W&OD Conquered; Mt. Vernon Trail >50% Conquered

Posted July 26, 2008, 11:34 p.m.

So the weekend ended up a bit more busy than I had really expected, but it’s going pretty well. I realized though that I had neglected to update you all on my effort to conquer the W&OD bike trail. Status: Success.

Last Thursday, I pushed myself to [and perhaps slightly beyond] my limit, setting off from the 16 mile marker on the trail and riding all the way to the 0 mile marker, and then all the way back for a total ride of 32 miles. My limit, in case you’re wondering, was around 25 miles ;-). I survived though. In the last 3 or 4 weeks, I’ve ridden the entire 45-mile length of the W&OD trail in both directions.

Today, I did have a couple of free hours so I started a similar exercise on the scenic 18 miles of the Mount Vernon Trail. I did a 10-mile ride from it’s northern terminus to a spot just south of the Beltway, then back again. Sometime in the next week or so, I’ll start from the southern terminus and ride 10 miles north (which will complete the whole trail, with a couple miles of overlap in the middle).

Hopefully soon, I’ll do another 30-miler and not feel like I’m about to die at the 25th mile ;-).

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

In any case, God commands us to have courage; he does not command us to be fools.

Whittaker Chambers

The method [of learning Japanese] recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan.

Dave Barry

Hating life, despising life—even for the genuine pain that life inflicts—merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.

Jordan Peterson

Trust between people who are not naive is a form of courage, because betrayal is always a possibility, and because this is consciously understood.

Jordan Peterson

In the case of Socrates, [his] executioner wept over the executed, but here, it is the [Christ] who is to be executed who weeps over the executioners. Such is the difference between a philosopher and God.

Fulton Sheen

But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another.

G. K. Chesterton

We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few.

George Washington

This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

Erasmus

We shall see hereafter that in America the real strength of the country is vested in the provincial far more than in the federal government.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Conversion is a matter of a moment. Sanctification is the work of a lifetime.

Josemaría Escrivá

Normally, thought precedes word; it seeks and formulates the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way round: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it.

Benedict XVI

[Pure] democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

James Madison

This is the final victory of the censor: When people, even people who know they are routinely lied to, cease to be able to imagine what is really the case.

Salman Rushdie

To be human is to live suspended between danger and opportunity.

Lee Smolin

I was walking around one day trying to figure out what the meaning of life was. I figured it was something that would come to me easily while walking around, but I didn’t actually figure it out until I sat down.

Scott Bradford

All economic transactions involve mutual accommodation and each transactor has to make the deal a net benefit to the other transactor, in order to have a deal at all.

Thomas Sowell

Freedom comes from being moral. Slavery to sin arises from being immoral.

U.S. Conf. of Catholic Bishops

[The] power of accurate observation . . . is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Bernard Shaw

One of the things that has constantly amazed me is the delight that decent people take in the ability to provide opportunities to those over whom they currently exercise authority.

Jordan Peterson