It has been about 60 days since I started riding a bike
again. I have seen some really beautiful
scenery, met some really nice people and lost some weight. I have probably ridden a total of 4-500
miles since I started training for this ride.
Of everything I have seen to date, the most beautiful was when my
odometer rolled over to 60 kilometers last Sunday!
What a beautiful day.
Jim Haake, my in house biking coach, agreed to ride the proposed route
with me. We left our office parking lot
around 8:30 in the morning, heading North on Troost Ave. I was
thinking of motion. Like me coasting down the hill and gravity, like me falling
off my bicycle while coasting down the hill, so I thought of Isaac Newton.
When Sir Isaac Newton wrote the three laws of motion over
300 years ago, I am sure he had no idea how they would impact an old fat guy on
a bicycle. The
first law says that an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an
object in motion tends to stay in motion, with the same direction and speed. Motion (or lack of
motion) cannot change without an unbalanced force acting. If nothing is
happening to you, and nothing does happen, you will never go anywhere. If
you're going in a specific direction, unless something happens to you, you will
always go in that direction. Forever.
I
considered that as I was careening down Troost hill towards Emmanuel Cleaver II Blvd. I was doing something, and I was going
somewhere. Mostly, I was just enjoying the thrill of rushing
through the cool morning at 28 miles an hour!
As I crossed Brush Creek Blvd. and looked up
the hill, I remembered the second part about the unbalanced force, in this case
the First Law of Motion. As I started up the hill I remembered that Newton's law of universal gravitation
states that every point mass in the universe attracts every other
point mass with a force that is directly
proportional to the
product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the
distance between them. I’m not sure
exactly what point in the universe was trying to pull me back down that hill,
but they were giving it a good shot! It
was a slow accent, but not as bad as I was afraid of. Training is paying off.
As
I neared the top of the hill, I completely understood his second law. The second
law says that the acceleration of an object produced by
a net (total) applied force is directly related to the magnitude of the
force, the same direction as the force, and inversely related to the mass of
the object (inverse is a value that is one over another number... the inverse
of 2 is 1/2). The second law shows that if you exert the same force on two
objects of different mass, you will get different accelerations (changes in
motion). The effect (acceleration) on the smaller mass will be greater (more
noticeable). The effect of a 10 newton force on a baseball would be much
greater than that same force acting on a truck. The difference in effect
(acceleration) is entirely due to the difference in their masses. That is why, even though Jim was pedaling up
the hill at about the same speed, he was a block ahead of me; basically, I have
considerably more mass!
Once
over the top of the hill, the rest of the ride was great. We rode the Trolley Trail and the Brush Creek
Trail. I was especially happy with the
Brush Creek Trail. In the heart of the city, it’s an unexpected nature spot. As we rode along, we saw at least 6 heron
standing in the water, dozens of other water fowl, like our friend the Canada
Goose, who leaves a lot of little calling cards all over the path.
There
is a great waterfall that you can only see from the trail, all of it nicely
maintained and smooth. There is one
place where the trail has been closed due to falling rock, but overall it was a
great ride.
We
stopped a number of times to check the route, discuss where the flattest hill
was etc., so it took around 3 ½ hours to finish. We’ll do better next time.
Nature
and Newton. Who knew?
More
Later
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