Remington Rd. Hillclimb, Ithaca (video)

Remington Rd. Hill Climb, Ithaca NY from Armin Heurich on Vimeo.

For cyclists looking for a great hill climb in the finger lakes region, this is one of my favorites. This route takes you on a 600 ft. vertical ascent in just under 2 miles, with twisty, well-maintained low-traffic roads and great views of Cayuga lake. It's also the most stealth exit from Ithaca to surrounding towns of Lansing and Dryden, where cycling can't be beat. I shot the footage from a car, and slowed the video down to simulate cycling speeds.


I shot the video footage in the fall of '09, at the tail end of a great cycling season. It's taken me a while to finally edit this together, and I'm hoping that it serves as inspiration for you cyclists waiting for the road biking season to begin. 

Crummy photos of my Miyata 1000 touring bike, purchased in '86

Yeah, the photos do stink, but these are for just for reference purposes. This blog won't be chronological, so let's jump ahead to 1986. I just had a great touring bike stolen from my apartment. This is the machine I bought back then to replace that bike, and it was my main ride up until the spring of '09. Mostly original parts, including Shimano biopace chainrings.

Look at how tall the stem is! The frame was too small for me, but I was stubborn and decided to just make adjustments to accommodate the frame size, including the stem and the seatpost. That was a pretty bad idea in retrospect. I thought that I'd save weight by doing that, but what did it matter on those long tours hauling 70+ pounds.

Why start this blog in the first place?

Cycling has been a critical part of my identity since I was at least seven, some fourty years ago. Every few years I am reminded of this, particularly when I have a watershed cycling season like this one, 2009, the year I got my first road bike. (Why did I wait so long?) [upcoming posts: watershed cycling experiences]

I've thought so much about what cycling means to me for so long that now I decided that it is finally time to write about some of my most treasured road biking experiences, as well as reflect on my attempt to be a year-round cyclist with the help of my new trainer. Since I'm terrible at keeping journals, I thought that maybe the discipline of maintaining a blog would be somehow more attractive and easier.

This picture is from 1971. We lived in Japan for three years, while my dad took a job with IBM to help to develop a new plant. This was my first serious bike and I was so proud. This photo was taken at our apartment complex in Osaka. It was a 5-speed with some pretty awesome headlights and tail lights, as well as a generator. I was king of all the world.