24 hours of Great Glen--the short version

So I think this sums it up:

Things that hurt:
-right knee from hitting it on someone's bike and bruising it badly first lap
-left knee from crashing on it/puncturing myself
-right forearm from re-opening the road rash from last week
-forehead from the bruise when I slid down the hill on my face
-hip where its bruised from crashing on it
-neck and shoulders from either crashing or more likely muscling my bike over wet roots
-lower back from just riding hard for 7 hours

Things I broke:
-helmet (yes the new one I just bought on wednesday)
-helmet mount for my light

Things I lost:
-one rear brake pad
-my timing chip (but only for one lap thank god)
-my mind

Hours slept: 2.5
Number of crashes: between 8 and 25, depending on what you call a crash
Number of times I had to adjust my front brakes: 4
Number of times I had to bring my bike to the pit: 2
Number of times I got passed by Boobar: 4
Number of times I beat Tracey's lap times: all my laps
Number of IBC riders: 14 (including our teams as IBC)
Number of ibuprofen tablets taken: 9
Miles ridden: 59.5 (although only 51 official ones)
Approximate number of calories eaten: 7000
Gallons of water drunk: 2.5
Number of mechanicals on the trail: 0!


Overall: Great time!!!! I can't wait for next year. Although given the rate I'm going through helmets right now, I think I better give racing a break for a bit...

Great Glen Prep

The 24 hours of great glen is this weekend. I've never done a 24 hour race before; I've done 12 hour ROGAINEs (no, nothing to do with the hair product) with Ed before, but that was only 12 hours and it was on foot. I guess that is considerably harder than 6 hours on a bike (I'm on a team of four). But I'll save those harder/easier comments for afterwards, because who knows, I might wreck myself as I have a tendency to do on that bike. Its funny though, I would much rather ride my mt bike than my roadie, despite my propensity for crashing. In any event, I'm super psyched to do this race, and not just from the racing standpoint--my team is amazing, and we all get along great, although we'll see if that changes after 24 hours together! Shoul be a great time. We'll see how I feel afterwards...

I thought it was just a bike race. Then I got the two page, color-coded, excel spreadsheet outlining all the stuff we need/want to have there. Wow. There were little check marks by people's names, indicating that they had to supply certain group things. My name was checked by the "baked goods" row. Ok, I can do baked goods. I (and my team) were imagining something like a batch of cookies and a batch of muffins. Just food that tastes good enough that you can eat it after you're sick of bars and gels. Well, I made the mistake (perhaps not a mistake) of telling Jackie I was going to bake things, and we started baking last night, and continued for a good six hours.

We ended up with zucchini lemon muffins, carrot spice muffins, maple walnust banana bran muffins, blackberry scones, lemon bars, oatmeal cookies, and chocolate cherry chocolate chip cookies. Holy cow.


So all these delicious baked goods make me want to not pack/clean my bike/fix my bike/study for the GREs. All valid things that need to get done. And I want to just sit here and eat blackberry scones. I'm going to have to make more of those before tomorrow at the rate these are disappearing...

Jess and Alex go on a Vermont adventure

After the Concord crit, Jess Snyder and I drove to Vermont, to get her skis evaluated by Zach Caldwell before he goes west, and then to do some serious ski training. We decided that the best plan would be to do a super duper long distance workout, because thats kind of fun, in the twisted skier's mind. So, we decided to start with a run, then ski, then bike to finish off as many hours as we needed that day. The run section vaguely followed this, over the top of the Peabody-Holt mt saddle, onto the Catamount trail, hitting up with the Danby road in the White Rocks Recreation Area, and then down down down down down into Danby. We stashed our skis by a dugout in Danby, and then skied along these roads, mostly uphill, through Walingford, East Walingford, and to the top of the pass into Weston. There, our bikes were locked to a tree by the side of the catamount trail again, and we switched out equipment again and biked home (route).


Mandatory "before" picture

We drove the loop before we started to put all our stuff in the right places. Mostly, we were just worried about having enough food. It took about an hour and a half to drive the whole thing, since we were going to be covering about fifty miles (on foot). The run started out in the shade, and we were up pretty high in elevation, so it wasn't too hot. Jess wanted me to remind her to drink out of her waterbottle enough, so I made loud, obnoxious slurping noises every time I was planning on taking a drink. It worked pretty well. We came over the top of the saddle between the two mountains, and descended into Green Mountain National Forest.

The part along the Catamount trail is gorgeous, and there were no bugs. Eventually we had to negotiate a little beaver dam damage, but otherwise the run went smoothly. Coming out of the woods onto the Danby road, we were still in the shade, and we started taking some "action" shots.



When the road turned from dirt to pavement, we knew we had come to the downhill section, and for about 20 minutes we went steeply downhill. Eventually we crossed a stream, and temptation was too strong; We took a five minute break to ice our lower legs and refresh ourselves before skiing.
We got to the dugout, and the skis were still there! That is step one. Got on the skis and started out north along rt 7, which is pretty flat, so we did a lot of double poling at first. Eventually we got into Walingford, and wasted a good 10 minutes searching for a place to fill up water bottles there. I guess being sick has its advantages; you're thirsty all the time, so you drink a lot. I always felt like I was full to bursting with water and gatorade, which was mostly a good thing.

The ski soon started uphill along a really pretty river on rt 140. It was still pretty shady, which was good because it was really hot down there. I should mention that we were trying to carry our running shoes with us on the ski, so that we wouldn't have to return to Danby (its harder to get to than the area where we dropped off the bikes). So, our waterbottle belts were so heavy that it took me a good 20 minutes before I felt comfortable enough to stride. We had water bottles, gu, bars, gorp, two shoes, sunscreen, a camera, money, and a shirt, all tied around the waist. Although a little bulky, it was less cumbersome than I would have thought.

Eventually we got up to East Wallingford, and after some more "action" shots, realized we were out of water. There are no gas stations or general stores in this town, so I was worried we would have to do the last eight miles or so without water. Luckily, there were a bunch of rednecks drinking beer on a front porch, and they were more than willing to give us water. "DANBY??? You came from DANBY??? Sheeeit, ah spent all day on a roof, but you rode in from DANBY!". They seemed suitably impressed, but it may have been the sports bras.


After a long stretch of stride-able uphill, we were finally at the bikes. We had been pretty good about being level 1 nazies, but we were still tired from running and rollerskiing for almost six hours.
We decided that the prudent thing to do would be to just go back home, rather than try and fit in a real ride, since we wanted some dinner and Jess had to drive back to Rochester that night. All in all, it ended up being about 6.5 hrs, most of which was skiing and running. Great day! (although my head could definitely have used some more ibuprofen at some point...)


Here, Ed laughs at us as we try to explain what we just did... for fun.

Concord Crit

So, I've been kinda sick all last week. I just found out something I already knew: racing doesn't make you get better. Even road racing, which is pretty darn easy on the intensity scale of things.

This past saturday was the Concord crit, in (you guessed it!) Concord NH. I did this one last year in the P/1/2/3 field, because I had a collegiate license and they didn't care what cat. I raced in. I got kinda shelled in that race with like 5 to go when my legs cramped up. Similar to last year, this year's crit was wickid hot, although there was a faint breeze out of the north, but this year I drank a lot of gatorade. I was in the cat.4 field, since I have an official license now. I gotta say, its kind of nice racing with the 4's. It was really easy to control the whole race. The 4's from my team were me, Julie, and Giulia, both of whom need like two points to upgrade. We decided that Giulia should win, because she needed more points, and Julie would be the leadout person, since she'd still probably finish pretty high after leading out Giulia. I was just the person who would tire out the rest of the field with attacks...

There weren't too many starters, maybe 20. The 123 field looked a lot bigger, and we had a bunch of girls in that one. They ran both fields at once, but it was pretty clean when the fields passed each other. My legs felt like absolute poo warming up, so I wasn't sure how much attacking, not to mention just hanging on, I could do. We started out and Giulia immediately went to the front. The first lap or so was pretty quiet, not much going on, nobody wanting to make a move. I was getting bored. Second lap, Giulia put in a slight move on the hill, and strung out the field a little bit. I countered on the back stretch of the high point of the course, and we were pretty strung out through the downhill corners. Next lap, Julie attacked. Strung out the field again. Next lap, I attacked. Then I started attacking each time I hit the hill, just because I was bored and it was too easy. My legs didn't feel good, but with the exception of my team, the people we were racing against just kind of sucked.

At ~9 to go, they rang the first prime bell. I figured, what the hell, noone else seems to care about racing, I'll try and take this. So I attacked with a purpose up the hill again, stringing them out and actually creating a small gap. I put in a good effort and had maybe 10 feet on the pack going down the corners, and I think Giulia and Julie were blocking a bit coming into the homestretch, although a couple people got around them. This is not a typical way to win a prime--you don't just go hard with the pack right there, because they'll pass you after resting on your wheel. Well, these girls were either scared of the wind or slow, so nobody passed me. God forbid that they should have to work!

I recovered well after that, and we just started attacking again. There was supposedly another prime in there, I didn't notice, but Julie said that Giulia won it, I was second, and she was third. I like it when that happens. Finally with three to go, the pack was down to ten. I strung us out pretty well going up the hill, and the Giulia counter-attacked, and Julie and I discussed some tactics for the last lap as we recovered in the back. I rested up until the last lap, and then put in the most disgusting attack I could muster at that point, pulling it out until we hit the first of the downhill corners, when I let Julie take over to recover for a sprint.

We came into the last corner, and I was on the outside, where I had been all race, because it was easier to pedal through it and keep momentum without busting ass to sprint back up to people. Someone on the inside wavered, caught handlebars with the Julie, (Giulia was in front of this), and they went down. This part was almost slow motion. I knew they would domino into the next girl, so I started moving outside trying to get around them. The girl next to them went down, into the girl next to her, who sprawled across the pavement in front of me. I tried to go more outside, but there was no more outside to go, and I was rubbing against this monster curb that I bet even Colin couldn't have jumped. I half hoped to be able to ride it out, but I had far too much sideways momentum, and so I ended up bouncing along on my head for a couple feet until I finally came to a stop. I was up pretty quick, and after deciding that I wasn't nauseous and I could remember things, and all my limbs worked, picked up my bike. Front wheel wouldn't roll, even with the brakes open, so I shouldered the damn thing and walked it in. I think it was Boobar who said he wished he'd had a picture of my face as I was walking it in. That still got me 6th place, so I guess we'd whittled down the field enough, but man was I pissed. Now I gotta buy a new helmet, dammit.

But, Giulia still won, and Julie was mad enough that she won the road race on sunday, so it all works out. Plus, we got money and schwag from primes and the win, so thats always nice. My front wheel is pretty FUBARed, since the rim is kind of bent, but Boobar was able to true it enough that it would roll on sunday. Some of those spokes have absolutely zero tension right now though. I had previously had to replace every spoke in that wheel due to a combination of last year's concord crit when a girl tried to put her derailleur through my wheel and kinked every spoke on that side, and when the airlines mangled the other side flying to France. So, now the rim is bent. Who wants to donate a wheel to me?


This is me walking around after the race. I don't look too happy do I...

Putting it together...

In the past two months, I've trained 162 hours. I've also been to Vermont (x3), Michigan, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Western MA, Buffalo NY, Seattle, Cincinnati OH, and Minnesota. And then I got sick. Huh.

Still planning on racing saturday (I already paid, dammit!), and then Jess and I are doing something very typical of a skier... run 13mi. Mostly downhill. Rollerski 25mi. Mostly uphill. Bike 50mi. Up and down hills. Woooo!!!! Training!!!! How DO I get so excited about these sorts of shenanigans? I guess I better put some pedals on my bike before this weekend.

Pictures from Olympic Peninsula

Four adults, two beagles, one car... and Rudi drove the car, obviously. Actually, it was a lot less hellish than I thought to have a dog sit mostly on your lap for many hours at a time. Thank god for frequent stops though.

Our view from Hurricane Ridge was pretty universal--although at times the mist in the trees got pretty dramatic.


This would be cresent lake--where we ate lunch one day. As you can see, a storm swept through, creating some awesome clouds and mist, as well as some wet picnickers.

We went to this beach, Rialto, that had these amazing sea stacks. There was also amazing driftwood--giant, giant trees, bleached by the sea. It was pretty cool.

Ed found a club. He was looking for baby seals to club, but only found Rudi, who didn't seem too adverse to being clubbed...






Different beach, back in the rain.

This is a rainforest, olympic peninsula style. Apparently its some of the only temperate rainforest in the lower 48. Very different looking than the stuff I saw in New Zealand.

I am a member of everything

Licenses I need:
USSA
FIS
NENSA
UCI
USCF
NEOC
CSU skiing
CSU orienteering
USOF

...and there are probably a couple more that I'll learn about soon. At least I haven't gotten into double digits yet.