NEWSFLASH: I'm terrible at blogging, but let's catch up...

OK, so obviousely I'm terrible at blogging.  Mostly I'm going to blame school, which I'm also terrible at, for my blogging demise.  But now it is summertime and I'm traveling to bike races.  So no excuses right?  I'm not going to promise anything, but hopefully I will be updating a bit more regularly.  Anyways let's see if I can put the past 2 months and 4 days since my last post into one entry:

I did some collegiate racing and the Tour of Walla Walla in April.  All that was cool, Walla Walla went well.  Normally I'm feeling pretty slow still at this point in the year, but things have been going well this season.  I won the collegiate conference criterium the day after my teammate, Ian Crane, won the conference road race.

Next up was the WA State Championship road race.  Long story short I was in a breakaway with a Canadian who turned out to be really strong.  He won the race and I got 2nd.  But since he was Canadian I got the State Championship title.  Winning actual bike races is way cooler though.

Then I went to Collegiate Road Nationals with my WWU homies.  The road race was a hard one.  I was doing real good going in some breakaways and what not, then I got tired and finished 8th.  We pedaled to 2nd in the TTT which is one of the more awesome events that a team can do.  You know, just through-and-off with your bros. The crit was fun too.  First I was the breakaway by myself for a long time.  Then at the end there was a breakaway that I was not in, and Ian wasn't in it either.  Ian wanted to do some sprinting.  So I rode the front from 6 laps to go until 2 laps to go.  Then there was no more breakaway.  Ian got 2nd in the sprint and we were happy with another medal for the team.  This photo sums up the collegiate nationals experience for most participants.

So then I did some training and some resting.  Then I won the Ballard Crit while most of my teammates were racing the the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic.   I was super stoked to win one of Seattle's coolest races. Apparently I'm a "sprinter", but let's not get ahead of ourselves.  I'm glad to be back racing with Ian and helping to position him for some real sprinting. Good to know that I can get it done when it needs to get done though. Thanks to Wheelsinfocus for the photo.

Now I'm in Milwaukee, WI to race the first half of the Tour of America's Dairyland.  It is a series of mostly crits which should provide good racing and some good prep for next week's nationals in Georgia.  So now that all I have to is race a 60-90min crit each day there should be plenty of time for blogging right?

Upgrades

Life has been upgraded on numerous fronts!  I am now an automobile owner again after being a carless hobo since September.  I don't just own any automobile though, behold my 1986 VW Vanagon!

 I'm pretty stoked about this purchase.  This isn't just an upgrade from no car to car.  This is a lifestyle upgrade.  This machine can take you and your stuff places in style!  It didn't come with a middle seat, but that is probably a good thing, because otherwise there would be a middle seat sitting in my garage right now.  So within 24hrs of purchase I set about filling the void left by this middle seat with an easy to clean floor and some secure bicycle mounting devices.

 A quick trip to the hardware store and I was off and running.  I'm not usually much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to non-bicycle things.  But with a little help I created a pretty slick floor that should be easy to sweep out and can also be easily removed.

 After the floor came the bike mounts.  These can also be easily removed so that when not going bikin' there is lots of space for activities, as demonstrated here.

I'm still waiting on some more bike mounts to finish it off, but 4 bikes will easily be accommodated.  I'm quite excited about the possibilities of my Vanagon.

Wait... I haven't directly written about bike racing yet in this blog entry...  So ya, I went to the Cherry Blossom Classic a couple weeks ago.  It was relatively awesome.  Young buck Logan Owen won the first stage for our team.  Then we did a time trial and a criterium in the dark. Oh my!  Those were plenty of fun, but the last stage was a legend that I had only heard of beforehand.  Here are some of my traveling companions discussing it over morning coffee.

Oh wait, actually they claimed to be "warming up" for the stage 2 time trial at this point.  Either way the last stage lived up to its hype with a lot of climbing and some sweet gravel.  I got into the early breakaway which turned into the leader's group on the final lap.  I hung on until the end, but I was real tired and could only muster 4th on the stage.  I did leap up to 6th overall though.  These results were enough to finish off my category 1 road upgrade.  So there you have it, life upgrade number 2 for the week.  I'll leave you with some action from the Cherry Blossom gravel. Thanks to Oregon Cycling Action for the photo.

March Bike Racing - All in the Rain - No Matter the Latitude

Well first off, I raced bikes in March for the first time in a few years.  Then I won the first three that I did!  I went down to the OSU/UO collegiate ominium in Corvallis and Eugene, OR.  It was fun hanging out with my WWU homies and getting it done in the wet road race and TTT on Saturday, and then a nice windy crit on Sunday.  After the early bike racing it was back to school for a week of finals.  There was Greek Mythology to be conquered!  I did some mild conquering, but the Craneimal still bested me by a couple points.  I did manage to capture a pretty interesting scene from the collegiate weekend below:

It appeared to be some sort of vigourous mid-race cramp massage therapy...  But, now I'm in sunny California to do a lot of training myself and some the first big races of the year for my teammates.  Wait...  California has not been so sunny...  Yesterday we drove to do a local crit through a very legitimate rain storm.  Like the kind of rain/wind/flash flood combo that makes even the knuckles of some Northwesterners a bit white on the freeway.  Especially when the wipers on the team van stop working completely...  Despite all of that though the industrial park crit was a good time.  Despite any stereotypes we may have had about the Socal peleton's ability to ride in the rain, everyone kept it upright and had a good time.  Today I found the sunny part of California though, so I'll share it with you.

After today's mellow ride Ian, Kennett and I went on an epic hike through the jungle.  Kennett found a rather strange plant.

OK, actually this was just in the back yard of one of our host houses...  Anyways California is great and I'm looking forward to some long rides coming up this week.  Hopefully I'll update again a bit sooner than last time.

The Off Season and Beyond!

Well it's been awhile... So a good number of things have happened.  After getting home from Europe I settled back into Bellingham and tried to get back in the school gear.  So that is what I spent most of my month or so long off season doing.  It was only interrupted by a week long visit from my cyclocross season traveling buddy Adam.  Adam likes to ride mountain bikes so I rode my mountain bike more days of the week than not for a bit.  We had some good fun and it was a good way to get back into the bike riding.

After Adam returned to Oregon I started up the training again and somehow I lucked out with nearly 3 weeks of great weather.  I think moslty I just got really lucky and had sun for the long days and most the rain came on the shorter days.  Until this past week when the weather got real for Bellingham and we got a decent amount of snow.  Which of course led to my nearly only once per year snow adventure involving some skinny skis.  It turns out you don't get any better at something if you only do it once per year.  Nonetheless I still headed up with some buddies from the WWU Cycling Team and proceeded to flounder around in the snow.  I think I did do some gliding on the skis, but there was a lot of pushing and a lot of soreness afterwards. I may have crashed a few times too...  I did my best to pretend I knew what I was doing though.  We managed to ski 8k through the 6inches or so of powder that was on top of the groomed-awhile-ago track.  Then I came home and looked up some ski race stuff.  8k is about half the distance of the shortest xc ski race.  Respect for those that do that and longer.  Oh ya, they also do it way faster too...