Not Dead Yet

Self portrait taken in a Hong Kong park. I have anger management issues

Blogging is dying out pretty quickly, so it would seem. To some degree, it's with good reason. How many times can you read about people patrolling the front, covering any dangerous/promising looking moves, hoping to unleash a monster sprint, getting a little boxed in, and still salvaging an eighth? Don't forget some mandatory sketchy riding thrown in there. Though it's been some number of years, I've written that post. But there are some good ones out there, Fatmarc (who will forever be FatBacon to me after a funny post of his last year) and Great Uncle Paps. Worth reading.

Life's been chucking it at me a bit, headed by a trip to China. My project management contract sent me to Qingyuan for the better part of two weeks recently. It's an interesting place. One might be tempted to say "good god, what a shit hole," and yes, it's very different from here and some stuff doesn't make any sense to us, but it makes sense to them. I think. They do have more bike shops per acre even than the greater DC metropolitan area, which is nuts. The tea is fantastic, never mind that it seems primarily motivated by the abiding need to boil water before you drink it. Anyhow, it's a super interesting place, I'm excited to go back but not too soon. If nothing else, the jet lag is a bitch on wheels. Hong Kong is a trip, though. That's worth seeing, for sure.

Apart from that, there's mad amounts of domestic traveling going on. This week I will be in NJ, PA, and NC visiting vendors and playing backup on sales calls. Training for pedaling bikes gets hard this way, so I've had to adapt to running. My hotel in China had spin bikes (actually it had the nicest gym I've ever been in) which I used a bit but generally with the time I had (not much) I chose to run a lot. After I broke my leg, I thought running was done, since I'd tried to do too much too fast, wound up in a ton of pain, and said "screw that." Knowing that a ton of traveling was on the come, I took another stab at it, did a slow build befitting the aged and infirm jackass that I am, and am getting along with it quite well. Shockingly, I'm not quite as slow as I'd feared - I snuck in a run on Friday night before having my family over for dinner and thought I was running (jogging, really) at like 9:15 pace or so. Nope, I was running (jogging, really) at 7:45 pace, which for me at this point, for 6 miles, is pretty good. I still have a lot of work to do to catch up to my 16 year old niece, though, who is proving to be an absolute asskicker at all things endurance related.

Being back in RI has some huge advantages for me. Let's face it, despite the fact that I deplore all Boston sports teams (which is in fact a subset of my deploring pretty much all pro sports except hockey), New England is my natural environment. So Saturday I windsurfed for the first time in like 4 years. It was pretty grisly conditions, pretty varsity in fact, but super fun. Thankfully I read the play when the breeze started to die and headed in. Then yesterday I went mountain biking and reacquainted myself with real rocks. My sight reading of the trail was poor (haven't been there but once in ten years), but when I re-did sections I nailed all of them. Pretty excited. And then in the hardest part, this drop section we called the dentist's chair (because if you fuck up you'll soon be in the dentist's chair), I just sailed through the A line on both laps, like it wasn't even there. Cool.

Maybe racing at this crit called Chris Hinds next Saturday, and then maybe a mountain bike tt on Sunday. The mtb thing is at Burlingame, where I haven't ridden since probably the 90s, so I'm set up for a major ass paddling, but whatever.