On Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 1:12:49 PM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
On 9/17/2020 12:37 PM, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 10:05:13 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 13:03:37 -0700 (PDT), jbeattie
wrote:

https://aqicn.org/city/usa/oregon/portland/ It varies by the hour. We're
hazardous but trending toward unhealthy. Hmmm. Maybe I'll go for an unhealthy
ride this evening. It may even get to "unhealthy for sensitive groups" around
6:00 -- and then back to hazardous.
-- Jay Beattie.
Thursday morning (9/17/2020), Portland air still looks really bad:
https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#9.14/45.4645/-122.6204
The hourly variations in smoke levels seem to be about 2.5 times.
Click on any of the purple dots and you'll get an AQI history graph
for the previous four days.

Satellite photo still shows considerable smoke over most of the left
coast:
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus_band.php?sat=G17&band=GEOCOLOR&length=12

Even Indiana is seeing some smoke:
https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow/

SF Bay coastal area were fairly clear yesterday, but have become worse
today:
https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#8.87/37.3508/-122.0335
Calif Sierras are as bad as Portland:
https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#6.89/38.138/-120..995

At AQI = 250 or worse, I would think twice about doing any riding.
When we were running AQI = 150, I was coughing a little, had a
continuous mild headache, was regularly clearing my sinuses, and was
using eyedrops to reduce burning eye problems.

Yesterday I took a short ride out to Alameda and back. The air was as good as you could want.

The map of West Coast air quality in my newspaper yesterday
noted that depending on local wind speed and direction some
adjacent areas have marked air quality differences.

Because I've getting up at o'dark thirty to watch the Tour de France, I haven't been getting sufficient sleep. So I go out for a ride and do dumb things like running into that tree. I think that it got knocked over by the gardening on the golf course adjacent to the bike path. But I should have actually looked up sooner rather than musing about that ground squirrel. I did almost the same thing about 5 years ago, on a route I ride that is always empty of parked cars I didn't even look up until I hit the back of a parked old pickup truck. I hit the brakes and came almost to a stop before hitting it. But this time I was riding about 18 mph and hit that damn tree before I could do anything.

Anyway, I did a short local ride and forgot to turn the Garmin on for the first mile and a half. It had 1,800 feet of climbing. Two weeks ago I did it when I was really feeling like crap. I felt like pretty good today and noticed something I haven't had for all of my last 10 rides or so - I would be breathing pretty hard on a steep section and when I hit the top, I would take a deep breath and almost be revived.

When I got back from tis ride I'm not tired other than the lack of sleep. My average speed was 0.1 mph faster than two weeks ago. That doesn't sound like much until you think that the climbing is pretty steep and very slow. And it was garbage day on Skyline so I kept getting held back by garbage trucks. In one spot it was a very narrow road and I barely had room to squeeze through and 2/3rds of the way down the truck there was a large stick in the way that I didn't have room tp go around and had to come to a halt and fall against the cliff face and wait for the truck to coast down the hill enough that I could get moving again. A average of 9.8 mph vs 9.7 mph was a whole lot of speed difference on the course.

Again I was attempting to see any effects of gusting winds on the aero wheels. The road surface would change my course. And when I was leaning against a strong side wind and a car came by and cut off that wind, I would swerve a little from having to come suddenly upright, but there was no changing of course from the effects of wind on wide wheels.