it is a proven fact

1/4 pound gas station hot dogs with copious amounts of ketchup and mayonnaise for breakfast cure hangovers. yes. fact.

weekend review

spent the weekend in the quad cities completing the DICE cyclocross race series. race #3 was saturday and it was cold...damn cold. a fairly long, stretched out course with a couple fast downhills and a mean run-up that was frozen to the point that my toe spikes couldn't dig in. i felt pretty good and had a really tight yo-yo battle for 5th/6th which i eventually lost. the guy that beat me was a strong rider and it kinda felt like my weeklong head/chest cold finally kicked my ass on the last lap (at least that was my excuse til he beat me worse on sunday). pretty cool course that was a little more wide open than races 1&2 of the series. sunday brought warmer temps, the biggest field of the series and my favorite course of the series. it was fast, a little soft and muddy in spots, had another tough run-up, and had a super fun downhill to a jump. can't say i really expected to be jumping fisty but you kind of had to try to NOT jump off this thing so you might as well put your head down and head right for it. top ten again (9th i think) which ended up getting me 5th overall in the points series. i think i ended up winning half my entry fees back over the course of the four races...not bad for a whole lot of fun. oh...and the vassago fisticuff continues to rock, and making the switch to wtb crosswolf tires is something i should have done a long time ago. these things have tons of traction. for me, cornering at speed is all about confidence. you don't have to ride a set of tires too long before they either give you that confidence or they don't. i won't be racing any other tires for a while. next up...hopefully gonna make it down to iowa city for the single speedo (not a typo) race on sunday of jingle cross. picture low 30's, rain/snow, and a nice blue speedo that goes with the color scheme that fisty is already sporting.

cold and running and jealous of the warm people drinking

sometimes racing is just fun

i really kinda sucked at barriers this weekend

grampa and larsson checking out the action

productive weekend

this weekend was spent working on trails rather than riding them and some pretty good progress was made. spent about 3 hours saturday with alex the scout finishing the construction phase of the structures to be placed along the river trail. now ready to install 2 teeters, 2 skinnies and a jump/drop. will most likely clean a new trail for these sometime this week and hopefully get them installed before a hard freeze makes it tough to dig. sunday i drug larsson out and met up with the group for close to another 3 hours (many of the others were out much longer than that) working on the new section of trail. for a long time we've focused on building harder and harder and more technical trails. this time around they're all about speed. there's a ton of off camber that's getting dug in and some pretty good ravine work as well. should be a pretty rippin fast section when its done. people i saw out busting their tails...deke, doug, jimmy, ogara, spinner, folke, kirk, larsson, sarge, deneb...sorry if i'm missing anyone.

doug, jeff, larsson, jimmy, me, deke

doug and jeff taking on a tree...yes, it really was that off-camber when we started

larsson pitching in

3 hours of trail work and he was toast...took the edge off the pain of watching the bears

thank you colin

THIS is worth watching. if you don't agree with colin's statement, i apologize. sort of. otherwise, "for those about to rock..."
yeah, you know where i'm going with that. hope paulios has seen it.

so it begins

again. i'm on the list (thanks for the heads up ari). seems appropriate that my registration gets posted the day after spending 3 hours in a freezing drizzle that eventually soaked my gloves and stole my hand function for the last hour of the ride. brakes froze over, hit something like 36 mph down a gravel hill that was starting to ice over, ice collecting on gloves, boots, jersey. it was a perfectly miserable day on tuesday...the kind of day that made you damn sure you were training for something.
on another note...i'll finally be starting physical therapy to do something about the shoulder i beat up in vegas. its nothing debilitating but i've certainly lost some strength and range of motion and just kept thinking time would heal it. not so much i guess.
to everyone getting ready to put in a winter's worth of suffering in preparation for transiowa v...happy training.

this week in pics

old towne vande-cross...fun but didn't race great
race #2 of 4-race DICE series borrowed spinner's chameleon/leaf blower...above is trail already ridden

above is trail yet to ride...this thing is actually awesome

a few too many lunchboxes and some good looking flamingos

well...what...happened...uummm...maybe they're just resting?

dropping science like galileo dropped his orange

first off...i'm pretty much a metal head and i'm a sucker for any sort of rap/rock fusion. despite this, i listen to a variety of music and have been listening to jack johnson and martin sexton almost exclusively for the last few weeks. but a few days ago i came across this...

so today after dropping larsson off with his grandparents i spent about an hour in the car rocking out to paul's boutique. i don't even know where this cd came from but its amazing how you don't listen to something for years, throw it in and immediately remember most of the words. here's the point to this post...eggman is an instant party. classic and still righteous. put the cd in and you're just waiting for that song to come on. not that the rest of the album isn't fantastic...but eggman is just where its at.

it comes from a chicken not a bunny, dummy.

good times

this weekend brought halloween, friends, bartending, luther soccer alumni weekend, partying, riding, and a mohawk. saturday's alumni soccer game took all of about 10 minutes to remind me why i've finally retired. at least i made it through without injury and i'm starting to walk a little more normal. scotty crashed for the weekend and we got in a good ride on sunday before he took off. monday brought adam and an older trek 4500. he showed up early and we started tearing into his bike immediately. the rigid fork didn't work out but he's now rockin a single speed, riding pretty well and showing lots of potential for someone who basically just started riding. oh, and he's completely sold on single and 29's. still sorting stuff out after the move back from phoenix, he'll probably be crushing a new jabber by this spring. we got in a couple long rides before it was time for him to head out on tuesday. somehow his trip up here coincided with mid 70's and absolutely gorgeous trail conditions. icing on the cake...i realized that when i hit that tree in the night race my jen green vassago headbadge went missing (yes, it was put on with jb weld). over a week after the race i went to where i thought i had crashed and in full needle-in-a-haystack style i found the headbadge buried in a pile of leaves after searching for less than 2 minutes. sounds like a reason to party. or at least lunch and a beer at t-bock's before heading to the bar for work. hope everybody enjoyed the weather cause its time for booties and tights...and time for me to try out my new pearl izumi barrier winter boots. mmmmm...warm.....

a quick stop for some post-crash adjustments

what a day to ride...

adam doing his thing in palisades

yeah, i let him have a couple minutes on the jabber...pretty sure that's all it took