Three NY State Park Ride
Three NY State Park Ride
Well, I’m back in New York but much further downstate, cycling today, mid-week, up along the Hudson River through three of the state’s most beautiful parks, Harriman, Bear Mountain and Fahnestock.
It was a bit more than three weeks ago that we packed up the car and left the Finger Lakes. Pam and the boys dropped me off at Newark Airport and I spent the next two weeks traveling through Frankfurt to Accra, Ghana for the climate change negotiations and then through Johannesburg to South America. After a brief weekend in São Paulo to run in the Human Race 10K, I spent the rest of that week in Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires.
On arriving back in New York, I got in some loops of Central Park that knocked me for a loop. Maybe too fast and too furious after two weeks on four continents. The jet lag wasn’t too bad, but the stress of being on the road and away from home for a total of four weeks, plus several all night flights, lots of airports, too much hotel and airplane food and maybe a few too many bottles of good Finger Lakes, Chilean and Argentine wines.. well, I was exhausted. Being just enough run down and then spinning around Central Park at top speed left the immunological door open for something I’d acquired flying from Buenos Aires to Washington… and on Monday, after yoga, I knew I was coming down with something. Isn’t it funny that when your body needs a break and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, eventually your immune system says, “Well, if you aren’t going to slow down on your own, I’m going to do it for you.” After seeing the podiatrist about my very uncooperative plantar fascia (more on this later) I rode my bike home, got into bed and didn’t emerge until Thursday night. But, if there is one thing that I have learned over the years, pushing through a bad cold only prolongs the agony.. So, I was good and just got into bed and stayed there, resisting even the temptation to migrate to the home office two bedrooms away for a little work.
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On Saturday, suffering now from a case of cabin fever, I decided to take a slow, easy nice weekend ride from North White Plains, up through Dutchess County and back to Croton Falls, riding from one MetroNorth train station to another. No pushing, just fun and slow. As you can see from the elevation profile, it was either up or down for 70 km. Surprisingly, by the end of the ride I think that the mild exertion (OK, for some people three hours on a bike is not “mild exertion”) actually help clear out the remnants of the cold and I was feeling strong and recovered by the end of the ride.
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Today’s ride was an escape from the pressures of planning for a series of reports we’ll publish next week during the start of the UN General Assembly here in New York. The week has been a series of frustrations in dealing with UN Security, a number of less than helpful bureaucrats who have too much responsibility and none of the necessary authority to actually decide anything, and governments that want everything now. So, I just announced that I was going to be riding my bike on Wednesday and delegated things so that it could happen.
Shaky video from Harriman State Park
The train left Grand Central Station at 6:41 am, arriving in Ossining around 7:25 and then the ferry across the Hudson got to Haverstraw around 8:00. After leaving the outskirts of the city, this ride just disappears into the countryside, avoiding any towns or traffic for more than 60 km.
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At about 50 km into the ride, as I was approaching the top of the hill in Fahnestock State Park, my phone chirped with an SMS, jerking my electronic leash. The plan was to continue east through the park and work my way south, back down towards Croton Harmon to take the 1:30 train, which would have gotten me back home around 3:00 but a little too late to deal with the latest greatest bureaucratic tangle that needed unsnarling. So, I turned around, headed downhill, set the GPS for the closest Metro-North station and sped down to the Cold Spring station to catch the 11:58 for home. 66 km in 3:06 and 1160 meters of vertical climbing. (Aside from the stretch across the Bear Mountain Bridge and north along the river for about five km, this entire route was either straight up or straight down. I swear my next ride is going to be somewhere flat!!)