Asian lady in a white Landcruiser versus white male on a road bike. . . Guess who won? Equal and opposite reactions aside, I am feeling pretty damn lucky to have ridden away from this one. I, attempting to go through a crosswalk(with a green walking dude) she, making a right hand turn on a red light. I never actually made eye contact with her, but she was stopped for about 5seconds at the red light before I decided that she must see me. It turns out I was wrong, no sooner had I moved in front of her, smack! She pulled the very safe, heavy on the throttle, then look where you are going manuever. I heard the engine rev, thought "oh shit" then proceeded to fly through the air while rotating 180 degrees clockwise. Tool's Jambi blaring on the ipod as I smacked asphalt, I finally understood why maynard yells like he does when he sings. Long story short, a cop showed up, wrote her a ticket, asked if I was OK, info was exchanged, I am fine, hopefully my bike is as well. Might need a new front wheel( a zipp maybe) maybe a new frame (cervelo P3 carbon) we shall see.
Always assume that they are trying to kill you. This is the first time in a while I gave a cager the benefit of the doubt. . . a lot of good that did me.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
a new season, new goals
Autumn: a time for reflection, introspection, and setting the stage for new goals.
It's time to start thinking about what kind of riding we all want to do next season. Maybe there are some scores to settle with ourselves -- goals we didn't quite get, for one reason or another. Maybe it had to do with lack of consistency. Maybe the goals themselves required a bit more than we anticipated. So what of this year? Will things open up, allowing us to do all the riding we didn't get in last year? Or will it be worse? What kinds of trade-offs are we going to have to make?
This is something I've thought about a lot, and I'd like to use this forum to make a couple of pretty big announcements.
First, I'd like to make an attempt on the world's hour record. My aim is, in one hour, to ride for two hours. This will be longer than anyone has ever ridden in one hour. It'll take some pretty precise training and probably a serious overhaul of my work ethic, but I think it's something I can accomplish if I set my mind to it. Some serious sacrifices will have to be made -- I'll have to clear my schedule of all the little, unnecessary clutter -- and I hope that I have the support of my loved ones and fans in this pursuit. Without recent advances in technology this would not even be possible for me. I'll have to use my heart rate monitor AND my stopwatch. A power meter would be a very useful tool, but in this endeavor a tachyon emitter might actually be more appropriate.
Depending on my success with the hour record, I might just set my sights on the 24-hour record, too. Who knows what's possible there? Maybe I can ride for 36 hours! The edge of the universe -- and of time -- is the limit!
And secondly, I'm going to do a serious overhaul of my freestyle riding. Freestyle, especially aerial maneuvers, have always been the most exciting and beautiful action on bicycles and in other realms. Find me someone who is not thrilled and amazed at watching Johnny Mosely or Toby Dawson, V-Dub or Cam McCaul. So it is my intention to complete a forward- and backward-flip simultaneously. Again, serious mental and physical training is going to be required for this. I anticipate that the crux of this accomplishment will be occupying two spin states simultaneously. As a boson this IS a theoretically feasible maneuver, but energetically it will be unstable, to say the least. I recognize fully the potential dangers, and I just ask that my fans and especially my loved ones keep themselves safe, and not worry about me.
For both these undertakings I've consulted experts at the Stanford Linear Accelarator and the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The consensus is that I have a lot of work to do.
Well, that's it. I'd love to hear everyone's response to this, but especially I'd like to hear what everyone else's riding goals are for the upcoming season. How are you spending the winter? When are you going to start laying the groundwork to acheive these goals?
It's time to start thinking about what kind of riding we all want to do next season. Maybe there are some scores to settle with ourselves -- goals we didn't quite get, for one reason or another. Maybe it had to do with lack of consistency. Maybe the goals themselves required a bit more than we anticipated. So what of this year? Will things open up, allowing us to do all the riding we didn't get in last year? Or will it be worse? What kinds of trade-offs are we going to have to make?
This is something I've thought about a lot, and I'd like to use this forum to make a couple of pretty big announcements.
First, I'd like to make an attempt on the world's hour record. My aim is, in one hour, to ride for two hours. This will be longer than anyone has ever ridden in one hour. It'll take some pretty precise training and probably a serious overhaul of my work ethic, but I think it's something I can accomplish if I set my mind to it. Some serious sacrifices will have to be made -- I'll have to clear my schedule of all the little, unnecessary clutter -- and I hope that I have the support of my loved ones and fans in this pursuit. Without recent advances in technology this would not even be possible for me. I'll have to use my heart rate monitor AND my stopwatch. A power meter would be a very useful tool, but in this endeavor a tachyon emitter might actually be more appropriate.
Depending on my success with the hour record, I might just set my sights on the 24-hour record, too. Who knows what's possible there? Maybe I can ride for 36 hours! The edge of the universe -- and of time -- is the limit!
And secondly, I'm going to do a serious overhaul of my freestyle riding. Freestyle, especially aerial maneuvers, have always been the most exciting and beautiful action on bicycles and in other realms. Find me someone who is not thrilled and amazed at watching Johnny Mosely or Toby Dawson, V-Dub or Cam McCaul. So it is my intention to complete a forward- and backward-flip simultaneously. Again, serious mental and physical training is going to be required for this. I anticipate that the crux of this accomplishment will be occupying two spin states simultaneously. As a boson this IS a theoretically feasible maneuver, but energetically it will be unstable, to say the least. I recognize fully the potential dangers, and I just ask that my fans and especially my loved ones keep themselves safe, and not worry about me.
For both these undertakings I've consulted experts at the Stanford Linear Accelarator and the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The consensus is that I have a lot of work to do.
Well, that's it. I'd love to hear everyone's response to this, but especially I'd like to hear what everyone else's riding goals are for the upcoming season. How are you spending the winter? When are you going to start laying the groundwork to acheive these goals?
Monday, October 8, 2007
Caught Speeding
Fiesta Island, 10/7/2007. The final TT of the year. The posted speed limit on Fiesta Island is 25mph. I managed to average 25.26mph over 20k this past Sunday. I plan to turn myself in to the police sometime next week. I raced on my track bike with TT bars, and a 50x15 was my gear of choice. Very little wind, which was nice. 29min 31sec was my time. I am now a mere 5.5 minutes away from the record. I highly recommend this TT to anyone who has not yet tried it. It is a most remarkable form of voluntary suffering that is at least as addicting as good beer. The 2008 TT series begins in February, I will be training hard this winter in the hopes of breaking the 26mph barrier.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Team Time Trial
4 men, 4 bikes, 40 kilometers, 10, 728 heart beats(at least for me)
Team Doppler Effect was comprised of: Pascal Bonaventure, John Genovese, Daryl Oya, and myself.
We did turn in a respectable time of 59 minutes, 37 seconds. That time works out to be 25+ mph. 25.01 to be exact.
The first lap went well, with all 4 riders taking pulls, the second lap also seemed to be going smoothly until John announced that we had dropped Daryl. I was shocked to hear this, mostly because I expected to be the one to get dropped. We decided quickly not to wait, and to just press on with three, the minumum needed to finish the race. A quick prayer was said to the flat tire gods, and one to the bonk gods for good measure.
Laps 2 through 4 were fairly uneventful, Pascal and John both took longer pulls than me, and also took all the pulls on the headwind side of the island. This is standard procedure for the team leader to be saved for the end of the race, just ask Lance.
About halfway through lap 5 I was certain I was dying. I glanced at my heart rate, and saw that it was at 193, which is technically, 4 beats above my theoretical maximum. We slowed to around 20 mph for around a minute as I slowly dropped to a sustainable heartrate. After this break, we pretty much hammered through to the finish, sprinting the final kilometer at around 32mph.
I believe that the mark of a good time trial is when you have snot dripping out of your nose after you finish, and you don't care. By this measure, I think we had a good TT.
All in all, a positive experience, next year I would like to ride with a more evenly matched team so that I can pull a little more. . .Lynch, I am looking in your direction.
Team Doppler Effect was comprised of: Pascal Bonaventure, John Genovese, Daryl Oya, and myself.
We did turn in a respectable time of 59 minutes, 37 seconds. That time works out to be 25+ mph. 25.01 to be exact.
The first lap went well, with all 4 riders taking pulls, the second lap also seemed to be going smoothly until John announced that we had dropped Daryl. I was shocked to hear this, mostly because I expected to be the one to get dropped. We decided quickly not to wait, and to just press on with three, the minumum needed to finish the race. A quick prayer was said to the flat tire gods, and one to the bonk gods for good measure.
Laps 2 through 4 were fairly uneventful, Pascal and John both took longer pulls than me, and also took all the pulls on the headwind side of the island. This is standard procedure for the team leader to be saved for the end of the race, just ask Lance.
About halfway through lap 5 I was certain I was dying. I glanced at my heart rate, and saw that it was at 193, which is technically, 4 beats above my theoretical maximum. We slowed to around 20 mph for around a minute as I slowly dropped to a sustainable heartrate. After this break, we pretty much hammered through to the finish, sprinting the final kilometer at around 32mph.
I believe that the mark of a good time trial is when you have snot dripping out of your nose after you finish, and you don't care. By this measure, I think we had a good TT.
All in all, a positive experience, next year I would like to ride with a more evenly matched team so that I can pull a little more. . .Lynch, I am looking in your direction.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Track update
Great news: Dr. Ruf-Dawg is ALIVE, and doing as WELL as a Medical Resident might hope.
It's been an off-n-on summer at the velodrome.
Mikey spent a lot of the summer getting shelled in the B's -- he hung on and rode well but those guys are FAST -- and then came back to the C's and raced to some respectable results. Then Lady Luck shit on him and he tweaked his back swatting with a metal stick at grapefruit-sized balls lobbed at him. Knocks on softball aside, this was a pretty serious injury and only last night was he able to come back to the track. He was definitely off his form somewhat (from where he had been), but I'd say he's still riding better now than he was last year. He and I duked it out on the last lap of our 12-lap point-a-lap for what I thought in my hypoxic haze had to be 12th and 13th place, but turned out to be for the lone available point (4th place that lap!). My chicken legs were just cooked and he managed to draw from the stores of strength he's got hidden in there, and he ended up taking 5th place overall. Best of all, he didn't get skunked like the rest of us did. I was 6th. You see, when you race the C's, there's about a 30% chance that there will be a sandbagger or two who just make the race silly. While it's heartening to think that, had those two dudes who walked away with 1st and 2nd in all of our races NOT been there, Mikey and I would have been battling for podium spots in probably every race. Yet sandbaggers are a great dose of humility -- they illustrate plainly that there is a lot of competition above you, always, and there is a lot of riding to be done.
I digress.
Let's see ... other highlights.
Iggy's back from his Belgium adventure. He didn't look as strong racing as before he left, and I suspect it's from just being cooked, or jetlagged, or maybe bored. It was good to see him, one way or another. He looks a bit more lean than when he left. That probably means he didn't drink any Belgian beer.
Bad crash on turn 3 during the B's miss-n-out (or win-n-out?). This event changed the way the rest of that race played out, and even thinned out the field for all the subsequent races, putting everyone on edge a bit. Kelly went down HARD with Andrew (I think -- I don't know him), making that awful, awful bodies-on-concrete sound punctuated by that horrible bone-chilling screech of metal scraping concrete. Everyone is okay, though less happy.
There's a company taking pictures nearly every week at the track now. Some of them look pretty cool. They seem to like Shaun Wallace a lot (but really, who doesn't?), but they manage to cover the whole crowd pretty well. Only one racing day of pictures up so far, but I imagine there will be more soon. I managed to sneak into a few in the Waltworks jersey, and you can tell in one that I'm about to take a serious flyer. I like the illusion that cropping creates -- without the context of the whole race in the picture, I might actually be in the lead, or at least not dying off the back.
I feel like I'm starting to recover a bit from the few months of spotty or zero riding, and am starting to feel like I have a little bit of form. I'm still pushing a tiny gear (50-16), but the C's are a slow enough bunch that I can get away with it. Plus, I think the months on months of high-cadence drills for tri training and weeks of trying to race on a stock 48-16 gearing have made it so that my legs don't get angry at higher pedal rates. Some day I'll have turkey legs (a step up from chicken, except for the tryptophan) and will put a bigger gear on. But first I'm just going to win some points, sandbaggers or no. With this slow-but-steady upward trajectory I could see myself actually racing with the B's next year. I've gotten to watch a few guys ascend -- Mike included -- and it's a bit frustrating.
I felt like it could happen, I could get points, in my last race last night, but I blew it. My fatal mistake was not taking an attack seriously until it was too late and I was off the back. I heard Kelsea (spelling? anyway the other half of Team Arguile) shout UP UP UP UP and I saw my favorite sketchy fly-n-die rider charge hard. I thought, "there's no way anyone will take him seriously", but I was flat f-ing wrong. Everybody went. And then I was in the back. I was trying to get coordinated with the other Steve and a few other dudes to get back on, but just ran into one snag after another, all centered on the C's not knowing how the hell to do pulls. Ray-ray was the worst. He was sitting wheel number 2 (I was 3) and he pulled up with Steve, bled some speed, and then realized he should probably pull, and dove back down right on top of me. I had kind of seen it coming and was able to maintain some space. But then he started to drag ass, and I had to pull up and over him in order not to run him over. So I pulled a lap. Ray-ray somehow managed to stay in the number 2 spot, despite dumb-ass blunderous riding. Then I pulled up to hear him goad, "Is that all you've got, one lap?" What a cock. What an idiot. He's racing Collegiate Nationals in a few weeks and I'm pretty sure he's going to get his ass handed to him. Of course that left him in charge of the line again, and I sat in the back to watch him cause an amazing accordian effect (with only 5 riders!) as he started to drag ass AGAIN. I heard the sprint bell ring, looked back and saw the lead was about 1/4 lap down from LAPPING us, and just called it. The bummer was, I still felt like I had legs, because I never got to spend them in that last race. It's all my fault, but it would be nice if I could have not been impeded from trying to make up for it.
Mike sat that one out. I can't say I disagree with that decision.
It's been an off-n-on summer at the velodrome.
Mikey spent a lot of the summer getting shelled in the B's -- he hung on and rode well but those guys are FAST -- and then came back to the C's and raced to some respectable results. Then Lady Luck shit on him and he tweaked his back swatting with a metal stick at grapefruit-sized balls lobbed at him. Knocks on softball aside, this was a pretty serious injury and only last night was he able to come back to the track. He was definitely off his form somewhat (from where he had been), but I'd say he's still riding better now than he was last year. He and I duked it out on the last lap of our 12-lap point-a-lap for what I thought in my hypoxic haze had to be 12th and 13th place, but turned out to be for the lone available point (4th place that lap!). My chicken legs were just cooked and he managed to draw from the stores of strength he's got hidden in there, and he ended up taking 5th place overall. Best of all, he didn't get skunked like the rest of us did. I was 6th. You see, when you race the C's, there's about a 30% chance that there will be a sandbagger or two who just make the race silly. While it's heartening to think that, had those two dudes who walked away with 1st and 2nd in all of our races NOT been there, Mikey and I would have been battling for podium spots in probably every race. Yet sandbaggers are a great dose of humility -- they illustrate plainly that there is a lot of competition above you, always, and there is a lot of riding to be done.
I digress.
Let's see ... other highlights.
Iggy's back from his Belgium adventure. He didn't look as strong racing as before he left, and I suspect it's from just being cooked, or jetlagged, or maybe bored. It was good to see him, one way or another. He looks a bit more lean than when he left. That probably means he didn't drink any Belgian beer.
Bad crash on turn 3 during the B's miss-n-out (or win-n-out?). This event changed the way the rest of that race played out, and even thinned out the field for all the subsequent races, putting everyone on edge a bit. Kelly went down HARD with Andrew (I think -- I don't know him), making that awful, awful bodies-on-concrete sound punctuated by that horrible bone-chilling screech of metal scraping concrete. Everyone is okay, though less happy.
There's a company taking pictures nearly every week at the track now. Some of them look pretty cool. They seem to like Shaun Wallace a lot (but really, who doesn't?), but they manage to cover the whole crowd pretty well. Only one racing day of pictures up so far, but I imagine there will be more soon. I managed to sneak into a few in the Waltworks jersey, and you can tell in one that I'm about to take a serious flyer. I like the illusion that cropping creates -- without the context of the whole race in the picture, I might actually be in the lead, or at least not dying off the back.
I feel like I'm starting to recover a bit from the few months of spotty or zero riding, and am starting to feel like I have a little bit of form. I'm still pushing a tiny gear (50-16), but the C's are a slow enough bunch that I can get away with it. Plus, I think the months on months of high-cadence drills for tri training and weeks of trying to race on a stock 48-16 gearing have made it so that my legs don't get angry at higher pedal rates. Some day I'll have turkey legs (a step up from chicken, except for the tryptophan) and will put a bigger gear on. But first I'm just going to win some points, sandbaggers or no. With this slow-but-steady upward trajectory I could see myself actually racing with the B's next year. I've gotten to watch a few guys ascend -- Mike included -- and it's a bit frustrating.
I felt like it could happen, I could get points, in my last race last night, but I blew it. My fatal mistake was not taking an attack seriously until it was too late and I was off the back. I heard Kelsea (spelling? anyway the other half of Team Arguile) shout UP UP UP UP and I saw my favorite sketchy fly-n-die rider charge hard. I thought, "there's no way anyone will take him seriously", but I was flat f-ing wrong. Everybody went. And then I was in the back. I was trying to get coordinated with the other Steve and a few other dudes to get back on, but just ran into one snag after another, all centered on the C's not knowing how the hell to do pulls. Ray-ray was the worst. He was sitting wheel number 2 (I was 3) and he pulled up with Steve, bled some speed, and then realized he should probably pull, and dove back down right on top of me. I had kind of seen it coming and was able to maintain some space. But then he started to drag ass, and I had to pull up and over him in order not to run him over. So I pulled a lap. Ray-ray somehow managed to stay in the number 2 spot, despite dumb-ass blunderous riding. Then I pulled up to hear him goad, "Is that all you've got, one lap?" What a cock. What an idiot. He's racing Collegiate Nationals in a few weeks and I'm pretty sure he's going to get his ass handed to him. Of course that left him in charge of the line again, and I sat in the back to watch him cause an amazing accordian effect (with only 5 riders!) as he started to drag ass AGAIN. I heard the sprint bell ring, looked back and saw the lead was about 1/4 lap down from LAPPING us, and just called it. The bummer was, I still felt like I had legs, because I never got to spend them in that last race. It's all my fault, but it would be nice if I could have not been impeded from trying to make up for it.
Mike sat that one out. I can't say I disagree with that decision.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
the demo vid
quick note: posts from kev are conspicuously lacking. you out there, kev?
indeed the trip never dies. and now it, and some other -- ahem -- footage is set to music, in an experiment in movie making.
a rough draft. lots of familiar stuff, but in newer, cooler context. final version will be better, and available with wider permissions. enjoy. let me know (email) if you can't see it and i can easily remedy that.
indeed the trip never dies. and now it, and some other -- ahem -- footage is set to music, in an experiment in movie making.
a rough draft. lots of familiar stuff, but in newer, cooler context. final version will be better, and available with wider permissions. enjoy. let me know (email) if you can't see it and i can easily remedy that.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
The trip that never dies!
Here are some more videos from the Moab April 2007 trip. Some decent footage here. Please note that everyone seems to boo when Kev does the drop at Bartlett. . .weird, but beautifully spontaneous. Oh, and there is even a video taken by Pat, he did eventually figure out how to work a "digital" camera. Good on ya mate!?
Without further adieu. . .
Mountain Biking = FUN!
Without further adieu. . .
Mountain Biking = FUN!
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