Small risk taken, wonderful reward - beautiful hour on the water

Last week, I started rallying the folks at work to bring in their boats and do a quick trip on the Allegheny River near the office one night this week. That day turned out to be today. It was a great site to see a three kayaks and a canoe (mine) on vehicles in the company parking lot. One other set of friends with their canoe I don't work with intended to come as well. However, life decided to not cooperate with everyone's schedule. One guy was unable to go for personal reasons, another couldn't because he's a slave to the Company and worked late. The couple decided to call it off because the weather was pretty terrible all afternoon, and it was still raining steadily at 5pm when I talked to them.


Nonetheless, my coworker, Bruce, and I figured we had the boats on our cars already and that it wouldn't hurt to check out the water and maybe get out for a little bit. If it got bad, we'd not be far from the cars.


We put in the Allegheny at a nice launch in Lawrenceville, under the 40th Street bridge. It was raining, but not very hard. This was the small risk I spoke of in the title to this post. Within the first 15 minutes, though, it stopped raining and got progressively sunnier.


What started out as a marginal day for paddling became a beautiful experience out on the water. This was our wonderful reward for avoiding the gumption trap and getting on the river. The river's surface was smooth and calm. The lighting was great. There was a slight breeze. Pretty much perfect weather for paddling.


We came across a great blue heron in a tree near a factory.


I ended up disturbing it, and it flew upstream, allowing for more photographs in different locations.


We turned around near the 62nd St bridge.


Looking at downtown Pittsburgh in the distance. It's only four river miles to the buildings from where this picture was taken. This is one of my very favorite things about Pittsburgh.

Downtown kayak rentals (and canoes)

Venture Outdoors rents kayaks and canoes on the Allegheny River at the base of PNC Park. It's a wonderful way to see the city from an uncommon perspective. The rivers were the key to Pittsburgh's growth and persist as probably the coolest thing about the city (sorry, Steelers fans).

2009 YTD GPS map

Just for kicks, here is an image of the 2009 GPS data overlaid onto the map of the greater Pittsburgh area in GoogleEarth. Cycling routes are in yellow, running in red, hiking in green, and canoeing in blue. The icons sort of overlap when coincident, so frequently traveled areas come out sort of jumbled.

There are runs, rides, and hikes in West Virginia, New York, Indiana, Nevada, and other parts of Pennsylvania that are not shown. It is pretty addictive to get to track where you've been with the GPS. When I miss logging an event due to a variety of reasons, I always curse myself because it feels like the ride/run/etc wasn't really validated without the GPS data. I know, it sounds like I need to get a life.

2009 mileage through the end of May

Ok, I haven't posted in forever. Much has happened. I'll try to catch up. In the meantime, I was working on this tonight, so I figured I'd share. Here are my mileage totals (measured by GPS) for each month for several activities.

	January	February	March	April	May
Cycling	0	70.0	136.0	231.4	252.6
Running	0	27.0	26.6	49.8	60.1
Canoeing	0	3.4	9.4	3.2	4.7
Hiking	4.4	14.3	8.9	3.1	15.1

Training is going well. Running has been really, really good for me...physically and mentally. I like the time on the bike, but running clears my head so much more, and I have less likelihood of negativity resulting from intolerant drivers on the roads. Plus, in general, when you're running and smile or say 'hi' to someone, they respond positively. That's much less common on the bike. Mostly because on the road, you're in you own little bubble of reality and nobody seems to like to be yanked out from behind the veil of anonymity that being in a car gives you (and by extrapolation, all other vehicle types).

My general overall leg strength is much more balanced now that I have a significant running component to my training. My knees hurt less from the bike and running is no longer feeling like I'm killing myself through joint pain every time I go out. I think all the time on the bike has made some muscles too strong for their own good in relation to the other leg and joint connective muscles that aren't being exercised on the bike. That's just my unscientific hypothesis, though... Don't go reporting it as truth just because you read it on some blog.

My May mileage on the bike would have been more, but my bike is disintegrating under me. As my friend, Dave, mentioned, the Shimano engineers did a killer job on value engineering the drivetrain parts. Two months after the 2-year warranty on all of the Shimano parts ran out, the damn thing fell apart. I replaced the cassette early in the month (and the chain). Now, the bottom bracket bearings are failing rapidly. I'm looking to buy tools to tear it apart, so I can overhaul the bottom bracket with the parts from the bike I got hit on (with about 50 miles on it). Like I've mentioned before, I'm not convinced that a 10-speed rear cassette and associated skinny parts are worth it. My mountain bike with 7-speed system (3 front x 7 rear, 21 total gear ratios) rode through rain, snow, and whatnot for 10 years before I got the fancy idea to make it a single speed bike.

Moraine State Park canoeing

We were all feeling sort of pent up, so we decided to spend the day at Moraine State Park. We attempted to get out in the boat for a while, but Silas was uncomfortable in his PFD when he tried to bend in the middle. So, he and Bethany went for a hike while Guthrie and I did a little paddling and then some trail running to catch up to them.




Guthrie really wants to be in the boat when it's leaving the shore, but then changes his mind and would rather be running on land instead. I think he also was sick of being in the sun with his black fur. There's nowhere to escape it in the canoe.


View of one of the spurs of Lake Arthur.

2009 Q1 mileage update

Nobody really cares, but at least I can watch my own progress as the year goes by... The image is just of the Pittsburgh area. There are runs, hikes, and canoe trips not shown on the map above. First quarter of 2009 logged distances:

Biking:
* January - 0 miles (surgery recovery)
* February - 70 miles
* March - 136 miles

Running:
* January - 0 miles (surgery recovery)
* February - 27 miles
* March - 27 miles

Hiking:
* January - 4 miles
* February - 14 miles
* March - 9 miles

Canoeing:
* January - 0 miles
* February - 3 miles
* March - 9 miles

While we were paddling...

Alongside the Youghiogheny River is the Great Allegheny Passage trail. The trail goes from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC. Maybe the latter part is called the C&O Towpath. Bethany, Silas, and Guthrie had a nice hike while Kevin and I were on the water.

Guthrie was actually pretty upset he wasn't in the canoe. Normally, he'd rather be out of the boat running on shore. This time, when he wasn't invited into the canoe, he wanted to be in it really badly. The first picture is at the put-in in Dawson. The second shot is of Guthrie sprinting back and forth on shore when we caught up to the three of them near the take-out.

Youghiogheny River day trip

On 22 March, Kevin and I did a nice section of the Youghiogheny River from Dawson to Whitset. It was a really nice spring day, despite how cold it looks in the GoogleEarth image of the route below.

Canoecopia: Wenonah canoes

Ok, this has been sitting in the unpublished pile for too long. I'm just going to blast through a few things that have been going on the past couple of weeks and catch up to real time again...

These were some of the Wenonah Canoe offerings at Canoecopia. Nice boats for lakes, mostly. Our solo canoe is a Wenonah Vagabond. It's a great boat, but not the most ideal for the rocky rivers in SW Pennsylvania.

Canoecopia: Nova Craft canoes

I am deeply in love with the canoes from Nova Craft. They're a canoe company from London, Ontario, Canada. They recently ran a graphic design contest at Fanshawe College for the students to generate graphic designs for the hulls. The three winning designs are shown above. My favorite is Lurking Octopus. There is more info about the contest and the three winning designs here.


This next canoe is the Centennial Edition Cronje. It's in honor of the opening/protection of the Quetico Provincial Park (in Canada) and the Superior National Forest (in the US). Also at that time, the Chestnut canoe company released their Cronje hull. P.A. Cronje was a general in the Boer War in South Africa.

Canoecopia: wood canoes

I didn't end up getting much time to walk the floor at the show. I was processing kayaks in an active area of 'kayakland' and couldn't break away. Here are a few pictures of some sexy wood canoes. Nothing feels like a wood canoe on the water. The materials also have a wonderful dampening quality on the vibrations that cause the brash noises that travel over long distances from other canoe materials. Someday, I'll be able to afford a beauty like one of these. In the meantime, I'm happy enough to have a pair of nice paddling canoes that get me out on the water when I can make the time.

Canoeing and 'hard' water

The dark line up ahead is the transition from open water to ice

So, it's good to remember that just because the air temperature is around 70, doesn't mean the lakes aren't still partly frozen over. My canoeing plans for the weekend changed about ten times. In the end, Tim and I took the tandem out on the lake at North Park. However, we didn't even notice the ice until we were already on the water. The satelite images I was looking at in Google Earth weren't taken yesterday, of course, so I had forgotten to even consider that there'd be ice. Oh well.

It was still fun. We paddled around the open water for a while and then shot into the ice floe as far as we could before it was thick enough to resist breaking, and the bow pushed up onto the sheet. In any case, this time of year, any warm day on the water, no matter how short, is worth the effort.

Tim checking the water hardness

Looking back after we broke our way into the ice sheet some

Backing out of the path we'd plowed

February 2009 human-powered transportation wrap up

I recovered from the surgery enough to have gotten back on the bike and back in the running shoes in February. Here are the monthly totals:

Biking (95%+ commuting/errands) = 70.0 miles
Running (0% commuting) = 27.0 miles
Canoeing (0% commuting) = 3.4 miles

The photos are from my daily commute on a frontage road parallel to the busy street that my office is on.

Future paddler

Silas, sporting his t-shirt from Rutabaga. Thanks again to the Bagans who sent us this shirt! I think that my friend Jason in Wisconsin did the artwork.

We can't wait to get back on the water. I get to go on the nicer days on safer water, but the water temperature is way too cold to risk bringing Silas out yet.

Last of the canoe pics: Anuses of Pittsburgh

Some last photos from the river.

Spelunking by canoe

Kevin noticed a neat culvert or outlet into the river when we were out the other day. I couldn't pass up exploring it, despite the vague odor of sewage. It was a dry day and had been, so I was pretty sure we wouldn't be caught by any sudden deluges and flushed back out into the river.

It was a really neat experience. The acoustics were awesome. This was on the north side of the river, so the sun shone in for a little distance and reflected in further. There was a slight trickling sound of water far in. I got in far enough to see it, as shown below. Where the cross section changed from round to rectangular, it got too shallow to continue. The hips of my canoe were pretty close to touching both sides at that point, so it was pretty definitive. It was too narrow to turn the boats, so we had to backpedal to get out.

The photos are in chronological order, so go from the river inward.




Pretty much dark by this point. A little dim light. The pictures were only possible because of the flash. There was a weird sensation that just up ahead where it was dark, there was a huge pit and waterfall into somewhere much more subterranean. Of course, one would be able to hear such a thing, but that didn't stop the overactive imagination. It was kind of exciting.