Speed Limits on the Capital Crescent Trail

The Sunday June 1 Washington Post Metro section featured an article saying that the Maryland National Park and Planning Commission is now establishing a speed limit of 15 MPH on some sections of the Capital Crescent Trail. Sorry, I can't provide a link to the article; it did not seem to be available on the Post's website or on the web earlier today.

I know from the article and my own observation that many of my fellow cyclists do not and will not take kindly to this new regulation. However, I do think it's needed, and I hope people will obey it and police patrols will enforce it. In the late afternoon and on weekends all day, the trail is crowded not only with cyclists but also with runners, walkers, and people pushing strollers. I have seen more close calls than I can possibly count on the trail. The near accidents all result from bicyclists going too fast for conditions--usually the crowding is the hazardous condition, not the weather. In particular, I have had some scary experiences when passing a slower cyclist or a couple walking together with other cyclists passing me at the same time--this on a 10 foot wide paved trail.

We can all enjoy the trail if we just take simple precautions, so I ask my fellow cyclists to slow down and enjoy the ride and not pass until the left hand lane is clear; that's no different from what you do as a matter of course when driving on a two lane road. However, you walkers and runners pay close attention and stay well to the right of the centerline.

More generally, as I state in my paper, "Recreational Trails in Our Sports and Fitness Present and Future", I believe that the trail user population, especially in urban areas, will increase faster than trail capacity, so there will have to be more regulation and more policing of trails. If not, there will be a growing number of accidents, many serious, that will deter people from using trails and the nation's overall fitness and health will suffer.


PS in regard to Saturday's post, on the Save the Trail event, Pam Browning wanted me to note that people from many communities helped in organizing the event. She said about 400 people attended.

Trying to Save The Capital Crescent Trail

As I have said several times, one of my great hopes that most Americans will become physically active enough for good health is the emergence of a vast network of recreational trails, especially those built on abandoned railroad rights of way. Here in suburban Washington, DC, we have a fine example--The Capital Crescent Trail, which stretches along an abandoned B&O Railroad spur from Georgetown in DC to the main East-West railroad tracks in Silver Spring, MD.

It now appears that the Eastern portion of the trail from Bethesda to Silver Spring is in danger of being taken over by a light rail transit line. The Maryland Department of Transportation wants to build this light rail line to relieve congestion on the beltway and other local roads and also make it easier to use transit to go from Silver Spring to Bethesda. Currently, transit riders between these two points must go into downtown DC and then out again on Metro's U-Shaped Red Line.

The State says it will use the space for both the trail and the transit line. However, at a gathering today sponsored by neighborhood groups who oppose the trail, I learned that my suspicion that this is an infeasible, environmentally-dangerous proposal is well-founded. As a frequent user, I opposed this joint transit-trail use proposal because I felt there would not be sufficient room for a two-track transit line and a trail of adequate width for all types of users (bikers, walkers, runners, mothers and fathers pushing strollers) moving in both directions. That initial belief proved correct as part of the trail is only 66 feet wide.

However, as the organizers of today's event clearly showed there are numerous other more complex problems with the proposal:

1. Numerous tall trees, some 100 years old, shade the trail and thereby make exercise on it more feasible in the heat of Washington summers and provide habitat for resident and migratory birds. All these trees would have to be cut down, thereby eliminating the shade and wildlife habitat.

2. The existing trail is on a crest of high ground. The south side of the right of way is depressed and would have to be filled in with thousands of tons of earth after the trees are cut down. The State would then face the challenge of preventing storm runoff into adjacent residences.

3. The trail now passes through a tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue and under the Air Rights Building. This separates trail users from motorized traffic above and no doubt prevents car-pedestrian and car-biker accidents. The State proposes that the trail and transit line pass through the tunnel. They propose to depress the existing grade of the tunnel to allow enough height for the transit trains to pass through and to put the trail in an enclosed, capsule-like space above the train part of the tunnel. It is not clear that there will be enough space for this given the current height of the tunnel without major structural work. In addition, for bikers, walkers and other trail users to reach their top tier of the tunnel, long ramps with grades gradual enough to meet ADA standards would have to be built on either side.

4. The small green area called Woodmont Plaza at the Bethesda end of the tunnel would be almost entirely taken up with an end turnaround point for the transit trains.

5. It is not certain that a bridge for the transit line would be built over Connecticut Avenue. If not, trains frequently crossing that busy street would tie up auto traffic even more than the B&O coal trains used to do.

6. Although at the Bethesda end of the transit line, a new entrance to the Metro Red LIne would be built for a convenient transfer, those who wished to transfer to Metrobuses at Bethesda would have to walk three blocks. The fare for either category of transfer riders would be high. What level of gas prices and time saving would be needed to justify using the transit line instead of a private car? There are no answers.

Hats off to Pam Browning who organized today's event via email and to Sam Schwartz who patiently and clearly explained the defects in the state's proposal to attending politicians and media personnel and to me and others nearby.

I was disappointed that neither the Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail nor the Rails to Trails Conservancy were present or at least they did not make their presence known. However, the large attendance showed that people in Bethesda and Chevy Chase really do care. That was encouraging. Politicians, we'll be watching, listening, and showing our support for our local gem!

My First Game at Washington Nationals Park

In all the years that Washington didn't have a major league baseball team, the lack of a true hometown team left me with a certain empty feeling. Having grown up in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, for the first 44 years of my life until 1983, I was a devoted Boston Red Sox fan. I had moved to DC to pursue a career with Uncle Sam in '64, but kept up with the Sox until the Orioles took the World Series in '83. Then with DC still lacking a team, I figured my roots here in the mid-Atlantic were strong enough to switch to the Orioles, so I did, and the Orioles never got to the World Series after that. Even worse, they had 10 losing seasons from '98-'07. Finally in '05, the Expos came to Washington and were renamed the Nationals. Since then, despite the Nats being way down in their division except when they were briefly in contention in the '06 season, I don't feel that emptiness any more.

So I just had to get out for a game at their beautiful new ballpark before more of the season passed, and my wife and I went on Saturday night. I congratulate the Nats and the city for doing just about everything right to make going to a game at the park a nice experience.

We took the team's and city's recommendation to go via Metro, and the trip was easy despite a good size crowd. On the way, we had seats on both trains and had a short walk from the Metro to our seats. Next time we'll take the escalators from street level; walking up the ramps had us puffing a little, although it probably did us good. Total trip from our door in Bethesda to our seats at the park was about 1 hour 20 minutes. We easily could have spent that much time driving and parking and then getting to our seats, especially on a week night when we would be driving to the park against traffic during the rush hour. We had to stand on the more crowded trains part of the way home, but the trip home by car I believe would have been longer. The Metro staff were very good in their management of the crowd.

Ordering tickets on line was easy and the price for what turned out to be good seats was comparable to what we would pay for most live theater performances in and around DC I felt a little intimidated by the seven minute time limit for completing my ticket order. I am sure this would fluster even more someone even less computer savvy than I or someone who still has a dial up Internet connection. I was glad to be able to print out the tickets at home to avoid standing in line at a will-call window, which has not been a good experience in the past. However, I don't see why the NATs put on a $1.75 extra charge for doing that. After all, by printing tickets ourselves, we are saving them labor and paper costs.

Our seats gave us an unobstructed view of the entire field of play, and we could easily see every replay and information about the players on the giant TV screen. Those sitting in center field couldn't easily see the TV screen in back of them, but they could see a smaller electronic scoreboard along the third base line.

The Nats have taken steps to make their new park pro-environment. As a non-smoker, I appreciate their restricting smoking to certain designated areas. I well remember the clouds of smoke one could see against the lights at a night game at Fenway. I noticed a garden on the roof of one of the vending stands and wondered what was planted. I have also read in the press that the lights are the most energy efficient of any in baseball.

I thought the food and drink prices were high. $7.50 for a beer and $4 for a bag of peanuts seem excessive. My wife and I had chicken sandwiches, which had lettuce and tomato on them--fairly nutritious for ball park food, but my sandwich bun was cold and became soggy.

Still, it was a nice evening even though my new hometown team did not come out on top.

A Wonderful Sportswomanlike Gesture

This article from the April 30 New York Times A Sporting Gesture Touches 'Em All touched me when I read it. A Western Oregon softball player Sara Tucholsky had never hit a home run before her team's game against Central Washington. However, she was unable to round the bases on her own because her knee buckled after she passed first base, so in a magnificent sporting gesture two opposing players carried her around the bases and gently lowered her so she could touch each base.

Had Sara not been carried around the bases, her team would have scored only two runs instead of three and she would have been credited only with a single.

What an example in this age of win at any cost!

ACL Injuries in Children and Youth

An article in the February 18, 2008, New York Times by excellent health and fitness reporter Gina Kolata,A Big Time Injury Striking Little Players' Knees and another one in the Times for May 18 by Michael Sokolove The Uneven Playing Field deal with the rise in ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injuries in child and youth athletes.  Formerly, ACL tears were thought to occur only in professional athletes.  Not so any more in our age of highly intense, competitive youth sports!  Both articles point to the intense specialization and near year-round competition in a single sport among elite youth athletes as a cause.  Moreover, girls sustain these injuries far more commonly than boys.  The articles are sending us a message that we ought to be concerned about the future of the athletes who sustain these injuries.  Will they be able to exercise enough to be fit at mid-life or will they be hobbling on "trick knees" while telling their children and grandchildren of their past athletic glories?  Sokolove, who has a book, Warrior Girls, coming out in June on the "macho" culture of girls' sports is particularly alarmed about the attitude that girls must tough out and play through athletic injuries to avoid losing the hard-won gains made in women's sports as a result of enforcement of Title IX.  The articles stress how serious ACL injuries are and how much more difficult they are to treat in children and youth who have not stopped growing than in adults.  Both also hold out hope that new training methods and surgical techniques will help prevent these injuries and make them easier to treat.  Let's hope that coaches, especially girls basketball and soccer coaches, are quick to adapt the new training methods and the new surgical techniques are successful. 

 Still better, why not let youth sports be less competitive, more inclusive and more fun and leave playing through pain to professional athletes?  And, why not let youth take at least one season off per year to rest or try another sport that stresses different muscle groups as groups like MomsTeam and the American Academy of Pediatrics keep recommending.

Hats Off to Fred Bowen

Fred Bowen is the sports opinion columnist for the Washington Post Kids Post page.  In his weekly column, he explains the complications of the world of sports in language kids of all ages can understand. His March 7 column What You Don't Know Might Hurt You is especially noteworthy because it advises kids to keep sports in perspective.

He offers the following tips:

1.  Avoid injury by staying alert on the playing field

2.  Don't ignore pain.  Even though professional athletes try to play through pain and TV announcers make a big deal of their doing so, kids should never play through pain.  He advises his young readers to tell a grownup if they are hurt.  Let's hope there are fewer and fewer and ultimately none of the Vince Lombardi, "winning is the only thing" coaches in kids' sports who will listen to the injured child and let her or him stay out of the game and give or get help when he or she is hurt.

3.  Get plenty of rest including taking a day or two off from sports every week to let the body recover.

People like Fred and Brooke de Lench at Mom's Team need to be listened to more to make kids' sports inclusive and fun and get more kids to be active.  

Parents of kids in sports ought to read Fred's column every Friday also.

Another Blow to Children's Fitness?

One of the major causes of American children's obesity and lack of fitness is that more and more restrictions are imposed on children's free play.  Parents restrict free play time by over-scheduling their children's activities, and schools do so by restricting what children may do during recess or cutting recess time or even eliminating it altogether.

Just yesterday, April 15, The Washington Post carried a story At McLean School, Playing Tag Turns Into Hot Potato on a McLean, VA, elementary school not allowing tag because tag had become "a game of intense aggression".  The school principal hoped to restore tag and touch football after review of school policies.   

This is ridiculous.  We as a society have to learn to let our children take some risks for their physical and mental well-being and their social development.

What if Athletes Have a Drug That Let's Them Go Beyond Their Natural Endurance Level?

Almost every day the sports pages carry new reports of athletes in many different sports using drugs like steroids or human growth hormones to enhance performance.  Many other ways to enhance the body's ability to perform are here already or soon will be due to the continuing life sciences revolution.

On February 12, New York Times health and fitness reporter Gina Kolata reported on an experimental drug that lets mice "keep running long after they would normally flop down in exhaustion".  The article Finding May Solve Riddle of Fatigue in Muscles says that Dr. Andrew Marks and a team of Columbia University scientists developed a new class of drugs called rycals that stop calcium leaks while not blocking calcium channels and thereby prevent heart damage from exertion.  Dr. Marks patented and licensed the drugs to a start-up company and hopes to start testing one of the drug this Spring.  The article notes that athletes may be tempted to use the drug if it goes to market.  Given the highly competitive nature of today's sports world, I think will is the more appropriate verb.  

Now that a major cause of muscle fatigue is apparently understood and a drug to alleviate it may well become available, sports governing bodies will have to decide whether athletes will be allowed to use it or not.  As with steroids, the issue will be whether use of the drug by some competitors gives them an unfair advantage of those who choose not to use it.

Of course, also given the tendency of young athletes to follow the example of professionals and to wish to become professionals even though only a few will be good enough to do so, there will be a great temptation for them to use such drugs whether they acquire them legally or not.  The professionalized culture of elite youth sports may tacitly or openly encourage such drug use.

The sports world cannot continue merely to react to ways to enhance the body in hopes of enhancing athletic performance.  It must use foresight to provide sensible regulation before use of body enhancements gets out of control.  How many Congressional hearings will be needed before the sports world develops this foresight capability.

Hats Off to David S. Broder

One doesn't usually find reference to sports on the Op Ed pages of major newspapers, but political reporter David Broder's column in the April 10 Washington Post The Sports World in Foul Territory addressed some of the darker aspects of the modern sports world.  In it, he was rightly critical of the big money world of professional and college sports.  He cited a recent agreement among leaders of high school, college and professional basketball leagues with corporate sponsors on a $30 million program to promote youth basketball.  He wrote of the perpetual low graduation rate of college athletes, and he was especially critical of the "unseemly competition" among cities and nations to host the Olympics.  He concludes with this sentence, "The way things are going with sports, politics is looking better and better." 

However, Broder did not go far enough.  He did not state the real danger, which is  that all this sports hype filters down to the youth of America and probably to that of other nations too.  It nurtures false or exaggerated hopes by parents of college sports scholarships for their children and by youth of college and high paying professional sports careers that only a few can ever hope to enjoy.  And, it encourages youth sports programs to be highly competitive and exclusionary instead of inclusive and fun and robs children of the benefits of free play and condemns those who don't make the team to the health hazards of a life without sufficient physical activity.

Broder might some day mention the efforts of groups like Moms Team to change the emphasis of youth sports and turn sports away from the professionalism that is filtering down from the pros to youth sports teams at the grade school level.

I'd like to think that politics is not looking better than sports, but, with the seemingly perpetual scandals and big money sloshing around the sports world these days, I think Broder is on to something.

Another Very Young Sports Phenom

On January 12, 2008, The Washington Post ran an article entitled Youth is Serving:Table Tennis Prodigy Paddles Toward U.S. Olympic Team about 12 year-old Ariel Hsing.  Ariel is a serious candidate for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team who spends three hours a day practicing during the school year with a training partner her parents imported from China and her summer vacations training in China.  According to the article, she won her first national title at age 8 and accepted a sponsorship from a major table tennis manufacturer at age 9.

After reading the article, I wonder if she will be a long-time U.S. Olympic champion in a sport in which the U.S. has never excelled.  After all, at her age, she could be around for 2, 3, or more Olympics.  If so, will she become a new national heroine?  And, will serious Table Tennis become a new fitness craze? As the article points out, competitive table tennis is very physically demanding.

On the other hand, I wonder if the pressures of such high-level competition and media attention as well as high parental expectations will not cause her to burn out before achieving her true potential as has happened to other sports-talented youngsters, especially girls.

I also think her story may be just another example of the excessive professionalization of youth sports.  Is Ariel being robbed of her childhood?  How will this affect her in later life?  Will her example cause other far less talented youngsters to pursue unrealistic dreams when they ought to be learning about themselves and getting ready for adult life?

Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise addressed this issue in their book The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap (New York, St. Martins Griffin, 2000).  In it, they say, "For every one of them there are a thousand kids who made the sacrifices, practiced six hours a day, gave up friends and other interests, neglected other aspects of their lives--and never made it to the top. ..We adults have a responsibility to protect our children, and ourselves, from ridiculous expectations.  We need to recognize that children simply do not have the tools to perform to adult standards, let alone Olympic level ones.  Childhood is the preparation, not the full-dress performance. As the saying goes, we need to let our kids be kids."