Luck

Found this yesterday on a walk with Cezanne and our dog Bono.

I'm off for a week vacation with high school buds, RVing, Camping, and hiking in Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks.

Happy Birthday to me

It would be nice if my birthday gift every year was to ride with a pro cyclist. Better yet would be an annual ride with Lance. I haven't posted this picture on my blog yet, but I know I've circulated it.

Thanks to Bob Cullinan from www.cycleto.com for the pic from the 2008 San Jose LiveStrong Ride. I'll have to post this picture once or twice a year to remind myself of this incredible experience.

Yesterday was my birthday, but Cezanne and I are celebrating it tonight. Having her as my wife is gift enough, but she decided to renew my "Bicycling" subscription as well as get me a massage for this Saturday. It's been a long time.

It was supposed to be sunny all afternoon yesterday. Turned out it wasn't. I still made it out for a ride in Rock Creek Park. It was decent. The rain stopped, so I just had to deal with the spray coming of the tires.

The deer were out in full force yesterday. There were packs of them all over. I stopped less than 10 feet from one and it just sat there staring at me. I thought for a minute it was either going to run away or come after me... I snapped the above pic, but it doesn't do it justice. By the time I pulled up my vest, got into my pocket, took my phone out of the plastic sandwich bag...the deer had made it's way across the street.

The Manayunk Wall. Cezanne used to live in Manayunk and is familiar with the "wall" as they call it. I think it's part of the Philly week races and the cyclists do the wall several times. Last time we were in Philly she saw this cool piece of art and she decided to get it (while I was driving from the Ephrata RR to Philly).

JW previously posted a video link to a guy doing a one-handed wheelie up the Manayunk wall:

http://jwbender.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-wish-you-were-this-cool-i-wish-i.html

Jeff Cup to Bunny Hop: Good to Awful

So the bike racing season goes for me: Good to Awful.

I don't know what I'm doing. I've gone from being in the top 6 or 7 heading into the last 50 feet of Jeff Cup (before 2 guys crashed a few feet in front of me and ended my top 10 finish) to getting dropped and lapped at Bunny Hop, a self proclaimed "good crit for beginners." Pathetic really.

I'm actually chuckling to myself right now (and shaking my head). Things have been off since last Thursday, starting with tired legs, but I was still able to post respectable top third finishes in the Tour de Ephrata RR and TT (not so much in the crit).

Maybe crits aren't my thing, but still, I usually have no problem hanging in and giving it a go even. It was raining pretty heavily today and I can honestly say that I cornered like I was 8 and it was my 5th ride on a bike. I consistently lost ground at every turn and it eventually became a TT on every straight-away to try and catch up to the main group. In the end it wasn't doable.

I didn't use my bike computer for the race. I'm sure it would have been fine, but I didn't want to chance getting any water into the Garmin 705 head unit with the heavy rain. Maybe in retrospect I just wasn't too excited for this race and that manifested itself in more ways than not using my computer.

I wasn't too upset at the end and managed a smile for Cezanne. She, of course, was being a really supportive wife and out there in the rain cheering me on...and watching me drift further and further back. She also put up with my slight grumpiness on the drive over to the crit. This has been the closest race to our place, but leave it to downtown DC to always have stuff closed off! We had to detour, u-turn, backtrack because the police had shut down what seemed like random streets.

So, I'm not sure where this leaves me and racing. I'm scheduled to race next Saturday (May 9) at the Fort Ritchie Criterium. After that I leave for a week long trip to go RVing, camping and hiking with my best highschool buds out in Zion National Park and Grand Canyon National Park. I'm out of town Memorial Day weekend as well as the weekend of June 6/7 (Toon's wedding!!!), so it's possible that after the race on May 9, I might not race until the Tour of Washington County on June 20-21, which is a stage race like Ephrata.

The possibility exists to do a the Fulton Road Race in Lancaster County, PA on May 30, but not sure about that weekend yet.

So I'm thinking I should try to bury myself with a tough week of training this week (if I can muster it) and not worry about a result in the Fort Ritchie Crit and then use this next week's trip as a rest week and start things from there.

Including the 2 crits I did in San Diego last year, the 3 Tradezone practice races at the beginning of this year, today was my 10th mass start, so I could put in for my upgrade to Cat 4. I'm still undecided if I'll put it in soon or after the last race of the season and then just start fresh as a Cat 4 next year.


On Saturday Cezanne and I visited 2 Embassies in DC as part of the Passport to DC event. The 2 closest Embassies to our place were Iraq and Nepal, so we decided to walk to both. The line to get into the Iraqi Embassy was so long we went to Nepal first. Above is my gorgeous wife outside of the Nepal Embassy.


We learned that Nepal is bordered by India on 3 sides and China on the other. They served some curried potatoes with some sort of dry rice cereal. It was good!


We worked our way back around to the Iraq Embassy and the line was about half the size. Above pic is of the line.


Yup, this is the Embassy. We went through a metal detector and on in. They had some old artifacts and a brochure with the history of Iraq and a ton of photos of the Iraqi troops working with US troops.


Out back they did a little Iraqi dancing and they had Iraqi food. The dancing and food was surprisingly like Greek dancing and food.

On the way home we walked a different way than we had ever been and approached the National Cathedral from a different angle.

More Ephrata pics...and "I got dropped"

Found some more photos from the Tour de Ephrata. The links are to the website, the photographer doesn't allow downloading.

TT

http://mlkimages.smugmug.com/gallery/7892276_jdpFp#521856145_3CaMn

http://mlkimages.smugmug.com/gallery/7892276_jdpFp#521851311_Nq3J7

Road Race

http://mlkimages.smugmug.com/gallery/7892264_jqmLT#520933573_hgHrA

http://mlkimages.smugmug.com/gallery/7892264_jqmLT#520996584_4tB7e


I also got my picture posted on the "you got dropped" blog. It's a blog where the owner puts photos of riders who got dropped in racing from the previous weekend. I thought it would be funny if I sent in my own photo, so I did.

http://yougotdropped.blogspot.com/2009/04/back-to-action-or-back-to-non-action.html

My legs are starting to feel a little more recovered. It was weird how dead they felt this week and going into the Tour de Ephrata race. This week's training has been real easy, on purpose. I did easy spins on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, then did a little bit more of an effort today, but nothing tough.

I was riding in Rock Creek Park today and saw my teammate David Kirkpatrick. He banged a u-turn and we wound up riding a few laps together. It was a good time and nice to have someone to talk to. My cornering was sucking (it was a bit wet and I was being a wimp), but I got some good advice from Dave.

Tomorrow I'll just do an easy 30-45 minute spin to loosen the legs up before the crit on Sunday.