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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January 4th, 2010 at 9:00 am
I saw a few “ants” go up and over Mt Lemmon only to be the last “ant” to come back home…those were some of the best rides we did in 2009.
Looking forward to seeing what you do, what lines you can clear, and how far you can push yourself in 2010….
January 4th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Very cool. I was wondering, did all the ants come back?
Happy New Year.
Ed
January 4th, 2010 at 11:20 am
These visualizations are great! What a cool way to show your rides on your home turf.
You’re lucky to have mountain biking accessible from home. I have to drive to go mountain biking … which is why I end up doing a lot of road riding instead.
January 4th, 2010 at 11:43 am
that is one of the coolest things I’ve seen for an end of year retro. Also amazed at all your miles without a roadie!
January 4th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Some of the ants went astray and never came back!
There are a few bikepacking trips in there that went off screen and definitely didn’t come back.
I think I’m still here, though. (?)
January 4th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
That was awesome.
January 4th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
I wish I carried my GPS with for all my rides just so I could do that. Oh well. Next year you should color code the dots based on the max temperature during each ride…
January 5th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
That was just about the coolest thing that I’ve ever seen… Scott, you rock!
January 7th, 2010 at 10:49 am
that was fun to watch!
January 11th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Very cool. Nice programming!!!
Next thing to do for the ants is to change color based on various attributes (speed, climbing, level of hoytesville, etc).
January 13th, 2010 at 6:42 am
[...] Morris over at TopoFusion posted up a cool video visualizing thousands of mountain bike rides he’s taken starting from his Tucson, AZ home. [...]
January 19th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
[...] Morris over at TopoFusion posted up a cool video visualizing thousands of mountain bike rides he’s taken starting from his Tucson, AZ home. [...]
January 30th, 2010 at 11:45 am
It’s nice seeing all the rides at once, but now I am interested in experiencing all of the post-ride recovery meals simultaneously. That is really what I am in it for anyway.
I am also curious what some of those trails are north of the foothills that you ride…those would be new to me…
Cool video!