Flight Test

What I probably should have done was have someone record all the crazy crap I said when I got back from my first ride on The Superfly yesterday. I do remember saying things like "It's like that thing where you throw a medicine ball up in the air a bunch of times and then someone throws you a basketball and you can't help but throw it through the roof".

That was the feeling I got when I went to hop a log by going "wheel to wheel", but instead of my front wheel bonking the log and then my rear wheel doing the same, I just lofted right over it, the bike snapped up underneath me. It seemed like the gravitational pull of the earth weakened momentarily.

All Net

I think I said something else about being used to driving a Prius and then getting behind the wheel of an Audi R8. You stomp on the gas going up the Highway on ramp and it goes BAM! Instead of going fzzz...ttt (Prius drivers don't mind the lack of pick up, they are too busy looking at their iphones and buying carbon credits online). That one is totally hypothetical, the closest I've come to driving an R8 is watching Jeremy do it on Top Gear. I have driven a Prius - my bike has better pick up.

I loved my two Rigs and I still love my Ferrous (called Dunderchee) but this bike is on another level entirely. The feeling when you stand up on the pedals is just so damn positive. I mean it GOES. You can feel that there is no energy being wasted. Let me put it this way; kind of by default I ended up running a big (to me, but my quads are a measly 20 3/8" in diameter) 34 X 17 gear with a large tire (2.25). This, I would consider a rather large race gear under normal circumstances. It did not feel like a big gear on this bike. It felt like a 32 X 18.

Human...nature. The Charles River. Millennium Park. On the Superfly adjustments

The area I was riding in, Cutler Park is generally pretty flat but the conditions were bizarre. A combination of super-muddiness, dry leaves, deep snow, deeper snow which was totally un-rideable, and vast expanses of solid ice covered in water which looked treacherous but due to the high temps, were completely traversable. Big tires with 25 Psi in them helped me stay upright.

In other non-Superfly-related news, I've picked up a great new sponsor; Tifosi Optics. The way I approach sponsors is like this. I look at the products I already use and pay good money for and then say "Hey, I wonder if I can get a deal on this stuff or maybe even get it for free?". Sometimes (but not often) folks return my emails and I get hooked up. I've been using Tifosi glasses for a couple years and I think they're awesome.

As a huge added bonus Tifosi and my other sponsors, International Bicycle Centers, Gary Fisher, and GU have joined together to broker a deal with Barack Obama to award me the 50 million dollar Dassault Falcon 7X private luxury jet which Citibank was planning to spend their bailout funds on. Obama thought it was not enough to pressure Citibank to cancel their order for the private jet. He felt that they should also be punished by having to watch as a pseudo-Pro Single Speed mountain bike racer jet sets around the world and New England, hopping from race to race in what was going to be their corporate plane, blaring Fu Manchu on the customizable entertainment center, while swilling PBR, blowing saltine crumbs out of the sides of his mouth, and throwing Dunkin Donuts wrappers all over the floor.

Sorry, I don't wake up early enough in the morning to compete with the Photoshopping mastery of The Dicky

When I Don't Ride I Don't Write
(About Anything Interesting)

Yes, I have trouble writing when I don't ride my bike. A rest week produces very little material for a bike-based-blog. I generally try to steer away from boring people with the banal existence I stumble through outside of my biking life. So While I wait on the uploading to Vimeo of the totally wicked awesome video I edited during the extra hours my insomnia gave me this morning (thanks insomnia, you rock!) I will share some more super-secret-crazy-crap with you.

If you are actually versed in the intricacies of diet and nutrition then the following will look like the ravings of a lunatic. If you are more like me and base your day to day actions on a hodge podge of half-remembered and misinterpreted articles and incorrectly overheard advice (that often...er, sometimes works), this will make a lot of sense.

Since I've been here, doing this blogging thing, I have generally been pretty skinny. There have been fluctuations (wild!) in my weight during that period, but mostly I have stayed pretty thin. Therefore, in the great American tradition of having a mild amount of success in a given area, declaring yourself an expert, and getting up on a soapbox to tell everyone else how they too can have such mild success I will share my "diet" with you.

But first...further qualifications! I have not always been thin, I was a fat kid. How fat? It doesn't matter. In the lead up to the last presidential election there were people out there trying to tell us that Obama is not black. Defining "black" as term used exclusively to describe those descended from West African slaves. The KKK doesn't care who you're descended from. If Obama had gone to Bob Jones University would he have been allowed to date white women due to the technicality that he was not actually descended from West African slaves? My point? You are as black...or as fat as people (white/jerks) think you are. And I was fat enough to get made fun of for years.

My Norwegian neighbors took Polaroid photos of me sitting in a chair in the kitchen with my shirt off, my rolls stacked up, my boobs hanging over them. They had never seen a fat kid before, they wanted to send the photo back to their friends in Norway.

After a trip to the swimming hole in High School one of my good buddies told me later that one of the girls present said that I had "the worst body she'd ever seen".

Thirty pounds overweight or three hundred pounds overweight, that shit hurt.

Unlike being some other color than paper white or gay or disabled due to a congenital birth defect or an accident, being fat is generally something you can change. I was fat, not because of some glandular or emotional problem. I was fat because I was lazy, played Nintendo constantly, ate snickers bars and drank coke all day, and did nothing active whatsoever. That is the case with most fat people I'm afraid.

I just wanted to spell that out for you because people often say things to me like "Oh it's easy for you, you have a great metabolism". I am not naturally thin, I try hard. I have the torn up fat kid photos to prove it.


The story of how I stopped being fat initially is something I will spare you from...for now. I will get on with the VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS at hand.

This is what I eat throughout the day when I want to lose weight for the big bike races while training wicked, wicked hard:

• At around 7:30-8AM I get up, have a big glass of Orange Juice with my generic Multi-Vitamin and make my two spinach and egg wraps*.
  
• If I'm doing a longer, harder training ride on the way to work I'll have a GU as well. Shorter ride? I'll just go with some GU2O in the water bottle. If I'm just commuting, no food at all.
• If I've done a hard ride, when I get to work I have some chocolate milk before I change out of my clothes. A little while later I'll eat one of my two spinach and egg wraps.
• A couple hours later I eat the second egg wrap.
• An hour and a half or so after that I have a small yogurt.
• About three hours before I plan on riding home I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
• Between then and when I get back on the bike I have an apple or a banana.
• If I'm doing a 2+ hour ride on the way home I'll have another GU.
• For dinner, if I'm being good, I'll have a big salad with tofu, chicken, or fish, tons of colorful veggies and maybe a small amount of cheese.
• If I'm too hungry to sleep later on, I'll have a glass of soymilk.
  

* Spinach and Egg Wrap:
- Begin heating pan on medium heat
- Scramble three eggs (I don't use milk) with a little salt and pepper
- Spray or coat pan in thin film of Olive Oil
- Dump eggs in, swirl pan to distribute egg evenly
- When they firm up, split into two halves and flip them
- Throw a small amount of cheese on (I usually use Feta) and some hot sauce
- Toss some spinach on top, sprinkle some salt on top (helps the wilt)
- Put a small Tortilla over each pile of egg and spinach and throw a lid over the pan so the spinach steams and the tortillas get soft and supple
- Let them sit while you go brush your teeth or make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich something
- Wrap 'em up, put 'em in a tup(perware container) and take them to work where you'll make your co-workers jealous because they ate McDonalds for breakfast.

That's about it. The idea is that you keep your energy up, never get bogged down, and never get ravenously hungry to the point where you freak out and eat something gnarly. It works for me anyway. Once a week I go out and go a little nuts with the food and maybe the drink. Other than that I just (try) to avoid fried foods and baked goods when I'm actually trying to drop weight. Once I'm racing and at a good weight I'll have a scone or cookie when I feel like it. Fortunately for me I worked in an Ice Cream shop when I was 13, and that pretty much killed my sweet tooth, by drowning.

OK, more than enough out of me for today, the alleged awesome Video will have to wait for tomorrow.

Vietnam - Rip it up Stir it Up

Spent another afternoon in Vietnam down in Milford, MA trying to figure out how to hurl my body and my bike off of high up objects. I tell myself that the fact that no one else is around is the reason why I can't huck my bike incredibly well, that if I wreck myself no one will be there to call the medics. The truth is I have the testicles of a Thai BumbleBee Bat. The things I do scare me, and for now that's good enough.

Got a terribly late start to the day. Saw Billy Bragg at The Somerville Theater last night. He talked more than he sang and did what he could to persuade a bunch of thirty plus, educated people who were already going to vote for Obama to...vote for Obama. He was incredibly funny while he was doing it though and the songs he did sing were great. He also talked about what an amazing band the clash was...a lot. He did persuade me to load my ipod with nothing but The Clash for the drive down to Milford. Hence the title of this post.

With all the ledges, man made stunts, and crazy curvy singletrack sometimes it's hard to notice how beautiful a place this is. When you get a flat, take a look around. I converted my non-UST Nevegals to tubeless using the Bontrager rim strips and valves. The conversion took well but I managed to puncture my rear catastrophically, the Stan's sealant fought valiantly to close it up but I ultimately had to stop and throw a tube in.

Just as I left the woods, it was getting cold and dark, and I was hungry as hell, the rear went flat again. Ghandi would have had a screaming hissy fit.


I've started playing with the travel adjust. It helps to dial it down for steep, technical uphills. It actually lowers the front end and shifts your center of gravity, keeping the front wheel on the ground. The suspension is getting more dialed and the bike flows like water.

Why Camelbag do you use these silly things to hold the sternum strap on? They kinda blow. They fall off and they can be hard to get back on. There has to be an alternative that doesn't suck so much.

So it turns out that the 32 Special from e.13 was not the ideal chain guide/bash guard combo for my bike, but it is the ideal device for my needs. I want to run a small, single chain ring with a serious bash guard. They recommend the LG 1 or the SRS. The LG 1 has a small, partial bash guard and the SRS has a bash guard for a 40t chainring. Those wouldn't work for me. I told the 32 Special to "Shut up and do what I tell you to do!". Thanks again Jens Voigt. You provide me with indispensable guidance and advice.

It actually works great, no chain drop issues whatsoever.


I heeded NEMBA's request to park down the road and enter via the railroad bed. Back before this place got so popular we would always enter at the power lines and park either on the side of the road or the small office park near the entrance. Too bad NEMBA had to buy the place and make all the trails so freakin' sweet.

Sometimes I adjust my photos in Photoshop, this is not one of them. This is what I saw with my naked eye.

Some Last Minute Training for The SWANK

Friday morning, two days before the SWANK I went up to Durham to meet up with another Boston transplant, Adrian Fletcher. We used to work together at Ace Wheelworks in Somerville, MA. Before that he was the guy who worked the parts counter at IBC Boston and made fun of me when I was attempting to build up my first fixed gear. "Um, ya, I need a chainring...". "What bolt circle diameter?". "What, what?". "Come back when you know what bolt circle diameter your chainring is (dumbass)". Now he works as an EMT in Durham. "I'm having a heart attack". "No you're not, it's indigestion, come back when you're having a heart attack (dumbass)".

He goes to coffee shops and doesn't drink coffee. This is like going to the crack house and not smoking crack. He is a freak.

He got his-self a Kona Unit 29er. For some insane reason he's running IRC Mythos 700 X 44 hybrid tires. The only thing they're good for besides getting flats is picking up poo. I figured this out while test riding it around his yard. At least there's no tread on them so the poo washes off easy.

Chris doing his best Dexter "I am totally stoked photo-face" in front of his place Carrboro.

We headed over to Brian's house to pick him up for a ride. At one time it was a run of the mill little ranch house. The darker areas of the facade are all textured steel plates. They look cool and serves as good bulllet-proofing in case of drive bys.

More shots of Brian Plasters' house.

While we waited I took more photos of his stuff. Hope he doesn't mind.

McQueen and Adrian.

Dunderchee.

There are killer trails about five minutes from McQueen's house in Chapel Hill North. Real tight, swoopy singletrack with optional little gap jumps and log jumps. It's a whole lot of trail packed into a real small area. I had a super good time out there.

Adrian's wee tires caught up with him quickly. Luckily Brian also runs bolt on axles with 15mm axle nuts, so he was carrying a 15mm wrench. While he fixed the flat a plane buzzed us on the way to the airport right next door...I was totally freaked out. I might have a phobia - an irrational fear of planes crashing directly into my head.

The gauntlet got thrown down, it hit me in the foot and I was like "What the hell, who did that?" and Chris was like "Dude if you don't ride over that big, pointy rock and probably smash every tooth out of your face you are a huge pussy". Adrian concurred and told me that I had too many teeth anyway so I threw myself over the thing.

You can see me redirect my front wheel off of the kind of wheel trapping slab of rock at the top. That was the moment when I said goodbye to my numerous teeth. It really doesn't look that scary, but it was.




Adrian informed us that we were going drinking after the ride. We started at The Milltown where we spent only the most cursory amount of time drinking quality beers before switching to large quantities of PBR. The place was cool but the hostesses made us feel like we were in a foreign country, they didn't speak our language, and they hated Americans. Maybe they were just racists and could tell Adrian was an Octoroon. And North Carolina went to Obama...no thanks to these two racist hostesses.

We stopped at The Lantern a place co-owned by Mac Mccaughan of Superchunk. They serve excellent cocktails and Japanesey type food. I had my first Sake-Tini. It may be my new favorite drink.

Next time: My First Chick-Fil-A Sandwich or How I Am Continuing to Get Fat At An Alarming Rate.

Goin’ Down South
North Cakalacky Part One

This trip was more about visiting all the New Englanders who have moved to North Carolina over the past year than anything (think it’s any accident the state went to Obama?). I signed up for The SWANK to pin down a date and guarantee (almost) that I would stop talking about going down there and actually get the hell down there. It worked.

Wednesday I got a good start…overslept by a couple and a half hours, got down to packing, spent about an hour more than I should have loading music onto the ipod, and still I did a crap job and was sick of my tunes in about three hours. The fact that I found a few episodes of This American Life and a bunch Studio 53 mixed tapes in the Podcasts folder saved my ears…and my brain.

I got punished by the Gods of the New Jersey Turnpike. The upside was that I got some writing done…while my car sat in PARK for two hours. Frickin’ Nightmare. At one point I freaked out, just had to get off the road. I pulled into a service plaza that had nothing but a Roy Rogers and decided that I should continue my downward carnivorous spiral by ingesting a Bacon Double Cheeseburger. I did like Roy Rogers back when I was a fat eleven year old, how much could my palette have changed in twenty three years? A metric butt load, that’s approximately how much. I couldn’t even finish half of the thing and it still left me feeling ill and dirty.



Twelve hours later I was in Bethesda Maryland, or Rockville to be precise. Land of high security office parks, Chilis and Starbucks, a lovely place. I spent the night with my future brother in law (more on that sometime later) at The Hilton. Thanks Ben. Left way too late again the next day. Once I’m in the car, I can go like a Methed out trucker from Bakersfield but I have a hell of a time motivating to get my butt in the thing to begin with. Give me a large coffee with a double-shot and a bottle to pee in and I’ll go for ten hours only stopping to fill the tank.



I arrived in Carrboro late afternoon. Not enough time for a proper mountain bike ride, but plenty of time for a quick cycle tour of Carrboro and Chapel Hill with guide Chris McQueen. He pointed out all the points of interest as his son Dex hooted and hollered from the Burley trailer behind. My first impression of the area was 100% positive, I really liked it. Good cafes, sandwich shops, bars, restaurants, all packed into a kinda funky downtown area. It’s definitely a bike friendly place as well. Tons of folks rolling around on the wide, tree-lined streets.

Chris, the tour guide with Dexter in tow riding from Carrboro into Chapel Hill on the bike path.

Dex doing his "I am totally stoked photo-face".

Later that evening we’re hanging out at Chris and Ann’s place and Chris asks if I want to go down to the Taco Truck. They live in a quiet, suburban neighborhood, which is dark and extra quiet at night. I think to myself “Where the hell do they put a taco truck?”. I was picturing the ice cream man coming down to the end of the cul de sac – only with Carne Asada, not rocket pops.

Y'know, I didn't take any photos of Johnny's that really did it any justice. You can see the taco truck in the background and the two guys who wanted me to film them eating tacos for a music video. I have no idea.

We walked around the corner and sure enough, there was a well lit parking lot and a big taco truck sitting there. Go figure. Turns out the truck was in the parking lot of a place called Johnny’s, named after the guy who owned it during it’s previous bait shop incarnation. It’s now owned and run by a guy named Brian Plaster, a metal sculptor, mountain biker, and local icon. The space is unique, a small, “Spanish” convenience store in the front, a café in the back, and a sprawling mega-patio area with hay covered ground, steel sculptures, and benches. This space is sometimes used to sell pumpkins, plants, or Christmas Trees. It also serves as a music venue. I had never seen anything quite like it.

McQueen preps Ann's bike for me to ride. The Brook's saddle did not conform to my, er "anatomy", I rode standing up a lot.

We had a few beers at Johnny’s then went over to Brian’s house for a bit. Again, unique…never seen anything quite like it. This place was an expression of Brian’s artistic vision. Notes and drawings scribbled on the sheet metal walls of the kitchen, a dining room table created from found vintage steel and wood, a fireplace full of metal tubes standing in for firewood, every aspect of it something he had manipulated or created. I was impressed.

Safety first. You never know when a piece of Biscotti might come up and hit you right in the freakin' head.

From there we rolled downtown on our bikes. First stopping at The Orange County Social Club, then The Station, and finally some other bar/music venue who’s name I forget, but it had a whole lot of nice steel work (Brian again).

At The Station. Here I had my first decent hamburger in twenty years (I've eaten a lot of bad burgers). It was mighty decent. Chris is probably talking about food, like putting hot sauce on the rim of your Tecate or curried pickles or something.

On the way back to the house Brian and Chris started turning the screws on their fixed gears, I got spun out and dropped, The Dunderchee is not a great street bike apparently.



It may take me a week to get to the SWANK report at this rate. Not like I have much to yammer about these days other than commuter rage stuff. Argh! I hate you Minivan – I hate you!

Race Across The Sky: FAIL

I made the arduous river-crossing into Boston last night and headed over to the Fenway theater for what would ultimately be a futile attempt to see Race Across The Sky 2010.

Race Across The Sky Part Two...this time it's different. Sort of...OK, fine...not really. It's pretty much the same except Lance didn't do it...which sucks, we know. Wait! Come back. Please?

I rode my bike in the rain to the subway, got totally soaked, then sat next to a woman on the train who stared at my soggy crotch, probably thinking I'd wet my pants. I wanted to explain to her that, for once in my life I hadn't really wet my pants, that it was just water. But I couldn't pull myself together and stop bawling long enough to do so. I'm always happy to ride the train too, it's such an ideal place to catch the plague. So when I got to Fenway, I was already 100% stoked and ready to watch another movie about what, to me, seems like the worst mountain bike race on the planet short of La Ruta. More on that in a minute.

Things started off well enough, Dave Towle was up there on screen hosting a panel discussion with JHK, Levi, Rebecca Rusch, Dave Wiens, and some other dudes in front of a live audience. I guess the deal was that, last week, when RATS (hey, that's the appropriate acronym) 2010 premiered, this panel discussion was actually live...that's my understanding anyway. (I'm good at understanding things too. It only took me five viewings to figure out the plot of Anchorman.) Problem with the "live" business was that the movie was coming to the theater via satellite and it got disrupted somehow, leaving the 50 people in the theater staring at a blank screen, listening to broken audio...or nothing.

50 people...I found out that RATS 2010 (I'm just going to keep saying it now, like a two-year-old that just learned the word "cucka.") was premiering last week, just a few hours before the show time. On any other night I would have jumped on it, because I would have been sitting at home like my loser-self, waiting for something to do, but no! On that night I had plans to go (by my loser-self) to the premiere of Life Cycles.

The only two mountain bike film premieres, in theaters, all year-long, that I know of...and they're on the same feckin' night. Who plans these things? It was like the Gallipoli of mountain bike movie premiere planning.


And, apparently these sort of aforementioned technical problems don't just arise when the film is live, because the same crap happened again. Did I say "staring at a blank screen, listening to broken audio...or nothing" back there? Because we weren't listening to nothing; we were listening to the incessant whining of several of the other theater goers, a couple of whom were shell-shocked veterans of the previous week's fiasco. You'd think the theater manager has turned off their heat and hot water and told them that they could only send text messages that were 140 characters long.

What is it with the direct messages on Twitter? I have a hard enough time making any sense at all in 140 characters, and generally all I'm trying to do is share a link to some stupid thing I've written or come up with a slightly disturbing and (hopefully) funny one-liner. My Twitter direct messages look something like this:

Cdelinks,

My apologies for conveying to the internet the one horribly offensive
act you committed this week that you did not want publisi—

It doesn't really work for me.


Anyway...

The service the RATS 2010 folks are using to convey their film to theaters is called Fathom and apparently it's kind of total shit. This fact is driven home when the picture freezes and what you end up looking at is not all that dissimilar from what you see when you pause your DVR at home.
These days, when you're paying $12 or more to see a movie, the suspension of disbelief must be maintained...the suspension of disbelief that you are not watching a slightly-larger-than-normal-television.


After about the third time the film stalled, I decided to take the free pass and the refund of my admission that the flustered manager had been offering for a while. I think some of the other patrons held out for compensatory and punitive damages. The manager did tell me, as we walked out, that they had successfully shown a LIVE Bon Jovi concert using the same service that had failed so miserably for RATS 2010. I told him that, even though we had only seen a cumulative fifteen minutes of this film, that it was still more of a success than showing an ENTIRE Bon Jovi concert. He didn't get it.


I debated with Natasha and Chris for a while as to whether we should take the free passes and head to a showing of Red, but we opted for the guaranteed good time of Beer instead. Probably a wise choice given we could only come up with three Bruce Willis movies, between the three of us, that didn't suck...that's one per person...and one of those was The Fifth Element.

At one point, over beers, Chris asked me if I'd ever done Leadville or if I'd ever do it. "No and no fucking way" I replied. "It's a stupid, overrated, hyped-up, out-and-back, gravel road race, with zero singletrack, all above 10,000 feet, that you have to enter a lottery to get into. There are plenty of hundred milers out there that don't suck that you can actually get into."

"Wow, you're kind of a dick" Chris thought to himself.

If I were as witty in person as I allegedly am in print, I would have gone on to say:

"People who think Leadville is awesome are like the Tea Baggers of the mountain bike racing world, they think that if they keep saying something that isn't true over and over again, long enough, it will become true — "Leadville is the BEST!" "Global warming is a HOAX!" "Leadville is AWESOME!" "Obama is a MUSLIM-SOCIALIST-FASCIST!"

Wow, I am a dick.

"You're not pirating this are you?"

"Yup, do you realize the street value of videos of blank screens taken with point and shoot cameras?"