One Year Blogaversary

Tuesday Oct 27th was the one year anniversary of this here biking blog. I would say that I have more or less stated true to my original intentions, keeping the topics mostly about biking with a little bit of other jabber here and there. I will not supply a few statistics.

I made 40 posts this year, which is a little less than one per week. In turn you blog readers have visited my site nearly 1800 times, which is about 5 a day. People have visited from 20 states, and I am also an international favorite, with a few visits from Canada.

Well, enough about all that. Recently I have been getting on the bike more, and it is much better than not being on the bike. This weekend I went on a nice ride around the Quabbin Reservoir, which is a huge reservoir that supplies Boston with water. Either way it was a little more than 75 miles, and it was a great day, with lots of nice views. Below is a nice picture I took:



Well, thanks again for a great first blog year!

In the name of Science: Part II

Well, looks like all the hard studying payed off, I passed the cumulative exam! This means, that I am done with those things, and with the unfortunate placement on these exams on bike races, I no longer have to worry about this conflict.

Either way, I am commuting to school almost every day, but other than that I have not been spending too much time on the bike. I have started going to the gym to lift weights, which so far has been fun. Although I would like to start spending some more time on the bike, I think things at school with be more manageable, so I should have time to get out.

Well, thats it for now, Caroline is coming into town this weekend, should be fun!

In the Name of Science!

Hello again, and sorry for the delay in my posting. The last few weeks have been very busy, and little of that has to do with my time on a bike. The life of a graduate student is great, I get to do awesome research and enjoy my time at work, however it is a lot of time, especially lately. I recently started a new project, and this allowed me to travel down to Arlington, VA for a meeting on the project. This was a great trip, my research adviser, post doc in the lab, and myself headed down to the meeting where I learned some great stuff and also got to do some sight seeing. I have never been to Washington D.C., so one night the three of us decided to tour the monuments, and my adviser was a great tour guide as he had previously lived in the area. I really enjoyed all the monuments, they truly are something every American should witness. (Below is a picture of me at the Ab Lincoln monument)



After the trip I was busy making a poster for a large Polymer Event at UMASS which happens in a few weeks. And now, I am studying for my next cumulative exam which could be my last, so I am going to be working hard on passing. The exam also happens to be the same day as the Regional Championships in the collegiate race series, so I will not be competing in that race, or the race that was this weekend so I could study for the test. Either way, these tests have unfortunately been placed on the biggest races of both my summer racing and now collegiate racing, just another reason to finish these things.

Through all of us, I ended up taking about two weeks off the bike, so we will count that as my rest period, which now means that the next month or so will be dedicated to fun activities, on and off the bike, with little emphasis on racing. Lets not forget about the research, there is a conference I would love to go to in March, so I need to get some data together, so I will be in the lab for sure.

Either way, no one said that getting a Ph.D. and trying to race at the professional level was going to be easy, but it has certainly been fun so far!