Warm Up for The Lumberjack 100 Report

I'm not quite ready to put my Lumberjack report together, not quite recovered enough, mentally. The car man, the car caused me trauma. I was so beat this morning, but I did not want to get back in the thing to drive to the work. I was also too lazy or discombobulated to go about procuring what normal people might consider acceptable breakfast food; I chose to subsist only on what was left in the car from the trip — pop tarts, beef jerky, pretzel rods, and peanuts. That's what I ate today. And that is a culinary representation of what my brain looks like right now. Shit, look how I packed the car when my brain was functioning at 100%.


So I will stumble half-blindly through some lengthy photo captions, perhaps insert a couple news items, then crawl into bed, where I will fall asleep, hopefully in the manner I described to K-Sweet on the phone last night during the last hour of my drive home from Michigan, the manner of falling asleep in which it feels like a hand is grabbing your face and pulling it down into a pool of water, it's frightening at first, but then you take a breath, fill your lungs with water, and drift off into oblivion. Not sure I put it so "poetically" to K-Sweet last night, but the sentiment was there.

The photo caption for the above photo goes something like this:

I am a somewhat savvy habitual speeder. I try not to be the fastest moving thing on the road, or at least not the leading fastest thing on the road. If a car passes me, I wait for it to get about a quarter mile up the road, then I accelerate and lock my cruise control onto that car's speed. That way it can flush out any Super Troopers for me. While driving across upstate New York I was employing just this method, I had an Escalade up the road from me, we were going about 85MPH. Thing was, I was rocking out with my ipod headphones on (couldn't find the cord to hook it up to the stereo to save my life). I was paying no attention to what was going on behind me. Suddenly there was car to my left. It was going the same speed as me. It was brown. It was a NY state trooper. Oops.

I realized that I was wearing a pink-pig neck pillow. I suddenly felt very self-conscious. It was way too late to do anything about it. He just drove next to me for about two minutes, though it seemed like an hour, and then took off.


Pedro's is holding a raffle to benefit IMBA's public lands initiative. IMBA is trying to protect bike access and push for more bike access around the country. This benefits us all and it is rad. There are a bunch of great items from Orbea, Mavic, and Pedro's being offered up. So check that out.


On the way to Michigan for the Lumberjack, I stopped off outside Buffalo to visit my friends Craig and Neilie and crash for a night. Neilie is a massage therapist and Craig is an acupuncturist. Before dinner I was lying on the floor, doing the muscle energy exercises that SBZ gave me. Craig and Neilie walked in and asked me what was up. They have both done work on me in the past, and they know what I mess I am physically. Craig went right after it, popping a couple of those...I have no idea what you call them...little magnetic buttons on my calves and quads. He told me to press them periodically as I drove. And holy crap they worked. I rode my bike once last week, on Tuesday, all I did was drive the rest of the week. I drove almost ten hours the night before the race and I got out of the car feeling fine and actually raced pretty freaking well. So thanks to Craig and Neilie, not just for putting me up, but for working their magic.


Another excellent part of that stop on the trip was dinner at Neilie's sister's house. It was a cool little country place, surrounded by vegetable gardens and incredible trees. If you look closely you might see human faces in the one above. That thing would totally freak me out on a windy night.


The 'gansett's. That was my addition to our grass-fed, all organic-type-meal. Thought those guys might want a little taste of "home" (Boston doesn't have a real crap-beer, we have to adopt Rhode Island's crap-beer as our own).

Raw Milk and "Chang," a homemade Nepali rice beer. Hanging out with people like this, in a place like that, so full of positive energy, makes me more aware of what a crotchety, cynical, east-coast douche bag I really am.

And hanging out with Neilie's brother-in-law, who is a Sherpa, who has lead Himalayan treks from the time he was sixteen made me realize that, although I was on my way to a 100 mile mountain bike race, I am still a huge wuss-bag.


Just in case you wanted to know, there is a Tim Horton's right at the Canadian border station at Niagra Falls. So don't do what I did and get off an exit or two before the border to pee and grab breakfast (or try to anyway) then get lost in an industrial-nightmare-area for an hour looking for an on-ramp.


After a nine-and-half-hour drive I showed up in Manistee six minutes before night-before registration closed. Just like I planned. Right.


Then I cooked a healthy dinner. Not exactly grass-fed chicken and Chang, but it'd do.

Remember what Dan The Man says:
"Always keep it slightly moist."

A little tech-tip aside here. If ever you are setting up a Bontrager Node 2 computer and you're having trouble getting the heart rate monitor to sync with the head, pay special attention to the part of the instructions that tell you that the contact point on the strap should be "slightly moist."

The Lumberjack report is coming. Don't worry, I've got it all stored in my semi-functional brain.