery, distance between us all [ thank god i will not have to commute for 24hours worrying about my bike in the cargo hold of the plane :) ]

How do we pack and get our gear from place to place? In other countries getting drivers is not as easy as India. We were beyond lucky to have a guy like G. He was a lifesaver and I never saw a 120lb man eat a cauldron of rice faster. This time we are all becoming mules and lugging our own gear.

We want to go big - the location needs to deliver from sites, to being rideable to having enough miles for us to cover. 

So at the end of it all, we have decided on Spain!! The route starts us off in Barcelona down the eastern coast, passed Gibraltar and down to the tip of the country. Roughly about 780 miles. Super excited as there is about 1 month left and still lots to put the finishing touches on. Packing, bringing more cameras [ taking it to the next level with my GoPro Black 5], colder gear, more and more training before January [ hopefully losing more weight ] and of course trimming the routes and working in the sites vs daylight and cooler temperatures.

Viva Espana!!

Independence Day Monuments Challenge

Independence day is probably my 2nd favorite holiday after Halloween. Celebrating America, freedom, family and eating way too much barbecued meat is just hard to beat it. Before the festivities started, I decided to try and get as many miles in as I could. I've been stuck at a weekly 100 miles or so and wanted to get my weekly average a bit higher in prep for January's Scorch 2 [ I have yet to blog Scorch 2 but it is coming! ] I also wanted to eat as many hotdogs as I could - so at least i wouldnt feel too guilty if I could bang out some miles beforehand.

So in order to celebrate our independence, I thought it would be nice to go to each of the war monuments on Staten Island and take a pic. I knew 5 of them off of the top of my head. You can see them starred below. The Battle of the Bulge memorial i always remember because my grandfather fought in that war during WWII, and the other 3 i had passed in my car a number of times. Hero park I had known of, but was so far I just didnt have the energy to bike over there. 

After I got home, I started googling trying to see if there were other sites I missed, and there was plenty. I looked through the NYC parks website here: https://www.nycgovparks.org/park-features/parks-list?boro=R which is a great website to check out the parks in all of the boroughs, when they were dedicated, why they were dedicated etc. So from that list I put together the below google map. I am thinking I will try to get to every park and snap a picture.

Strava Link: https://www.strava.com/activities/1066895167

Total Miles: 28.2mi

Total Time: 2:01:14

Pace: 14mph

My strava route

Google map - I starred the ones i biked to

Battle of the Bulge

Midland Beach Veteran's Memorial

Miller Field World War II Memorial

Independence Park

Mini Scorch : NJ->Liberty Bell : Training Ride 2

this flag was hanging off the bridge connecting to Pennsylvania - we walked over and back

The 2nd scorch training ride pushed us a bit more on the D&R canal path. We did 35.5 miles which is a small 10% uptick from the first long ride. We were supposed to do the NJ to Philly ride, but the forecast was signalling rain and we didn't want to have a soggy cycle through the elements.

The weather turned out fantastic, the ground was dry and so we decided to try out a different route. There was a number of other people who also had the same idea to get out and exercise. [ you can see the strava map below which shows the area is quite popular. ] 

Ride Stats - longest ride so far as a team!

Strava link: https://www.strava.com/activities/1053940494
Miles: 35.5
Moving Time: 3:26:16
Moving Time Pace: 10.3mi/h


I cant say more good things about the D&R canal route. The earlier in the day you go the better. 

We agreed a new date for the philly ride! Memorial day weekend! Hopefully my teammates practice. :)

I stopped after i almost killed this poor turtle and moved him/her in to the grass :)

Seems there was an abandoned railway in many parts of the canal. This old train car was cool

super nice trails

Micro Scorch : Staten Island Edition / 4 bridges challenge attempt 1

 

Horrible Staten Island Flag

CITY OF NY FLAG

I can officially say that I have put in thousands of cycling miles over the passed year on Staten Island. There are fantastic locations to cycle in the borough. Many of the locations are off the beaten path and probably aren't known to many if you don't live in that respective area or do a bit of exploratory bicycling.

Over the past year I have found many really cool routes, hidden parks, mountain bike style trails and many alternative entrances and exits to familiar places. I'll save the reviews of the many locales for a later post. This post is to discuss an idea I had to put a little bit of adventure and gameify my cycling.

If you are in to running, cycling, swimming and like to keep track and obsess over your statistics, then you must be a user of Strava. There are many other alternative GPS tracking apps, but this one seams to have the most widespread adoption. You can find it at http://www.strava.com . There are also Chrome plugins to bring your lunacy of metrics to the next level. I use Stravistix https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stravistix-for-strava/dhiaggccakkgdfcadnklkbljcgicpckn?hl=en.

Within Strava there is the concept of "Segments" which are mini courses, usually multiple streets, hills, loops etc created by riders. Every time you hit one of the segments you are in essence competing with yourself and all of the other riders who have ridden it before you. It adds a great bit of competitiveness to the rides so when you get home you can check how you did. If you are the best you will get the label KOM or king of the mountain. Pretty cool.

 

A bit more background on Staten Island is that there are 4 bridges that connecting Staten island to NJ and Brooklyn. Some cool facts are that the Verrazano was the largest Suspension bridge in the world from 1964 to 1981 and the Bayonne bridge has a footpath [ once it is complete ]. Im really looking forward to the footpath to NJ. Will open up a lot of long distance cycling opportunities! 

• The Verrazano - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verrazano-Narrows_Bridge
• The Bayonne Bridge [ guess where it goes? :) ] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge
• The Goethels Bridge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethals_Bridge
• The Outerbridge Crossing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing

So taking the idea of "Segments" from Strava, I came up with my own idea of a "Challenge" to spice up my ride and give myself a bit of a quest. The challenge i thought of I dubbed the 4 bridges challenge. Basically what i challenged myself to do is cycle under each of the 4 bridges spread out all over the island and take a picture.

The challenge started at 5:30am, 67f and a bit overcast, giving me some very comfortable weather. The traffic at that time is minimal as well. I made it to the Bayonne bridge in no time, about 6 miles from my house. a horrible looking bridge, under construction to raise it up more from the ocean to let in larger vessels.

The second up was the Goethals bridge which put me in quite a different part of the island that i have never cycled through. You can see the pix below. 

I never got to bridges 3 and 4 which was quite disappointing. It wasn't that i was tired, it was that I had run out of time. I had to get back to the kids and I was already out for a few hours. The bit that sucked up a bit of my time was getting lost near freshkills park and not knowing that there was way to cycle through that park of the island. it is completely closed off unless you go on the highway, which I couldn't use.

Over all ride stats were pretty good. 36.8miles, 13.7 average mph...

Strava link: https://www.strava.com/activities/1040720465

The Bayonne bridge in all of its glory

Goethels bridge - old in the back and you can see the new more modern bridge in the foreground

My first thought was - where the hell am i? and is that a prison being built in the background. There was a few signs saying no trespassing,... so i rode on it. :)

Mini Scorch : NJ->Liberty Bell : Training Ride



Click for a larger map

SHAO LIN RACERS first official test ride is in the books!

Over the memorial day weekend we did a trial ride along part of the D&R canal. This is the same path we will be taking on the NJ to Liberty Bell cycle at the end of the month. More information on the canal can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_and_Raritan_Canal

We finally had a nice sunny 70f day after many days of rain. We set off at 6:30, a bit later than I wanted to, but not everyone is as crazy as i am :) . The trail was fantastic, covered by trees so we didnt get burned, cool, not crowded, very scenic and best of all no cars to dodge. One bit that was on the downside was that with all the rain there was a considerable amount of puddles we had to avoid, the ground was a bit soft which increased the effort, my legs were hurting afterwards, and there arent any places to buy a drink if you had to.[ at least in the 15mi stretch out and back we did ]

This training ride was great to get all 5 of us together and test out our riding formation, stopping, coordination, some of us testing out the racks and how we will be packing and i got a chance to test out different types of go pro attachments and methods of filming. One thing I have learned is that the selfie stick is the most versatile tool for filming at every angle and distance imaginable. I absolutely love using it, however the one issue I have is how do you stow it between uses. I was basically holding it with a few fingers and the handlebar with the other fingers for 3 hours. My hand's grip strength increased to that of the incredible hulk by the time the ride was over. :) I need to figure out how to "holster it" before the official ride.

The 2 day 110 mile ride is coming up in 9 days! I can taste those cheesesteaks! :)

 

Ride Stats - longest ride so far as a team!

Strava link: https://www.strava.com/activities/1008223793
Miles: 30.3
Moving Time: 3:07:16
Moving Time Pace: 9.7mph











Really great scenery

I found a little friend on my leg :P

Bikes came back SUPER dirty