Back to Racing

I have been wanting to get back to racing since the last race that I was in. Ok maybe not right after my last race but shortly after. I have not raced since May or June of 2007. My last race did not end well and since I am in grad school I knew that I could not afford a new frame if something happened to the one I have. Well about a year ago a very nice guy took that excuse away from me. Peter Erdoes gave me a frame that I have been trying to build up.

The build has been slow. To be fair it has pretty much stalled. But I really want to get back to racing. So I made a decision today to just do it. I have signed up for a race 3 weeks from today. YIKES! Yeah my training is probably 2 months behind schedule but in order to push myself to train at 5:30 am I needed the pressure of knowing that the opportunity to race was real.


While I am taking the risk that something happens to my Madone I have a plan in case it does. I will have to sell my Santa Cruz Superlight mountain bike so that I can a)repair my Madone and b)build the frame that Peter game me. I have been holding off on selling my mountain bike b/c I do really like riding it but I have not been on it for over a year now. Hopefully it won't come to this but I am prepared.

So now I just have to make sure I don't look like an idiot and my legs can actually keep me in the race for more than 10 minutes!

Hoops

So on a cycling related blog you would assume that anything entitled hoops probably has to do with wheels. While I do need a set of wheels to build up the frame I am still working on building...this post has nothing to do with wheels.

The hoops I am referring to are the important ones that you have to step through as a graduate student to earn your Ph.D.
They start far before you enter the program. Earn good grades, good GRE score, letters of recommendation, apply to school. Once you are in you have a whole new set of hoops to jump through. Take classes, do research, thesis proposal, thesis defense, written comprehensive exams, oral comprehensive exams, dissertation proposal, dissertation defense.

Well today I successfully proposed my dissertation so I only have one hoop left to jump through--dissertation defense.

Now on to the data collection and defense!