Samford plus light up the resistance

Tried the triple but ran into tire problems

Dog park with J

Church shakedown triple century tonight/tomorrow

MTB practice with the jags

213 cars, 1.6/mi, 0.4/min, 34.6mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/76893

So cold, then hot, then southwest headwind the whole way back until sunset. Lots of dogs, one took out one of our group. Lots of angry drivers on the AL-23 stretch from Ashville to Springville. Great group of guys, when’s the next one?!

Note about Eddington... I created eddingtonmap.com to visualize your Eddington number (orange lines) and to pay special attention to the “doomed” rides (red lines) that will no longer count if you increase your number. Each orange line represents a bike ride of at least 213 miles given that my current Eddington number is 212. The four red lines trace the path of adventures that were exactly 212 miles long. These are the "doomed" rides. So let me give you the story behind the four rides that will no longer count sometime early in 2024 when I have enough time to knock out FIVE more 213 mile rides to replace these four and then the one extra to be my 213th 213 mile long ride.
Ride #1 - 2019/07/22 - 212.9 miles from Tallahassee, Florida to Auburn, Alabama - this was the third day of a multi-day commute home from vacation in Tybee Island back home to Hoover ... via Orlando 😂 ... This was an unrouted ride because the ride the day before was supposed to make it all the way to Panama City Beach and then from there all the way home to Hoover the next day. But I was having knee problems. I don't often have any kind of physical problems while riding (thank God!) but at some point my knee really started to hurt while making my way north from the Orlando area. So I decided mid-ride to book a hotel in Tallhassee stopping well short of Panama City Beach where I had already reserved an AirBNB. It was a very nice lady I had been communicating with throughout the day letting her know my arrival time was slipping and that it might be very late. At some point, I told her please just keep my money there's no way I'm going to make it (she ended up refunding the rental anyway). Having to then spend what I thought at the time was additional money on a hotel in Tallahassee and then knowing that I wouldn't be able to do a a single day ride from there all the way back to Hoover with knee problems, I put out the call to find a place to stay and my friend Dusty gladly welcomed me to stay with them in Auburn. So using just my phone, I scouted out a route that ended up being super-awesome and involved a long gravel / sand road (on my road bike) past a historic church west of Albany. And then a quick detour through Fort Moore (Fort Benning).
Ride #2 - 2015/08/03 - 212.6 miles Hoover, Alabama cheaha 2x little chainring extremely hot - I've ridden to Mount Cheaha from my house well over a hundred times by now so I don't even remember this ride at all just from the title and am curious if I was trying to work on spinning or if I had broken the front deraileur during the ride. The timing is also interesting with it being a little over a month after finishing my first Race Across America. So here goes, I'm opening Strava now to see what I wrote about the ride eight years ago:
"Thanks y'all, what an adventure. Stung by a bee the first time back down the Cheaha descent and my knee swelled up pretty good. It got crazy hot in the afternoon and I ended up losing close to 10 pounds on this ride so I was really dehydrated at the end. @Darren - my Garmin 1000 will only last about 10 hours, so I take an external battery pack to recharge it. My Garmin 800 lasted this entire ride with no recharging or stopping it - so just under 15 hours. The way I got the hawk picture is that I saw it fly across the road and then land on a tree branch very close to the road. I got my camera out thinking I would try to take a picture of it in the tree when it took off right in front of me. Here's a second pic I got but didn't post to instagram - this one would have been amazing if the hawk had been in focus - http://toonecycling.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/hawk.jpg"
I used to post TONS of pictures on instagram and they would sync across to Strava before you could manually add photos to a Strava ride. All those pics are now gone from my Strava account. But if I dig far enough back into my instagram history and if they made it easier to filter your own instagram history by date, I could figure out which pics I had posted to this ride, because there are several Strava comments related to my pictures from this ride. Here's the link to the Strava - https://www.strava.com/activities/360669800
I have been stung by bees many times while riding, but I have no memory of getting stung by a bee on this ride. I still really don't remember this ride at all. Sad, I guess, but I am sure some things from this ride have either morphed into memories associated with other rides or at least a general feeling of all the various roads and places along the route.
Ride #3 - 2022/09/24 - 212.2 miles bbc century fast plus there and back again with Jason - oh my goodness, Jason and I were just reminiscing about this ride from last year on my ride with him yesterday which bumped my Eddington to 212! How funny because Eddington was a discussion point a couple times during this ride last year with Jason Bierley! I had recently set an Eddington Number of 250 as my lifetime goal (I've since updated it to 256) and it was so hot and I decided mid-ride on the way back that there was absolutely no way I was going to add on miles after we got back to get to 250, that it would ruin the ride and the thought of having to do that was making me miserable ... so much relief when I made that decision and that really helped enjoy the time that we were both sitting on the cement in the shade at a very busy Love's gas station trying to do our best to cool off and survive the rest of the way back. We were pretty close to the entrance and so many people stared at us as they came or left the gas station. I'm surprised nobody asked us ... hey are y'all ok? we were not ok, but we were both truly alive and that's all that matters. That's the key with Eddington, it can be a great motivator, but it primarily should be used as a measurement device as opposed to a driver for your rides. If you use it to drive your rides, you are going to be miserable. Let the rides end up at a distance that makes sense and only use Eddington to push yourself a little bit farther than maybe you would have gone otherwise ... not 44 miles farther in ridiculous heat.
Ride #4 - 2016/07/15 - 212.8 miles Hoover, AL lookout mountain adventure for lacrosse - omg, all of my hours of effort to create this website were absolutely 100% totally worth it ... without this Eddington map website designed to highlight these doomed rides, it is highly likely I never would have had a reason to look back at this ride and remember everyting associated with it. And that weekend was jammed back with family adventure. I had biked to Chattanooga once or twice before, but this was the first time I decided to bike up there all the way across Lookout Mountain from Gadsden taking a bunch of gravel roads and doing some of the gravel climbs off the side of the mountain, too. We had just bought my wife's subaru and it was our first car without a physical key that you put into the ignition. Kristine, Analise, and Josiah had driven up in the new Subaru on Friday This led to Josiah and I driving off to a Walmart without the key (Kristine had it in her purse). So we made it to Walmart, turned off the car, and had no way to turn the car back on when we finished getting the stuff we needed to get for the lacross team. So Josiah and I had to walk from the walmart (thankfully not too far away) with four bags of stuff to get back to the lacross field, retrieve the key and then walk back to Walmart to get to the car. Those walks are also on Strava, lol. Also, at this lacrosse tournameny, Josiah and I created a Pokemon Go account and started playing Pokemon Go.

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Brian Toone

2023/10/21 Hoover, AL springville 300k bamarando

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Samford plus light up the resistance

Tried the triple but ran into tire problems

Dog park with J

Church shakedown triple century tonight/tomorrow

MTB practice with the jags

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