The theme of my week has been liquid. Of course I mean that because I have ridden indoors without the fan that Steve has been hoarding in his room while I go through two bottles and two towels in a one hour roller workout and still leave a sweat puddle the size of Papua New Guinea (also, for you haters who are thinking in your mind "uhhh Ian, Papua New Guinea is actually quite a small country, so therefore you probably didn't sweat that much if you're comparing it to a mini-country", you're wrong and stop your playa-hating because it's still a country which is a large land mass that is home to over six million people. Which means it's a HUGE puddle on the floor of the garage).
So when the snow made a mess of Bellingham I dealt with it. But I'm no hero because lots of people rode inside all day this week OH and also congrats on posting it to your facebook that you rode X-amount of hours on the trainer, twice.
MOVING ON. I rode outside today! And I am going to talk about that. After 24 straight hours of torrential, down-pouring, sky emptying drizzle (kidding it wasn't a drizzle, it was raining quite hard) Lil'Steve and I went out on a bike pedal adventure. Most of the snow had melted away but there was still some sketchy sections where the snow hadn't quite melted yet and there was icy-slush (not liquid form, that's why it's not blue) residue in random spots on the pavements. Steve went a little bit faster than me in those sections because he was riding a cross bike with narrow road tires which are designed for slicing through the ice getting him down to the pavement underneath the ice whereas my wider tires kept me above the surface and made me slip and almost fall three times. But I didn't! Hooray for that. Also, Steve's center of gravity is quite low.
The best part of the ride was how delicious the water in the bottles tasted. Just pure wonder inside of the bottles. The air temperature was of proper levels and the bicycle-pedaling exertion was at the right balance that the drinking while riding was pure pleasure. I know you've experienced those days- the ones where the water tastes SOOO GOOD that there must be something in it that makes it taste better than normal. Delicious. Delicacy. Dreamy.
I could continue with liquid stories but I'll stop there. I now leave you with a text message thread between myself and my sister. She just got back from racing track bikes at the Beijing World Cup and I think she picked up some humor during the long plane ride. Or at least planned for this moment that I properly countered.
T: what did the ocean say to the other ocean?
I: nothing, it just waved
T: are you shore you got that?
I: stop being so shellfish, your jokes krill me!
T: haha, I sea what you did there. what are you going to watch whale you ride the trainer today?
I: we shellsea. the trainer is a beach but I'll find something to tide me over
T: oooh, you're good. oar are you cheating?
I: I could say the same to your fishy responses!
Also, everyone should follow @telacrane(she's not a liquid but links are blue, so click it. Well technically I guess humans ARE more than 60% water but....) on twitter because when she tweets, she often makes fun of me.
We're normal, I swear it.
Peace Bros.
"Now what we have here is a Capuchin monkey, he makes his home in the rainforest. Now the rainforest is threatened by ....
This weekend was the first meet and greet of the 2012 season for the HB Elite team. It was an opportunity to reunite with the teammates from last year and a chance to get to know the new guys before we are forced to go through airport security together at 4:50 am- a time of the day and a situation where you really get to see the true personality of a man.
Friday for me started out pretty normal. I was sitting in my car waiting for David, when this creature stared at me from across the road. It proceeded to stare into my eyes, through my cornea and into my iris, sliding right through my retina and directly past my cerebellum into my cerebral cortex and just grazing past my medulla oblongata. It walked across the street, pounced onto my car, and stood there, staring into the depths of my potential as a human. A direct sign of trust, and a haunting foreshadowing of the trust exercises to come.
Fast forward to downtown Seattle, where all 13 of us (on Friday the 13th #scary) got to spend some quality time inside the offices of Hagens Berman, AKA the penthouse suite of Seattle. After a 1/8th of a second elevator ride that took us 33 floors into the building, we sat down in a conference room, greeted by several pitchers of water that were chilled by ice cubes that were created as a result of the Titanic running into the iceberg, chipping off large chunks of ice that made their way into our pitchers. Or perhaps even if someone filled a plastic bucket with water, then froze that. Ice cold. We did some general team meetings, individual rider meetings, sponsor presentations, and video interviews.
Reps from Blue bikes/Cole Wheels and Shimano came to give us some knowledge on product that we will be using this season. It's pretty great to have utmost confidence in the product that we'll be racing on this year, and it was awesome that the Shimano reps brought in the shoe ovens to fit our new R315 kicks. We'll be using those shoes, Shimano pedals, Blue Axino SL frames, and a pretty wide range of Cole wheels. I'll usually be on the T-50s or the C-38s, but I'm looking forward to doing some racing on the super-light Ventoux wheelset also.
Alex and Mercedes from Shimano set Cody up with his shoes
Where we sat for awhile. Optimal
Here is a quick teaser of what is to come with our video interviews- The goal is to have footage throughout the season and use these as fillers as videos we do for sponsors. And by we I mean WingerStudios.Com, who is responsible for the video. Also, all pictures I'm using are from WingerStudios.Com, unless I took them with my cellphone. Or also there are pictures that Winger took with his cellphone, so that technically does mean that some of the cellphone pictures are WingerStudios, but if there is no studio does that mean that Winger didn't take the picture?
I'm not really sure how Kennett got onto that subject, since the questions were all about things like "what type of rider are you?" and "what's your favorite race?".
After our meeting at the firm was over, we had a slim amount of time to change into fancy clothes and get to a restaurant for dinner with Steve Berman, our title sponsor. Naturally, we decided to change in the parking garage, do up our ties in the reflective windows, and steam iron our shirts with our breath.
Problem. We get to the van in the parking garage and notice that it has a flat tire. Since we are late, we decide to walk to dinner, to deal with the flat later. So we all change. Then someone has the bright idea to check to see when the parking garage gets locked up, and that time is troubling. That time means that now the flat tire must be changed BEFORE dinner, which means now 13 guys with little to no experience wearing fancy clothes must change a tire WITHOUT getting clothes dirty. We all succeeded except Kennett, and his clothes were definitely not dirty before starting the changing process. And by we all, I mean that three or four people changed the flat.
Now you might be asking "Ian, who was the most stylish, as well as most properly dressed for this occasion, besides you?" That is a good question since clearly I pulled off the fancy dinner clothes look the best, but I'd have to say that Cody was the next stylish. And I chose that because he wore the exact same color combinations as I did.
After dinner we went back to our hotel for the night. Before going to sleep, us locals (David, Colin, Steve, Winger and I) decided we should show the out-of-towners the Space Needle and Seattle Center. So we walked there and checked it out. It was quite majestic in the evening light.
Saturday morning we headed to Gravitec, who are one of our sponsors. We all were quite excited for the fun that was to be had. Kennett unfortunately caught some sort of 12hr bug (seafood?) so he didn't sleep well but he still was raring to go.
Gravitec is a company who specializes in fall protection for people who work at heights. They also do corporate team building activities- and we were able to participate in both of those throughout the course of the day. Here are some things that we did-
Human chain
Four way Tug-a-war (in which Jesse, Chris, and Myself were clearly superior to the other teams but lost due to ... weather)
Eight people standing on one milk crate (in the snow- Picture a movie where the protagonist finally accomplishes something they've been looking to do for their whole lives and as the rain falls in slow motion and fireworks explode into the air the characters throw up a fist pump in excitement and pound their chest in a slow-motion, excitement-filled frenzy)
Trust activities
Trust falls
Harness related repels
Rope climbing
Ping pong ball moving team exercise
Floating pvc pipes
Burritos
Leadership stuff
These activities were set up so the task gradually got more and more difficult throughout the day, and we were able to see our progression as a team. We all took something out of this experience, and it was cool to see some peoples inner-leader come out.
Here are some of those fancy Winger Studios pictures I was talking about-
Human Chain- My legs are currently a... tunnel for Colin....
David falls into our soft, supple & trusting arms
Schmitz gets his 100 ft of rope climb on
Rescue simulation
4-way Tug-o-War
Cody, David, Myself, and Jesse manipulate the elastic to try and grab the paint can
Pictures say a thousand words, so this blog post was 13,000 + words in length. So Kennett may have posted first, but well, yeah. These exercises proved A) how competitive we are and B) how well we work as a team.
I give my advanced apologies for every soul we crush this year in Bike Racing tournaments.
Not all bike racers are huge-headed. Just Lang. But huge-brained, that's a different story. I mean Colin graduated College. And so did David and Chris Parrish! And maybe someday Steve will also.
But here I have proof that our minds didn't rot, either from almost a month off of school (me) or from long days working in a hotel and doing extremely weird things to their bikes (Kennett).
Really Kennett? A homemade saddle bag? Those cost like, two dollars. A Bento Box? Please, pull down your compression socks and remove the neoprene wetsuit off your brain and think for a second. Who am I? Where do I belong? Do I want to return to these days?
Remember Kennett. It's always better to starve than to have a Bento Box strapped onto the front of your bike.
Anyways, here is a FB chat conversation that Kennett and myself had. Clearly proving our intelligence.
:I can't tell if it was likeable or not. Now I'm tearing myself apart
: What did you say?
: I don't even remember
: do you think that things that no one remembers actually happened? there's no way to disprove this. or prove it.
: I've read that three times and I've come to the conclusion that if it can't be remembered that it doesn't exist- but if something doesn't exist that means that in order for it not to exist it must begin to exist
: you're saying it had to exist in the first place but then not be remembered?--therefore nullifying its existence?
: I'm saying that the simple act of existing existentially shows that remembrance is directly correlated to the inclusion of existing memories
: 
: