Reality Bites

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 181#, 14.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 180#, 14.5% BF

 

Oh well, back at work, second day back since the vacation. It was an awesome time though: a little more than a week away, five rides and a hike, plus the usual sightseeing, nightlife etc. I took a boatload of photos, and all the keepers (133 pictures by my count) are now uploaded, so go check them out!

 

(I also took some video, but it needs a little massaging and may run too long for flickr, so -- after I learn how -- I'll edit the video & then probably put it on YouTube or something. Stay tuned.)

 

Things here are fairly busy: I pumped out a lot of stuff, drawings and calculations, things for internal review etc, in the days before I left, and it's all coming back. I was only gone for four work days, but right now I'm running around answering questions, catching up with design changes, reviewing comments and making revisions. Busy is good...

Rest Day

We rode (most of the way) up to Hurrah Pass on Monday, then yesterday Anne and I rode up from town and did the Slickrock Trail, and in the afternoon hiked out to Delicate Arch in the national park. Today was supposed to be an on-and-off rainy day, so while the rest of the crew decided to take their chances, we took the day off. Reading, going into town for breakfast and some shopping/sightseeing, now we're hanging out at the condo. (I am watching the heavy clouds pass by over the cliffs as I write this.) Some rain blew through, I'm sure those guys are OK but I think we made the right choice.

The vacation is starting to wind down. We have tomorrow (Porcupine Rim), then maybe a ride on Friday before it all comes to an end.

I've been posting photos every day, don't forget to check them out. I now have over 5000 photos on Flickr, 92 of them (so far) from this trip.

One Day Down

Whew! Tough day, between the sun, and heat, and sand, and climbing, and the altitude (only 4600 feet, but still something us sea-level types could really feel).

We rode the Sovereign Trail, a new section to the west of the main part of the trail system. I'm not sure if recent (hot and dry) conditions made things sandy, or if this area is normally like that but it was definitely sandy. Tough going, like trying to ride at the beach or in snow. Beautiful day though, cloudless and blue sky, the usual amazing desert scenery...

Tomorrow I think Anne and I will do an "us" day. It was fun riding with the crew today, but I think we might want to keep it mellower than they do, so we'll probably do Hurrah Pass -- skipping the (likely sandy) bottom section.

Almost Ready To Start

Well, here we are in beautiful Moab, Utah, sitting around the upstairs porch and drinking coffee, waiting for the day to start.

The trip here was fairly uneventful, even if it made for a long day: up at 3:00 AM, we flew out of Newark and arrived in Salt Lake City around 10:00 local time, and followed that with a nice looooong drive -- maybe 4 hours but it felt like forever. Settled in at the condo, retrieved the bikes, got some dinner and we totally crashed by 9:00.

Now comes breakfast. Anne is making pancakes, which I hope doesn't become a trend but she says she likes to cook so... We should be done and ready to ride by 9:00 -- we're hitting the Sovereign Trail.

Lost Weekend

Morning weigh-in: 179#, 14% BF (not so good...)

 

Here's something I can't say every day: I did a nice run this morning with Anne. Not far, maybe 2.5 miles but it felt really good, especially since the last time I did a real run (ie not counting that Hash thing) was back in April.

 

One friend, on the local bike club forum, has a signature file that reads "every day you don't ride is another day you will never ride." Which usually just sounds like another version of "meh, trite but true," but to me it's the epitaph for last weekend: except for Friday night's "Heels on Wheels" ride, I was pretty much immobile the entire weekend, and it came back to bite me...

 

Friday was my computer-obsession day, then came Friday night's ride. The Heels on Wheels crew was the biggest group yet, maybe 10 girls in skirts & heels, plus a few auxiliary dudes, and we hit a bunch of places, on the north and south sides of the river, before making it home.

 

Saturday was another wasted day, or rather a recovery day, all headachey and spent (again) in front of the laptop, while Anne baked a cake -- she was making it for Judy's surprise birthday party that night, which made things very awkward when Judy called, saying she was in the neighborhood and would be stopping by. We scrambled, hid the partially-assembled cake (and icing, and sundry other incriminating cake-baking-type things) in the bedroom, and I don't think she ever knew, though we were practically choking on our laughter. That night was her party, and though I was a bit subdued -- and did not partake of any alcoholic cheer -- it was another fun night.

 

Maybe I could have gone riding on Sunday, but when I woke up it was pouring, and Anne was doing one leg (of the relay race) in the local marathon -- I met her at the end of her leg, then we went to the finish line in Easton to cheer her team on, and then we (me, Anne, and her teammates Liz, Kris & Tony) grabbed brunch at Porters. Some shopping, some reading, some napping, and the day was over. So much couch-potato living, and in the end I felt like warmed-over shit, all lethargic and sleepy.

 

I went to yoga last night, first time in like forever, and it felt great. Tonight is the gym, tomorrow night will probably be a towpath ride on the singlespeed. I feel like I have to get back in the game.

 

Geekout On A Sunny Day

I've been using GRASS for about two years now, mostly playing around with maps of Sals.  I have the trail network mapped out pretty well at this point, and recently figured out how to use GPX files of trail networks in my Garmin, having them them show up on the map like any other road, so naturally I wanted to do that with my Sals map on GRASS...

In the past I have been able to get the GRASS trails saved as GPX files, but the process involved jumping through a lot of hoops - I had to convert my data from the coordinate system I'm using on my personal map, to the standard one used by GPS units, then output that to a GPX file as output, converting from GRASS's internal format along the way. (There is actually a command in GRASS that would do all of this in a single step, but it never worked. Doh!)

Two nights ago I was messing with my map yet again, and wanted to generate a newer GPX file, and I got so totally frustrated by all the hoop-jumping and broken commands I couldn't think of anything else. Today's my Friday off, so as soon as I got up this morning I opened up the file for the offending command (a shell script called "v.out.gpsbabel"), took it apart and found the problem.

Turns out that the script massages the data by piping it through some sed commands, and this script, like so many scripts before it, had foundered on the rock of regular expressions. Two minutes figuring out what was supposed to happen, a schnipsel here and there, and now the thing works like a charm! I played with it for a while, but I only really had a half-minute task for it to do, and it was a bit anticlimactic after all that work.

I tapped the keyboard listlessly for a while, trying to recapture my fading high, then went out for a haircut. Now I'm hanging with Anne in a new (to me) coffee shop on New Street. (Anne wouldn't care, she's "blogging" old-school with pen and paper, but our regular coffee-shop hangout has had a lot of wireless problems lately, so we've been branching out.)

Another geeky discovery: I was clicking idly through phone's settings, and found that the Droid supports tethering, so I can access the Internet with the laptop, without needing a wi-fi connection. Sweet! -- but it's another anticlimax, because the wi-fi here at The Wise Bean is pretty decent. And so's the coffee...

Back To Work

Well, Labor Day is behind us, though due to the vagaries of our "every other Friday off" system this is actually a three-day week for me, it's not quite the end of vacation season... The weekend was spent with the usual biking hijinks (Big Pocono on Friday, Jacobsburg on Saturday, and a circumnavigation of South Mountain on the road bikes on Sunday), plus a few picnics and other end-of-summer activities.

 

Fun With Maps #1: For its monthly meetings, the VMB rotates through small list of venues, and the question always arises: which one is the most convenient -- in other words, which is closest, or easiest to get to -- for the majority of our membership? (We have members in  Raubsville and Bucks County, Emmaus and Macungie, Tamaqua, Stroudsburg, and the Slate Belt, and even a few in western New Jersey, as well as the Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton areas.) I don't have information on member addresses, but I do know where the different venues are, and I thought that, as a good first approximation, I could find the most centrally located of the venues by comparing driving times (as given by Google Maps driving directions) from each one to the others: the one with least total driving time to all the others would be the most centrally located.

 

I have about 10 venues in my dry run, which -- counting "point A to point B" and "point B to point A" as separate cases (drive times can differ in each direction), but ignoring "point A to point A" -- that gives 90 different sets of directions to work through. This looks like a job for automation, and luckily I found a way to do it. I wrote a pretty simplistic script the other day, to get the data from Google and look for drive times, but I don't have all the bugs worked out: there is no error checking, so if the mapping request hits a snag it just bombs. I should have the thing finalized in a few days though. From what preliminary results I did get, I suspect that the Bethlehem venues are going to remain the most viable meeting places.

 

Noted In Passing #1: Happy 110th Birthday, Galveston Hurricane!

 

Fun With Maps #2: Anne and I did a short Jacobsburg ride a week ago Thursday, hitting mostly the boring parts, doubletrack through grassy fields and the like, and were talking about the other parts of the park. Anne said that she and Donna had been exploring, but hadn't found their way over to the good parts, and she had found the official park trail map a bit inadequate...

 

That night I went onto Garmin Connect and grabbed a bunch of GPX tracks from Jacobsburg rides, mine and others, and then fired up TopoFusion. I fed in all the tracks, then ran TopoFusion's "make network" analysis -- this is the feature that made TF worth getting for me -- which analyzed them and reduced them to a single trail network. Plopped the new network into Google Earth, superimposed the official Jacobsburg trail (found online), and hit "Print," and we now have our own trail map!

 

So, this Friday we rode Jacobsburg again, with a little more time available to explore, though we forgot the new (printed) map -- Anne wanted to see what she could navigate from memory, so it was OK. I'd loaded a GPX of the trail network onto my Garmin, and I'd also uploaded a version of it onto Google Maps, and I wanted to experiment, compare and contrast, navigating with both Droid and Garmin...

 

The Garmin was a disappointment -- you couldn't see the trail network, just each separate trail in the network (like, one at a time), and it was more "navigate this trail" than "show the trail on the map." The Google Maps trail was beautiful -- much better looking than on the regular computer, where the network is spread among multiple pages instead of showing up all on one page -- and came in handy several times for illustrating where we were. We did everything in the park, except the grassy doubletrack...

 

Noted In Passing #2: Happy 36th Anniversary, Nixon Pardon!

 

Fun With Maps #3: In terms of the Garmin, it was back to the drawing board, which in this case meant back to Garmin to upgrade my firmware, and since they don't support Linux, that meant downloading their special software (with proprietary drivers) onto Anne's Mac, and going through the upgrade process from there. Things worked out just fine, despite the extra hoops I had to jump through; now I have the latest system on my 705, and that does support showing tracks on the map (you still have to work with them one at a time if there are a bunch on the GPX file). I experimented with this tonight -- I generated a GPX of the Sals trails from my GRASS database, and will added that as well as the Jacobsburg map. It's all I ever really wanted, that I didn't already have, from the 705, at least for now...

 

Passed, Not Noticed: It was just about 10 years ago that I had my worst bike crash ever. The actual date was August 11, 2000, when I crashed avoiding someone making a sudden left turn in front of me. Concussion, lacerations, coma, I spent the next 3 days in the hospital, and back in July I thought for sure that I would definitely remember the anniversary. Nope.

 

By blog doesn't go back that far, but here's what I wrote five years ago.

 

 

Back To School

The local kids, not me... seems weird, they're all going back a lot earlier these days, not just locally and not just college kids. "Better them than me," I say, as I sit in my office...

 

It was a great weekend for biking: Thursday night at Jacobsburg, Friday on the American Standard in Jim Thorpe, Saturday at Jordan, and Sunday, which was supposed to be a long-ish road ride, but we got to Emmaus, had some iced coffee, thought better about it -- tired, hot, we had guests coming over later --  and headed home.

 

The Jim Thorpe ride was especially good. Just me and Anne; we did a big chunk of the American Standard including the "roller coaster" stuff, then (my mistake) we made a wrong turn, which brought us to a shortcut out, so we bailed. Still, pretty impressive ride, about 11 miles or so, ride stats can be found here. (I don't know why, but I keep going back to this ride in my mind; it's like: here was one of my life's high points that I didn't quite realize at the time.) Got some pictures, mostly of unusual mushrooms, but also one or two of me at the eponymous urinal -- don't worry, not those kinds of pictures, I didn't use the thing -- so stay tuned...

 

Tonight is going to be Sals, also with Anne.

 

Reading: Anne's been on a real Margaret Atwood kick lately, and just finished (among others) The Year of the Flood, which she loved and highly recommends. Rather than starting with that one though, I took on Oryx and Crake, a sort of prequel to The Year of the Flood. I can't put it down.

 

Listening: Back in 1983 or so I was working at the local drugstore as a stock clerk and delivery boy, and on my drug runs I would listen to the same Yes cassette over and over, and over, driving around in my AMC Pacer. The other day I downloaded that very album, and drove home yesterday jamming to "Yours Is No Disgrace" like it was 1983 all over again. (Other recent downloads include Oasis and the White Stripes, so there's at least a little temporal bandwidth in my nostalgia kick.)

 

 Not much else going on. Yesterday was a rest day; I did some some drycleaning/laundry/lawnmower catch-up, and we had an awesome steak dinner at home. I'd been messing with the Turner's suspension settings lately (on coach Jon's advice), and last night I did some playing around, practicing my corners out in the street for a while.

Love Me Now That I Can

Woo, what a ride!

Jon is an old friend, the younger brother of my riding buddy Joe. He's been a professional racer for years, just an awesome rider, and now that he's a mountain bike coach I decided to get some lessons. (I want to get out of the "comfort zone" I built for myself over the last few years, and was especially looking for help with cornering, which has always been a problem -- maybe a mystery? -- to me...) Last night was our evaluation ride: he followed me down the usual Yellow/Orange/Red route at Sals, from Dodson to the bottom of Constitution, stopping a few times to give pointers and to practice at good "teachable moment" locations, then in the bottom lot he had me practicing the new cornering method he wants me to master -- I think it'll be a while before it really clicks. Time and daylight were running out by that point, so we took the road back up the hill, practicing the relaxed standing climb he also wants me to use.

It was a real eye-opener. My main take-away (other than the new cornering tips) was that I'm too stiff on the bike, mainly because I spend way more time than I should seated rather than standing. Jon also wants me to lower my cadence in a lot of stuff, especially hills -- a bullet through the heart of my previous training regimen -- powering up with standing sprints and recovering at the top; he had me ride through technical sections in a higher gear than I normally would, at higher speeds, and whenever I "got it" (not always), it would really work. You learn something new every day...

There Are Many Rooms In The Super Dimensional Fortress: I was playing with my toy program again the other day, and it finally dawned on me why I was getting that intermittent "cannot execute binary file" error: when you log onto SDF, there are a number of different machines you can connect to. Normally I don't make any distinction between them, letting the system choose the most convenient connection at each logon, and I never really noted which machine I was running on. It turns out though, that there are differences between the different servers, and when you compile on one server it produces a program that runs on that server, which may or may not work on the other machines. Log in on one server, compile and run, log out and back in (onto another server), and -- fail.

The explanation is simple enough, but -- other than always logging in to the same server (or always running make before using the program) -- I don't know what the solution might be.

Looking Back

Pretty good weekend, though a little on the low-energy side...

 

I took off Friday, and we went to Barnegat Light to visit my brother at the beach house he rented -- photos on Flickr -- then Saturday was a sort of "slacker day" for me -- no doubt a necessity after all the sunburn and playing in the ocean -- while Anne tackled some heavy-duty gardening. (We were supposed do the Hash Run, but neither of us felt really motivated.) Saturday evening was a tour of Southside: we hit the Bookstore (OK) and the Funhouse (boring band), then stopped in at Brew Works on the way home and met up with some of the bike crowd.

 

Sunday was another mellow day, a rainy day... We had a late breakfast at Jumbar's with Donna and her beau, who told us of all the Hashing shenanigans they got into (and it did sound like fun, but I'm glad we skipped it), then we all went over to the Brew Works for their Mug Club Auction.

 

Yes that's right, we finally got our Brew Works mugs, but not without a fight... Instead of a straight mug purchase, like at Weyerbacher and Which Brew, or the "drink all the different beers on this list and you're in the club" approach of Porter's Pub, Brew Works does things a little differently: mug club size is kept limited, then every year they auction off the non-renewing memberships. We spent over $200 apiece in very competitive bidding for the limited places, but we now have our place among the Star Bellied Sneeches. We drank our complimentary mug (most expensive Free Beer I've ever had) then headed home.

 

Anne and I crashed for a while, watched "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (Swedish, subtitles, pretty good & it didn't stray too far from the book), then rode over to Lehigh Pizza for a late dinner.

 

Last night was the gym, followed by our first paying use of our new mugs.

 

That's How It's Done

Morning weigh-in: 174.5#, 13% BF

 

Got home last night and hopped on the singlespeed -- the Turner had a surprise flat -- and rode like a madman down the towpath. Anne was about an hour ahead of me, riding with Deb and Donna and Amy, and when I got to the boat launch I got a message that they were just a little ahead, and heading to Porter's for dinner... I caught up with them at Porter's, where we had a killer dinner and got to hang out with Larry & Kelly-Jo (among others), then we tooled back to Bethlehem together, in the dark on the towpath. Fell into bed around 10:30. What fun!

 

 

Pafko At The Wall

Morning weigh-in: 175#, 13% BF

 

Rode last night over at Sals, a solid ride broken up by the VMB meeting at the lower lot, and followed by a visit to Brew Works to meet the post-knitting ladies. Good news on the heart rate front too: my max HR is back in the mid 170's, a sign that I am no longer fatigued. Now, if only I were not slow...

 

A Sad Synchronicity: I remember reading "Pafko at the Wall" in Harper's when it first came out, and it's still my favorite part of Underworld. I just happened to pick up and start re-reading it the other night, and yesterday I saw that Bobby Thomson, the guy who'd hit "The Shot Heard Round The World," had passed away.

 

 If I don't ride tonight, it'll be a rest day (except maybe some at-home yoga), but there's the lawn, and laundry, and bills, etc so I think it'll be a night at home. Tomorrow is the gym with Dawn, first time since June.

 

Musikfest Recap

Morning weigh-in: 176#, 15% BF

 

Some of the Bands I Saw:

Start Making Sense (3 times)

Zen For Primates

Trouble City All Stars (2 times)

Brother JT3

Los Straitjackets (2 times)

Insidious Rays

The Red Elvises

Philly Funk Authority

Eric Steckel

The Great White Caps

(These include visits to some peripheral venues...)

 

Food I Ate, Beer I Drank: Surprisingly little, unless you count visits to the Brew Works. Maybe Anne's kitchen skills have spoiled me, or maybe I just couldn't see any of the good vendors, but the food seemed especially nasty this year, like the worst of county fair crap, and I had no appetite for the stuff. I got a good meal at the Wildflower one night, dinner at BW a few times, and beer almost exclusively at the Brew Works, even if I had to walk across the entire Fest to get my refills.

 

Weight I Gained Anyway: About 5 pounds (unofficial).

 

Been going to the gym again, riding here & there (towpath last night, Emmaus on Friday), getting back in the swing of things. Tonight is either Sals, or Jacobsburg with Anne.

 

Mba-Kayere

Forgot to note yesterday the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which got me drifting along Pynchonesque paths... Hiroshima, spared most war damage, saved for a more terrible fate, mba-kayere, "I am passed over," Enzian's mantra as he wonders if he'd been spared in the Herero genocide, or if he's similarly being held in reserve.


Is This The SS Linux? Not really, but I have been playing with the gadgets again lately. What I did was install an app called ConnectBot on my Droid, which lets me SSH into my Freeshell account. I also recently moved a few of my toy programs from the laptop over to the "Super Dimensional Fortress" too, minor changes and they ran just fine -- at least when I ran them while connected from the laptop.

I connected through my droid, tried running the programs, and got all sorts of error messages, "cannot execute binary file," etc. Tried again at home, they ran just fine. No luck on a google search, I just (randomly) decided to recompile the programs via the droid, and now they work from wherever I connect. Go figure...

Skipped the ride last night, then made it a late one with trips to the Wildflower Cafe and the Funhouse. First Friday on Southside, Musikfest across the river, the old town was crowded, though our return up Main Street, after everything was closed, was like going through a desert.

I'll be hitting Sals in about an hour, yo later.

Culture!

Wow, my little hiatus has stretched to two weeks, better get cracking...

 

I've been riding, but they've mostly been easy rides, some towpath, a little Sals, and one longer road ride over Blue Mountain with Anne last weekend. (Last night I rode to the rope swing at Freemansburg, met Anne, Deb, Donna & Liz there, and jumped into the river for a good long swim.) I really feel like I'm in the middle of a slump, the "crash" part of "peak and crash," and I've been fairly happy with that. (Rode up to Lehigh through campus on Wednesday, and was so whooped I blew off the actual ride when I got to the top.) According to my original training regimen, after the peak I should be useless for hard riding for about four weeks, and that time period is almost over. I don't know what kind of regimen, if any, I'll be following after I get back in the game -- I can't say "back in the saddle," because I actually have been getting out more often, lately, than I was while training -- maybe I will use the "just ride" method, it's always worked well before. By the way, it's been weeks since the gym, and months since I went to yoga. Much act needs to be gotten together.

 

Speaking of "act," we went to the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival this week (at Desales, maybe 15 minutes away), and saw "The Merry Wives of Windsor."

 

This next week, starting tonight, the main part of Bethlehem will be inundated: it's the start of Musikfest. Not sure what I want to see, but there's plenty to choose from. I'll probably ride at Sals tonight; maybe I'll get to hear some of the headliners (in pay-to-see venue, but it's literally across the river from Sals). Tonight's headliner is Counting Crows, a distinct "meh" but even Kenny G sounded pretty decent once, when heard from the Red Trail. Maybe a little Doppler Effect?

 

By the way, the skin thing is a thing of the past. I have a new allergist, and she's really good.

 

Stand Down: Come To A Decision On It

No morning weigh-in: my official weigh-in procedure is to step on the scale before breakfast, just before stepping into the shower, but lately I've been eating breakfast at home, and to save time I do that while the water boils for coffee, ie long before I shower. I'll have to come up with a new procedure...

 

Today marks Day # of the Great Clinton Water Emergency, we can't use the tap water here at work (not for drinking, or washing hands, or cooking) because they found E. coli in the town well. I will keep eating breakfast at home, and limit myself to Diet Coke at work, at least until they give us the all clear.

 

My Decision: The Wilderness 101 is a week from tomorrow, and I've decided that I'm not really ready for it, so I am not going. Last weekend's rides were the final tests, and I felt like death on at least one (the other was too short and easy to really tell me anything); since those results might have been anomalous, I tested the situation again with a Sals ride on Tuesday -- and I felt even worse. I'm kind of disappointed, but I just don't think I'm up for it -- 100 miles is a long ride on a mountain bike, that's a lot further than "tough it out" can carry you and I do not feel like spending $200 or more to suffer for 15 hours -- or worse, drop out before the finish like last year. "Go big or go home," as the saying goes, and I think I'd better stay home.

 

So what about all that training? Some observations:

 

1. I really felt great a few weeks ago. The training guide I followed says up front that you'll crash after week 11 or so, after peaking at around week 8 of the program, because this program will not give you the base necessary to sustain high levels of effort. (The W101 was supposed to be at the end of week 10.) I wonder if I actually peaked a week or so ago, and crashed early too.

 

2. I think I made some real progress on this program, and -- up until a week or so ago -- I was riding much better than I had been when I started. Unfortunately, I think I started too far back, I had too much ground to make up.

 

Anyway, now my time is my own again, that weekend as well as training days. I rode last night with a bunch of friends at Sals, and will do it again tomorrow, and will probably be getting back into yoga and the gym regularly soon.

 

Reading: I am almost done with Pynchon's latest, Inherent Vice. Pretty good read, more like Vineland or The Crying of Lot 49 than anything else he's done, and fairly entertaining if a bit thin by Pynchon standards -- it's practically a beach novel. When I'm done with this I'll probably take up The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, last in Steig Larssen's "Millennium Trilogy," and another fairly light summer thriller. Anne just finished the second book in the series, so I better hurry if I want to stay ahead...

 

Listening: Recent downloads include the Decemberists' "The Hazards of Love," both albums by Neutral Milk Hotel and Titus Andronicus's "Monitor." For some reason, probably just temporal proximity, they all seem very similar.

 

Tonight we're going to the Velodrome.

 

Update: They just lifted the drinking water restrictions! Party!!!

 

A Portrait In Sunburn and Lakewater

 

Oops! wrote this Monday, forgot to post it...

 

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 174#, 12% BF

 

Terrible accident on the way in this morning. I didn't see it happen, just dealt with the aftermath -- they closed I-78 for a while, and I was stuck for more than an hour -- and saw the wreckage when they finally let us through. Three cars at least, one flipped on its side, scene looked like a yard sale littered across the road... People drove carefully for a few miles afterwards, but within minutes I saw the same old stupidity.

 

Anyway, good weekend, lotsa biking too. The second Heels On Wheels pub crawl (Friday night) was a smashing success, with the ladies (Anne, Donna, Debbie, Amy, and a few others) out riding bicycles in in their skirts and heels, plus a few tag-along guys like myself who were, um, intrigued by the concept... We started at Brew Works, then hit the Bookstore, then Welcome, then Mach's Gut before finishing with nachos back at Brew Works.

 

Saturday was a bit of a rough morning, but Anne and I got out to Drewstock 2010 (ie the Riverside Bar, just north of Easton on 611), where fellow VMB'er Robin was running the charity road ride. Things stayed rough for me until about the 10-mile mark, but after that I felt pretty good, and Anne and I ended up in the breakaway pack in the "fast group" -- the pace wasn't really too bad, but there were a lot of mechanicals, missed turns etc, and the front group really got winnowed down, just us two and three guys, hammering away on the hot tarmac. Luckily, the entire second half felt like it was down hill... It was a beautiful ride, and an awesome route, and then we dipped our derrieres in the Delaware for about an hour after we got back to the Riverside. They were having bands and a pig roast later in the day, but we took off after the swim, we had plans: we spent Saturday night (after a nap) at a friend's house party, listening to impromptu jam sessions and sampling homebrew.

 

Sunday was a ride in Jim Thorpe. I'd originally planned to do a Twin Peaks mini-epic, a fairly substantial group ride, while Anne rode the Switchback Trail with a few friends, but in the end it was just Anne and Liz and me, so rather than riding alone I tagged along with the ladies. This was another great ride, and again it was followed by a nice dip -- we rode out to the end of the dam at Mauch Chunk Lake and treated the rocks like our own private beach. (I managed to get some "nice color," ie lobster-level sunburn, on my chest and shoulders.) It was a breezy day, and while the water was warm anything above the surface was exposed to the chilling breeze. We bobbed along with just our heads above water...

 

Last night was just hanging out; I brought my photos up to date on flickr -- I didn't take any photos of the Heels On Wheels event, and none to speak of from Drewstock either, but I did get a few good shots yesterday -- and after dinner we met Donna at Brew Works. Now it's Monday, so sad...

 

Remembering Brian

It was one year ago last Friday that I got the phone call from Joe C: Brian had collapsed while out on a bike ride. (He'd heard that from Mike U, another friend and a neighbor of Brian's, who happened to drive past the accident scene.) Did I know anything? Was he OK? I tried calling the hospital, got nowhere -- privacy rules, yadda yadda -- and finally just called his cell phone. His neighbor answered, crying, crying so hard I could barely understand her but I knew what she was saying. I still couldn't believe it, and I made her say it clearly and out loud: "Brian's dead."

 

The first time we met was probably about 1994 or 1995, at one of our first trail maintenance events at Jacobsburg. (This was before I joined the Chain Gang, so it was probably under the auspices of the Jacobsburg Trail Volunteer Association.) Colette was there, a mutual friend, and I was talking to her about biking or whatever, just hanging in the parking lot waiting for things to start, and Brian came up and said hello. I don't think we hit it off right away or anything, I just sort of knew him as "Colette's really tall friend."

 

Over the next year I saw him at a number of races; I remember bumping into him at Lewis Morris just after he bought Tomias's extra-large Super-V. I had my first, normal-sized Super-Vat the time, and I sort of knew both him and Tomias, so though that would be a good icebreaker, and I asked "Hey, wow isn't that Tomias's bike?"

 

He laughed and said "Not anymore!"

 

I remember when the bad news was going around the old Chain Gang phone tree, there was a lot of uncertainty: Who found him, who called 911? Did it happen near home, how did Mike happen on the scene? And (this is the part that still hurts) did they really resuscitate him at the crash scene, only to lose him? At the time I really didn't care about details -- the key fact wouldn't change by rearranging the timeline or whatever, but over the past year I did sort of piece together a timeline, and I am kind of glad I did. Sometimes I think it's important that I know what happened, other times I go back to my original attitude: he's gone, there's not much point embellishing.

 

As the club's perennial bachelors, Brian and I often ended up rooming together on Chain Gang group vacations, and I can say, without fear of contradiction, that that guy could snore!

 

Brian and I were sharing a room with Eric once, on a weekend trip to race the Vermont 50-Miler.  We had an early start planned, so we went to bed not long after we arrived at the hotel. (The room had twin beds for Eric and me, but Brian, at 6'-7" brought his own extra-large folding cot.) Some time in the middle of the night, Eric and I were both awakened by Brian sawing logs  -- and it was so incredibly, ludicrously loud that we both started giggling. This woke Brian, and he sort of mumbled "Oh, you guys couldn't sleep either, huh?"

 

The heart stuff started maybe five or so years ago, at least as far as his bike friends knew: he'd been having some chest pains, went for a checkup, and the doctors sent him to the hospital to get a stent, to alleviate the "blockage" they thought they'd found. That didn't work, he really didn't have any blockage -- which Brian took as a vindication that he didn't have "couch potato disease." Next diagnosis dealt with possible valve damage, possibly caused by a virus, and they put him on some kind of medication that limited his maximum heart rate, like a governor on a car. (This was probably the start of his  withdrawal from the bike scene.) He seemed OK for a while, then had more problems; this time the doctors diagnosed some kind of neuro-electrical cause, and he had a procedure to cauterize certain locations on his heart that were screwing up the synchronization. He didn't tell anyone about this procedure until a few weeks afterward... At the funeral someone told me that his heart troubles actually started in the eighties, and now I remember how he once told me about some EKG monitoring he had to have done years ago. At the time (long before his final heart trouble), it was just a throw-away part of some humorous story he was telling, and I didn't think anything of it until his funeral.

Doug and Brian and I used to like hanging at Weyerbacher back when it was a brewpub, and we each secretly thought we'd corrupted the other two babes in the woods -- this came out one night, and we were all very surprised when we finally compared notes on our pasts.

 

Allamuchy: 1996, 1997, 1998 (teammates), 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 (teammates), 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008

Canaan: 1998, 1999

Slatyfork: 1998

Staunton: 1999

Crested Butte: 1999

Moab: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008. The general plan was to go every even-numbered year.

Downieville: 2001

PPRAC: 2003, 2005, 2007

 

The last time I saw him was at his surprise 50th birthday party, just a few weeks before his death.

 

Standing Six Foot One

Morning weigh-in: 175.5#, 10% BF

 

Not bad, considering I had a chicken cheese steak and a couple of Black & Blues for dinner last night...

 

Yes I am back on my cheese game, and also my wheat, milk, egg, and soy games; new, more accurate allergy test results were negative for what seemed (in earlier tests) to be problem foods. I still have to deal with whatever is the root cause of my skin issue, but at least I can eat normal foods again, including my favorite: pizza. Pizza! Ahhhh, life is good, even if the scale doesn't always agree.

 

I found this out last night at the first visit to my new allergist, who was highly recommended by a friend, and I think she's going to live up to the recommendation. I was there for about three hours (the skin tests take a while) and the woman conducted a friendly & personable, but very intense, consultation/interrogation: general health, past history, current problems, things that work and things that don't. She seemed very on top of her game, almost knew ahead of time a lot of the nuances of my case. I was very impressed, and now we'll see how things pan out.

 

 Tonight is a training ride, something shorter and a little different: an hour of "endurance miles" with some intervals of high-cadence pedaling thrown in. I'll probably bust out the singlespeed and do this on the towpath, rain or shine. Gotta work these new calories off somehow.

Counting Down

Morning weigh-in: 174#, 12% BF

 

Pretty good weekend. Friday was a rest day, and an evening out at the Velodrome. Saturday was an impromptu rest day because it was pouring out, so we stayed home and made beer, and in the evening we hit an art opening in Easton. Yesterday Anne and I rode with Donna, and another couple Anne knew from work, up on the Broad Mountain loop. Total fun! Last night was Paul & Mary's Heritage Day party, also very fun.

 

This is week 8 of my training regimen, the final week building week (there another several weeks of workouts, but they are all for maintenance, I am supposed to be at my peak at the end of this week). We shall see -- Anne's heading out of town to visit Ben this weekend, and I may do a road century, or some long offroad ride, just to see how things stand.

 

In Memoriam: Brian passed away a year ago Friday. It's strange, so many of the things we did this weekend (the Velodrome, biking on Broad Mountain, Mary's party) were things I did, many times, with Brian over the years --  I spent a lot of time thinking about him this weekend. Hard to believe he's been gone a year.