Bikes of my past

After seeing Brandons list, then Adams list, i decided to follow the trend and make my own list. Here's the list as far back as i can remember-

Mongoose steel frame MTB- full rigid
Royce Union BMX bike- awesome
Mongoose Aluminum hardtail MTB- heavy and horrible
Vitus steel frame tri-bike- first 700c bike, road well but not very fast...squishy.
Fuji Aloha tri bike- Don hooked me up here and i road the wheels off it, kind of liked it.
Fuji Tahoe Pro MTB- First decent mountain bike. Pretty good ride
Specialized Allez elite Road bike- first road bike, nothing special(ized)
Redline SS 29'er- Fun but useless
Cervelo P3C- Unreal.. I don't want a P4
Cervelo Soloist Carbon- Another great cervelo, most fun bike I've ever ridden
Fuji Mt. Fuji Pro MTB- somewhat disappointed, but a fun bike
Orbea Orca (as commuter)- Never late to work on it
Cervelo SLC-SL- R.I.P
Soon to come- another SLC-SL frame

The past 10 or so is within the last 3-4 years... I should slow down with the bikes..

Weather and other boring crap like that...

This weather is bullshit, but I guess considering it's middle of December I should be a little more thankful. I just wish it'd stay somewhat consistant for more than 24 hours. I do hate that everything seems to drastically slow down as soon as November ends.

It is that time of the year that everything at the shop changes too. New '09 bikes and accesories and I think it's tradition to knock out a couple walls and rearrange the whole inventory but we've gotten that out of the way early. My recovery is still the slow process I was told it would be so it's good I don't actually have the motivation to want to do anything. Saturday evening I did get to spend 4 hours in the Brack ER so they could stick a 12 guage needle into my elbow to dig out a piece of glass that had been bothering me for a month. Aaaand that's about the only exciting thing going on with me besides getting a PowerTap power meter for my P3C! More later....

Things I've learned this week

After the little accident I had wednesday I haven't been able to do much besides sit down or lay down, which apparently leads to alot of t.v, computer, and thinking. I decided to compile some of the finer points I've learned lately. The first being that riding on the trainer might not be as monotonous and boring as I'd previously seen it to be. The next that the human body really does not like to go from over 30mph to zero too quickly. Then that random Austin citizens can be your best friends, and APD/EMS/Fire have impressively fast response times. The final that I don't ever, ever want to get hit by a car again. I'm not even that bummed about my cracked and splintered SLC-SL that has less than 20 miles on it because I'm still in one piece, nothings broken, and in a few days I'll be back to the way i was on Tuesday, and a bike can be replaced. As always the care and support of everyone kept spirits up and again reminded me that I'm lucky to have all you guys around. Thanks Mom and Dad for keeping calm when I called you from the back of an ambulance, meeting me at the hospital, and taking care of me more than I'd wanted the first couple days of recovery.

Down and Out.

This is gonna be a tough week... I thought it was going to be great because I got a new bike yesterday (SLC-SL!!) and finished building it last night. Took it out this afternoon for the inaugural ride and was psyched about the upgraded ride quality. I had about a mile to go until the end of the ride and was cruising down congress on my way back to barton springs. At 8th and congress I had a green light, a lady going the opposite direction was was turning left and came to a stop to let me go. last minute i guess she decided to try to make it and gunned it. i was moving about 30-35 mph trying to go the same speed as traffic and just couldn't stop in time. I put a big dent in her car and put my elbow through her windshield, and the first thing i heard after she hit me was the sound of carbon shattering...Not even 20 miles on the first ride and my bike is trash. I layed in the street unable to move and the EMT's scooped me up, put me on a backboard, strapped on a neck brace, and loaded me into the ambulance. In the ambulance they were shining flash lights in my eyes, checking my blood pressure, sticking needles in me, wiping up blood, and covering me with heart-rate moniters. Once I got to the hospital they were picking glass out of my arm, scrubbing the road rash, cleaning the open wounds, x-raying my back, and asking me a bunch of questions i was too drugged up to answer. My parents are awesome and picked me up from the hospital and took me home so they can cater to me and grow gray hairs. I don't think I'll be doing Tour Das Hugel on saturday. Way too sore to move much right now and doctors say it's gonna be worse tomorrow. Fortunately I'm drugged up on a bunch of hydrocodone right now and as soon as i lay down I'll be out for the night. Hopefully everyones having a better week..

Kona

Yesterday was ironman world championships in kona, and as always, it was pretty exciting to watch even from a poor connection on my laptop. My prediction for next year is Chrissie Wellington takes the overall.. Congrats to Grant Glauser in finishing! By the number of DNF's and painfully slow bike/run times for the pros and the AG'ers it must have been a tough day.
Now the only big event left for the season is clearwater then a brief hibernation for triathletes.

The winter can never come too soon after seasons like these. Some good races, alot of bad races, and plenty to learn from. It's good to get into a different rythm now that I don't have anything to train for, just maintainance until January. Now if it'd just start to cool off outside so it felt like the off-season.

Longhorn 70.3

Longhorn is this weekend, and I'm secretly really disappointed that I won't be racing it again this year. The turnout looks intense this year with Bjorn Andersson, Simon Lessing, Tim Deboom, Marky V, and Brandon Marsh. I anticipate the swim/bike to be a heated race and can't wait to see who's gonna take it on the run, which all led me to come up with my own race-day playout, so here's how it's gonna go: marky V first out of the water, Lessing and Brandon close in 2nd and 3rd. Bjorn will be backstroking playfully sporting a baggy swimsuit because he knows what's about to happen on the bike. Mile 15 of the bike marky V and Brandon battle for 2nd while being lead by bjorn. The order into T2 off the bike will be Bjorn, Mark, Brandon, and i don't care after that. Brandon and Mark struggle to gap Bjorn who just drop-kicked Tim Deboom, in turn making Lessing afraid to pass Bjorn. Brandon wins, Mark and Bjorn even-tie for second (first time in 70.3 history!!!), Lessing happily accepts a conscious 3rd, Time Deboom wishes he was conscious or 3rd.
As far as the womans race goes we all know by now Amy Marsh faked a stress fracture to train secretly on her new P4 and will win by a huge margin, hurdling over the out-cold Deboom to cartwheel through the finish line, which in it's entirety is obscenely ridiculous and completely untrue. So that's my completely unbiased version on how the race will play out.
If I were to be serious for a brief moment I'd say that I was fortunate enough to hang out with Mark and Bjorn for a short while today, both of whom seemed nonchalantly confident about their own races and it could be anyones day on sunday.

Off season and ACL weekend

It's monday night and I've finally recovered from the carnage that is ACL weekend. It was a heavy weekend of drinking that started on wednesday. The professional drinkers carried it out until sunday night. I, a young amatuer, had to throw in the towel after a horrendous saturday. I didn't get much riding in except for my commutes. This week is probably going to be alot of riding and a few good swims. After a couple short runs i'm having mild, not so much pain, but discomfort, where I had the stress fracture in leg. To be on the safe side and with CDA training in mind I'm taking another couple months off from running.
Training aside, the focus for the rest of the year is school, and not drinking beer ever again. But mostly school. Good luck to everyone doing Longhorn next weekend, if anyone who reads this is racing Longhorn..

End of Season Race

This is the blog where I say everything I've said before then say that this time it's really true. The first being that I'm going to start updating regularly and more frequently and the other that today was the last multisport event of the season for me.
This morning ATC made a strong appearance at the burnet triathlon with 5 guys in the top 10 overall. Conditions were perfect, course was poorly marked but competitive enough to break up any forming groups on the bike and run. Now I'm going to take advantage of my bragging rights (since there was no prize money) about my first overall win in a triathlon, which I unrealistically like to think will stop Don from taunting me about the time he beat me in a sprint a couple years ago. Congrats to him though on his 5th overall finish and to Adams first AG and 8th overall.
For me the rest of the season will probably be focused on cycling and running until CDA training starts in January unless miraculously the Galveston tri is NOT cancelled.

South padre!

Summer vacation is pretty nice when you actually make a point of sitting and doing nothing. Usually I try to run when I can, and swim if possible, etc.. This year all I can do is hobble and drink, and I don't like trying to hobble much. I got up this morning and tried to swim laps in a cresent shaped pool in water so murky I couldn't see the wall, so now I can't even swim for a week. The rest of the day consisted of breakfast/coffee, floating in the gulf, lunch, then floating in the gulf drinking beer, and now it's drinking beer in the condo, eating dinner, possibly going to check out the weight room, drinking beer and launching water balloons off the balcony, then call it a day so we can start over tomorrow. Hope everyones summer is as relaxing as mine!

P.S- crutches don't work well on the beach

End of season post

So I'm making this my end-of-the-season recap-of-a-terrible-season post, even though it's july. Buffalo springs 70.3 went very well for me because I was determined to have a good run for once this season and I feel acomplished. It rained most of the day and I'm a wimp when it comes to riding on wet pavement down winding hills, so I spent about 2 1/2 hours riding my brakes and getting passed by everyone. I was having pains on the back of my lower calf that I passed off as tight muscles so I took a week or so off before the race then just ran through the pain during the race and managed a 1:39, and haven't been able to walk since. In the past week (2 1/2 weeks later) I decide to go to the doctor to be told I have a stress fracture in my tibia, so no weight on my right leg for at least a week, then a walking boot for at least a month. I'm hoping to race a couple sprints and maybe an olympic before the season is over and train through the winter for next year...CDA '09!

Almost made it a month!

It's been almost a month since I've posted, and I'm proud of that. This seems to be my fall-back when I have a few minutes to kill. So life is back to normal, but sadly I'm still having hamstring problems from that one time I did an ironman. Training is back up, school is back down, and I'm still working 40+ hours a week.
There are a couple semi-important races coming up but I'm just trying to have fun and enjoy what I'm doing rather than force myself to get out of bed and despise training the way I did towards the end of Arizona training. It's almost summer which for me doesn't mean alot, but I'm looking forward to being done taking a class taught by a rabid Captain Insano. She really is visious. Off to run now, happy almost summer!

Last day off

So today (thursday) is my last day off from work. As fun as it was sitting around doing absolutely nothing (besides drinking beer/watching movies) I swung by the shop to give my bike the bath it desperately needs and it was completely hectic. They're backed up about 4 custom bike builds, probably a few other builds, and had more repairs and customers than the 4 people working could handle. It really snowballs because when everyone gets stressed, everyone deals with it differently. Don and Adam just give up trying to stay on top of everything and hang out, usually on slowtwitch.com, and not uncommon for them to be drinking beer. then brad tries hanging on to his end while picking up don and adams, and missy maintains her norm by consistantly working harder than anyone else. Often times I keep on working and hold off the catastrophic crash, but sometimes adam and don make relaxing look way too tempting. It really is one of the most entertaining disasters you can witness. The end result is Brad takes a week or 2 sabatical, lately working at the repair shop at his house, and we eventually get caught up.
On a lighter note, my new bike came in and my lineup now includes an '08 Cervelo soloist-carbon along with my cervelo P3C. Woooo

Still Alive!

So for those who've never done an ironman before, you wouldn't know that for the 2-3 days following the race it feels like you've been hit by a truck. Walking hurts, sitting hurts, moving hurts, eating hurts, sleeping hurts, showering hurts. I tried taking ibuprofen constantly to try to get ouf of some of the aches and pains of muscle soreness, chafing-scabbing, sunburn, and a totally distorted sleep schedule. I found yesterday that the only way out is drinking beer all day. That didn't help how I felt this morning :-P The back of my neck has a few good sized scabs from where the skin chafed off from rubbing on the wetsuit during the swim, then sunburned from the rest of the day. Probably the worst of the pain because I can't move my neck much since it's so brittle. And the worst catch-22 of all is I'm always hungry, but can't function without a couple cups of coffee, then in too much discomfort to eat so I take a couple ibuprofens which make me naceous and no longer want to eat and I try taking a nap until I wake up again and repeat the cycle. The muscle soreness is still present but not painful and slowing me down anymore. I just can't wait until I can get a good nights sleep at decent hours, a few good/regular meals, and the sunburn/chafe to go away. Being conscious sucks right now but I promise I'm going to swim at least 500 meters this afternoon and be back on the bike tomorrow.

Arizona Airport

Thank god I made this blog. Again I've stressed everything else there is to do on the internet when there's nothing else to do but sit at a computer. Our checkout time was 1 and our flight is at 7:30 so we're just sitting in the airport for a few hours. Luckily I did an ironman yesterday so I don't have the excess energy that has to be burned off before I can sit still for the next 20 until I get my next whim. Honestly my parents are saints for putting up with me as well as they do. As we've found in the past I don't do so stellar in airports where you simultaneously need to be quiet and behave. The only dumb thing I did so far on our trip back was send my boarding pass in with my items being scanned and worried they wouldn't let me through the metal detector without it, they did. I also got a new book today, which I feel is something to mention since it only happens every couple years or so, and I plan on finishing this one! It's titled "I hope they serve beer in hell" and saw it very fitting as a book I can relate to. Brittany, I'll lend it to you when I finish it. Happy monday and I hope all 3 of you who read this have a great week :)

Recap

Well....shit. The good news is i finished, the bad news is I messed up my right calf at the end of the bike and my time was not between 10-11 hours like i wanted. It was a brutal day, much hotter than expected, and winds so strong I couldn't get up over 14 mph for half the ride. At the turn around on the last loop of the 3 loop course i didn't have enough electrolytes in me and so my body stopped digesting anything, I threw up then blacked out and next thing I know the medic is holding me up telling me I'm out of the race... I said no and got back on my bike :) At the very end of the bike I stood up to climb a small hill up to the finish without realizing my calf was completely cramped up so I get up and push down on it as hard as i could and it felt like every muscle and tendon just shredded. Then I had to run a marathon on it. During the transition from bike to run Dr. Sellers found me and checked it out while i got my helmet and sunglasses on. He gave the ok and I ran my marathon about an hour slower than planned at 4:40 on a very painful leg. During and after the race I swore up and down I'm never doing an ironman again, but now I'm seeing mistakes that could have made the day much faster and less painful. My finishing time was 11:27:16 for a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run, and coming in 263rd place. For a first ironman I'm happy I finished and happier it's over with. And thanks again for all of the texts and phonecalls!

Last pre-race post

Well... It's race morning. It's 4:15 here and I've been up since 3:30 trying to eat a big enough breakfast, which is grossly difficult this early/nervous. I think the whole pot of coffee will be sufficient. I couldn't turn my phone off last night because then I'd only have 2 alarms this morning instead of the 3 I'm used to but thankfully I didn't get any calls at ridiculous times of the night, so I'll do what I've never done before and thank everyone for not calling me. Today's itinerary is to leave the hotel at 5, park and be at transition by 5:30, air up tires, fill up bottles, make sure i didn't forget something stupid, get my swim stuff together, then talk some last minute shit to some random participants to make sure everyone knows I'm going for the win :-P Then the pro-race goes off at 6:45, us regulars go off at 7. I have no idea when I'll be posting again. I get home late monday night and plan on sleeping for about 16 hours straight, go to my massage wednesday night, then lay in my parents' pool drinking beer for a week or so, open invite to that if anyone cares to join.

IMAZ eve

Alright so thanks for the comments! It's good to know people are actually reading this so I'll just continue to talk about myself :-P Tomorrow is the race, and i gotta be up at 3-3:30 am, or about 19 hours from now. We were supposed to get up at 7 to be at the last open-water practice swim that started at 8, but apparently Hammer and I were the only ones who woke up on time. By the time i realized the swim wasn't going to happen for T3 and i didn't need to be anywhere until 10:30 I'd had too much coffee to go back to sleep. The tension of the race has already kept me from getting much sleep...for the past 2 weeks. Today is bike and transition bags check-in, team dinner, and early to bed. Of the people I'm spending all the time with here I'm the only one who hasn't done a full ironman so I'm the only one stressing over every minor detail. The comments, messages, texts, e-mails, and phone calls from everyone with encouragements about the race has totally helped me hold my focus and stay somewhat relaxed, I know i completely lucked out on having so many people be so supportive of this, so thanks to everyone. Turq just called and needs help with his bike so I'm headed out! peace

IMAZ '08 and first post

Alright so i made this cool blog primarily because I'm 2 days out from my first ironman and I've over-stressed my interest in facebook, myspace, and slowtwitch. After reading a couple friends' blog i thought it'd be fun to have my own. So I'm here in the hotel room with crappy internet bored out of my mind. Being here in Tempe leading up to the ironman is one of the coolest experiences i can recall. Being here with all the T3'ers competing has relieved huge amounts of stress since alot of them have been through this before. Nothing too exciting at the moment but tomorrow is crunch time getting bikes/gear bags checked in and then sitting around another day waiting to get this over with and stressing over the things i forgot to put in my gear bags. It'd be great to have comments/PM's/whatever just to know people are actually reading this in hopes it's maybe possibly somewhat interesting.