Spare No Expense

Over here in RacinRick land, money flows like wine, sponsors throw themselves at me and the women - hoo boy, the women! A recession has never touched the land of RR. Oh so fortunate.

Here is a good example.  My winter shoes started to bit the dust a few years ago but instead of buying new shoes, I got a pair of shoe covers.  Those shit the bed in a year or two, but instead of buying new shoes or at least another set of shoe covers I taped them up with duct tape instead.  MacGuyver would be proud.  Sadly, two years of duct tape had them looking a bit ragged with everything but the top completely shredded. 

Any normal person may have just ponied up the $30 to buy a new pair of covers.  Me?  I just added another quarter roll of duct tape. 

Success!

go pro

Blogger Screwed Me

Blogger f'd me last time I posted a long(er) video so I'm going to keep this short in case it's feeling frisky again. Below is a vid I made last weekend on a snow/ice/trail ride. I was playing a bit with camera locations and think that I'm going to like the fork location. Everything looks faster from that perspective. Until I crash and jamb the camera into the spokes.

First Test 

Marcy didn't initially tell me but she fully expects to use my GoPro while diving. To test things out, I video'd be swimming this afternoon. The underwater picture quality is pretty impressive!

Lets Try This Again 

Yesterday, blogger gave me the high hard one and lost my post. I was uploading a video at the time so I'm guessing it timed out or just plain shit the bed and the autosave no workey. Oh well.

The legs finally feel like they're starting to come around.  I still feel like I'm WAY behind the 8-ball fitness wise compared to most seasons but at least I'm feeling an improvement.  I have no way to gauge said improvement but I believe it's there so that's all that matters.

More importantly, I'm now looking forward to riding again.  For a while I began to wonder if I even enjoyed riding anymore since I was constantly bagging rides and not really enjoying the rides that I did do.  Thankfully, I'm now out of that funk (I think) and am feeling good enough to push again.  The hours on the bike aren't great but their improving as well with 6 hours of ride time last week and another 3+ of running and core work. 

One weird thing about this winter is that I have zero interest in the road bike.  I'm sure that will change at some point but I've just been enjoying the snow bike too much.  The trails are pretty much ideal right now.  They've been packed, had some rain and a few freeze thaw cycles so they're hard enough to really rip on.  You just need to be aware if ice.  Take this morning for example, yesterday we got about an inch of fluffy powder.  Beautiful stuff that didn't pose too much of an issue for most of this morning's commute except for where it was hiding ice.  The current trail consistency is what I call frozen styrofoam.  It's hard-ish but still has some give under the tires so you're hearing a constant soft crunching noise as you ride.  It's when the crunching stops that you have to worry because you've likely just ridden onto ice.  I like to handle ice by screaming "don't panic!, DON'T PANIC! DON'T PANIC!" inside my head while I try to not panic.  Thankfully, today, I didn't.

Blogger Stinks

As you can imagine, I had a brilliant post ready to post today and was just waiting for the video to upload but stupid blogger lost everything.  Bastards.  Now you get nothing.

I Swore I'd Never Do It

There was a time way back when (I looked for an old post to link to but gave up my search.  I'm lazy) that I put in a fair amount of time on the indoor trainer in the winter.  That was before I discovered the joys of winter mountain biking.  Once I realized how freaking sweet snowmobile trails can be for riding, I swore that I'd never ride an indoor trainer aka "a bike lobotomy".  Why waste your time sweating away in your basement watching shitty videos and counting the minutes until your done when there is sooooo much white corduroy outside?

the mukluk after a slushy ride the other night.

bad conditions but at least I was outside.

Well, times change, schedules get tougher, bellies get bigger and you finally make the realization that the trainer is the ONLY WAY TO GET A "RIDE" IN SOME DAYS.  As a result, Marcy and I decided to pony up for a newer, less horrific trainer.  One that doesn't sound like a toaster making sweet love to a bench grinder.

enter the kurt kinetic

When we built the new house, Marcy told me that I'd never have a bike upstairs again.If you look closely in the pic above, you'll notice that we not one bike upstairs but two.  I plan to move my work bench up this weekend...

I wish such drastic measure weren't necessary but I've been struggling to get 2 rides a week in and have been off the back on all group rides I've been to so something had to happen.  Now it can and I'll hate every second of it.

A Bit Belated

This is kinda sorta oldish news at this point since Eric outed me on Facebook (although, I hardly every post to the book and nobody really pays attention anyway) (and I was supposed to unveil over two weeks ago) but I'm officially unveiling 2012's race steed, the Kona King Kahuna.  Go ahead, I'll give you a minute to click on the pic and link to marvel at it's purtyness.  It is quite fetching don't you think?  I especially like that the color scheme is almost identical to my beloved Salsa Selma.

Originally, I planned on swapping out a bunch or parts (or buying a raw frame to build up) but the economics of that just didn't make sense right now.  Heck, with the way things are these days, I consider myself damn lucky to even be buying a new bike.  So, I'll settle for the mid-range SRAM parts and replace/upgrade as things wear out.  The only big change I see making is instead of spending a ton of money to swap out the crank and brakes to shave a few grams and MAYBE see a performance increase, I'll instead spend the money on buying a chi-chi set of wheels for the season.  The jury is still out on what those wheels will be but rest assured, I've been burning up the internet looking at options and I'm guessing that if our team manager isn't sick of me e-mailing him yet, he soon will be.

 More about the wheels later (tomorrow if I actually remember).

Anybody who has ridden with me for the a while might note that I swore off carbon bikes years ago when I had my fully carbon Trek Fuel.  It was a sweet bike and I never actually had any issues with carbon breakage even though I had a massive ding on the downtube when I unceremoniously smashed it into a rather large boulder but I was constantly worrying about smashing it into things.  But time passes, technologies get better and I'm not a politician and am allowed to change my mind and soon will be rolling around on 1240 grams of crabon.

Winter Ride

20 degrees, dark, windy and a snow storm on it's way.  Sound like ideal group mountain bike ride conditions?  Not necessarily, but it didn't stop 8 guys from showing up to ride in what we hoped would be primo snow/ice conditions.  I wish I had my camera with me because I sure would have loved to document everyone waiting around for me to get ready.  Seven guys standing around watching as I fumbled to get my stoooooopid bar mitts on the bike.  I was saved though when just after I finished up CDog noticed that his tire had gone flat so we ended up waiting for him.  Just like we always do.

And then, THEN, we rode our bikes for like 2 hours.  Got lost-ish, got less lost-ish, stared at Iphone compasses, figured out where we were and then got back to the cars unscathed and ready for beer. 

Great blog post huh?