My hammies have been extraordinarily tight the past few months so I got a massage last night to try and loosen them up and prevent any hammy pull disasters. But now my ass feels like it's been through a meat grinder and I can't sit down very easily. I don't know how that tiny woman and her elbows could inflict such pain in parts of my ass I didn't know existed.
But I know it's all good.
Epsom salts bath tonight.
It's funny that a number of us are talking about stomach failure as our training programs begin to reintroduce intervals back into our soft, wintery lives. I had two 5-minute hill intervals on my agenda tonight so I staked out my route around the corner from my house in Magnolia.
You know how it goes....you start out completely charged eating up that hill and breathing deep and hard something fierce and then....you look at your watch and only 60 seconds have passed by. Shit. It must be broken! You continue on up as you try to entertain your brain with the cracks in the pavement or seeing how close you can get to parked cars while going anoxic, but the lunch that never really digested 5 hours ago has awakened and would love to revisit the land of the living. Oh no not now! Think of something else.....so you lean forward over the seat and into the hill and you're thankful that you pulled on your bibs so the winter insulation packed around your waist won't insult you any more than is necessary at this point. You push the thought of your lunch back down and continue up knowing that you can make it that much farther and you do. Rest. Repeat. Hurl.
In a word: awesome. What exactly was so awesome, you ask? Well I'll tell you:
- Seeing all the bike luv hovering around and locked up outside the Portland convention center. There was as much of a show outside as inside.
- 3,000 people stuffed into a convention hall and freaking out the fire marshal
- Steel, titanium, lugs, cargo, fenders, racks, painted flower hubs, wooden rims, singlespeed CX, etc etc
- Andy Hampston's 1988 Giro d'Italia bike
- My new pink wool beanie
- Running into everyone I knew and luved all while oozing with bike luv
- Riding all over Portland Sat night
- Bike trees everywhere you turned
- The magic carpet cargo bike we borrowed from the house we stayed at
- Zack taking me to the best Cajun restaurant after the afterparty and inhaling not just my bowl of jumbalya, but his as well
- Riding home after 2 bowls of jumbalaya, not so awesome
- Defying the laws of advanced aging and staying up til 3 a.m.
Hard to pick out favorite things. I'm a Vanilla groupie so I was digging the Speedvagen, Sacha's proprietary steel tubing CX rig. Thin, teardrop tubing for an ultra lightweight steel frame with lots of lateral stiffness. It's the new Vanilla team issue bike. I know there are other excellent framebuilders out there, but hey, they say crack is whack too.
Like a 6 year old kid at the gates of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, I am absolutely GIDDY in anticipation for this weekend's North American Handmade Bike Show!!! The past few years I've coveted all the bikes from afar, but this year there was no way I'd miss it being in the bike haven of Portland. Sacha, Indy Fab, steel, lugs, cargo, fixed, cross, hotness. We'll be there tomorrow and Sunday. The previews, as always, have me tingling.
Remembrances abound this week around the Interweb for bike guru Sheldon Brown. They ranged from misty-eyed tributes to witty, succinct observations. I liked this one in particular, "If you tallied up all the gear inches calculated on his Gear Calculator, it would reach the moon." No kidding. The number of gear inches I've tallied alone from that page could get me most of the way to Cape Canaveral. I'd walk back and forth from my bike stand to my computer figuring out which combination would work best and if the 36t wouldn't give me a good enough chainline, what would I have to change out to still keep 58"...oh but then if I change out from 23s to 32s what does that do....etc. etc. If his Gear Calculator were a paperback, it'd be dogearred and covered in Scotch tape.
More of the best:
Bike Snob
Belgian Knee Warmers
Bike Portland
Kent Peterson
Velonews
The semi-official Blogspot remembrance site
Bicycling icon, hero, inventor, muse, artist, humorist, mechanic, historian, inspiration, and all-around Good Guy, Sheldon Brown, passed away last night from a massive heart attack. We were saddened to hear of his diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis a few years ago, and I followed his journal as he made his way through the bumps of dealing with this degenerative disease, which slowly robbed him of time on his bicycles, but no one thought it would end like this or so soon. Sheldon was supposed to live forever like Santa Claus, but caked in Phil Wood grease, squirreling down in his Massachusetts bike shop looking for that odd component from 30 years ago that he knows will do the trick for your restoration project or updating one of the many pages of his web site that so many of us turned to at 1 a.m. when the brakes just weren't working right or to calculate how many gear inches we'd have with that shiny new 15t cog and 19mm tubulars.
Most of all, Sheldon loved his wife and they spent most of their lives together raising their family and riding bikes together. Just earlier this month he mentioned that he'd miss her while she was away for the weekend. I guess that's what I loved and admired most about Sheldon. He and his wife shared a wonderful, simple life together tethered by their love for bikes and their family. They rode around France and went on silly rides around town. They epitomized what it means to grow old together and to share even the most routine moments of the day together.
You are missed by so many people! Our hearts go out to you and your family. Thank you for sharing your life with us.
(This is for Christine who says I don't blog about riding my bike, hence I must not be riding it, which isn't totally off.)
I went on our team ride Saturday. It was really fun. We started next to the Snohomish airport, rode up to Everett under SUNNY skies (big thanks to our team meteorologist!), wound back to Snohomish where Laura made an emergency chamois cream application stop (she of saddle sore self-surgery fame), continued our way at Mach 9 over to Monroe, then south through some rolling hills at nearly the same silly-fast pace that made my legs question why I ever got off the couch this winter, then down out of the hills zipping past Miss Christine and her man, Pat, going the other way, finally ending up back at the cars 41 miles, 5 full heart rate zones, 0 flat tires, 2 Heed water bottles, and 3 mini-Lara bars later.
Ellen and I got in my car and she was the first to blurt out, "That was HARD!". No shit, little Ellen. This is not the team of old. If I could survive a team ride like this, I can hopefully survive my first race in 5 weeks, which my coach is deliberately not preparing me for. He wants to see how well I do "not being in shape," holding me back for later spring and summer blossoming. I'm only starting to come out of Zone 2 next week with some intervals thrown in once/week (ok minus the full-throttle team rides). So roger that. I am on target for a serious ass kicking by amazon women on bikes come March.
Snoqualmie Pass has been closed since Tuesday! Avy after avy after avy has been coming down over I-90 and there are some lucky ski bums who have been stuck up at the Pass enjoying all the freshiez and jumping off the overpass into massive piles of FLUFF. How epic would it be to skin up I-90 to the Pass, then ski back down? ("What's that loud rumbling noise, Honey?")
Of all the years for my knee to be completely effed up:
"Additional heavy snowfall was received in most areas on Thursday, heaviest near and west of the Cascade crest, with 24-hour amounts ranging from about 8 to over 16 inches and 6-day totals since last weekend ranging up to 5-8 feet."
I do still have my snowboard. And it's not like my knee could get much WORSE. Just a few runs on deep.....fluffy...puffy.....snow!!!
