Mountain Bike Quantum Physics

One of my favorite things about mountain biking is you don’t have to drive to play.

The options are endless when you leave from home on a bike. What if all possibilities happened at the same time?

This video explores that, replaying several thousand mountain bike rides that started from this Tucson mountain biker’s home.



Or, as Paula said as she walked by, “do you have an ant problem in your computer?”

Another way of looking at it is that you leave a trace everywhere you pedal, and indeed glycogen and time — life — is burned everywhere you go. Simply by being there, you change what there is, what it becomes. And you change yourself. This video shows the weaving of the ‘rich tapestry of life’, or my Tucson MTB neural network, at about 250,000x real time.



The lines get darker and thicker the more a route is traced. You can see my favorite trails very clearly. So many rides, so much time and energy well spent. The red lines remind me of blood veins, with my house as the ‘heart.’ It’s fitting since those lines are my lifeblood, a huge part of what drives me, a manifestation of imagination and exploration.

So, yeah, it was a phenomenal year.

Every new year I ask TopoFusion to add up the stats for every GPS file I collected. Here are 2009’s stats:

5770.60 mi (1808.76 mi uphill, 1905.57 mi downhill, 1557.12 mi flat)
759,092 ft total ascent (748,782 ft descent) – 9.5 % uphill grade, 13.5 % downhill grade
32 days 2:02:02 moving (53 days 18:09:36 total time)
8.3 mph average speed
3753.702 difficulty, 12369.366 effort

A bit more mileage than last year, and quite a bit more elevation gain and more steep climbing at that — as noted in the total ‘difficulty index.’ I probably ‘miss’ (don’t GPS) the same number of rides per year, so it’s a fair comparison. It’s all on mountain bikes, since I don’t own a road bike.

Looking forward to what 2010 has to offer.

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