lunch crawl......

Up the hills in the Weir Conservation Land for my noon-time ride today.

From the southeast corner heading northwest up the weir hill trail (singletrack):



Northbound on the Stevens trail (wide, but worn well):


Yes, those are sustained HRs in the low 180's. The complete round trip from my office, through the Osgood Hill conservation land, Half Mile Hill conservation land, and Weir Hill conservation land is just over 9 miles and takes an hour, less when it's dry I'm more fit.

"he's not dead, he's pining!"

Actually, just shivering from hypothermia.....
(or he could be pining for the fjords...Lovely Plumage!)



The above badly-stitched panorama is what the conditions were at the start of the Quabbin Reservoir Road Race last saturday. Temperature about 35 degrees, precipitation alternating between sleet and rain. The only thing missing was wind. There was a little gust from time to time, but nothing steady. The picture doesn't quite show it, but this was about as bad as it gets. If this were a cross race, we would all have been licking our chops, since in a cross race you warm up quick, it only lasts an hour, and you're never more than 5 minutes from your car.

This is a 65 mile hilly road race. About 5000 feet of climbing, with some rather rough pavement on the east side of the reservoir. The first three miles of this race is downhill - in 35 degree rain, and at some point your going to be about 90 minutes from your car, with big hills in the way. I've done that a few times in my life. I didn't envy anyone.

Turnout was high considering the conditions, but no one ever accused bike racers of common sense. My team puts on the race, so I lucked into driving a wheel van for the womens field. It was neutral, but one rider asked me to carry her wheels. I told her "I think I'm going to be carrying more passengers than changing wheels today" - she didn't get it, and it turns out I was right.

The first three miles of this race is downhill - in 35 degree rain. I've done that a few times in my life. I didn't envy anyone.

Ten miles into the race I see a group of 4 male riders huddled at the side of the ride like a bunch of asparagus. I pulled off.

"You guys ok?"
"No", one of them managed to shiver out loud.

I was just going to have them sit in my car when a big cargo van from Killing Mountain School pulled up. They were towing a trailer for the bikes, the van probably had seats for 15. The men all hopped in eagerly.

I went ahead and caught the back of the womens field again. About 15 miles in we came across an EMT and fire marshals car at the side of the road. They had a rider in the back of the ambulance under a metal blanket. He wasn't quite coherent. Apparently he had simply fallen down, not really crashed, but just collapsed. Another teammate of mine working the race had pulled up and said he would make sure the kid made it back to the parking lot. I continued back on the course.

I had a radio in my car provided by the emergency crew Mike Norton had hired. They were asking support vehicles with room in their cars to stop by a country store at about the 20 mile point and pick up riders, I was almost there. There was a dozen bikes outside, and a dozen wet racers inside huddling and shivering. An EMT was there triaging who needed to go first. With the extra wheels in my car, I had room for two bikes and two riders. My other teammate had the kid from the earlier ambulance in his car and came along as well. He could fit two more. Other vehicles were on their way. One of the guys I took wasn't thinking clearly and was speaking slowly, but the EMT said he would be OK. The other guy was limping a bit because he couldn't feel one of his feet. I drove them back to the finish, and by this time the lead pro/1/2/3 had finished.

I drove the course backwards, looking for suffering riders - on this day, that was redundant. Since I had started behind the last field at the beginning of the race, I kept going until I passed the last person I remember, a cat 4 woman in a red jersey and black tights. I drove past her another 5 minutes and didn't see anyone else, so I figure she was probably it. The radio didn't report anyone needing a ride anywhere, so I turned around the follow her.

There was a cop at an intersection at the 45 mile point, and she pulled over. I figure she was probably done. Sure enough - she struggled off the bike, shivering slightly, soaking wet to the point she was actually dripping where she stood. I loaded her and the bike and went back after the field. By the time I started catching people again there was maybe 15 miles to go, so I slowed by and asked each person if they were ok, how they felt. I guess at that point it was becoming a matter of pride, since they all kind of gave me a brush off. I had to ask one guy twice, I couldn't tell if he was ignoring me or was mentally on a carribean vacation. He grunted "I'm ok" at me. One other woman, another cat 4, said she couldn't feel her hands or her feet. She was friends with the woman I had picked up, and decided to hop in the car.

The rain had subsided to a mist by now - 4 hour hours later - but the temperature was still 38 according to my car. I dropped the women off at their car, and I noticed my front seat actually had a 1" deep puddle of water in it. Luckily, my car has waterproof seats. I had a blanket in the back, I just tossed it on the seat to soak it up.

There wasn't much revelry at the end of this race. No groups hanging out on the tailgate of the SUV barbecuing tofu burgers, no coolers with exotic local microbrews....just a steady stream of people slowly skulking back to their cars....some just tired, some looking sullen and gaunt, most everyone leaving the bike outside of their vehicles and getting it to start the engine, looking for some respite from the cold, trying to make some sense of their _lack_ of sense. Even the riders who placed seemed annoyed that they had to get out of their warm cars to collect the winnings. The race staff was bailing as soon as the race promoter said they could.

To punctuate the dismal affair, I went looking for a local restaurant to sit and have a burger and a beer. There are two reasonably sized towns on the way back to the Mass Pike from the race, Ware and Palmer. Of the two towns, only Palmer had a legitimate restaurant, and it wasn't open (at 3 PM on a saturday). Ware had a sub shop, and Palmer had a subway - not quite what I was looking for. Between the two towns there were five open chinese joints - in a section of the state where the only chinese residents probably worked in those restaurants. I had to settle for a burger from Wendy's.

It's some thing we all do as bike racers, something we _have_ to do. I understand it, and I've done it. I'll probably do it again to, but no one ever accused me of having common sense either....

Competition for UltraEndure Guy

Whilst wasting time, I stumbled upon Dom Mazetti (though I wasn't actually using 'stumbleupon', I was legitimately surfing aimlessly (is 'surfing aimlessly' considered a legitimate activity?)).

Dom Mazetti is the Brooklyn counterpart to Boston's Own UltraEndure Guy. I have embedded here, for you edification, "Dom Mazetti Vs. Hipsters", in which Dom discusses hairy-legged women, fixed-gear bikes ("doze bikes wit no brakes"), and American Eagle Outfitters.

Enjoy!

A Dose Of Awesome

From Boston.com, news of public bike repair stands.

"The stands provide tire gauges and pumps, Allen wrenches and a few other tools that enable cyclists to make minor repairs, such as adjusting seats or handlebars."

I say it's awesome because it shows the willingness of the city of Cambridge to embrace cycling as a viable transportation alternative. However, I'm not so sure the money couldn't be more well spent elsewhere. This is certainly something that I would support if the cycling culture in Boston were more 'mature', but I'm not so sure the general public in the Boston area is quite comfortable with cycling in the city just yet. Cambridge, maybe, since the article quotes a significant increase in cycling traffic over the past couple of years.

From a different perspective, is there a liability issue with the city 'encouraging' people to elicit their own repairs to dubious ends? I really don't know the answer to that question, but I'm wondering if it was considered.

Still, I applaud Cambridge's efforts to encourage cycling. Perhaps it will in fact serve as an epicenter for responsible cooperation between cyclist and local government, and radiate outward from there.

Oh, and don't bother with the comments on the article. As usual, it's loaded with the usual selfish ignorant diatribes from big-mac-eating fuckers, sort of like the facebook comments from ugly americans over the earthquake and tsunami in japan (click on the facebook image after it loads to enlarge so you can read it).

H.N.T.

Some of you know my riding hasn't progressed as I would have liked this spring. I'm still having a nagging tendonitis issue as a result of that late winter ride with a certain bike company executive.


It's getting better, I can commute to work without any problems, though I'm noticing the colder it is, the more likely I can feel some pain. But, since it's just over 30 minutes of riding, I haven't had any pain that would cause me to alter my pedaling style.


The funny thing about it is that it hurts the most when I'm spinning a light gear. If I get out of the saddle, or grind a hard gear, the pain all but goes away. If I sit and spin, after about 45 minutes it feels like someone is jabbing a hot soldering iron under my right kneecap.


I did two MTB rides of note. Two weekends ago I did my typical Winnekenni ride. I was out for two hours, and didn't feel anything until I was on the road for the ten minute ride home from the park. The last 1/4 mile was quite painful.


Last weekend I went to HPSF, and rode for two solid hours. I felt a little pain as I was cruising on one of the fire roads about an hour into the ride, but when I hit the single track in the south end of the park, again, the pain went away, since very little of that section allows you to sit and spin a light gear. It's all rocky and technical - delightfully so.


FWIW - I rode at HPSF on a modified version of Son Of Ice Bike. I put on some WTB 2.1 rubber, a Scott LF flat bar, and a Ritchey Vector saddle. It rode well and was comfortable, though I'll be putting on a shorter stem for the next trip - pictures to follow soon.....of the bike....

Mega Python vs Gatoroid: A Parable of The Modern Popular Culture

So I'm channel surfing on the couch one night last week, too lazy to get my out-of-shape ass up off the couch to go to bed, and figure I'll pick some bad movie to watch to help me realize the futility of sleeping on the the couch, when I come across this gem on the Sy-Fy channel. Now, truth be told, It wasn't the prospect of seeing poorly animated giant pythons battling poorly animated giant alligators, rather it was the cast: Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.

Yes, This Tiffany:

and this Debbie Gibson:

OK, not really. The movie came out in 2011, so it was really this Tiffany:

(from her 2002 playboy shoot)

And this Deborah Gibson.

(from her 2005 playboy shoot)

No, no, just kidding. Being a Mega-Man-Pig, that's just what I was hoping I would see. In fact, it was this Tiffany:

(from the movie release party)

and this Deborah Gibson:

(from the movie release party)

ok, wait....that still isn't right. What we were instead treated to was a crack whore and trailer trash:

(still from the movie set)

OK,that was mean - and quite unfair....well...maybe not.

(still from the movie set after the cat-fight scene) Although it doesn't come out in these photos, Tiffany has probably dozens of small tattoos that were easily visible in that black cocktail dress through the various scenes

And yes, you read that right, there was a rather long cat fight scene.

(still from the cat-fight scene)

Which was - to say the least - quite entertaining to a middle-aged too-bored-with-his-life hopelessly-married man sitting up too-late on the couch. I didn't torture myself with the whole movie though. I bounced away during the commercials to watch a competing effort on the science channel feature a rather currently-relevant show on tectonic drift and volcanism, bouncing back to the '80's teen-idol tete-a-tete when it went to commercial. Trust me, this wasn't a movie you had to put a whole helluvalot of effort into to get.

The premise was as cheesy as one could surmise from the title: There is in fact a python problem in the everglades from people releasing pets into the wild, and there have been a number of cases of pythons eating alligators, upsetting the biodiversity of the swamps. Yes, it's true. The movie portrays a story of a park-ranger scientist (Tiffany) that thinks they need to beef up the gators to keep their status at the top of the food chain by feeding them chicken laced with steroids. Meanwhile, another biological scientist (Gibson) thinks that isn't letting nature sort it self out, so she sets out genetically engineering the snakes to ginormous proportions.

The result? Why, Mega-Python Vs. Gatoroid, of course. Fans of Pop-Culture will get a big kick out of Mickey Dolenz' cameo appearance (more than a few lines, actually) just before he gets eaten in one gulp by a big fucking snake.

But is this movie really about big fucking snakes and big fucking alligators? I suspect not. I suspect it's more of an analogy of pop-icons being consumed by their own success. Face it, we have two aging teen-queens who in recent years have engaged in desperate acts for the sole purpose of trying to re-ignite that flame of popularity they once held in American Culture, only to see it ostensibly backfire. So alligators (tiffany) eat steroids (pose in playboy) and end up competing with pythons (gibson) that have been genetically modified (posed in playboy) to the point that they are killed (fade into obscurity) by a scientist from the CDC with a special technique that kills megasized creatures (the complacency of the American Public).

But hey, I'm not criticizing either of them for posing nude. I like that they posed nude. I wish more people would pose nude. To quote Ultra-Endure Guy: "I like boobies". I mean, how many of us have rewound the nude scene with Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons back and forth to enhance the jiggle of her magnificent tatas? Freeze frame Annette Benning's FFN in The Grifters? Slow-Mo Dana Delaney in her various totally nude scenes in East Of Eden? Susan Sarandons masturbation scene in Pretty Baby? Please. Give me more...often. I don't think it's bad/sad that they did it, It think it's bad/sad that it's an issue.

But that's all bullshit. I'm way over thinking this whole thing. It's a fucking movie that not even Tiffany or Debbie took very seriously. I mean, in the cat-fight scene, I think they pretty much did most of the stunts.

If you're bored enough to watch that clip to the end, you'll see something very familiar:

Tiffany did it too, and it's been rumored that Debbie had a version in the works. Other bits I've scanned on-line in the preparation for this post claim more references to each others music, but since I was never more than peripherally aware of these two, I'll just chalk that up to an unsubstantiated claim. It appears they had fun making it, so regardless of whether or not anyone else likes it, it was a success unless they had some delusion that it was going to be any more than a campy made-for-cable movie.

It's a bad movie, and isn't really worth wasting your time on, unless you _really_ like '80s teen idols, or like seeing '80s teen idols in a cat-fight, or like seeing '80s teen idols dressed like trailer trash, or like seeing '80s teen idols getting eaten by giant amphibious creatures. In fact, just that you spent all this time reading about here is probably more than a waste of time on the whole idea, unless you're into that sort of thing.

urban downill

I can't really describe this any other way but awesome. A sanctioned downhill race through narrow city streets with a few added obstacles. Watch for the dog @:40 and the wall @2:00.

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.