GLOBADOM

Above Average

Just a short note for now: I just finished the Pacific Populaire. Official Times should be available this evening, and my card is not quite reliable as to official times because of a delay in the start (which should be calculated into the start time), but it appears I did a sub-3-hour 100km ride.

That’s not a little better than I hoped, that’s spectacularly beyond my expectations. To give you an idea of how good it was, my time would have been a course record any other year (the route changed a bit this year, making it both a tiny bit shorter and a lot easier to negotiate. A messy section involving the Queensborough Bridge was removed). This year I hung on to the lead group for almost the entire ride, until about the 93km mark. They went on to finish several minutes ahead of me. I finished out the ride with a woman who got dropped on the same hill I did; she was first female.

Woo hoo!

Veni Vedi Flicki

So I met Claire for the EV ride Saturday morning, we got a good healthy warm-up going around UBC, and then I knocked her off the Pinarello. D’oh! Well, it wasn’t quite as bad as that, but when the dust settled I dropped her off at a clinic for treatment of scrapes and owies, including one that went rather deep.

On the upside, tomorrow is the ever-popular Pacific Populaire. The weather forecast looks excellent. You be there!

So, What’s up?

I dunno. I’m just plum fatigued right now, and I think it’s because I’ve been busy. I’m never quite sure. But let’s see:

Yesterday I got up at 4 to troubleshoot a network outage (thanks, Telus!) that killed The Lovely One’s web tutoring session. Then I went to work. Came home, got dinner from a local Chinese restaurant (Carefree; it’s okay, and they didn’t poison us!), then it was shopping time. After the shopping, I wandered around for an hour or so, watched a bit of TV, and went to bed shortly after 11. That was it.

Tonight? Come home, eat, show apartment, fix wheel, get Bianchi ready for the Saturday ride, don’t forget to put out a tire and the bike rack, and that will probably be bedtime.

On Wednesday night, I met the charming Claire Petersky and loaned her the Pastiche. With a bum front tire. Sorry Claire! Well, we’ll correct that Saturday morning at the usual EV Easy Spin ride.

Sunday, It’s the Pacific Populaire! The funnest 100k you’ll ever do, until you hit that hill at the 103 km mark that tries to kill you.

“Funnest”? What?

I’m reading Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters now. It’s interesting to a die-hard Orwell fan like me, but so far it’s an extended defense of Orwell’s reputation against the attacks of people I’ve never heard of.

There should be more later. That’s all there is for now.

Some of you may have noticed that my posting level has fallen off an awful lot lately.

That’s because I suck.

BTW, hands up anyone here who would care if I spent an hour and set up an Atom feed for this thing. Feedback to the usual address, please. If I don’t hear anything, I won’t bother.

Uglier and uglier

Was doing a bit of proactive mid-week restoration on the Pinarello to make it ready to ride. In the process it got new, extra-ugly bar tape on the right side, which barely matches the bike except for the purple fork.

Was planning to do some sprints on the ride home today, but I had no legs whatsoever. On the other hand, it was a glorious afternoon for a ride. Ironically, the morning had been so miserable I didn’t even bring my light gear, and I was wildly overheating on the ride home, in too-heavy socks and way-too-heavy rain pants.

Short post. I need a long sleep.

What a difference a day makes

So yesterday I finished in the bunch in the race and was mad. Today, I finished in the bunch in a crit and felt great. What was the difference? Expectations, and a bit of work.

First, go back and read the report of Saturday’s ride. It’s okay, I’ll wait…now, you can see that I really expected that I could dust off the pack with a bit of patience and better awareness of positioning on the last lap. Well, it didn’t happen because compared to the serious sprinters (serious sprinters in a C race? Pull the other one…), I had no jump. I couldn’t really blame my positioning, which was fairly good.

So today, I went out and figured, “I’m never, not in a month of Sundays, going to dust these guys in a sprint. All I can do is try another way to win, or at least make the race interesting, and get some good training in.” What the heck, this is a training series, right?

So I told what I had in the way of teammates (mainly some dEVo kids already tired from their previous race) that I was going to jump early, and then maybe late. And I did.

At the 15-minute mark of a 45-minute crit, to the probable bemusement of every serious rider in the pack, I asked for and got a leadout from one of the very game dEVo kids. So sweet: He pulled me straight up the outside of the pack, parked himself on the front of the paceline so smoothly it wasn’t funny, and as he pulled off, I accelerated with horrifying power. Snot all over my face (always happens when I work really hard). I got well clear of the pack, so much so that I actually disappeared from their view for a while. But they got back. in a few laps. First a breakaway rider caught me, and then very rapidly we were pulled back into the gooey maw of the peloton.

But it was glorious! The composure of the race changed after that: the pace picked up from an occasionally lazy roll, and people just worked a bit more. I sat in for about 15 minutes, then started looking for another move. And what do you know? With two laps to go, I pushed off the front again, without quite the same leadout, and only dragged one rider with me. But he didn’t work, I didn’t have the limitless power of my first break, and the pack was already thinking about the sprint anyways. Scratch breakaway number two.

To my credit, I never even came close to getting dropped (albeit on a very flat circuit with non-technical corners). I finished behind the sprinters, but made an effort on the finish line, even going so far as a bike-throw for the glory of 15th-or-so place.

Half the reason I broke away was to test the pack (after all, if I lapped them…), and half was to just avoid having to ride in the middle of the always-sketchy C riders. It’s hard to get hurt on a breakaway. And another half was that hey, it’s a training race, I’d already proved the sprinters would eat me for lunch, let’s see if they could time trial against me. That adds up to three halves. Maybe that’s why I didn’t win.

Old family friend and avid cyclist Vic G. came out to see the race, which was great. He witnessed at least one of my aggressive attempts, and gave me a big old Italian hug. He was thrilled, and wants to start racing this year. Another old-timer in the pack complimented my first attempt as I pulled back in, and I thanked my game leadout rider after the race.

So, what’s a guy to do? I hereby award myself the combativeness prize today. And club sponsors Sisu (they make Hydrade, official high-performance fluid of Team Wired Cola), with their nice tent and drink stand, even gave me a cool bottle, which I used in the race. Thanks, Sisu!

Meanwhile in the afternoon, The Lovely One and I, along with all our parents and my middle brother and his fiancee, ate dinner at Wild Rice, and dessert at La Casa Gelato [WARNING: link contains sound effects. Mute computer before use], which is always fun. The Lovely One had won martinis for 8, which sounded like enough excuse for all of us to have a dinner out. Barring an uncharacteristic blunder with my mom’s order (came out vegetarian, not as ordered, then replacement was forgotten until we reminded them), it all was quite fun. But why oh why did they take the fig buns off the menu?!

Best new item may be the “small” Sweet & Sour ribs, which is a pretty substantial plate of side-cut (is that the right term for minute-steak thickness ribs?) ribs on very thin stringy french fries. Wild Rice has taken East-West fusion cuisine into some entertaining places. I had the venison thing, which was quite tasty, and very filling. It didn’t send me into mysterious new culinary lands, but not every dish can. At some point most regularly-visited restaurants move from the delight of the new into the comfort of familiarity.

To do: finish shed, sell motorcycle, change spark plugs, straighten two derailleurs. Busy week.

Aw Crap…

Saturday’s race really demonstrated that I’m not as fast as I think I am.

After keeping with the pack all day on the nearly-flat course, on a day when the pack was going nowhere (one semi-serious breakaway, and a routinely slow pace), the sprint happened and I went backwards. My placement in the pack was excellent, I was ready for the sprint prep, and then I started pushing the pedals in preparation for the finishing sprint and…nothing. I ended up about 15th in a pack where points were given to the top 10.

Maybe I wasn’t patient enough and did too much work. Maybe the unselective course worked against me. Maybe it wasn’t my day. I was so disgusted I rode the 200 metres past the line to my car, and with no more cool-down than that, went home. Sucks.

The pasta experiments Saturday evening were much more successful. Deep-fried apricot and fig ravioli? Yes indeedy! It’s as simple as it sounds. Make your favourite pasta recipe (4 eggs, 500g flour), turn it into ravioli squares (more like wontons, really), stuff with a half a reconstituted fig or apricot, and deep fry in oil. Dust with icing sugar.

The regular raviolis were also fun. I made mozzarella, cheddar, feta-in-olive, and Italian sausage. The Lovely One was rather impressed.

Criterium Sunday morning. I’m in such a goofy mood I plan to take 15 minutes in the 45-minute race to warm up, then I’m launching suicide breakaways for the entire race. Then dinner with the families and the brother that’s about to get married and the fiancee at Wild Rice. I’m ready for that.

See? I told you so

Chance of showers? That’s not enough. How about some blowing wind, biting rain, and misery? I need the preparation for the likely-miserable Harris-Roubaix.

I’m starting to get my race face on already. The Pinarello just got switched over to a new front brake lever, which means a little less cable in the way. Ironically, it won’t matter much for tomorrow’s race (except for the detail that I’ve cut the cable a little shorter than I would like), but it will help when I put the aerobars on for TTs in the future.

Am I excited? Oh yes. It feels like a good race coming. But that may just be the too-many-doughnuts-I-just-ate talking.

Every second day is not the new posting schedule.

Bad news on a happy day? Who cares! It turns out I probably won’t be able to do the time trial I wanted to on Sunday, because of a conflict with a foreordained martini party. D’oh! But that’s not a bad conflict, really, and I’ll still be able to do two other races.

And my intramural floor hockey team lost a heartbreaking playoff game in a shootout after overtime. But we played well and had fun. So you can’t say that’s bad.

And I nodded off in a meeting this afternoon, to the amusement of the other attendees, but after I woke up I was sharp enough to make two good suggestions that will be minor action items. Small victories, but you do what you can.

And hey, it rained cats and dogs on the ride home. But you know what? I have cat and dog-proof riding gear now. Good booties, good gloves, and a pretty good jacket. Rain is not a problem. And more importantly, I was riding. And I liked it. I even sprinted up a hard hill and made the traffic light before it went yellow. Yeah! Small victories, but you take them where you can get them.

And I gave The Lovely One flowers for the third time this week, which made her suspicious. But amused. I’ll take it. Maybe no more flowers for a while, though.

Read 1-1/2 books recently. The full book was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a weird but wonderful work. A really good tale, considering it won an award. The half-book was Choke by Chuck “Fight Club” Palanhiuk. Too weird, too too ugly to keep reading. I have figured out that life can be too short for some books to be read.

Busy, fantastic weekend planned: the Martini party that The Lovely One won on Sunday night, A little Arts reception Friday night, two, maybe three race stages, and a good chance I’ll nail the floor down for the shed, too. And it’s treat day tomorrow, and I get inordinately excited by fried carbs.

Speaking of which, I consulted with my mother-in-law, and hatched a mad, bad recipe idea with which to inagurate our shiny, unused pasta maker: deep-fried raviolis using pineapple, date, or dried apricot filling. Mincemeat was vetoed as “not healthy.”

Wish me luck.

Argh. This non-posting has got to stop

After an aimless, grumpy Sunday caused by no racing caused by a small bend in the wheel that was detected too late because I didn’t try to finish rebuilding the wheel until Sunday morning because I’m a ninny, I got better.

Monday at work, nothing special, but today was a flex day. In honour of this great idea (work 9 slightly longer days every two weeks, take one weekday off), I dug out most of the foundation for my bike shed. Three hours in the glorious early-Spring weather staking lines, shovelling dirt, pouring sand, placing slabs, checking for levelness, getting it wrong, placing the slabs again, and the measuring. Always the measuring.

The good news is it’s mostly done. Just one or two less-important slabs to place, and then I can build the floor out of 2x4s and plywood. And then the easiest bit of all, the actual assembly of the shed.

I also fixed the wheel problem, by buying a new wheel from my parts-pusher, Dave. It’s an ugly relationship we have: I’m addicted to endorphins, and Dave sells me bike parts (or as I like to call them, drug paraphenalia) at great prices. Sweet!

Traditionally, though, flex days are all about what The Lovely One wants to do. This is a fair trade, since I’m away longer the rest of the week. This day’s errand was getting a valuation on some early 20th century postcards, complete with stamps.

After three tries, we got a good idea of the value. Turns out the cards are more desirable than the stamps, and the collection is worth a bit, but not a lot. Before they go up for sale, though, I intend to scan in the lot, because they’re beautiful ephemera featuring some interesting pictures of B.C. in the nineteen oughts.

We also visited The Lovely One’s grandmother’s grave. It’s a simple slab, not far from the big Murchie (of tea-merchant fame?) marker in the New Westminster cemetery. “Gassy” Jack Deighton is buried there, too.

Back to the salt mines tomorrow, but I’ve got a wheel, so I’m going racing Saturday! Joe Hailey Memorial Stage Race! It will be my first stage race and my first individual time trial! I can feel a win coming, I’m due, I tell ya!

Hey, what’s better than winning a “C” group race? Not being in the “C” group.