Ski to Sea is a adventurous relay race that has two different types of skiing, a run, a road bike, a canoe, a mountain bike, and a sea kayak. It starts somewhere in the snow on Mt Baker and finishes in Fairhaven. Then Bellingham goes crazy into a city-wide party celebrating our abilities to travel 100 miles by something other than cars. Speaking of which, there are teams that are doing S2S weekend entirely car-free. Props to those teams, but y'all are crazy. This includes coming up from Everett via bike, towing canoes and stuff like that. Yeah, I'm going to get a ride to my start.
Since you all are curious, I'm doing the running leg. I really like to run in my spare time. My favorite part about running is how you don't go very fast and your legs and feet and ankles and back and arms and nose and personality and spirit hurt after running for just one minute. Which is why I just quit running and am going to do the road bike leg. To each his/her own.
Now here is the unique part. The road bike leg is basically how you get from the snow to the lowlands for the canoers to do their thing. I've said it many times before, I'm no meteorologist or geologist, but my basic knowledge of weather patterns is that the higher elevations have more chance of snow. That means to escape this, I must go downhill.
It is a 40 something mile (I should really figure this out) TT with a large portion of it being slightly downhill. The profile looks something like:
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That is my best analysis of the course. You can use TT bikes, drafting is legal, aero wheels are necessary, my bottle will be filled with Hammer Monster energy drink, and I will NOT touch my brakes on the 2% downhill sections. Here is where things get very interesting. The only rules are that you can't use headphones and your bike can't be motorized. INSERT TACTICS HERE!
- 14 bottles filled with coins. Since that would be more money than I have, I'll be filling bottles up with sand or dirt.
- I have been working for like, 2.5 years to build a Red Bull build-your-own-flying-machine type fairing for my TT bike. I figured that if I attached some wings to the top tube, the likelihood that I will legitimately take off the ground and fly is quite good.
- I'm going to wear tall socks. TAKE THAT UCI!
- Using only plastic wrap soaked in Lemon Pledge (light/wind slippery) (and packing tape), I've created a way for me to be one with my bike. That's right. No longer am I a separate entity to my bike. I will be wrapped up in the plastic to my bike in the most aerodynamically efficient way possible. Someone please wait for me at the finish with a knife so you can cut me out of the wrap. Thanks. (This is similar to the following picture- except cooler (style wise, I'll be EXTREMELY warm wrapped in a saran wrap body suit. Getting skinny!), cheaper, and faster) And yes, I did just use a parentheses inside of a parentheses. Grammar-ception.
If you like running, sorry. I'm too soft for that. Speaking of being soft, ever since breaking my chest my music tastes have changed 180ยบ. I'm pretty sure that when the sternum broke inwards, it pushed my heart outwards, making me more sensitive and emotional.
I'm not saying that listening to music like this makes someone soft, but I'm just saying compared to the last music video that I was in, this is quite different for me.
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| me rapping |
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