Exit171… it’s all about the journey

I can’t believe August is done. Another month with over 500 miles on the bike! I’ve lost over 25 pounds since I started exercising and only have a few more to get to my target weight/BMI.
Road Cycling - 501.64 miles
Walking - 60.70 miles, 165,312 steps

I’ve decided to discontinue manually logging my daily activities on my exercise page. Instead, I’ll continue using SportBrain (for walking) and MotionBased (for cycling) to report everything. I’ll also start logging my rides at BikeJournal.com. Check out my exercise page for all the links.

About a week ago I was wolfing down some McDonald’s on the go in my car (yes, McD’s, The Bell, and BK are still my kryptonite). Anyway, I was trying to fit my medium fries into my cup holder, but it just wasn’t fitting. I’m thinking, why don’t they make these containers circular so they fit in cup holders? I can’t be the only one thinking of this. Sure enough, I go to Burger King today and what do they have? The “Frypod”… a new holder for fries (and onion rings) that fits in a cup holder. Sometimes it’s just the little things that make the difference

I’m not usually one to watch award shows, but I had to watch my favorite, Conan O’Brien, host The Emmys. The opening video was hilarious and I thought he did a great job to the end. I was psyched that Kiefer Sutherland, 24, and The Office all won. I’m going to check out The Colbert Report on Comedy Central — that Stephen Colbert looks pretty funny.

I decided to start a photo gallery in my Smugmug of some of my cycling rides (at least the scenic ones). I figured I’d start with my longest ride to date — 52 miles. For some of the trips with a lot of photos, I’ll probably continue creating separate galleries. Here are the links:

Cycling Photo Journal
Cycling Photo Journal RSS Feed
Ithaca Gallery
New York City Gallery

The pic above is actually an image from Google Earth. I exported my route from MotionBased (as captured via my Garmin Edge 305 GPS). Gotta love Google Earth!

Zone Five Software just updated SportTracks to include cadence graphing for cycling. What an outstanding program for tracking any exercise or activity! I’m using my Garmin Edge 305 for data collection — integration with SportTracks is perfect. Here’s a sample graph and map from my latest workout (~13 miles):

I had a great time this past weekend in upstate New York (in and around Ithaca). Went camping, cycling, hiking, and attended the NASCAR race at Watkins Glen.

Here are some pics from our 36 mile ride through the hills (over 2,600 feet in total elevation) and some light hiking through Robert H. Treman State Park. The hills on this ride really kicked my butt… the grade for one hill at Cornell University was 23.8%… steep! Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region is simply beautiful. I’ll definitely be back. Thanks for the great tour Darren!

Ithaca Cycling & Hiking

More cycling and exercise details here (be sure to export and view any of my rides in Google Earth… wild stuff!):

Dio’s Exercise Log
Dio’s MotionBased Digest

Here are my pictures from ‘AMD at The Glen’. Ironically, I took a bunch of pictures of Kevin Harvick’s car BEFORE the race (he won). Who knew?!

AMD at The Glen

What a huge disappointment (although I still want to believe he’s innocent)…

PARIS (Reuters) - Floyd Landis is likely to lose his Tour de France title after a second drugs sample on Saturday confirmed a positive test for excessive amounts of the male sex hormone testosterone.

[Reuters Article]