Pregnancy Appointment #2: It Lives!

Rosey and I had our second pregnancy appointment today. The highlight of the appointment was that we got to hear the baby's heartbeat. Wow, how cool is that? He/She must have been excited too because his/her little heart was beating really fast. I guess that's normal though.

Less exciting but equally notable was that Rosey discovered that there may be some relief for the problems that she's been having. First the nurse told her that it was perfectly OK for her to be taking her Claritin. Second, they gave her a Vitamin B shot which they claimed would help with her nausea and lack of energy. And third, if the Vitamins didn't help the nausea then they gave her a prescription for something that should. She was ecstatic to discover all of this but at the same time upset that she's been sufferring for so long... why didn't the previous doctor mention any of these things???

ULCER 2007

I rode my second ULCER (Utah Lake Century Epic Ride) on Saturday August 11th. The course started and ended at Thanksgiving Point and rode 111 miles around Utah Lake... although I managed to squeeze in an extra 6 miles by getting off course near Spanish Fork canyon. I completed the ride with a moving average of 21 miles per hour. That's a pretty good speed for me but it probably would have been better if it wasn't for some trouble that I had along the way.

This is essentially a slightly longer version of the weekly ride that I do on Thursday mornings. On Thursdays, I do the same loop traveling in the opposite direction but only end with about 89 miles as we don't start at Thanksgiving Point and we don't detour all the way out to Springville.

I was hoping to ride ULCER with the same group that I do my weekly ride with, but they all either had prior commitments or they weren't interested in doing an organized ride that they already ride so frequently for free. I could see their point, but there is just something special about the ULCER being in our "neighborhood" and it's kind of neat to ride in a group of 2000 cyclists that share your passion for riding.

So, I had originally thought that I was going to be riding the ULCER solo, but then I got hooked up with some friends of DanB that were riding as a team. This was MikeB, his son, Ben, Bob and a guy whose name I never got despite riding with for most of the day. We'll refer to him as WhiteJerseyGuy or WJG for short. I had briefly met MikeB and his son Ben at RANATAD but all of the other faces were new.

Riding as a team we actually got to start a little earlier than the general crowd. The teams were released in stages starting at 7AM. We got off by about 7:15. Despite Mike claiming that we were going to start "slow and easy to warm up", we ended up peeling away from the starting line and holding a pace of better than 25 miles per hour. We probably couldn't have maintained this pace on our own, but we were riding on the wheels of a larger group of teams that was doing most of the work. We just got the free ride :)

About 15 miles into the ride, the larger group started to split into several smaller ones. Somehow we ended up in a slightly slower group doing 22 miles per hour. After a couple of miles at this pace, I looked over at my teammate and asked, "Wanna close the gap on the larger group?". "Yeah", he said, "I was thinking about that too. Lead the way." And so I did.

It looked like I had to sprint for a quarter mile to catch up to the larger pack. But after going all out and finally catching the group in front of us, it turned out that they weren't the larger, faster group. They were just another slow group that had been dropped by the fast group. So, I rested for a second and then sprinted for another quarter mile to catch the next group. This happened 3 or 4 times until we finally caught a group that was moving at a nice pace. What looked like an easy quarter mile sprint ended up being an exhausting 2 or 3 mile sprint to catch up with this group. I took the next several miles easy to catch my breath.

By the time that we reached the first rest stop in Springville 30 some odd miles into the ride, we were riding a staggering average of 23 miles per hour. That's fast. At least for me that's fast. I was feeling good, but starting to fear that I couldn't hold that pace for the full 111 miles. We actually rode right on past the first rest stop. The guys that I was riding with really wanted to put in a good time, and so they planned on doing the full loop with only a single stop at the 70 mile mark.

At this point in the ride, we had already lost MikeB and Bob back in Pleasant Grove somewhere. So, it was just Ben, WhiteJerseyGuy and myself heading out from Springville into Spanish Fork. We were still riding on the wheels of another team as we left Springville and starting climbing the hill in Mapleton up Hwy 89. As we got further and further and down this road I begun to wonder when the course was going to turn off towards the lake. This didn't feel right.

To make things worse, we were riding into gale force winds of Spanish Fork Canyon. This couldn't be the right route. No one would be sadistic enough to plan a ride into this kind of a canyon wind. But I just kept following the guy in front of me who was following the guy in front of him. I assumed that someone at the front the of pack knew where we were going. It wasn't until we reached the mouth of Spanish Fork canyon that the entire group collectively realized that we were lost.

We rode fast back down Hwy 6 into Spanish Fork. I knew how to get back on course, but I couldn't convince anyone else to come with me except for WhiteJerseyGuy. So, we split off from the larger group and I took backroads through my hometown to get us back on course. Ben had disappeared into one of the other groups and we wouldn't see him for the rest of the day. I kind of wonder how long it took those other groups to get back on track. It really pissed me to not only lose 6 miles worth of course time, but to have to ride those into a grueling canyon wind. You really don't need that kind of extra work when you are already riding a 111 mile course.

The ride from Spanish Fork to the front side of the lake was smooth. WJG and I got back into a fast moving pack and cruised through the country side out to the lake. I even got the opportunity to pull (ride in front and let the group draft off of me) a couple of times. Things didn't get ugly until we hit the Southwest corner of West Mountain. It's there that we hit a ridiculously strong headwind and a small patch of climbing that knocks the gusto out of you.

The climbing wasn't very difficult by Nebo standards but it just hits you in a way that demoralizing after riding so fast. Coupled with the heat of the rising sun and a water bottle that was beginning to run dry, this section was kind of miserable. The group quickly scattered into individual riders slogging along at their own pace. For the first time in the day, WJG pulled ahead of me and I ended up riding semi-solo for a couple of miles.

There was a water stop just before we picked up highway 6 in Goshen. And it was well placed considering that my water bottles had completely dried up a mile earlier. Even though it was only another 5 miles to our planned lunch stop, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to refill my bottles, empty my bladder and stretch my legs for a couple of minutes.

We were still fighting a stiff head/cross wind on the road to Goshen. But somehow it was made easier knowing that we had such a short distance to cover and that we were going to stop for lunch once we got there. The time went quickly.

At the lunch stop we reunited with MikeB and Bob. Apparently, our little detour through Spanish Fork canyon had given them plenty of time to catch up with us. They pulled into the rest stop just a little after we did. MikeB was still full of vim and vigor but Bob looked a little worse for the wear. We grabbed a couple of bites to eat and then jumped right back out on the road.

I led the group heading out of Goshen. We only had about 5 miles to Elberta where we would turn behind the lake and turn that grueling cross/headwind into a glorious tailwind. I pushed hard to fight the wind on that stretch of road but I was still concerned that I was going too slow for my teammates... so I would push a little harder. A couple of miles down the road, I decided to pull out and let someone else pull when I realized that there was no longer any of my teammates behind me. I had apparently dropped all of them. I hadn't realized it because some other guy had gotten on my wheel making me think that they were still behind me.

I rode solo up to the Elberta turn-off and then waited a couple of minutes in the shade for the rest of the group to catch up. At this point, I wasn't all that concerned about my individual time, I just wanted to have a good, fun ride back to Thanksgiving Point. MikeB and WJG came tooling along in a couple of minutes but Bob was nowhere to be seen. I got back on their wheels and we rode a blazing fast pace with a beautiful tailwind behind us.

When it comes to favorable riding conditions such as tail winds and downhill sections, there are two types of riders: Those who use the easy riding as an opportunity to rest for a while and enjoy the ride and those who use the conditions as mechanism to bolster their average speed. I can be either type of rider depending on the scenario, but with 75+ miles behind me already on this ride, I was leaning more towards cruising for a few miles to recuperate from that ugly headwind.

The group that we were pacing however, saw things differently. They decided that tailwind was the perfect reason to pick the speed up to over 30 miles an hour. That was actually easier than it sounds given the wind and stretch of road that we were riding. But nonetheless, we held that pace for about 5 miles before MikeB decided that he'd had enough and wanted to drop back to a more comfortable pace. I wasn't about to argue with him. A more comfortable pace sounded pretty good to me.

So, we slowed it back down to about 25 or 26 miles per hour and "relaxed" :) We had been cruising along at this pace for a couple of minutes when all of the sudden I heard a loud popping noise. It kind of startled me. At first I thought that I had blown one of my tires. Had my Kevlar failed me? No, my tires seemed to be holding pressure although something didn't look quite right about my front wheel. I pulled over to take a closer look and discovered that I had popped one of my spokes. That popping sound was the sound of my spoke breaking. I'm not entirely sure what caused it. I might have run over something or it could just be a freak accident.

The broken spoke had caused my wheel to become untrue. It was crooked enough that as it spun an entire revolution it rubbed up against both the left and right brake pads. On top of slowing me down, this made it so that the front wheel was kind of wobbly as it spun around. It probably wasn't that big of a deal but after the accident that I had just survived a week ago, a wobbly wheel at 25 miles per hour sounded a little intimidating.

MikeB stuck with me until the next rest stop where I was planning to get a SAG vehicle to bring a mechanic to look at my wheel. We dropped the pace down a couple of miles an hour just to be safe. As if the difference between 25 miles per hour and 23 miles per hour was going to matter if my wheel failed and I came crashing down into the asphalt.

The next "rest stop" was basically a tent setup in the middle of nowhere with a volunteer passing out ice and water. It was a minor stop that most riders didn't even bother to stop at. But at least the guy had a radio and he started to track down a mechanic for me. I probably waited for 15 minutes before being informed that it would be a while before they could get anyone out to me. But, there was a mechanic from Bingham cycle setup at the next rest stop just 12 miles down the road.

They offered to SAG me up to it. I appreciated the offer, but there was no way that I was going to be SAG'ed for any portion of this ride. I saddled up and decided to ride slow and easy to the next stop. 12 miles really wasn't that far. It went quickly with that nice tailwind and a few good tunes on my iPod.

The mechanic took one look at my wheel and basically told me I was screwed. He didn't have any spare spokes and even if he had normal ones, he wouldn't have any of the special spokes that my wheel takes. See I have these fancy wheels with flat aerodynamic spokes rather than the normal round ones. Basically, my only option was to open up my brakes so that the wheel didn't rub as it spun around and to ride the last 20 some odd miles on a wobbly wheel. "Why not?" I thought to myself. If I could ride 15 miles on a wobbly wheel then I can ride another 20. No problem.

Just as I had resigned myself to this option, the mechanic says, "Or... I could just let you take the wheel of my bike here". Hanging right behind him was his personal road bike. I'm not quite sure why he had it with him considering that he wasn't riding, but it just so happened to have the exact same set of wheels that I had on my bike. It wouldn't have mattered if they weren't the same set of wheels, but I thought it a strange coincidence that they just happened to be the same set of wheels. It was an offer that was too good to refuse. I took the wheels and got back on the road without even partaking of the food or water at the rest stop.

The 20 miles back to the finish line actually went pretty quickly. With my confidence in my wheels restored I was able to pick up the speed a little (actually a lot) and pass up a bunch of the people that had passed me up when I had been riding slower on bum wheels. There wasn't a whole lot of drafting to be had. I was mostly riding solo or picking up small groups here and there. The groups never seemed to last for very long though.

Coming through Saratoga Springs I actually met up with Bob again. Apparently the fiddling that I had done with my wheels had given him the opportunity to get back in front of me. I slowed for a minute to talk to him and even briefly considered sticking with him for the remainder of the ride. But he seemed to be really bogged down and after finally getting a good set of wheels back I just didn't feel like holding myself back anymore.

I pulled into the finish line 6 hours and five minutes after leaving earlier that morning. That included roughly 35 minutes of non-moving time for a moving time of 5 hours and 30 minutes with an average speed of 21 miles per hour.


Here is the elevation profile for the ride. It actually looks more jagged than some of the other profiles that I've posted but that's because there was much less overall elevation change which means you see more detail in the rolling ups and downs.

Wedding and Reception Plans

Just wanted to give a heads up to everyone about our wedding plans. We're still working out the details, but we do have a date range for the wedding and a weekend picked out for the reception.

The wedding is going to occur sometime between the 7th of September and the 21st of September as Rosey and I take a 2 week long road trip throughout the Northwest. The actual date hasn't been decided yet because we are just going to pick a nice spot as we are on the road and get married there. In case you haven't figured it out yet... you're not invited :) The wedding is going to be just Rosey and I. Well, I suppose that we'll have someone to officiate the ceremony as well.

You ARE, on the other hand, invited to the wedding reception. The reception will be held on Saturday, October the 6th. We don't have a time or place nailed down yet, but I am thinking about 11AM and we are hoping to reserve an outdoor spot in American Fork Canyon.

For those of you in Hawaii... unfortunately we will not be coming to Hawaii this fall. Our current plan is to come sometime next Spring after the baby comes. So, don't feel like you have to figure out a way to get to the reception in October. We would love to have you, but if you're not able to come, we'll be seeing you soon enough.

For those of you in other far off places... if you are unable to attend, we are willing to take this show on the road for the price of plane tickets. This applies particularly to my Australian, German and Russian blog readers :)

Once we've solidified the plans for the reception, we'll be sure to send out invitations to everyone.

Getting Spoiled

Rosey's Mom came to visit for the last week and a half and spoiled the three of us (baby included) rotten. On top of taking us out to eat numerous times she decided to tackle a few projects around the house while Rosey and I worked during the day. The most daunting, and wildly appreciated, of these projects was her tackling the weed forest out in our yard.

It took most of the time that she was here to accomplish it, but she was able to clean up and landscape nearly all of our delinquent flower beds around the house. In addition to pulling weeds (a monumental task in and of itself), she laid down landscaping bark and planted a bunch of new plants and flowers. Here are some photos of her handiwork...

The back yard...


The front yard...


Our little aspen grove...


Thank you so much Mom for everything that you did for us while you were here visiting!

Battle Wound

I think this is going to leave a scar.

Who Let This Chicken into my Pain Cave?

I woke up a little after 3AM this morning, just like I do every Thursday morning, to ride in to work around Utah Lake. Only this morning, from the instant that my alarm clock went off, every muscle in my body and every neuron in my brain was screaming, "GO BACK TO BED!". It was more than just being tired; I couldn't shake this weird feeling that I just shouldn't ride this morning. Oh, if only I had listened.

The first sign of trouble came as we were riding through the still dark streets of pleasant grove at four in the morning. We were approaching a red traffic light that for some strange reason actually had a fair amount of traffic approaching from the green direction. It was almost as if light saw us coming and switched in our favor so that we had the green and the traffic got the red. I proceeded to power through the light only to hear Layne shout from behind me, "WATCH OUT!!!".

Well, it turns out that the cars approaching from the other direction did something that I myself might have done. They saw a red light at 4 in the morning with no apparent cross traffic and they were just about to run through it... directly into my path. I'm not sure if Layne's shout got their attention or if they just finally saw my approaching lights, but they did stop and we made it safely through the intersection.

We suffered no major catastrophes for the remainder of the ride to Saratoga Springs where we met up with our DanB, but I did think it unlucky that somehow we managed to ride straight through the middle of about half-a-dozen brain-jarring potholes. These are potholes that are usually easily avoidable even in the wee hours of the morning. But somehow we hit nearly every one of them.

After we picked up DanB, we got about 5 miles before he got a flat tire. As I was waiting for him to change his tire, my bowels decided that they were unhappy with my selection of food last night. Well, not so much unhappy with the selection, but rather with the quantity. See, I get into this bad habit of thinking, "I'm riding 90 miles tomorrow so I can eat whatever I want tonight". And although this is true from a caloric perspective, I have discovered that eating large quantities of food before a long ride just leaves me miserable and in constant anticipation of our next bathroom stop.

I had actually been dreaming of our first bathroom stop in Goshen ever since leaving Orem. Now, in Saratoga Springs, we were still an hour and a half away and I knew that I just wasn't going to make it. And in case your unfamiliar with Utah Lake, there is nothing but scrub brush between Saratoga Springs and Elberta... no parks, no gas stations, no porta-potties, just scrub brush.

We were right on the edge of town in Saratoga Springs. Just beyond that last couple of houses were some farm fields. Luckily, I had the foresight to bring along some emergency tissue to use as toilet paper. So, I headed off into one of the fields, pulled my bike shorts around my ankles, squatted down and did my business. I'm not exactly sure what was growing in those fields (looked like weeds mostly), but it really wasn't very tall. I could look one way and see houses and the other and see the road; and no doubt I was also in plain sight of both.

I kept waiting for a light to turn on in one of the houses and for an angry farmer to come chase me down with a shotgun for pooing in his field. Fortunately there were no lights or shotguns. Unfortunately, there was irrigation. Just as I was finishing my business an irrigation sprinkler that had been spouting the other direction had now run a full cycle and was shooting full blast at me. It must have been a funny sight to see me in that field, buck naked from the bottom down, struggling in the dark to find the leg holes in my black underwear and biker shorts. It was no simple task. It took several misfires of getting my bike cleats stuck in my shorts and almost falling over sideways before I was finally successful.

The ride to Elberta was fraught with ugly headwinds. There was a storm brewing up ahead and we were fighting hard to keep a speed of 17.5 MPH. Several times on this stretch of road, I couldn't help but questioning what I found so enticing about all of this to get myself out of bed at 3 in the morning just to endure this kind of suffering. I had trouble coming up with answers.

And then the rain came. It was slow at first but gradually worked into a fairly steady downpour. It wasn't long before we were all soaking wet. Nonetheless, we were all still in fairly good spirits. That headwind from behind the lake was now a crosswind, and in a few more miles would turn into a tailwind that would carry us along West Mountain at a speed of about 27 to 30 miles per hour. That's a great thing about loop rides... even the worst headwind is bound to turn into a tailwind at some point.

The downside of a tailwind, is that once you turn out of it, and you're bound to turn at some point, it's SO demoralizing to go from riding a light and lively 25+ MPH back down to a grueling, fighting the wind pace. It was after making just such a turn that we stumbled onto the most bizarre incident of the day...

I was out in front pulling the group along into the wind. My gaze rest upon the 3 feet of pavement in front of me, intensely concentrating on each and every grueling stroke of the pedal. I was in my pain cave. I was cold and wet and my legs were burning. But I knew that the only way to get into work was to finish that ride. Surrender was not an option.

Just then I hear a loud, "baaa-gaaawwkk" and a chicken came darting out into the road right in front of my tire. A real, live, full-sized, farm chicken. I tried to swerve but couldn't get out of the way in time. I rode right over the top of that chicken. Feathers were flying and it let out a blood curdling scream. But to my amazement, after it cleared my wheel it just kept on moving. I suspect that it made it to the other side of the road and probably died in the ditch. But I'll never know for sure because my cohorts and I were too busy laughing hysterically to pay attention to the chicken :)

The chicken carnage was not to be the last carnage that we were to encounter this morning. As we approached the WalMart overpass in Springville, I was overcome by this foreboding feeling. Something bad was going to happen. I even thought to myself that I should warn my riding companions to take it easy for the next couple of miles until we got back to Novell. But I didn't because I thought it would sound hokey.

Not 5 minutes later, we were taking a sharp right onto Kuhni road via what was previously referred to as Layne's corner. This is the corner that Layne wiped out on at last year's ULCER. History was about to repeat itself only with different players. Layne even warned the group to slow down, but even with the warning, DanB hit that corner just the wrong way on wet asphalt and his bike went flying out from beneath him. Fortunately both bike and rider were OK. DanB got some good road rash on his right thigh but other than that he was able to shake it off in a couple of minutes and get back onto the bike.

As we pulled away from the site of the wreck, I still had that foreboding feeling. I just had the sense that wasn't the last of our bad luck for the morning even though we were just a couple of miles from our destination now. Not but a couple of minutes later, calamity struck once more.

This time Layne was out in front and I was riding tight on his rear wheel to take advantage of the draft. Layne is usually a pretty steady rider and so I don't worry about getting right on his wheel. But as he was riding along this morning his bike computer completely gave out and he slowed down to turn around and tell us about it. I wasn't paying close enough attention and before I knew it my front tire bumped right into the back of his.

At first I was OK, I got over to the right side of his tire. But then to try and recover from my wobble my bike veered back to the left. By this time I had gained an inch on his back tire so that as I came back left, my wheel hit the side of his wheel. This bump along with the wet pavement was just enough to throw my front wheel out from underneath me. My bike went flying to the right and I came crashing down into the pavement chest first and slid to a slow uncomfortable stop on chip-sealed asphalt. A very uncomfortable stop.

The impact was nearly enough to knock the wind out of me but not so much wind was knocked to prevent the shouting of expletives :) It hurt. Bad. After a minute or so I was able to get up and take inventory. The damage didn't actually look that bad. My knees were scraped up and bleeding. My palms were sore from partially breaking the fall. But then I looked down and noticed the blood streaming from left elbow. It didn't feel broken but there was a dime-size chunk of skin missing about half-an-inch deep.

It was ugly. And if you know me very well, you know that I don't handle blood well. So, I laid down and mustered all my mental fortitude to keep from passing out. The laceration was deep but I still think that if I was a normal person I wouldn't have had a problem riding the rest of the way into work before getting it treated. But every time that I tried to stand up I got dizzy again and had to lay back down. So, Rosey came to the rescue, scooped me and my bike up and took me to the clinic where the wound was scraped out and sewn up with many and varied stitches.

So, the moral of the story is this: the next time you get up at three in the morning and everything is screaming at you to go back to bed... listen :)

The End.