A Day That Makes Me Feel Happy of Myself

Hi!

Yesterday was a phenomenal day. Let me start from the very beginning.

I woke up with ease, well before the alarm was set to go off. I actually did something amazing- Colin (my roomate*) woke me up by saying "Hey Ian, it's breakfast time" and I woke up instantly in correct sentence structure. What I mean is that as Colin started his sentence, I peacefully woke up, and while waking up I processed that Colin was speaking to me, and as I drifted into the waking world I formulated a sentence that made perfect sense. Good start!

Also, the birds were chirping like a symphony of Mozart's stepchildren.

Next, I walked downstairs and used the button-push coffee machine to make coffeets. They were awesome. Then I had cookies for breakfast! After a winter of not eating anything but Kale and chicken broth, it was nice to learn that I had beaten Kennett in the body weight competition. So now that I've gained 18 pounds, it was time to sprint again.

Attention- there are no photos or videos here even though we took lots yesterday. I'm assuming that they just haven't gone through in my email yet, because Chris Wingfield took lots of awesome photos and Alan took lots of videos. I can only assume that the reason that I don't have these to share in my blog is that Winger is doing lots of editing to make sure my muscles look huge and shiny. Also, pretty excited to see these (hint) and I can't wait to see them (hint) and I'm sure that Wingerstudios.com did a awesome job and when I see the videos (hint) and have a new picture for my blog heading (hint) (that's a panoramic shot) (hint) I will be really excited. I'm glad that we have a photographer on the team who can make me look cool (I'm hoping) and can send me pictures and videos to use on my blog (hint). Thanks Winger and Alan for capturing our day yesterday!

So yesterday we got to do some sprint leadout training. Since we are group of hooligans, we had a great opportunity to learn from literally one of the best US based sprinters of all time- Ivan Dominguez.

Ivan is friends with Joe and because of that, we were able to go out and ride and get advice while doing the actual leadouts. No offense to Holmes, but he isn't and has never been capable of winning a bunch sprint at Tour of California, Tour of Missouri, or Seward Park Thursday Night World Championships. We split into some squads, and basically raced eachother using what we had just learned. My team was Jesse, David, Gabe, and Danny. We all restricted ourselves from putting the other team (our teammates) into the curb, but at one point I looked each of our competition through their eyes, into their souls, and threatened their unborn children. Not really. But actually I did.

We did three sprints, and each were the highlight of my week. It was a really great experience to do these with Dominguez giving us pointers and I took a lot from it. It's pretty cray cray how much you can learn in twenty minutes, and we're pretty G'd to try it out in the bike pedal races.

And then the first highlight of my great day-

After coffee with Dominguez, and by coffee I mean he had apple juice, we rode off for another photoshoot type activity. Winger stood in the middle of the road and Alan tried to walk rapidly backwards in flip-flops. I have yet to see these photos (hint) but when I do expect me to post them on here. Unless I look fat or my arms look really hairy.

For the second big highlight of my great day, check out this awesome photo I found of Steve and his peers!

David- "those are all the tall guys kids. And they're all in like, elementary and middle school"
Kennett- "Steve just wanted to feel part of a group that's not above him"
Chris- "I'm so happy that photo exists"

And somehow camp is now over. In an hour David, Danny and I get into a rental Ferrari and drive nine hours to Tucson for the Old Pueblo GP. RACING ON SATURDAY!

              *my kangaroo buddy (Colin's joke) (lol) (high-fives in the kitchen)

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Doing Things In Large Quantities: HB Team Camp Edition

There are roughly 2.3 billion acres of land in the great Ol' United States of America. There are 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water in our oceans. Danny ate 14 Oreos, Kennett got in trouble with Joe, Jesse threw frisbees indoors, and Dan did Danland stuff (mostly homework). These are all things that exist or happen in large quantities. Here are some more!

Starting from the beginning of this trip, Kennett needed to clean his bike. Instead of say, one rag, he used what appears to be tissues and Q-tips to clean his bike. Plus side, it got clean. Down side, he didn't end up needing to clean it because he got a new bike.

Our Salvation Army camp and industrial sized kitchen leads to some pretty large utensils that make cutting things smaller than pumpkins quite difficult. Since I don't put pumpkins in my oatmeal, I have had to figure out how to ball using essentially a machete to cut my apple.

We all went in on a dinner last night. Originally, we had noodles and sauce. That is all. Then Jesse and Colin went on a mission into the large, industrial sized freezer and returned with a heap of supplies. Including ~15 pounds of parmesan cheese and the equivalent of a burlap sack filled with chicken.

We began the cooking process and I, being the most thoughtful, considerate, and handsome of the group decided that in the sake of leftovers we should cook all the noodles that we bought, which was five whole packets. Proportionately, we had three jars of sauce. This means that now we have roughly 3.5 bags of cooked spaghetti leftover and 0.0 liters, ounces, or grams of pasta sauce left.

Also, the sun and the Pacific Ocean are in large quantities.

I am feeling a large quantity of squeezing and massaging in my legs right now as I am caressed by PodiumLegs.

Finally, we did a large quantity of through and off today on the coast. Miss you Cody, Steve & Logan!

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Team Camp Battle Royale- Me vs. Eastbound & Down Star Kenny Powers

Yesterday we rode and did some pedaling and some uphills and some downhills. Most importantly, we rotated on PCH and I followed behind Danny. It just felt so right.

Ignoring every other aspect of my life in this specific moment, I want to tell you about a mythical battle that I didn't know that I was having, with someone who I didn't know raced bicycles.

For a little background on the situation, I was born in Seattle, Washington in December of 1989. I grew up and eventually got a Garmin. Ok, up to date. Thanks to the miracles of Strava, I can upload a ride file and see comparisons to other people up hills, or even down them! Yesterday we did a climb called Latigo, and it was incredible. We don't really have any opportunities to do climbs longer than 4 minutes at home, and this one is 40. Went up it, finished riding, then scurried home to Strava, all night long.

That's a screen shot from the Strava Latigo KOM. Blah, blah, and... timeout. 6th place is Kenny Powers?

Wow, my world is shattered. Could it really be that the HBO show Eastbound and Down produced a man who can bike-pedal with ease? That can hold 593 watts for an entire 36 minutes and 53 seconds? For those of you unfamiliar, Kenny Powers is fat, does drugs, and has a motivational speaking disc. I'm guessing that he had to have been listening to that disc while climbing. Either that or he rode one of these:

Or one of these-

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not crying because of this. I am however taking some notes on how to climb better based on episodes of Eastbound and Down. First step- crashing my car (check), second step- becoming a PE teacher (not check), third step- selling lots of memorabilia on eBay (sort of check, I sold a powertap computer recently). Also, personal style is quite important. Luckily Kennett has hair clippers here at camp so that since I don't have long enough hair to braid, I can shave my head so it appears like I have the braids.

Props Kenny Powers, props. However, I had to check. This is a battle royale after all. On Saturday we did a climb called Mulholland. Could Kenny Powers have corn-rowed his way majestically up the mountain, dancing on his pedals much like, well much like this:

I DON'T THINK SO KENNY POWERS! TAKE THAT MY CINEMATIC NEMESIS!

Mulholland Drive saves the day. Back to school Kenny Powers.

 

See you all later, I'm really busy. I have to go watch Tirreno-Adriatico stage 6 footage now, then ride bikes in the sun (and drink coffee) (at Westlake Starbucks).

It's a hard knock life.

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Back in Agoura Hills! What a Relief!

After an immensely inconvenient two-weeks of trying in school, it finally became time to come to California for team camp. I got the pleasure of driving down in the team van, and instead of talking about that, you should watch this video:

http://vimeo.com/38202182

So fast forward 20 hours and we got to our base for the next week. Before that, I held my bladder for roughly 4.5 hours and may have imploded a kidney.

So we're here, in Agoura Hills. New for this year is that instead of staying at the Malibou Lake house, we took over a building of a YMCA camp. Features include breakfasts made for us, huge rooms, and primal wall art of one hawk eating another hawk. Vicious.


My favorite part about today was how everyone knew that we had a breakfast to get to between 8 and 845. Of course by everyone I mean everyone but Kennett- the person who would love a free buffet style meal the most-est out of every one of us. Poor Kennett.

Guess Who?

Guess Who?

Guess Who?

That is a dangling moose. Huh?

Sorry, I must go walk around in my boxers more.

Bye!

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Consistency Breeds Success, Right?

500 miles of driving later and the #swaggerwagon is as good as ever. Take that, haters!

This weekend I participated in the bicycle race tournaments titled: Icebreaker Time Trial and Mason Lake Road Race (#1). Last year I did the time trial, made more trainings by going for a ride afterwards, and then went home and went to sleep. Then I went to the road race the next day. Last year I got third place in the time trial, and made the break in the road race and got third again. That was last year.

USAcycling has a new race predictor feature, and that told me I was going to get second in the TT. Since I had seen the future by looking at this race predictor, I knew I didn't have to pedal hard because I was a shoo-in for second. Turns out there were two people who were MORE of a shoo-in for first and second, because the USAcycling perfect race predicting algorithm forgot the fact that I am destined for... third place at this Icebreaker TT event.

It appears that I've gotten slower. Which is inconvenient, because Jamie Stangeland went about... 8 minutes faster than last year.

Fast forward to Sunday. Mason Lake. We get our entire team in the break. Four of my teammates ride the front for 50k. I make the next and final move, drive that. Lang bridges up, leads me out, and I almost make a crash in the finish. Then I get third place, again! Consistency, right?

Yeah... Here is my weekend in pictures.

                                           #PRO

Laugh

That was Saturday, and it was awesome. Here's Sunday.

Lang showed up in this:

And then we drove this:

Can the #swaggerwagon fit all this, 4 people/their stuff, and 4 bikes?

Easy!

 

Chaos!

Taco truck trip #1

Taco Truck trip #2

OK, I thought it would take less time to do a picture heavy update instead of a writing words heavy post but I was wrong because I'm illiterate.

(Yes, that was three taco truck stops within 25 hours)

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Grab Hold of Something!

EVERYONE!!!! I GET TO RACE BIKES TOMORROW! AND THE NEXT DAY! IT'S BEGUN!
Holy Inspector Gadget I am super excited to pedal my bike with a number on my back. In fact, I've already pinned my number for the time trial tomorrow and I'm probably going to sleep in my skinsuit tonight.

Rewind. When I was younger I was really into baseball. I also was very superstitious. So superstitious that every game I'd draw a certain symbol on my hand, pull up my baseball pants the same way, and sleep with my jersey and my glove underneath my pillow. I'm sure that this had everything to do with me being way better than that kid who picked his nose in right field. Everyone knows they put the worst kid in right field.

Now however I've apparently become more interested in appearance than superstition because my current self wouldn't let a slept on wrinkly jersey exist on my back. So if you break into my house tonight, I will NOT be sleeping in my skinsuit or with it under my pillow.

Back to bike racing real quick, YES!

BIKING!

Here is an amazing statistic, there are 19 cat 1/2s registered for the TT tomorrow. What?!? That sounds like probably a record for this race.

Hold onto the millenium falcon Han Solo (geek alert) because we're going into that speed where the stars stop moving for a second and then you burst forward into super super speed. Right now (tonight, Friday) we're at that crazy moment where the stars don't move somehow, even though the ship is still moving (weird). Tomorrow, it's go time.

I'll breathe again in late September, which is just the way I want it.

Peace bros

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