foto-blahggin'

Jenny and I made the epic drive up to Winthrop on thursday to spend the weekend with Solomon and Brandy in a solar-powered, outhouse-equipped cabin in the woods. Did some good rides, ate some good food, drank a couple of good drinks, and generally decompressed. Thier "driveway" was really just a couple miles of goat-path which cuts straight up the side of a mountain.



You step outside the door in the morning and you are alone. Very alone. Quite the change from the downtown apartment.




Good morning. Coffee, velonews and not much else.



One advantage of living where they do is the security of it all. Some people get all excited about never locking thier doors. How about leaving race bikes on the covered porch and sleeping outside every night? The master bedroom is a roofed and mosquito-netted deck on the side of the house.



Sometimes you're sitting on the porch just relaxing, talking about the world and you get the undeniable urge to shoot some stuff. Do you live way out in the middle of nowhere? Do you have a CO2 powered BB gun and some empty budweisers? If yes, then let that hick-flag fly high and take some shots, my friend.



There's more where that came from.
DT

shop of the stars...

For a rainy monday, we were at an 11 on the rock star-o-meter. First the singer for chick-band formerly known as Sleater Kinney stopped by to get a flat fixed. Pete almost peed himself. Then the singer for Kaddisfly dropped by for a new tube. Then Colin Meloy from the Decemberists had to show everyone up by breezing through to buy matching Amsterdams for him and his girlfriend. He came up to ask me where the helmets were and I couldn't remember. The haven't been moved in two years. Couldn't even remember my name. I think I mumbled something about a mariner's revenge and stumbled off. All in all, he's a nice guy with a nice girlfriend, who had to borrow a truck from his guitarist because he doesn't own a car.

Another Swan Island crit went down the tubes on Sunday. I rode there and back, so of course it pissed rain all the way there, rained even harder during, and even harder when I struggled over Skyline afterwards. The race itself was pretty average. About 40 Team Hamburglar guys tried to do the Rubicon TTT by getting a big group of thier own off the front, but just ended up attacking and chasing each other all day. I tried a couple of moves, but each time was so far in the redzone I knew it would go nowhere. So they effectively kept themselves from getting a group together and it all comes down to a field sprint. I find Casey and Gephart's wheel, the laps count down and off we go. Mr. Too Vanilla himself is leading out Gephart. Coming into the last sweeping right hander, I launch around on the left and just as I overlap with Skerrit he blows and goes LEFT pretty hard. I'm screaming my head off (which at the time probably came out as a barely audible "hhrraaaiiiiiieeee" type whimper), I steer into a wet manhole cover and I'm going sideways into the outside curb. I closed my eyes, clicked my Nikes three times and said "there's nowhere like home" and when I opened my peepers, I'm uright and rolling down the finish straight, watching the sprint unfold. Skerrit says he never saw me. I say he owes me one.

Tuckerman finished 3rd overall in Arkansas. That's huge. It's huge-tastic. Huge-tacular. huge. Sounds like a weekend of big sacrifice from the team. I'll post more when I hear it straight from the boys.

I might be racing somewhere in Trinidad in a red, white and blue skinsuit next month. Not sure of any dates, or even if I'm going for sure, but I'm in total panic-training mode either way... Fingers crossed.

DT

Tuckerman wins!

He may not be a pretty man, but he's a pretty quick little bugger.

Awesome. That's too cool for school.

just chillin

This is what it's like to hang out with Curry and Tuckerman. Wake of destruction

wack attack

In the mood to cause a hipster heart-attack at stumptown? Roll up on this. Maybe with some pink rims.

DT

Hoy Polloi

So Chris Hoy jumped head-first into the hurt-box in Bolivia a few days ago. The guy already has the sea-level world kilo record, but he wanted the absolute record that frenchie Arnaud Tournaut holds of 58.875 at altitude. 15,000 feet of hot, nasty altitude.

After 2 attempts he missed by .05 seconds. Draaaag. Train for years, dedicate your life to a dying niche of the sport, spend a few months doing intervals in a hyperbaric chamber, fly to La Paz, put your one-directional front wheel on backwards and miss the record by a hair.

That's a lovely little what if to think about for the rest of your life.

DT

back to school

yeah, i know you said you'd never set foot in another high school gymnasium ever again, but this might be a good reason to give it another go.

I may get annoyed with some of the ones that mope around in front of the convenience store by my house smoking crappy ciggarettes and begging me to buy them beer, but big ups to an awesome group of kids from Lincoln High for taking matters into thier own hands and staging one of the best fundraisers ever.

I can see the brainstorming session:
**students**
"our music department sucks"
"yeah, it sucks"
"i wish we had a recording studio so we could record emo records"
"yeah"

**teacher**
"conservatives dont want to pay taxes for you to have music education, or for me to make a decent wage. sucks doesn't it? that's life so get used to it. I need a drink"

**students**
"that sucks"
"yeah"
"we should have a fundraiser"
"yeah"
"carwash?"
"nah. too wet"
"rummage sale?"
"nah. i don't want to sell my Wii"
"bake sale?"
"nah, my cook wouldn't be into that"
"silent auction?"
"nah. boring"
"concert in the gymnasium with two of the best bands in the entire city?"
"sweet idea"
"wicked"
"yeah let's do that"
"cool, my dad knows a guy"

DT

sliding on your back

at wicked fast speeds sucks.

frenchies

Found a New York Times at the coffee shop this morning on my way to work. Big noise about the French elections, the continuing failure of the Socialists to get anything together and the newly elected ultra-conservative pro-business anti-fun Nicolas Sarcozy-shack. The thing that struck me was the turnout. 84 percent of the french voted. 84 percent.

In 2004 we set records for 60 percent of the US getting off thier lazy asses to vote. In 2000 we managed a pathetic 52 percent. According to Newsweek's latest poll, Bushie's approval rating is 28 percent. 72 percent of the country doesn't like him but only 52 percent bothered to even vote? And of that 52 percent only 51 percent of that actually voted against him? Wierd. People suck.

Speaking of people who suck.

DT
p.s. next time I will only write about awesome stuff, happy sunflower meadows and reckless behavior.

Go HomeTeam

Bend's favorite roadie son Chris Horner makes good.

shop notes

I thought I would make it to Burnaby this time around... No dice.
Even with a free place to stay, the day off work and the forty gallons or so of gas at 3 and a half bucks a pop makes the whole deal a bit impossible. Weak sauce.

Come on Portland indoor velodrome, come to daddy.

Drove to Seattle to beg for a sweet job from some men in white shirts on Sunday. Interviews never feel like they went great, so it's hard to say how it'll all end up. I find out in a month.

Next race on the schedule is the great Swan Island Crit. Guess I should put my road bike back together...

DT

Gay Top Gun

Quentin Tarantino tells it like it is.

no pity in the rose city

If I wasn't a bike racer, I'd be a soccer player...

Watched the Timbers smash Puerto Rico 3-1 at PGE last night with 7800 others. It was a night for the hooligans. I've never seen a match get so violent. After we scored in the opening minutes and doubled it before the half, the Puerto Ricans got pissed and didn't hide it. Multiple fights broke out across the field and by the looks of it, the home boys have been working on thier Kung Fu.

The Army was too big for thier traditional section 107, and ended up sprawling out into 4 others including ours. What a manic atmosphere. 60 percent total chaos and 40 percent sychronized madness. The songs, the flags, the GIANT flags, the chants, the screaming. All while surrounded by cops and PGE officials, but nobody seems to care. The Army really is an army this year. Flyers were passed around for a convoy of busses heading to seattle for a showdown on May 5th. That could get wonderfully messy.

DT

T minus a couple weeks or so...

Track racing's almost upon us again. In May the circus begins again. Big events are afoot in Canada during the first weekend; big races, big fields, big beer garden, maybe even some cold hard cash. I'd love to make it up to the glo-worm velodrome if the financial stars can align themselves and someone gives me some floorspace to pass out on at night. Might have a place with Chader, but he has to check and make sure if its all right with his dog or something...

Once again. Raining. On track workout day. Fcuk.

Anyone up for a puddle-cruise up Forest Park? Single-speed mountain bikes? Maybe a night raid? We could blast up to skyline on the knobby tires, slide back down in full panic brake-lock, charge into town and park our bikes next to the harleys stacked up at Starbucks on 23rd and loudly critique the monstrosities for thier wastefullness and laziness. Could be a good time. Think about it.

DT

someone give Moninger a sandwich

seriously

the sea clam report

I didn't go to the Grand Sea Clam Pro Cycling Nascar Classic in monterey last weekend, but some of our skinnier guys were there, and they were all over it.

I did the Laguna Seca Shimmy when I was a much smaller junior lad, and I can tell you, that course is not even close to fun. Everyone always talks about "corkscrew this" and "corkscrew that" and "oh you gotta watch out for crashes," but by my memory, that's a bunch of crap. In order to get to the corkscrew you have to come up this steep bastard of a hill (which is way bigger than it looks on TV) so once you hit the corkscrew descent you're crosseyed anyway, and then once you actually go down it, you realize that it's probably only fun at about 200 miles an hour. Nice wide, smooth, easy corners that wind down to a 180 and back around to the front straight, which just means that you'll be heading back up that stupid hill in a couple of seconds flat. So if you're on a rediculously powerfull motorcycle or a fantastically expensive car, it's probably great. Maybe even hair-raising. On a bike however, I have a trickier commute home from work.

That doesn't stop the marketers from touting the Sea Clam Classic as the greatest race ever to grace the face of the world, and it continues to pull huge sponsorship dollars, tons of people and lots of industry bigwigs with deep pockets. So a result at the Sea Clam is a big deal. Which is cool, because the Rubicon guys pulled a big result.

Aaron Skeletor Tuckerman rode like a man possed with a bike racer, bridged a bunch of gaps, successfully didn't crash and even managed to drop last year's winner Andy Badjadali in the closing laps by flexing his diminutive little buttcheeks and attacking on the hill, eventually finishing 5th. Brad apparently showed some power-cards by shuttling Tuckie around all day, with Logan doing his part as well. Dan and Kirk overcame gravity to place very well, 10th and 19th respectively. Matt Brandt snagged 18th and the Best Young Rider award, and Richard kept his current streak alive by running into some mechanical issues. Hopefully he can shake the curse sometime before Hood.

The boys even found time to chat with some schoolkids about racing, foreigners and that kind of stuff. I spent my weekend glaring at kids trying to ride big-wheels into stacks of carbon road bikes. The books show we had a record weekend at the shop, which is cool. My brain says that I need to sleep, but what does it really know? I have a three hour Codes and Ordinances class tonight, should be plenty of time to catch up on the zzz's.

DT

midday sale update

I am surrounded by oceans of screaming children who seem like they should be too old to be pitching fits in bike shops. Lines of unusually irritated people waiting for cashiers stretch for miles. Head full of static.

Sea Otter is on. It's on like Donkey Kong. Godspeed to all the boys. Stay upright and impress someone willing to donate some hard earned money to a struggling development team.

More kids. Jesus where do all these kids come from? Is birth control going out of style?

the writing is on the wall

Kurt Vonnegut died today.

These things always seem to happen at the end of good days. So it goes, as the man would say.

If you haven't read Player Piano, Slaughterhouse Five or Cats Cradle, pick one up at Powells some time. It'll be worth it. In fact, get them all. You don't need to watch American Idol (americans idle?) that much anyway.

"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
-KV

DT

this week may be a death march

Come one, come all, it's time once again for the Bike Gallery's Big Giant Super Mega Spring Sale To End All Sales.
Happy times.
Seems like we're busy enough without it lately, the store has been smacked by too-frequent waves of madness for weeks. It's a tight rope to walk, being at a shop known for giving cutomers individual attention while there are three times as many customers as salespeople. Most people are understanding of the fact that we have a lot on our plate, but some still think they are the only humans in the store. Possibly in the world. Must be upsetting to realize otherwise...

In the fantasy land known as Bicycle Racing, some people did some crit this weekend. Boat Street Crit I'm told. I did it a few years ago, was brought down in a big fat 20-person crash and snapped a couple of brand new carbon wheels that my parents had saved up for. Bad memories of a sketchy corner, always wet. Haven't been back since. Conveniently, I had to work.

Sounded like the boys were on fine form. They even kept up thier amazing rate of two crashes per crit. Last weekend it was myself and Richard, this weekend it was Dan and Skeletor. Dan The Man flexed his left butt-cheek and broke his chain into a million little peices and launched himself over his bars and Tuckerman probably pulled the other standard Skeletor move (aside from attacking from the gun, which he had already done by this point) and crashed all by himself off the front. Probably tried to ignore the simple laws of physics by trying to enter a 90 degree corner at about a hundred and ten miles per hour. "oh I'm a mountain biker with a funny haircut, I can make it."


The face of sorrow, the legs of strength. That chain never stood a chance. Neither did the jersey.

The rest of the boys miraculously stayed upright and finished well. Brad made it out of the sick bay and on to the bike, leaving Adam all alone in the quarantine. Matt Brandt gets 3 gut points for wearing white gloves, but those points are canceled out by the negative three gut points Kirk gets for racing with his shorts rolled up to his crotch in the J Dangle position. Kenny Williams heard the cash registers ringing and took the sprint ahead of Kirk, keeping his title of "fastest old guy in Seattle" firmly planted on the mantle. Pretty sure that guy will be winning 1/2 crits up there when he's 80. Pure machine that guy is.

Sea Otter's up next for the unemployed. I'll start racing when the temperatures get above 70.

DT

p.s. Pic's from the fastest eye in the west, Amara Boursaw. You should buy lots of pictures from her at www.wheelsinfocus.com. Put them on your walls, put them on your fridge, put them on your pets, put them on your kids, buy that picture of Dan and put it on a t-shirt and be the envy of all your friends.