Grey Tuesday

Not a ton of excitement this past weekend, but still a good one. I got out for a great ride with Seth and Chuck for a ride around Boulder. The weather was looking iffy, so we nixed the idea of going as high as originally planned. Plus Chuck had his fixie, so that made the decision that much easier. No bitching about anything being too steep, if Chuck was smashing his way up the same hill with you! Good ride though, it stayed drier, warmer, and less windy than we had expected. As usual, the weather forecasters were 90% wrong with their predictions.

To recover after the ride, I had a bottle of the Orval trappist. It was quite tasty, with a surprisingly spicy taste. Not my favorite beer, but quite a delicious beer. By the end of the glass I was wishing I had another bottle.

For Sunday, the forecast was sounding even worse... which of course meant I should have just planned on riding outside from the start. I left from the house, and about two-thirds of the way down I thought I might have made a big mistake... it was FREEZING! But the plan was just get in some nice violent climbing and head home. So I got in Sunshine, and then back up Magnolia, and called a day. Two hours taking the freezing cold descents slowly, and nice steep climbing which was more than enough to get myself warm again. It wasn't really looking like rain at the top of Sugarloaf;

Monday was a day to relax, and I did active-recovery, walking on all the errands I was running around campus for the day. I spend the rest of the day pouring over all the pictures of the new Red Bull RB5 Formula 1 car that was unveiled in Juarez! A VERY cool looking car, with some very interesting new shapes and lines to it. Further proof that the beginning of this season should prove interesting, as the new rules mean that teams are trying all sorts of different approaches to design a car that falls within the rules. It's impossible to tell who's ideas are going to work from the start, and which teams are going to be scrambling! I guess we'll have our first ideas in another 44 days.

And today I was finally able to justify heading over to the new Boulder Velodrome, to check it out! I have done a little riding and racing on the Lehigh Valley Velodrome, which is an absolutely stunning track. And it's huge compared to the new indoor track in Boulder (333meters vs. 142meters), which of course means that the corners are much steeper.

So it was bound to take a couple laps to get the feel of them. But after two or three times around, the comfort returned, and I started to get use to the strange, borrowed bike, and it was time to lay down some hotter laps! I'm definitely grateful for the track in Boulder, but it really made me miss racing at LVV and probably even more, made me miss going to the Friday night races and banging on the boards for your favorite riders! But hey... you can't ride the Lehigh Valley Velodrome when it's snowing out!