Art

Spending 15-30 hours each week wearing spandex and drinking juice from a bottle is hardly the mark of a manly man. Luckily I stumbled upon this website: http://artofmanliness.com/ If I can slowly incorporate some suggestions from that website I may be able to counteract all of the cycling I've been doing.

I found it while looking into straight razor shaving again. I barely need to shave as it is, but there seem to be many benefits to doing it with a reusable single blade. Plus it's about as manly as scratching an itch with a gun.

pigs and bikes on ice

In the past few weeks I was complimented on my mustache, got swine flu and raced my cyclocross bike, not in that order.

Usually about 1 or 2 weeks before a big race I'll start to decrease my training load to allow my body recover, get faster, and come into the event fresh and fast. This year I got the swine flu instead. It didn't work nearly as well as my usual tapering protocol. Too bad. I still decided to travel all the way across the country to race anyway. About halfway through the race I realized I hadn't crashed yet, and decided to make it a personal goal of mine to finish the race without crashing. I succeeded at this goal.

I finished 25th of the collegiate Div 1 boys. Considering that I lost my call up and had the swine flu, and flatted during the race I'm reasonably ok with this. Apparently the ACCC allowed me to race a whole season and win the conference on an expired license, I had no idea until I went to check in. The USAC director told me I had been crossed off the start list. Bummer. I was allowed to race, but without the benefit of a front row start.

Oregon has a cyclocross (and probably cycling in general) scene that is on par with New England. One thing they have that New England does not, is a group of professional photographers who race cyclocross and take kick ass pictures of the races. Visit here: http://www.pdxcross.com/ and note the sexy black and white.

The pdxcross group was able to show a few crashes during my race:





I'm the one still upright behind the other dudes. It seemed like all day I was dodging crashing riders. Below is teammate John Crow who fell down more times AND made more money than I did.



It's time for a little break from riding. Maybe a week or two. Then it will be back to the mtb, I can't wait.

Patterns

I'm afraid I'm getting repetitious with these posts of images trying to show patterns. Maybe I should figure it out, or stop posting. I threw some bike racing in there too, jus cuz.





















And a few more:

More racing

Last weekend I raced at Virginia Tech. Saturday the race started at 9:30 pm. This was a bit different from the 7:00 am starts I was used to during the endurance mtb season.

I raced like a sissy Saturday night sucking wheel and finishing second in the college race. Luckily the college kid I was following went pretty fast so we caught and passed most of the pro field who had started 45 seconds ahead of us.

Sunday to make up for Saturday night's lackluster race I rode harder and alone. I was able to catch and pass all of the pro field. So despite a 45 second handicap I managed to win the race outright. Sweet. Hopefully this means my form is starting to come around in time for nationals.

Here are some pictures from Sunday, the glasses made me faster.

More pix

I took some pictures at the NC state fair early in the morning. I also took a few pictures while I was home last weekend. Here are some of them:




I went to the fair with Joel and Herc Nasty, Joel walked through my shot so I got to blur him: