About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

After a few too many beers after work this winter a few of us decided it would be fun to enter a mountain bike race. Not being very clever about the impacts of altitude on oxygen intake we thought a race in Colorado would be particularly awesome. The early team had about six brave souls but we boiled down to three for the trip and a mascot. Racing under the banner of F1 we had:

Bill “Giddy Up” Greer

Mookie “The Machine” Kumar

Sean “Old Man” Gorman

Biscuit “Toilet Beard” Gorman

Fully embracing our map geekness we built out datasets for the trip. This started with Bill being annoyed at not being able to find the locations of places to rent bikes. So, he built a dataset with every bike shop in the US. For some reason he also added CTPP data on female bicycle riders by census tract… We also did a bit of work mapping out the race course and other trails that might be fun while we were out and about.

We probably should have looked at the elevation course map a bit closer:

All those bits going up 2000+ feet are a real pain in the ass when there is no oxygen. This became even more apparent as 60 year old men passed me. Despite the fact I was hallucinating an hour into the race we managed to finish, although Bill completely doored me. He would have ended up 3rd in the Clydesdale division but he stopped to not hit some kids running in front of the finish line and guy behind had so such qualms. Beating Bill by 2 seconds.

We managed to recover well enough to grill up some steaks and enjoy the scenery. Over all highly recommend the trip – just bring an oxygen tank with you or give yourself more than 24 hours to acclimate

Popularity: 5% [?]