Kind of alive… Finally an update!!!!

My dear wife being herself!

This is us at Dachstein - click for more pics

Before the carnage - Click for more pics

After the carnage

It’s been ages since I’ve written.

Why?

Well, my excuse boils down to my new job and trying to ride as much as I can. Sadly, a large part of the time the two goals seem to cancel each other out.

Not only have I pretty much vanished as a web presence/blogger, I’ve also not been able or made time for a few other things (i.e. Phone calls, emails, stuff around the house, the list goes on).

For that, I apologise. Things are slowly starting to normalize, a bit. I’m managing, or should I say, we’re adjusting to me working full-time and not having anywhere near as much time for all the things I could do as a freelancer.

Kera and I have begun going on one, if not two long rides (100 plus kilometers) each weekend. Also, I’m doing my best to get out at least twice a week for a ride with intervals. Strangely, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape because of those rides.

That was two weeks ago. Almost no exercise for me since then. We’ve been on a long weekend trip to Hallstatt, Austria since which was great and we both needed.

Wow, that was written a few weeks ago. Things have changed a bit…. or, a lot!

It’s already snowed here. I crashed pretty hard in a race and have hardly exercised in a month and we’re both very busy with work.

Right now, Kera us in Australia. In the last month, she’s travelled to Toronto, Canada, Seattle, London, Zurich and now she’s taking on the Southern Hemisphere. Needless to say she’s a busy girl.

I just felt the need to get something posted for the first time since June. Please excuse the absence and scattered thoughts. This was all typed while on the subway or train between classes.

Ciao!

I’m a Turkey…you’re a Turkey!

I need a vacation!

Turkey.. not for Thanksgiving

We’re off to Turkey for vacation in just a couple of hours. Can hardly wait as it’s been something like 7 months since we’ve done anything other than weekend trips and both Kera and I are tired and ready for a few days away. On this trip we’re doing a few days of see kayaking along the Southeastern coast. Should be fun. Here is the link to our tour (which is just Kera, myself and the guide).

Christian is taking care of Baby-cat. Thanks man!

In other news, I’m now working for another school. It’s called Accelingua. I’m attempting to get a staff job with them as I am really feeling the need to have a “real” job and have responsibilities. Funny how that works.

So, we’ll take lots of photos which will go up when we return.

Sorry that we’ve been really really out of touch. Like I mentioned, we’re both pretty burned out and we’ve been quite busy even when we’re around home. Seems like we never stop running.

I have my first race of the year the weekend ever we get back. It’s a flat-ish 90 km race around Munich. Still haven’t committed to doing it singlespeed even though that would be my preference. If I can just find a gear ratio that won’t kill me I should be golden.

SiS race report and other things… naturally!

So, we went to SiS (Schlaflos im Sattel) last weekend. I’m glad we did. It was great to see friends from throughout the world there. This little (only 400+ participants) is one of the best events this side of the Atlantic. Phaty, Keili and crew do a fantastic job and are to be commended for their efforts. THANKS GANG! What is also commendable is the efforts of the local people. They come out, volunteer, work hard, make food, serve drinks, etc. for 3+ days. I’m sure that they make a bunch of money from all of us, but it wouldn’t be the event that it is without the participation of the people of Weidenthal.

Here are a few photos from the event. Many more here and here.

This ball was about 6′ tall and had fake snow falling inside.

Toilet out of order. That’s bad at a bike event!

Marty rocking a lap in partion BWR gear.

Me (sleeping whilst standing…I think).

My teammate Matthias coming in at the end of the race.

Another of Matthias

A beautiful singlespeed Gary Fisher Superfly

That’s me there with all the colors on the lead-out lap.

Our friend David….always smiling

There’s a lot of love going on (actually, it was after bike jousting).

Tattoos and piercings everywhere

Even belt-drive fixies could be found

Also, a Ti Independent Fabrication singlespeed it belongs to Ken who is really nice and fast… bastard!

Yup… clueless me before the start.

Marty hitting the Start/Finish at some point during the night.

Busted! Got to love the Dopers Suck socks I bought from Ken.

A great shot of Ed that I stole from Keili’s photos. Thanks Keili.

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So…. after all those pics, it’s probably time to write just a bit. We hit town on Friday, went for a ride with Ken and then had fun chatting with everyone we know and having a few drinks. We woke the next morning to a beautiful day, had breakfast, ate some lunch, chatted some more and then did a lap of the course. We watched a bit of the singlespeed race, watched the jousting, took lots of photos and generally relaxed.

The race started just before 21:00 and I did the first two laps. I felt surprisingly good. During the first lap I, somehow, caught up with Marty and tailed him up the long climb to the top of the mountain. It was really great to have teammates in like uniforms for a change. Most of the races that I go to I don’t really know anyone and it’s good to have people you know around. Anyway, I cranked out a couple of first laps and then Matthias went out. After that, Armin and then Christian. While they were out I had a shot of really good Scotch and some food up at the refreshment booth and headed back for a nap. I awoke about 2:00 after what amounted to an hours sleep and then waited. No one had awoken me and I didn’t know that Christian had already done his two laps and then he rolled around after a break with food. He dropped the food and off he went for a third lap. Way to go man!

Then I hit the trail again and cranked out my fastest lap of the night. By then, there was a beautiful tracked worked in to even the most difficult parts of the course. Sadly, most of the way through my 3rd lap I ran across the ambulance picking up their second victim of the night. He’d fallen and broken his pelvis (OUCH!!!). The first had hurt himself but not too badly (Phaty informed me that both hurt guys have said that they’ll be back again next year). Luckily, the worst injuries I received amounted to sore muscles and a small rash from Stinging Nettles wrapping around my arm on the previous days fun ride.

Another couple of comments. This race has to have a large majority of the 29′ers and singlespeeds from Germany if not the middle part of Europe in general. If you’ve got the time, cruise through a lot of the photos. There are some beauties there. Thanks again to everyone that had something to do with this race. It’s the best!

My little Dinotte light performed well as did all my various Ergon products (BC2 pack, grips and gloves). I’ve mentioned it before and will again. I love Ergon! My Black Sheep is, finally, starting to act the way that I’ve always wanted it to. I might have been the week we spent together in Italy. Who knows? Anyway, if/when I get my seatpost I’ll have a complete bike after nearly two years of waiting. Is it time to get a new one yet?

This is a little pic of said seatpost if/when it ever comes.

A little home news. I’m applying for another job at the school doing the same job as I attempted to get the last time but at the school that I teach in nearly daily. Wish me luck. At 46 I suppose it’s time that I attempt to grow up and have a ‘real’ job.

O.K., now that I’ve worn out your eyes and brain…. I’m signing off.

FYI – Ken… still working on the tagged Blog.

Tegernseer Marathon ’08

The only photos of the event where I look like I’m moving more than about 4 km/hour. The above were taken by Sportograf.de and the ones below were taken by Kera. A few other photos can be found here and here.

Last Sunday I ‘participated’ in the Tegernseer Marathon 2008 version and did the C route. That means 65 kilometers with 2.483 meters (8,146′) of climbing. I say participating because my performance didn’t warrant the term racing.

I hadn’t signed up in advance so I missed out on the really cool ClimaCool Adidas running shirt that they give the other racers or ‘participants’. I did get a few goodies in my bag though. I got 2 Powergels and a Chocolate Harvestbar (the only Powerbar that I can bear to put in my mouth) and one of the regular extruded (Soylent Green-like bar). The regular ones are just too similar to 10 year old toothpaste or Soylent Green to me.

After riding (mostly) a well laid-out course with a lot of up and the only down being sloppy-rugged singletrack, I was pretty beaten up. Quite a few riders would come up to me after the long 30 minute downhills and congratulate me on doing it with a rigid fork. It was kind of funny. On the last downhill I’d finally decided that this wasn’t either A) fun anymore or B) funny at all. Luckily, just past that, I hit what amounted to the last few kilomoters of the course. The back side of Walburg will look familiar to some of you as you saw photos of it when we went sledding with our friends back in the winter. See below or here or here. Oh… as a side note, there are a lot of rocks under that snow which I found on the way down in the race.

In the end, I finished 73rd in my category and 241st overall for the ‘C’ course in 5:20:06.02. It probably goes down as one of my worst races in recent memory even considering my abysmal performance thus far this year. I’m not really sure what’s going on with me other than not enough training. I just can’t seem to get jump-started at the beginning of each race. It’s actually becoming fairly frustrating in spite of the fact that I feel stronger each week but I just seem to keep falling further and further behind in results.

On a lighter note: one thing that I can often say about events here in Europe is how well organized they are. I suppose when you’ve got the population of a small American city racing (think between 1500 and 2500 racers) you kind of have to be well prepared. At the Start/Finish area this past weekend there was a small expo area, food, beer, etc. There’s almost always an official MC to announce incoming riders and keep the crowd entertained throughout the day. Along with that there is music and sometimes a DJ. Out on the course, there are a lot of volunteers at key places with food (bananas, Powerbars and chocolate) along with water, Coke and some sort of sport drink. At one point on the course, they actually had a bike wash where, while I was drinking and eating a bit, a young girl was washing my bike to remove of the massive amounts of mud that had collected.

So… I just want to thanks to Ergon for making great gloves, one of these days I’ll get around to putting some Ergon grips on my Curtlo.. It’d sure help. I’ve got the GP1′s on my Black Sheep and they’ve become one of my best riding buddies. Also, I was running Maxxis Ignitor tires which never ever slipped on even the muddiest and wettest of rocks and as soon as I was out of the mud shed it quickly. Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to get ahold of some of the other sponsors products, but I’m happy with what I’ve got at this point. Thanks again to our team sponsors.

The long weekend that was – Garda, Italy

This past weekend, Kera and I headed down to Riva del Garda, Italy for the annual “ride Michael in to the ground fest”

I found this great video on on the Prairie Peddler blog.

I have no hope of ever riding like this but it’s great fun to watch

A few Garda pics here.

We drove down on Thursday which was somewhat uneventful other than the snow falling in Austria. By the time we got to Italy it was shorts and T-shirt weather. We kind of farted around, picked up my registration packet and had lunch at one of our favorite places in the area.

Friday we got up and went for a pretty good almost 50 km mountain bike ride which was supposed to be a “stretch the legs” sort of thing and a chance for Kera to ride non-technical singletrack. Well, the second part of that was correct. She got some good time on some fun singletrack and rocky double-track. Unfortunately, I think we went a little hard which I felt the next day.

Saturday dawned fairly early as I had a 8:00 a.m. start time. Ed Husted (my team mate) also came over to do the race. Ed is a star! The man did the long course (88 km or something with 3000 meters of vertical) on a rigid singlespeed. He way outdid any feat that I could have been credited with.

Anyway, I raced/rode the short course which amounted to just over 55 km and something like 1300 vertical meters (almost all of which was on the first 2 hour climb). I think that I finished 111th in my class. The photos of the race have, finally, been released and they want an arm & a leg for them. They want more per photo then Sportograf wanted for all of them. What’s up with that? I get $5 or 5 Euros but I don’t get 19.90 Euros for each photo. Given that each photographer probably took 500 or more, they’d make 10′s of thousands if people were dumb enough to buy them at that price. If they’d lower the price to something reasonable, I’d imagine that you’d sell a lot more.

The course wasn’t so much of an issue for me. Of course, the past two years it was hell for one reason or another. In 2006 it was the 3 hour climb at the start of the race that I attempted to do on little training and on a rigid singlespeed with thousands of unsympathetic Euro racers aboard their beer-can fully’s, cranking up the mountain in their Granny Gears wondering why I wanted to get around them. Oh, don’t forget the 5 km downhill where I cracked my crank too. That was pretty special as well.

Last year they ran pretty much the same course as this year other than part of it was run inside out. In that part, we had 45 minutes of bike traffic jam. Yes folks… a bicycle traffic jam. Apparently, a lead motorcycle had fallen over in front of the pack at the start of some singletrack and they couldn’t get it righted quickly enough to avoid major problems

This year… 2008. A few problems came together on one day to play with my feeble mind and body. First, a messed up bottom bracket which squeaked so very loudy. I’d even changed out a cracked BB cup but it actually got worse (could have been the lack of grease). Second, riding harder than I should the day before the race as I’d mentioned before (that I blame myself for). Third, I didn’t eat a good breakfast or have any coffee (I’m a freakin’ coffee addict after all). Needless to say, I had absolutely no energy for the epic 2 hour 1050+ vertical meter climb that started the race.

All in all we had a good time, ate some good food, hung out with Ed and got to enjoy some nice riding and fantastic weather. I really can’t complain beyond my race performance.

Photo follow-through

I promised you photos from the Corratec City Bike Marathon. Here are a few. There are more here.

This coming weekend, Ed Husted and I are partaking in the Garda Marathon. I think he’s shooting for the long-loop and I’ll probably be happy if I make the time cut-off for the middle distance (I’d love to do the long one though). I’m sure that we’ll both have race reports from that ASAP afterwards.

Also, this past weekend Kera and I went down to Tegernsee to go for a ride in the mountains. We did about 1/2 of the Tegernsee Marathon loop. It’s a beautiful place, to say the least. The big surprise was the amount of snow that is still on the ground. There’s going to have to be a fair amount of snow melt otherwise we’ll be racing on snow/slush in a month when we race.

Check out the video from last years race (here… nevermind the bad music).

1st Race of the season

This morning, I took part in the first race of my ’08 season. As I mentioned in my last blog entry this was done in part to gauge my fitness for the upcoming Garda marathon and just because I wanted to do it. Yes… I have to be truthful there.

So, I’ll get results out of the way right off the bat and head on to the meat of the matter. I placed 46th (if you look at my time not where they placed me) out of something like 160 in my class. They don’t seem to have overall results posted, but I’ll keep checking.

O.K., the meat of the matter. Kera and I left (she didn’t race) to ride up to the Olympic Park at about 8:00 this morning as my class and distance were to leave in two groups starting at 8:50 & 8:53. I left in the second group as I didn’t feel like fighting my way to the front of 700-1000 people. By doing this, it meant that I was in the heart of the newbies instead of with more of the seasoned veterans. Looking back, it was probably a big mistake on my part.

The city had blocked off the streets with signs for not only our bike marathon but a running marathon as well. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize what they were dealing with and made a lot of “pinch points” on the course while in the city. Everytime that we got close to one of these areas things got really squirrelly.

What else? Oh… they’d place cones in various places but no one had any idea why. While hundreds of us where rolling though the English Garden and rounding a turn, suddenly there was a bus coming at us. Surprise! We then figured out what the cones were for.

About 25 km in to the race I saw some course tape lying on the side of the gravel/dirt road that we were on. I assumed that it was to block that off and a hiker had broken it (hikers don’t like most cyclists here either). Well…. no! That was there to actually mark the corner. Again, a group of maybe 100+ seemed to figure it out simultaniously and we all did a U-Turn and headed back toward the tape. That cost us 20 minutes and 6-10 km.

Immediately after that, we hit a huge bike traffic jam. When we, finally, made our way up to the front it turned out to be a 1 bike width bridge that we had to cross as the canal was too deep and too cold to cross with the bike.

That was the last major foible short of the roadies that aren’t able to handle a mountain bike on anything other than pavement. As an added bonus, they seemingly can’t make it up a hill without falling over in front of you either. This is where I picked off a lot of people. Give me a climb baby! It’s definitely something that I’ve learned to love while singlespeeding here and in the Alps. I’m a damn good climber. Woohoo… I have at least one good skill on a bike.

After all this it was nearly all flatland gravel, dirt or pavement for the remaining kilometers. I honestly don’t know how many actually. One place the long course was listed as 100 km. Then it was listed as 90 or 87 km depending on where you saw the listing. On my speedometer (with getting lost as well) I have just shy of 72 km. Are you with me? No, I have no actual idea how far we travelled.

Anyway, the end of the race found us riding up and over the Olympic mountain three times in different directions. It was here that I realized that I was in danger of cramping so I downed as much of the fluid that I had and that seemed to help along with spinning vs. mashing. We then rolled in to the Olympic stadium and crossed the timer.

They then fed all of us pizza, all the fruit, cucumbers and cobbler that we could stomach. As always, we also got all the Alcohol-Free Weissbier that we could drink. I had a bit of each and headed home.

How do I feel now? Pretty good actually now that I realize that I’m actually 12 places higher than where they put me. I also know that I need to do some pretty heavy training before Garda and especially before I do a week of climbing starting in Garda and ending up on the other side of the Dolomites. It’s 270 km and 10,800 vertical meters in 6 days.

We then headed off to the Chinese Tower for a going away party for one of the girls that I worked with at Berlitz and her boyfriend who are moving back to the states. It was a perfect day to be outside and even more perfect to be in a beer garden.

Kera’s working on a cool bag for our friend David who’s hosting the SingleSpeed French Rally 2008.

Now we’re home getting ready to BBQ. Till next time.

Before the weekend

A week ago today, I went for a ride with a couple of new ‘friends’. I’d previously met Axel when I spotted his beautiful Bontrager Road bike sitting at a beer garden south of München. Matthias and I went over and drewled on this thing of beauty. Afterwards, we looked at the beer garden crowd trying to gauge whom it must belong to. I picked the solo guy with the Sock Guy socks. If I remember correctly, I was right.

The Sock Guy….er, guy, finished his meal, got on his bike, rolled over to our bikes and did a once over then rolled over to us and struck up a conversation. We talked about Retrotecs (he has a Ti one with a Rohloff rear hub), Independent Fabrications (he has a couple, I think), Phil Wood bikes amongst others. I quickly figured out that Axel was probably an even more avid “bike geek” than even I.

A couple of weeks ago I received a message from a friend of Axels that he wanted to go for a ride and check out my Black Sheep. Somehow, we arranged to meet and he brought along two of his bikes (a Phil Wood Piss-off titanium singlespeed 29′er and a Serrota Ti 29′er) and one of his friends Tommaso. Someone had to ride the other bike. It was Tommaso’s first 29′er experience but definitely not his first riding experience (he mentioned that he used to do a lot of hill climb UCI type events (think… fast).

Anyway, we did about 45 km in total then went and had coffee and a snack at our local Bistro Bissone (very, very Italian). It was fun listening to Tommaso banter with the waiter in Italian. We chatted about this and that and decided that we’d definitely have to repeat this in the future.

In other news… we joined a car sharing group so that means that we should have a car when/if we need it and not have to pay too much to own a car for awhile.

Our friend Justine, whom we met on our Egypt trip, came to visit last week. It was really good to see her. We went down to Neuschwanstein on Sunday and then she and I wandered around town one day and went to see Hayseed Dixie. Kera, unfortunately, had to go out of town on business for most of the time that Justine was here. More pics here.

Lastly, I think that I’m going to do the City Bike Marathon race on Sunday if for no other reason than to figure out how bad of shape that I’m in. Maybe it’ll work as a good training race for Garda coming up in 3 short… very short weeks.

Decisions galore

I took the above pic of myself (gotta love timers) riding close to home the other day. It’s roughly 10-15′ down from the top of this. This was a really frustrating day for me for many reasons, so I ‘attacked’ the trail like an enemy. It felt good to work off all that anger and frustration. Things are quite a bit better now.

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It’s the middle of the week and I’m getting ready to take off to teach a class and then go get the next tattoo at least started. The design is a surprise, of sorts. I’ll wait till it’s done to post picks of it (unless we only do part tonight), then I’ll post what gets finished.

Other decisions to be made, the most important one at this point is whether to run singlespeed, 9 speed or 27 speed at Garda in about 4 weeks. I’d really like to ride the Black Sheep as it’s the bike that I’d expected to have for the race last year and it’s light and handles really well.

My major hang-up is whether to hang derailluers on it and maybe put the Reba back on for  Garda. I can’t get last years first climb out of my mind (something like 500 meters in not too long of a run). In short… UGH! The other thing that I think of is the first year that I did it on a singlespeed. It took me just over three hours to complete the first climb. Do I really want to repeat that?

Lastly, I’d really like to do the long course and I’m guessing that I won’t be fast enough without gears to make the time cut-off (especially if there’s a bike traffic jam again this year). That thought alone might help make my decision.

Other things on my tiny brain slate:

Where are we staying for SS World’s in Napa?

Where are we staying for Garda (this might need to be first)?

Am I getting enough training in to do well this year?

When will I get the resume/CV in for the job my buddy Clark told me about?

There’s more….. I told you it was a small slate.

Ah… should I do the City Race going on in town in two weeks? My thought is yes as it will help me gauge whether or not I’m going to die at Garda or not.

Last but not least, thanks a lot to my in-laws for taking possession of the crazy amount of stuff that we had in storage. We appreciate it very much. Thanks!

New BWR post

If you’re interested… there’s a new post over on the BWR Europe site.