Training Log Archive: Ari-o

Event: Mt Tom
 

Warm day for the relay race. I was on a not-super-racey team, which meant that I went out for a nice L3 run. It was certainly warm, so at the end of my run I went and jumped in the ocean.

Speaking of, I went surfing every day and that was hard and beat me up pretty well but by day 3 I was able to kind of sort of catch a wave and stand up on it. It's quite an interval workout paddling out into an incoming set. Will need to go back and try again some time.

November Project circuit workout, the way they go, at MB.

Off to check out Rose Creek bike path. I ran this several times last year, but it was part dirt and by no means complete. It was nice. Still a lot of work to be done to make San Diego bike-able, really a shame that this basically dumps out onto a highway on either end.

Alas, I probably could have talked my way onto a preview run of the light rail earlier had I known it was going on. It's also way more done, too.

Then biking to have dinner with NP folk

And then biking back home.

All in all I biked about 35 miles today and let's just say that biking in San Diego is … frustrating. It should be the best city to bike in in the country. The climate is perfect. There's a lot of road space. There are some decent off-street paths. But the rest of the bike infrastructure is not good.

For instance, biking from PB to Point Loma … the first few miles were okay, although a separated facility along Mission Bay which is not the curvy, unlit shared use path would be nice. But then from there to Point Loma there are several bad choices. I could have gone via Sea World, but would have been dumped on to literal, actual highways, with merge ramps and the like. And no reasonable bike route through it, before a long bit of wide, stripmall road. The way I did go was down along the bay, but then over the Pacific Highway bridge, which is old and narrow and loses the bike lanes, before dumping on to the wide roadway, which is way wider than the upstream traffic requires but, in the way of the country, we just paint all the lanes anyway. At least I knew this portion.

Then on to Rosencrans, which is 6 lanes wide, median, and the bike lane comes and goes as it pleases. Each block is a new adventure: will there be a bike lane? Will there be a parking lane? Will there be a sharrow in the rightmost of three lanes that we probably don't need but heavens forbid a road diet someone driving a car might be slightly inconvenienced.

Anyway, biking back I found a slight more bike-friend route, and by bike-friendly I mean "went on Pacific Highway which has a bike lane but is still 8 lanes wide even though the 5 basically replaced it 50 years ago." Then I stopped for a Pronto card and found out that the trolley was replaced with a bus (ersatzbus!) so my airport trip tomorrow might take longer (turns out, yes a bit longer, but Google overestimates the transfer via the rental car shuttle so I had plenty of time and could have left the NP thing later).

I would have ridden a bike share but oh, no, that doesn't exist. Apparently it never succeeded because bike rental owners in places like PB didn't want the competition, and then the scooters swooped in and basically said "here, use these, they're super-subsidized and way more dangerous." Of course, now they are not subsidized, and still way more dangerous, and while I'd be reasonable comfortable biking 6 miles on a shared bike from MB to the airport there's no freakin' way I'd do that on a scooter wearing a backpack. (On a bike share I could put some of the weight in the basket.) Also, it would have cost $15 or so, because the scooters all require someone to pick them up and charge them every day and believe it or not, that isn't free.

Anyway, thank you for reading my rant and also eff scooters. It makes me appreciate more that while things in Boston are pretty lousy, it could be worse.

Nadia and I decided to go to the desert, since we didn't do that at all last year (because we were told not to go places and, like saps, we obeyed; also, they closed a bunch of parks and parking areas). So we went to hike up a trail to an oasis in a valley with palm trees. It was lovely, with cacti and views and desert and I only put my shoe into one cactus (minor cactus related injury). Not many folks out, even on a holiday.

Jogaroo; it's dark around parts of Jamaica Pond.