Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The moose sauntered up and off the trail and away from us. Perhaps they are a bit like horses and since they have not had the pleasure of evolving with super-fast psycle chics and fellows, they are frightened that us quickly moving somewhat big things might want to eat them. As long as the moose remain frightened of us, I'm OK with seeing them. In fact, I think it's pretty cool. However, they really are much bigger than me and I would hate to come across an aggressive one.
LB
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Wednesday evening was the weekly road race in Palouse. This time we had 9 riders made up of 6 men and 3 women. Unfortunately, Lorena was unable to be there because she has a class on Wednesday evenings. Total bummer. We rolled out of town and warmed up for the first few miles and then things just kinda sped up, quickly separating the group into men and women (not intentionally). The six of us traded pulls until the base of the first climb when it turned into a free-for-all. A lead group of 3 riders made it over first with the remainder of us to chase. The lead group was moving at a pretty good pace and I topped out at 48mph on the descent after the climb trying to bridge up. As it turned out, our group of three worked well together over the next 4 miles or so to close down the gap... at the base of the next big climb. Everyone sort of sat up as we started the climb and then Jeremy dropped his only bottle. Forget any good will at this point. We were all waiting to see who was going to attack the climb. It turned out to be Jan who attacked and he and Jeremy just walked away from the rest of us. They ended up opening up a 5 minute gap by the time it was all said and done, finishing the 23-mile loop in 1:03hrs. The rest of us beat on each other and had a lot of fun. I ended up finishing 5th. It was a helluva lot better than the previous week trying to race nauseated. With the daylight situation, we'll probably only get one more week in before we have to move it to the weekend or something.
Thursday was a bit of a recovery ride on the Chipman Trail. I wish I had my camera because the grain elevator that burned down collapsed on a section of the trail and they're still trying to clean it up. For now, they've at least got a gravel detour around the carnage.
Friday evening, Lorena and I went up and rode on Moscow Mountain and then proceeded to drink a little too much beer afterward at the Alehouse. Thank goodness it's only a 5 minute walk home. We were sure to toast Whitney's 21st birthday from 3 time zones away.
Yesterday was the first official ride of the semester for the UI Cycling Club. We had a couple of new freshmen show up and we proceeded to ride over to Pullman to hook up with the WSU cycling club. All of our rides with them end up being 18 miles longer because we have to ride 9 miles to get there and 9 miles home. All told, we did a 42 mile out and back ride to the top of the Wawawai grade. The wind was pretty gusty and made some descents a little hairy with the big crosswinds. We didn't kill the new guys and so we'll probably seem them again next weekend.
This morning, we met up with Ted and Allison for a little mountain biking up on Moscow Mountain. It was our turn to be tour guide, as in showing them around some of the trails because they're a bit unfamiliar with them. It was a beautiful morning but windy. I'm glad we were mountain biking because trying to ride the road today would have been zero fun.
Oh yeah, there were some classes and other such school-related activities thrown in there too but you don't want to hear about that do you?
~Chris
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
So, my cross bike is now in working order and I decided to take it out on a little 2.5 hour jaunt on some of the gravel roads around the area. This ride had a little bit of everything as far as roads go.
I started out buzzing through campus to get on the old "highway" that used to run between Moscow and Pullman, aptly named "Old Moscow-Pullman Highway". The road starts out paved but turns to gravel after a mile or so. Not only gravel but, enormous, tooth rattling washboarding. The gravel was rather deep in some spots too. This made for some interesting line-picking when dealing with traffic. Typically, this road doesn't have any traffic but, was unusually busy. I don't know if it's just people trying to avoid the construction on 270 between Pullman and Moscow but, I don't think I'd want to drive on that washboarding unless I absolutely had to.
I finally got back on pavement in Pullman and headed south toward another road that I knew turned to gravel. The bike seemed rather twitchy on pavement and I don't know if that is just me not being used to it after not riding that bike for a little while. I was beginning to wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that I was running a road tube in my front cross tire, making the tire a little softer because the tube didn't want to stretch to fit the larger tire. This is the only thing I could think of but, it was the only tube I had when switching tires before I left. Anybody else have any comments on this?
After turning onto the next road, I hit what I think was just a rock in the road and the front tire felt flat. I tried putting a little air in it to see how far I could limp along and about a mile later, I decided to change the tube. The only thing I could determine from the tube was a pinch-flat but none of the marks appeared to have a hole big enough to flatten the tire. Perhaps it's a little different when there's air in there. I changed the tube nonetheless and didn't have any problems through the rest of the ride.
I eventually made it to what was supposed to be one of my turns. On the map it looked like a through road but, when I got there, it looked like a farm access road that cut through the wheat fields. It had a road sign, however, I wasn't sure if it was open to public traffic. I knew the next turn off was waaay down the road I was on so I chanced it. Turns out, it was basically a hard-packed dirt road that had seen a lot of traffic recently with all of the wheat harvest. It went all the way through to the next gravel road just like Google Maps showed. I still felt funny about riding there and probably won't take that one again.
Now the fun began. Two big climbs to get up and over Paradise Ridge. I'd never climbed it from the south side before and was looking forward to it. Lorena said the gravel was deep the last time she came down it. I found that you just had to pick your line carefully to avoid the deep stuff. Just like with the washboarding earlier, I felt like the riders in Paris-Roubaix trying to find the smooth dirt beside the cobbles. The 38x23 didn't make the climb any easier either.
It was nearly dark when I got home, was a pretty tough ride, and I had a good time. I was surprised that took me as long as it did but after thinking about the road conditions, fixing the flat, and the huge climbs, I wasn't too surprised. Here's a link to the route I mapped at MapMyRide.com.
http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/id/moscow/899298268
Tonight's the big Wednesday night "race" in Palouse. I hope I feel better than last week. That sucked.
Here's my friendly advice for the week: Make your coffee with distilled water! It's amazing.
I'd better to a little work before going to class.
~Chris
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Yesterday evening we spent a couple of hours on campus promoting the UI Cycling Team and also MAMBA (Moscow Area Mountain Bike Association) at the annual Palousafest. It's basically a big event the university has to promote all of the student organizations to new students. They had a couple of concerts as well. All in all, it wasn't too bad and we had quite a few people stop by our booth. The strangest, and yet pretty cool, thing that we saw was a freshman that was walking around with a new lugged-steel Colnago road bike. He actually rides but, you have admit that not too many college freshman have that kind of bike.
On Friday, I got Lorena's front wheel on her Epic trued and tensioned after building it into the new rim. It was a little bit of a challenge given that it's a Lefty wheel and I couldn't put it in the truing stand. Thus, it was dished and trued on the bike using some zip-ties off of the fork leg as my indicator.
I also purchased and installed a set of Ergon grips for my Gunnar. Friday evening we decided to go mountain biking to make sure the wheel was going to hold together and to see if I was going to like the grips. For the first five minutes, I couldn't believe how great those grips feel! The whole ride was amazing and I didn't have any hand fatigue at all. I'm sure it will take a few more rides to get a true feel for how I'm going to like them. For now, I wish I hadn't waited so long to get them.
Classes start tomorrow and, fortunately, I only have one class and it's only 3 days a week. That should give e a hell of a lot more time to train for cross as compared with last fall. Right now, it looks like the schedule for racing this fall is going to be:
Sept 8th: Moscow Mountain Madness (mountain bike race)
Sept 22nd: Starcrossed (Seattle)
Oct 7th: NW Cyclocross Series #1 (Moscow, ID)
Oct 14th: NW Cyclocross Series #2 (Spokane Valley, WA)
Oct 21st: NW Cyclocross Series #3 (Coeur D'Alene, ID)
Oct 27th: NW Cyclocross Series #4 (Walla Walla, WA)
Oct 28th: NW Cyclocross Series #5 (Walla Walla, WA)
Nov 4th: NW Cyclocross Series #6 (Spokane, WA)
Nov 11th: NW Cyclocross Series #7 (Coeur D'Alene, ID)
Nov 18th: NW Cyclocross Series #8 (Spokane, WA)
Should be a lot of fun. With that, I'm going to go work on my cross bike.
~Chris
Friday, August 17, 2007
Lorena and I rode a couple of laps of the Headwaters trail on the mountain on Tuesday evening. Even though it was hot, it wasn't quite as bad in the woods. Besides that, the evening was starting so the temperature had started to drop. I felt great and my second lap time was about 1 minute faster than my fastest 2nd lap time so far this summer.
I was really psyched up for Wednesday's "race" over in Palouse, WA. We met up with a couple of other riders at a grocery store where the sign out front said 106 degrees. I don't know where the actual thermometer was located but we thought that seemed a little high and attributed it to "being in the sun" or "near the asphalt parking lot". According to weather.com, the high was 97 degrees and humidity 8% when we started at 6pm.
There were seven riders including one guy on a single-speed road bike. He won Moscow Mountain Madness last year on a single-speed. The course is about 24 miles and is the same course we used for the Northwest Collegiate Cycling Conference Championships.
We stayed together for the first couple of miles at a pretty chilled out pace but as soon as we made the first turn, the pace jumped to 25mph+. We approached the first climb with a group of 5 riders that quickly reduced to 3 as we ascended into a snowstorm of wheat chaff from a couple of combines that were working on the fields next to the road. The dust and chaff was actually accumulating on the road a little and we just suffered through it for about 1/4 mile. Unfortunately, I was not in that group of 3 that crested the hill first. This was the beginning of my body revolting against me.
I had been feeling a little sick to my stomach off and on during the day and had debated on whether or not to ride that night. After a nap at 4:30, I felt better and decided to play chicken with a stomach bug. This proved to be what I shall refer to as a "bad" decision. After the first climb, I was able to recover a bit and work with one of the other riders to try and bridge back up to the leading 3. We traded pulls for about 5 miles and the pace never dropped below 25mph. Then, we made our next turn onto the next big climb of the ride. This was the real beginning of the end. I almost immediately felt nauseated and every drink of Gatorade made me feel like I was going to hurl. All of my joints hurt and I just watched as everyone rode away from me. There was nothing I could do about it either.
I basically limped along for the next 10 miles and felt like death-warmed-over when I got back to the car. This was probably the worst I've ever felt on a bike. Was it the flu? Heat exhaustion? Too-sweet Gatorade? It's hard to tell but I think it's out of my system now. I still had a hint of it in my system yesterday so I took the day off to help with the recovery. I'm feeling back to normal and will probably head out for a ride this evening.
In other bike related news... I've almost got Lorena's Spinergy wheel back together for her Epic. It's laced into the new rim but I haven't got it trued and tensioned up yet. Being a Lefty wheel, it doesn't exactly make it easy to true unless you have some specialty tools. I've got to do it on the bike.
School starts on Monday. Campus is buzzing with all of the freshmen moving into the dorms. It's a good time to not drive on campus and makes me glad I ride a bike to get around.
Time to get some lunch.
~Chris
Monday, August 13, 2007
I think Lorena was trying to test my bike handling skills as we rode on the trail in the arboretum. Gravel, in the dark, and I'm on my fixed gear with road tires. Yes, we had lights but, the gravel was still deep.
Got in a good 2-hour ride yesterday evening to stretch the legs out after my run on Saturday night. The hamstrings were a little tight but everything felt better as the ride went on. Today is a rest day but I'll be riding the rest of the week including a little informal road race out in Palouse, WA. Some OCC members may know Matt Morra, the instigator or this Wednesday night race series.
Speaking of racing... Lorena and I are planning on going to Starcrossed again this year. It was such an amazing race that it's hard to pass it up. After that, it looks like the next race will be the first weekend in October as the Inland Northwest Cyclocross Series gets underway. Unfortunately, we only went to one of these races last year because we were ridiculously busy with school. This fall looks to be a little less strenuous from a class perspective so we're hoping to hit more of these. They changed the format to be only one race per weekend versus racing both days last year. This is good because it means we don't have to drive 4 hours (2 hours each way) both days to hit the races and also kill any chance of getting anything else done on the weekend. We're supposed to kick off the series with a race here in Moscow. Should be a lot of fun.
Better get back to work.
~Chris
Sunday, August 12, 2007
~Chris
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Let's see, we last left off after a really great mountain bike ride up on Moscow Mountain. That following Sunday, we drove up to Plummer, ID to meet up with our Ohio friends Hap & Diane. They were going to be riding on the Trail of the Coeur D'Alenes and we figured we'd meet them near Harrison, ID. As it turned out, we met them about 5 miles east of Harrison or basically 26.5 miles from where we started in Plummer. We rode with them back to Harrison where they set up camp and we joined them for some food and a little catching up. It was a great visit and we couldn't believe how long it had been since we'd seen them. They're on a pretty amazing journey and we were glad that we got a chance to see them along the way. They even rode with us back to the car albeit a little lighter than they normally pack that tandem.
The next day, we drove up to Spokane to pick up Lorena's parents at the airport because they were going to be visiting until August 9th... and to help us out a little bit with our move to our new house. At this point, we still didn't have a moving truck secured even though we were just moving in town. Fortunately, we managed to get that taken care of while on the way back to Moscow. This is where the real adventure begins.
July 31st came and we had to be moved out of our apartment because the new tenant was going to be moving in on the 1st. The downside was that we weren't going to be able to pick up our moving truck until 5pm on the 31st despite having everything ready to be loaded. We got a great call at about 3 to let us know we could get our truck early. We moved to Idaho in a 17' truck, have gotten rid of some stuff since we've been here, and now we going to be loading a 24' truck to move across town. I felt like I was driving a tractor trailer.
As her dad and I were carrying a dresser into the truck, I heard her mom yell from in the house "Lorena, what do you have on? It smells like something's burning." I walked out of the back of the truck and saw smoke rolling out of the windows of the house. I ran in and the whole place was full of smoke and Lorena was looking for the fire extinguisher. A cardboard box was accidentally placed on the stove and the wrong burner was turned on while trying to boil some water in the tea kettle. It was basically a smoldering pile of ash at this point with a little flame. Lorena tried to discharge the fire extinguisher and it didn't work so she handed to me. I couldn't get it to discharge either. We scrambled around looking for a box of baking soda and managed to put the fire out with that. With the fire out, we went back outside to catch our breath a little.
We were glad no one was hurt and nothing was really damaged. The main thing we were worried about was smoke damage to the ceiling tiles and the curtains because we had cleaned the whole place while we were waiting for the truck to be ready. We managed to scrounge up enough box fans to evacuate the smoke and we took all of the curtains down to get them out of the smoke. As it turns out, there really wasn't any smoke damage to anything. It just made for a longer night of cleaning on top of loading the truck. Our landlord was home at the time and she told us we'd cleaned enough but she wanted to spray the ceiling with vinegar-water to get any lingering smoke smell out (even though there wasn't any). We went back the next morning to turn in our keys and she was re-cleaning everything we'd already done the day before. It was extremely frustrating but we learned something from the whole experience: 'Never rent a basement apartment with our landlords living upstairs.' We still don't know how much, if any, of our deposit we're going to get back.
We moved into our new house on August 1st and it has been like night and day from where we spent the last year. Likely the best aspect is having a garage. It's amazing how much clutter can be eliminated when you don't have to keep your 'extra' stuff in your living space. Most everything is arranged where we want it with mostly minor decorating left. We actually purchased a dining table and chairs today that we're going to refinish.
While Lorena's parents were in town, we took them to a lot of our favorite spots and also went to some places that even Lorena and I had never visited. One of those places was Elk Creek Falls near Elk River, ID. The volcanic rock formations near there are pretty awesome. You don't think 'volcano' when you think of Idaho but that's what's under most of the Palouse region. Just ask Paul Kinney and he'll tell you all about it. He told us how cool he thought the geology was out here as he was driving in the area. Here's a couple of shots of the falls.
The last highlight of the last few weeks was a fire in a grain elevator in Pullman, WA last night. Lorena and I were riding west on the Chipman Trail and were almost to Pullman when we saw the smoke. At first, we thought it was just dust from all of the wheat that's being harvested right now. When we got a little closer, we ran into some people we know that were heading back to Moscow and were informed that the trail had been closed by the elevator. Some of the grass near the elevator was also on fire and that prompted the trail closure. We modified our route a little bit and continued on our way. You can read more about the fire here.
That's about it. School starts in a little over a week and thus endeth the summer.
Now that we have internet access again, I hope to update this on a more regular basis like before. Cross season is coming up and we're looking forward to it. That said, time to get a workout in before the sun goes down.
~Chris
