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.

Going Wireless

After realizing over the last couple of months how little I actually use my home phone line that I pay $45 a month for, I finally called the phone company today and canceled my service. So, starting tomorrow I will no longer have a home phone line.

I'm taking the money that I'm saving on the home phone line and upgrading my cell phone from a pay-as-you-go phone to a monthly rate. I hate the idea of signing a two year contract with a cell phone company but it eases the pain to think of it as replacing a monthly fee that I was already paying to the phone company. Not to mention, I'll actually get a pretty good deal by signing up for a "Family Share Plan" with Rosey. Neither one of us use enough minutes that it's a big deal to share 5 or 600 minutes a month.

I should be keeping my same cell phone number as I switch providers, however the change between the two may mean that my phone is out of service for a couple of days. If you don't already have my cell phone number then email me and I'll give it to you. If you don't have my email address... well, then you have no business having my cell phone number :)

Officially Engaged

I proposed to Rosey this weekend in Bryce Canyon National Park. We were on the Navajo Loop to Queens Garden trail when we ventured off trail to get away from the people. Surrounded by redrock hoodoos, I asked Rosey to be my wife and, fortunately for me, she said Yes :)

Swim Lessons

I have wanted to take swim lessons for a long time now. Growing up in Hawaii I learned to swim in the sense that I wouldn't drown if thrown into the water, but I never really learned how to swim athletically. I would swim with my head above the water and stroke really inefficiently such that I couldn't go more than 20 or 30 yards without stopping to take a breather.

Last weekend I stopped by the pool at the Orem Rec center and went for a swim. On my way out, I noticed that they offerred private swim lessons that were very reasonably priced. So, I signed up. My classes don't begin until August, but I'm already very excited about them.

Last night I went back to the pool with Rosey and she, being a fairly experienced swimmer, gave me some good pointers to get started. She makes an excellent teacher. I almost regret signing up for lessons now as I think that she could teach me everything that I really need to know. But the lessons are already paid for, so I figure that I can get twice the learning: from Rosey and my instructor.

I spent the night practicing swimming with my head below the water and trying to remember to breathe occasionally :) It's amazing how much difference it makes to wear goggles. It's much more comfortable to keep your head below water that way. It also amazes me how much more efficient it is to swim that way. I was able to swim the length of the pool without tiring as opposed the 20 or 30 yards that I could swim above water.

So, why swimming? I guess that there are really two reasons. One, after biking all week and totally stressing out my lower body it will be nice to have another activity that I can do that focuses more on upper body. Two, I have been dreaming for a long time of being able to participate in a Triathlon and the swimming has been my one weak activity. When's the Ironman in Hawaii? :)

Pregnancy Appointment #1

Rosey and I just got back from our first official pregnancy appointment. We are roughly 8 weeks pregnant right now. Everything went great. The doctor was really nice and it looks like Rosey is really healthy and everything is going well with the exception of a slight anemia (which is apparently common among pregnant women). We discovered that her uterus is roughly the size of an orange right now. Mmm, citrus :) Our next appointment is in 4 weeks when we will get to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time. I can't wait!

Rana-Mo-Tad

Rana-Mo-Tad: Ride Around Nebo and Most Of Timp in A Day.

I failed to complete the full RANATAD ride today. I came so close, at 147 of the 160 total miles. That's just 7 more miles of climbing that I would have had to do followed by an easy 6 miles downhill back to Sundance. But my body just wouldn't take anymore.

The funny thing was that it wasn't my legs that gave out. As the day wore on, my stomach gave me more and more trouble. By my last rest stop, the very thought of food was enough to make me nauseous. Even water was beginning to give me trouble. On the last leg of the ride, Rosey came to meet me and brought me some cold water. As soon as I got off the bike, I almost puked and then shortly thereafter almost blacked out. That's when I decided that it was time to throw in the towel for this year.

Nonetheless, I did still ride 147 miles on my bike including going over the Nebo Loop and doing most of the Alpine Loop as well. Not only is that a personal best for me, but I think that it is also a fairly significant accomplishment even without finishing (although I'm still very sad that I didn't finish).

The day started off well. There were somewhere between 40 and 50 people signed up for the ride. We left Sundance at 6:30 in the morning and rode a very fast 25 MPH average to Payson, some 36 miles away. It was kind of nuts. I heard later that some guy wrecked on that first section and busted his head open. Scary!

As we were leaving our rest stop in Payson, I got separated from my group. I turned around and it appeared that everyone was already gone from the park. I didn't worry about it too much since we hadn't really planned on staying together for the climb anyway. Once you hit serious elevation, it's every man for himself until you get to the other side.

Well, it turns out that most of my group missed a detour and got stuck going through some mud in a construction area. It slowed them down just enough for me to get ahead of them. I expected that they would catch up to me shortly, but I never did see them on that section. I must have been riding fast, because I was one of the first 10 people to make it over the loop to Nephi. I was pretty impressed with myself. I think that it helped me to have ridden Nebo so many times already this year.

My original plan had been wait for the rest of the group once I got to the other side. But I waited for 10 or 15 minutes and there was still no sign of them. When a bunch of guys decided to head back out on the road, I figured that I would just jump in and ride with them instead of waiting.

This turned out to not be such a good idea. The problem with being at the head of the pack is that it is populated by the strongest riders. We were 35 miles from our lunch stop and these guys were setting of pace of 25 to 30 MPH. It was crazy. I held on for the first 25 miles but then got dropped going up a small section of uphill. With 90 miles and a huge climb behind me, I just didn't have what it took to keep their pace.

I think that riding at that pace really took a lot out of me. I would have been better off sticking with a group that was moving 20-25 MPH. Fortunately, I was smart enough to not make the same mistake leaving our lunch stop. I actually waited for the second group to come in rather than leave with the fast group.

It turned out that the second group had several mechanical difficulties and was more than an hour behind the first group. I used the time to rest up. My stomach was already giving me trouble at this point. I was at the lunch stop for over 30 minutes before I could even think about eating anything.

The ride between the lunch stop and the 35 miles to our next stop in Pleasant Grove was slow and HOT. The mid-July temperates were in full swing and it was nearly 100 degrees out. It made things worse that we ended up in a smaller groups that quickly dwindled down to nothing. As we left the stop there were only four of us. We rode hard and caught up with another group of four in front of us. But then one dropped off the back and four split off the front, leaving me to ride with just two compatriots.

But then, just as we were approaching Novell, I turned around and the two of them had disappeared. Poof, vanished into thin air. Now, it was just me, riding solo in the sweltering sun with 120 miles behind me and another 20 in front of me to the next rest stop. As I meandered through Provo, trying to stick to the course, I was fortunate enough to bump into half of the group of four that had split off in front of us. I'm still not quite sure how it happened. But I rode with them all the way to the next rest stop.

I probably spent an hour at that rest stop, waiting for something to sound edible. But no matter how long I waited, nothing sounded good. I finally downed a Coke (someone mentioned that they settle your stomach) and then decided to tackle the final 23 miles.

The final 23 miles went like this: 4 miles of rolling hills followed by 13 miles of climbing, followed by 6 miles of downhill back to Sundance. I was convinced that I could suffer through a mere 17 miles and make it to the downhill section. It may take me longer than usual, but I could do it. I was totally convinced of this until I stopped 10 miles into the climb and nearly blacked out.

So, I guess the moral of the story is: There's always next year :)

In the meantime, I need to figure out how to prevent these problems from happening during LOTOJA. I think that riding in cooler weather will be a huge help. Also, LOTOJA, is said to be an easier ride even though it's longer because it doesn't have nearly as much climbing. But, I need to experiment with food that I can eat on a long ride and not feel like I'm going to puke. And it probably wouldn't hurt to be carrying a little less weight with me up those hills.

Sicko

Last weekend Rosey and I went to see Michael Moore's new film, "Sicko". It's a documentary that exposes how broken the American health care system is and poses the question, Why doesn't America have universal health care like much of the rest of the civilized world?

Although he makes some really good points, you can't help but feel like you are being manipulated. The format of the movie is basically this: Tell the story of some poor sap in America that has been screwed by the health care system and then contrast that to the story of some blissfully happy people in another country that has universal health care. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I have no doubt that there are some things that are broken with our health care system. I have no doubt that there are people in other countries that are happy with universal health care. But I guarantee you that the bad isn't as bad as he makes it look and the good isn't as good as he makes it look. I bet that you could just as easily make a movie about the evils of socialized medicine in Canada, England or France and have just as many sad stories to tell of people that felt they were screwed by the system.

I believe this to be a Universal Truth: Anywhere you have a system, any kind of system, there will be people that feel marginalized or victimized by that system, with probably some percentage of those that genuinely are. This means that filmmakers like Michael Moore will always be able to find the right set of people and capture their sad stories as evidence of a broken system.

Despite feeling blatantly manipulated, I did actually leave the film feeling two things:
1) More educated about the issue of Universal Health Care
2) That America would be a better place if it were to implement some sort of Universal Health Care.

I had no idea that much of the civilized world already offers universal health care. That came as a shock to me. Paying for health care is as much ingrained in my American mind as not paying for it was ingrained in the minds of the English or French... judging by their confused reactions when Michael Moore went into various European hospitals and asked where he could pay his bill.

The other argument that I found interesting was that we already have some precedent for socialized services. It's not like medicine would be the first thing to be controlled by the government. Think about education, fire protection, law enforcement, libraries, etc. And in many of these cases, you still have the option to pay for additional services if you feel like your needs aren't be met by the government offered ones. For instance, you can still send your child to private school if you're not happy with the public ones. And, I imagine, you would still be able to pay for private health care if you felt like you weren't getting what you needed out of the public system.

Of course the two things that Michael Moore left out of his documentary was exactly how much these universal health care systems cost the average citizen and any sort of proposal of how to transition America from it's current privatized system into a public one. The transition is what I see as the biggest problem. Even if everyone were to jump on board and agree that universal health care is what we needed, it would be an epic transformation. As I understand it, the health care industry is the second largest industry in the nation (second to the military). How do you pull the rug out from underneath an industry that large?

A friend of mine pointed out that there may be other obstacles to America converting to a socialized system of medicine. He posited that the high prices that we pay for health care and drugs in America actually subsidize the industry for the rest of the world. That's right. According to him, the reason why Universal Health Care works in places like Canada, England and France is that we Americans are paying for it up front. A lot of medical and drug research is funded in America. If that revenue stream were to dry up, would it be worth it for companies to continue research?

Here's an interesting question for you: If you had to choose between universal health care and the progress of medical research, which would you choose? Personally, I think that I would choose universal health care. A lot of research these days is targeting very specialized ailments, whereas a lot of good could be done with the generalized knowledge that we already have. Not to mention, I think that more emphasis should be placed on preventative maintenance rather than spending millions of dollars on developing drugs to fix a problem after the fact.

Down With The Sickness

Endurance athletes (if I may deign to label myself as such) are a pretty twisted bunch of people. This is a group of people that like to punish themselves with exercise. It's almost like we are the modern day ascetics.

A really good endurance event might be referred to as a "suffer-fest". And instead of discouraging people from signing up, the use of this term might actually bolster attendance. You might even find these people talking about going in search of their "Pain Cave".

Quoth "The Everyday Athlete"

It’s that place you go where you are enveloped by a complete and raw brand of pain. You reach it after feeling the seering inside of you and then ignoring it. You reach it when every voice inside of you has screamed for you to stop and you have silenced them all. The quiet of the pain cave is eerie and horrific.

If there really is such a thing as a pain cave, and you knew that you had one, would you really go looking for it?

I would. I am.

It's not good enough to have ridden the Nebo Loop. It's not good enough to have ridden the Alpine Loop. How about I get together with a bunch of other lunatics and take a day off of work to ride them both in the same day. Now that sounds like fun!

The event is called R.A.N.A.T.A.D. - Ride Around Nebo And Timp in A Day. 170 miles, 13,000 feet of elevation gain. The ride starts at Sundance resort on the Alpine Loop. You descend into Utah Valley, ride to Payson, up and over the Nebo Loop to Nephi, come back through the valley to Alpine and then end by climbing up and over the Alpine Loop back to Sundance. I get chills just thinking about it :)

The ride is on Monday, July 9th. If all goes well, I hope to still be alive on July 10th :) Wish me luck!

How to Lower Your Bike Seat

Following on the heels of the ever-so-popular "How to Clean Your iPod" is the next installment in my do-it-yourself series, "How to Lower Your Bike Seat".

Step 1: Affix your bike to the roof rack of your car. Ensure that you perform this step outside of your garage.

Step 2: Forget that bike is affixed to top of car and drive into garage. Note that this procedure only works when your bike seat is slightly taller than the opening of your garage door, but not so tall that the garage door takes the bike clean off the top of your car.

Step 3: Remove bike from roof and enjoy your new properly adjusted seat.

Disclaimer - This procedure may cause peripheral damage to the vehicle used to perform the adjustments, such as (but not limited to) indentations, scraped paint and roof rack removal. This is completely normal.

Yeah, so this is pretty much the worst nightmare of anyone who has ever owned a roof rack :) Fortunately very little damage was done. The only visible damage to the bike was the seat was scuffed up some by the stucco as it squeezed to fit below the garage opening.

My Camry didn't fair as well. The front mounting bracket of the roof rack was ripped free of the door and took a good chunk of paint with it as it came loose. Okay, so it was really a pretty tiny section of paint but it felt bigger than it was :) The rear mounting bracket was pushed into the sheet metal of the roof and made a pretty good indentation. And, again, by "pretty good indentation" I mean a really very small indentation :)

I'm hoping that I can get a body shop to clean up both spots for me. In the meantime, I'm trying to dream up some sort of infrared device that detects that the bike is on top of the car and kills the ignition if I attempt to drive into garage. Fortunately for me, I have a pretty low waiting period before tragedy turns into comedy. After all, it is pretty funny if you think about it :)

iPod Stasis

After several weeks with two busted iPods, we have finally restored iPod stasis this weekend. On Saturday, I bought a new 30 Gig iPod Video to replace the one that went through the wash. I was originally entertaining the idea of getting one of the new iPhone's but I just couldn't talk myself into the $600 price tag or the monthly fee for AT&T cellular service. Although, after seeing one in person on Sunday I'm beginning to have second thoughts :) Maybe next month.

Rosey's iPod has had a dead clickwheel for the last several weeks. It would sync, charge and was probably even capable of playing music if it weren't for the fact that there was no way for you fingers to send signals of the brain of the iPod to do anything. Luckily, the nano was still covered under Apple's one year warranty. I thought it was neat that they have a spot on their website where you can just type in your serial number and they will tell you whether or not it's still covered.

So, we dropped by the Apple Store at the Gateway in Salt Lake City and intended to drop the unit off for service. But, it turns out that they don't service iPods at the store... they just outright replace them. So, we walked out of the Apple Store with a brand spanking new iPod nano to replace the one with the bad clickwheel. I have to say that I'm terribly impressed with how Apple does business. It was so easy to get this thing replaced. Granted, I did have to pay $30 processing fee since it was past the first 6 months of the warranty, but that's nothing compared to the price of a new unit.

Mountain Bike Miles

My fancy new mountain bike has not been sitting idle despite all of the miles that I've been racking up on my road bike lately. Yesterday morning I rode a 30 mile loop from Diamond Fork canyon up and over the mountains into Hobble Creek canyon and then turned around and rode back to Diamond Fork.

The ride was interesting in that it incorporated 3 shorter rides or trails that Rosey and I had attempted previously in the year...

A couple of months ago we rode from Diamond Fork about 7 or 8 miles up the trail to Mollie's Nipple (I swear that's the official name of the geological formation). We speculated that if we continued on that trail that it would continue on into Hobble Creek but neither of us had the energy or water to continue on that day.

The second stretch of trail we happened upon while hiking with Rosey's stepmom Karen in March. We started at Sawmill Hollow in Diamond Fork canyon and ended up hiking to a dirt road in the middle of the mountains. At that time the whole area was still largely covered in snow. I had no idea that the dirt road that we hiked on was actually going to be the same road that mountain bike trail turned into. It was kind of neat to see the same area again without all of the snow 4 months later.

The final stretch of trail was a ride that we did a couple of months back. We had planned on riding from Hobble Creek to Diamond Fork over the dirt road. Unfortunately we were only about to make it a couple of miles before we ran into impassable snow on the road. Ironically, we stopped on the road where there was a 'T' in the road with another trail. We were curious where that trail went but figured that we would have to wait until the snow melted until we found out.

Well it turns out that trail connected to the hike that we had done earlier and then eventually to the same mountain bike trail that we had attempted in Diamond Fork. It was kind of fun to ride all three sections yesterday without even realizing that I was going to be seeing all of these familiar places.

The irony of the ride was that I really hadn't planned on doing it as a 'out and back' ride. I was going to ride from Diamond Fork to Hobble Creek and then come down Hobble Creek canyon and have Rosey pick me up with the car. I was worried that it would be too long of a ride otherwise.

Well, it turns out that the ride from Diamond Fork to Hobble Creek was actually shorter than I had imagined. It was 14.6 miles from where I had parked my car in Diamond Fork to where the pavement begins in Hobble Creek. As I reached the pavement, I thought to myself, "Hmm, I could continue down the pavement and get home early OR I could turn around and just ride back over the mountain to my car. A peak at my elevation profile will tell you which option I took :)

I took a different route on the ride back. I stayed on the main dirt road that connected the two canyons. It was actually a fairly easy ride compared to the ride out. In fact, the last 8 miles of the ride were 'cheating' miles. The dirt road ended in Diamond Fork and I coasted down 8 miles of pavement back to my car.

I'm Going To Be a Daddy!

It's official! Rosey and I are pregnant (well, she's really doing most of the 'being pregnant'). We are due, I believe, sometime in February. I can't think of a better person than Rosey to tackle parenthood with. She will make a wonderful Mommy.

Of course there is the small detail of a wedding that will be planned in the coming months. I never was good at doing things in the right order :) I'll keep you posted with details as we settle on plans. I'm so excited!

Thursday Morning Commute

Every Thursday for the last 3 weeks (and hopefully for the rest of the summer) I have a special commute into work. For this commute, I wake up at 3 in the morning, drive past Novell to Orem and then bike from Orem around the backside of Utah Lake 79 miles into work. It is undoubtedly not the most efficient way to get from Spanish Fork to Novell, but it sure is a lot of fun :) Believe it or not, there are actually 4 other guys (Novell or ex-Novell) who also think that this sounds like fun.

The ride officially starts in Orem at 4 in the morning when it's still very dark out. I had to buy a headlight and blinking taillights for my bike in order to ride safely. The headlight helps a little but it's still a little scary to be cruising along a backroad at 20 MPH when you can barely see the asphalt. It's all worth it though by the time that we get around the back of the lake a little after 5 in the morning. The sun is just starting peek out over Timpanogos and you get a gorgeous view of the lake with all of Utah Valley and the mountains in the background.

A New Pet Peeve

As I've been driving around Provo for the last couple of days, I've noticed something that is starting to really annoy me. You see, it's started to warm up a little after a short cold spell and I've seen dozens of people riding through town on their bikes. This should be a good thing right?

Well, what really annoys me is seeing a bunch of people riding around town on full suspension mountain bikes that they never intend to take off the pavement. You can always tell these people because you can see them bouncing up and down on their suspension as they try to propel themselves forward.

Full suspension mountain bikes were never intended to be ridden on pavement for any extended distance. The rear suspension actually makes pedaling less efficient by absorbing some of the down stroke of your pedaling motion. When you are cruising over a rocky and/or stumpy trail, that rear suspension can be invaluable. When you are riding down the street, that rear suspension just makes you look silly.

I think that we have Wal-Mart to blame for this phenomenon. Wal-Mart doesn't really care about selling you the right bike, they just want to sell you a bike. They figure if the really expensive, high-end mountain bikes have full suspensions, then what everyone wants and needs is a really cheap Walmart bike with a full suspension.

Unfortunately, there is no one in Wal-Mart's bike department to help you pick out the bike you really need. So, you come to Wal-Mart to look at bikes, notice that 90% of their mountain bike selection is full suspension and priced under a $100, and you think to yourself: That looks like the bike that I need to buy. This would never happen in a real bike store with competent sales people.

How to Clean an iPod

Step 1: Carry your iPod around in the hidden pocket of your cargo shorts.
Step 2: Forget to remove iPod from said pocket when taking shorts off.
Step 3: Wash cargo shorts in washing machine using favorite detergent and water temperature.
Step 4: Transfer cargo shorts (and iPod) into the dryer and let bounce around for about an hour until thoroughly dry.
Step 5: Remove iPod from cargo shorts.

You should now have a very, very clean iPod.

Note: iPod may cease to work properly after trip through washer. But, hey, at least it's clean :)

Step 6: Attempt repeatedly for at least a week to power on and/or reboot your iPod.
Step 7: Finally break down and totally disassemble your iPod using a knife (my implement of choice) or other sharp object.

Note: At this point you should no longer hold any hope that you can get it working again... you just want to see what it looks like inside.