The Twitterati Are Up In Arms

Lance Armstrong is taking on ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser over comments he made about bike lanes in the nation’s capitol.  Kornheiser went so far as to suggest running cyclist over.  A number of other well known cyclist have joined in.  I wish comments like these were an isolated case, but they aren’t.  After passage of Colorado’s 3 foot rule, I heard similar comments on both KRFX and KALC here in Denver.

Aerobics Instructors Should Not Teach Spinning

As a general rule, I believe cyclist are a quite people.  Not so much by nature, but by necessity.   When you’re riding hard, wasting your breath on needless conversation is a luxury.   One that I certainly can’t afford.  That’s why it seemed rather disconcerting to have a spinning instructor (but mainly an aerobics instructor) who ran class like an aerobics class -constant talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.  Save the conversation for the post ride beer.

Pop Throwing Hooligans of the World Unite!

I was on the light rail train yesterday going home from work, when three Metro State students took the three seats around me. I had the Foo Fighters going on my iPod, but it was still hard not to hear what they (particularly the girl across from me) were talking about. The first topic was about a speech she had given. I didn’t actually catch the topic of said speech,something about the military, but whatever it was had caused one of her listeners to throw his big gulp  pop on her. The second topic of discussion was the upcoming tattoo the she was planning on getting. A large pair of praying hands going up the right side of her back. I only bring that up because one would assume that someone wanting a large set of praying hand on her for eternity would also subscribe to some sort of philosophy that involves praying and Christian values – apparently not though. It was the three topic of discussion however that caught my attention. She matter-of-fact-ly stated she wanted to run over any cyclist she found out on the road. She thought they were too slow and should stay on the sidewalk. One of her friendstried to pointed out that cyclists were actually suppose to be on the road, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. Her statement to that was she “didn’t want to run them over, but just knock them down”. To be honest, I was speechless. I felt like saying something but did know what to say. I can only take comfort in knowing that some pop throwing hooligan had the guts to do what I so badly wanted to do at that moment.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Resolutions – Part I

So, I said I would expand on how I hoped to achieve my resolution goals.   My last resolution was to be a better blogger.  Hmm, one post in the last 28 days.  I guess that might be considered a failure.  I hope to keep this better updated in the future, but to be honest, I don’t have any concrete plans for making that happen.

Resolution Time

I know, I know I haven’t been writing. I guess it is New Year’s resolution time again. I can happily say that my resolutions will not include anything about working out. I have been (more or less) faithfully working out four times a week for the last four or five months.

My resolutions:

• I resolve to eat better.
• I resolve to be better organized.
• I resolve to be a better blogger.

More on how I hope to achive my goals in another post.

 Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Rites Of Passage

Finally got around to reading my latest issue of Bicycling magazine.   They have an article listing 109 rites of passage.  Things sooner or later every cyclist runs into.  Some of my favorites:

6.  Bonking so bad you don’t think you’ll be able to make it home. – I’ve done that one lot’s of times.
10.  When your bike computer registers triple digits for one ride.  – I still remember every 100+ mile ride I’ve ever done. 
20.  You get stuck in your pedels and topple over at a stoplight.  – and usually in front of someone your trying to be cool around.
28.  Getting hopelessly lost – deliberately – I don’t get the chance to just ride off often enough.
32.  When you no longer have to stop to take off your jacket.  – To be honset I’ve never done that and probably never will.
33.  Feeling confident about taking off your jacket while riding – then catching the trailing sleeve in the rear wheel – That’s more my speed.
35.  Planning a riding vacation – Who doesn’t want to spend their vacation sleeping in a tent, getting up before dawn every morning so you can go out and exercise for 6 hours?
38.  In your head, Phil Liggett narrates your ride.  – Bob Roll maybe.
85.  Out sprinting a crazed dog.  – S. Rooney Rd – 1984.  I won.
106.  Feeling super strong and then turning around for the bike ride back and realizing you had a tail wind.

And the one hitting cloest to home perhaps:
81.  Explicating your training in exquisite detail in a blog, then realizing nobody cares.

I’m Getting Old

I’ve tried to really ramp up my workouts the last month or so.  It’s going well, except I’m beginning to feel my age.  For the last month, I’ve been in more or less constant pain.  Not terrible,  more a slow to get up – hard to feel comfortable kind of pain. 

A normal person would take a couple aspirin, and call it good.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for me.  I am one of the 5% to 20% of asthmatics who also can’t take NSAIDs (Non Steroid Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (Aspirin – Ibuprofen – Aleve)).   An hour or so after I take one, I become a snot producing machine, can breath and my stomach starts to hurt.  I will literally go through a box of kleenex in a couple hours.  It ain’t pretty.  I can take acetaminophen (Tylenol), but it doesn’t reduce swelling which is really what I think I need most.

The other day I was trying to hunt down some Tylenol.  The office has a cabinet located on each floor stocked with medical supplies, but all they had were NSAID-based drugs – that’s not entirely true – I did find something, but I couldn’t bring myself to take something called PMF – Pre Menstrual Formula.

HTFU

HTFU – that is my new mantra.
I’ve been working on getting ‘it’ all together over the last month or so. By ‘it’, I mean I’ve made a conscience effort to identify my goals in life and work up a plan to accomplish them. That said, I haven’t been able to get everything firing on all cylinders all at the same time. I can get most things going, but there is always one or two things (usually diet and exercise) that get left by the wayside. I’ve entertained the possibility that I’ve taken on too much, but I don’t think that is it. It mostly seems to be laziness or some bad habits I can’t seem to break myself of. To over come this hurdle, I’m taking a page from the Stuart O’Grady book of motivation. He bought black wrist bands for his team one year during the Tour de France. They had four letters on them HTFU. I’ll let you google it yourself. Well if you will excuse me, I need to HTFU and get my ass to spin class.

Tornado

After returning from the Elephant rock bike ride, I laid down for a nap.  About half an hour later, I was awoke by the sound of hail stones hitting the roof and windows. I looked out the window and there were hail stones the size of golf balls littering the lawn.  I went to the kitchen, Marcie is on the phone with her parents. andlooks outside and sees a funnel cloud in the sky to the East.  She grabs the kids, the kids grab the cats and theyall  head downstairs. I stayed and watched it for a while. It was hard to tell which direction it was going. It was definitely going South but I couldn’t tell if it was going East (away from us)  or West (toward us).  Evidentually it moved out of view behind the house behind us.  At that point, I headed downstairs also. Found out later, that the tornado went through the Southlands Mall about two miles to the East of us.  It damaged a JC Penneys and the Lowes.  Only one injury, a guy who was trying to take a picture from his roof.

My Blog

I have a website, why to I need a blog?

The one thing I am finding with my website, is it is very hard to update in any reasonable period of time.  I need special software and usually end up reloaded the whole sight to make all my changes get posted.  Oh, I can make a change in a matter of 15 minutes, which may not seem like a lot of time, but it you are looking to keep it updated on a continuous basis, it becomes prohibitive.

This blog on the other hand can be updated quickly and from anywhere I have computer access.  I have even managed to find a way to update it remotely using my Blackberry.  How geeky is that?

I will still use the website to post photos and other larger size files.