The 757 bike bloggers got dirty, cold and wet today on the trail system around Lake Maury in Newport News. With rain creeping into the area, I was more than ready to pull the plug, make some coffee and read the paper, but Kevin told me Liz was in, so there was no pulling out. It was cold and gray when we arrived at the parking lot.
In fact, there were a whole mess of us. Kevin organized the boys to poach in on the women’s ride organized by Beneline and Liz. Here’s a group shot from Liz, but shot by Beneline:
Then we rode off and let the women be. We boys were chasing our tour guide Todd from Trek’s East Coast team through the woods. It was a lot of fun. Since I hadn’t been on my K2 since July, when I tore the tire racing in Richmond, I was kind of tentative, slipping out on leaves and not feeling real secure. Even sick Marco was riding away from me. Then it started raining. A nice cold rain. The kind that soaks through your clothes and settles in your bones. Ride faster, stay warmer. The mud was fun, sliding through turns; the wet roots, not so much. I started to feel more confident on the bike and towards the end was having little trouble staying up with Marc and Jerry… Todd and Kevin were another matter. Wish I had better MTB skills. All four of these guys outclassed me on that count.
Despite the rain, we had a great, fun ride. If we’d started at 8am instead of 9, we could have logged some decent time in, but we still got nearly 90 minutes of riding. Hopefully I’ll log more time on the mountain bike this year. It’s a good alternative when it’s cold outside. The trail keeps your mind off the chill and the woods negate whatever wind there is. And even though I was cold and all wet, a quick change of clothes in the car and I was good to go.
The family came to Chez Dins last night for the traditional Christmas Eve lasagna, egg nog and laughter. Ellie recently took up the cello at school and wanted to play for us.
She regaled us with a soulful “Jingle Bells” as could only be delivered by a cello. Not to be outdone, Millie fetched her piano and Audrey the bongo drums.
My present this year was a new bike to replace the Schwinn and its cracked frame. I bought Danbo’s year-old Cannondale CAAD9 team frame, switched my Mavics over and bought a SRAM Force gruppo after reading some reviews that said it was good for sprinters.
I put 20 miles on it before the skies opened Sunday to start getting used to the shifting, then I took it out with the Tripower group on Christmas Eve. The bike is super-light and the handling is almost twitchy. I can feel the power transfer instantly when I push, which is awesome. It has a stiffer feel than the old Schwinn Fastback. It’s definitely going to take some getting used to, but so far it’s doing well. The drivetrain still needs some tweaking though. Getting some miss-shifts, though that may yet be operator error!
With the week off, I hope to get many more miles in on her.
Will buy a yummy St. George Porter, which is exactly what I did after finishing the “alley cat for kittens” Friday evening in about 21 minutes. Wes shot video of the entire race (um, I mean, scavenger hunt, officer) with three cameras and spliced together this cool video:
I guess I take these things too seriously, but I just love rolling fast through the city in a helter skelter manner like this. It brings me back to the summer when I was a bike courier in D.C. The race took the group of maybe 15 of us to 21st Street, then down by PETA, over to the Pagoda, through downtown to Harbor Park, back to the Greyhound station and up to The Boot on the other end of 21st. It was all of 6.3 miles for me, but it was fun, especially flying down Colley and scrambling through a busy downtown on Friday evening. Four or five guys rolled up a minute or so after me, but some stopped at Empire on Granby for a beverage.
Who had more fun? We all did. Come on out and play next time.
If I can get off work in time and figure out how to eat dinner earlier than usual, I’ll check out Norfolk’s second alley cat race tonight - this one to benefit kittens (or the Norfolk SPCA). I enjoyed my first alley cat on Halloween. It will be fun to see what the organizers, whomever they are, have up their sleeves for us. Hope this one is a little longer.
USA Cycling named Team Tripower, my new racing team this year, as the 2007 Division II Club of the Year! (Division II means clubs with 30-75 members.) It’s richly deserved recognition for a great group of people, who are fast, made me faster and just plain fun to train with and hang out with.
Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you’ve selected hasn’t found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it’s now been awarded—might just improve its chances. This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (”leet,” or “elite”) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double “o” in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for “we owned the other team”—again stemming from the gaming community.
Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:
1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”
w00t! I won the contest!
Submitted by: Kat from Massachusetts on Nov. 30, 2005 23:18
Click on each of the other words in the Top Ten List for their definitions in either Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary:
