I (heart) MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)

I'm pretty excited about learning and that's a good thing as I'm in the STEM field and the technology barely lasts 3 to 5 years before it's replaced. I'm now taking free courses on subjects like Statistics, Data Science, Learning (I suffer from ADD and will do anything to make learning easier) and the IoT. These MOOCs are allowing a new generation of people the resources to learn without the heavy load of student loans. One thing about a MOOC, you need to participate in the course for it to work. The Professors, Instructors and Assistants are few and can't do all the work, so some work is offloaded on to the students and is part of the grading. So far this is working well (from what I can see) and I don't mind helping as it makes me feel like I'm actually learning and helping others. In addition to the free aspect there is the certificate aspect (which you pay for). Good certificates look good on your resume. The Data Science specialization costs as much as one of my single 4 credit course, from 30 years ago.

Right now I'm watching a course in Coursera called: "Learning How to Learn" by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski & Dr. Barbara Oakley, excellent course. It is helping me to learn and explaining things like: why exercise helps me to learn. I'm also taking a Data Science specialization on Coursera, current course is R programming language. I'm certain I need this for future employment and I am interested in the topic. I'll experiment more with MOOCs, so far I'm thrilled I can learn in a formal, organized way.

Does this qualify as a Hill Slug ride?

So Saturday (8/16/2014) I decided to ride to Ringoes. Normally I lead a flat B to B+ ride (15 - 16 to 17 - 18 mph) this one ended up as 14.7 mph avg over 82.6 miles. As a flat lander I try to avoid 'real hills' like the Sourland Mountains but lets face it. It's a great riding area. Besides I don't want to exhaust my rides into South Jersey by doing the same routes over and over again.

So we left Cranbury, for Ringoes, by heading East, North, then West (Ride leader logic, must get in my miles and have rest stops every so often). We started the real hills when we cross the Griggstown Causeway (mile 31). We headed to Dutchtown Zion, boy was I out of shape and my lungs hurt at the top! I decided not to try to bomb down Lindbergh but instead cut over to Rileyville Rd. Rileyville Rd has a better surface and a better line of sight and I love to bomb down hills :-). We then stopped at the Carousel Deli in Ringoes where we met several other rides from all over. :-) We spoke with one group out of Bridgewater and talked them into looking into the Longest Day. We left the deli and proceeded to Boss Rd where we were greeted by an immediate hill and headwind and this was good as this meant we mostly had a tail wind from Hopewell to Cranbury. On Queen Rd we encountered recent chip seal (July?) and I hopped that Mt. Airy wasn't done recently also and we lucked out. The climb up Mt Airy was prefect chip seal (no loose gravel!). We turned left at the High School and rode the quiet back roads. Again we reached Rileyville Rd but this time we took it down to Hopewell (bombs away). The ride from Hopewell to Rockyhill was nice (tail wind). A stop in Kingston at the Deli/Bakery (boy were they packed) and off to a then a quick sprint down Plainsboro Rd into Cranbury.

A few weeks ago I was poking around Laura Lynch's web site: Hill Slug Chronicles. She posted a link to Ride With GPS to one of the rides we did. I took a look at the site, tried out the free part of the site and download their app. I planned out the route and it laid out the cue sheet (you need a paid account to print the cue sheet), turn by turn. Gives the elevation, grade, avg speed, the steepest grade, calories burned (I posted my weight to the site's stats) and fastest speed. Cool, too much information for a info junkie! Actually I thought the information about the grade was interesting. I used it to judge my efforts climbing (yup, flat lander). I really need to work on my climbing. ;-) I'll play with it a bit more and I'll be signing up for a subscription. Here's the link to Saturday's Cranbury-Ringoes ride.

More On the road again

More nice weather in NJ for my 5/17 ride. It started out a bit cool and I left my sweater in the car. I planned out a nice 103 mile ride from Cranbury to Lacey to Tabernacle and back. I was surprised at how warm I felt in the cooler temperatures (high 50's) I usually need a sweater for that. The week before we'd experienced hot weather and I didn't fare well until the thunderstorm cooled us down. I still get a bit winded by the small climbs (this is the flat lands, these are small and could barely be called hills). I need to work a bit more on my stamina and recovery. Our first stop was at mile 38.7. I tend to not stop early but I do have more stops later, if needed. We stopped at the Lacey WaWa, a very busy place but it has pretty much everything we need (restrooms, junk food, sandwiches, etc). We then proceeded to Pasadena Rd. I recall Pasadena being rather rough (crocodile cracking). But it wasn't too bad or I hadn't been on it in such a long time I didn't care ;-). The sand mine was rather busy as there were about 8 dump trucks going in the other direction. This is also probably why the railroad crossings on Rt 539 and Pasadena/Savoy Rd were replaced with new crossings. The intersection at Savoy Rd and Rt 72 was very busy but manageable. When we hit Chatsworth our old friend the westerly wind was there to greet us. It normal for the wind to be out of the west at this time of the year which makes Tabernacle-Chatsworth Rd (Rt 532) a very good road to train for the Longest Day ride. The ride from Chatsworth to Tabernacle was pleasant. That might be why it didn't feel as long, especially early in the season. So when we reached Nixon's and we found that we had a pace of 17.1 mph I was ecstatic. We owe that to Rich who was feeling good and helped us keep the pace up (I wasn't sucking wheel this time though ;-) ). Lunch was quicker (we knew what to do at the lunch counter).

The ride home was pretty good though my legs had been pushed pretty hard. Surprisingly I was able to climb short hills and overpasses better than I had been able to in the past 5 years. Normally after mile 75 I'd hit the hill an I was forced to shift to a 39x25 as I had no strength. Don't get me wrong I was tired and sore still but I was climbing these hills much faster than 1.5 mph (sometimes I'd even hit 4.5 mph ! ;-) ). We skipped stopping at Allentown so we road the last 40 miles straight back. While I was sore and tired (no so more than normal) I was feeling pretty good. We avg'd 16.9 mph which was a 1mph avg jump over the previous week. I'm very please with my progress so far. Especially when I'm carrying more weight than I every have in my life and that I've had a messed up riding schedule for the last 3 years. Next week (5/24) it's a double metric riding from Cranbury to Griggstown, down part of the Longest Day route to Chatsworth, then over to Tabernacle and Back to Cranbury. I think I'll start that ride 1 hour early (7AM).

We rides again!

It's been a tough few years and I'm hoping that this one will be a bit quieter. With that in mind I've been building up my mileage. Last week I did the CJBC Farmlands century ride. I was pretty sick at the start of the ride but fared better as the day went. Of course I was sucking wheel all day, I don't normally make a habit of doing that. We averaged only 15.4 mph (mea culpa) but I did finish with a bit of something left. Yea, first century in 2 years!

Jump ahead to this week, I led a ride yesterday (Saturday, 5/10) for a century from Cranbury, NJ to Tabernacle, NJ. We started out slow as pollen was causing asthma problems (not to mention I have some serious weight to lose). We made okay time on the first half. Temp's jumped into the 80's by the time we hit Pemberton (Pine Barrens). And it was a bit windy (normal for NJ and this time of year, steady 8 - 12 mph winds out of the SW). The stretch from Chatsworth to Tabernacle wasn't too bad despite the wind and that I hadn't been down here in 2 years (mentally challenging). We stopped off in Nixon's for lunch (at about mile 60), dead tired. Not unusual for early training rides. So we ate, got back on the bikes and started back. We now had a tail wind and that helped a bit (might have helped a lot more than a bit). We managed to get just east of Columbus when we ran into a downpour. We reached the general store in Chester and hid under the porch for a while. When it appeared to be letting up we took off again only to go about 500 ft and be driven under a bank's drive through by a surge of rain and wind. We had roughly 20 miles to go and the worse seemed to be over (though it didn't stop raining), so we headed out. With the cooler temperatures we seemed to be feeling better and we started booking it. We hit several more pockets of heavy rain but just kept going. We finished with an average of 15.9 mph, not bad for 2 rest stops (and a few hide from the rain stops).

Not quite a century

My rides are still a bit inconsistent (riding one weekend, not riding the next) but they are starting to get back to the century mark. During the week I'm squeezing in more miles, which is helping. It's been more than a year since I've done a century. I've been fighting health, weather and other problems just trying to get in any rides at all so I'm quite pleased that I managed to get in my 92 mile ride yesterday. Two weeks ago I got in an 80 mile ride with an avg. pace of 15.8 mph. No where near my usual 17 - 18 mph avg. This week it was hotter and we rode longer (92 miles) and faster (16.3 mph). I also just had the first step of a tooth implant put in so I'm on anti-biotics. That played havoc with my digestion yesterday but only small problems (I was queasy most of the ride). Despite this I was just happy to be doing any riding! Approaching the century mark and averaging 16.3 was icing on the cake.

I decided to head down to Whiting and ride Pasadena Rd from Village Park in Cranbury, NJ. The day started out warm, the way I like it. But I did worry it might be too warm (high expected was low 90's F). We had 3 stops planned, Whiting, Pemberton and Allentown. The first 25 went quietly, the busiest stretch from Plumstead to Whiting (New Egypt - Whiting Rd) was not bad. A quick stop at the WaWa for a break and we were on our way. Pasadena was nice except for the one guy who buzzed me. I was riding 2 wide (oops) but there was no one else on the road and no visibility problems. He could have gone a bit more wide and a beep before hand would have been a good idea too. After that it was quiet and we enjoyed the scenery. When we reached Chatsworth we turned North to Sooy Place. While I enjoyed the scenery I was surprised to find that there was much less shade than what I was expecting. I wonder if they widened the fire break along the road? On this ride I decided to check out a 'new' road called Avenue Rd (it's listed as just Avenue) if for no other reason than it's name. It appeared to be a nice back road and it was. Also it dropped us right into Ong's Hat (I love these names :-) ). Avenue is a nice road despite no controlled intersection on Rt 70 (we had no trouble crossing). After much sun, nice scenery and being entertained by a crop duster in the fields not more than 100 ft away from us, we made it to the WaWa in Pemberton. The next section is the return to Cranbury via Allentown, we've done this section hundreds of times and such familiarity at the end of a ride is a comforting thought. Unfortunately the bridge over the Turnpike was closed so we were diverted (added 1 mile, oh woe is me ;-)). I'm glad to see that we may have access to the new bridge soon. The older narrower one was uncomfortable with a large group. I decided to detour along a nice back route that avoided much of the traffic in Hightstown (and the nice down hill :( ). It felt good to be back but better that we had done the ride and that we had so many positives. I'll need to see what I can come up with for next week's ride.