Portable Heater

Nothing like following a heater on a winter ride, wonder if he is for hire???  

Speaking of "for hire"  mmmmmmm!

Dressed with no place to go, hell no, this is where the action is!  

Can barely hold back the excitement:)  

Now What??

I have been occupying my evening with this, Big D and I finished the season 2 final episode last night.  Time to figure out something to entertain two ADHD off season, so called, cyclist before we drive Michelle mad!

Phillips Tent!

Bored at work waiting for HVAC changes, so what better thing to do but look at nice houses in warmer climates!  I pick this one for Mikey P's tent on the Oregon lot!!

Doing things right?

How come when you talk to or read about "pro" riders finally pulling the so called plug it is filled with things like this, are we really doing it right trying to live 'the life"

"During that period, I was able to spend more time with my wife, family, friends, and community than I have in my whole career. I really thought about and felt my life outside of cycling more than I ever have. I felt alive again. It has become clear how important some other things are to me and how much I’m missing," Duggan writes.

Choices :)

Retirement Planning

I think I just built one of the funnest bikes I have ever owned!!  Sorry for the blurry pic, but it was raining all weekend and my lens was fogged up:

I cannot wait to get this thing boxed up and headed out west!  Maybe a trip to Tuscon to visit the Matters again?  That is if Brian ever ends his season and stops racing!  

I did get it out for a bit this weekend to ride with Eric and Sam at Hartman Creek.  Nothing that will test the 5.5 inches of suspension, but lots of fun either way.  I did get to test the tires some.  The wet leaves and trail were no match for the 2.3 Butcher/Purgatory tire combo as Eric said every time I leaned it in the corner I left him a berm to use:)  Sweet!!

So I think this is my new go to bike for the all day fun "retirement" rides:)  

Also, why speaking of retirement.  This last trip to Bend had Michelle and I looking at property.  Not a  bad thing except for the fact we found one we really liked and closed on it last Friday!  It is now official, we own a small part of Bend, OR.  Phillips is already asking to put a tent on it, but pretty sure it is against the covenants in Tetherow.  Guess I better start planning the new home design!  Here are some views:

Yes, that is a golf course!  WTF?  No I do not golf and really have no intentions of learning.  Just liked the location to the trails. 

Hope everyone is enjoying the off season, that is unless you are park racing.  Blah!

Full Circle

So to say my year has been up and down would not even come close to telling the whole picture!  I had the early season highs of the NUE races which led me to being first overall in the NUE series for a bit, then the sickness.  One stupid little bug turned into about 14 weeks of just miserable, hardly able to ride, and failed attempts at racing.  So many things went through the head.. Including a fog that never seemed to lift and the thought of it being time to hang the bike up. My racing age will be 40 next year!  Although if you look at the results from this past weekends Sheboygan race, there are signs that say you can still be competitive at the local level since later 30 somethings held a lot of the top 10 spots.    

Now things have been getting better and I am almost back to norm.  Hopefully by Iceman??

Either way I have come full circle and have hit the youthful, despite my age, enjoyment that I had as I started to get into the sport.  The hours of cruising aimlessly on two wheels in search of whatever our heart desired or nothing at all.  Both are acceptable, but once you get off the bike, that perma-smile had better be there for the rest of the day.  Life is stressful enough to have your hobby add to it!  So why the weather is still nice here in Wisconsin be sure to get out on your bike and have the goal of doing nothing more than laying down some sweet skids on your local trails!!

I beg of you, noooo........

Went Naked!

Well this past week I fell off the grid and left all bikes behind to try and put this tick thing to rest and went to Bend Oregon anyways even though I would not be making the race. For the first time ever I made the list of riders NOT to watch: mtbracenews.com.  It was really weird to finally make the call last minute and walk out the door without the bikes.  Hell, I even had them in the box already!  But with the way I had been felling bike riding has not really been much of an option anyway with most of my rides being replaced with naps.

Anyway it was a fun time.  We went out there and just became tourists!  It took some getting used to but after the first day of drinks and food something clicked, maybe my liver, and it was game on!  We watched a bit of bike racing on Saturday night with the Cascades Cycling Classic Crits happening downtown but that was it for bikes the entire week.  Well minus the coffee and watching the tour with Axel Mercks.  So what did we do?

We started with the Tour of Homes, finally found a house out there and I am still trying to convince Michelle it is where we belong :)

View from the Master Bedroom:

We did a visit to crater lake.  I was thinking that I have seen one Mountain Lake that I have seen them all, was I ever wrong!

Ate too many of these and drank to many of those for a non ride trip!  Oops, might take me longer to get back to non Clydesdale weight!

A hike up North Fork for awesome view of Tumalo Falls:

And even a sunset dinner at the top of Mt Bachelor.  Yup, looks just like Amherst!

So now we are back in Wisconsin and have started to get back on the bike again.  I really thought hard about it and was almost tempted to not bother, but I would miss the team and I think they would miss me?  So today was my first time doing a ride over 2 hrs long in almost 8 weeks and the other plus it did not require a mid ride nap!!  Progress??  Guess time will tell.

Mathematics

This:

Plus two laps of this:

Equals a little ring:

Stop buggn me..

So the last few weeks have had a lot of ups and downs.  First the ups.  I had a really successful spring run at the NUE races and actually found myself leading the overall for the first time ever.  I know it will not last as the usual fast guys start to get the right results in place, but I believe it will be good enough to hold onto a top 5 overall this year, which is a big accomplishment for me.  Here is the last published overall:

	Men's Open	Women's Open	Single Speed	Masters
1.	Chris Peariso	Cheryl Sornson	Gerry Pflug	Chris Irving
2.	Lee Simril	Brenda Simril	Scott Green	Charles Buki
3.	Kevin Carter	Shannon Tenwalde	Patrick Blair	David Jolin
4.	Dan Kotwicki	Kathleen Harding	Mike Montalbano	Terry Blanchet
5.	Jesse Kelly	Linda Shin	Trevor Rockwell	Mark Drogalis
6.	Jay Click	Denise Coppock	Craig Fleetwood	Monte Hewett
7.	Jarom Thomas	Priscilla Baltz	Peat Henry	Al Blanchard
8.	Steven Hecht	Susan Lynch	James Prentice	Alec Petro
9.	Michael Bonsby	Jocelyn Linscott	Ernesto Marenchin	Jody Bailey
10.	David Moore	Vicki Barclay	Daniel Rapp	Ron Sanborn

Now for the downs.  Well I had to pull out of the NUE race out in New York due to fatigue and headaches.  I did not think anything of it with all the travel and everything else going on in life and just kept plugging along.   Then the following weekend I raced well at Rhinelander but was super tired leading up to and after the race.  So with the good legs I was excited for the Mohican 100 and things went pretty good there, once again minus the fatigue and the fact that I literally had to sit down during the race to take a break and could barely function after the race?? I was now sleeping more than I was awake and was in a downward spiral,  The trend continued and finally two weekends ago I ended up in the ER in Hayward.  They run the typical tests and come to find out I ended up with Erlichiosis.  I guess it is a tick bacteria and all I know is it gives you wicked headaches, fever, and makes you sleep like 20 hrs a day.  I am now on a good antibiotic regiment that I get to stick with for the next 3 weeks and Sunday was my 3rd ride in a period of 2 weeks.   Not to mention that my warm up routine consisted of only a nap!!  

Now the next downer, I leave tomorrow for Marathon National Championships in Idaho.  I have lowered my expectations and I now think my biggest goal is to not get severally sunburned while I am out there due to the antibiotics and the 95 degrees and sunny weather they have going on.  

On a plus note, I did have a lot of fun over the weekend hanging with the team and I got to ride with B Frazier at the WORS race! 

Ha!!

I know I owe some race updates, but still debating my 100 miler retirement after the Mohican 100! In the meantime this is good:

The slow one...

Find it so funny that I seem to get comments all the time that I have become slow and that is why I have moved to the 100 milers.  This weekends comment came directly from Don as I was about to get on the podium for 4th place overall just 45 seconds outside of the race win.  Maybe it is true, I am slow, or maybe it is the fact that there are other races out there that can offer a better product??  I myself am up to the new scene.  I am on my 13th season doing exactly the same courses over and over again in WORS.  You can argue that races have come and gone but you cannot argue that each venue has the exact same feel to it.  Not saying it is bad, but change is good.  Why is Brian Matter out at the Transylvania Epic right now?   Why are the USProXCT races almost extinct and all the 100 milers and stages races selling out in minutes when registration opens?  I feel it is because the Olympic format coming down from UCI is not what most riders want!  We want the travel to be less than the total time riding our bikes, we want to go out for an adventure for the day and forget our day jobs and the stress it brings!  Yes most of us have day jobs USA Cycling.

We also race cause it is a bond that holds most of our friend circles together.  That is the point of team Adventure 212.  We are all getting older, some have kids, some just enjoy life, but all of us love to ride bikes and hang out.  The race is nothing more than an excuse for us to get together and make fun of each other and our competitors.  Don once described the team as "The best Team money can buy."  I hate to inform him that he is absolutely incorrect, you can never buy a team that is as close knit as ours.  We are the benchmark for every team to follow.  Yes the team is spoiled and Michelle and I take care of them like they are our kids but we would have it no other way.  We want the team to travel together, eat together, stay together, etc... If you are not doing that then what is the point of a team??  Just to say you won the team category??  I cannot even tell you who placed in that last year!!  If that is your purpose then you do not have a team, you have created an organized buying group to annoy everyone in and out of the industry with your requests for cheap or free product!

So anyway, cheers to getting old and slow.  I welcome it cause I know that my team will always be there to offer some good laughs and fun for many years to come.

Title here....

Just whatever.  Been busy with about everything and enjoying most of it.  Especially Team 212 + Justin day at the Kettles on Sunday!!! Fun, fun, fun!  Here are some pics of the team from Cohutta.

Cohutta Race Review

No car for me, but here is the MTBR write up, I will work on extending on my version later:

MTBR

The Dirty Hundie!

Well, Iola is postponed and the UCI ban on anyone riding bikes has been pushed back till 2014!  Sweet, lets go rock the Cohutta 100!!   Should be a good time and I am excited for the 14,000 ft of climbing and hanging out at our sweet cabin with the team!  Looking for a little help though, I am a car geek and have been wanting to get something for a while now.  Michelle said I could get one of these if I won a NUE race so wish me lots of luck!! LOTS and LOTS of luck and maybe help me pedal too!!!!

No Xmas Card for mother nature!!!

No birthday card either!  This is ridiculous.  So bad that I will be surprised if all the snow we have is gone before Iola.  I even heard that with all the snow, they were still cross country skiing at Iola last weekend!!

So with all this snow, our best case scenario is another mud race for the WORS opener so I figured it would be a lot easier to push or carry one of these!!

Zoom, zoom!!

In the meantime I will dream of riding mountain bikes!  Should we blow off Iola all together and go back to Brown County??  I'm in!!

Tour Dah Denzer Results

So I am sure everyone is wondering so here ya go!

Polka Dot Jersey:  No one could touch Big D in this!!  He tore everyones legs off and beat us over the head with them!!

Green Jersey:  I think I might have this cause I seemed to be the only one attentive to the road signs??

Most Aggressive:  Definitely Michelle!  She kept attacking the boys whenever we were not looking and we would have to chase her down!

Best young rider:  Well since the average age on the team is like 40, Myles is a shoe in since he is the only one of us under 25!!

Roller Dog/Mustard stain award:  RK!  When we hit Richland Center, he pushed two kids over, never held the door for the old lady with the walker, and was all over the cheese filled roller dog!

Most improved rider:  Bryan has this, he was usually right behind Big D and I on all the hills!!

Hostess with the mostest:  Lisa has this!  After 4 hr rides she went right to work making sure everyone had Coffee Martinis or beer in hand before you could even remove your chamois! Nikki was huge in this as well with helping with all the food prep and bringing baked goods to go with Lisa's brownies she made!

Now for the GC??  Might be too close to call!  I would like to think I have it, but with big D crushing it on the hills. Not sure I could of matched him!!  My only savior was the days were long, so I had him when the time started nearing the 4 hr mark, or at least he faked it like I did:)

The 2 x 6 challenge was postponed due to mother nature not cooperating. With Sundays ride being in the rain, none of us wanting to stop and just kept moving to get the hours in, minus the warm up shot a couple miles from home!!

Thanks to Ryan and Lisa for putting on an awesome event!!  Cannot wait for the 2nd edition of this in 2014!!

Tour Dah Denzer

The weather sucked, the rides were awesome, the big guns came out(of some sort), shots were heard, shots were taken, fun was had, and no one lost an eye.  No cats or chickens were harmed in the filming of the next video!

I know the next one is blurry, but the person taking the pic was raised in a bar, yup with guns.  

Road Trip

Screw this, I'm outta here!!!

Fueled up RK style!!

Oh yeah, we have bike wash babes on this trip!!  To hell with just holding the umbrella and putting on chapstick!  

Highly recommended trails!!

Highly not recommended!  I bet you all went to those fancy Wisconsin camps!  The lady here was crazy!  Mocked  us for heading back to the State Park to go ride "mindless" trail as she put it!!  

This weekends activities and this bad dog is up fro grabs in the first ever Freedom Rd 2 x 6  challenge as part of the Tour Dah Denzer!  I am sure there will be lots to come out of this event!! 

St George

Group at the start of a long day of Barrel Roll/Zen/Stucki Springs/ Sidewinder/and don't forget Suicidal Tendencies!

Myles ride.  I almost needed it after a close call on Sidewinder

Michelle on Prospector

Myles on Gooseberry Mesa

Top of Gooseberry Mesa

You all in?  I heard yup!!

I know pics do not do trails justice, but the yup was quickly followed by a nope!

Re hydrating Frazierita style!

No complaints here

If you ask Michelle that is a first out of me, I always have something to say!  So on Thursday, Michelle, Myles, and I made the trip to St George, Utah for the season opener of the NUE. We flew into Vegas and bolted right away before Myles became corrupted and had the urge to gamble.  Travel was smooth and it was amazing to realize ho win the middle of no where Vegas is.  We arrived into St George and moved into our lodging for the next couple weeks.  Glad Michelle talked me into bringing our own espresso machine, cause this view every morning from our patio with a latte is not going to suck:)

 
So for the race.  We started with pre ride on Friday and quickly realized that this was one of the most technical courses I have ever raced.  Myles and I both crashed once during pre ride and Michelle broke he shifter.  After pre ride I worked to fix Michelle's shifter but had no luck and she would not be able to race.

Race morning.  We woke later than normal and pulled into the venue at around 6:20 PM for the 7AM start that actually ended up getting pushed back to 7:15 due to the lack of daylight. Good thing I am blind, cause it was still dark when they said go!!  Luckily daylight broke just in time before we hit the barrel trail!  At the start we immediately separated a lead group of 9 and were riding pretty hill until about 45 minutes into the race when Alex Grant decided to light it up a bit.  With this being my first race, the fact it is March, and with the 85 degree temps expected later in the afternoon I decided to just ride my race and let them go.  I went back and forth between 5th and 9th for the rest of the day and rolled into my third aid stop, and the start of the 2nd lap at about 4 hrs 45 min, with goose bumps, and hungry in 8th place. I spent a luttle extra time here, gt down a banana, a half bottle of Gatorade, and an oatmeal cream pie!  MMMmmmmm!  That is  my new fix in the 100s.  I rolled out of the aid in 7th spot and settled in for the 2nd lap.  All seemed good till I had to get of to step over a cattle guard and both of my toes locked pointing straight down?  Kind of hard to get back on your bike on your tip toes!  I finally got back going and had to spin for about 5 minutes to get the cramps to go away.  By the time I finally started riding well again Gerry Phlug had already passed me and offered some words of encouragement.  I kept it steady up to the Barrel Roll trail and caught Gerry again on the first lap.  Shortly after I caught him he flatted, which is a bummer!  Luckily for me I had no mechanicals and  was able to keep my body working for the entire race to come in for 7th place overall.

I was really happy with that for it being a March 100 mile race and the lack of riding that I have done due to being sick in January and the snow that keeps hammering Wisconsin. Next up is two weeks of riding in St George with various people popping in and out to to ride with us so I am excited to enjoy the weather and learn how to ride some of the technical trails around here!

More to come but I think it is time to sit on the patio and enjoy a 2nd latte!  

So deal with it.....

There she blows!

That has been this last week.  Things are blowing up around me with the Hot Tub pump going first, then the dryer input shaft, and now another pool motor this morning.  I might have to camp out here tonight with my laser sighted rifle to get rid of the Gremlins!  Pretty sure they are sneaking cookies out of the Bistro after midnight and wrecking havoc on all my daily plans!

Here was my last two days in Pic:

So that is the drum of the dryer sitting on the floor and the center of that plate is their shitty weld that broke!  The removal was interesting too.  The length of the drum is 39" and the space between the dryer and the sink is 36".  Oops!  So I had to lay on my back lifting the drum with my feet, while lifting the front of the dryer off the ground with a bar to make room to get it above the sink.  Yup, worked the same putting it back in.  Oh did all that while rebuilding the pump that was keeping the hot tub down, and doing a little of this:

Yup, hanging out at the Laundromat! They are still as interesting as I remember!!

Now lets throw in some of this:

Not sure were the day went but had to use the trainer to get my ride in on Tuesday night.  Then got some of this last night:

Got cold when the sun went down!  Makes you work on your skills when you cant see the ice ruts in the road!!  Good thing for studded tires!!

Then in my spare time I booked another warmer weather trip as well as lodging and registering the team for all non WORS related events through June!  Here is my list as of now, hope to see you at the races!