A Medley of Extemporanea And No, I'm Not Marie of Romania, but thanks for asking

It has begun!

I’ve started biking to work! 22km and 65 minutes later, I had cold toes (from not wearing booties), rosy cheeks, and an attitude of superiority.

It was extremely fresh when I left this morning, -3C outside and -8 with the wind, which as always was in my face the entire ride. My usual route is still under a bit of snow, so I decided to stay on the road the entire trip. I should have, but didn’t end up doing any route finding before I left, and ended up taking a bit of a roundabout way of getting to Baseline. I’ve now looked it up, and I will be cutting about 1.5 km from my return leg. I’m hoping that unlike later in the year, the wind doesn’t change direction in the afternoon, as I would like a nice push home.

Another thing that I did differently on this ride is ditch my headphones. I don’t mind wearing them on the paths, but I do not feel comfortable with them in on Baseline. My solution? A handy battery-powered speaker that plugs into my player’s headphone jack. I could listen to my music and still be situationally aware.

Note to Dan: I also solved the scarf problem.  I have a beard.

Truth in Cycling

I’ve worked out a formula based on speed, weight and time to get a rough estimate of calorie burn for my cycling trips. Interestingly, it hits a bit of a plateau in the middle speed ranges, as shown below. If my calculations are correct, then, I can take it a bit easier going in without hitting a calorie penalty (or, hopefully, needing a shower). On the way home I can boot it, make up the time from the morning, and hop straight into the pool to refresh myself. Win/Win/Win/Win.

Note that I have correlated these calculations with my heart rate monitor (which is probably using a variation of the same formula, since I worked mine out from plotting various responses from different “Calorie counting” Web sites). Bonus points if you can tell me how much I weighed when I made this graph!