Happy St. Patrick's Day

For the past few weeks I've been working on a project in my basement workout/workshop room to install a flat screen monitor from the ceiling.  I thought it'd be cool to use my Roku and watch P90X videos, muni videos, and movies while I'm working out or working on projects.  I went a little extreme and made a custom ceiling mount that allows me to rotate the monitor 360° and slide it from the workout area to the workshop area.

Here's a picture showing the workout area half of the room.
The monitor is turned towards the elliptical and a headphone cable is hanging from it.  The A/V and power cables are all kind of slapped up behind the monitor for now, but I'd like to improve that.  The rails are attached to the ceiling joists with spacers to leave about an inch gap.  The monitor is mounted on a trolley that slides on top of the rails. The mount hangs down between the rails so when I rotate the monitor the trolley can't rotate.  It works very well for my purposes. I can move it to the workout area or the workshop area, and rotate it to see from anywhere.

So yesterday I was psyched up to watch a movie while using my elliptical machine.  Since I'm preparing for the Singlespeed-A-Palooza, I set my elliptical program to the maximum of 99 minutes and chose Strength Intervals at level 8, whatever that means.  Towards the end it did start to feel comparable to a hard muni ride.  Everything was telling me to stop about 20 minutes towards the end.  My legs are feeling it today.

Despite the sore legs, I wanted to get out and ride on this sunny, though 27°F (-3°C), afternoon.  Nothing beats training for a sport like doing the actual sport! I rode the road, Hojack, and route 104 path again.  The Hojack has much less snow, but much more mud.  Actually the spots with snow where very compact and hard which was preferable to the mud.  Some spots were actually quite dry and nice.

I had my first major spill on the road.  I was in high gear heading south on the shoulder of Dewitt Rd.  The gutters of a side road kind of merged into the shoulder.  I was moving at about 10 mph, hit this bump and bad things happened.  I don't remember exactly, but I probably dismounted in front, planted a foot on the ground and rolled from there.  All I remember was the sound of my Camelbak scraping on the road.  I immediately stood up, felt pain in my knee and elbow, grabbed my uni and stepped off the the roadside.  My thin cargo pants were ripped where my knee hurt but my long underwear was fine.  I suspected I was bleeding a bit, but everything seemed functional so I took inventory and moved on.

I found my ride along the 104 path annoying because of the intersections.  My timing was bad and I had to wait for every light.

I headed through North Ponds park and decided to cross the Hojack and check on the Bird Sanctuary Trail.  It was soft, muddy, and clearly needs a lot of work to be a sustainable trail.

Then I crossed into the Chiyoda trail expecting the worse.  And that's exactly what I found.  I had no choice but to walk 95% of it.

When I got home I inspected my war wounds.  Nothing too crazy but still painful.  I found an abrasion similar to my elbow's on my hip.

I rode just over 15 miles.

Muni on Road, Hojack, and 104 Path - 2013-03-17