ELV Six days of Winter 3 Cat 3/4s

If anyone was interested or wondered what the racing was like here......This is last Saturday's race at Hog Hill. That is actually me below. I am failing miserably to cover the break at 1.28 in....

Not alot has been going on lately. Its gotten cold again, and looking for the high tomorrow of 2. Hope you are enjoying your 70 degrees in Tulsa. Just remember how nice it was during the winter when you are boiling again next summer.

Hams getting clean

Hampton's dog sitter branched out to walker and groomer today.......

Ham in a tub (click link left)

Holy Nutella!

Everyone here always talks about how fat Americans are and how much we eat and on and on and on.  Well say what you will, I have never seen at 11 pound jar of Nutella anywhere in the U.S.

We saw this today at an ice cream place.  Check it out 5 kilos.  The 'small' jar is like the economy/family size you can sometimes find in the store.  Seriously how or why would you ever need that much?  It was like a five gallon bucket!

Shrek!!

In the long running, and well I guess seemingly never ending process of making movies out of plays and plays out of movies, we took a bit of a leap and went to see Shrek. Its one thing to take a movie with humans and a somewhat 'normal' plot and setting and turn it into a play/musical, but I wasn't so sure just how they were going to pull it off with fairytales and annimation.

Kristen works pretty much in the center of the theatre district so it makes it easy to stumble across tickets. Turns out that what we thought was the best course of action.....go to the half price tickets shop first thing in the morning might not have actually been all that great. Kristen just walked right up to the box office early afternoon, and low and behold front row center.

So we arrive a the Royal Theatre Drury Lane, home to Miss Saigon for 4,263 performances in a row from 1989-1999. (Pretty incredible to think that they can essentially do the exact same thing night after night and keep selling out, or at least making good money at it) The old theatres are easily one of my favorite parts. This building has been standing since 1812, and is essentially the same as it was after renovation in 1922. In general 1. they are just cool, 2. you get to sit super close, really no matter where your seats are, 3) the just 'feel' better, like you could be having the exact experience that someone had 50 or 100 years ago. Albeit there was no Shrek back then, but maybe we will go see something really old, and then it will be exactly the same.

The show was really good, I am a big fan of animated movies, so I think I might have built it up too, much, afterall it was a play and there is only so much you can do. Makes me think what the world might be like in 50 or 100 years, when everything is 3D and CGI, will actors even exist much less plays and musicals. Anyway, I give them alot of credit for the production, I can imagine from 15 or so rows back it was fantastic. With all the makeup and costumes and such being on the front row was a bit like getting to see the sausage being made. We were so close that you could see the little things that they worked so hard to hide. I am nitpicking for sure, but just an observation.

Best part hands down was the guy who played Lord Farqaad ruler of Duloc. In the movie he is just really short, but in the play, he had to do everything from his knees. Imagine it as Dwarf on acting.

I do however resent that fact that their songs are so damn catchy that i find myself singing them pretty regularly now. I even think Kristen was a fan despite what I anticipate was a fair bit of trepidation going into it.

Time for a new name

So not sure who does the marketing here, but I gotta think that it would be easy to come up with something better.
I go past this warehouse on the way to Reading everyday, and giggle to myself. Not sure if things don't have the same meaning here vs. the States, but really funny to me.

Festive 1120

I am writing this as a submission to the Rapha Festive 500 - Ride to Redemption. Not necessarialiy because it was the point behind all the bike riding over the my vacation, but more because I had already completed the task, and thought that I might as well go ahead and chronicle the adventure. Unfortunately, I missed out on pictures for most of it, so words will have to do.

You can check out the premise here Festive 500. The idea is to ride 500 kilometres (310) miles from Dec 23 to Dec 31. While I achieved said 500 km in the allotted time. (398 miles) I had my own little or I guess big adventure over the holidays. We will call it the festive 1120 (doesn't quite have the same ring to it).

Anyway as I mentioned before I hadn't planned on writing about this so don't have a ton of good stories, but will lay out the highlights.

Saturday Dec 17 - First ride back in Tulsa. I had packed just about everything I own with the full intentions of riding my bike no matter how cold it was. To my surprise, and a welcome surprise at that, I was welcomed home with 60 degrees and sun. It was the first I had seen of those two together since September.  A nice 50 miler with Raton to shake off the jet lag, and work on the tan.

Sunday Dec 18 - Cyclocross. Seriously somebody should have told me how bad of an idea this was before I tried it. It was a day of firsts for sure.

First time riding a cross bike (or mtb for that matter)

First time racing cross

First time riding mtb pedals and shoes

First time trying to dismount and mount a moving bicycle (I emphasize TRYING)

And finally, first time crashing a cross bike (this first can be repeated for the next 6 crashes too).

Would like to thank Raton Parmain and Tanner Culbreath for lending me gear, and Ryan Gabriel for the crash course (pun intended).

If anyone has a picture of my endo down the hill please send it to me, I am sure it was pretty impressive.

Wednesday Dec 21 - Here is where things started to hurt. It was pretty much 4 hour + rides other than rest days from here on out. And since I hadn't riden that long in at least 2 months it was a bit of a shock to the system. So much so that as I stretched out the ride with some bonus night time River Trail time, I got dropped by a super charged Scott Rose. I was all hopped up on Egg Nog and butterhorns so I don't feel so bad. Went to the new Blue Rose afterwards. I highly recommend the club sandwich, and if you are in the need for some entertainment, they have karaoke night. All I can say is WOW!!

Tuesday Dec 27 - Gravel Roads. Tanner had been posting invites to rides all week, but they were always advertised as 'Gravel Road Ride', and I consistently passed as gravel roads and an aluminium frame didn't seem like a good idea. This specific ride however, had no mention of gravel and I was in. Let me just say that a little omission might as well had been full on false advertising. I guess it wasn't so bad after all, hell the gravel roads were probably smoother than Wekiwa.

Sunday Jan 1 - Payback. In general every ride in Tulsa was better than could have been imagined, eventually ending in the 70s. No arm or leg warmers, seemed so foreign.

So getting back to the UK, was I guess a dose of reality. It was raining on Saturday so I stayed inside and rode the trainer and played Wii. I contend that I am the worlds best Mario Cart cyclist. I challenge anyone to a game at 180 watts. Anyway, Sunday weather.com said that it was supposed to be sunny and 56, with only a 20% chance of precipitation until after 4 in the afternoon. I guess my first mistake was to even plan on getting up early on New Year's Day, so missed the group by an hour and a half but should have still been ok to beat the 4 o'clock rain. Well the sun never came, and my hill repeats were super uninspired. Its crazy to be riding back roads in Oklahoma one day, and a couple days later, riding the Olympic Road Race circuit I thought that the worst was behind me at this point and headed back to London. Little did I know the worst was to come. What started as a drizzle soon turned into a full on rain storm. Not just a London shower, but a full on Oklahoma downpour. It was an hour and a half in pouring down rain before I finally got home. Probably 20lbs heavier as all of the winter gear I had set out with, became soaked. I guess that only made the workout harder. The only, and I mean only positive of the rain was that the road grime that had come up off of the damp roads for the first 3 hours of the day was washed away by the deluge.

At the end of the day, close to 700 miles over 16 days. Now its time for a nap and a couple cold frosties. Until the next Rapha adventure, Happy New Year, and Happy Riding.

Ski jump

So I have the TV on in the background as I do things, and look up to see this.......

Not sure which would be scarier standing at the top of this tower or actually jumping off. This just doesn't seem like it could be safe or structurally sound.

I will stick to the ground thanks very much.

Bowflex

Don't know why or how this came to my mind, but........

Whatever happened to the bowflex? That thing was on infomercials for like 15 years. I didn't know anyone who ever bought one, and really not sure how that thing stayed on the TV for so long.

I guess they must have done ok, but can't imagine how many of these they really sold.

Missing out

No question that we have been missing things since we have been in London, holidays, birthdays, etc. but I really haven't felt like there was anything that I was really sad about not getting to experince. I am sure that snowpocalypse, and the great heat wave of 2011 were fun, but I really don't think that I would say that I 'missed' them. But yesterday, and I guess in reality for the last 4 months or so I have really missed Cowboy football. I have done my best to catch games live and on TV whenever possible, but not being in and around Stillwater/Tulsa during the time I have just missed out. I can't imagine how much fun the kids on campus are having right now. So proud of the team.

I imagine my entire wardrobe would be orange if I were living in Tulsa right now. I get enough weird looks wearing orange on Fridays as it is now.

I remember back to my first OSU experinces, in the Simmons era. We were so bad, and it was so hard to be a fan. OSU was a basketball school then. Amazing what some great coaching and $$ can do. (lots of $$) Can't wait to see what the future holds. I know everyone is thinking that this year was once in a lifetime, but if you think back to some of the quarterback/receiver combinations of the past few years (Fields/Woods, Robinson/Bryant) we would have never thought that it would get better, and they were all surpassed this year. Clearly the system works should continue to work.

So to all of you that were there in person, and watching on TV (yeah I fell asleep trying to stay awake till the game came on, damn jet-lag) consider yourselves lucky.