Bicycle ride to Clark State Forest

I decided to document, with photos, a typical bike ride in Southern Indiana. This was a 45 mile trip to the Clark State Forest on Sunday, November 2, 2008. More details on the route can be found by clicking this link.

In the table below, you can click on the thumbnail images for a larger photo. Or you can view the originals on flickr.

Starting at County Line Road, make your way to Payne Koehler Road, then out 60 to Bean Road, next to the Clark County airport.
1-Bean Road
While on Bean Road, be sure to pass directly under the pair of Fila tennis shoes someone threw over the line directly above the railroad tracks.
2-Hanging Filas on Bean
About five miles out, take in the scenic beauty of the Sellersburg Stone Company and asphalt plant. Oh, so that's where all those huge trucks are coming from (unless you go on a Sunday).
3-Sellersburg Stone and Asphalt
Ugh. I hate this particular railroad crossing on East Utica Street in sleepy old Sellersburg.
4-Tracks on E Utica St
A close second to railroad crossings I don't like. These always give me the feeling of a potential pancaked front wheel.
5-More Tracks on E Utica St
If you are going to rendezvous with the Southern Indiana Wheelmen, you might find yourself pulling out of this parking lot at Silver Creek High School.
6-Leaving Silver Creek Parking Lot
Once you head down 31 a little bit, take a right on Webber past the "see-mint" plant.
7-Heading out Webber
Climb a little incline on Brick Church Road and get greeted by the Silver Creek Cemetery. You've got promises to keep and miles to go before you sleep.
8-Silver Creek Cemetery
Nice little farm on Brick Church Road.
9-Brick Church Road
Take a left on Stricker. You can build up some speed on the few little rollers but you might as well not, just coast as much as possible. This is not the Tour de France, and you aren't even Walter Mitty.
10-Looking up Stricker Road
Head due East on Stricker. That's kind of a cool lookin barn on the right.
11-Due East on Stricker Rd
Once you turn off of Fox onto Trealor, had you done this ride before the election, you might have noticed the lone Obama sign in a seemingly endless sea of McCain-Palin signs.
12-Lone Obama Sign on Route
So peaceful, a nice scene along Hansberry.
13-Farm Pond on Hansberry Rd
The same farm. Nice spread you got, whoever you are.
14-Farm on Hansberry Rd
The crop's all in, but this is still a spectacular view. Beats riding in downtown Louisville and fighting traffic any day.
15-Field off Hansberry
Keep going on Hansberry. I see a lot of Bluebirds out on this stretch at the right time of day.
16-Due Northwest on Hansberry
You can't see it very well in this photo, but there's a nice smiley face on this barn.
17-Farm on Murphy
Get ready to do the little incline up Murphy to Caney. There are buffalo on the farm to the right once you get to the stop sign.
18-Uphill on Murphy to Caney
Take the nice downhill on into Henryville. Oh Lyle Lovett did a cool song called "Up In Indiana" that mentions Henryville.
19-Downhill on Murphy to Henryville
Get off 31 and take a left into the Forest entrance. As soon as you can. Those cars on 31 can be kind of cruel sometimes, at speeds over 60 often.
20-Entrance to Forest off 31
Welcome to the Forest. Congratulations. You made it.
21-Welcome to the Forest
Oh man, the trees. The leaves.
22-Into the Trees Pretty Quick
Take a left on White Oak and head past the lake. The one-way road makes it a very nice cruise.
23-Rolling to Franke Lake
Leave the lake area and just past here, if you want, go on and take the Fire Tower Challenge. Not for me, on this day.
24-Leaving Lake Area
So long, nice forest area. Head back to 31.
25-Goodbye Forest - Oak Lake
At the four way stop, take a right on 160.
26-Four way in Henryville
This stretch of 160 is not too pleasant, so why not make a stop at the Sprint store for a snack?
27-Food Mart on 160
There is a bench, and may I recommend a Zagnut bar and a Sunkist soda, in lieu of a Clark bar and an Orange Crush (which they do not have). From here, you can go on out 160 to Henryville-Bluelick and make your way back, or simply turn around and go back the way you came. That's what I did.
28-Zagnut and Sunkist

Catching Up

Well, I really don’t know where to begin.  I doubt if I can really catch up just in one post, but I will try, for those two or three people who stop by now and then to see if I am still on the planet.   :)   My year started out good.  I had some goals.  I have achieved a few of them, and I have not achieved a few of them.  I was running races trying to prep for the Mini Marathon.  I think the last one I logged here was the Anthem 5K.  Then after that, I did the Rodes City Run 10K, the Clover Leaf 10K, and the Papa John’s 10 miler.   That was on March 29.  I kept training after that, but a week or two later, I sustained a fluke injury, a bruised rib.  At work.  Sitting in my chair, lol.

But it was a bitch.  Every step I took was like someone poking me really rather severely in my right rib area.  Actually, it was like that with every deep breath I took.  I couldn’t believe my dumb luck.   For a while, I thought I was not going to be able to run the Mini.  I didn’t really make my mind up until about two days before the race, which was April 26.   I managed somehow to complete the race, a whole lot slower than I had originally planned, but considering the circumstances, just finishing was an accomplishment for me.

During that entire time, and since then, I sort of withdrew into myself a bit.  It’s not like I have become anti-social, but I didn’t really feel like I had much to say in terms of keeping this journal up.  I still am not quite sure if I have enough going on that’s worthy enough to write down, but maybe there is.   We’ll see.

After the mini, I stopped training.   I have only run two races since then, both 5Ks, the Thru the Zoo race on May 10, and the Race for the Cure on October 12.  I am in piss poor running shape, but I am going to get back into the swing of it.   I felt like I could barely finish the Race for the Cure, but all I had to do was think about my friend Diann who is recovering from breast cancer, and whatever pain I was feeling during the run seemed trivial.

So, what I have been doing, a whole lot since about June, is riding bicycles.   I had not been doing much riding in the past few years, but back in June, I bought a Cannondale Synapse.  Since then I have been totally and completely hooked.   I have picked up a couple of old Schwinns, too, and restored them.  I made one into a singlespeed with a flip-flop hub for fixie riding, and the other is an aqua colored 1984 Schwinn Traveler 12-speed that is now in it’s original glory.

I have been putting miles in.  It’s sort of addicting, like running is, when you get into it.  Since June 13, I have ridden over 1500 miles, which of course is not a whole bunch but considering I am a working stiff and I don’t really commute because I can’t bring myself to fight the Second Street Bridge traffic on my bike all alone, twice a day, I think the miles I have accumulated so far are good miles.  By that I mean they are miles that for the most part have been exceedingly freeing and supremely satisfying.  I wish I could think up some more superlatives to use.  Bicycling is great.  It doesn’t help me lose weight like running does but that’s not why I do it so much.   It’s very hard to describe but it’s kind of spiritual for me.  :)

More to come…I shall attempt to document the rides I did this weekend, but in a different post.

Haven’t been posting, but I am alive

Yeah.  I haven’t been doing too much in front of the PC at home lately.   Not for a few months in fact.  To catch up, I ran the mini, started riding my bikes again, bought a new bike, started riding it, started fixing up some old bikes I got, started riding them.  And so on.  I will have to get my act together and start blogging again, it’s cathartic.  But so are a lot of other things.   More to come.

Anthem 5K

I have gained a little weight (4 pounds over 2 weeks), getting slower on runs, and generally feeling crappy so I didn’t have high expectations today at the Anthem 5K. I did not get a PR, but looking back over race results I managed to save since 1999 (I took a multi-year hiatus from 2003 to 2007 while turning into a couch potato), there was only one 5K I ran faster, the Colgate 5K in 2000, at 25:06. So not bad for an old, still-overweight guy who just got back into running again:

Chip time: 25:49
Pace: 8:20
Numbers from my watch:
First mile: 7:55
Second mile: 8:20
Third mile: 8:10

Ohio Falls Bridge Painting, Part II

Ohio Falls Bridge Painting, Part II

Okay, I was not able to work on this all week. I only had time today to put on a little more wash, and begin blocking out some of the patterns on the bridge structure. At this rate, it might take me seven weeks. But hey, I’m enjoying it!

Oh, this Part II in a series. It’s a painting I am doing from a photograph I took of the Ohio Falls Bridge, also known as the Fourteenth Street Bridge, on December 26, 2007. I will post more photographs as the painting progresses. Part I was done exactly one week ago.

I am starting on this by doing thin washes and mostly working from the top down. At this point, I am just using a lot of burnt umber, some yellow ochre, raw sienna, cerulean blue, french ultramarine and Permalba. I am mixing it with Turpenoid, which I do not like only because I cannot smell it. I would actually rather work with something I can smell. That way, I know if I am inhaling too much of it.

Today I brought the painting and easel in from my garage to my living room and painted for a couple hours, taking my time. Then I sealed up my palettes (a couple of Chinet paper plates) with some Press’n Seal and moved it all back out into the garage. Most of the paint I had from many years ago was no longer usable, but the brushes have held up well. If “real life” work is not too much of a killer this week, I hope to do some more work on this throughout the week. That way, when it comes to posting Part III next week, there will be more to look at!

Groove Me

Today I completed a 13 mile run, in keeping with my training plan for the 2008 Kentucky Derby Festival miniMarathon. It was the longest I have run since April 28, 2001 (last time I ran the mini). I am pleased that I made it through the run, but I now know that my goal of completing the mini in under 2 hours is probably not achievable. I thought I ran fairly strong, and I took a one minute walk break every 9 minutes, carried water with me and hydrated correctly, ate a bowl of Kashi hot cereal beforehand for energy, etc. But I must have bonked somewhere around mile 10. All I know is that by the time I had gone around 11.6 miles, it seemed like I was running in slow motion, maybe because I was! The last two miles seemed killer to me.

I kind of felt this coming, psychologically. I have not been losing weight like I was, in fact, I have even gained a couple of pounds in the past couple weeks [lousy diet lately], and I have been having the winter/gray skies/all work and no play blues. So building up to this day, I just felt a little anxiety. I woke up around 4 in the morning last night feeling like I needed to have some new music on my iPod to just get me through the run. I downloaded about 10 songs, most of them old funk/R&B classics. I have a huge weakness for early 70s stuff, especially soul funk. Then I created a playlist on my iPod called “Get me thru” and loaded the new songs into it, without listening to any of them because I wanted sort of a “surprise” factor, and mixed in some stuff I already had, enough to last 2.5 hours. All I can say is thank god I did. I really don’t think I could have done this run if it weren’t for the music. And I know for a fact I would have just walked the last uphill half-mile if not for King Floyd’s “Groove Me.” What an awesome, awesome song! From the moment it starts out with a grunt, all the way to the very end, just absolute beauty.

And so, I title this post in honor of that song. King Floyd died a couple years ago but I owe him big time. For those of you interested in the song or maybe want to listen to it, click on this link to a page on the NPR website about it, and about Mr. Floyd. You can then click on another link to listen to the full song, in all its funky splendor. Maybe you will see what I mean, how it carried me up the hill and through the last half mile, and why I love it so.

Obligatory numbers (Yeah, I know. Slow.):

Total Time (h:m:s) 2:21:45 10:45 pace
Distance (mi) 13.19  
Moving Speed (mph) 5.6 avg. 9.4 max.
Elevation Gain (ft) +967 / -964  
Temperature (F) 30.8 F avg. 32 F high
Wind Speed (mph) N 6.9 avg. N 8.1 max.

Ohio Falls Bridge Painting, Part I

Ohio Falls Bridge Painting, Part I

This is the beginning of the first painting I have done in a very long time. It was the number one goal I mentioned in an earlier post on my goals for the year to create a painting to hang over my mantel by the beginning of spring, so today I started it. I decided to use a photo I took on December 26, 2007 of the Ohio Falls Bridge, also known as the Fourteenth Street Bridge, at the Falls of the Ohio.

The canvas size is 36 x 24 inches, and I am working in oils. For the first step, I created a very light pencil drawing, and chose some rudimentary colors for a very thin wash. I will build up more color, detail and paint as the painting progresses, and post photos here of the progress. It’s great to be painting again. It may not be much to look at now, but hopefully by the time I am done with it, it will be. Regardless, the joy is in the doing. Oh, and reading my fellow blogger Michelle’s wonderful articles on her landscape painting has been very inspirational to me this time around. She is a fantastic artist. So thanks, Michelle!

Here is the original photo I took:

Ohio Falls Bridge

If you want to read more about the bridge, you can click this Wikipedia link.

 

Twelve

No words but these, and some numbers.

Total Time (h:m:s) 2:07:51 10:39 pace
Distance (mi) 12.00  
Moving Speed (mph) 5.6 avg. 8.1 max.
Elevation Gain (ft) +853 / -847  
Temperature (F) 36.5F avg. 37.4F high

Juno

Hmm, this is only the second movie rating I have done since I started this blog, but I know I have seen more than Juno and No Country for Old Men recently. I will have to think about it and get back to you on the others, but these are the only two I have bothered to rate here so far. Two extremely different movies, but both are excellent. I just love movies. Soon I will post a list of 100 movies I have enjoyed. In the meantime, if you have not seen Juno, I very much would recommend it. No need to review it or provide a synopsis; there are plenty of sites on the internet that do just that. Nope, this is just a rating, and I do so thusly:

Rating: ★★★★★

And here is my favorite quote from the movie, spoken to the title character by her father:

“Look, in my opinion the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what-have-you. The right person is still going to think the sun shines out of your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with.”

Eleven

Today, in accordance with my training plan for the miniMarathon, I completed 11.25 miles. I followed the route below. I only had a general plan before I started out; I just added on some streets to a pretty consistently run 8-mile route to give me more miles.

Today's route

I enjoyed the run. For me, there isn’t such a thing as running “junk miles.” I don’t run enough miles every week to warrant any such classification. Nor am I a speed demon. I do have specific goals in races, but those are mainly just side benefits to be out there, running. Here are my Garmin watch numbers for the day:

Total Time (h:m:s) 1:54:40 10:11 pace
Distance (mi) 11.25  
Moving Speed (mph) 5.9 avg. 11.4 max.
Elevation Gain (ft) +940 / -941  
Temperature (F) 42.8 F avg. 42.8 F high
Wind Speed (mph) W 14.4 avg. W 14.9 max.

The miles went a lot better for me than on last week’s 10 mile run. However, I am still inconsistent in my pace. Since I run alone, I think I have a tendency to not be as aware of an ideal, efficient pacing. Maybe I should advertise in the want-ads.

Wanted: Running partner to train for half marathon. Desire to run the mini in under 2 hours, so an experienced training partner who can help me achieve that goal would be a plus. Buy you a beer after.

Here is a table of my lap times today:

Lap # Time (m:s) Distance (mi)
1 7:57 1
2 9:19 1
3 10:02 1
4 11:56 1 (messed with earphones)
5 10:05 1
6 10:06 1
7 10:02 1
8 10:12 1
9 11:17 1
10 10:30 1
11 11:02 1
12 2:06 0.22

Oh, a final, humorous side benefit of today’s training run. As I had mentioned in a previous post, I track my running on FitLinxx, a website that shares data with the Downtown YMCA where I work out. After I logged the humongous amount of calories I burned on the run, it put me into the number one spot in males my age there, as you can see in the graphic below. Eat your heart out, “Facility Users” and mwebster52, whoever you are. :)

Eat your heart out, please!