What The Hell Do I Know About Not-Partying or Anything Else?

For some insane reason I was up at 5:20 his morning. Allow me to reiterate that this is NOT normal for me. Alright, maybe it's normal, but it's definitely not planned and it's certainly not pleasant. I tried to look at the bright side and kid myself that I had begun my "waking up early training" for the Wilderness 101...and The High Cascades 100...and probably The Breck Epic. Ya, that's a whole lot of big, crazy, racing stuff, I have bitten off more than I can chew, both physically and financially. Expect a frantic fire sale sometime in the next couple weeks. Hopefully I'll still have some body organs left to sell on the black market to get me to SSWC10 NZ (Cough! Crack pipe dream — cough!). As unlikely as my trip to NZ might seem, the Oregon and Colorado trips are definites, the plane tickets have been bought, I gotta go. And of course the 101 is solid as well. My buddy Will C. will be picking me up Friday AM for the drive down to State College, PA whether I like it or not. I'm less nervous about this 101 than any previous edition...all two of the ones I've attended, ONE of which I wrote about. The back to back 6 hour races have given me the confidence that, for once, I might actually have the miles in my legs necessary to do this thing effectively. This will be my first geared edition, which gives me the confidence that I will be able to crush my Breck Epic blogger grant buddy, Montana Miller. He'll be on one of those ridiculous single speeds. Those things are wicked, wicked slow, who the hell would choose to Jazz-Funk one of those things (I'm not giving up my quest to retire and replace "rock this" or "rock that.") of his own free will? At the very least I hope not to have my fragile soul brutally squashed like it was in '07. Or, more importantly, not as brutally squashed as Dicky's soul was at the ORAMM this past weekend.

The massage I just had a couple hours ago down at Big Hands Massage seems to have worked out the issue I was having with the recurring sensations that felt like Ninjas jabbing hot shurikens into my scapula. If I'm not lying on the ground, rolling around on a miniature can of coke like I was in the Pats peak feed-zone two hours into the 101, I'll be ecstatic.

Just going to put it out there,
I still have no place to stay and no transportation in Bend or Breck. I smell nice and I am sometimes quite quiet and sedate in person.


This past weekend was a weekend for not riding a lot and going out to drink the beers with the peoples. Friday was a bust, I was way too cooked to go out, but Saturday night I ventured out to Charlie's Kitchen where I met up with some local, awesome cycling people, people like Adam Myerson and Leah Pappas-Barnes. There was even a brief, but very pleasant Matt and Mo sighting. We sat at a table, three feet from one another, but it was so loud, we had to text each other everything we had to say all night. Then we discussed our social-media campaign — Adam would tweet about it, Leah would post it to facebook, and then I would blog about it.


Our neighbors at the next table over may have only tipped a dollar on a $60 tab, but the dollar was in the form of an origami elephant, but we couldn't step to that. Wait...do paper airplanes count as origami? What about a sailor's hat? No? Damn.

Seth's shirt reads : "Shit Sandwich"

It was nice to pretend I had a life outside trying to race and trying to work and trying to write things besides this crap and trying to sleep, if only for a few hours.

The S.C.U.L. "battalion" navigates the "Harvard Constellation"

As we left the bar we saw a S.C.U.L. ride roll by, some of them on their tall bikes. I have been on a few S.C.U.L. rides in my time, none of them at all recently. There seemed to be a shift going on during the time I associated with them. At first the rides were like a raucous parades of incredibly-dangerous-to-ride-bikes that went from party to party, it was mayhem. On subsequent rides there was way more time spent doing "recon" at parties with drawn out, coded discussions ensuing and less time spent actually partying. These days it appears that they have effectively become LARPERS on bikes, with their own lingo and ranking structure. In fact, I think they prefer to be called "BLARPERS" (Bicycling Live Action Role Players). Who knows, maybe all that craziness was part of the deal all those years back too, I could have been too hopped up on PBR's to notice. But of course I'm just a "bandit" or a "CBU" (carbon-based unit), rolling around on my "civilian ship." What the hell do I know about not-partying or anything else?