Old crib

After 4 and a half years, tonight will be my last night in my old place. Yep, I'm moving. Tomorrow will be official moving day, hope to get everything done in just one day...

I'm pretty excited about the new place, but moving itself just stinks! It's also amazing to realize how much shit you actually have and how many boxes you need.

Packing up the boxes kept me pretty busy lately, don't even have time to work out. Well, there it is, finally some recovery!

Opening day of winter biking

While I was in Salt Lake City, friends back in town went riding on Thanksgiving Day.


Dress warm in the Michigan winter!

Time to talk about skiing

Another day in SLC, and we got snow! Not really enough for skiing, but everything is white. We drove up to Alta to see what is going on up there, and I ended up buying skis for $200. Rossignol Bandit B2's including bindings - I was told they used to be the skis of the owner of the Alta Resort... I don't care who owned them, now they are mine!

The skis won't travel back to the "D" with me, but stay out in Salt Lake since I'll be back out in 4 weeks again.

A nice hike beats the stepper

Happy Thanksgiving! Are you done eating turkey yet? Our party out here will start at 6 pm, so we had time to do stuff before. Aaron, Robbin, Zeno (the dog) and I headed south for some hiking. Went up the hill on a super muddy trail and down on some icy slippery stuff. Hiking makes me hungry, can't wait for the turkey!

Greetings from Salt Lake

Yep, I'm in Utah visiting friends over Thanksgiving. I love this place. It has everything I love to do: Skiing and Biking. Unfortunatelly the snow isn't here yet, but my friends have many bikes, so I took one of them out. I know, I'm talking about November being recovery month and here I am riding sweet singletrail for 4 hours...

My friend out here got pretty busy and hasn't had time to ride his bike too much lately, at one point of time I think I heard the poor bike ask me "are we done soon, I'm getting tired?"

Well, I certainly got tired. It was so much fun being out there, but damn my legs hurt. Being out here and riding these great trails also makes me wonder if I should do the Kokopelli trail race in 2006 rather than Trans-Iowa. I certainly can't do both, too close together, and I've done Iowa successfully, so it would be fun to try a new race. Still got some time left to think about it.

Happy holidays, ride hard and eat a lot - Turkey is good protein for recovery!

Crosstraining

The weather was perfect this weekend, Sat and Sun around 55F.

Met Pete on Sat at Pontiac Lake, we did 2 easy laps, ran in some other guys we knew and since we didn't want to look bad and slow we had to ride faster than those guys. I did another lap with another guy I met out there, and the pace was picked up again.

On Sunday I met people doing a group ride out there - but it was painfully slow. Since we had some faster guys out there as well we took of and had a blast for a couple more laps.

I know, to much biking for a recovery month, but it was just too nice out. But I did some "crosstraining" on Saturday evening - we went to see a good band and ended up dancing wild for 3 hours. It's helpful being in shape! But I don't know if all the trinking helped...

"He curses you"

As mentioned earlier, a good friend of mine is moving to Atlanta. Just got back from the final going away party. Good times - I realized I'm quite famous. Word spread around that I'm the endurance biker, and a couple of people at the party heard about me through my friend before. I got the typical "you are crazy" comments, and I was even told that my friend curses me (another comment I liked was "this German is f***ing fast").

Stuff like that makes me feel good, and I'm really excited now about riding tomorrow. Hope it won't be too cold - planning on hitting the trails again before the big snow comes in.

Should be interesting, haven't ridden since last Sunday. As I said before, November is the easy month! (The same for last season, crosstraining and almost no riding until January - and I was still able to finish 3rd at Trans Iowa - so don't freak out about that race, it's not that hard (ha ha)!)

Ready for some pictures?

My digital camera broke sometimes this summer and I was too cheap to buy a new one. Finally I had some time to dig around the www to figure out what fault code "E18" means - that was the only thing the Canon Supershot 110 displayed.

I learned I have to open it, clean the gears and motor of the lens and it should work again. Since I had nothing to lose I gave it a shot.

After about 3 hourse I had everything disassembled, cleaned and put back together. Hitting the on button fired the little camera right up, and I couldn't believe it. Even more unbelievable was that I then realized there was still a controller board on the table. Took the camera apart again, stuck the board (which only controls the menu buttons) in and now the camera is back alive.

I'll start taking more pictures again, it's just easier than reading!

The world is OK again

After that trouble I had on my bike yesterday I decided to join a social ride today. We had about 25 people, and I knew that pace will be fairly easy.

The weather was perfect again, the ride started easy, and since we had some faster people participating we increased the pace towards the end. And the fun on the bike came back! The part I actually enjoyed the most was riding into the superstrong headwind we had on the way back.

A short stop for donuts and cider at the cider mill towards the end rounded up a sweet day on the bike!

One of my worst days on the bike

Saturday, sweet weather, almost 65 F. Time for a ride. Headed to Pontiac, one of my favorite trails. The plan was to do 3 laps out there, but about 1 mile into the trail I realized things aren't as they used to be... and a lot more happened during this lap:

- My legs were super tired everytime I climbed on of the short powerclimb
- I almost crashed on a downhill that I have ridden more than 100 times
- Leaves got caught in my rear derailler and almost ripped it of
- I wasn't able to pick a good line
- I was way overdressed
- I was passed by someone riding in jeans and without a helmet (ok, this didn't happen, but I just waited for it to happen).

That's why I decided at the end of the lap to call it a day and ride home. I just didn't feel good this day riding my bike.

I guess all signs that I should take a longer time off...

Kart-2-Kart

Friday night I went Kart racing at some indoor place called "Kart-2-Kart". It's a ton of fun. We had about 25 people from work going, most of them are racing cars on tracks or hang out at the Kart place to race around in circles (after all, I'm in the automotive industry, and that's just what people seem to do when they are not interested in biking...).

So I was a little scared of all their experience. But I still managed to pull the 3rd fastest time in the evening! Maybe I should switch my sport and hang out at a stinky loud race track? Stupid idea.

Pretty quiet lately

Sorry for not posting in a while - but there just wasn't a whole lot bike related stuff going on:

- Or do you want to know that my brother in Germany bought a used mountainbike?
- Or that I bought a really comfy pair of pants for around the house, but they create a ton of lint that I now have all over my appartment and it really overwhelms my tiny vacuum cleaner?
- Or that I finally got some of the stains out of my carpet so the appartment looks cleaner when I move out?
- Or that I got a new computer at work?

Well - I don't think so, I'll try to post more interesting stuff again...

A day off work

Due to the election's around town we had a day off work today. Finally some free time, and since I'm doing active rest and recovery I stayed at home all day and watched all the Opra-Episodes I tevo-ed over the last bike season. Ha ha, just kidding.

I didn't rest at all today. In fact, I went out with Robert and Mike for a dirtroad-assault around Auburn Hills. They were leading the ride and included as many hills as they could find. My task was to measure the elevation gain of each hill. We ended up with 73 miles and 3140 feet of climbing.

Even though I wanted to recover I just couldn't resist Roberts invitation. I knew it will be a faster pace, and the weather is just too good right now to stay away from the bike. BTW, Robert and Mike are some of the fastest riders around here. In the Iceman race last weekend they finished 9th and 21st - out of about 2000 riders...

Oh, and Mike rides for the Bell's beer mountain bike team. This is the best beer coming out of Michigan (remember, I'm German, and we know a lot about beer!)

The gears are gone

Today was too windy to go riding, so to kill some time I decided to "take of all the shifting crap" (comment from the Singleator installation sheet). The MEGAbike looks naked, poor thing! It was quite scary in the garage with all the wind, I often enough thought the garage will be lifted of the ground and we will get a free flight over I-75. Never happened. Another scary moment was when the broom, that I store on one of the beams, decided to fall down and right onto my head. Ouch.

I'm kinda mad at myself that I always refused to listen to single-speeder conversations as I had no idea what gears to put on, but I think I overheard conversations before about a 2:1 ratio. That's what I put on for now. Tomorrow will be the first ride on it, I'll see if that works.

Went riding yesterday - the legs feel a lot better again. But it was obvious that I wasn't on the bike for a couple of days. Didn't push hard, but the HR was always up.

Another easy week is waiting for me (and Tuesday will be a day off work!)

It's a new record for the season

I've been off the bike for 5 days in a row. Unbelievable!

So I guess I haven't told you the truth. I posted about the ride on Sunday, but I never mentioned anything about my legs and how heavy they were on Sunday evening. I think it might be related to the fact that lately I got tired of hydrating properly throughout the day. During the high season I used to drink at least 2 liters of water during the day - even more the days before an endurance event, but once racing season was over I didn't take the drinking too seriously any longer (or I just drank less so I won't have to run to the bathroom all the time...).

I got a lot of stuff cleaned up around the apartment this week, I slept a ton and ate too much crap. Feel a lot better now, so I guess I'll go for an easy ride to the coffee shop tomorrow.

There is a big MTB race in the norther part of Michigan this weekend, called the "Iceman". 27 miles on two track on gravel, only a small section of trail. It's a huge event with around 2000 bikers, and the event sells out in June already. I'm sad on the one side that I haven't signed up, but glad on the other side that I don't have to race considering how I felt the last couple of days.

The "MEGA bike"

Oh, I just remembered I already posted a picture of my 1st MTB im May (I had it with me on a short work trip to Colorado). If you want to look at it again just click here!

Bike wash

I have been a good boy - not been on the bike in two days. Let's see how much longer I can fight the urge to go ride my bike.

Since the winter is just around the corner I started cleaning the bikes and get them ready for storage. 2 down, one more to go. And number 4 will soon get prepped for the winter. Not sure yet if I'll put a singulator on it or keep the gears...

Oh, number 4, aka the "MEGA bike", is pretty famous around here, and all my friends keep asking when it'll have it's comeback. I keep telling them it's sitting in the garage praying for snow so it'll finally get ridden again.


My "MEGA bike" looks similar to the one in the picture. It was the first MTB I bought when I still lived in Germany, the name of the shop was MEGA bike. They pretty much build it up however you want (and put a sticker on the frame).

Alex