Conesus Lake and some important Murphy family news

Please visit my GoFundMe page, where I'm $49 short of $1,500!

It was a productive weekend for Finger Lakes bike riding, as I knocked off two lakes in two days. Saturday I rode around Otisco with my good friend Scott MacPherson. I'll wait to write about that one until later this week, though, because my ride Sunday was special for a few reasons.

Conesus Lake is probably the Finger Lake where I've spent the most time; it's closest to Rochester and my aunts Kathy and Patty live there year-round. I started and finished there Sunday, and got to visit with them, my cousin Charlsey and her husband J.T. afterward, which was great.

The main reason I was excited for this ride, though, was because my wife Kat was doing it with me. She's quite an athlete - she used to play competitive ice hockey - but I saved one of the shortest lakes for our ride together.

Not because she couldn't handle something longer. It's just that she's 13 weeks pregnant.

Kat is going to be an amazing mom. She's a planner - maybe even an over-planner - and it didn't take long for her to research the best prenatal vitamins, what not to eat and where to give birth. We've been religious about meeting with our midwife from URMC and reading our baby books. If you have a few hours to kill, ask us what names we're considering.

In brief, Little Murphy is going to have every advantage we can give him or her, and that's how it ought to be. We're nervous as any first-time parents are, but we know we have the support, knowledge and resources to raise our child right-ish.

That may sound familiar from your own experience raising (or being) children. And while much of that maternal instinct is innate, not all of it is. A lot of our parenting will be learned behavior from our own parents, who did a great job. But what if we hadn't had their example?

You see where I'm going with this. I've been writing for months that helping at-risk first-time mothers-to-be is an important thing to do. Now that my own wife is a first-time mother-to-be, it really hits home.

We know how much there is to worry about and to learn. Kat and I are picking it up as fast as we can before our delivery arrives in late January. We both believe strongly that every other young woman in the same position deserves the same support and knowledge we're getting.

Please donate to the dang charity. I'll post more updates soon, about the biking and the baby.

Seneca Lake, and something you can do

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I rode 79 miles around Seneca Lake on Saturday, by myself. It's the only one of my 10 rides I expect to do alone - but, like most everyone else in our country, I had a lot to think about anyway.

Don't worry, I'll be brief.

How can we hold in mind at the same time both the ongoing, centuries-old tragedy of the treatment of black people in America and also the need to support, not demonize, the people whose job it is to uphold our laws? Can we find a way to talk about the bias each of us carries around every day without devolving to hypocrisy and shaming?

I find this sort of rhetorical exercise tiresome. Even writing those two sentences was tiresome.

Here's what I think. It has always been a feature of humanity on Earth that there are opportunities to help people. I'm inclined to believe that feature was created on purpose, but that's another point.

Those opportunities (that is, instances of human suffering) exist in an abundance and variety we can scarcely conceive of. You could never get to the end of them if you dedicated 10 lifetimes to it.

The trick, though, is that you have to actually act on them. And that's where everyone gets stuck. How many Facebook posts or news stories have you seen in the last two weeks that finish in some hopeless rhetorical question? What can I do? When will things change? What's the matter with everyone?

Look: there are literally thousands of people in Rochester, or wherever you are living, who will give you something to do that will lead to a demonstrable improvement in the state of the world.

If you go to a food cupboard, they'll say: put these potatoes in this box. If you go to a hospice, they'll say: take these sheets and go change that bed. If you go to a school, they'll say: take this book and read it to that kid.

Those are things that make things better, and you can pick any one you like. That's a blessing!

The subtext here is that I want you to donate money to the charity I'm riding around all these lakes for. Nurse-Family Partnership is good at that simple declarative sentence kind of help: they pay nurses to spend a lot of time with poor pregnant teenagers so their babies have half a shot at a healthy, successful, fulfilling life. That's not a hashtag; that's actually changing the world.

I guess I wasn't terribly brief after all.

About Seneca Lake: that was the longest I've ever ridden my bike in one shot, and I was feeling it by the end. The last 15 miles or so were very challenging. It was a great sense of accomplishment, though, to look back across the lake to where I had been riding six hours earlier and know I'd gone that far on my own locomotion.

Better yet, while I was doing it, four people donated a combined $95, bringing my total above $1,300. Thanks to Christine, Bill, Dave and Brian. We're accomplishing something.

Honeoye Lake

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After two nearly all-day affairs, 18-mile Honeoye Lake was a pleasant break. It was all the more enjoyable because I did it with my largest riding party yet - David Riley, Ben Jacobs and Ryan Miller, all colleagues from the Democrat and Chronicle.

The Friday night before the ride, Ryan and I were working late at the paper, Ben was at the Jazz Festival and David was up with his infant daughter. Nonetheless, the four of us gathered at Honeoye High School just before 8 a.m. to set out down the east side of the lake.

Like Owasco Lake, a significant portion of the length of the ride is actually due to a marsh at the south end of the lake. In fact, Honeoye Lake itself is only about 4.5 miles long, the second-shortest Finger Lake after Canadice, I think.

We rode at a fairly good clip, stopped just once for a drink of water and rolled back into the high school at about 9:30 a.m. As on my last two rides, the weather was great.

I won't be riding the next two weekends, but plan to resume July 16 for Seneca Lake, which is the second-longest ride at 77 miles. Until then, have a Happy Fourth of July, and thanks for your support of Nurse-Family Partnership.

Owasco Lake

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After an unforeseen one-week break, I restarted my ride Saturday at Owasco Lake with my good friend, former colleague and Twitter personality Robert Harding. It was a hot, sunny day for a 30-mile ride.

(OK, I recognize the videography has a ways to go, but at least I figured out the GoPro this time.)

Owasco Lake is in Cayuga County, with Auburn at the north end and Moravia at the south. I guess it's one of the least-known or visited lakes, but I got to know it well while working for two years at the Citizen newspaper in Auburn, where I met Bob. I made water quality part of my news beat there and learned a lot about invasive species, agricultural pesticide overflow and that sort of thing.

Compared with Canadice and Hemlock, Owasco was a pretty flat ride but we took it slow and finished by the early afternoon. Bob's wife Sarah was awesome as road crew, bringing water at the halfway point and taking our sweaty photo when we got back to Emerson Park at the end.

That now makes three of 11 Finger Lakes completed. Next Saturday, I'll be doing Honeoye Lake with David Riley and perhaps some other Democrat and Chronicle colleagues. In the meantime, please visit my GoFundMe page to support the riding and my charity of choice, Nurse-Family Partnership.

A good reason not to ride

I planned on riding around Keuka Lake Saturday, but it didn't happen.

Earlier this week, my dad had a routine appointment with a cardiologist, who thought it might be a good idea to go in for a closer look and, possibly, a stent in one of his arteries. Not a big deal.

When they got in there, though, they instead found that three arteries were nearly completely blocked. While he had never had a heart attack nor shortness of breath nor any other symptoms, he seemingly had nearly no blood flow to his heart.

He was scheduled immediately for triple bypass surgery on Saturday afternoon. That's when my cycling plans went out the window. My mother, my siblings and I and our spouses spent the afternoon in the waiting room at Strong Memorial Hospital, staring at his number on the monitor and trying to keep ourselves distracted.

Everything went great. He's in recovery now and already back making stupid jokes, even though he's on doctor's orders not to laugh, lest he tear his open chest wound apart.

It was a blessing beyond description that my dad went to get checked out before he had a heart attack. So today, instead of bothering you all for a donation to my charity (though you can still do that if you want!), I have a different request: if you have some preventive health care you've been putting off, please stop putting it off and make a doctor's appointment in the morning. Please consider, at least for your family's sake, that it could save your life.

The riding begins again next Saturday, on Owasco Lake with my good friend Bob Harding.

Back on the road

After two weeks away from my bicycle, I'm starting riding again this Saturday. My good friend John Forbush and I will be heading out bright and early to Keuka Lake, probably my favorite of the Finger Lakes. Its Y shape, unique among the lakes, provides for some incredible vantage points, particularly on the bluff in the middle.
It's a 55-mile ride with little elevation change, so it should be very pleasant. I've also figured out my GoPro camera, so hopefully I'll have some nice footage to share afterward.
Please remember, all this bike riding is not only fun but intended to raise money for a good cause. Please look at my GoFundMe page for more details!

The first ride: Canadice and Hemlock lakes

After a few months of talking, I finally got my Finger Lakes ride underway on Sunday with Canadice and Hemlock lakes.
Canadice (the smaller, eastern one) and Hemlock are right side-by-side, south of Rochester and between Honeoye and Conesus lakes. They're best known as the water source for the city of Rochester. The water flows completely via gravity about 30 miles north to Cobb's Hill and Highland reservoirs, then again via gravity to taps throughout the city.
Because we drink from them, it's especially important that they be kept free of pollution. As such, they're the only two lakes with absolutely no development along the shorelines. New York state owns all the land in the area, including an extensive state forest. It's a really great place for a hike.

As I mentioned earlier, I called on my friend Buddy Nyhof for the ride. It was an absolutely beautiful day and we were enjoying catching up with each other so much that we hardly noticed the first climb going south on Bald Hill Road on our way around Hemlock. Because of the fact that the shorelines are undeveloped, we couldn't actually see the lake for our entire circuit around it, but the day was pleasant enough without it.
We had one very steep hill coming back around the south end of Hemlock, but otherwise finished the first, longer part of the ride in pretty good shape. We stopped back at Hemlock Lake Park for lunch and a rest, then got going on what was supposedly the easier half of the day, the much-shorter Canadice Lake.
We had to go back up Bald Hill Road again, and we noticed right away that the climb we'd tackled without a sweat a few hours earlier felt a lot steeper the second time around. We weren't chit-chatting quite as much on our way up. It was only a few miles, though, and we then were treated with a long coast down a mostly empty road on the hillside and then a beautiful path on the east side of Canadice, where there is an access road right near the water.
The last few miles were on Purcell Hill Road. Actually, almost every road we rode on had the word 'hill' in the name, and Purcell Hill came by it honestly. After about 40 miles of up-and-down riding, we had a monster of an up-hill a few miles from the end of the day.
I won't speak for Buddy, but I almost died.
After that it was an easy coast back to the park and our car. It took a little longer than we planned for the 45 miles, but we had a great time. Unfortunately, I deleted the GoPro video off my computer like an idiot, but we did take this selfie video.

I'm taking a hiatus for a few weeks before my next ride: Honeoye Lake on June 11. I hope to be joined by some friends from the Democrat and Chronicle newsroom.
While I'm gone, please have a look at my GoFundMe page and consider donating to the Nurse-Family Partnership, helping create strong families through early intervention.