Hey I got a fitness letter answered over at Cyclingnews.com. It is a pretty wacky question, but go check it out. Form & Fitness Q&A
My Niterider adapter finally appeared in the mail. I can start my road rides at midnight now. Yah! Here is another picture of me from my "gay dude" sings Cher song commercial.
Random sentence! I got pulled over by a cop right outside my driveway for not wearing my seatbelt. Yah! $50 dollar ticket! Yah! Fuck the Santa Rosa police department in the ass! The pilot-lite on my heater won't stay lit. Yah! I can see my breath inside my house! Ants have taken over my bedroom! They're in my bed! One crawled into mouth last night! Fuck Yah!
Death just isn't coming fast enough.
My Fondriest has been decommissioned. After riding it for about 6 months, I believe I am ready to sell it. It was a great frame, but it never seemed to "do" anything special for me. It was as if I never noticed the bike was underneath me. It cornered on rails, was extra plush on my butt and had a rock solid bottom bracket. However I never felt any personal connection to the frame. It was like this foreign thing that I would ride on for hours a day. All the while, it didn't like me and I didn't like it. I sound insane but the Fondriest just didn't have any love. Or it could be that my stem was too long, cranks to short and saddle to gimmicky to ever enjoy the ride. Whatever the reason; the frame, stem, cranks and saddle have either sold or will be sold on eBay very soon. I am now looking forward to a new Sycip road frame for the 2004 season.
What does this all mean!? That ole' ''Morte Nero" (my CX bike) is now doing duty as my full time road bike. I spent almost 9 months training and racing on it this season, and now it is back. Just in time for some serious miles! Morte Nero is a bicylce frame that has love. Strangely enough, it cost about 1/4 of the Fondriest, is made entirely of bone jarring aluminum (even the damn fork), fits me a little small and handles pretty slow. But for some reason I really love riding it.
I am eating brownies right now that were dropped off on my doorstep by my landlord. He is constantly visiting and giving me apples, bananas and other such fruit. It is kinda like the "Witch" who gives "Snow White" a poisoned apple. Only I haven't gotten poisoned yet, my landlord is an old dude and he is a hundred times crazier than the "Witch."
Although he might just be scheming to get me to let my guard down while he gives me an irresistible, albeit poison riddled, brownie. So if I die in my sleep tonight...
About 5 miles into my ride today I got a flat rear tire from a piece of glass. Why the hell are there so many broken bottles on the side of the road? Everyday that I am able to ride out of Santa Rosa and into the countryside without a puncture is a goddamn miracle.
I went 4000 miles this year without a single flat tire. I rode through every kind of shit imaginable and not a single piece of it penetrated my tires. There where times during races when jerks up at the front of the pack would neglect to call out huge potholes. With no time or room to dodge the road craters, the middle of the peleton would be forced go right over them. Riders all around me would be getting pinch flats from the impacts, yet I always emerged tires unharmed.
About halfway through the season I got my first flat. This was to be the beginning of the end. From then on, almost every time I rode my bike more than 20 miles, I punctured. Even my bulletproof "Ruffy Tuffy" tires from Rivendell have been popping.
Why doesn't all liquor come in cans or plastic bottles so drunks can't make such a hazardous mess?
It was great to finally have an agro, hill climb workout today. I have been looking forward to this all week. There is a really steep long climb a few miles away from my house that has me tasting blood in the back of my throat by the time I crest the top. When rode on a fixed-gear, it is perfect for building leg muscle.
Riding home after this brief but very tiring workout, I managed to pickup a screw in my rear tire. Two seconds after it popped my tube, my whole tire exploded in a mess of rubber and cotton strands. MOTHER FUCKING SHIT!
I ended up walking home through my dirty ghetto neighborhood. Every homeless person and Mexican mariachi player staring at me like I'm a fucking alien. Meanwhile it is OK for them to be passed out on park benches, begging for money, pushing around shopping carts full or garbage, talking to themselves, or walking around dressed like it is the year 1850 on a tobacco ranch in Mexico.
I wish I was more violently inclined so I could have the balls to curb the next drunk crack-addict asking me for money. No one would miss him.
I don't like driving my car, so I commute almost everywhere by bicycle. I ride to the grocery store, to work, to the movies, and just about anywhere within a reasonable radius. As such, I end up riding home in the dark quite a bit. So to keep myself visible to traffic, I have this "hot-shit" expensive lighting system on my bike. The headlamp puts out a ridiculous amount of white light. I often have other cars flash their brights on me - as if I am blinding them. My taillight is rated to be even brighter than what you would find on an automobile. Both of these wonders of technology are connected to a single battery strapped to my downtube.
This all worked fine until I lost the adapter that links the taillight to the battery. It fell off during a ride or was stolen by a magical gnome, I have no fucking clue. But it has been gone for a month. I emailed the company to have them send me another one. Much to my surprise a part showed up in the mail, however it was the wrong adapter. So I emailed again to get the correct part. Apparently that wasn't OK. I somehow made the "shit-list" at the bicycle lighting factory.
My plan for the end of this season was to race cyclocross until November, take a month off and begin my base training sometime in December. So in September I started running and working on my cyclocross skills. High speed dismounts, re-mounts, bunny hops, etc. I was all set to race in a few weeks. Then the morning of the first race came around, I had to wake up at 5am on a Saturday and drive two hours to the start line. However once I was awake, I decided that I really didn't feel like racing - more sleep seemed like a better idea. So I skipped the race that weekend. And from that day on, I started avoided my bike altogether. I was no long motivated to go out and ride. I didn't participate in a single cyclocross race the entire fall and didn't ride more than 500 miles in 6 weeks.
So when I started my 2004 training season this November, I thought I would be violently out of shape. I expected my legs to give out at every hill and die into headwinds. As it turned out, my fitness was just fine. As per my "base" training regiment, I am not doing any intense work, just long easy miles. But when I decide to crank it up to pass a car, make a green-light or just fire myself uphill, it is like I never stopped riding at all.
I spilled a cereal bowl all over my open laptop. Sludgy generic raisin-bran seeped into all nooks and under my keyboard. I had to dismantle the laptop casing (not recommended) to remove the keyboard. So now there is a big hole in my computer and I am typing with an external keyboard. Which is actually easier to type with than the tiny laptop's. However it was the cheapest one available, so the keys are kinda insensitive. Some keys act like they needed to be hit with a hammer or leaned into to register. This becomes a pain-in-the-ass when playing games where moving your character forward requires holding down the "W" key. (ala Enemy Territory) To many times have I been running away from a grenade or some Nazi's MP40 to be stopped in mid-dash because I wasn't putting all my weight into a particular key. Boo hoo.
I "have" a whole lot to say today, so buckle down and prepare to be bombarded.
I filmed a commercial a few months ago for a sporting goods store up in Tahoe, CA. I dressed up as gay dude and sang along to the Cher song, "Believe." The final cut hasn't been released yet, but here is a picture of me in costume from the shoot.
It took me a while to get into the role of "Singing Homo", but eventually I was belting out bad music like some drunk butt-lover outside a stud bar.
I was out on a long ride the other day and about 3 hours into the trip I got a flat tire. This was right before a steep hill, so I decided to climb the hill with my still-warm legs and repair the flat before the descent. After replacing my tube, I plugged my Co cartridge and dispenser on to the valve stem. When I opened the cartridge, it shot out of the dispenser and into the air. The dispenser had fucked o-rings. I had no other way of filling the tube. I was 20 miles from home with 0psi on my front wheel.
So here is the new website. I decided to integrate my training diary into it so there will always be new content. (as uninteresting as it might be). If anything, the training log will be a gauge of how tired or cranky I will be.
Since my 2004 season officially started on Monday November 10th, I wanted to get the information live as soon as possible. Thus, lack of other content. I will be adding the features from the old versions of ink.ph very soon.
A little something on programming the website: I wanted to talk about this as I am fairly proud of it. This website is completely automated. All I have to do is input my data into my training diary on my computer. The training diary data is then automatically uploaded once per day. I programmed a PHP script to interpret the data and output it into this page. It was my first time writing in PHP language. It is very similar to PERL, however I was still dumbfounded countless times while scripting.
