Riding the Continental Divide

Thursday, April 4, 2012

Maybe Manny Acta has been putting too much faith in the movie ‘Moneyball’ which idolizes baseball statistics and makes them the bible of on field decisions.  The holy grail of baseball today is the pitch count.  No pitcher can avoid it, it would seem.  When a certain number of pitches has been thrown…statistically speaking…it is time to take that pitcher out of the game and go to the bullpen.  The Indians’ Justin Masterson was pitching a fantastic game through 8 innings and had a 4 to 1 lead before a sell out crowd on Opening Day.  He’d thrown 99 pitches and regardless of his effectiveness and whatever a gut might be telling a manager…it was time to take him out…so out he came.  The Indians closer then blew the lead and the Tribe lost in 16 innings…spoiling Masterson’s performance and ruining Opening Day.

I’m reading a book on the life of the greatest pitcher in baseball’s history…Cy Young.  He won 511 games in his major league career when the thought of counting how many pitches were thrown would have been thought ridiculous.  The managers then didn’t need pitch counts…when the other team started whacking the ball all over the place, they figured their pitcher needed to be pulled…and not until.  I will grant you that the pitchers may have been used too much and became less effective towards the end of the season, but like so many things that may need a little tweak, the pendulum swung too far…and appears to be still heading in the wrong direction.  Oh well…we’ll get them next year.

I rode the trainer for 80 minutes…the length of the movie I was watching called ‘Ride the Divide’.  It’s another documentary on bike riding/racing, but much different than the Tour.  This race pitted 15 riders less against themselves and completely against the terrain and the elements that make up the Continental Divide.  The race starts just across the border in Canada and proceeds down the Continental Divide through Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and finishing just across the border in Mexico.  Almost all of the course is ridden on dirt trails, old logging roads, over snowy passes and through complete wilderness.  There are some small towns along the way, but supplies have to be carried and much of the race finds the riders sleeping in bivy sacks overnight.  Encounters with bears are not infrequent and the total distance covered is over 2,700 miles with 200,000 feet of elevation change thrown in just for fun.  And of course the riders on not on sleek road bikes, but much heavier and slow moving mountain bikes.  Damn…my kind of event.

I threw in a one-hour hike prior to the ride, spending some time exploring off-trail in hopes of finding and antler drop, but without success.  The season for this is past, but any time in the woods and off-trail is time well spent.

Hike duration: 60 minutes.  Bike duration: 80 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 75 for the hike and 120 for the bike.
Calories burned:  250 for the hike and 1125 for the bike.