Day 14 after two weeks on the road, my body felt like a bicycling machine

July 29, 2021

This was the second of two 'test' days for me. I realized this afternoon, riding US 25 between London and Corbin KY - in some ways the most dangerous riding of this tour - that I was not thinking about what my body was doing, except in the context of trying to stay alive and get on down the road. I realized that my body had finally gotten back into bicycling machine mode.

I just wrote a several paragraph section about bicycling machine mode and then, because I referenced something from an earlier days report went back to check on it. That cost me half of hour of work that I probably won't redo. That happens way too often on CycleBlaze! Please at least give a warning to the user to save before switching to another page in the same journal! Personlly, I'm probably going back to doing all on my text creation in another program that won't let me loose my work so easily!

The steepest and longest hill of the days ride happens climbing out of Mount Vernon on us 25. The hill is marked, at the top, with a warning for trucks of a long 7% grade. when I rode down it coming north, I coasted at 35 mph. Today, when coasting down the other side of that hill, I was only coasting at 30 mph. The other side of that hill is where U S 25 goes under I-75 and has the steepest slope coming north.

About ten miles into the ride, just on the other side of Livingston, US 25 reaches the bottom of the river valley it follows until, after crossing the river It climbs out of that valley on its way to London This image shows the river and the railroad bridge across it.

Riding through the river valley is peaceful and quite pleasant

Climbing out of the valley requires several long climbs where I used the tour assist mode

Here is the sign that let me know I was near getting out of the valley

After getting to and through London. I had about 10 miles of somewhat stressful riding with heavy traffic including big trucks, narrow, rumble stripped, but usually still rideable shoulder with occasional sections that weren't rideable. It was actually not as bad as riding north on the same road, but it still had its thrills like being passed by a semi whose tire were on the white line and which was going 50 mph faster than me less than half a foot away from my handlebar. This image is from the last section, in Corbin, when I was riding over to the motels near the interstate. That was a MUCH safer part of today's ride.

Tomorrow I'll head for the Cumberland Gap. The next day for Bean Station or possibly farther south.

Today's ride: 43 miles (69 km)
Total: 579 miles (932 km)

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Kathleen JonesGlad to hear you’re feeling better.

Sorry you’re losing so much work. Very frustrating. Are you frequently hitting the “Save and Edit More” green button at the bottom of the page?
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3 years ago

Kelly IniguezI had the same problem, lost the entire page! Someone suggested writing on another format, such as google sheets, and then copy/paste. I have been doing as Kathleen suggests above and hitting the 'save/edit more' button often.

Glad to hear you are getting in the groove!
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3 years ago

Mark BoydTo Kathleen JonesI've tried both ding everything on another text editor and cut/paste it and regular use of the save and keep editing button which requires a major interruption in my work flow every time I use it. In both cases it is a major distraction and, as soon as I forget, I've lost a lot of work.

It the save button was on the screen rather than at the end of the page, which is typically many screens down because I like to put up my images before I start entering text that would be a great help.

As it is, the system is designed - not intentionally - to lose lots of my work, including images that I've uploaded and text that I've typed because I am used to - I've been doing my ride journals online as I toured since the late 1990s. I started by doing it all in HTML and scanning fllm to create the images. As soon as digital cameras became affordable, I was able to eliminate having to develop the film and scan it.
After I retired in 2011, I switched to doing my journals on Crazy Guy. which made things straight forward, did not lose my text unless the connection was cut in the middle of text entry, and never lost my uploaded images or their captions. CycleBlaze's 'everything you enter must be explicitly saved; mode is, as far as I know, unique and I'm a retired university Computer Science Prof. I've lost all of the above multiple times on Cycle Blaze without losing my connection.

http://www.cs.unca.edu/~boyd/bicycling.html - 1995 - 2011 - all of my bicycle related web stuff

https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/my/?usr=mjb 2011 - 2019
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3 years ago

Kathleen JonesSo, I guess you don’t need me to offer advice in the vein of “that thing is not a foot pedal it’s called a mouse”. I for one am expecting auto save to be the default too. Good luck.
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3 years ago