Charm City teaser

Beautiful day, good course, mediocre legs, bad bike setup.

Raced Charm City this morning (and this afternoon), and I'm beat. Placed 60th in the Men's C after a crash and two mechanicals. DNFed the B after losing my chain six times in the first two laps.

More to come tomorrow or maybe Tuesday or maybe Wednesday, including pictures from the B race.

Goodnight.

Fast is slow, slow is steady, steady is fast.

First cross race of the season tomorrow (for me). I'm zazzed. My bike is shiny and waxed, my wheelsets are trued, and the tires are ready to roll at 45 PSI. Two wheels good, four wheels better, right?

See you tomorrow.

Listening to my cousin's new band. They're called The Great Collide.

Crash, and crash again

I love (to crash while) riding my cross bike. It handles so well (when I'm not slamming into chain link fences), and my remount is (still far from) flawless (--so much so that I think my new Egg Beaters put a hole in my tibia). I'm looking forward to (trying not to kill myself training for) the start of cross season.

Have a good weekend, friends (and try to stay wheel-side down).

I get so jazzed

when I talk about Africa and development. Tonight was a big night.

Classes at GW started yesterday. I had a class yesterday evening--a history of military strategy and policy course--and that went well enough. Tonight though, tonight's class was good. The class is called Development in Africa, and it's taught by a professor who's big on statistical modeling and conflict/reconstruction. These are all fantastic things. To put it into terms we can all appreciate, when I talk about development, I get the same feeling as I would going off the front with a teammate with 1km to go. I'm energized; I know I've got a hell of a lot of hard work in front of me, but I'm energized. Bring on semester number three. Also fun: the class is 18 women and 6 men. I would like my odds, were I still a gambling man.

In other news, I did my second cross workout of the "fall" over the weekend, and I've got the hitch out of my step on my remount. It's about damn time. I took a little bit of a spill unclipping about an hour into my workout, so I've got the first crash out of the way.

Note the indications of a textbook tuck-and-roll.

Pimp my ride: cx edition
I've also got some fresh new buff & blue (I still don't know what the hell "buff" is) bartape, some new egg beater pedals with blue anodized spindles, and an anodized blue BBG chainguard. It's 4 grams heavier than the FSA carbon guard, and costs $12 on the BBG website. Buy one. Actually buy 8, and tell them where you heard about them. Maybe I can score some free.... chainguards. Because I totally need more than the two I've already got. Whatev.



For those of you in school, I hope your fall semester is getting off to a good start. For those of you who've got a full time job and nothing else to pull you off of your velocipede machine, I envy you. Also, I see you bragging from the other side of the internet tubes.

Listening to Atlas by Battles. Really gets me through my core workouts. See if you can do a plank all the way through the track.

Bring me your well-trained crazies

...and I'll race cross with them.


In my line of work, I get to meet lots of people every day--usually something like 250 folks. Yesterday, I noticed one of these 250 and felt a strange sort of cosmic connection with him. He was a wiry sort with a partially-kempt mustache and devilish soul patch, but it was his eyes that I recognized. I'd seen those enthusiastic rapid movements with a hint of crazy somewhere before.

About once a week, I'll have someone recognize my wheel-and-flag USA Cycling lapel pin and talk to me about cycling. So after the tour, this gaunt fellow approached me with his female companion. She asked me something relevant to the tour, and then with a bit of a huff, introduced crazy eyes to me: "and he's got a question that's not relevant to anything."

Perfect, those are my favorite.

"So I see your pin. Do you race?"

Whoa, actually those are my favorite questions. "Yeah, just finished my road season and I'm getting ready for cross. Do you?"

"Yeah, I race cross."

So that's where I've seen that crazy before. Cross races.

Dammit, I'm excited for September 20 at Charm City. Who gives a what about the shape my legs are in right now and how I'm about 28 lbs over racing weight? Cross races are fun. Always. Until the temp dips below 20F. Then they're fun when you finish top 10, which I'm not really into.

Listening to an acoustic version of She Moves in Her Own Way by the Kooks.

This kit is magic.

This kit. This is the magic one. As my small hipster friend says, wearing the GW kit is kinda like I'm a lady, in that strangers talked to me.

I've competed in school colors before, and it was cool then, so I'm sure it'll be pretty good times riding for the first Commander in Chief of the Continental Army and his famed velocipede regiments.
Also, someone get on the road-results.com compiling duties--we'll all thank you and you'll be very popular. Almost like you're wearing a GW kit.

Listening to a pleasantly bouncy remix of Flux by Bloc Party.

I'm still ready for cross season.

I had my first cross practice of the season a few days ago, and I forgot how absolutely foolish it is to carry a perfectly rideable bike up a hill and how painful it is after a few laps above threshold. Fort Reno Park is still an awesome place to train, but whoever maintains the place stopped cutting the grass on my favorite ride-up. Seucks.

In any case, I signed up for the Charm City CX race today--both the B and C race. I checked out the race predictor at crossresults.com, and it seems that I'm totally outclassed in the B race. So I'm excited. Also, I just saw that the crossresults guy(s) launched a new website--road-results.com. The cross website is awesome, in part, because of how widely it's used. We (and by "we," I mean "race promoters," of which I am not one) need to get on the ball with reporting MABRA races to road-results. If you're reading this, it's because you like seeing things on the internets machine that tell you about bicycle racists in our fair region. And given that our fair region is filled with nerds, you probably like playing with numbers (like the numbers on crossresults).

So get to it, promoters.

Listening to Ratatat's Big Slippa Mix of the Comeback by Shout Out Louds. I couldn't stop listening to the original when it came out a few years ago, and I have a feeling it'll be the same story with this remix.