One down, two to go...

So I started the semester with three goals:

1) Get straight A's

2) Win the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference Overall title

3) Learn to like coffee

I won the ECCC overall conference title and also took home the gravity title, but the other two are proving to be a bit more difficult. I just got back from collegiate mountain bike nationals, where we took 5th in the Division I omnium, and I took a pair of top 15 finishes in the gravity events. In the process, I managed to give myself a concussion when I crashed headfirst into one of the dirt berms on the Dual Slalom course. This, naturally, is making goal number one a little more difficult to achieve, since I've been to one class in the last 6 school days... which I could sum up by saying that biochemistry can really make your head spin. As for goal three, most people wonder the most about that one, but it seems to me like it fits perfect with #1. It's the most economical source of caffeine (as in, it's free in the dining halls) and what college student doesn't need an economical source of the most common legal stimulant?

As for everything else, I'm stoked to be heading home for a week over Thanksgiving. And I can't wait until I can think straight & ride my bikes again.

From chocolate to ice cream...

A lot has happened in the last two months - here's a quick update.

I moved up to Burlington, VT in the middle of August and got in a great road trip through Pennsylvania & most of New England before I started school at the University of Vermont. I've started racing with the team here, and things are a lot different than what I'm used to. There just aren't that many girls, and there aren't as many riders as I'm used to in RMCC. There also aren't pro girls in every women's A race, which has been better for my results. I definitely miss RMCC, and I'm hoping I get the chance to race back in Colorado sometime in the near future. For now, I'm stoked to race a four event weekend at UMass. I did my first Dual Slalom at Mt. Snow about a month ago, and even though I'm a bigger fan of mountain cross, I can't wait to race this weekend.

Oh baby, baby!

Nationals has come and gone, and it could have gone a lot better. My teammate Nate wasn't allowed to race because they didn't take any riders on the waitlists. I was definitely disappointed with my own performance in the U23 crit. Luckily, Ethan had some good finishes in the 15-16 men, with a 66th in the TT and a 56th in the RR. It was great to be able to hang out with my Colorado teammates for a race weekend. Today I had to get back to work, but things are coming along there. I only have a few weeks left of the program here, but I've definitely been considering coming back next summer. Last week we had a birthday party for all the Hershey BBSI guys (the 3 in the picture), because they all have July birthdays.

A first time for everything

So around here they have 20 mile road races and 25 mile crits. Confused? Yeah, so was I. I still don't have an answer, but I did get my first road race in. I crashed about a mile into the 20 mile race, when a girl ahead of me went down for no apparent reason. I was just fine, so I got up and chased the pack on my own for a while. When I got around to the start/finish I found out that they had neutralized the race, so I got back in with the group anyway. It was pretty uneventful from that point on, and I took 4th in the field sprint. When the race was over, I caught up with my roommate and her brother for my first ever country concert. A few of my collegiate teammates are country fans, and after enough time travelling with them that I've gotten a good feel for that genre. It was a really good show, featuring Heartland, an up & coming country group with some great energy. The next morning I decided to check out the local trails, and I ran into one of the girls I had raced with the day before. Back in Western Colorado, overgrown trails are totally hypothetical, a fantastical dream that is in no way realistic. Around here, things are a bit different. In fact, I eventually lost this trail and had to turn around.
This weekend I raced the most elite field I've competed against up until this point in my racing career. I got blown away in 12 minutes and 21 seconds at the the Iron Hill Criterium. I don't think I've been dropped that fast in my life, but I also have never learned so much in only 12 minutes. (If only I could cram like that during school!) This coming weekend I'll be meeting up with some of my Brown & Wills teammates in Seven Springs, for USA Cycling's Road Nationals.

Damage report

Here's the painful part...

hanging by a thread...

remnants of the rear triangle...

severed limbs...

the whole package.

Car 2, bikes 0

So last night I met a new riding buddy and we headed out from the main entrance of the hospital. We got back much quicker than expected, minus 2 bikes and plus an ambulence and backboard. There's something to be said for living and working on a hospital campus. As for the accident itself... here's a quick summary. We were just riding along one of the local highways when a Saturn went to make a left turn from the opposite lane, and took out both of us in the process. I rolled over the hood, broke the windshield, and landed facedown on the pavement. Beth, the girl I was riding with, took her knee into the taillight and her hand into something else. I was conscious the whole time, but since I'd hit my head twice and cracked my helmet in quite a few places, I got to go through the whole neckcollar, full backboard deal. I came out of the situation in as close to one piece as you could reasonably expect. Both knees are pretty battered and bruised, and I've got some serious chainring marks on the inside of one shin. My head's alright, no headache or anything, just a small cut on my forehead. Right now I'm waiting to see the bike, which I already know is in bad shape.

Out of Oxygen

Not quite - let's make that carbon dioxide. I got my first experience racing in the area, and it did not go as planned. I hadn't been able to ride in the middle of the day until this past weekend, and it makes a huge difference. The humidity could kill someone, I swear. And if it's not the humidity it's the rain- check out these photos. Let me point out that these are "before" and "after" shots. Originally, I got the camera out to take a picture of the downed tree on the other side of the courtyard. About five minutes later we looked out the window again, and there was one down right in front of our door. This is pretty much what it takes for me to make an evening workout into an indoor trainer session, but tonight I didn't have a choice. These pictures were taken after my ride, the one that I almost did outside because it wasn't really raining that hard. I guess the Colorado motto doesn't apply here, you know "Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes." Around here, five minutes will just topple another tree. I'd like to point out that these trees had to have been around for awhile, because no one plants anything near that big - and it was the wind that took them out, not the lightening.Yesterday was my day off after racing this weekend, and I headed over to Hershey Park with my roommate Elise. We had a great time, hitting as many rollercoasters in 3 hours as you can on a normal Sunday.

Who's this Hershey guy?

I realized Sunday morning that it's been a good five years since I've been on a rollercoaster. I don't even think about going to an amusement park on weekends, because I can get plenty of thrills on my bike without having to stand in lines. But I just invested in a Hersheypark season pass along with some of the other students in my program, so we'll be there a few more times this summer. It was a really good time, and I realized that you can go faster on a rollercoaster than it's possible to go with anything that requires human reaction times for tight turns, loops and things. So, I give them credit, those things really are pretty sweet. Also in the area is the Hotel Hershey, a swank place with gardens just down the road that I haven't gotten around to checking out yet.

On Monday morning, it was back to the lab for some peptide synthesis. Even though the process can be done in an automated fashion, it was cool to use a more hands on method. I had to skip out on my lab today to attend another workshop up at the main campus, on Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). Tomorrow, our lab is hosting a professor from Yale who will be speaking about delivery systems for drugs, genes, and proteins. They have actually been talking about this professor since we got here a couple weeks ago, so it should be good. My project is working on a controlled drug delivery system, so this should be pretty relevent.
The crazy thing that I noticed while writing this post, is that none of the stuff I've mentioned would exist today without Milton Hershey's support. This whole town is a tribute to what he did, from making chocolate to funding a medical center.

Can't blame the DHers

XC riding is dangerous - not much suspension, 6" rotors, and nothing but spandex for protection means there's little room for error. At least that's what the downhillers say in New Jersey - I'm not totally sure it's any safer than riding a big bike off a drop, or a skinny tires at 30+ mph on the pavement. But I had a day to myself on Saturday, so I searched the internet a bit and found an awesome freeride park in Vernon, NJ. The riders I met from Massachusetts say its the best place on the east coast, so I guess I got lucky. I'd probably consider that one of my best days on a bike - meeting cool people and riding all kinds of new terrain. They have rocky technical runs, jump trails, random dropoffs, and a lot more stuff my parents really don't want to hear about. And even better, it's located right next to a water park, which means there are lots of people in swimsuits staring at the fully armored dirt riding junkies and asking how much our bikes cost. But when I was convinced my arms just wouldn't stand another run I had to switch into the lycra chamois and get on my skinny tired, full carbon Ibis and do some ummm... "real" riding out into the backroads of NJ. At that point, I could feel the impact from a crack in the pavement all the way in my shoulders, but I shouldn't complain about any day where I can ride for 7-8 hours.

"I'll nanofabricate you!" - ???

I got up early this morning to catch the shuttle that goes from the Hershey to State College, aka the medical campus to the main campus. We were going to a cell culture workshop because I'll begin working with cell cultures later this week to create a sample to do some in vitro testing. Josh & I both made the four hour round trip, and with the shuttle times we had plenty of time to check out the Penn State Campus. He's a newish Penn State student, after transferrring from Virginia Tech this past semester, so the campus is pretty new to him too. For lunch we checked out this little Cajun place called Spatz, which was really good. We got teased about it when we got back to campus because they say that that's where all the professors eat, but hey, we didn't know that. We have a few more workshops in the next few weeks, but hopefully we won't have to go up to State College too many more times after that. It really ends up being an all day thing, and I barely had time to get out on my bike by the time we got back home. The riding's so different here that it's been interesting trying to adjust. My heartrate just won't go as high and I never really breathe hard, but I'm still working hard. It is really cool to have a whole new area to explore, and between that and sitting in a lab all day, it's not hard to motivate myself to get out when I'm done with work.

I can't think straight enough to title this but...

So over the last week, I've driven myself and all my stuff to Hershey, flown back to Grand Junction, and then back again to Hershey... I think that redefines the term "jetlag". I'm pretty tired now, so excuse any mindless babbling you might find on this post. I went home for my sister's Bat Mitzvah, and spent more time travelling than anything else. It wasn't planned that way, but I had a 3 hour layover in Denver, then the plane was delayed for another hour, which made me miss the connecting flight, so I had to stay in Washington overnight and wait for the first flight to Harrisburg this morning. Then I found out that my bike had made it, but my bag hadn't. So I was late to lab and I barely found clean clothes to wear. We're still trying to get things set up in lab, which meant I got to wear a lab coat that apparently belonged to a Dr. John so-and-so, M.D., Department of Urology. And we found out that Nalgene sells lab books for $40 apiece, which makes Mesa State bookstore prices sem like a bargain.

Hershey, PA

1900 miles makes for a long drive, and it gets even longer as you're forced to drive slower and slower as you get further east. I'm not sure what I'm going to do without 75 mph speed limits - here's to going 35 on the highways!

I sat through hours of safety & orientation information, and got an overview of the lab I'll be working in for the next ten weeks - starting tomorrow. I also got to meet the other students in my program. There's only five of us, and it's a good group. Everyone else is from Pennsylvania and they're all engineering students, which kind of makes me the oddball.

After all that lecturing, it felt great to stretch my legs and check out the amusement park half of Hershey. The roads around here are great and so is the scenery. Everything's green, and there are some awesome old farmhouses along the way. I've also found that every road seems to connect to something else. It's a change coming from Colorado, where a lot of times the epic rides only have 1 or 2 routes like the National Monument or Mt. Evans.

How do you spell "geak"?

So I'm leaving GJ tomorrow to drive across the country to Hershey, Pennsylvania. For those of you that haven't heard, I managed to get a chemical engineering internship at Penn State. I'm pretty stoked, although I know a lot of people out there are starting to wonder about my sanity.
Hmmm.... as I recall this site is supposed to be about cycling, so let me do a quick summary. Mesa State took 1st place (DII) in the Rocky Mountain conference, and my teammates Ticia Slusher and Chris Stuart managed to win the DII womens' and mens' individual titles. My personal season highlights included winning the Hell of the North Road Race, and taking 3rd in our conference.
The weekend before finals we took off for Lawrence, Kansas to compete in Collegiate Road Nationals. The weekend went well for Mesa State, with a team podium and Chris taking home the DII omnium title. After flatting and bonking in the RR, I pulled off a 10th place finish in Sunday's crit.

It burns!

There's nothing like three races in two days to whoop you straight into the season. My favorite announcer would say "welcome to downtown pain city!", and that's exactly where I spent my weekend. The Time Trial was the first event of the weekend, but it was just a warmup compared to the crit later in the afternoon. They combined our category with the open women, which had strong teams from Excel Sports Boulder & Vitamin Cottage. The open girls were going for it every chance they got and the collegiate girls were going hard for premes, so it was a tough race. Ticia, my Mesa State teammate, laid down a super strong race and managed to get two of the points premes. She took 4th out the collegiate girls and I took 9th, but those places gave us 1st & 2nd out of the Division II women.

This morning was the circuit race, which shouldn't have been too bad, but I didn't have anything left in my legs. The Fort Lewis girls really worked it well, and charged up the hills like no one's business. They eventually claimed 1st and 2nd places, but we got to suffer for about an hour & a half first. As soon as we were done, the A men were sent off.

About halfway through, the Mesa boys managed to get Mitch into a break that made it all the way through the race. Chris, Nate and Kevin all finished with the main pack, which gave us some good finishes for the weekend.

Spring Break!

Break's treated me pretty well so far. I started it off by ski coaching the Powderhorn team up at Beaver Creek, then headed down to the south part of the state for some quality spring skiing in Telluride. If it doesn't get cold soon, I might not get back on snow again this season... it was at least 40 every day I was down there. I'm having a hard time accepting the end of ski season this year, but with school kicking back in on Monday and my race season starting this weekend, I might not have a choice. We're heading up to Boulder tomorrow afternoon for CU's race. I'm pretty pumped to start the season, especially after picking up my new roadie earlier today. It's an Ibis Silk set up with full Dura-ace. I won't be racing it this weekend for obvious reasons, but I get to start training on it after the weekend's over. The new bike should be a pretty good motivator to get some miles in.

What's up w/ the weather?

Alright, it's been a while, and I'm sorry I haven't kept up. School's been keeping me busy, and all my free time goes to riding my bike. I've had an exam in each class by now, so I feel a bit more confidant that I can handle this semester.

But riding's been great lately. Collegiate team's been going for a while now, and some of my teammates will be headed down to UNM next weekend for the first race of the collegiate season. I'll be heading to Moab, where the weather should be warmer, and I won't have to get my heart rate above 180. I'm also hoping to get my new roadie by next weekend, and try it out.

Back home

I'm getting ready to go back to school, but in the meantime, I thought I'd take a trip to Denver. I had a meeting with my new coach, and I'm really excited about this coming season. I'm also really glad I don't live in Denver, because he said he hasn't been able to ride outside in 6 weeks! Roads over there are horrible, and I'm convinced that the city of Denver is trying to keep all of their car maintenance places in business. I went over with my friend Sarah, who's leaving for a six moth trip to India. I dropped her off for her flight out of DIA, and she should be on her way now.

Happy New Year!

I guess the thing to do on New Year's is ride bikes. I've been putting in the miles lately, but yesterday was what it's all about. We started with a group of three and slowly added on. We found Ross and then Doug from Ruby Canyon. Much better than those rides with just the horses and llamas looking on.
Oh, and I should mention the dogs that chased us down and snapped at my leg the other day. My new tactic for getting away from those little ones is sprint, baby, sprint!
Anyhow, happy new year! Ride hard and avoid unfriendly canines.