Balance

It is amazing how a few things can change everything very quickly. At the end of August I crashed and started the Fall semester. That plus a week of rain lead to a very low number of miles ridden in September. 257.2 miles low! There were weeks this summer that I put in more miles than what I did in all of September.

Cycling seems to be a great metaphor for life sometimes. Keeping the wheels rubber side down and not losing your balance. Keeping the pedals turning and moving you forward in the direction you choose. The basics of cycling are learned pretty quickly otherwise you stop riding. But if you keep it up and you keep trying you master how to not fall and to keep moving forward. As time goes on and the riding becomes more compitative you learn how to push through the pain and pedal harder. As life gets more complicated sometimes keeping our balance and pushing to get where you want gets harder. It is easy to let work or other things get in the way and make you loose your balance.

This semester is going to be a very important one for me if I can get everything done. This semester I have 3 more independent research projects to finish (and submit to journals), comps to study for and pass, a dissertation proposal to work on, and a post-doc to line up. All so I can still graduate in May or August.

So I have a lot to do but I have to keep the rest of my life in balance to make it all worth while.
I have a list of goals and plans to get those goals accomplished which I will share shortly but for now the first thing that I will commit to is posting more often and more consistently. So hopefully once a week or so.

Thats all for now but more to come soon.

Hotter'n Hell take 2

I completed my second hotter'n hell last Saturday and while I did complete it faster and with fewer stops than last year but I did not enjoy it nearly as much. About 15 miles into the ride I was in a line of riders that shifted to the left and I had no choice but to shift with them which put me off of the road in the dirt. While my transition to the dirt went relatively the transition back to the pavement did not. A gap between the pavement and the dirt appeared and grabbed my rear wheel sending my down. I am told that I was out for a little bit but I got up angry so my friends were not too concerned about me. I did finish the ride with out another stop but the crash tore my bib shorts, scuffed the edge of my saddle and cracked my helmet. Not to mention the road rash on my hip.

I already have a new helmet, I have retaped my handle bars, and I am looking to see if I can get a new saddle cheap on ebay. My only real issue at this point is that my team has no extra bibs or jerseys. So I am somewhat stuck. I may be able to get a jersey from last year but no bibs. So the delema is this....do I just go with a jersey from last year and some black bibs, find a kit from a non-local team that is not too expensive to last until March, or option C go back to my last team kit for 6 months.

Ideas, suggestions, team offers????

2nd half of summer

My summer has really been divided into two halves plus a little at the end. The first half was spent writing a few papers and getting ready to teach. The second half was very busy and spent finishing a paper and sending it to a journal and teaching. Tomorrow I am heading to NC to get Nici and head back to TX with her. It has been a long summer with her working in NC and me working in TX. It is amazing to think that we just had our 4th anniversary on Thursday. It seems like yesterday that we got married.


While I am not looking forward to summer being over I am looking forward to Nici being back in TX with me. I will still have 2 weeks until I have to start teaching in the fall and about a week until I will have to be back in the lab full time.

I had hoped to get 1000 miles in on the bike and a tt and a MTB race but I settled for 800 miles and no racing. It is odd that about the times that the races came around my legs were feeling pretty weak but afterwards they were feeling better. This last week I was able to make it to the KOW ride (race) and I stayed on the lead group much longer than usual. I was able to stay at the front and watch a bunch of cat 1 and cat 2 racers play out team tatics. Amazingly I am a member of one of the two teams that was controling the ride. When I saw a teammate being pulled back to the group form a break away, I came very close to attacking and trying to form a break of my own. I quickly realized that I was doing everything that I could to simply stay with the group so attacking was out of the question. At least my head knew what the right thing to do was, even if my legs could not do it.

Hotter than Hell is coming up and despite my plans to not do it this year I am ready for another shot. Hopefully I can finish in under 4 hours this year. I was very close last year so maybe with my legs starting to come around I can do it.

Well I am off to North Carolina in the morning and I can't wait to see my wife and not have to just talk on the phone.
North Cakallacky here I come!

A tale of two rides

It is amazing how different two rides in the same week can be. A few weeks ago I was planning on doing my first time trial as a way to get back into racing in a way that would be very unlikely to result in a crash. The weekend before I had done some very good hard rides and my legs were feeling good. I was unable to do my usual Monday night recovery ride because I got stuck on campus later than I should have been. By Wednesday I went out on my usual KOW (king of Wednesday) ride (race) and my legs felt horrible. I got dropped much earlier than I had wanted. After a slow ride home I decided that it was not worth the $40 and getting up at 4am on Saturday to drive 2 hours to go to a 40K time trial just to come in dead last.

That Saturday I got up to do my usual ride and felt much stronger than I expected. In fact I stayed on to the lead pack about 10 miles longer that usual. My best Saturday ride the year!

I was disappointed with not racing that day until I looked at the time for the cat 5 racers and the winning time was around 1 hour. I know that I could not have finished in 1 hour so I felt ok with my decision. Hopefully some consistent training over the next couple of months will put me in good shape for a possible TT in the fall.

I have decided to give the Hotter than Hell another shot. After last years ride I figured that I had checked it off my list and was not planning on going back but I am getting than itch to go again. Plus a number of my friends are planning on going so I can't pass it up.

One of my riding friends is planning on making his racing come back (to a cat 3) next year and will be training to do so. I am going to try and put a training schedule together for us and get my self in back in racing shape so when I can start racing again I will be able to get to a cat 3 in a season.

Enough for now, time to go to sleep and attack the last week of being in TX without Nici.

Back for 2nd half of the summer

I had a very very nice trip back to NC last week. It is amazing to think that the summer (atleast the way I am breaking it up) is half over. The plus side is that I have made it half way through the summer and am closer to having Nici back in TX with me.

My trip to NC was great. I was able to get in two nice rides with friends. Thank you Terry for letting me borrow your Madone! After my usual 4th of July ride Nici and I made a short trip down to the beach to see my sister and brother in law. We had a very nice time at the beach, grilling out, playing cornhole, and playing Mario kart on the Wii. It is a good thing that I am a better bike handler ( and driver) than I am at Mario Kart. It was pretty ugly. Other than a rainy few minutes at the beach after taking the time to get our stuff out to the beach we had a lot of fun.

I am back in TX and prepairing for teaching during the second summer session. I am still working on a few papers and have several undergrads collecting data for other studies but I will need even more focus during the second half of the summer to get the papers out, teaching done, and miles logged. While I came pretty close to hitting my 1,000 mile goal during the first half I am even more determined to hit it this go around. Fortunatly I have an extra week to get it done so I should be ok. I do have 1 race ( Time trial) planned and so we will see how it goes.

Well enough for now. I am heading back to have a slice of pizza and watch the end of todays tour stage!

End of the Month

While I have not done as good a job updating my blog as I would like I have been very busy here. In the last month (since I have been back from NC) I have ridden 896.4 miles, Written 1st drafts of two paper (which should be sent to journals soon) and I have stopped drinking as much Dr. Pepper as I had been. While I had been drinking 2 per day I am not down to 3 per week. Not bad. So I have gotten a good number of miles in, only 100 short of my goal for the month, and I have gotten a good amount of work done on papers. I have plenty of new goals for the second half of the summer as well as my first race in a year and a half coming up soon but for now I am focusing on my trip to NC. I leave tomorrow and I will be in NC seeing my wife, family, and friends and I can't wait! If any of my NC friends want to catch up for a ride or coffee let me know and I will see you soon.

So while I am really really excited about going to NC tomorrow everything seemed to go very badly today. I had one of those days that makes you question everything about what you are doing. I was in a really bad mood and not trusting any choices that I had made (except getting married to my amazing wife). Maybe it was being in TX with my wife in NC for 4.5 weeks and not having her here to talk to but today was headed to being one of the worst days I have had for a few years. Until I decided to go for the recovery ride that I really did not feel like going on. I was ready to take a nap on the couch and then pack for my flight tomorrow. I decided that getting on my bike had never been a bad decision and so I would go. As usual riding today turned today into a pretty good day. The time on the bike simply chatting with friends about my NC trip or the up coming Tour or just stuff made me feel so much better. It is amazing that a few hours on the bike talking with people who you know about anything is great. I don't know if it is the rhythm of the motion, or talking with people that you spend early morning weekend hours with, or hot days or freezing in the winter, or maybe it is because you learn to trust these people riding so close at such high speeds but sometimes the folks that you ride with who may not know what you do for a living seem to know you better than anyone else. Riding friends have become some of my closest friends both in TX and in NC. That is one reason why I miss my NC riding friends and why I look forward to spending time with them when I am back in NC.

Well it is late and I need to finish packing and getting ready to leave. I have to get up early tomorrow and the beer is tasty but probably not helping but at least it is tasty. Well I hope to see some of you in NC over the next week and at the Spin Cycle 4th of July Ride. I have been going to that ride since I started road biking and I am so excited that I get to make it again this year! My first 4th of July Spin Cycle ride was July 4th 2003 so this will be my 6th time of the ride. I am really glad that they are keeping the ride going.



Ok time to go to sleep. See y'all in NC tomorrow!!!

Crazy Week

This week has been a very odd week. I have gotten a good amount of work done in the lab and have a new study started. I have almost finished a 1st draft of a paper on stress and executive functioning/working memory. I have started getting more miles in the legs but I did miss a couple of rides this week because of the weather. Now a little rain during the summer is no big deal but around here we don't just get a little rain. The storms that came through Wednesday night and Thursday morning did quite a bit of damage. I was lucky in that we are only missing a few shingles and our fence is leaning a little. Many of my neighbors did not fair as well. A ton of trees came down. Many of them either came out of the ground or were torn apart. Here is a pretty good example:

So I feel very lucky that nothing like that fell into my place or on my car. Huddling in the bathroom with the dog and cats was not a ton of fun but with 70-80mph wind and a tornado confirmed 3 miles away I was not about to take any chances.

Now that the storms have passed the heat is here. The highs for the next several days are forecast to be 96,97,98,98...... Basically the same until it goes over 100 and then cools down sometime in say...October. At least the humidity is low!

The sunsets have been absolutely amazing for the last few days, at least what I can see in the city. Last night the sky was all purple and tonight looking outside it looks orangish. Crazy.

Well, I am cheering the Pittsburgh Penguins on and then heading to bed for some good rest before tomorrow mornings ride. Several of the Metro VW elite guys are coming to the Mad Duck group ride tomorrow. Should be lots of fun and very painful.