A Great Day On The Rivanna River Trail

The RTF is an organization that has built and maintains a trail that runs all the way around the city of Charlottesville. It's about 20 miles of "urban trail". It's not really single track but it's also not paved rail trail either. Some of it is a bit of a scramble or a sketchy ride through a tunnel but a lot of it is pretty sweet riding. Some buff, some technical.

Kyle and I organized a circumnavigation of the Rivanna River Trail as a sort of birthday celebration. Here's a few pics.

Here's the start of the ride. 15 riders total.


Here's a huge creek crossing/hike-a-bike


Most of the way around, chilling at Bodos for a minute.




Dave making an excellent decision with the egg bagel.


Fellow rider (I think he was drunk) on the Rivanna trail. Apparently his rear D blew apart and Dave was helping him get it back together. Only on the urban trails are you going to run into something like this. I would have been disappointed if this didn't happen. Nolan is the muscle, making sure nothing goes down.


All in all a great day, maybe we'll do it again before 2009.

Dark Hours

So, this is a concept that we came up with in college. One evening when I couldn't sleep my roommate and I tried to account for all of the hours in a week, 168. I don't remember the exact calculations but we allotted time for classes, getting back and forth to class, work, homework, meals, brushing teeth, showering, exercise, etc. As I recall we were fairly generous with the time, overestimating to try and get a realistic count. By the end of our exercise, we had accounted for less than 150 hours, almost a full day that we couldn't account for.

As I was driving to work the other day thinking about all of the things I do (poker, paintball, riding) I started to wonder if I could account for all of the hours in my week and exactly how many "Dark Hours" were left, unaccounted for. Here's my assessment.

Sleep
8-9 hours/day
63 hours/wk
(105 remaining)

Work (including driving to/from)
45 hrs/week
(60 remaining)

Eating
3 hours/day
21 hrs/week
(39 remaining)

Riding
9 hours/week
(30 remaining)

Mini-Z Racing
2.5 hours/week average
(27.5 remaining)

Hygiene - Showering, brushing teeth, etc
1 hr/day
(20.5 remaining)

Food Shopping
1 hour/week
(19.5 remaining)

Email, web-surfing, etc
1 hour/day
(12.5 remaining)

I would say most of those estimates are pretty fair. This leaves about 12 hours/week unaccounted for. Granted, I didn't account for TV which could easily be 2-5 hours for me. I guess my time is just a little more cluttered today than it was 10 years ago. I also find myself working on random pet projects around during my idle time...something that didn't really happen when I lived in one room.

I don't know if I expected to have some huge revelation when I started writing this...but I didn't. I guess I am just curious to know if other people have such "Dark Hours" that get lost little by little in the daily shuffle.