2008 Stats and Traces

GPS Stats

According to my TopoFusion logbook, these are my year end stats:

5669.22 mi (1954.64 mi uphill, 2020.32 mi downhill, 1628.15 mi flat)
681,078 ft total ascent (679,717 ft descent) – 8.8 % avg uphill grade, 11.0 % avg downhill grade
31 days 5:33:06 moving time (60 days 12:45:38 total time)
8.3 mph average speed
3167.098 difficulty, 9188.656 effort

I’m missing a few rides, since I don’t GPS everything, but that’s the bulk of it.

Compared to last year, I rode 650 more miles, but climbed 40,000 less feet. Miles are not very meaningful for a mountain biker (IMO), so the lack of climbing must mean I’m getting soft. Total difficulty index is also significantly lower, confirming my wimpiness (as if anyone needed to confirm that, least of all me).

Still, I spent about a tenth of my total time alive physically moving on a bicycle (or, heaven forbid, hiking along side it), and almost 20% of the time “out on the bike.”

8.3 mph for an overall average seems really low considering how much pavement and dirt road riding is in there. Plenty of slow (aka fun) riding in there, I guess.

Photos

I took 5,715 different pictures in 2008, or about 15 per day. 902 of them were posted on this diary.

Words

103 posts on the diary, totaling 58,155 words (359,337 characters). Yikes.

Scott Traces

My 2008 GPS data looks like this (Tucson detail):

You can probably guess about where I live. Things are pretty much connected, but I see some critical missing links, meaning that I didn’t ride to places like the 50 year trail (from home) a single time in ’08. For shame, for shame.

All my GPS data (~2002 – 2008) in Tucson looks like this:

The darker and thicker the lines, the more I’ve been there. Definitely a few new additions in there for 08, and some coloring of lines that used to be faint.

Those lines are my lifeblood, the central nervous system of my psyche.

I was quite happy to see TopoFusion only take about one minute to load all my GPS data, and though it isn’t smooth/fast at crunching through all 2.5 million points, it was definitely usable.

Zoomed way out, it looks like this:

Again, faint lines are less traveled. A lot of that is well connected in 2008, thanks to the Grand Enchantment Trail which brought AZ and CO together (via the Divide Route). Still quite a few islands to reel in and connect to ‘the Network.’ I’ve got some riding to do (and routes to figure out)…

Weather (from NWS)

THE RESIDENTS OF THE TUCSON METRO AREA EXPERIENCED YET ANOTHER WARM
AND DRY YEAR…

…14TH WARMEST AND 23RD DRIEST YEAR ON RECORD…
…10TH STRAIGHT YEAR OF ABOVE NORMAL TEMPERATURES…
…8TH STRAIGHT YEAR OF BELOW NORMAL RAINFALL…
…1ST RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE SET IN OCTOBER SINCE 1971…

Hmm.