Loose Endz
Racing Season Re-Cap.
So my 2005 season on a pro team was a blow out. I quantitatively had my best form ever, and have almost nothing to show for it. Montreal Quebec, where I was 3rd team mate on the road, but the front two guys got dropped proved to be a turning point in the season. The best laid plans can go wrong, but when your plan continuously proves to be fatal, and pro teams loose local race after local race, you need some sort of consequence, or try something new… So my team and I parted ways things have been looking up.
1st Poland Maine ITT
2nd Saco Maine Criterium
1st The Great Josh Billings 400+ person mass start
1st Arcadia National Park ITT
Then things started to slump a little when I took up Cyclo-Cross, borrowing a bike 40 minutes before the Elite Race. The main problem with Cross is that two many people train for it. I just wedged it in between bike tours, and didn’t have the high end to really challenge for the win. But I did have a blast and could see some more cross in my future.
4th (Prime winner) Bakersfield, California CX
3rd Turkey Trot (Glendale, CA) CX
To be fair the team also ended things on a high note with Dan winning 2nd place in Detroit.
Doping in Cycling. Yeah it’s still there in spades like the other professional sports..
Cycling is making great strides in it’s effort to expunge doping from the ranks, Kinda like Molson or Bacardi sponsoring Alcoholics Anonymous… http://velonews.com/news/fea/9118.0.html ‘Yeah we realize that most of our sales are to illegally produce athletes who ride bicycles faster than humanly possible, so we’ll self appoint the fox to guard the henhouse and WTF!?!?!
Trivia:
I realized that I have had 9 bicycles this year, Name them:
(Hints: One was bought for wheels and never ridden, another was a team bike which was worked but never owned by me)
Otherwise it’s 2 days until I head off on my 7ish month long bike tour, and my bike frame and parts are starting to show up in the shop to day. Typical of the monkeys that inhabit this kind of establishment, I notice that the employees forgot to mention that some things were back ordered. Some aren’t tragic, like the brookes saddle. It would have been cool. But when the saddle’s back ordered, why order the special conditioning lotion for it. Great so now I own lotion for a non existent saddle… Other things they simply didn’t bother to order at all.
Ah well.
Annoying things
I always wonder why in gas stations when they have 2 one person toilettes they mark them men and women. Since I travel with packs of men, it’s often the case that the female bathroom is the only vacant one after a 4h stint in the van. As my personal protest to non-unisex bathrooms I always take the skirt one. And yes, when I’m finished peeing I do leave the seat up (but not peed on, because that’s nasty).
Random Late night….
There is a town built at the bottom of a hill. One day a child playing at the top of the hill falls off and hurts himself. The one ambulance in town takes a long time to reach the injured boy, and by the time he reaches the hospital he’s irreparably damaged.
The town is in an uproar, and holds a meeting to decide the best plan of action so as to prevent further tragedy. As the youth had passed away in the ambulance, most of the townspeople wanted to send more money on ambulances so that they could reach people faster. Then one lady spoke up “why don’t we build a fence at the top of the hill to prevent other children from falling off the hill in the first place?”
Hmmm. Kyoto accord, might not be on the tip of many Americans lips as Bush refuses to sign the accord which is designed primarily to combat greenhouse gasses, and global warming.
New Orleans Dikes (searching New Orleans Dykes gets you completely different results) were built to protect against the worst storms that they knew.
It’s been hard to not be shocked by the news from the South. People hiding out, shooting at cops, armed bands of people ambushing passers by, firing automatic weapons at air ambulances restocking hospitals. Good think that everyone has a gun ‘to protect themselves’.
So it’s anarchy in the old south. The images of dead bodies, and looters from the TV are horrific. Desperate people wiling to do anything just to survive.
But imagine if instead of just one state, it was your entire country under siege.
Not winds and water, under engineered (for the global warming induced super-storms) dikes breaking causing havoc, but an invading army.
Wouldn’t that really suck then eh?
Instead of a 3-5 week camping trip inland, you would be without power, police, healthcare structure, or access to medication, food, or a reliable source of water for 4 years already with no end in sight.
Yeah, I guess that would make you Iraqi or Afghani.
