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| Horrible Staten Island Flag |
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| 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!
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...
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| The Bayonne bridge in all of its glory |
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| Goethels bridge - old in the back and you can see the new more modern bridge in the foreground |
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| 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. :) |
