Thwarted

I felt betrayed. The display on the bike rack read, "Temporarily closed for system servicing. Please come back later."

I didn't have "later." The monthly noontime Tidal Basin 3K Run, held the third Wednesday of every month, was going to start in 10 minutes. And it was two miles away.

I wasn't going to make it. This was going to be only the tenth one that I have missed in the last hundred months.

I have a new system for attending this run which is two and a half miles from my work, to cut down the time I am away from the office when it is held. I used to jog there, run the race, and jog back. It was time consuming.

Lately I have been jogging over to Judiciary Square and picking up a SmartBike (100 bikes scattered about the city at 10 bike racks that members can use for free anytime during the day). Then I bicycle the rest of the way, and bicycle back after the race. It saves a lot of time. I have come to depend upon this method of getting there, and now leave my office for the race at a quarter to noon instead of at 11:30.

But the SmartBike.DC system was down, and I was stuck. I couldn't get a bike out of the locked rack, although there were seven candy-colored beauties there tantalizing me. Just when you start to count on something . . . . .

Runners are resilient though, right? I figured out a 3K route in my head that travelled up Capitol Hill for a little hillwork thrown in and took off at noon for a virtual 3K race. I wound up 14:54 (8:02) later at Union Station where I bought lunch and walked with it the two blocks back to my office, arriving back at work at 12:20.

Later when I plotted out the route I had run on g-maps, I saw it was a little short of 3K, 1.8 miles instead of 1.86 miles. But the real race doesn't have a big hill like Capitol Hill in it.

Goin' Down.

We're goin' over!

Yesterday I came out of a restaurant after lunch in DC and unlocked my bike (one of the 100 bikes that SmartBike.DC keeps scattered about the town for my use whenever the mood strikes me) to return to work. It was next to the curb, and the rear wheel slipped down the cement sidewall into the street. Then the front wheel slid down the curb. Next I started going over.

As I tried to keep the bike from clattering onto the street, I just followed it down into the roadway. Face down. In the gutter. At high noon in midtown. In my suit.

All energy being expended, motion ceased. There was no harm done to anything from the slow spastic fall.

I looked up from where I was flat on my face in the street, lying atop a candy-colored red and white SmartBike. If I was a younger version of myself, I would have sprung back up and cycled away before anyone noticed me. (Yeah, right, an anonymous noisy falling down in a busy street at noon.)

I stood up, brushed my hands off and righted my bike. Everyone on the sidewalk bustling by was ignoring me. I raised my arm, waved it and said loudly, "Don't worry, I'm alright everyone!"

A man crossing the street called out, "Are you all right?"

"Everything's fine except the pride," I said and he laughed.

I just hate it when those slow motion train wrecks get started.

A blogland hookup

I had a nice hookup for lunch with Not Born To Run on Saturday at Teaism in the District. Since she does tris now, she really should be known as Not Born to Run, Bike or Swim (or maybe Not Born to Whatever). She had a real nice post recently about losing her Mom, and it was good to catch up with her for an hour.

I was late. I couldn't find parking nearby so I finally parked over near my work across the street from Georgetown Law and ran from there to Judiciary Square, where I jumped aboard a DC Smartbike and bicycled the rest of the way to the restaurant at E and 8th Streets. Jeanne's observation as I rode up was that all I needed was to add swimming and I'd be a tri-athlete too.

It's funny the difference between men and women. I spent the hour bemoaning the fact that I hadn't brought my cable lock so we had to sit by the window where I could watch my bike, parked outside. NBTR instead was worried that I didn't have a helmet. (Helmet? What helmet?)

I grew up biking all over the hills of Staten Island on my trusty red Schwinn without a helmet. I delivered the Herald Tribune every morning and went to the corner candy store for an Almond Joy bar every afternoon on my bike without mishap. Gears? What gears? (Ain't this a thing of beauty? My Schwinn didn't have any front brakes, though. )

Even the Smartbike has three gears. While we ate, I saw another Smartbike user ride by my forlorn red and white bicycle parked on the curb, sans lock. I felt like rushing outside and waving to him. Sort of like back in the early 60s when VW owners always beeped at each other when they drove by one another. But he had on a helmet so I didn't point him out to Jeanne. Show-off!

After sixty minutes of delightful conversation during which we solved many of the problems of blogland but none of the difficulties of the real world, I bicycled back to Judiciary Square to return my bike to its rack and then went in to work for a few hours to do some administrative work on the half-marathon program I direct for my club. Jeanne is hard at work training for her next race, the Blue & Gray Half-Marathon in Fredericksburg. She is fresh from a 10K PR in a race last week. She looks great.

What I forgot to tell Jeanne is that I have the same birthday as her Mom had, April 15th, Income Tax Day. It's unforgettable.

Do you suppose I really need a helmet?

A Visit to the National Arboretum

A couple of weekends ago, I picked up a SmartBike, threw it in my pickup and drove over to the National Arboretum for a couple of hours biking over there. It was very rewarding. (Columns from the Capitol, removed when they enlarged and refurbished it in the 1950s, are planted out here in the National Arboretum.)

I had never been there before. This 412-acre reserve off New York Avenue is on the northeastern edge of DC, just before you leave the District by way of the Baltimore Washington Parkway. Admission is free and there is plenty of parking.

It is well kept and features lots of little stands of different kinds of both indigenous and exotic trees. Hilly roadways snake through the grounds, and security is ever present. (A quiet spot in the National Arboretum.)

There were lots of picnickers on that Sunday. They were even having an ice-cream social there so I parked my bike among some green-thumb types, muscled ahead of some children on line and partook in a refreshing ice-cream cone.

Check it out someday. It's fun and relaxing.

Green Day

I was green today. Oh yeah. This morning I went to the furthest outlying SmartBike rack, the one at Dupont Circle, to check out its actual location and to simulate a "bike commute" to work.

When I arrived in Dupont Circle, I checked out both entrances to the Metro Station but couldn't locate a SmartBike rack. So I asked a nearby downtown Hospitality Ambassador, standing around in her distinctive black and gold clothing (an "ask me" person), where the SmartBike rack was. She had never heard of the SmartBike program but she got on her radio and in minutes had the answer. As a matter of fact she chased me down with the information because by then I was wandering around asking other clueless persons. (Right: These Golden Triangle Ambassadors will get you answers in downtown DC.)

Mass Avenue on Dupont Circle. Sure enough, there was the bike rack, out of sight of either entranceway but loaded with the distinctive red and white bikes.

Rush hour traffic in DC is nuts. I decided the safest route over to the Union Station area where I work didn't lie in following the hypotenuse down Mass Avenue to Union Station, but rather going along the two legs of the triangle. So I gained Rock Creek Park, where there is a bike path, by going a few blocks down P Street, almost getting run over by a swiftly moving Metro bus in the process. After my traverse down Rock Creek Park, I hung a left and rode up the Mall to near Judiciary Square, whereupon I rode a few blocks on city streets to the drop-off bike rack.

Lo and behold, there was a SmartBike guy there, dressed in red and white clothing, unloading several bikes from that full rack to transport them in his red and white van to less full racks at other locations. I helpfully wheeled a couple of bikes over to his van to help him out.

Twenty-nine minutes on a bike. My legs were on fire. But this is a program that works. I have a stable of 100 bikes being kept downtown for my personal use anytime (between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.), all being serviced by a legion of mechanics and drivers, for $40 a year. Nah-nah, do you?

Dark Pleasures

I feel like I've been untrue. Less than a day after I took my first whirl on a Smart Bike in downtown DC, thoroughly enjoying the ride although wary of the dangers of riding a bicycle in the wild woolly west of downtown DC traffic, I checked the SmartBikeDC website at the end of the workday (it electronically keeps track of the current whereabouts of every returned bike), discovered there was only one bike left at Judiciary Square, the bike rack closest to my work, and hastened out the door and over to Judiciary Square, five minutes away. I fought off the urge to run there.

Wednesday's ride was an experiment, a breaking in period, a getting-to-know-you experience. Yesterday's rendezvous was a guilty pleasure. I didn't need to bike on the surface from Judiciary Square on the Red Line to Metro Center on the Orange Line during rush hour. Trains come every three or five minutes then so the transfer is swift.

The bike was still there at Judiciary Square. Telling myself that I was cross-training a little, I took 'er out for a spin. I didn't have my bulky briefcase hung over my shoulder like the day before so I felt more nimble as I made my way through the busy, broken downtown streets over to Metro Center, using muscles that haven't been worked out in decades (you know, the "bike muscles"). I thought about maybe riding over to the further Foggy Bottom Orange Line stop on the next outing.

I hope this doesn't get out of hand.