Popov Vodka continues to be THE go-to drink for dirt road alcoholics. Maybe it was the harsher than usual winter, but I must have gone past a hundred bottles or more of the stuff in the past week. Damn… I’m sort of shocked that in all my years I’ve never tried it. Hmmm… with the week I am having, it might be time to start!
I was able to get a couple of nice rides in this weekend (both on dirt (roads) and pavement). And today I FINALLY got to ride without a winter jacket AND in knee warmers for the first time in 2014!! Most of the dirt roads were bone dry from the warm(ish) temps and relentless winds we’ve had the past few days, but some are still covered with ice, snow and LOTS of mud. Still, it was all good.
I have some pics to go through and some words to add about the rides, but other than my time on the bike, the last week and weekend have been less than stellar. Wifey took my xB back to Pittsburgh (because we thought it was the better of our two paid off high mileage cars) and the engine took a $3,000 bed shit. Ssoooooo we are in the midst of replacing the vehicle (which is still in Pittsburgh), dealing with a giant ass rental car (seriously, the Dodge Caravan is like a city fucking block long) and figuring out what to do.
As I drank a couple of beers late last Saturday afternoon I somehow convinced myself to go ahead and enter the Barry-Roubaix’s 36 mile race, a distance– at the time of entering–roughly 15 miles longer than any ride I had done in 2014 due to the relentless and brutal winter we’ve had. It would also be only my second ride not to be completed on fat bike this calendar year. “This could be bad for me, but other than a few out-of-staters, everyone else will be in the same frigid, snow, ice and shit filled boat as me,” I thought as entered my credit card information and took the final draw from my pint of Founder’s Imperial Stout. So let it be done… it’s God’s will… it is what it is. Pffft! Whatever, it’s just bike ridin’.
And with that, I now give you yet another race ride report, in a long history of Soiled Chamois race reports, that didn’t need to be written…
It only took 79 days (I think, you do the math) but I finally got a ride in on a bike with tires less than 3.8 inches wide. FUCK YEAH, SPRING!! (sort of).
The 2014 Strade Bianche race was a super fun race to watch! I highly recommend watching it [HERE] on YouTube or downloading it from your favorite torrent site. Peter Sagan (Cannondale) is such a powerful and fun racer to watch, but was outdone by Michal “The Kielbasa King” Kwiatkowski (Omega Pharma-Quick Step) who was in freaking beast mode. Watching the pros racing on the white, dusty gravel of Italy was just the motivation I needed (along with a couple high-octane beers) to finally enter the 2014 Barry-Roubaix.
After mentally cracking for what may have been the 84th time in my life last week and vowing to spend the rest of this godforsaken endless winter under beer fueled fart smelling blankets in a curtains closed bedroom, I pulled up my grown fat man bibs and forced myself out into the snow to ride today. I have to say it was worth every second of the 21 minutes it took me to stuff my fat ass into three layers of cycling and cold weather gear.
I love riding on dirt and gravel roads and racing on them can be just as cool. Sadly, as I look out my window it is snowing yet again, adding more inches of the white stuff on to the many layers of ice and snow that have been on the ground since Thanksgiving. So, any riding I do in the next few weeks will probably have to be done with four-inch wide tires.
Lately, blogging has been pretty easy and my mind has been pretty generous with topics. Sadly, that ended today. Feel free to read on but I can’t promise much (except a bunch of photos and that the blog is even more lackluster than usual)….
A well used ceramic space heater sat humming at my feet as I sat sipping my third cup of coffee and staring blankly into my computer monitor. I had long given up on it producing anything worth while and now aimlessly clicked through dead-end after dead-end on Monster.com, hyperbolic football gossip on The Daily Mail and finally full circle back to weather.com where I had started my morning off three hours earlier. I was pleased to see that it was warming up, however I was disappointed to see that all that meant was that it was now 4˚ and not -4˚. Thoughts of climbing on the trainer in my basement now entered my head as I took a big sip of my now ice-cold coffee. Fuck.
I opened my eyes, rolled over and shut off the alarm clock a mere minute before the French ambulance siren on speed screech could emanate from its tiny speaker. I stretched, unfurled my man blubber, let out a loud clack of a fart and tried to remind myself of why I had the alarm set for 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Oh yeah, Wifey asked me to set the alarm, because she had an appointment with the Lord, or was at least going to church to meet up with B-Man who stayed the night at a friend’s house and would be attending 9 a.m. mass with his family.