Nico’s

Yesterday was Earth Day. Yes, it was yesterday, not Sunday! Sunday just happened to be more practical for a celebration/event, while also coinciding with 4-20
At any rate, I’m trying to go all week long without driving my car, in some sort of celebration of Earth Day. So far, I’ve been successful, but yesterday was really a trying day.
I begun by riding to work.
I wore tights, and some really short shorts. You see, work had this contest for Earth Day: win $100 by using an alternative method of transportation! And since I’ve been riding my bike to work for the last couple of weeks, I figured I’d spice it up by looking just a little bit more weird. I didn’t win, but oh well.

Like every Tuesday, I have a Cisco class at TMCC. I was determined to ride up to TMCC by the end of the semester, but the dates lined up well enough for me to have a good excuse to do it, so I did it!
The final stretch, on Dandini Boulevard, was a killer. To add to the long steep climb -without a bike lane- was the wind. The fucking wind, again!
It took me a whole 33 minutes to go from Work to School (590 Eureka to 7000 Dandini), which ended up being a whole 10 minutes faster than I expected. Of course, I got there sweaty, out of breath and thirsty… but above all, accomplished.
In class, I struggled to stay awake. My body wanted to shut off to recover, but somehow I managed to stay awake. Now, don’t ask me too much about VLANs, because I can’t remember anything from class.
I looked forward to the ride home from class. Like the famous saying goes, “what goes up, must come down”, I looked forward to gravity enforcing its 9.8m/s² acceleration on my unit of mass, as I gracefully handled the curves that the road provided, whether it be by its design or its many many fucking potholes.
But alas. None of that. The wind kept blowing face-on, and the acceleration was brought to a near zero, providing a very neutral coasting speed down the hill. Damn it, Earth, this is how you pay me back for celebrating you?

At any rate, I made it down the hill, rather uneventfully. I crashed at my girlfriend Dani’s place, and caught up on the Spurs-Suns #2 game of the playoffs. I knew we’d win, but it’s always fun to see Manu kicking some ass.
I was going to finish riding home after dinner, but I took a shower and hit the sack, so it was the end of the day.
My route ended up looking something like this:

You can just click here to view the larger map

Not too shabby. It usually takes me less than 15 minutes to get to work from home, and it took me 33 minutes to get to TMCC from work. Throw 15 minutes for the “descent” ( ), and it took me a whole hour to commute. I saved some money, I burned some calories. I strengthened the bond between my ass and my saddle.
I’ll be doing this again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Reno, Sports, Study, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.