Toronto Ride for heart weekend
 

whoooooooo! time to bust out my daily commuter and use it on the highway for fun! I just hope it doesn't rain sunday! forecast isn't playing nice.

oh, it'll rain.
bring a rain coat :)

Forecast is rain.

But then what do the forecasters know?

Last year was damp too - and cool,cloudy and windy the year before. Time we had a fine day for the event.

Forecast is for 10mm of rain and 15 degrees!

well..... at least we will not overheat!
I'm going to get a plastic bag on my rack trunk.

Cool, wet and windy but it was still a good time. I didn't start till just before 9:00 so the rain was almost over by then :thumb:

I left around 8:30 or so the rain was just whipping in your face luckily I'm wearing glasses just needed wipers on them. But on the return trip at the halfway point we all dried up quickly from the riding besides my squishy shoes. by the time we where leaving the skies where beautiful and sunny :( seems like it was taunting us. All in all it was awesome.

did the entire 50km run in under 3 hrs on my strida 5.0 heh. was able to easily pass people on the uphill but lose to them on the downhill with my single speedness. I thought I was weird until some eccentric on a unicycle passed me uphill!!! never caught up to him again! besides that guy there was some weird 2x2 recumbent setup like a car two in front two behind with a bionx setup. wish I had a picture. I'm always checking out folders was very few of them like 1 brompton, 1 dahon mu, 1 avenir type folder. and 2-3 no names.

http://rnkpr.com/a6g0nl - the first 1km was messed up cause I started it indoors (didn't want to get my iphone wet)

It was pouring rain 7-8am. Was there a fatality? Saw somebody having CPR performed on them...

You guys were lucky.

Started at just before 7 the rain, and it just got wetter and colder. We hit the decision point for 50 vs 75km at around 9, and even though the rain had just about stopped by then, it was a no brainer. Back to the start for 50km rather than the planned-for 75km.

I was amazed not to see accidents.

I saw that oddball 2x2 recumbent quite early, within the first 1km.
coming back down from the turn around point was fantastic this year.

lots of tail wind and not too wet so it was quite easy to hit, my guess, 50km/h

Saw a couple small ones, apparently there was a pile up at one of the later general starts w/ firetrucks and everything... didn't see any crashing at the turn-around - a few close calls though.

Also why on earth was there roadkill at the turn-around? mmm roadkill water, i bet that thing(whatever it was) was runover by 1/3 of everybody riding!

hahah yeah I saw that roadkill also. seems like others after the ride where talking about it also. makes things interesting. Also yeah the ride back was amazing with a strong tailwind while going there uphill was just headwind, I felt the life get sucked out from me there.

I was wondering about that road kill too :lol:

So I'm dressed in riding gear at 6AM in my basement, topping up the tires when I hear the sound of running water. The south half of the my basement is filling with water. So I bail and mop and re-sealed a cinder block wall rather than riding.

This was the first ride for heart I've missed since 1995.

I'm going to be grumpy all week.

My bike shoes are still damp from yesterday. I came up from NYC to do the ride and didn't bother bringing any wet weather gear so I threw some wool socks and a wool zip-up on and got wet, but stayed warm. After the ride, I saw a CP24 poll that said 81% of respondents think cyclists should stay off major roads and highways when doing charity rides. This is in contrast to the first time the ride was ever sold out and the $3M raised for charity. Oh well, we raised it for them since they were probably sitting in traffic fuming and about to stroke out when they responded to the poll.

I don't even know why they complain since it's only out for the morning on a sunday for once a year. The don valley was shut down for 2-3 weekends already this year just from construction so this is nothing. These are probably the type of people that complain about marathons closing roads too. And the poll cp24 did was mostly to keep off major highways not roads I guess. I checked the polls and we're also talking about the 3500 who voted against vs the 13,000 people that attends the event so the point is pretty moot of whether it's good to have such fun things. Heck having no cars clogging up the highway for one morning is very refreshing!

http://www.cp24.com/servlet/HTMLTemp...=CTVNewsCPHome

I always wanted to do that 5 borough bike tour you guys have probably next year, and they close off major highways too I think :).

Yeah, but no one asks motorists what they think about the 5BBT closing down the highways and bridges. The MS tour in the fall also closes down the two highways (FDR/Harlem River and Henry Hudson/West Side Hwy) in Manhattan so people can circle the island traffic free. It's only 30 miles around Manhattan, but there's 60 and 100 mile routes available that take you out to NJ for some hill climbing. That one's for charity and again, no one asks motorists what they think because no one gives a flying f*ck.

It's just local media, recently they've been feeding the anti-bike, anti-chairty and anti-everything types.

13,000 people "driving" the gardiner and dvp on a sunday is a pretty fair use of the road!