The Weekend!

This weekend was great for riding. Both Saturday and Sunday I hit Earl's trails (which are flowey fast trails) on my single speed. Saturday I went out with two Jeffs, and Sean, and it was my first ride on my single speed in those trails in a long while, maybe since last fall. Below is a really weird picture of Sean, one of the Jeffs (Elie), and myself, yeah really weird.



Sunday it was Sean and Jeff (Cronin), and we did some good exploring. We sort of just went which ever way we wanted, and the trail network is so all over the place that it works well. Sunday was particularly good, maybe it was because I took off the suspension fork on my single speed and replaced it with the rigid "tough guy" fork, or because the weather was just perfect, or perhaps a lot of both.

Then on the way home from that ride I found there huge leaves on the trail across the street from my house. Attached is a picture below:



The leaves around the big leaves are normal sized [for comparison :) ], and all of these big leaves fell in about three days time, it was a really cool to see them all over the place.

This was one of the best weekends of riding in a long time, it was great to just go and ride the trails with some good friends with nice weather. I really like riding in the fall, it is most defiantly my favorite time of the year to ride. Maybe its the crisp fall air, or the end of the serious racing season, or maybe its all of the beautiful colors, one way or another, it is fun.

This upcoming weekend I will be racing in my first cyclocross race, should be an interesting experience. But for now, its time to sign out.

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!

First Collegiate Race of the Year

This past weekend was the East Collegiate Cycling Conference opening weekend and it was hosted by none other that UMASS. The race was held in West Dover, VT (where Mt Snow is) so we were able to once again stay at Sean's place. As I did not race in August it did not really rain, so when the weather heard I was racing again it of course rained and rained. So Saturday was the cross country race, on a trail that would have been sweet if it had been dry, but like I said it was raining and it was wet. My race went all right, I was having trouble keeping control through all of the slippery mud and roots, and then came the swamp section. The swamp section was full of huge mud bogs and puddles. I was in the lead until this point, this season my single biggest problem has been extended mud bogs. I can't seem to pick a good line and I just get stuck, and then everyone blows by me. Either way I dropped back a few positions, and then had to do this for four laps. I ended up coming in second place behind a storming Chris Hamlin, who had a great race.

Sunday was short track, and luckily it was not raining, but it was still not dry from the day before. Long story short, I came in second once again, behind Chris. It was a pretty fun course that was really difficult, with a hard climb and some really slippery downhills.



All and all it was a good weekend. I am not sure that not racing for about 5 weeks is the best way to prepare for fall racing, but I may come into good form in a few weeks. A lot of thanks goes out to Hucker Joe, who nearly single-handily set up and controlled all four races from the UMASS weekend. Thanks is also due to Sean for letting us use his place, and Jeremy who like Joe placed a big part in making sure all the races went off right!

This week in riding

There was a race this weekend, but I did not go to hang out with some ol'college buddies. This weekend two friends from UMich were in town, Sean M. and Mattison B. and we had planned on some pretty good rides. Thursday we did a good 3 hours at the local rocky loop. We suffered two flat tires, and by the end pretty flat arms (this thing works you!).

Friday was a rainy ride in the woods with Sean K., we got there pretty late so we only got about an hour in, but it was still pretty fun. Saturday was supposed to be a road ride with Sean M. and Mattison B. but that hurricane off the coast made for some cold, wet, terrible to ride in weather. later that night I did hit the road bike for a while, and got a sweet tailwind coming home, sweet!

Sunday was the last ride with Sean M, and Sean K tagged along. This was a confusing ride because having two Seans on one ride is tough, especially when you are yelling while out of breath you don't have enough air to add that last name letter. Either way, it was a pretty sweet ride with stream crossing (which were ripping from the weekend rain).

I am glad I got to ride with my UMich guys, especially because Mattison will be in the peace core for 2.5 years, and Sean M. knows the trails better than me, so he is always good for a ride (and yes Sean K you are good to ride with too, but you are local so I am sure I will ride with you again this week).

On a final note I have also been wipping up some t shirt designs for the upcoming collegiate season. Below you will find the almost final UMASS MTB shirt design, its first public unveiling, enjoy!

Weekend riding and those long miles

This past week I rode over 200 miles, which is the most I have ridden in about 18 months (I had longer weeks on the trainer, but you don't actually go anywhere, so that does not count). The gem of the week was a ride on Saturday with Sean that was meant to be over 100 miles long. The ride was going to take us over a few big climbs and then take us to the highest point in Mass., Mt. Graylock! However as these things go, it was raining the whole time, and as fun as the ride could have been riding in the rain for 6 hours is not all that fun. So instead the ride was 5 hours long and we covered 80 miles.

We did make it to the top of a big climb where we found this sweet deer statue:

The most exciting part besides the rain came when we were about to descend for a long time. I stopped at this restaurant to get some news papers to stuff down my jersey to keep me warm, however this did not go as planned either. The guy there went looking for newspaper but did not find any. He then offered me a sweatshirt, which I declined. The guy then said "Wait one minute" and then he came back with a t shirt, which had apparently came off some guys back! I tried to decline again but he was not having it , and insisted I take it. So I did, and below you can see how amazingly good I looked in the shirt, and it did in fact keep me warm.

We will have to complete this ride another day (that is when it is drier), because of the 80 miles I say, it was great.