Night Swimming

Swimming is much harder than I thought. It's not like I've never swum before either. I re-habed from my back surgery with swimming. And periodically throughout the past ten years I have hopped in the pool a few times a week in a sort of therapeutic way. I guess that's the issue — I've always kind of just gotten in there and splashed around, just trying to loosen up my tight bike muscles. The only stroke I would do (or know how to do) is freestyle. The fact that I only know one stroke (and not all the well it seems) has become abundantly clear.

My breast stroke is a joke. My backstroke is a nightmare. And oddly enough my kicking is by far my weakest point. I seriously suck at kicking. I make it half way across the pool, begin to sputter, then cramp, then sink. "Kick from your hips!" The instructor yells. But my hips don't comply.

My wife (M) and I have this ongoing swimming-related competition. As I see it I'm 1 and 1. As she sees it she's 2 and 0. This all started back when we first started dating. I took her out to my family's lake house in Wrentham. There's this sunken island way out in the middle of the lake. We swam out there, hung out for a bit. I saw that she was a good swimmer (something about competing when she was a kid and something else about junior Olympic swim trials). I don't know who suggested racing back, but that's what we did. It is not a short swim.

Quickly I found myself being "half-bodied" (like half-wheeled, get it?), and in no time my hands were barely overlapping M's feet. I started working harder, struggling to keep pace with her. By the time we reached the floating dock near the beach I was at death's door. She easily gapped me and stepped out on the beach first.

There are two factors which put me at a severe disadvantage to M:


Factor #1: I was wearing cut-of Dickies which created a lot of drag. M was wearing a very hydro-dynamic swimsuit (much like the one Michael Phelps wears).

Factor #2: I suffer from a condition called "Wookie's Syndrome" which causes my body to be almost entirely covered in thick (but luxurious) hair. I do shave my legs of course. If you saw me naked (which you just might if you read this blog long enough, lucky!) you would immediately see my resemblance to a feather duster. Only with fur where the feathers should be and my bony white legs where the handle should be. This, like my Dickies creates a lot of drag, and again M was wearing a super high-tech bathing suit.

I shambled out of the water like a water-logged mummy. Smack-talk ensued (maybe, just maybe I had gone into this endeavor a tad bit over confident, and maybe, just maybe I had expressed this prior to setting out from the sunken island). We looked up to see my grandfather, who had seen the whole thing, sitting in a lawn chair laughing his ass off.

I needed redemption.

And it came (at least in my bleary eyes) later that summer (or the next summer...I have no concept of time or...or, anything really). We were up in New Hampshire at Lake Sunapee. Same sort of scenario, but a little shorter distance. I think I was still wearing my cycling bib shorts (we had just done a race so this was semi-normal). The race was a little closer coming down to the line, but, and here's the controversial part — as soon as we entered shallow water, I stood up and began to run. And I won!

No I did not says M.

She claims I won the bi-athalon, but she won the swimming race. Hence the incongruity of our competitive records. I can't help it if I have long legs and that I ran out of water before she did. I also can't help that she has short little legs that barely reach the ground.

Did I mention how cute M looked in her bathing suit?

Next Tuesday our "coach" is going to time us and place us in appropriate lanes.

Any bets?

P.S. - A big thank you to those of you who put up and didn't shut up, donating money to the SSUSA trip. You didn't have to do that, but I appreciate it. And Eric Lorenzo...you live in Somerville, we should go ride sometime. We're thinking about an Otis AFB trip next weekend. Drop me an email at thomp2000 at gmail dot com.

Berms, Barriers, and Beer -
The Ice Weasels Cometh

Where to start. Aside from a couple small snags, The Ice Weasels Cometh Part II went off without a hitch, maybe with even less hitches than last year. Things looked dicey on Friday with the amount of snow we had on the course, but due to some hard work by our volunteers, it came together. I'm going to put my thanks up front, if I forgot to thank you and you were an instrumental part of making this event awesome, it is not because I am not thankful to you; it is because I am an idiot.

Big thanks go out to:
My co-promoters Colin and Kevin. I joked during the event that none of the three of us knew everything about what was going on during the event. Like a well-organized terrorist cell, we each held crucial bits of knowledge, but if we were to be tortured and interrogated our torturers/interrogators would never get the whole story. It was just like that.

Thanks to Mike Rowell, Dave Wilcox, Bryan Philbrook and Mike Zanconato for all the course work. And special thanks to MVP of course construction: Chris from White Barn Farm who, with some deft tractor work, turned a rutted out, icy nightmare into a smooth run-in to our berm.

The Berm graffiti was, of course, inspired by Thomas Needham's video (see below).

Our sponsors: International Bicycle Center, Crossresults, Harpoon , Bell Lap Coaching, and Cycleops (and Jon Lewis from Cycelops). Sweet merch was given out courtesy of IBC. Results were posted in a timely fashion by Crossresults. Two kegs of free Harpoon beer were tapped and emptied by 12:30. Bell Lap provided coaching gift certificates as prizes. And Jon Lewis had a huge Cycleops trainer warm-up station in the barn.

My family: My grandmother, Mary Alice Raymond for letting us wreck her yard. My cousin Christy and partner Chris who run White Barn Farm and let us run over their gardens. My wife Miriam, my sister Julie, my mom, and cousin Hannah for dealing with food.

Race announcer Paul Nixon donated and set up a pro-style PA system so we could have tunes and commentary during the event (thanks to Steven Hopengarten for stepping up to the mic and filling my dead air).

And of course thanks to all the folks that came out to watch and race and support. Shout out to Cambridge Bikes, Seaside Cycles, NEBC, Hup United, and all the other bad ass Cyclocross crews that brought the ruckus to the event.

I think I need to do some processing. At the moment I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, too overwhelmed to weave this into anything like story. For now I leave you with photos and captions, more to come later.



I'm still reeling with laughter over this video Thomas Needham did to promote the event. It was more funny to me than the very funny "Hipsters Discussing Cyclocross" Xtranormal vid.

There was some magnificent meat being grilled just upwind from the PA area. Thanks to the grillin' dudes who shared some of this stuff with me.

Uri warms up at Jon Lewis' Cycleops trainer station

Heading down in the butt-ass early AM. I got to go through the tunnel twice because I forgot the damn registration forms. I sat in a northbound traffic jam on 93 for twenty minutes...at 6:15 on a Saturday morning.

Parking lot capacity had me sweating. Luckily Alex jospe and boyfriend Ed kept it under control.

Leah Papas Barnes went down in her second race of the day (she won the women's single speed race). Colavita rider Chris Raymond was on hand with the EMT skills. She had us worried there for a minute, but being the super-trooper that she is, she was up and walking (hobbling) around drinking beer in no time.

I joked that "the guy on the Pugsley was going to win." Then he did, handily. Arnold Roest and Alec Petro from Team Psycho won the 4 and 3 races respectively on their mountain bikes. Sick!