Bikes are Evil

This one is for Julie, who asked what happened, and for Stef, who is way too amused by stories about me crashing. Not funny, Stef.  :(

I really like bikes. I always have. From when I was six years old trying (and failing) to wheelie up the road in front of my house to when I was in college and my friends and I used them to get to cross country practice to when I started mountain biking post-college, I've liked bikes. However, bikes have not always liked me back. Aside from falling off my bike and running into stuff when I was trying to learn to ride, my first real bike trauma was in sixth grade. That year, I was invited to one of the cool kids' parties. Naturally, I just had to go. It was my chance to get in with the "in" crowd, right? Well, at the party, a couple of the popular girls decided to take some bikes out for a ride and asked me if I wanted to come. Of course I accepted, and grabbed the only bike left...a skinny tired road bike with drop bars that was way too big for me. I had never ridden drops before and could just barely reach the pedals, but it was just a bike. How hard could it be? We took off down the path in front of her house. As not quite a popular girl, I got stuck in the awkward out the back position, while everyone else was riding side by side in doubles. Seeking to rectify this, I moved up to the group in front of me. Unfortunately, the path was too narrow to accommodate three bikes, and I dropped off the side of the path into the grass. This probably would have been alright, except that in trying to get back up onto the path, I scraped the sidewall of my tire against the side of the path, which of course sent me flying off the bike and skidding across the path. I tried to play it off, but the popular girls just stared at me like I was some kind of uncoordinated idiot who couldn't ride a bike (which I guess was sort of right, in retrospect). So much for getting in with the popular crowd.

Now of course I've done similar things since, like when I did the same thing on Boulder Creek Path and skidded across the bike path, nearly hitting a screaming mother and her baby stroller as I left a trail of skin in my wake, but the next "Me + Bikes = Disaster" situation happened on a trail. By this point, I had taken up mountain biking (not that I was any good at it, but that's besides the point). I finally cleaned the ascent portion of this one trail with no dabs or falls or anything, and man, was I stoked. So stoked that I let my guard down to fly down the nontechnical descent. I picked up a bunch of speed, leaned the bike to carve a turn, and felt the bike start to skid. The next thing I knew, the bike was gone and I was flying through the air towards a big, pointy rock. The next part seemed to happen in slow motion, giving myself just enough time to think "How can I make this hurt the least?" but not enough time to actually do anything about it. Then I landed, belly first, on the rock. Initially I thought I just knocked the wind out of myself, but after a failed attempt to get back on the bike, a failed attempt to walk the bike back to my car, an MRI, and a night in the ICU, I realized I had actually smashed my spleen into a bunch of little pieces. "Like a bowl of jello that you threw on the ground," according to my doctor. And as if that's not a gross enough comparison, the hospital tried to feed me jello for all my meals.

A smart person would have given up on bikes by now. Or at least decided to stick to cruiser bikes where you can flatfoot the ground while still sitting on the saddle. Not me. I decided to go to the Team Luna Chix mountain bike clinic at the short track. Which I guess would have been okay if I had gone with the beginner group who was learning to turn and climb and descend, which, based on previous experience, I clearly did not know how to do. But no, I decided to go with the advanced group, and when the Luna Chix asked what we wanted to work on, I suggested pumping and jumping terrain. Pumping went well, really it did. And that's what most of the people decided to stick with, especially since the Luna Chix themselves neglected to work on jumping. But I really wanted to work jumping, and for a while, that went okay too. Not "well," since I wasn't getting much air, but not badly either. Until I got to a roller that I started to jump, but realized it was kind of high and decided to pump instead...while part of the way up the face. I ended up over the bars with a bar end to my adductor magnus. No big deal though, right? I rode for a little while longer, then packed up and drove home. On the drive home, it started to stiffen up, and before long, the entire inside of my thigh was deep purple...with the small exception of a normal colored circle where I took the bar end. You'd think a contusion wouldn't be that noteworthy, but for some reason my entire upper leg was useless for a week.

So by now I should have learned my lesson, right? And the last thing in the world I should be doing is riding a BMX bike, right? But I discovered a track a couple miles from my house, and I suddenly became helpless to resist. I only had a freestyle bike, but whatever, a 20" is a 20" at the level I'm riding. So, most of the people at the track pump the rollers. Pumping is fast, and for the most part, less risky. But jumping is so much more fun. Again, I am helpless to resist. Well, a couple days ago, a TV crew showed up for a news spot. I knew the news guy from high school, so we talked for a while, and when he went back to his car to get some equipment, I shot down the starting hill and aired off the first roller. And for some reason, I got a lot more air than usual. Slightly freaked out by the air, I pumped the tabletop instead of jumping it, momentarily forgetting that while a bike in the air loses speed, a bike being pumped gains speed. This sent me into the step up with way too much speed. Now, you cannot go into a jump and not either pump or jump, or you'll end up bucked off the bike, so I had to do something. Split second decision...jump! And I jumped, but immediately realized I was not going to make the step up, nor was I going to land is the "safe" spot I usually land in when I have less speed. Instead, I was going to crash directly into the face of the "up" part of the step up. I immediately decided to abort bike, and threw the bike away from me. The bike crashed into the face, and I shot over the step up and rolled down the backside. It was a pretty nice roll, and I rolled onto my feet, and initially I thought I had only ripped up my elbow a bit. I brought bike bike back to the start hill, laughed about it with my high school friend, and tried again. This time, the bike was really squirrelly in the air, like the headset or stem was loose or something. I pumped the rest of the track, though it was squirrelly doing that too. I checked the bike, but everything seemed dialed. It was almost like something was wrong with me. I rode back to the start ramp, but by now my thumb was starting to tingle. Weird. I declined an interview (really, what was I going to say? "I fall a lot.") and drove home. By the time I got home, I had no range of motion in my wrist. By the next morning, I couldn't move my fingers either. Moral of the story is you guys better love me because typing this with one hand took forever.

It's What's For Dinner...

I was eating beets today, when I realized that they don't really look very appetizing. They taste alright, otherwise I wouldn't be eating them, but they look gross.

Beets
As I said, beets are gross. Obama wants nothing to do with them, and I doubt it's because he's afraid of Iron poisoning. So what are beets exactly? Well, first off, they're a root vegetable. So they're not something you pick off a tree like an apple. Instead, you pull them out of the ground, covered in dirt. So now you're holding this dirt covered, hard as a rock thing that kind of looks like an alien. Oh yeah, and when you cut it, it bleeds. Or at least leaks dark red juice that stains your hands. Still want to eat that, Lady Macbeth? Awesome, it's supposed to be pretty good for you. And make you look really hardcore when you pee what looks like blood after your next workout.

Yogurt
A long time ago, someone thought it would be a good idea to grab a cow's udder, squeeze it, and drink what comes out. If someone tried to do that to my boobs...well, I better like him a lot. Though hopefully I'm not lactating, and if I am for some reason, that's a very big problem, but that's besides the point. Anyway, you're probably grossed out by the idea of drinking people milk, right? But we drink cow milk all the time, and no one reading this blog is a baby cow (at least I don't think so). Well, as if that's not weird enough, now we're taking milk, purposely introducing bacteria so it goes sour and chunky, and then eating it! I think this is how they make cheese too...let the milk spoil and eat the chunky part.

Push-Up Ice Cream
Push-Up ice creams are long cylinders that have ice cream that comes out the top. Then you lick and suck on the tip of the ice cream. They're kind of messy, so in the end, you usually end up a little sticky. These are marketed towards little kids. WTF?!

Rocky Mountain Oysters
Ever hear that joke about the guy who goes to the restaurant after the bullfight and finds out that their house special is the bull's testicles? And he gets on the waiting list, and when it's finally his turn, the matador loses and he gets served some poor guy's jewels? Either way, do you really want balls for dinner?

Black Pudding
I know that Twilight is all the rage with the kiddies today. And that being a vampire is the cool thing to do. Which means that drinking blood automatically makes you awesome...or something like that. Well, since biting someone's jugular isn't exactly politically correct, the Brits have come up with another solution that involves letting blood congeal in meats and grains until you get something that looks kind of like sausage. Sausage made for vampires. That looks like something a dog left behind. I think I'll stick with Count Chocula.

Soylent Green
Soylent Green is people! But honestly, compared to these other things, does it really sound that horrible?

Cupcakes are Stupid

This post is dedicated to my friend Molly, who doesn't like cupcakes either.

Not that long ago, the trendy food of the culinary world was bacon. People were putting bacon on and in everything. Bacon of the month clubs, bacon pizza, bacon pancakes, chicken fried bacon, bacon salt, bacon vodka, bacon soap, bacon candles, and one of my friends even made bacon brownies, which she described as disgusting (to be fair, it was a deterrent to stop people from stealing her food). Actually, disgusting is a word I would use to describe bacon in general. It's either flaccid and tastes like grease or crunchy and tastes like burnt. Ew.

Well, if bacon covers the manly side of the spectrum (I think bacon is the manly side? I don't think women are interested in things that can be described as flaccid), cupcakes cover the womanly side. The cupcake revolution supposedly started when Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City ate cupcakes. This is confusing, since I'm pretty sure Carrie ate a lot of things on that show, only some of which were G-rated, and only one of which was a cupcake, yet cupcakes and cosmopolitans are the only things that got trendy. Why not a sandwich?

"But cupcakes are so bite size and cute!" I'm not much of a desserts person, but if I were, why would I want something bite size? Cupcakes might be a good size for little children, but little children are usually only interested in the frosting and will end up throwing out the cake part anyway. There are adults who are only interested in the frosting too, and for them, the frosting off of a single cupcake is definitely not enough. I'd say to make cupcakes bigger, but then it's just a regular cake. And don't get me started on cute. Ryan Hall is cute. Puppies are cute. A spongey lump of cake with a plop of frosting on top is not cute. A swirl of pastel pink frosting with sparkley sprinkles doesn't help either. If bakers want to go all out and make it artistic and pretty, more power to them, as long as they realize that their artwork is going to be mashed between someone's molars, churned into chyme with digestive enzymes, and ultimately end up in the toilet. I guess that goes for any artistic presentation of food, but as someone who has drained pasta, thrown it into the pot with sauce, and eaten it out of the pot, I obviously don't get it.

"Your opinion on cupcakes is ruined by your indifference towards sweets in general! If you liked cake it would be a different story!" Except as I said before, cupcakes are just too small. If I liked cake, I would want a large piece of cake, not two bites worth of food. I've heard of people making savory foods in cupcake form, which almost sounds appealing. Macaroni and cheese baked in cupcake cups, lasagna in cupcake form, etc. But what good is two bites of macaroni and cheese? That's certainly not going to satisfy my appetite. Plus bite size macaroni and cheese is not a cupcake, since there's no cake involved. It's just a too small serving of macaroni and cheese that probably took more effort to put in little bite size cups than it would take to make a casserole anyway.

Advertisement is Everything

Have you ever bought something and soon after, asked yourself exactly what you paid for? Sometimes it's just good marketing. Case in point:

Bottled Water
Water is the most plentiful compound on Earth. Now, granted the majority of it is salt water, and a lot of the fresh water is groundwater, so it's not like it's all ready and waiting for immediate consumption. However, it costs pennies out of a tap. Bottled water, on the other hand, is fairly expensive. At $1.25 for a 20oz bottle, you're looking at $8 a gallon. All of a sudden, gas doesn't sound all that bad. "But it's so easy and convenient!" you say. Let me ask you this. If I pointed to a stack of bottles and a faucet and said I'd pay you $1.25 for every bottle you filled, would you fill up a couple of them? That's what I thought.

 "Barefoot" Shoes
The latest running craze seems to be barefoot running. People covering the spectrum from neutral pronators with perfect biomechanics to overpronators with collapsed arches have embraced the revolution and decided that running sans shoes was the key to all their injury problems. After all, we've evolved to run barefoot (or at least we did until those with bad biomechanics stopped being eaten for lunch by sabretooth tigers and humans started to adapt to wearing shoes). But that's besides the point. Somewhere along the way, someone thought it would be a great idea to take a shoe and market it as being a "barefoot" shoe. You'd think this oxymoron would never sell, but it took off. The shoes aren't all bad shoes. The Nike Free is a flexible and lightweight performance trainer with a seamless upper. The Saucony Kinvara is a fairly well-cushioned shoe for its weight with a low heel-toe differential that bridges the gap between marathon flat and performance trainer. The Vibram Five Finger is uh...probably what you'd get if a Walmart watershoe had sex with a frog. Maybe if Brooks marketed the Beast as a barefoot shoe with motion control features for overpronators, we could finally get people to buy the shoes that they should actually be wearing.

Netbooks
The laptop was a great idea. Everything you love (and hate) about a desktop PC, now in portable form. Yeah, it's a little less powerful and a lot more expensive, but you can't very well lug your desktop back and forth from work, or bring it to class, or take it in the car, or carry it on an airplane. So, if small is good, smaller must be better, right? So we'll just take out some more processing power and RAM until it's really only good for internet browsing and word processing, we'll take out the optical disc drive because DVDs are so yesterday, we'll shrink the keyboard (don't worry, you'll get used to it eventually), and now, we have a very small computer. Or maybe a very large Blackberry that folds in half (or doesn't, in the case of the iPad). They're also oftentimes more expensive than a more powerful but slightly larger ultraportable laptop. Too small to fit processing power under the hood, but too large to fit in your pocket, netbooks are pretty much the red-headed stepchild of the computer industry.

Deckle Edge
Recently, I bought a book only to discovered that it looked like something chewed on the sides of the pages. I had bought it secondhand off of Amazon, so I figured maybe someone didn't take very good care of it and left it out in the rain or in their hamster's cage or something. Or that it was a one off that the manufacturer screwed up. You never know with secondhand books, right? Well, I later discovered that this was actually something that people do on purpose and call "deckle edge." Who thought of this? And for what reason? So all of the pages already look dog-eared so no one can tell if the publisher wanted it to look like that or if I read it a few too many times? If I wanted my books to look like that, I'd just take a scissors to the edge and cut it myself. File this one under "Why does this exist and if I really wanted that, couldn't I do it myself?" alongside ripped jeans and frayed brim hats.

Who needs a bucket list?

Recently, I've been hearing a lot of people refer to their "bucket list," aka their list of things to do before they kick the bucket. At first, I thought this was a pretty cool idea. Make a list of things that you want to do before you die. And since for all you know, you can die tomorrow, well, you better get on that. So I decided I was going to make a bucket list too! It looked something like this:

1) Run really fast.
2) Learn to drive a motorcycle.

Hm. That wasn't a very good bucket list. I vaguely remember the rules of goal setting are to have a definite timeline and a tangible goal. Obviously the timeline is "before I die," and for the first one, I have to do it before I get too old. However, that first goal isn't very tangible, so I added some times to it to make it a good first goal. But then I realized my enemies are death, old age, and genetics. Against that unholy trinity, I'd probably have better luck going up against a Tyrannosaurus Rex with rabies. I decided to go back to that one later and turn my attention to the second goal. Motorcycles! I've always loved motorcycles. I had like a million toy motorcycles as a little kid. And I've scored two different first dates by begging a boy to take me for a ride on his motorcycle (though now that I think about it, I wonder if I got the dates because he thought there was innuendo where there was actually just a fascination with a bike). For that one, my only enemy is death. Really though, I think this one made the list because the day before I tried to make my bucket list, my mom's friend's husband bought himself a little Honda Rebel. And given my mountain biking experiences, death may be a powerful enemy. Maybe this bucket list thing wasn't such a great idea. However, not wanting to be completely left out of the fun, I decided to make...

THE ANTI-BUCKET LIST!

Simply, a list of things that I have no plans to do before I die. Instead of failing if I die before accomplishing the goals, I fail if I check something off the list by mistake.

1) Go vegetarian
Back in college, my friend offered me what I thought was a hot dog. But NOOO! It was actually a tofu pup! It tasted like death and sadness. Only not really death because no animals died to make it, unless rubber is an animal. It was probably a condom stuffed with tofu that she tricked me into eating. I did everything in my power to block this memory from my mind, something that unfortunately turned against me (always remember your mistakes, kids!). A few years later, I was living in Boulder, hippie capital of the United States (no offense, Boulderites, I love Boulder! Just not tofu), and everyone was talking about how much more energy and how much healthier they felt after eliminating meat from their diet. I wanted to be healthy and energetic too! But I ate a lot of turkey sandwiches, and turkey apparently did not mean healthy and energetic. So I went out and bought myself a package of Tofurkey. That ended up being not only a waste of money, but a waste of a sandwich that I threw out and a waste of taste buds that spontaneously died upon tasting the vile tofu. Since then, I've decided that I like eating animals. And I like not being anemic too.

2) Watch every season of Lost
One summer, back before Hulu got popular, my friend and I found seasons and seasons of TV shows online. I remembered hearing lots of people rave about how amazing Lost was, and that happened to be one of the shows available, so I decided to try it. Plane crashes! A dangerous island! People with cryptic pasts! Mysterious number patterns! A monster that ate the pilot! What's in the hatch? And where did that polar bear come from?! I blew through season 1. Then I started season 2. And it began with a weird man living in the hatch who listened to bad music and constantly reset a bomb that may or may not blow up island if he forgot to reset it. Then they found more people and the cast size spun out of control faster than an X-Men vs. Avengers supersize team-up. Sound bad? Well, it just went downhill from there and started making even less sense than it did before (HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE???). I'm pretty sure the writers' strike didn't happen until later, so I'm not sure what even happened. And really, I don't care to find out either.

3) Complete an Ironman Triathlon
This race starts with a 2.4 mile swim. 2.4 miles. I can't even get my head around that. Then you go right into a 112 mile bike. Hope your saddle and chamois are really good...that might trick you into thinking you might still be able to have kids for the first 50 miles anyway. Then, just when you think you're almost done, you get hit with a marathon. 26.2 miles is really far. And that's a 26.2 mile run where all you do preceding it is eating breakfast and doing a short warm up. This one you have to do with your arms and quads about to explode and feeling like someone took a belt grinder to your girly bits (or man parts). And then there's the gear. Carbon fiber shoes that have the latest foam for cushioning and posts to correct pronation but still swear to be as minimalist as running barefoot, compression sleeves to keep your blood flowing just in case your circulation system decides it's not really interested in this Ironman stuff, $500 sunglasses made of unobtainium, a visor that wicks away sweat before it even comes out of your pores, a waterproof GPS watch the size of a netbook, a helmet the size of Texas that makes you look like an extra from a George Lucas movie, a bike that disappears when you look at it head on and has carbon fiber wheels that make whooshing sounds to let everyone know you're coming, a wetsuit that is engineered to act like shark skin so you speed through the water and eat any athletes who cross your path, etc. It should probably be renamed the Six Million Dollar Man Triathlon. Also, I'm all for rocking the name of a few companies that I like, and if someone is giving me gear/discounts, I'm more than happy to do some advertising for them. But sometimes I look at those guys and wonder if they're just competing to see who can get more logos on their clothes (though if they're getting paid by all of them, by all means, more power to them!)

I'm sure I could go on, but that's probably enough for now. Don't want to set those standards too low high.

Rock Repeats

I just read an article on a push to rename the half-marathon a Pikermi. The logic behind the movement is that a half-marathon is a legitimate race in its own right. It doesn't involve half the effort of a marathon. Nor does it involve half the training of a marathon. And they have a point. A half is a legit distance that requires real effort and real training.

But oh wait, its distance is half of a marathon.

The Pikermi motto is 13.1 miles should not be considered half of anything. But...13.1 miles is half of 26.2 miles. That's a fact that's kind of hard to get around. Just like 26.2 is half of 52.4, and if the race that had the legend surrounding it was a 52.4 mile race, the modern-day marathon would likely be called a half-something-or-other.

So what about the name "Pikermi?" Sort of sounds like the name of a Pokemon.

Well, the word marathon comes from the name of the city involved in the Battle of Marathon. According to legend, Pheidippides was sent to run to Athens to bring word of Greek victory. So our intrepid hero ran the 40k from Marathon to Athens and was able to deliver the message just before collapsing of exhaustion and dying. Now, this is kind of screwed up for a couple reasons. First, because we thought it would be a good idea to get lots of people to try something where the first person who did it died. Second, because the British royal family thought it would be a good idea to make it even longer and harder so it could start closer to the castle. Well, it turns out that Pikermi is the name of a town halfway (whoops, there's that evil "half" word again!) through Pheidippides' route from Marathon to Athens.

So that would give us the marathon and the pikermi. But what about the other distances? The 10k used to be called the mini-marathon, which sounds kind of cool, but maybe that's even more demeaning than "half-marathon," since now we're not even going by the mathematical definition. There's probably a tree or something 10k outside of Athens, so maybe that can be the tree race. 5k already sounds legendary, since racing a 5k is practically everyone's first goal, so that one can stay. Mile is stupid, since the mile is hardly even contested outside of indoor track meets anymore, and it's really either a 1500 or 1600. And explaining 1500 PR vs 1600 PR vs mile PR is always a pain in the butt, so we should pick a distance and find some landmark that far outside of Athens. Like a rock, so I can say my workout was rock repeats. That sounds so cool I think I'm going to explode with awesomeness next time I do that workout. Either that or exhaustion.

Lauren Fleshman is my hero

I'd make a real post, but nothing I post will ever beat this.

The race itself was even better. F the World Cup, this is far more exciting. Sorry Landon, but Lauren Fleshman has bigger balls than you. Jen Rhines was equally impressive, as it takes far more guts to surge and open a ridiculous gap with 5(!) laps to go than it does to walk eight baseball players in order to get your no-hitter (screw you, ESPN).

Did I really not write anything in a month? Update soon, I promise.