Tag Archives: biking

MCW Cycling Club Updated

From 2006-2010 I attended the Medical College of Wisconsin. One of the clubs that I started was the CCIG, or Cycling Club Interest Group. I’m now almost 4 years out from graduating from MCW so haven’t really kept up too much with the activities of the club. There’s a ton of great cycling in Southeastern Wisconsin so I hope students continue to utilize the resources on the club’s site, MCW Cycling Club.

I had been hosting a PHP bulletin board, but the hassles of dealing with spam made it difficult to use. I recently transitioned the message board to Google Groups. It is invite only to limit access to current or former students. The message board can be accessed here: MCW Cycling Club Google Group

MCW Cycling Club site

I just updated the MCW Cycling Club site. Previously, it ran completely from my own hosting service. This worked okay, but required a lot of work to add new pages since I was literally doing the HTML coding by hand. My experiences using the WYSIWUG editors are that they add a bunch of code that destroys the readability. Anyway, I was looking for something simple and went ahead with transferring the data to Google Sites. In the past, Google Sites didn’t offer much ability to customize, however, a lot has now changed. After switching the CNAME to point to Google, the switch was seamless. It looks pretty good and will be much easier to update. I can even add collaborators to help me with posting club events and updating the bike routes. This will be tremendous as I will be leaving for a year. The only thing still running on my hosting package is the punBB forum. It would be terrific if there would be a way to host that within Google Sites as well.

Check out the new site: MCW Cycling Club

Twitter: Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel

So I don’t completely understand the idea of letting people know your exact status all the time (primarily because it must take a ton of time to keep it updated), but in this case, the concept is really cool. (Also, to keep your Twitter page, you would most definitely need an iPhone, Blackberry, or another capable phone in order to do the updates when away from the computer.)

From yesterday. Why the 28 in the back is a good idea. on TwitPic

Lance Armstrong and Astana manager Johan Bruyneel are on Twitter! It is a pretty sweet way to stay updated on their training. The photo above was their Twitter page. I look forward to following their updates. Go Lance!

Original Tour de France

As you know, the Tour de France began in 1903 as some sort of wild-hair publicity scheme for the sports daily L’Auto, a paper that eventually evolved into what is now L’Equipe. The race differed remarkably from the one we know and love today. The original Tour could probably best be described as a synthesis of a modern stage race, that exercise in sleep deprivation known as the Race Across America (RAAM) and a mountain bike race, held under original NORBA rules.

Like the Tour, it was a stage race. Like RAAM, the first Tour was an individual sport, with no cooperation between riders allowed. Like an old NORBA race, riders were completely on their own, required to provide their own support and mechanical assistance.

The 1903 Tour de France was 2468 kilometers (editor: 1534 miles), but involved only six stages. These things were monsters, ranging from the shortest ? Stage 4’s 268km (editor: 167 miles) run from Toulouse to Bordeaux ? to the longest, Stage 6 from Nantes to Paris at 471km (editor: 293 miles). (Obviously, the Tour’s tradition of turning the final stage into a victory parade for the overall leader hadn’t yet taken hold.) Instead of one or two formal rest days as we now see, the 1903 Tour’s stages were separated by gaps of several days. The 1903 Tour began in Paris in July 1 and ended in Paris on July 19.

You can see from the finishing times that things must have been quite different than they are today. Frenchman Maurice Garin won the first Tour, with an impressive time of 94 hours, 33 minutes and 14 seconds. Lucien Pothier finished second, two hours and 49 minutes behind the winner. If you think that’s a substantial time gap, keep in mind that there was a whopping 63-hour gap between the first and 20th-place finishers. They’d obviously not come up with the concept of a time cut, either, leaving attrition to make those calls. Indeed, of the 60 starters, only 21 finished.

Continue reading: Velonews | The Explainer – Disqualified!

Google Transit now in Milwaukee

Google Maps for a few years now has offered the ability to search for a route taking public transportation. This service, called Google Transit, is now offered in dozens of US and world cities, including the city that I have been living in for the past two years. Having recently experienced the excellent public transportation system in Prague, I hope that this service will make the Milwaukee system more popular for everyone. When I lived in Madison, WI for undergrad, I used the public transportation system all the time. It was free or very cheap for students. I’ve yet to use the Milwaukee public transportation system because I have my own car and because it would have been scary to ride the buses without having a specific idea of where they are going or the approximate time frame. This is probably the biggest hurdle for a system of only buses (like in Milwaukee)…in Prague everyone rides the public transit system (trams, buses, and subway). It was also very cheap in Prague. If buying a set of day passes for an entire week, the cost was about $6-7 a day for unlimited travel on any of the public transit options. In Milwaukee, the cost for an adult is $2 per ride and residents only get the choice of bus. And, I’m sure that the quality of our bus system cannot compare to the service that I had in Prague. But, services like Google Transit are a start. I hope they help inspire improvements in public transportation across the US.

One more thing. Sign this petition to ask Google to add a “Bike There” option to Google Maps.
Here are some sites with more info about this:
“Bike There” petition for Google Maps gets support
I Want Google to Keep Me Out of A Pickle
Big News (regarding Austin and Google)

MCW Cycling Club

Since no one checks my Scott, Future MD blog since I’ve never updated it, I’d just like to use this opportunity to mention that as my 2nd year of medical school comes to an end, I will be updating it more regularly. The first update will be to discuss the creation of the MCoW Cycling Club Interest Group.