- Mental Meandering From F5's SVP of Marketing
Cycling
For the past 3 years people at F5 have participated in "The Commute Challenge" that is organized by Seattle's Cascade Bicycle Club. When people accept the challenge, they agree to ride their bike to work at least 5 days during the month of May. It's a great way to get people out on their bikes for some exercise and save a little gas while they're at it.
Some of the highlights for us this year are:
147 F5ers signed up
21,443 miles ridden (which equates to roughly 21,443 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide generated) ...
May is national Bike to Work Month and this year we have 70 F5ers who are signed up for something called the Commute Challenge. The Challenge is basically to ride your bike to work a minimum of 5 times during the month.
So far our riders have ridden more than 3,400 miles over about 250 round trips.
The response has been so good that we had to get additional bike racks installed to have enough rack capacity.
We try to make it easy to use alternative forms of transportation while working at F5. Here are some of the things we do:
Bike racks are...
Many of the people on my team are in the middle of a pretty hectic travel season - myself included.
After being in England and France two weeks ago, this past week I presented at the Thomas Weisel conference in San Francisco on Monday. As an aside, the firm's founder and namesake is a cyclist and big cycling supporter. At age 66 Weisel is listed as part of the Discovery Masters Cycling Team.
From there I went to New York on Tuesday for F5's analyst day presentation that took place on Wednesday. I'm writing this as I'm sitting at the Narita airport in Japan on...
Yesterday I did a very informal and unscientific study of helmet use by cyclists in London.
My methodology was simple - I just counted the number of cyclists I saw and kept track of how many of them were wearing helmets.
Cyclists counted: 48Total Number wearing helmets: 13Couriers Wearing Helmets: 0Helmet Wearing %: 27%
Observations were made between Paddington Station and Soho during the afternoon. Riders were roughly 3/4 commuters and the rest bike couriers. I was surprised by the low percentage of people wearing helmets.
In Seattle you still see people commuting and couriers riding without helmets but they are in the minority. I'd...
I was in Paris yesterday on Feb1, 2007 which happened to be the first day that France's new non-smoking law went into effect. It bans smoking from public places while bars and restaurants have another year before it kicks in for them.
No smoking in France? That is certainly something I didn't think would come about. Japan, Italy and many other countries where smoking is prevalent have also instituted bans. France has engaged 175,000 public servants to attempt to enforce the ban.
We'll see if they take it to heart. My hotel still had ashtrays out in full force throughout the lobby.
On a...
It seems like just yesterday that I wrote the post about my experience with the bike in Dec 2005 and minutes since the July 2006 update.
This year my mileage total on the Roubaix will be about 3,500 miles. Lower than last year but my business travel was significantly higher in 2006 and I did more mountain biking this year than I have in a long time. I did complete my first double century this year at an average of 18.8mph and felt good at the end of it so I was pretty plesaed with that.
Over the weekend I was getting my bike...
Floyd Landis posted some interesting information about his doping case recently. Since he was basically declared guilty in public I guess making his appeal public is fitting. It is also in keeping with his practice of publishing his training data - something most other riders would never do. The presentation focuses on exposing the inconsistencies in the testing process. When you look through it, it does look pretty bad - sample identification numbers apparently wrong, possible contamination of the sample, and 200%+ variation in test results for the same test on the same sample.
I really hope that Floyd is innocent of this but...
A couple of mornings ago my ride in was particularly peaceful. No one around and a light fog made things very quiet. These words describe my mood for that ride:
SolitudePuddleTracksCommunity
On Wednesday of this week a woman who was riding her bike collided with a van when the van attempted to make a left turn in front of her from a side street. Yesterday morning news came out that the woman died from her injuries. She was wearing a helmet and witnesses claim that the van driver simply did not see the cyclist. This is a tragic accident and additional awareness can help to reduce the number of cyclists who are injured or killed each year.
To give you an idea of the impact, imagine Michael Johnson, the world record holder...
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