Year 2012 in Cycling

When I first moved to DC, I bought a used Trek mountain bike from a seller on Craigslist for $140. I used it to get from home to school and work and back, riding down from Columbia Heights in the morning and back up through Adams Morgan in the evenings. And knowing nothing of bicycle maintenance at the time, I once let a wheel get so badly out of true that I eventually had to alternate between carrying it and half-lifting, half-rolling it the six blocks to the nearest bike shop.

My housemates and many of my friends also rode to get around – it’s just the most practical mode of transportation within the city – but I can’t recall riding for the pure pleasure of it. Cycling was simply a more reliable option than taking the bus: my commute always took the same time and I didn’t have to wait 40 minutes at night for a bus that never came. (That used to happen pretty often when I worked late shifts at work.) On my mountain bike I was slow, but faster than when I was on foot.

2012 was the first year I rode for more than pure transportation purposes. I bought my first new road bike with a recommendation from my friend, who’s an avid road cyclist. I led a team of a six to ride in the Bike MS charity ride in June, which meant I had to train for distances I had never even imagined riding before: a total of 100 miles over two days. Besides getting food poisoning a couple weeks before the ride and losing a lot of fitness there, the ride went well and everyone on my team finished the ride happy and exhausted. We polished off a couple pizzas and about half a chocolate cake afterwards. By then I also knew to keep my chain clean and lubed and how to change a flat tire, and the function of most bike parts.

I’ll pull just a few numbers about my first year of getting more into cycling. Most of these stats come from Strava, where I’ve recorded maybe 80-90% of my rides this year.

Most Elevation Gain in One Month: 9,910 feet in August. I did some riding in Maryland, rode the Reston Bike Club (Metric) Century, and part of John’s Hoppy 100 ride, which I hope he makes into an annual event. I know people that climb more than this in a single ride, but I’m happy with my progress.

Most Mileage in One Month: 391.2 miles in October. This includes a weekend ride to Harpers Ferry and back, the Seagull Century, and several commutes. It’s also the month I got my Surly, which replaced my road bike and became my do-everything, pleasure-to-ride bike.

Longest Single Ride: 127.1 miles. This was my first brevet, the Flatbread 200k.

Mileage on Capital Bikeshare: Over 150 miles. This number may even be closer to 200 miles, considering I usually don’t record my short Bikeshare trips. It’s a great service to get around town, and I’d say a year-long membership is essential for anyone living in DC.

Total Mileage for 2012: 2,397.3 miles since mid-March. I’m shooting for at least 3,000 miles next year.

Below is a screencap displaying my local ride map for the year, created with Jonathan O’Keeffe’s multiple ride mapping tool. The line thicknesses represent frequency of riding specific routes. Suggestions for where to ride more in 2013? Arlington streets don’t appear to be represented, though I take the Custis Trail quite often.

I’m sure all this riding balances out the beer.

Year 2012 in Drinks

This post is a continuation of this project to record every drink we have this year, complete now with a full year’s worth of data.

I recognize that we’re only two points of reference and therefore can only draw conclusions about our own habits, but the concept of quantified life seems to be enjoying its heyday at the moment. People are getting creative about what they track and how they visualize it: Nick Felton’s design-oriented Annual Reports were my original inspiration. Tracking one’s bike rides is popular, as you can see with Strava and posts like this from a fellow rider in DC. People are measuring what they eat, where they travel, and how they spend their days. This piece in the New York Times, “The Data-Driven Life”, describes a guy who even explored how much time he spent doing his roommate’s dishes – along with everything else he spent time on throughout the course of each day.

Alcohol consumed seems like as good a metric as any to track over the course of a year. Never having taken this kind of count before, we were frequently surprised at our totals – after a month, three months, or an entire year. Adam and I lead fairly active social lives in Washington, DC, where there are plenty of options for going out. We rarely go clubbing and prefer the bar scene or relaxed parties at friends’ houses. And this seems to be reflected in the data: we’re on average 21 times as likely to choose a beer over a mixed drink or hard liquor.

Year 2012 Totals

From January 1st, 2012 to December 31st, 2012

Crystal Total Number of Drinks: 505 (of which 82% were beers) Average Number of Drinks per Day: 1.38 Favorite Brewery: New Belgium Most-Frequented Watering Hole: Boundary Stone

Adam Total Number of Drinks: 833 (of which 93% were beers) Average Number of Drinks per Day: 2.28 Favorite Brewery: Chocolate City Most-Frequented Watering Hole: Thunder Burger

Both of Us

I usually have the most drinks on a Saturday, while it’s Fridays for him. On Saturdays I have more than twice as many drinks on average than on Mondays (the day with my lowest drink averages). I’m more likely to go out closer to home, and Adam goes out closer to work. That’s probably due to the fact that there aren’t very many good places to grab a drink near my office, which isn’t in the city.

Number of drinks for both of us also trend down overall throughout the entire year. However, the numbers trend upward going from the beginning of the year into the summer, then drop in late summer and trend upward again towards the end of the year (and the holiday season).

Click to zoom.

More to come. Let me know what you think or would have been interesting to note!

Year 2012 Recap: The Good, the Bad, and the Goals

2012 has been a memorable year.

I traveled to Boulder in the spring to visit a good friend, took an end-of-summer trip around Iceland, and spent a long weekend in Atlanta with two of my oldest friends. I rode my bike over a hundred miles in a single day (twice), followed ongoing transportation projects in the area, and organized a couple of local rides that turned out to be very popular. I went on a 50km/31mi hike that lasted 12 hours and left me with more memories than blisters (though it gave me plenty of blisters). I spent a lot of time in a tent, though I would have liked to spend more. I read some great books and also started writing more. I made lots of new friends and reconnected with others.

There have also been some bad moments in the year, such as the time my friend got into a bad crash. Or the time our apartment got burglarized. But these have also served as important learning moments, teaching me and those around me that although you have to be careful, you can’t prevent everything.

On another note, Adam and I spent the year tracking our drink consumption and are working now to summarize that information. We’ve got a year’s worth of data. It makes for a good feeling to track an aspect of our lives for an entire year, and in total it comes to something like 16,000 fluid ounces of beverages between the two of us to make sense of – so as you can imagine, this’ll take some time. We’ll find out if the metrics we tracked were the worthwhile ones, and see what else we can cull from the data.

For now, I can easily see that the brewery I most represented this year was New Belgium, a Colorado-based brewery that is well-loved in DC. Their traveling festival, Tour de Fat, even came to Washington, DC for the first time this year. Adam’s most represented brewery was Chocolate City. The Chocolate City brewery is practically next door to us, so we’re lucky to be able to fill up growlers on Saturdays.

We had beers from about 121 distinct breweries this year – and I say “about” because tonight’s drinks are still to be recorded. It’s hard to say whether there’s an observer effect here, whether we’re drinking more or less or opting for more variety because of our decision to record our drinks.

Looking forward, here are my resolutions for 2013. I’m keeping them to the goals I really want to focus on and think are achievable this year. Besides these, I have other projects in the works that will become better realized the new year.

• New Year’s Resolution #1: Read all of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’m going to begin by rereading Swann’s Way (the first volume of seven volumes total), since I last read that four years ago. Just some 3,000 pages to go.
• New Year’s Resolution #2: Learn to enjoy running. I try this every year, but I think having a dedicated running buddy will help this time around. Our goal is to run a 5K in the spring, maybe work up to a 10K later in the year.
• New Year’s Resolution #3: More civic participation! Volunteer with local organizations and give back to the community. What’s your favorite local cause?
• New Year’s Resolution #4: Ride more brevets than I did last year. Hopefully that’s easy because I rode only one brevet – my first – in 2012.
• New Year’s Resolution #5 is another bike-related one: Ride 3,000 miles in 2013. Evenly distributed that’d be 250 miles/month – doable! In 2012, I rode about 2,400 miles from April to December.

Happy New Year!

This Thanksgiving

Be thankful for what you have: health, family (no matter how unconventional), friends (whether near or far), and the courage to work towards the unknown future.

Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless,
To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,
Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys;
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you—however long, but it stretches and waits for you;
To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither,
To see no possession but you may possess it—enjoying all without labor or purchase—abstracting the feast, yet not abstracting one particle of it;
To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go,
To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them—to gather the love out of their hearts,
To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you,
To know the universe itself as a road—as many roads—as roads for traveling souls.

‘Song of the Open Road’, Walt Whitman

Poetry’s place in each day

Advice given to me at graduation by one of my English professors, Judith Plotz: “Carry a good anthology of poetry on your travels.”

As a scholar of Romanticism, Professor Plotz introduced me to some of my (now) favorite poets, including the English peasant poet John Clare. She taught me to memorize poetry, believing in its powers to sustain a person. She measured her love for poetry like the cadence of one’s gait, each word dropped like a step upon the earth. I’m thinking back to her advice now, as I do more walking and prepare to spend over 8 hours straight walking in the Sierra Club’s annual One Day Hike.

Recently, another of my former English professors, Margaret Soltan (University Diaries), has begun to record an online poetry lecture series at Udemy, called Modern Poetry. Her focus is on Modernism and Post-Modernism. It’s a free online course, so no risk in poking around and seeing if you enjoy it. Every human being owes themselves this appreciation of language and its power. In particular, Professor Soltan goes through detailed analyses of certain famous poems, such as Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror“. But it’s also just nice to listen to her speak of poetry in general.

Give poetry a chance, especially if you’re only ever been forced to read it. Especially if you find it challenging. Poetry expands your understanding of the breadth and depth of human experience, shaping language to express desire, pain, tedium.

“The present moment is constantly slipping into the past…”

Everyday Lessons Learned: December 2011, Week 4

Here’s to the end of 2011. It’s been quite a busy and eventful year. I’m pleased with how I’ve been able to keep up with posting what I’ve learned every day, even if I didn’t keep track in June (posting instead about my trip to Korea). One blogging tip I have – especially for longer term projects like my “Everyday Lessons Learned” – is to set aside time to post. Otherwise it’s easy to forget and realize that you’ve fallen behind. If you set a personal schedule of posting and set yourself to it, it’s not hard to keep a blog active.

22: This year was the first year in over 3 decades in which we sentenced fewer than 100 people to death row. From a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, as reported on NPR’s Morning Edition. Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, says one factor in this is crime rates:

This year the murder rate fell to where it was in the 1960s, meaning there are fewer people to charge with capital murder. That’s an enormous drop from the 1990s — when the U.S. executed more inmates than in at least half a century.

23: Did anyone else attempt to read the dictionary as a kid? I’m reminded of my short-lived attempt to read (not necessarily memorize) every word in the dictionary when I see this list of words David Foster Wallace copied out of a dictionary. My bookmark while I read DFW’s Infinite Jest was a sheet of paper on which I wrote all the words he used that I didn’t know the meaning of.

24: Together with the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) forms the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking in the United States.  It’s 3,100 mile long, and runs along part of the North American Continental Divide. A thru-hike (a complete hike of the entire trail from end-to-end) of the CDT takes around six months at a pace of 17 miles/day. Add that one to your bucket list.

25: The East Coast Greenway (ECG) is a 2,500-mile, car-free path planned to go from Calais, Maine to Key West Florida, spanning huge distances with a continuous path. Currently over 25% is already on paths free of motorized vehicles, and the rest consists of interim on-road routes while the rest of the paths are being constructed. The goal for the ECG is to link all the major cities along the way, creating a safe way to travel by non-motorized means between these places on the eastern seaboard.

26: Some of the benefits to having a green roof:

There are many benefits to a green roof including a decrease in heating and cooling costs, which in turn mitigates the urban heat island effect. Other benefits include a natural filter for rain water, an increase in the life span of the roof, a natural habitat for animals and plants and a reduction in dust and smog levels. (via ArchDaily)

27: Detroit is planning a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that will span 110 miles with these dedicated bus lanes. This would make Detroit’s BRT system the largest in the United States. (The largest in the world is currently Jakarta’s TransJakarta BRT system.) Stephanie Lotshaw at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy says that all current BRT systems in the U.S. are under 20 miles.

28: As described in the New Yorker, the Pitch Drop Experiment is the world’s longest running lab experiment, in which University of Queensland physics professor Thomas Parnell poured hot pitch into a glass funnel, tracking how long it would take for a drop to fall. It look eight years for the first drop of pitch to fall, another nine for the second drop, and so far there have been eight drops. The professor currently overseeing the experiment, John Mainstone, predicts the next drop will occur in 2013 – no one has yet witnessed the actual occurrence of a falling drop.

29: Layaway programs are regaining popularity in America with the depressed economy. These allow shoppers to make payments on the full price of a product, only getting the product once it’s paid off. However, there’s usually a $5 service fee, which means that it would typically cost more to buy something on layaway. The option of paying for things on layaway has recently returned to Walmart. Some of the appeal of layaway is that it forces you to put money aside for a specific product, rather than spending it elsewhere, especially because of the sunk cost of the service fee and the extra fee for cancellation if the shopper doesn’t make all the payments.

30: The Teapot Dome Scandal was an incident considered the greatest scandal in American politics, before Watergate. In 1922, during President Harding’s administration, the Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted huge bribes from oil companies to grant them production rights without competitive bidding at Teapot Dome, an oil field in Wyoming. Fall was the first Presidential cabinet member to be imprisoned for his actions while in office.

31: Just to come back around: In 2011, Arlington may have had its first year since the 1950s without a single murder. DC’s also experiencing a decline in murders.

For some other notes in the year-end roundup, keep reading.

Traffic to my blog grew by more than 65% over last year.

Most-read posts on Aesthetics of Everywhere from 2011:

1. Everyday Lessons Learned: May 2011, Week 3
2. T-money for transport and more in Seoul
3. Spa Land in Centum City, Busan (and this one I just typed out quickly on my iPod)
4. Seersucker Social 2011 Photos
5. “Hamtdaa: Together” at Artisphere

Cheers to the New Year! Make 2012 count.

More 2011 roundup posts than you’ll ever get around to reading

I hope by now everyone’s wrapping up the year and spending a lot of time with family and friends. Here’s my roundup of 2011 roundups. Add your own in the comments!

• Zeitgeist 2011: Year in Review Video (Google)
• Best Maps of 2011 (Spatial Analysis)
• Best Memes of 2011 (Know Your Meme)
• Best Websites of 2011 (Time Magazine)
• 10 Worst Social Media Marketing Blunders of 2011 (Advertising Age)
• Top 10 Best TED Talks of 2011 and Top 10 Culture-Tech Stories of 2011 (ReadWriteWeb)
• Another List of Lists at Listgeeks Staff Picks for Best of 2011
• Rusty’s Top 30 Songs of the Year and Top 50 Albums of the Year
• The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011 (FlowingData)
• From one of my favorite new art blogs of the year, A Colossal Year
• Conversational Reading’s Favorite Films of 2011
• Doree Shafrir’s Top Longreads of 2011
• Ryan Little’s 10 Best Local Tracks of 2011
• The Most Important Graphs of 2011 (The Atlantic)
• The Geography of the Year in Music (The Atlantic Cities)

In 2011, I…

• Kept a running list of new things I learned almost every day.
• Read fewer books than I did the previous year, which isn’t a good thing – but I have a long commute by bus/Metro so I’m looking to up that number in 2012.
• Joined – and became slightly obsessed with – Quora. It’s the way online Q&A should be done.
• Cooked a lot and tried out many new recipes, including a bunch of kale soups, pierogies, kimchi chigae, the best sweet potato fries recipe ever, and homemade salsa and tortilla chips.
• Traveled to South Korea for a few weeks with my brother and my boyfriend. Went hiking on Soraksan, danced in Korean clubs, visited royal palaces, and made new friends.
• Took shorter trips to Philadelphia, Austin, New York City, and Baltimore. All of them are exciting cities with vibrant cultural and artistic life.
• Greatly expanded my knowledge and study of urbanism, public transit systems, and mapping projects.
• Rode my bicycle all over DC, and on fun rides like the Seersucker Social, the Tweed Ride, and bike caravans with friends.
• Started taking Capoeira classes. Fun, challenging, and an incredible workout.
• Moved to the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC, which is definitely my favorite place I’ve lived in Washington, DC.

Looking forward to setting some new goals in 2012!

Everyday Lessons Learned: September 2011, Week 1

Happy September!

01: Your senses are delayed by about 80 milliseconds. Your brain can align inputs from simultaneous sensations (traveling from different distances through your body) so they’re experienced in sync – in a way, your brain waits before registering the information it has gathered from your body.

02: According to a recent CDC report, 5% of Americans drink over 550 calories of sweetened drinks daily. Teenage boys drink the most of the sugary stuff.

03: Caleb Chung, the creator of the Furby, wanted to improve upon the electronic pet idea (like the Tamagotchi and Giga Pet – very popular in the 90s) by creating a toy that could appear to be responsive and emulate machine learning. The more you played with a Furby, the more its vocabulary seemed to grow. It was programmed to gradually move from an unintelligible “Furbish” language to the English language, though the toy itself couldn’t actually hear or understand anything that was said to it. The Furby’s emotional expression are tracked to its ears – essentially serving as both its eyebrows and its arms. (Radiolab)

04: Pickling cucumbers doesn’t require many ingredients: cucumbers, water, vinegar, sugar, salt, garlic, and dill. I haven’t tried making them myself but hope to soon!

05: Verbal overshadowing is a term used to describe the strange effect studied by Jonathan Schooler: those who wrote down a description of a bank robber immediately after a staged crime actually had a harder time remembering the details later than those who didn’t describe the person right afterward. But his data began to regress towards the mean… (This one’s fascinating. Listen to the whole story here.)

06: The first Piggly Wiggly supermarket opened in Memphis, TN on this day in 1916. It was the first of its kind: a fully self-serve grocery store, in which customers could pick their items off the shelves without having to write an order to the clerk. According to the commemorative plaque at that site, “shoppers presented their orders to clerks who fetched goods, ground coffee beans, measured flour and sugar, and then added the bills in pencil on the back of sacks.”

07: An interesting analysis of China’s dependence on tobacco:

Smoking in China remains a highly gendered behavior with 57.4% of men and 3% of women smoking, respectively (WHO, 2010). The concentration of smoking among men reflects advertising and marketing strategies that have linked tobacco to traditional notions of masculine identity (nanzihan – 男子汉), political leadership (imagery of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoking) and expressions of nationalism and patriotism (cigarette brands such as Zhonghua – 中华). Anthropologists such as Matthew Kohrman have described how exchanging cigarettes forms the currency of male networking and friendship in rural and urban China (Kohrman, 2007).

Travel Flashback to 2006: St. Gallen, Switzerland

Going through old emails is a fun jaunt into the past. You never realize quite how much you’ve grown until you’re looking back several years in your inbox.

I dug up a few emails from July/August 2006, when I took a trip to Switzerland with one of my best friends to visit her aunt’s family, who lives in St. Gallen. Comments and excerpts, for nostalgia’s sake:

• The first day we arrived in Switzerland was the first time I tried grappa, a strong Italian drink.
• I noted that the calcium levels in the tap water were very high: “…so it’s good for you, but showers hurt if the levels go unchecked.”
• One of the main things I noted was how much environmental consciousness informed all aspects of daily living:
• Bike lanes are ubiquitous because they discourage driving if you can bike instead. Example: At the train stations, the bike parking area is much closer to the platforms than the car parking spots are.
• Trash bags cost 15 francs (at the time) for 10 bags. This works out to about one US dollar per trash bag, and the only way your trash will be collected is if you use these special bags that are specific to the area you live in. The money you pay for the trash bags covers some of the local government’s cost to pay for the maintenance workers and trash servicemen. People default to recycling if at all possible – it’s just too pricey to throw a lot of garbage out in Switzerland.
• We were told it was typical that most houses aren’t air-conditioned. I wonder if that’s still the case now, or whether it’s changing. It’s also not common to have a refrigerator in a Swiss household; my friend’s aunt had to special order theirs (she grew up in the United States and was used to having a fridge in the kitchen). I found out that fresh eggs don’t need to be kept refrigerated, like we see in most US grocery stores.
• “Beautiful mountains.” (You know I’m a fan.)
• Huge drug problems among the teenagers there. Some public restrooms have blue lighting installed, so that intravenous drug users can’t find their veins to shoot up.
• While in St. Gallen, we slept with the windows open and breakfasted on the terrace. Such idyllic days.
• “The cheese is wonderful, and the Swiss are very proud of their cows, so you see cows wandering everywhere, even across roads. They are sweet and wear cute bells.”

Cows allowed to wander. After I returned from the trip, I summed it up this way: “It was amazing and refreshing and I ate tons of delicious food and took many photos (all while missing the DC heat wave).”

Give thanks

I give thanks that again that long nights, though they’re lonely, are lit by stars and end with suns that climb. And the moon will back me up on this, just look up. – The Microphones, “Thanksgiving”

In 2010, I’ve had much to be thankful for. At breakfast with my family, we’ve gone over the ones we like to remember each year (if not each day). Friends. Family. Health.

And also: it takes time after traveling to internalize the depth of one’s experiences abroad. Being in a new place makes me want to run around and take it all in completely, pushing myself to be more active – the obvious compression of time makes it feel necessary and of course the air is surged with excitement – and there’s less time for introspection. Most of my thoughts are saved to be written down in the stale air of an airplane or to the rattling of a rail car, but often just lost to time. My memory isn’t so great. So as time passes, there’s the test of what comes back: the sound of screaming cockroaches in a concrete shower, feeling warm and embraced by a roomful of strangers singing along to American songs in Bandung, watching the afternoon rains from a window in Bangkok.

My addition to my list of thanks in 2010 is this: Recognizing that I am one of many living in a world that does not deal evenly with all people, and yet it is no reason to lose faith that it gets better. I’ve seen a little more of the world: cried in a bedroom on an island far from home, made friends abroad who have loved unconditionally across oceans and sent their tidings across years, and found utopia in the most inconspicuous places.