All right. I never do this, and I hate when other people do it. But I'm doing it. I'm announcing goals.

By July 30, I'll weigh 199 and have extended my 12-mile round-trip commute to at least 16 miles. I'm doing the 55-mile Harlem Valley Rail Ride that day, and I want to be lighter and stronger for it.

This will be my third long bike ride. My first was the 50-mile MS Ride I did a couple of years ago, which was mostly just me being pugnacious. I have a vague memory of mentioning much later that I was in mid-exacerbation during the ride, but I think I kept it to myself at the time.

The second was the 42-mile 5-Boros Bike Tour two months ago, which was so much fun that I went looking for more, and found the Harlem Valley thing. The bus is going to pick us up at 6AM in Manhattan, so I may be heading out of Queens around 4:30AM and adding 13 miles to my day. That's one-way mileage; I can't imagine my 40-year-old tendons will be up for another 13 miles home after riding 68 and then sitting on the bus back to Manhattan for 2 hours.

I'm not sure what the next long ride will be, but I ordered a map from adventurecycling.org. I don't think I can do all of it in the foreseeable future (baby boys keep a guy close to home), but maybe a jaunt out along the route here and there. And I'm also wondering about Long Island. Seeing as geographically speaking, I live on it.

My helmet's falling apart and always made me look like Meteor Boy, so I've ordered a new one along with a cyclocomputer, which I always thought were sort of dumb. If I can find room between the laptop, clothes, audio gear, rain clothing, snow clothing, and various tools and junk in the panniers, I'll carry some extra weight on my commute. On the 5-Boros ride, the lightness from the lack of panniers and the low rolling resistance from my new 100-psi tires had me upshifting at the bottoms of hills other people were downshifting for.

I'm still no good at going fast, but I can go slow all day.




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