[NickBull]

@Tim Kelley 137438 wrote:

I’ve been told in the past that the paint is actually an anti-mold substance. Mold = more slippery. Just think, it could be worse!

Yeah, I think it’s some sort of marine paint. It doesn’t seem to make it more slippery in practice. And it’s good to know that the park service values cyclists lives enough to buy a gallon of paint once a decade or so. This is the second time they’ve painted with this stuff. It’s also the second time where they weirdly don’t just paint the entire area. They’ve partially painted it and then apparently decided their work is done. I guess cyclist’s lives are not worth the two gallons of paint it would require to finish the job.

[NickBull]

@KWL 136112 wrote:

Pretreating bookends my MVT commute. Way to show up all other jurisdictions, Arlington County. L to R: Rosslyn to MVT GW Parkway overpass. MVT intersection with 4MRT.

That pre-treatment stuff is pretty weird to ride on. Kinda sticky so your tires get coated with … whatever. I stopped several times to check that I hadn’t ridden through broken glass and gotten a flat tire.

[NickBull]

Arlington resident working at the base of Capitol Hill,

Highest priority for me: Clear the MVT from Rosslyn down to Memorial bridge, and clear the connector up to Memorial Bridge and the Memorial Bridge sidewalk on the downstream side. That lets me get from Custis to cleared (low-traffic) streets in the district, like Ohio Drive.

Lower priority: In addition, clear all the way to the 14th St bridge.

Alternative route is Custis->Key->Rock Creek Trail->Ohio Drive but it doesn’t sound like any of that is under the jurisdiction of the NPS GWMP.

Thanks,

Nick Bull

[NickBull]

@Emm 135160 wrote:

I feel like the second they offered us beer and free water bottles the protest would end peacefully…

Maybe we should all have signs that say “Will protest for free beer”

[NickBull]

@dbb 135018 wrote:

I would submit the NPS ownership/operation of the the local parks in the District …

Perhaps we should organize an occupation of one of those parks to protest overweening federal ownership of what should be local lands? Wait, wasn’t there one of those recently out west that didn’t end too well?

Just kidding, everyone!

Nick

[NickBull]

More generally, from the top of Rosslyn Hill, down the Custis to the MVT, across 14th St bridge, and then through neighborhood streets, the only patch of ice I encountered at around 8:30 to 9:00 am was the above-mentioned 8′ by 8′ patch of ice south of the Trollheim.

[NickBull]

@huskerdont 135145 wrote:

Anyone ride Trollheim this morning? Any ice? I need to leave early and that’s my usual route home (though not in). I’m on 25 slicks.

I rode the Trollheim this morning on studded tires, but did not notice any ice on the Trollheim itself. However there is a small sheet of black ice that was covering the MVT a little south of the Trollheim. Only about 8 feet by 8 feet, but I didn’t see it until I was right on top of it, so I was glad to have studs. It maybe gone by now, though, who knows.

[NickBull]

@vvill 134492 wrote:

I imagine Kurt Searvogel’s number is north of 200, although I guess it depends on how you count a ride day, especially since he would also change bikes (to a recumbent).

The impressive thing about a R-12 is that it’s also RUSA/ACP sanctioned rides/routes. So you can’t just do loops around HP and go up the W&OD to get your 200k.

Well, although a typical RUSA route is a lot hillier than Haines Point, I really can’t imagine anything much more brutally boring than riding around HP 39 times to get your 200km done! Part of what makes a tough ride “easy” (OK, “easier”) is that the scenery is so pretty it helps the miles disappear. And if you’ve got friends to ride with and chat with, you don’t notice the miles go by.

[NickBull]

@Rod Smith 134489 wrote:

Awesome, Nick! Nice meeting you yesterday. Are you sure that guy rode over 190 miles 190 times? Brevets of 200, 300K don’t count towards that E number except for 300s that exceed the minimum distance by four miles…

Hi, Rod,

Well, I’m not “firing squad certain” but I am pretty sure. Go to the RUSA site and search Results for #2565. I just pasted the results into Excel, changed the format to unmerge cells, sorted on distance (descending) and then made a “counting” column and a “miles” column. You just scan down the counting column looking for the last point at which the count is still less than the miles. All the events above that are the same or longer distance. I think that works!

Good to meet you, too,

Nick

[NickBull]

@Rod Smith 134117 wrote:

Strava or it didn’t happen, Nick! :rolleyes:

Hah, Steve O bumped into me on the Custis on the way home and told me about this, so I had to go compute my Eddington number. For this year, it’s 15 (in miles). Lifetime, it’s 125. I’m not on Strava, but these are “official” RUSA events, you can search for me on here:
http://rusa.org/cgi-bin/resultsearch_PF.pl

I’ve ridden 238 RUSA events of 100km or longer, totalling 57,372 kms since 2005. Steve O mentioned the R-12 award for riding 12 months in a row of 200km or longer “official” events. In January, I became the first person east of the Mississippi to have ridden 120 straight months of R-12 events; there are half a dozen randonneurs west of the Mississippi who have ridden ten R-12’s though I don’t know if all of them are sequential.

But … of course there’s always someone who’s “a little” better.

One of the RUSA members has ridden 1042 events of 100km or longer, totalling 247,501 kms. His Eddington number is 190. Of course, he’s one of the six west of the Mississippi and by now he probably has 132 consecutive events as far as I can tell, though there are so many it’s pretty hard to keep track!

In km, his Eddington number is 289 and mine is 194.

If you want to find people with high Eddington numbers, look on the RUSA site for “Awards” and then the “Galaxy” award (at least 100,000km’s). All those people have high Eddington numbers!

Edited to add: And if you want a really high Eddington number, measure it in meters. My round-trip commute is around 32,000 meters so the real constraint is how many times I’ve ridden it, maybe around 2000 times over the last couple of decades.

Nick

[NickBull]

FYI, This issue has hit the WaPo “Dr Gridlock” section:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/02/04/shouldnt-snow-cleanup-include-trails/

[NickBull]

My route in was easy on studded tires and would have been feasible on road tires with a few little sections of hike-a-bike.

Kirkwood -> Lyons Village -> Custis -> Key Bridge -> C&O towpath -> Rock Creek Trail (under the Whitehurst) -> Ohio Drive -> E Basin Dr -> Maine Ave and then some miscellaneous surface streets.

Studded tires were not mandatory for any of this, but there were some sections of the Rock Creek Trail that still had short glacier fields that I wouldn’t have tried on road tires. The guy in front of me on road tires discovered to his chagrin that psychic friction is not enough to keep you upright if you hit the glacier at significant speed without even slowing down. The glacier field has two single-track ruts through it, so it’s possible he might have made it through if he had slowed down enough to pick his way through, though I’m not sure. If it were me on road tires, I’d just dismount and walk the thirty feet. With studded tires, the glacier field was essentially un-noticeable. But the studded tires are a lot of work to roll, so depending on conditions on my commute home, I might come in on road tires tomorrow and plan on hiking those little sections.

[NickBull]

@chris_s 133584 wrote:

That’s odd – it’s coming up fine for me. What device and browser are you using?

Firefox with Noscript at work and home. I’ve told NoScript to allow all at dcbikemap.com. Still fails.

However Internet Explorer succeeds at home (not avail. at work).

I can’t tell what color Rock Creek Trail is supposed to be. It looks black. Is it supposed to be green??

Nick

[NickBull]

Has anyone tried to get from Georgetown to the area of Federal Triangle SW? Particularly Rock Creek Trail?

I usually would take Key Bridge, then cross the C&O on one of the bridges and ride down the towpath for a bit, then down to the waterfront riding the road under Whitehurst Fwy. From there I would take Rock Creek Trail past the Kennedy Center and eventually to Ohio Drive, bump onto sidewalks next to E. Basin and past the Jefferson Memorial and eventually over to Maine Ave.

Haven’t seen any reports on road conditions for any parts of this route.

Thanks in advance if anyone knows anything.

Nick

[NickBull]

@chris_s 132851 wrote:

Anybody want to be a guinea pig? Seems like a good weekend for trial by fire.

The #bikedc crowd-sourced regional trail and road conditions map

It’s a very rough beta, but functional.

It was functional the first time I tried it right after you posted this. But the next time I looked, a couple of days ago, all I get is a big, blank page. Same’s true today.

Nick

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