Author: kennettron

As you’re all well aware of, today was and still is Pancake Day.  It’s the traditional day of feasting on the last bits of goodies from the pantry before the 40 days of Lent fasting.  It began as a way to use up the good food: sugar, milk, butter, flour–the unholy foods that give pleasure, and Lent is all about being miserable.  But like any good holiday, Pancake Day’s religious roots take a back seat to what people really care about: gluttony!  Yesterday I rode to the grocery store and went well out of my way to buy all the fixings and toppings for some extra pleasurable ingredients for my P-cakes.  Take that Lent!

The rules of Pancake Day are simple: you eat pancakes all day long and NOTHING else.  If you had a bad day today, like if a lot of things went wrong and you just came home feeling like crap for some unknown reason, it was most likely due to you not participating in Pancake Day’s golden rule: eat anything BUT pancakes and bad luck will be bestowed upon you until you consume more pancakes.  I was unaware of this rule until early this afternoon when I ate a tiny sample of a coffee cake at a frozen yogurt shop (of note, I was not there to eat frozen yogurt, I had to meet someone there).  Anyways, not five minutes after consuming the tiny morsel of ovencake, I was hit by a car.  I shit you not.  I wasn’t hurt and my bike (luckily I was on my mountain bike, not my road bike) was fine.  I decided that since no harm was done, and since I’d been riding on the left hand side of the road on the sidewalk (although it still wasn’t my fault for getting hit) I’d let the guy off easy and we went our separate ways after he apologized and I told him to pay attention.  No legal authorities, despite my constant hope in getting hit by a car so I can get another bike.  I’d let him off easy because deep down I knew that it, in fact, HAD been my fault.  It was my fault because I’d forlorn the Pancake Gods.  My belief in them had momentarily wavered when I’d been lured in by the Sirens of crumbly brown sugar-topped coffee cake: the exact opposite of a pancake and therefore the most disrespectful food to eat on this day, the day of Pancake prayer.  I had tempted the Pancake Gods to show their existence, and show it they did!  Their wrath, wrapped in the form of a careless auto driver, sent me hurrying home to mix pancake batter as fast as I could.  I made sure to add extra faith.

Turns out faith tastes pretty damn good.

Breakfast pancakes #1 through #3 were half whole wheat, half white flour.  I make all my pancakes from scratch since I’m not an idiot who’ll be tricked into buying expensive pancake batter with the two dry ingredients pre-mixed (flour and baking powder).

P-Cake #1: almond butter, regular butter, agave syrup.

Simple yet probably my favorite toppings for a pancake.  Nut butter and syrup.  Unfortunately I didn’t use maple syrup.  I’m saving all my rations for race season.  Milk, as you can see in the background, is always a necessity when consuming heavily-toppinged pancakes.  Keeps the throat lubricated.

Agave and almond butter.

For pancake numero dos I made a special pot of plum and cranberry sauce jam.

Result: good.  Very good.  Base layer of almond butter as well.

I decided I needed some more vitamins in my third pancake so I went with strawberries and a banana.  Base layer of almond butter and topped with a hint of agave syrup.

Now very groggy and sluggish with my stomach full of 2,300 calories of sugar, I set off on some errands by bike to help digest and wake up before my training ride.

My lunch pancake meal consisted of three medium-sized banana pancakes.  I blended these three bananas up, added in an egg, almond milk, baking powder, and some whole wheat flour to create some ultra sweat and fluffy banana cakes.

Mmmm perfect.

For toppings I went with more almond butter and strawberry jam.

I strayed yet again from my pancake diet for dinner, unwisely eating a salad instead of more pancakes.  This, as you may have guessed, resulted in another unfortunate incident: having to issue an $87 reimbursement for an item I’d sold on ebay a few weeks ago.  The reason being was that the said item was lost in the mail, supposedly.  Though it can be argued that the post office already lost it well before Pancake Day and before my ill-chosen salad dinner, I believe the Pancake Gods knew weeks ago that I’d eat the salad today and so therefore created my punishment in advance.  I went back on pancakes after that.  I’ve learned my lesson.  If a higher being wants you to consume ultra savory and sweet pan-fried goodies, you do it.

Dessert pancakes: one regular pancake and one with cocoa powder and cinnamon.  The lower half slathered with butter, almond butter, and agave syrup.  The top half bearing a large scoop of my roommate’s French carmel salted chocolate chunk ice cream, unbeknownst to him of course.  I’m just doing the bidding of my gods, it’s not stealing!

Oh man those two were good.  They only made me hungrier.  That puts my quota at eight solid ass pancakes.  There’s actually one more rule to Pancake Day: you must eat at least one more pancake than you did the Pancake Day the year before.  So leave room for improvement.

(Below written Feb. 20th, today.)

I’m posting this ish today no matter what!  It’s been procrastinated on far too long now, and it’s not even that good of a post.  I am currently (that stuff below is not current, it was THEN, but not any more which is why I’m using italics to let you know that those past present tenses are actually long gone, so don’t get confus-ed and think that any of the horrible things from the past week are still going on in my life)–as I said, I’m currently sitting in the cafe section of Alfalfa’s, a trendy, spendy Whole Foods look-a-like here in downtown Boulder.  It’s a great place to drink decaf coffee, use the internet, and eavesdrop on homeless people’s conversations (usually they’re pretty good but right now these two women are just talking about the wind outside).  Plus they have lots of free samples here at Alfalfa’s and a good bulk food section.  About an hour ago, while riding to the post office–which is closed today because of Washington’s birthday–and then to the library–which is also closed today–I was almost destroyed by a car.  Well, I wasn’t almost destroyed, but the SUV right in front of me almost was.  It was INCHES away from being nailed by another SUV that blatantly ran a red light at 40mph.  This almost death happened not five blocks from my house amongst a sleepy neighborhood with a slow speed limit, not out in the back roads with some jacked up pick-up driving red neck who hates faggot cyclists, not during rush hour in a busy intersection, not down town with a bus merging into the bike lane, not at night, not in the snow, and not descending a mountain at 50 mph (all situations that I assume are the most dangerous while riding a bike).  Here’s how it happened: the stop light was red for me and for the car in front of me.  It was already sitting at the light before I got there.  The light turned green for us when I was about 25 meters from the intersection.  The car started through the intersection and luckily jammed its brakes on just in time to avoid getting hit by the other car from the right, as it ran a red light and didn’t even break to slow down.  I assume the driver was on their cell phone or some stupid shit, not looking at the road in front of them.  I was still just entering the intersection when I saw that the car, coming down a slight hill so therefore going extra fast, wasn’t going to stop.  But if I had left home five (5) seconds sooner, I would have reached the stop light just as it was turning green, I would have stood up to pedal hard and accelerate through the intersection and beat the car to my left to the crosswalk on the other side (because every race counts).  I would have come even and then passed that car that had been waiting at the light (I was in the bike lane and it would have been just to my left), and I might have noticed, in one split second, out of the corner of my right eye, a huge, black metallic beast careening towards me at bone-crushing speed.  The way I imagine it, I would have been partially sandwiched in between the two cars, with the SUV running the stop sign plowing into my front half and my back half being scissored off from the bumper of the other car behind and to the left of me.  I would not have survived and, despite wearing my helmet and thick puffy jacket, which in the past I’ve always assumed would be good enough to protect me (kind of like a motorcyclist’s mindset with leather).  Luckily, my appetite saved me and I had stalled momentarily in front of a bowl of fruit in the kitchen before I left, deciding whether or not to grab an apple for the road.  But now I’m safe and sound at Alfalfa’s and I’ll finish writing the stuff down below.

(Started writing the below on Feb. 19th)

It is now February 19th and I’ve almost wrapped up another very heavy, hard week of trainings, including some good days of intervals and my first real group ride in months, the Gateway ride.  The legs are strong, but the mind is stronger still.  I’m very excited to see what this last chunk of training has done to my fitness once I rest up for half a week before my next block of hard work.  I’ve finally had a minute or two to finish writing what I started earlier this week.  The past week has been packed full of activities.  To name a few: bike riding, more bike riding, working 5 days in a row at Ras Kassa’s, which is almost 35 HOURS of standing up, walking around, being polite to strangers, and carrying things (not a cyclist’s forte whatsoever), finishing Twilight Break Dawn Part 1 (a highlight of the week, which took me three different tries to get through), posting sarcastic comments about people’s beliefs on facebook (a civil duty these days), and last but not least: I was walking through Sunflower Farmer’s Market the other day, mouth full of bulk food, grocery cart full of cheap bananas and lettuce, when I happened upon a loan loaf of bread sitting in a discounted bakery basket stand thing.  I normally don’t buy bread, as I don’t want to get really, really fat, but I had a long ride planned for the next day and I was chalk out of my banana bread and rice cake ride food.  I quick, guilty thought raped my mind like a raccoon stealing a new garbage bin’s virginity.  Discounted oat bread fresh from the bakery+grind your own honey-roasted peanut butter+jam.  This may not sound like anything special to any of you, but it was the BEST thing I ate in a long time.  Like at least 40 minutes.  Once I got home I immediately cracked open the bag and had myself one and a half slices to get a taste for the next day’s ride before.  The ride tasted wonderful (I associate how my ride will go based on the food I bring–this is a given).  The bread, discounted for reasons I do not know, was fresh, super soft, yet dense and packed full of grains like Bob’s Red Mill.  But the best part about it was that it wasn’t pre-sliced, meaning I could cut extra thick chunks–not slices–of the the delicious, mouth-watering whole grain goodness.  I’ve always known that non-sliced bread is the best thing since sliced bread.  Once the PB&J slid down my gullet my mind went on a wild rampage, very forcefully trying to convince me that it would be a good idea to down the entire loaf right then and there.  After all, I needed the energy for tomorrow!  But I thought better of it as I came to a more rational rationalization, for I still had over a POUND of salmon to eat!!!! Yes, I had gone all out and bought a big as (<–the New Zealand version) chunk of salmon to bake.  And guess what else was on sale at my favorite grocery store of all time, Sunflower Farmer’s Market?  Strawberries for a buck a pound!  That question mark seems misplaced but it’s not.

Note: image in image is larger than it appears.  This was a lot of salmon, trust me.  But still not nearly enough.

To accompany the salmon, I had quite a few strawberries and a dish full of cooked mushrooms, onions, and asparagus.  Man I STANK the next day!

(Started writing the below the morning of Feb 15th).  

My legs have not been feeling very good lately.  I haven’t been able to put out good power in the cold, and on top of that, each cumulative hour spent with numb hands, feet, face, and core take their toll more I ever think.  The riding has been miserable.  You know that numbness you get in your forehead and face that makes your eyes go crossed?  It’s pretty much a general rule that this will happen riding here lately.  After coming in from the cold I go immediately into the shower and stick my face in the hot stream of water and it comes back to life, my eyes slowly and stiffly unfreezing and returning their gaze straight ahead instead of towards my nose.  I’ve trained myself to ‘enjoy’ the pain of blood rushing back into my hands and feet once the hot water hits them.  I turn the heat up extra and flip the drain shut to make a bath for my feet to thaw in.  I use extra hot water to train myself to deal with a little extra pain.  Is it bad to force all those blood vessels open like that?  Maybe.  I’m not sure, but I don’t care.

The mental aspect of this continuously shitty weather is the worst part, since after we get snow and cold for a few days the weather forecast looks like it’s about to start warming up.  Then, as soon as the thought of warm, dry roads has planted itself in your mind, another snow storm and cold snap comes along and ruins everything.  Luckily I think (I’ve thought this before though) that we’re out of it for good now.  Yesterday and the day before were both 40 degrees and partly sunny.   Very nice riding conditions.  Unfortunately I did not take advantage of them since I needed some rest days.

Despite telling myself that training in sub freezing conditions must have some benefit, I know I’m lying and it’s just causing extra fatigue and slowing my recovery.  Yesterday, Valentine’s Day, I went out to attempt my first set of v02 intervals of the season.  I had high hopes for good numbers, as I always do, especially since it wasn’t freezing out.  I did the first interval with a lot of effort and not a lot of power.  It hurt way more than it should have.  A little discouraged, I shrugged it off as a combination of things: not being used to v02 at altitude, not having done many efforts this intense yet this year, and unopened legs.  Interval two would be better since my legs were definitely now open.  One minute and 20 seconds into the second interval I stopped and rode home.  My body was having none of it that day.  I called it a rest day before I did any serious damage and would try again tomorrow.

Well after writing the above, I’ve now decided to post pone those intervals until the 16th.  It’s maybe 30 degrees outside right now (the warm weather I was hoping for didn’t come) and I slept in past 11, meaning I was extra tired to begin with.  I had a late night last night on Valentine’s Day, but not because I had a date.  I had a late night because it was the BUSIEST and most HECTIC day of the year at Ras Kassa’s and I didn’t get off work until midnight.

V-DAY

The hype had been building over the past two weeks.  Valentine’s Day would make or break me and would be my final initiation into Ras Kassa’s.  I was told horror stories of how busy we’d be, with dozens of inpatient, angry people waiting at the door and standing in the bar area, of horror stories of things going wrong when they absolutely could NOT go wrong, like the dishwasher breaking or the computer crashing or something catastrophic like that.  On a normal busy night like this past Sunday or Monday, even when it’s busy I get to sit down at the bar and drink water or eat food once in a while.  It’s strange: the days leading up to and the days following Valentine’s Day are all extra busy because of people not being able to go out on the actual day of Feb. 14, so they celebrate it earlier or later.  I wasn’t even aware Valentine’s was an actual holiday people pay attention to.  I’ve always assumed it’s a greeting card holiday.  Not so.  It’s a restaurant holiday, and the most stressful night of the year at Ras Kassa’s.

Here’s a run-down of the characters at play, their nationality, and the languages they speak.  Kind of like I did with my teammates.

Tsehay, pronounced ‘sah-hi’ and also known as ‘Ma’: Ethiopian.  Speaks Amheric, which is just one of the 90 languages spoken in Ethiopia.  She also speaks English and some Spanish.  She’s the owner of Ras Kassa’s, having opened the restaurant south of town 24 years ago in a tiny cinder-block building.  The place still exists as a legend and any Boulderite that’s old enough to remember it still rants and raves about how amazing it was back then, having to wait outside in a long line to be seated, buying beer at the liquor shop next door and taking it into the restaurant to drink since at the time Ras Kass’s didn’t sell alcohol, and then once they’d ordered at the register and had taken their seats around their tables on the low stools in the tiny one-room building, leaning against the person behind them for support, back to back, since the place was so packed and the stools were backless.  Tsehay is a short, round woman with a huge laugh and an amazing ability to hug and smile away stress.  If a customer is pissed off at me or one of the other waiters, Tsehay can and WILL fix the problem no matter how mad they are and she’ll have them laughing and smiling within 30 seconds.  I don’t know how she does this.  I guess my fake smile isn’t very convincing.  If things are getting stressful for the staff, even while we have twenty things to do that were supposed to be done ten minutes ago, she’ll trap you in a hug and tell you how happy she is that you’re here and how good of a job you’re doing.

Malang: Senegalian.  Speaks English, French and one of the languages in Senegal I think.  I’m not sure which one.  Malang abandoned his goal of playing for his country’s national soccer team to come to the States and play the drums, which is one of his other professions aside from working at Ras Kassa’s.  Malang is always really excited and rushes around like mad doing the work of three people most of the time.  His catch phrase for almost any situation: “I’m telling you man…”  He’s easy to get along with and seems to have a continuous 5-Hour Energy IV drip.  He and Jason are both on rival soccer teams.

Jason: American.  Speaks English and Spanish.  Jason is 24 and is going to school at CU.  He’s originally from New York, but you’d never guess it due to his laid back mentality.  Jason can go on for hours talking to the guests and has a knack for entertaining the single cougars that come prowling to the bar.  His work history is pretty rich, with the coolest sounding job (to me anyways) being a year working on a produce farm outside of town where he was part of a long line of field-men who’d lift and throw watermelons rugby-style to each other and onto a tractor all day long.  His shoulders are at least twice as broad as mine.  Jason has done most of my waiter training and I couldn’t have asked for an easier-going person to teach me the ways.

Abesha: Ethiopian.  She speaks Amheric and is learning English.  Being a waiter and not speaking English seems like a tough task, and it is.  I think her job is three times harder for her than for everyone else since she’s in a constant state of confusion due to language and culture shock.  She’s only been living in the States for six months now, having come over from Ethiopia’s hot, 8,000 ft highlands to Boulder’s frigid “low lands.”  Abesha is short and thin, built for the heat and is not at all used to the snow.  I thought she was 16 or 17 when I first met her, but she’s 23.

Elizabeth: Mexican, speaks Spanish.  She’s the head cook.  She’s friendly and is willing to let me practice my Spanish on her all night long.  She always makes a huge community dinner for everyone and likes us all to gather round and eat at the bar with her before the customers start arriving.

Eric: Mexican, speaks Spanish.  He’s a cook sometimes and a dishwasher others.  He rarely smiles and seems pretty angry most of the time.

Mitch.  American.  Dishwasher.  The only white kid in the kitchen and he doesn’t speak Spanish, so he gets ganged up on somewhat when things get hectic in there.  I don’t know him that well yet but he’s recommended some good authors to me.

There are a couple other people that come in pretty usually to help with dishes and to hang out and eat some food or whatnot.  People that either used to work at Ras Kassa’s, who help out with the restaurant’s advertising, or are just friends of people who work there.

Now that I’ve written all this I don’t really feel like writing about the actual Valentine’s Day night.  I’ll sum it up quick.  I got to the restaurant early, prepared a lot of injera (the bread all the food comes with), we all ate a huge platter of food that Elizabeth cooked, and then people started coming in before we even opened, at like 4:45.  The place was soon packed and there was a constant door-jam of 20-30 people waiting to be seated.  We’d moved the tables closer together to make more room, littered the place with red shiny tinsel and Valentine decorations and candles, dimmed the lights to the lowest setting, and were playing love songs on the speakers instead of the traditional afro pop we usually jam to.  We were extremely understaffed, with one waiter not coming because she was sick and a dishwasher just not showing up, so there was no time to think.  Just take orders, bring food, clean tables, repeat.  Customers would ask for water or extra napkins or whatever and sometimes I wouldn’t get back to them for half an hour (if I remembered at all) since there were so many other things to do.  A minor disagreement broke out in the kitchen from the plates stacking up and things falling on the ground, an angry patron tried to get extra food, tried to get a free drink, failed at both, Abesha soon became shell shocked from the stress, we ran out of injera like three times that night and had to make more, I dropped some glasses, Jason dropped glasses, people were eating at the bar so there was no room to make drinks, the floor was sticky with champagne (we were giving free champagne and chocolate brownies to everyone), my insulin was JACKED the entire night from the brownies and adrenaline…the madness didn’t stop until well past 11.  Though it was stressful and packed the entire night, just about everyone who came in left super happy (it’s the best restaurant in town for crying out loud).  And with most people ordering the special Valentine’s day feast, all of us servers made more money than a super solid day of snow shoveling.  Success.

This is a picture of a re-furbished ride food sandwich I had yesterday.  I made a monster, triple decker sandwich of strawberry jam, a small avacado, and a banana about a week ago for a big ride.  I ended up turning that ride into a recovery day since I was too tired, but I didn’t want to let the sandwich go to waste.  So I froze it.  I forgot about it for a week or more, then remembered it yesterday.  But after I thawed it out it was so soggy that it would have fallen apart in my pocket, despite being wrapped in tinfoil.  So first I toasted it in the toaster oven.  Then I made a batter of flower and egg, spread it on both sides and cooked it in a pan.  Then I dipped the still-soggy ends in corn flour and cooked it some more.

And there we have it.  A treat not to be beat, lest ye eat the feet of a sheep, which are so tastey I’d bleep a bleep.

Check out this great video Winger created of our team get together last month.  We’re making one webisode every month or so throughout the season so you’ll be able to follow our progress as we stomp some heads in this season.  HB Show Episode 1.  Man was I fat back then.

Here’s a rundown of the last week:

It snowed again.  I had to ride the trainer twice during the miniature storm because the snow wasn’t thick enough to shovel.

My rash cleared up.  I suspect it was caused by using too much detergent in the laundry machine (repeatedly) since I thought extra soap might kill whatever might be in my clothes that was giving me the rash.  Goes to show that humans are our own worst enemies.

It’s really cold now.  I did a long ride the other day and another longish ride today with some hard intervals and I can really feel the cold zap the life from my body.  I’m looking forward to anything above 38 degrees.  I’ve also been wondering how riding and living in the cold will affect my racing this season, since it’s been three or four years since I spent a winter in a wintery place.  In a way, I think it will help.  I’ve been reading a bit about the cold and how it affects certain growth hormones.  Living in a warm place the entire year might affect the on and off switch for those hormones in an adverse way (so I’m telling myself).  One thing the cold does help with is increasing fat-burning capabilities, since more calories are needed to maintain core temperature homeostasis.  If nothing else, as long as I don’t get sick, training in the cold will result in quite a bit of hardening up.

If you’re on Twitter, please follow my team, hbcycling.  If you’re not on Twitter, create a Twitter account or two and follow us.  For every Twitter person I recruit I get one Chipotle burrito.

The strange thing I recently found out about using a fluid trainer in below freezing temps is that the fluid inside turns slushy (I’m assuming this is the case) and creates more resistance.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen individual snow flakes this clearly before.  They say every snow flake is unique.  So what.  Every grain of sand is unique too, just like every molecule of anything.  The only non-unique things are ideas and catch phrases, which are both a dime a dozen.

HB video.  Watch it:  HB Show Episode 1.  Follow us on Twitter.  Be our fan.  Support us by supporting our sponsors.  Support Kennett’s burrito consumption.  Burritos are good.  Follow KPburritos on Twitter.

 

While many of you weenies are enjoying an extremely late Indian summer out in the tropical pacific northwest, I’m hardening the F up in the Rockies, where we’ve been getting absolutely pounded with snowstorms.  Just this last week we got two feet in a little over 24 hours.  Being the ever-vigilant capitalist, I’ve acquired quite a few snow shoveling clients in the past couple months.  After this weekend I’m now shoveling at six houses every time it snows (this isn’t including all the doors I knock on).  The most lucrative household I have in my portfolio includes a house with a long L-shaped sidewalk section, sitting at a cool $60.  Aside from this being the best-paying home, the people who live there are also my favorites.  They include a 73-year old retired geologist who believes in animal-to-human telepathy, three cats, and the geologist’s daughter who’s an Amazon.com entrepreneur, meaning she buys house-fulls of stuff on sale and sells it on Amazon at a slightly increased price.  They always invite me in a chai chocolate tea with liquor.  They also usually give me a ride home since I’m on my bike and I always save their house for last, resulting in it being dark by the time I have to ride home in the snow, which I’ve done a few too many times.  This last week  the three of us all spent a good hour chatting and drinking liquored hot chocolate and tea while feeding peanuts from the kitchen window to a friendly squirrel.  Part of my snow shovel job is providing company.  The snow, like any out of the ordinary natural disaster, brings people together.  While I walk down the streets in the white early morning beauty, everyone I pass has a bright smile on their face and is eager to sing a cheerful hello and a ‘good morning, some storm huh!?’  The minor inconvenience forces people to take a day off work and pull their kids around in sleds, take their overly-excited dogs on long walks, and help each other push their stuck cars out of the deep snow.  The value of human companionship is the most undervalued commodity in our world.  It’s lacking in a monumental way, which is seen in the overall deep depression in most of our lives–something that’s becoming more and more un-noticed by younger generations who grew up in front of a TV sitting in the back of an SUV.   It’s just natural to feel depressed now, which is something you can easily get a prescription for.  While we live 50 feet away from our neighbors and sit 10 feet away from the car next to us on the highway, our souls exist in universes populated by one.  Loneliness among cities of millions.

Friday was a big day for me in terms of snow shoveling profits.  I won’t say the number, but it was big.  I’m always amazed at the price someone will pay for me to spend 15-45 minutes shoveling their driveway and sidewalk.  I’m amazed and grateful.  I try to hit up the hills, where the wealthier people live, and I struck gold this time with a new neighborhood I recently discovered within walking distance of my house.  I usually underbid if I sense any hesitancy after asking if they’d like any shoveling done.  And time and time again, after I’ve completed the job for $15, they throw in an extra $5 or $10 or even $20, feeling bad for taking advantage of my overly affordable price.  After all, the snow removal companies would charge them three times as much.  But it’s just amazing to me that they’ll drop $20 or more on something that takes me 20 minutes.  It would likely take them around an hour (I’m a professional after all) in which case that’s $20/hr-worth of their time.  I assume most of these people make more than that.

After a long day walking, riding, and shoveling in the snow, Tricia stopped by Boulder in the evening on her way up to the mountains for a weekend of skiing.  We went out to dinner, searching for a Thai place, but instead found ourselves at a Moroccan restaurant.  I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with some more African dishes and compare this place to Ras Kassa’s Ethiopian Resaurant.  It didn’t look like much from the outside: a cinder block office-complex-looking building with only one or two windows.  It was situated next to a Subway and a Mexican meat market.  A cheap neon light flashed ‘Open.’  Expecting the place to be cheap and empty, due to the snowstorm, we walked in surprised to see it bustling with customers and decorated to the ceiling with gold tapestries, rugs, and statues.  We took off our shoes, as requested by a sign, and barely got in without a reservation.  Within 20 minutes the place was completely packed with people.  The food was good and rich, though not filling.  But what it lacked in quantity of food, it made up for in quality of entertainment.  A belly dancer came out and performed for at least half an hour.  She used a sword AND flames, much to my approval.  She made the entire restaurant get up and dance with her, teaching us some basic moves and turning the restaurant into a Moroccan belly dancing club.

The next morning I woke up to move more snow, since it snowed again that night.  I can’t think of a more menial task: moving soon-to-be liquid water from one area to the next.  What am I producing for the world?  All I’m doing is speeding up what would happen anyways.  The sidewalks will be void of snow in a few days no matter if I shovel or not.  The modest amount of human contact and the friendly smile that I’m giving at the door are worth more to the world than my shoveling service. So why do we value non-valuable things? We’ll pay an extra ten bucks for the fancy laundry detergent but won’t invest that same ten bucks in a community skate park or a larger swimming pool at the local YMCA. Instead of visiting a friend in person we’ll pay extra money for a smart phone so we can check our email anywhere we go (a mockery to real communication): keeping us staring at screens everywhere we go, ignoring one another while we’re distracted by the bombardments of modern day media in our hand-held billboards. Billions spent on tricking people into buying crap…money that could go to something useful. The free market reigns terror on humanity, opting to crush thought, creativity, and quality of life in order to brainwash a society into buying and indebting itself with things it doesn’t need or want.  Hoarding money is the American dream and those who do it best are regarded as heroes.  Regardless, I went out to shovel snow and earn some grocery money for the second day in a row and tried not to think about how huge my arms and shoulders would become after all the heavy snow lifting.  Snow storms are a time of forced rest for me, and I think I’ve already benefitted from the extra rest that I KNOW FOR CERTAIN that I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d been in Tucson this year.  So while I’m unfortunately working out my upper body, it’s a small price to pay for my legs’ extra recovery time.

Some bad news I have in the form of a health issue: it began a little over a week ago.  I started noticing small red dots on the tops of my feet.  I didn’t think too much of it until a few days ago when I realized the dots had moved up my legs most of the way to my torso.  A day later (yesterday) and they were on my hands and arms, somehow skipping over my stomach and chest.  Today the rash is slightly worse.  I assume it’s an alergic reaction to something I ate or touched in the last week, but before I came to that convenient conclusion I worried about bed bugs, flees, a recently acquired allergy to the cold or exercise (two things that I came upon on my Google searches), bacterial infections, and last but not least, scurvy.  Scurvy was more of a hope really, since it would be pretty damn funny if I got scurvy.  Not really, because it would mess up the entire year for me, but I know in hindsight it would make for a funny story and hopefully lead to a new pirate-inspired nick name.  Alas, I eat too much vitamin C to get scurvy.

Some good news I have in the form of that same health issue is that I no longer care about my rapidly spreading rash.  I’ve decided that if I ignore it, it will most likely go away.  Sort of like debt collectors and cavities.

No transition: While my last post included a detailed story of a very hard day on the bike that I thought was thoroughly bad-ass, I want to clear up the incorrect notion that all my rides are like this.  My intentions were to describe to and entertain my readers with a HARD day, because I for one like to hear about hard training.  It’s more interesting and exciting to hear a description of an all-out suffer fest than a one hour recovery spin.  But many of my rides are easy recovery days, of course.  Today I rode two hours total and focused on keeping a smooth and controlled cadence of 110-125.  I did this for an hour and a half.  No hard efforts.  No suffering.  No leg bleedage.  Just relaxed and focused riding.  So for anyone out there that thinks I’m training like an idiot or too hard, remember that I only do a Shaky ride once or twice a month (at most).  Hopefully my racing will speak for my hard (yet focused and smart) training this winter.

Final thoughts: Every time I’m broke it snows and I get rich quick.  What do I do with the money?  Celebrate with a fully loaded backpack of the best groceries money can by at my favorite grocery store in the world, Sunflower Farmer’s Market, the poor man’s Whole Foods (I’m pretty sure that’s their real motto).  I’m living a true gangster life-style, even banking on powdery white stuff for cash. My street cred is rising, despite my up-bringing in white middle-class suburbia. Gone from my ipod are 80’s rock ballads, Green Day, Modest Mouse, and Katy Perry. Now all I listen to is rap. It pays to get paid.

“The world is yours end everything in it. The world is yours, and every bitch in it.”
“Niggaz still hate but they can kiss my ass, still get a hard on when I count that cash.”
Thug Motivation
Let’s Get it

I’m glad to have Young Jeeze preaching these great American values. He knows what’s really important and has obviously taught us well. Get on your grind and get it.

The day started out early at the crack of 9, dripping with anticipation like the sweat that would soon be dripping from my forehead, mixing with sunscreen and accumulated salt and road grime encrusted to my face, dribbling its way down into my eyes and searing them with anger.  My eyes, though now burning, had not enough pain receptors firing in them to notice, since every ounce of attention was being diverted to my legs, lungs, and other internal organs that groaned in agony for me to stop pressing on the pedals, for their bursting point was near and they wouldn’t think twice about leaving me lying dead on the road bleeding out my ears, mouth, and ass.  My mind refused to obey my organs.  The pain I was in was far superior to anal bleeding.

But forget about that for a second and let me get back to the morning and breakfast, which as everyone knows is the most important meal before noon.  I turned on the stove, where my pre-cooked pot of oats was waiting where I’d left it the night before.  Half cup day.  Normally I have a third cup but today was a big day.  Half cup day.  In I poured 15o calories of coconut milk, a chopped banana, cinnamon, salt, a few precious blueberries that were on sale from Argentina.  I wished for walnuts and cranberries but I keep none in the house because they’d cost me a fortune in money and calories.  With my measly 640 calorie breakfast, I consumed over a liter of water and a little under a liter of coffee with almond milk.  Today was a half cup of oats day and a three mug coffee day.  If you’d been watching my breakfast from the window, you’d have known, without me telling you, that the ride was going to be a biggun.

Dressed for a rare warm day, somewhere between 60-and-38 degree, my pockets bulged with goodies and my heart bulged with blood, because if my heart bulged with anything other than blood that would be a serious medical issue that I’d need to check out before riding hard.  With me I carried seven, 150-calorie banana breads, individually wrapped in tinfoil.  In one water bottle resided a lip-smacking concoction of coconut milk/coffee/white sugar/more white sugar/ and cinnamon for a total of 650 calories.  In my bike bag resided three dollars in loose change for a gas station burrito/cappuccino machine combo–the best mid ride bike fuel known to man, assuming you have a strong stomach (the deep fried burrito that is).  (Aside from Hammer Nutrition products, which I am currently out of right now and have to rely on other sources of food).

I’d rested the past two days for this ride.  No riding on Friday and only a 1.75 hr spin on Saturday.  The Shaky ride, as my wise guru coach Sam Johnson calls it, is to be done only once or twice  a month: “Come home shaky.”  Here’s how they go: 5 to 5.5 hours total with the first 3 hours of high zone 2 or low zone 3.  1x 20-40 minute threshold effort.  Then the final hour you attempt to hold the same wattage you held in the first hour.  If you do it right, you can’t hold that wattage and you end up coming home shaking with fatigue, or something like that.  Or maybe you come home shaking your head in wonder of why you put yourself through something like that when the rest of America is sitting down on a nice soft couch watching a Sunday football game while eating a big bag of chips in a heated house with the curtains drawn, roasting their toes next to a fire, waiting for the pizza delivery guy to ring the doorbell, and getting a back rub from their girlfriend, who for some reason in this fantasy enjoys watching football and giving back rubs to lazy overweight slobs who don’t do anything other than watch TV and eat pizza all day…the American dream.

But the reason you do end up going on a shaky ride instead of that is because when you really think about it, that normal life would suck.  It has no pain.  And without pain their is no reason to live, because those comfortable times are quickly discarded from a memory that’s intent on recording only the best, worst, hardest, craziest days.  The neural pathways created during a day of slothing in front of the TV are weak and will vanish before the show is even over.  Conquering pain and creating memories is why I ride.  That, and to inflict pain in others.  Those two reasons.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, just imagine cyclists as those religious fanatics who whip themselves on the back for Christ.  It just feels good to suffer for whatever you believe to be a just cause.  We’ll leave it at that.  Now, onto the suffering!!!

The easy thing about a five or six hour ride is that you don’t really suffer that much at first.  If you do, you’re probably not going to make it to five hours.  So basically for the first two hours I felt at ease, pumping out a shyte ton of watts.  After an hour and a half or riding I’d already covered 40 miles and burned close to 1700 calories.  If you remember correctly, I’d only eaten about 650 for breakfast, so at this rate the food I’d brought along would not be enough.  An emergency stop at Wendy’s was in order.  I picked through my change bag and found the proper amount of  shiny circular discs that would warrant me one crispy chicken sandwich (380 calories) and one small coke (filled in my water bottle at 21 ounces and 250 calories).  The coke I saved for later.  The sandwich I devoured immediately, in pure crispy hydrogenated bliss.

Back on the bike I pumped up the power a bit more in order to make up for the wattage I’d lost during my riding through the city I was currently in, which was somewhere north of Boulder.  Though the first three hours of the ride are the easiest, in terms of perceived exertion, they’re the most mentally strenuous for me since those first three hours determine how my ride will go.  If I can maintain a good power without killing myself, the last two hours will work out fine and I’ll have a good ride.  If the first three hours go poorly, I’m screwed for those last two and I’m doomed to vent and fume over the failed ride for the rest of the week.  It’s almost easier for me to do the last two simply  because I can say to myself: “Just go all out.  Easy as that.”  There’s little conservation required at that stage in the ride and even less thinking, other than the mundane thoughts that pass through one’s head while suffering during a workout (these thoughts are actually unknown to humankind because it’s impossible to remember what you were thinking about while you were going hard).  The closer you get to the end, the more physically demanding and painful it gets.  But at the same time the easier it gets too.  When all you have to do is go as hard as you possibly can, your life is pretty simple and pretty easy.

The wind was windy.  It slammed against my face and stalled my speed to 13 miles an hour on the flats.  I turned a corner and it threw its weight against my side and leaned my bike way over, trying to push me into traffic.  I turned another corner and suddenly sped off at 36 miles an hour, soon reaching for gears I didn’t have.  But mainly the west wind slammed against my side trying to push me into traffic.  The route I took was a big rectangle heading up north, then back south to town where I planned on doing two climbs on Sunshine Road, a steep climb that tops out at 8,000 ft with the last 15 or so minutes of it being a washboard dirt road.  It’s my favorite climb in Boulder and I know every turn and every hard section because, although I’ve only been here three months, I’ve done that climb, or at least sections of it, about 40 times.

Three hours in.  Average watts are now at 304.  Just a warning, I’m going to talk about watts for the rest of the post, so if my un-pro’ness for talking about numbers is to un-pro for you, you’re now warned.  As I was saying, today  (or yesterday actually) was a good day.  I chugged the rest of the bottle of Coke into my unsettled stomach, forcing glycogen preparedness for the hard threshold effort that was soon to come.  I made my way through town, cursing the red lights and pedestrians that jumped out in front of me and reduced my average power.  I had a goal today.  An obsession actually.  A power obsession that I’ve had for a long time: 300 watts for five hours.  I’ve been close before.  Soooo close.  I’ve basically done it before, but just a few watts off or a few minutes off.  I know I can do it, but just haven’t yet, but I was on track for it today.  A ride like this is very hard to have a high average wattage because of the threshold effort, the climbing, and the descending.  The descent means you’re at zero watts for a full 16 minutes, the threshold effort, though a high wattage throughout it, means you’ll burn up your energy five times faster than you would if you were just sitting at tempo while doing 300, and the climbing–at least here–means you’ll be going way above 7,000 ft–the altitude where I can see my power take a nose dive.  Part of me wanted to turn around and just pump out tempo for another two hours and accomplish my goal once and for all and finally be done with it.  But that wasn’t the workout, and the Shaky ride had a purpose that was much sharper than a pure tempo slog.  The purpose of the Shaky ride?  TO FUCK YOU UP.

I began breathing hard about 11 minutes into the climb.  I began wheezing about four minutes later when the road continued steepening past 20%.  18 minutes into the effort and I was averaging 347 watts for the threshold interval, not high at all, but not bad considering the hard riding before hand and the altitude here.  I grimaced hard and went into my big ring for the short 30 second descent before the road went upwards again.  Suddenly I cracked.  I had been good for 19 minutes, then it was all over.  I began crouching lower and lower on my bike, jerking my body up and down to try to get some purchase on the pedals.  My legs were failing and I tried using the rest of my body to make up for it, frantically lurching to and fro like a Carson Miller (no offense intended, Carson, I’m just trying to paint a picture).  I began breathing less and less as the power continued dropping and the glycogen in my legs soon found itself drastically low.  Finally, at 42 minutes, I crested the steepest 30% grade dirt switchback and reached the top of the climb and sucked in air raggedly.  I was now exactly 4 hours into the ride and sitting at 308 watts.  Damn it.  Thought I’d be higher after the climb, but I’d blown up early.  That was alright though.  It was better to go harder for shorter than easier for longer.  I drank the rest of my coconut milk and another banana bread, started hacking and coughing like a smoker, and began the cold descent off the patchy-treed mountain, barren in sections due to forest fires.  I threw up a little from coughing too much as I descended and let the snot and mucus run all over my face in the wind because I was too tired to care.

At the base of the climb I made a quick U turn in the middle of the road and began heading back up.  My legs were barely there.  This was going to be a difficult task–getting back up to 300, because after the descent my average was already down to 297.  I came upon another cyclist, made up ground on him fast at first, then he must have looked back and seen me because the bastard sped up.  My anger swelled and I stood up to catch him.  I hate it when people pull this sort of crap and can’t keep the pace up for more than two minutes.  If you see me coming and want to have a little race, that’s fine but you better be able to maintain your new speed for more than 300 meters.  I got within two bike lengths of him, he looked back at me, stood up and did a half sprint for 20 seconds.  Not cool.  I decided to quit messing around and pass him.  I did it hard and fast, without looking him in the eye or saying a word (that’s what he said?)  I was in no mood for these shenanigans.  My legs’ furry grew for making me ride harder.  I couldn’t slow down now though, since it would look pretty foolish of me to get passed by him after I just cruised by.

Twenty minutes later, the other cyclist long gone by now, I completely blew up.  I could stand for only ten seconds at a time, or less, then I’d fall back into my saddle and pull and strain with my entire body to keep going in somewhat of a straight line.  As I got closer to the top, time slowed down.  I remember thinking I only had 11 minutes to go at one point, and that 11 minutes was not a long time at all.  Those 11 minutes must have taken about 17 hours to pass.  I hadn’t bonked, but I could not go hard anymore.  280 watts. 273.  260.  240 ALL OUT.  If an alien space craft had come down and threatened to blow up the earth if I didn’t increase my watts by 5, there’d have been nothing I could have done.  If an investment banker threatened to destroy the economy and send our country and world into a downward spiral so hopelessly deep that we’d never have a chance to see the light of day again if I didn’t increase my wattage by 2, there would have been nothing I could have done because my legs—oh wait that already happened.

I had reached failing point.  I almost started zigzagging back and forth across the road once I’d gotten to the dirt section with multiple +20% sections.  I refrained somehow.  I couldn’t stand for more than four pedal strokes now.  I’d plop back into my seat, heavily…defeated.  Or maybe I’d defeated the ride.  Depends on how you look at it.  I wasn’t breathing anymore.  There was no need to breath hard during low zone 2.  I just grit my teeth and cursed my legs to continue onwards.  “Damn ye beasts!! Mush, I say! MUSH!!  We must make camp before nightfall for there’s a storm a brewin’ that will take the toes off all but the strongest of ye’!  Mush, I say.  MUSH!!”  My dogs had no bark left in them, only whimpers.

I got to the top, somehow managing to ride up the last 30% switchback at 250 watts without falling over.  I wish I had it on video because that was some serious Peterson Grimace Face that got me up it.  I ate two more banana breads and began coughing again.  My lungs were fried.  I put on all my warm clothes for the descent and immediately felt like I’d ridden myself into sickness.  If it were possible to ride-induce the flu, I did it.  I felt so incredibly achy, nauseous, weak and tired that I began doubting the likelihood that I’d make it to work that evening.  But a 5,500 kilojoul ride requires some serious food.  And serious food comes from Ras Kassa’s Ethiopian Restaurant, so I hustled down the mountain, did one all out sprint at the base for the hell of it to see what I could do (not much), got home, made a smoothie, showered, ate some oats I’d pre-cooked, and rode to work within 40 minutes of getting home.  I got to work 15 minutes late, but at least I got there, which was an accomplishment in itself.   The food there was worth slogging through five hours of waiting tables, and I managed to keep my shaky legs from buckling, save for one near fall while carrying a pitcher of water.  I slept hard that night.

After the ride.  Lookin good, feelin good…

NOT.

I’ll start out with Joe and Allan, then go alphabetically

.

Alan Schmitz is the president of the Hagens Berman Cycling team and will also be working on the road this season as a mechanic/sougnier/general logistics for many of our bigger races. He gets things done.  Like making sure our team has money and gear and ensuring our ability to get to races, like that one race that both Joe and Alan know everyone (including Kennett) really want to do and should do, so it should definitely be on the schedule this year instead of that other race.  The first thing one might notice about Alan is that he is extremely happy the majority of the time. Even when Alan isn’t happy, he appears to be happy and is almost always smiling. The second thing one might notice about Alan is that he’s much taller than another Alan on the team, who’s been forced to don the name “Tiny Alan,” despite being six feet tall. Even though Alan is not part of the racing squad, he’s a fast man on the bike himself and a racer, like everyone is at HB.  That includes the entire office that Alan works at in the Hagens Berman office building.  Even the janitors race there.  Words of advice from Alan: “Focus, Kennett. Focus.”

THE Joe Holmes, team director.  Oh man where do I start. I think I can pretty much sum Joe up with quotes alone. Here we go: “How you doin?” “I got in shape…today.” “When you see the cars up ahead start echeloning, that’s when you know there’s a strong cross wind. Keep an eye out for it.” “You’re not playing with a full deck.” “Really?” “Typical, Fuckin Prius in the fast lane.” “Just sayin’.”  “My coach is Weather.com.” “You’ll here me say it throughout the season…” “Dirt nap.”  “Buckeyes.” “Be proactive, not reactive.” You only have so many bullets.” “My bark’s worse than my bight.” “Just flow into it.” “I’m all about second chances.”  “You’ve gotta, like…” “I wish that I knew then what I know now.” “Really?” “Through and off.” “Smarter, not harder.”  “You’ve gotta learn how to dial it back.”  “Trust me, I’ve been there before. It may not seem like it but I know what I’m talking about.” “You’ll hear me say this again…” “Fuck.” “What the fuck.” “Really?” “Nutella on dark chocolate.”  “Pro.” “Quadshot.” Joe, like Alan, gets things done.  He likes to get things done fast, so if he emails you, you have precisely 13 minutes to respond or else he’s pissed.  Three quick facts about Joe: he’s the best driver in the caravan and will risk dozens of lives to get you back into the race after a crash or a flat, he lives on an island, and he rides more than most of the guys on the team.  He can be a hard man to get to know at first, but once you do know him he’s a good man to know.

 

Chris Wingfield, AKA Winger, AKA wingerstudios.com, AKA fake Candian #1, also lives on an island. But it’s a better island than Joe lives on because it has a really good pastry bakery, among other things (electricity and pluming). Winger spends approximately 2/3 of his life on a ferry, commuting between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. The other third of his time is spent instagraming photos on Twitter. Winger appears to be a red-blooded American like you and me: he’s arrogant, not very polite, and likes to make fun of others, but if you look closely there are some subtle differences that reveal his true identity: he only drinks espresso, he over-pronounces things so you can understand him clearly (not American-like at all) and he listens to NPR. No, he’s not gay, he’s Canadian. Barely. Just barely.  Winger has been on the team for the past four or five years, but made the jump to the elite squad this year and is chomping at the bit to show his strength, which has always been there.   He’s tuning it further this winter by training hard every day and not eating popcorn late at night.  Right Winger?

Cody Campbell is more Canadian than Winger can ever nightmare to be. First of all, he lives in Canada. Second of all, he lives in a log cabin with no windows, catches beavers with his bare teeth while out snow-shoing/ice skating in blizzards, and his cologne, tooth paste, shampoo, chamois cream, and maple syrup are all made with 100% natural maple syrup, not the high fructose corn stuff like we have here. Cody is known by many as the guy who started out last season with the Black Plague, which unfortunately just made its way to Canada after roughly 700 years since it hit Europe way back in the dark ages. Other things Cody just found out about include: typewriters, the Backstreet Boys, WWII, Mexico, and Apple (not the computer company, the fruit). It may take a while for news to reach up north, but Cody is quick in the mind and the legs and will be co-captain of the team this year.  Cody’s race knowledge and experience from his time spent with Trek Livestrong will be invaluable this year as we venture into bigger, harder races than we’ve done before.

Colin Gibson tore the cat 2 Cascade Classic up SO badly last summer that the race promoters tried forcing a mandatory cat 1 upgrade mid-race during his time trial. Colin, unlike Steven and Ian, is a college graduate and is reaping the benefits of his hard-earned degree by teaching spin classes at Cycle U. This is THE college grad/cat 1 cyclist’s dream come true (assuming Starbucks isn’t hiring, which it never is). Colin likes to make jokes, like a few of us do on the team, and is personally my favorite person to tell jokes to because he always laughs at them, possibly out of politeness or possibly because he’s laughing at me for thinking the joke I told was funny. As an all-around extremely thin strong man, Collin performs well in sprints as well as climbing and will therefore have the entire weight of the team resting on his shoulders this season as both a GC rider and crit sprinter. Colin, don’t fuck this up.

Dan Bechtold, also fondly known as “Danland” is quite possibly the most intellegint person on the team. After all, he’s the only person on the team with a PHd, unlike Steve and Ian who haven’t even graduated college yet!  (Haha, can you imagine the shame?  Because I sure can’t.)  Dan enjoys counting salmon sperm (or maybe eggs), teaching college, studying for the MCATS, being married, and being extremely confused and lost 100% of the time. Dan spends the majority of his days inhabiting Danland, a far off place with soft elevator music playing in the background and long, never-ending hallways painted with soothing earth tones.  His strolls through the hickory-perfumed halls of Danland can be marathon events, so it’s best to keep a close eye on him if time is of the essence, which it always is.  Dan is the fastest time trialist on the team, and I believe he harnesses the power it takes to smash a mind-numbing time trial by already having a numb mind (tired from thinking of the chemistry of salmon sperm). Dan is currently trying to fatten himself up by eating garden burgers. It has not worked yet.

Danny Healy is the fist new guy on the team that I met this year. After yelling out his name in the airport I was startled to see the guy sitting in front of me look up and say, “I’m Danny”– the reason of my startledness being that this guy was sporting not just a pierced ear, but a mohawk! Definitely not the typical northwest cyclist look.  Maybe this would distract Joe from the mullet I was planning on growing. Excellent.  Another reason I like Danny is that he’s not small.  As bike racers, we’re all obviously paranoid with our size, and take all possible opportunities to make fun of each other for being either too big or too small.  As a sprinter and another Bigguns on the team, Danny will help make me appear to be smaller, ie. skinnier, ie. faster.  One more thing we have in common is that Danny hails from one of the nicest training grounds in the States, Santa Barbara.  As you all know, I trained in and around SB last winter and will therefor be living vicariously through Danny this season, imagining riding past girls in bikinis playing volleyball, picking oranges off trees, smashing the SB Worlds ride, and generally having fun in the sun all day long.

David Fleishhauer.  Jesus Christ that’s a hard last name to spell.  It’s easy to say though, “felsh-hour.”  Judging from his jovial, kind, and team-player personality, I imagine David will live up to his name and spend every waking “hour” give ever last drop of “flesh” to the team.  But enough praise for one person, David is another crit specialist that better help win us some damn bike races or else he’ll be out on the street with his two pet Chinchillas.  Sam Johnson, former HB teammate, was a guinea pig man.  David takes it one or maybe even two steps further and has become a Chinchilla man, adopting a married lesbian Chinchilla couple.  I say “married” because there’s some obvious sexual tension going on between the two, and since this blog is Hollywood PG-rated, sexual partners must be married in mattress money.  Like any good cliché’d pair of lesbian lovers, there’s a butch alpha female (the man) and her hot chick trophy wife (did I just call a Chinchilla hot?)  When I was sleeping over last week the butch one tried to bite me and the hot one let me tickle her belly.  Hopefully after this paragraph the key words you remember about David are: Chinchilla, Lesbian, Flesh, Tickle.

Ian Crane (craneimal) is the only teammate I have that can compete with me in terms of blog hits.  In fact, I think he’s currently outdoing me, though I suspect it’s mainly due to people’s failed search results for “Ian Crane’s teammate superior blog Kennetron5000.”  That extra T in my name throws people off.  Ian is a fast sprinter and won many bike races last year.  But he’s growing thinner and thinner by the day, hoping to become a Chris Parish in the mountains and win the sprint on the final day of the Tour of the Gila.  Ian is attending university while bike racing, which is always a difficult task.  I find it hard enough responding to emails when I’m training, so Steve and Ian’s (and whoever else on the team is taking classes) commitment to making themselves smarter is a thumbs up in my book.  Anyways, enough about Ian since, like his blog, you were probably searching for me instead: my favorite animal is the sea lion, followed by the wolf, followed by the deinonychus (though my power animal is the horse, of course), my favorite fruits include but are not limited to: water mellon, mango, pineapple, CRISP apples, not soggy ones, tangelos, grapefruit with ALL the white stuff removed, coconut (not a fruit), and peaches.  Man I love peaches.  If I could survive on a single fruit, it would be peaches.  I’m really glad their not the size of grapes, because that would really suck.  If that were the case and it took forever to eat your fill (like it does with grapes and other types of small berries) I’d always be like, “Man, what if peaches were the size of apples?  That would be sooo awesome.  Think of how much peach you could eat.  I bet there’d even be such an over abundance of them we’d have to can them or something.  Can you imagine?  Haha.  I bet they’d even taste better if they were bigger too.  A world where peaches were apple-sized would be a world with no problems.”

Gabe Varella is very voracious ven it comes to vanquishing villians on Valentine’s day.  I sort of wish Gabe were German (go back and read that last sentence as a German).  I wish Gabe were German not just so I could secretly laugh at everything he said because of his funny accent, but because I like and respect the German People, especially for what they attempted back in the 1930s (the first semi-successful anti-tobacco movement).  Gabe, aside from the quizzical German expression he portrays in this portrait, is sadly not from Germany, but is a country boy from a French city in Idaho.  Gabe is another fast sprinter (how many damn sprinters do we have on the team this year anyways?  It’s almost like we’re trying to win some races or something).  Gabe proved his emense strength last September at Univest with his constant attacks and endless surplus of energy, which of course resulted in him not getting a result there (though it did help Ian get 4th in the crit).  When harnessed properly, Gabe’s strength will see him on top of the podium quite a few times this upcoming season.  But even more importantly: Gabe knows how to change a tire on a car!  This will likely result in him being on the squad for every single race the team does (even overlapping races), just in case we get a flat.

Jesse Reams is our third and most Canadian Canadian. He lives somewhere so far north it’s actually south of the Canadian/US border (like other-side-of-the-globe-north).  I think I’ve just about reached my quota of Canadian jokes for this blog post, so maybe I’ll write something serious about Jesse.  Jesse began cycling at an early age of two and a half, when his family migrated with the caribou for the summer of ’89.  He was born with stunted legs, much like the stunted trees hundreds of miles south of his igloo at the tree line.  Jesse couldn’t keep up with his tribe on foot (children past the age of two are expected to care for themselves in Canada–except health care and education and other socialist regimes).  His parents devised a pair of wooden skis into these sort of roundish objects that could travel over dirt instead of snow.  These became the first Canadian wheels.  Although the wheel is still being studied and perfected by Canada’s finest scientists (“are there infinite sides or one side,” being the main question), Jesse’s “wheel skis” were a huge success in helping him in the summer migration, as well as building his legs big and strong for a career as a burly strong-man cyclist.  Strong enough for him to eventually WIN the Canadian U23 road championships last year.  Take a gander, folks.  This is one Canadian that will be “migrating” across the finish line with his arms in the air.  Get it?  See what I did there?

Jon Hornbeck (Bro-Cal) is from So-Cal, bro.  He is a former motocross racer, so this whole bike racing thing seems a bit slow, a bit lame, a bit boring, and a bit nerdy.  There are no 40-foot gaps to jump, no speeds in excess of 100 mph, and no cool pads and back braces to wear.  But what bike racing lacks in rock n’ roll, it makes up for in Euro techno, which I’m guessing is Jon’s secretly favorite music genre, judging by that big Euro hair.  Jon is a newcomer to the sport, but from what I’ve been told he’s taken no time in smashing legs and forgetting names.  Jon doesn’t know who anyone is in the domestic (or Euro) pelotons, so it’s going to be fun watching him try to chop one of the Jacques-Mayne brothers or lining up behind Zirbel in a technical crit.  Not that I have ever done either of those things and regretted it.  Jon is in for a year of learning, but his motocross attitude and aggression will likely turn some heads as well.

Logan Owen (AKA White Bread) probably has his own Wikipedia page, so you can just go to that if you really want to know about him.  If you’re too lazy to go to Wikipedia, here’s the rundown: he’s won 71 National Cyclocross championships and 39 other national championships, he lives on an island (the same one as Joe), he enjoys frequenting the state of Milwaukee, the country of Brussels, and the Ocean of Lake Michigan, he knows that Indian food comes from Asia somewhere, he’s not at all gullible, he wears a gold cross on a chain when he races (pro), he’s coached by Joe, which means he does 17 hours of through and off by himself every week, he’s only 16 and bike racing really hurts, and he was probably faster than you five years ago.  Logan was punched in the face during a race last year (by a Canadian no less) and instead of punching back and causing a crash, or crying about it, Logan road off the front and won solo!  No just kidding, but can you imagine if that were true?!!!?  He did ride off the front of many Belgian races last season, truly putting a Bremerton stamp on the ass of Belgium.  Well done, Logan.  Now finish your homework.

Steve Fischer is basically the new Lang on the team (this is a good thing, as Lang was the most respected member of the team in recent years).  As team captain, we can go to Steve with any issues we may have with SRMs, bike mechanical issues, height issues, racing issues, training issues, teammate issues, cyclocross issues, etc.  Steve has worked his way up from a junior with Hagens Berman, and although he still has two or three more years of U-18 competition left, he’s decided to tackle the older kids’ races with us instead.  Although his head isn’t nearly as large as Lang’s, he’s equally smart and tactful when it comes to strategory.  I’m not really sure what Steve’s strengths are.  I know he can spint (like everyone else on the team except me) and he can climb too.  He used both of these skills to win the” fourth group on the road” sprint at the Cascade Lakes stage 2 of the Cascade Classic.  I thought he was leading Ian and I out, but we were too tired and neither of us could come around him.  That sounds awkward.

My thoughts on our team this year: we’re stronger and better organized than we’ve ever been.  It will be a turning point.  I’m excited to see these guys at the Agoura training camp and share some laughs after we attempt to crush each others souls up that one climb we always do where Joe says to keep it holstered just so he won’t get dropped but we never do keep it holstered because winning that climb on day #1 of training camp=pro contract.

Wingerstudios.com has something like 50GB of media from this weekend, most in the form of video. Chris has released a snippet of photos from our training day at Gravitec. So now after you’ve read the book, you can see the movie and all your creatively preconceived thoughts and ideas of what we were doing will go down the drain as imagination takes a shotgun to the chest and visual stimulation turns your brain to mush. (Ah, who am I kidding, the movie is ALWAYS better than the book, just look at the sales if you don’t agree).

Randy asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you trust your teammates with your life.”  I thought everyone would hold up a 10. Not the case. We should do the same test at the end of the year and see if we changed.

Wingerstudios.com getting some quality portraits of “Bro-cal” Jon (it’s a take on So-cal. Get it?)

Human chain exercise. Goal: go inbetween Ian’s legs as many times as possible.

Everyone was fine with ascending 100 ft of rope, all out tug of war, and high-impact trust falls, but it was very quickly brought to Randy’s attention that we could NOT handle one more second spent forming discussion circles and squatting like this. A cyclist’s knees are ever so precious and ever so delicate.

If we had things my way, we would have done tug of war for 3 or 4 hours straight. I wish I could do this everyday. It just isn’t the same without my teammates, and tying a rope to a tree is just pointless (as I’ve found out in the past couple days).

There was a strategy, and realizing that was the point of the exercise, but some of us preferred to just pull extra hard instead. From the looks of it, Gabe might have been one.

I just want to point out here that Ian and Winger’s strategy relied on Jesse being a behemoth. Come on guys, this is TUG of war, not lying down of War. (To be fair, I spent a good deal of time on my back too–but that’s only because my back is my strongest muscle).

Back inside where it’s not snowing (it was snowing earlier, you just couldn’t see it in the pictures). Jesse’s thoughts (far right), “Did I forget to order maple syrup on my carnitas beaver burrito?” (He’s canadian in case you couldn’t tell from the picture, or the joke.)

The most infuriating exercise of the day: Nuclear Ping Pong Balls. Objective of the game was to use those strings/rubber bands to move the can of balls across the room and dump them out into another can without spilling any. Stipulations included no one being allowed to touch the can, go inside the rope circles, or grasp the strings anywhere but the very ends between two little knots. Lesson’s learned: patience, the art of leadership, and the proper use of the word “fuck.”

Colin reverting to his marching band days.

Added complications included making Steve mute, and then blind. We decided he’d be better off stepping out of the way since people with handicaps aren’t useful to society in any way, shape, or form. (Was that the lesson we were supposed to take away from this Randy?)

Joe’s thoughts: “Nutella on dark chocolate…mmmm.” Dan’s thoughts: “Outside his buckyball home, one molecule overheard another molecule saying, ‘I’m positive that a free electron once stripped me of an electron after he lepton me. You gotta keep your ion them.'”

Burrito break.

Object of game: to get all 7 members of the team standing atop the milk crate at the same time for 10 seconds. Our team DOMINATED this event and set a new Gravitec record of 35 seconds. The other team never figured it out. Hahaha, stupids.

Our team decided the weekend wasn’t homo-erotic enough, so we all piled on top of David for fun.

Getting some practice for the trust fall. One person stood in the center, made themselves rigid, and let their body be passed around the circle. Sounds kind of like last night with…..I shouldn’t finish that sentence.

Randy leading us on the trust fall.  Logan’s thoughts: “I swear to god if I get hurt the week before cyclocross world’s…”  Cody’s thoughts: “Gosh darn it, how did I forget to order poutine on my burrito?”

The trust fall off a 5.5-foot fork lift platform. I thought this was one of the most exciting drills we did. Everyone came to the consensus that the actual fall wasn’t that bad, and that we all felt more nervous about having to catch the person falling. It may not look like much, but falling straight onto one’s back at that height would mess you up pretty good (which I’ve done, only it was 15 feet not 5). I’d say the only mishap was when David’s chin went into my eyebrow. He had a headache for an hour. My eye was already pretty messed up so I didn’t feel a thing.

This was probably the most bizarre of the drills. “Helium Stick” is designed to get the group moving in the same direction, an objective much harder than it sounds. We all started out (fingers only) by holding the stick at chest level and attempting to lower it to the ground, everyone maintaining contact with the PVC pipe the entire time. At first, somehow the stick began rising (hence the name) and I thought maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention while the rules were being explained and that the object of the game was to raise the stick over our heads. We got things under control eventually, though I’m still unsure why this was so hard. I repeatedly told everyone, “On the count of three, just move your hands down, god damn it!” This just shows that while an individual has control over themselves, one cannot force movement in others, it must be coached.

“Okay guys, the object of this game is to not fall and kill yourselves.”

Most of the team was surprisingly bad at rappelling, though no one had any real fear of height, just some slight nervousness. Steve here demonstrates good form, minus the steal grip on the rope above him.

After an hour and a half of rappelling, we finally get to the final drill of the day. Here’s how it went: Joe and Alan both ascended 100 feet of rope, got lowered, and then climbed up a separate tower, got “stuck or injured” and required rescue by their team (teams of 6). Each teammmember was required to climb 100 feet of rope (using ascenders), then send one person up to “rescue” the Joe or the Alan, and then once the rest of us were finished climbing the 100 feet of rope, we were to lower them both down using a pulley system. Our team dominated, btw.

Not pictured is the image of Joe and Steve being lowered, which is not appropriate for this blog. I like to keep things rated R, not NC-17.

All 13 of us Hagens Berman riders traveled to the pristine northwest, the best corner of the country, this Friday and Saturday for a team sponsor camp/get to know one another weekend. Ian had a great blog post at the end of last year that introduced the cast of characters in his 2011 play. It was a great idea, but implemented about nine months too late. So I’m going to do it right this year and give a brief rundown of my teammates before the season is over. But first, a quick recap of the camp’s activities. (That was like when NPR talks about three or four interesting things and then says, “But first the news.” I always wonder why they do that because it makes the news seem extra boring).

Friday Morning: I met Dan at the airport. He’d forgotten to bring my pedals that he’s continuously forgotten to mail to me since Gila last year. He also almost forgot to catch the plane and drove half way to work before turning around to the airport. We had many cups of coffee while we waited for Danny and Jon to arrive from sunny southern California. To eat: oranges and some free samples from Starbucks.

Friday Morning-Evening: David and Ian picked the four of us up, took us Alans’ house (HB HQ) and everyone met for the first time. I took the opportunity to sew up the armpits of my favorite argyle sweater that I was currently wearing. Later, we crammed into the team van and dove to the Hagens Berman law firm in downtown Seattle. We took a high speed elevator up to the 34th floor and drank water from pitchers that contained the largest ice cubes any of us had ever seen. The next couple hours were spent listening to our Blue and Shimano sponsors tell us about all the cool equipment we’d be riding this year. Our eyes bulged with the excitement of school children on Christmas morning. We then got our feet molded to a pair of our new Shimano shoes, did movie camera interviews with Winger, and talked to Joe about our goals and aspirations for the 2012 season. Finally, when we were all about to pass out from hunger, Ian, Alan, and David came through for us with a box of pastries. The day was saved and we remained concious while Joe gave us a powerpoint presentation about the mission of the team, the races we’d be doing, and all that jazz. He also touched on why Adrian, Sam and Chris succeeded in getting pro contracts the past three years. What I took away from it was this: Adrian=smart, cool, and calm. Sam=Sam. Chris=really hairy. (Of note, Ian is terrible at catching grapes in his mouth, Jon has a girlfriend who calls every 87 seconds, and Jesse is a REAL Canadian, unlike Cody and former HBer, Spencer).

Friday Evening: After Joe finished the slide show up Ian and I ate the last dougnut, having guilted Joe into not wanting it (a first success for us in asking Joe if he “really needed that”). We said goodbye to our view from the past five hours, which had transformed into an amazingly beautiful picturesque sunset of downtown Seattle (which was below us since we were king of the castle), and then we took the high speed elevator down to the parking garage and started stripping off our clothes in the dark, cold cement cave 100 feet below ground. We began adorning ourselves with the nicest clothes any of us owned, but not before we realized that the van’s front tire was completely flat. Let’s get things straight here: we changed into our nice collared shirts, ties, and slacks, for dinner with out title sponsor and then we crawled under the van and began attempting to change the flat. After a good 15 minutes we realized that car tires don’t have tubes like bike tires, so we decided to let Gabe take control of the situation. Most of the guys left to walk half a mile to dinner, which we were already an hour late for, and more than enough of us stayed to work on the tire and document our own idiocy–Wingerstudios.com will have some quality footage I’m sure.

Friday Evening still: The five of us who’d taken care of the flat tire arrived to dinner way too late, for the appetizers had already been arriving! We were pretty well covered in grease and dirt from finally successfully changing the tire/wheel. The restaurant we were eating at was a very fancy Italian place, and our title sponsor, Steve Berman, of Hagens Berman, was treating us to an amazing dinner with bottle after bottle of wine and, like I said, appetizers aplenty. The appetizers did NOT STOP. The waiters were actually taking away still-full trays of appetizers to make room for more appetizers. I was in heaven. No, it was better than that. It’s like I’d died and gone to heaven, then died in heaven and gone to a better heaven. I had pasta with mussels, one and a half chocolate and cream deserts, and a cappuccino that was so fluffy I thought I was drinking a feather pillow (okay that doesn’t sound as good as I thought, but it was damn fluffy). Dinner was over much too quickly and Steve Berman said goodbye for the night, all of us greatly appreciating him flying in from Salt Lake City to have dinner with us. Words cannot express how grateful we all are for him funding this team and our dreams (words probably can express it, but they’d take up more than you’d care to read). It was great to finally meet him and having the honor of sitting right next to him at dinner, which Alan suggested.

Friday Night: we went to our hotel and went to sleep at a very reasonable hour because we had to be up early the next day.

Saturday Morning: Alan picked us up from our hotel and took us to the ferry. Food included: bagels, cream cheese, oranges, juice, and scones made from scratch by his girlfriend
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Saturday Morning a little later: We got off the ferry, something that Jon and Danny had never done before, and had coffee in Bainbridge. I had chi for some reason, thinking that maybe today I’d try to go easy on the caffeine since I’d already had three cups at the hotel. This did not last for long.

Saturday Late Morning-Evening: We began the festivities at another one of our sponsor companies, Gravitec. Randy Wingfield, the owner of the fall-protection and training company for vertical safety in dangerous workplaces, had set up an amazing day for us to learn about leadership, improve our senses of observation and listening, build trust amongst the team, and basically just get us all working as one. It was much more valuable than I could have anticipated and a lot of fun as well. We did things like tug of war X4, human chain drills, puzzles and problem-solving competitions, rappelling, ascending (ropes), a trust fall off a fork lift, and eating and drinking coffee, since we’d gotten too much sleep the night before we needed coffee to keep us awake. For lunch: burritos, chips, salsa, veggies, snack packs, and a bunch of other tasty stuff.

Almost everything we did at Gravitec that day involved competition. We were split up into teams and put against each another for almost every exercise. It did a great job illustrating how competitive each one of us is, and it was a bit scary to see just how mad I got when I was on a losing team, which reminded me of how depressed and angry I can get when a race goes poorly–something I believe I need to work on this year. The other main thing that I took away from the day was a completely new outlook on how leadership works. As you know, I’ve been trying and failing with my attempts to make change, even small change, in the people I’ve been encountering lately. But after today, I came to these conclusions:

I think that in order to be a good leader you need to be able put yourself in someone else’s shoes and be able to think about what they’re thinking about, much like a good writer will do. Usually what people are thinking about mainly involves themselves, how they appear, what others may be thinking of them (human nature and something I’ve been aware of for a while), and when the situation involves problem, most people think about what everyone else is doing wrong. As a leader, knowing what’s going on in your team’s mind is crucial. And as a cyclist, every person on the team is a leader at some point, requiring that everyone knows how everyone else thinks. There is no quarterback and since we don’t have race radios, there really isn’t even a director for us to talk to unless we head back to the caravan, which is almost always just for bottles. In bike racing, decisions are made by the individual and most of them are snap decisions.

How those snap decisions are made, though, is where the team dynamic comes into play. A good team dynamic requires that every person trusts every other person, knows everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, cares about the team’s goal for that particular race, and cares about their teammates and team enough in order to completely sacrifice their own personal goals for the team’s mission to be carried out.

One thing that I seem to forget when it comes to decision-making is that there’s a time limit. If there was no time limit, democracy might work better than it currently does. One of our exercises was to manipulate a system of strings in order to move a can full of ping pong balls into another can way across the room. The make-believe scenario was that the ping pong balls were radioactive waste and we had to save the world by removing the waste to a safe area (the sun?). The pressure was on because we were competing to do it faster than the other team. If we’d been given an hour to talk about it, I’m sure a group consensus, with no true leader dictating the discussion, would have take form and we could have agreed on one or two options, slowly and cautiously tried them, talked about more solutions, tried those, and finally, six hours later, accomplished the task without spilling the radioactive balls.

But, like I said, time mattered. Decisions within even six-person group won’t happen for a LONG time unless a few people take control. A leader or two was necessary, and everyone else needed to shut up and listen. I don’t like the idea of one person having more power than another, especially when I think my way is better, but this simple game certainly re-opened my eyes to the value of a good leader: someone who doesn’t necessarily have all the ideas, but instead: someone who has the ability to recognize a good idea, get the group working together quickly and efficiently, and put those ideas into action without an argument occurring. As our instructor, Randy, put it…okay I can’t really remember how he put it, but it was something like “recognizing and harnessing the qualities in people.” I like that.

The day at Gravitec left everyone sore and tired, hitting us especially hard since we’d all gotten way too much sleep and rest the night before, making our central nervous systems groggy and listless. Randy took us to a fantastic Thai restaurant where I ate approximately 11 times more than anyone else, then we went to a bar down the street where I got my second ice cream of the night, succeeding in my weekend goal of living it up for to the max before it’s back to the starvation diet in Boulder. Some of us took the ferry back to Seattle and spent the night at David’s house in a room with a rambunctious pair of chinchillas, which are nocturnal. Fortunately we all crashed to sleep immediately from all the hard upper body work we’d done at Gravitec. I’m still sore and I’m sure everyone else is too.

Sunday I flew home. This was the best possible way to kick off the 2012 season and I’m growing more excited about the team every day. I’ve always been very optimistic about each upcoming year I’ve raced, but none compares to this year. The team is going to crush it; it’s the strongest, most organized, focused, and determined group of guys we’ve ever had and it’s going to be one hell of a year. Thank you Alan, Joe, and all of our sponsors for taking the team to the next level. I’ll leave you with this:

Kennett talks about oats

(How I got from “what’s your favorite race of the year” to this, is beyond me).

I miss-read my flight information last night and ended up arriving at the airport an hour earlier than needed. So I’ve got some time to burn and some thoughts to think. Last night while I was working at the Ethiopian restaurant, I glanced at the clock at 7:30 and, for whatever reason, thought that it said 8:30. An hour later I looked at it again and saw that it was still 8:30, and realized my mistake. What this meant was that I had just lived an extra hour of life. An in-between segment of time, sandwiched like an invisibly thin slice of deli meat between two thick pieces of bread, un-noticed by the entire world except the person eating the sandwich, who is extremely perplexed as to why their plain bread sandwich tastes like it has a roast beef center.

The concept of time came about later that night as well, when I set and re-set my alarm for 4:30 AM, making doubly sure that it was indeed set for AM and not PM, and that I left the sound on so I’d wake up. It’s our team’s sponsor camp/get to know each other weekend. We have some big plans for the upcoming season and some exciting things going on this weekend as well, which I can only hope includes an all you can eat eating contest at Home Town Buffet. I will win the S outa that S.

When my alarm went off this morning I had a strict time plan for leaving the house no later than 4:50, to ride my bike downtown to the bus station, where I’d catch the bus to the airport in Denver. The temperature of my oats delayed things by about 10 minutes, but I got to the bus station on time anyways. 9 minutes early actually.

Finally, with the time obsession over for a little while, I had time to reflect on all the time I’d been dealing with as I attempted to drift off to sleep for the hour-thirty bus ride. Sleep did not come, likely from the two giant cups of coffee I’d consumed (coffee being another time-expander, kind of like miss-reading the clock-miss). My thoughts began on the subject of moving and living in new places. I began wondering how it was possible that I’ve been in Boulder for two months now, and can already feeling the nomadic athlete’s foot in my souls itching away at my feet. Just two months ago I was on this same bus, heading from the airport up to Boulder with a backpack, a duffle bag, and a bike, and without a clue where I was going to live or if I’d be able to find a job in time before my money ran out and I had to head back to my parent’s house with my tail between my legs. Luckily for me, though, moving is a lot easier than for most people. Not having spent more than four months in one place in the past three years, I’ve successfully avoided creating any concrete social network to tie me down. No real job, no girlfriend, no friends…man life is good when you’re a nomad. Jokes aside, it’s pretty satisfying to be able to pack your life on your back, head off to a new place, and make a name for yourself.

The name I’ve made for myself is not at all what I had hoped for back when I was in high school. It’s hard to live up to your dreams, though surprisingly non-disappointing when you don’t, since your dreams constantly change. My life goals back in high school were to A) ride my bike down to Costa Rica, B) become a professional rock climber and or white water kayaker and or runner, C) write for the National Geographic about my professional climbing/kayaking/running, and D) at some point in my life, go live and hunt with a wolf pack for a year or two up in Alaska. Only one of these things remains as a goal of mine, so while the past Kennett may be disappointed to learn I’m no longer on his chosen path, present Kennett is okay with things for now.

I don’t think it’s ever healthy to be fully satisfied with things though. You know in movies where someone says, “I have no fear of death; I’ve lived a full life with no regrets and achieved everything a man can hope for.” Usually he escapes said impending death and lives happily ever after, but regardless, I don’t buy it. Being completely satisfied with one’s life would mean that if you died tomorrow, you wouldn’t really care. And if this is the case, you might as well just get it over with today and shoot yourself in the head. This is why I think suicides shouldn’t be frowned upon, because suicidal people must actually be more content with their lives than the rest of us, agreeing with Death that they’ve accomplished everything they set out to accomplish and spending any more time here on earth showing up the rest of us would just be brash waste of time.

Time again. It’s almost time to board my plane, but more importantly, it’s time to think about what my life goals have changed to since graduating high school. It’s too difficult to come up with any real long term goals (I’m talking more than five years), but for the short term I’m keeping them the same as they’ve been since 2008: race my bike and race good enough to make a minimum wage living at it. It seems a simple, unimportant goal in the grand scheme of things. But looking around here in the airport one con see that just about no one has anything important to do. Everyone most likely thinks they’re important, especially while at the airport. Business people think they’re important because they’re getting paid to travel somewhere and do business things, families on vacation think they’re important because they can afford to travel by air and go spend time somewhere different (and therefor better) than where they currently reside, and all these athletic teams, cub scouts squads, spelling B students and whoever all these people are in matching sweat suits–they all think they’re important because they’re part of a big group. Kind of like why a country thinks it’s important.

From what I’ve gathered from my observations on society, a person’s importance resides in a very easily quantifiable derivative based on any one of these things: # of babies made, # of dollars made, # would-be babies made save for birth control, # watts produced on a bike, # of cheeseburgers eaten. Most people seem to have chosen the last option, which was my second choice to be honest.

Well, I have to cut it short before I come to any real conclusion about any of this. Time, life goals, the importance of an individual in a world so vast it can’t accurately count its inhabitance, let alone decide on how to distribute the goods amongst ourselves (it’s like we’re all cats living in a crazy cat lady’s home and for some reason she decides to feed some of us way too much and some of us not nearly enough–just for fun to see what happens–she IS crazy after all). Anyways, I just don’t have the time right now. Not even enough to spellcheck this sucker. Time to board.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell

Bear with my initial negativity here, I come to a good compromise at the end.

How I view the world (turn the volume up): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjDPWP5GKQA
How most normal people view the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwH4wPz-URM&feature=related

I’ve been having some difficulties dealing with people lately (lately as in the past decade or so). But lately it’s been getting worse. My pessimism is growing like a tumor in my brain, feeding on the emotionally healthy people around me and feasting on their happy-go-lucky thoughts while excreting the waste as evil cancerous cells into my head, which has become distraught by the fact that most peoples’ self-satisfied way of life will result in humanity’s and the earth’s destruction. I try to tell them what they’re doing wrong. I try to show them the world outside their cave, but it turns out that informing people of their ignorance leads to arguments, and arguing leads to dead ends. The more anger I aim at humanity’s atrocities, the less accurate my shot becomes as my arm shakes in anger and sends the arrow flying off into the bushes where it will be lost forever. Maybe I’m aiming at the wrong target altogether. Or maybe I need a bazooka, not a bow and arrow. Either way, I feel like I’m the lone rational person left on earth, which has become overrun with the idiots that populate the ingenious movie, Idiocracy.

Even people who say they care about the world don’t seem to care. I stopped by Occupy Boulder last week, which has relocated and grown in size due to an influx of homeless Occupy Denver protesters after the brutal police raid on their camp put things to an end a few weeks ago. I was eagerly conversing with a group of people about something I thought we all felt passionately about, but was let down when the girl I was talking to interrupted me to ask if I was 420 friendly. I said, “Yeah sure,” and she lit up and passed her pipe around to her friends, changed the subject, and I was left standing there realizing that the entire time all she’d been thinking about was an opportunity to light up and she didn’t actually give a damn about anything we were talking about. I left and continued my job hunt, and found a job. They’re still there, getting high and NOT talking about anything.

A lot of dull people like to say, “Well I just wish everyone would get along once and for all. I just wish people would be nicer to each other you know?” Well no shit Sherlock. Of course that would be a good thing. But there are limited resources on the earth and not all 7 billion people can live the way we do. It’s not compassion that humans lack. Compassion is not the problem in our world. Very few people want to make someone starve, very few want to see an innocent child blow their leg off on a land mine, and very few people want to cut down the rain forests (well, maybe less care about the forests). But my point is that most people aren’t evil, obviously. Most people are kind, and yet the world is an unkind place if you live in the two-thirds of it that make up the third world.

The problem with humans is a lack of knowledge, not a lack of kindness.

When you call someone ignorant, they’re likely to get upset. This is because they think that the word ignorant means stupid. This only further proves how ignorant people are, since ignorant doesn’t mean stupid, it means lacking knowledge. Everyone’s ignorant in one subject or another. (I for one, don’t know how to be less excellent at everything I say and do). But ignorance, when it comes to the small decisions one makes that affect others in large ways, is not an excuse that we can afford to give any longer.

We’ve been brought up with the notion that being a nice person is the ultimate way to make the world a better place. I disagree. Misinformed and misplaced compassion is a waste. What good does being a nice person do when you’re not informed enough to know what to support, what to hate, and what to stop from happening all together? The world is full of nice people. Nice, ignorant people that don’t think of the consequences of buying that Hummer that chugs a half gallon of gas every time they drive five minutes to Walmart for a pound of steak, which also required a half gallon of oil for its creation (this is not an exaggeration). Do people not see the repercussions of relying on foreign fossil fuels? The environmental devastation alone should be enough for them to decide upon walking or riding their bike instead of driving. But even that, PLUS the death toll in the Gulf isn’t reason enough for people to get off their fat, lazy asses and walk. 1.5 million people. That’s how many we’ve killed in Iraq for our cheap oil in the last decade. I assume it’s ignorance that allows this to continue happening, because, as “nice” people, we’d put a stop to it if we really thought about what was going on. At least I hope it’s ignorance that’s the problem.

Most people don’t stop to think about these things, and that’s what drives me nuts. But I know there are plenty of things I do wrong too. I eat meat, I rely on air travel, I require 60 times the resources a single Bangladeshi citizen consumes. But at least I’m aware that I’m a monster, though by admitting this I guess my problem IS compassion.

I’ve been told by a fair number of wise friends, with my best intentions in their minds, that I need to stop being so self-righteous, less confrontational, and more accepting, if not for my own health and well-being, then for the sake of the people and companies I represent as a cyclist on a sponsored team. So do I follow my ethics or do I keep quiet and race my bike? Can I have both?

Martin Luther King Vs. the Black Panthers: if I lived in the era and had to choose between the two I’d most likely have chosen the Black Panthers, a civil-rights group hell-bent on getting their rights met NOW by use of force and violence. I can’t imagine the rage a black person must have felt before the 60s (and the rage they still must feel because racism is, of course, still thriving). But King accomplished so much more than the Black Panthers did, by use of peaceful protests and enlightened speeches. I’ve decided to strive towards a less confrontational method of achieving change after thinking about how real change is made. Martin Luther King didn’t challenge people in a menacing way and he achieved the greatest results of any of the civil rights leaders. By keeping a calm, cool head under pressure and not scaring off potential supporters, he created real change (getting shot helped speed things along too).

Methods I’ve been thinking of to get my point across without being so harsh, for my writing as well as person-to-person interaction, include:

-Less confrontation so I don’t scare off my subject without them absorbing a word I say.
-Pandering to the lowest common denominator helps accomplish this too, by making people feel smart and knowledgeable. Maybe I’ll start making more mistakes and intentionally playing dumb so I don’t intimidate people so much (oh wait I’ve been doing that for years already).
-Not letting people realize how radical I really am, or even which side of an issue I’m on. This will allow them to accept more of what I say, especially if I initially agree with them on things that I otherwise would have shot down immediately.
-Preaching to the choir is a waste of time, so basically I assume this entire blog post is a waste of time. I need to lasso the in-between-ers.
-Newton’s third law, “For ever action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” only applies to the Chinese finger trap when attempting to escape the incorrect way. The harder you pull your fingers apart in a Chinese finger trap, the more difficult it is to escape. I need to adopt the correct escape method and learn to pull slowly and carefully (or just become so strong I can rip it apart with one yank). This applies to racing too.

The best real leaders throughout history have never used force. Tibetan monks lit themselves on fire, which was much more effective than lighting the enemy on fire. Gandhi led hunger strikes and peaceful protests, which was more effective than starting a war with the British since the British would have massacred India like we did the Middle East. Ansel Adams used photography to impassion people about the natural beauty they were destroying and John Muir accomplished more than any other environmentalist with pen and paper. Authors trick their readers into adopting their point of view by hiding the moral deep amongst action, drama, love, comedy and all that other garbage that goes into a book to keep people entertained. Unfortunately, as we learned in high school, the moral of the story has to be pretty obvious for most people to pick up on it.

So through deception and deceit, I plan on amassing an unwitting army of free thinkers and rational consumers who’ve decided on their own (sort of but not really) that changes need to be made and that Complacency Falls is not a good direction for the human race to continue to row towards.