If it weren't for bad luck...

Training and racing suffered a majorly expensive, if not catastrophic setback this evening. I was coming home from the Team meeting and my beautiful new bike, with the freshly rebuilt fork and still sporting that "new bike smell"...(pause for dramatic effect)...fell off of my truck driving down the highway!! AAAAAHHHHAHH!!!!!!!!

I know (I think) that I had strapped it down to the rack but either I am wrong or the rubber strappy-things didn't hold because it flopped off and then disappeared under the front of a very large, very rapidly moving Dodge pickup with a terrible carbon-fiber-meets-American-steel-and-asphalt crunching sound and a scream. OK, well maybe it was me screaming. I don't know. It was traumatic.

What I do know is that the frame, fork, cranks, bars, seat, stem, brakes and at least one wheel are F.U.B.A.R., and that's only what I can tell in the dark. It may get worse in the morning when I can actually *see* the damage. My picture at top right of this blog was the last ride of a great bike.

R.I.P.

Possibly the most painful part of this story: this bike was bought to replace the one I drove into the parking garage at work a few months ago. I give up.

If I didn't have race fees to pay...

Have you ever had one of those days at work that makes you wonder why you didn't listen to your friends and get a degree in 'something cool'? From the minute I walked into the office it was one of those days...and the beautiful weather didn't help. I had broken Excel links, bad data, servers that wouldn't respond - all the joys of financial applications. The whole time I was watching the temps rise into the high 60's and the sun peek out from behind the clouds. Damn. Now I really hate my cube. And not in the way most people hate their cube. This is the kind of hate that makes you tune into some really, really nasty death metal on iTunes so you don't have to hear the breathing of your coworkers (Really, it's in their best interest that I not recognize their existence right now) because you realize that pretty much every day for the next 20 years will be some variation of this day. God I need to go run.

Maybe in my next life I will be a spy, or a firefighter, or a space commander, or...

The Revolution will be televised...

This is the maiden voyage of a rookie blogger, with an unhealthy fascination with Adventure Racing. If I'm not racing, I'm thinking about racing...or gear...or training. Which would all be fine if I had any real talent or physical aptitude for AR. I have some genetic predisposition towards endurance events (I'm skinny) and the addictive nature required of multi-sport training, but most of all I live in the middle of Texas. This affords me year-around exposure to paddling, mountain biking, rock climbing and running. While Minneapolis is hovering somewhere around zero today, we here in Austin were treated to a relatively balmy 52. So I have no excuse.

This blog will be a place for me to babble incoherently about my training and AR in general, with a side trip or two about crappy jobs, great TexMex, and family.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the Revolution.