Catching Up With Life

...or is life catching up with me? It has been an interesting past few weeks. This post will catch y'all up on the latest and greatest:

Romance

Since it was just recently Valentines day and all, let's get the romantic news out of the way. And what I have to report to the world is that I guess that I am single again. Without going into details, I'll just say that there were some communication issues that caused complications in the relationship and I don't quite know who is to blame if not both. However, I think the following video summarizes my thoughts on the situation:



My Career

And onwards to my passion in life: being a slave to my job. Yes I can easily say that I like my day job to a greater extent than my bicycle racing career. There are a number of reasons and I think they are as follows:

- unlike racing, I don't have to spend money to make money and the money I do make at my job is considerably more than what I make racing.
 - unlike racing, the work that I do benefits people as opposed to crushing their dreams whenever I place better than other racers.

But perhaps I'm not fully realizing my potential as it may be if I were to start a start-up company in that I would have to sacrifice near-term earnings while I built up my business into something profitable. Hmmm. Nah. Another note to make is that I see other racers such as Eric Lagestrom and Max 'Missle' O'Neil who are young and get invited to go to these cool training camps in Southern California while the only invite I've ever gotten is to some Washington team merely because I was usually the only Guinness rider and that I may feel too lonely.

However, as it stands today, my day job is my primary funding mechanism for launching my aspiring pro-cyclist career if that is in God's will. And there was recently some uncertainty as to whether that inflow of racing money was going to continue. There was recently some uncertainty of my company being financially solvent which caused some fallout from my current company where three people I had been working with left the company. This was fairly concerning and gave me doubts about my future at that company. So I investigated whether there may be other options and I finally ended up applying, interviewing and accepting a job at TriMet - the transit agency serving the Portland area.

This is a rather huge move for me in my career. Ever since I graduated from college I have been working with the same people on mostly auto-related projects. However, my passion is transportation and within transportation my passion is basically anything but cars. Trains, bikes, planes, ships, aerial trams and buses all fascinate me. In my long-term career plans I have always promised myself that eventually I would leave the auto industry and switch to working primarily for public transit or perhaps biking. However, I thought that that would more likely occur when I was 30 after my pro-bike racing career was winding down perhaps. So, I guess that came sooner than later and now since I have pretty much landed my dream job, I think I may be officially giving up on any hopes of going pro and racing my bike everywhere. And I think that is a decision I can be confident in making.



And Bikes

So does that mean that I'm giving up on crushing all you poser-panzie-pussie-non Guinness Cycling Team-loser-racers? Absolutely not! I'm still going to bring it to you all! But in going through my rather life-changing events with women and working, I had a feeling in the back of my mind that something else bad was still going to happen. And I was correct!

Bang! Out of nowhere, or as explained through my success equation - out of bad luck and a lack of situational awareness, I hit something - I still don't know what - on Highway 26 between the Zoo and Goose Hollow at roughly 37 mph. I think that I ended up endoing over my handlebars and definitely slid for a while on my right side and worst of all bruised my knee so much that it was roughly the size of a baseball immediately afterwards. In these rare cases, I approve of the use of cars - such as the good samaritan high school kid - Cooper - who pulled over at the Goose Hollow exit and drove me back to my appartment. And later that evening, my housemate Senthil who drove me to the ER over at Legacy Good Samaratin.

The X-Rays showed no bone fracture, but I could basically not walk with my right leg. I stayed home, popped pills and iced it up for the next 3 days, but still managed to make time for 2 interviews at TriMet. I eventually did some easy easy rides, but the knee was so stiff and it didn't feel all that pleasant to ride. Then on my first attempt to do a decent ride, I was riding along and shifted down into gear 0 - the gear between the spokes and the cassette - and nearly crashed as I skidded to a stop. After yanking out the chain, two spokes were completely broken. So I just gave up and took a bus home and took it even more easy.

Unfortunately this all came during two weeks where I was supposed to be maxing out on my weightlifting and doing lots of intervals on the bike. I finally got back into the gym this week and was surprised to find that I still had some strength and even matched my previous highest squat weight so far this year. More than anything, the knee just feels tight and gets better after stretching - which I regretfully neglected for more than a week after crashing.

Waaaa :'( :'( :'''(  , life is so hard

Drama, drama, drama.  Man, I have felt like there have been more broken things in my life than there were good experiences.  It was like, first this girl I like is falling off the face of the earth, my job is ending and I got in an off-season crash to top it all off.  But on top of all that, the weather in Portland just sucks, it rains, it's cold and dark before you know it.  I really guess the moral of the story is that it is easier for things to fall apart than it is to construct a beautiful situation.

But, but, it's so hard, it's not fair, things just aren't presented to me on a golden platter, God doesn't open up the heavens and rain down mana Dave's Killer Bread.  Ok, maybe I shouldn't joke about what God can and can't do, but the point I'm trying to relate to is that accomplishing stuff is not easy - it takes work.  And at the end of the day, each person is responsible for their choice to work or not work.  Finding the motivation to ride in the nasty, cold, dreary, dark weather has been hard for me.  I am not sure how I do it sometimes, I guess I just do the working out as if it were a chore to do and just get it done.  But even then, I sometimes need a little nudge in the right direction.  For inspiration, I think the following video has really gotten me going the most this season:

The Success Equation

The problem with bike racing and every other competition for a scarce resource in this world is that not everybody can get that scarce resource. However, sometimes it seems like some people have a seemingly natural and unexplainable ability to excel in the area where they can easily obtain something where others struggle desperately to no avail. However, it is no coincidence that some people are just better at some things than others are.

This entire world is discrete. There are a certain number of people in this world, there is even a certain number of matter in this world, the point is that nothing is infinite in this natural world. And furthermore, rules hold together this world: gravity keeps matter close together, thermodynamics cause weather. And even furthermore there are patterns to everything: certain ways to race a bicycle race that gives you a good chance of winning and certain things to say to women to make them attracted to you.

On a spiritual note, however, my Lord Jesus Christ is infinite and has the power to accomplish anything despite the laws and general patterns of the world since He created all that. But on the other hand, His way of doing things can dramatically differ from what any one person can judge to be good, bad, preferred or even desired. So even though it can be possible for a paralyzed man to desire to win the Tour de France, this man is subject to the conditions placed on him by God.

No matter how strong of a bike rider you are, since you probably don't have such a superior amount of fitness that you can ride away from everyone since you are constrained to the general abilities of the human body, there has to be some management of the exertion of the potential energy you have. Similarly, with women (the other obnoxious area of my life where it seems like it's impossible to achieve success) since I am constrained by the amount of base attractiveness I have relative to every other douchebag competing for the same woman, there has to be some difference in my methodology for achieving my goal. So, I have come up with an equation to describe this problem:

Success

This is the end result that you want. In a bike race, usually the result you want is to be the first across the line. With women, I want to have consistent companionship with a woman that loves me how I like to be loved and enjoys receiving my love as well. So, how to get these things?

Situational Awareness

Do you really understand what is going on around you? In a bike race, do you know how many miles are left in the race? How to tell who is feeling strong? Or how good you are feeling? The world around us feeds us data about the current state of everything. But how good are you at determining exactly what the world is telling you? When this bonehead Evan from Guinness makes an attack 5 miles into a 70 mile race, how likely is it that he will ride faster than the other 50 riders for the next 65 miles? In the sprint, who is the sprinter that knows what wheel to take and where should you position yourself prior to those last 3 turns?

With women it is just as complex, but my awareness is so bad that I can barely guess what is happening. And at times I have let my feelings rage out of control to the point where I'm so excited about a woman that I can't see that she's actually not as good as I think she is. The point is that each situation has particles of information located all over the place and the more of this information that the brain can process and catalog, the more informed one will be when the time comes to make a decision about what action to take.

Strategy Formulation

So, how to achieve your goal? To win a bike race you have to ride hard and fast, right? To get a girl you have to "be yourself", right? Unfortunately for things that are hard to get, it is usually not simple. In fact it is annoying and painful and at times compelling to make one try harder.

If you ever fail in succeeding, you probably did something wrong. Perhaps that breakaway attempt at mile 5 of a 70 mile race was not a good idea. Maybe I shouldn't have been so nice to that woman that wasn't all that interesting. To achieve your goal there are patterns that can be more effective for certain kinds of situations. To win from a bike race, your timing must be just right to be first across the line. To get into a loving relationship, both parties must be interested in and working towards the benefit of each other.

The challenge is in the details of how to achieve your goal. And typically and even statistically if you really want to study it, there are patterns that generally can be followed to obtain a certain result. There are patterns that rarely work such as breaking away 5 miles into a 70 mile race or being the most boring person on earth to a woman, but then others patterns that are usually more successful like being behind a good wheel up until the last point of a field sprint or with women... actually I don't have much advice to offer with that. But the more ways one can identify to achieve their goal the more arsenal one will have in trying to achieve their goal.

Execution

With whatever strategy you use, there is the slight matter of actually carrying it out. You can be in exactly the right spot at the right time and still execute poorly and thus not achieve the level of success you wanted. For example, at last year's Franz Bakery Crit I had planned on sprinting for the win, but pedaled through the final corner crashing myself and then the field passed me, however at the Salem Crit I sprinted for the win on a 500m straightaway.

Luck

Luck can be anywhere in the spectrum between good and bad. If you had no idea what was going on around you and you didn't really have a plan, but the result of whatever you executed was success, than you had good luck. If you did not achieve your desired result despite thinking you were aware of your situation and came up with and executed what you thought was the best possible strategy, then you had bad luck. Luck is an interesting factor because it basically represents a situation you were not aware of or some strategy you weren't realizing that you were doing. If everything about the world is known and all possible strategies and their outcomes are already known then luck is a passive variable in the equation.

Bad luck for example can range from being struck by lightning to getting a flat tire. Yet since the world is discrete these items are not random. There are patterns to lightning and you're much more likely to be struck by it if you bike around holding a 40 foot metal pole sticking into the air in a thunderstorm in Florida. But even with the flat tire, the chances are far less likely that you'll get a flat tire if you slap on a brand new tire in substitute for the tire you've been riding since last season. Luck is an opportunity to learn more about the world and various situations and what strategies you can design to combat such a problem in the future or if whatever caused the good luck is replicable, perhaps this can be used again to achieve success again.

Resources

No matter how well you sense things, pick good plans and execute them well, you are bound by the physical resources at your disposal that you will need to accomplish the goal. If you want to win a bike race, you will need to have a bike. If you want to win a time trial against Fabian Cancellara you better have an immense amount of fitness available to use. In the case of the paralyzed man who wants to win the Tour de France, while he himself may not be physically capable of doing it himself, there would be nothing stopping him from giving other resources of his own to another person who has a body functioning well enough that he could accomplish that success.

Putting it all together

Success is tough because it requires a keen situational awareness combined with an effective strategy and then decent enough execution of that strategy or strategies all assuming you have enough resources available to achieve your goal. I've personally got a lot to work on in both the situational awareness and strategy formulation departments. With biking I need to be aware of the course and competitors and how much effort I am able to exert over the remaining distance. With women, I've got to be able to sense what they are feeling like and if I'm being treated well enough by them. And then I've got to have a whole range of tactics to employ in my bike racing from attacking at certain times or even having teammates do work for me. With women, it's really weird how they react to certain strategies and it can often times be surprising what strategies are effective.

Anyways, Racing...

I didn't do Hagg Lake because I got really sick the night before due to what I believe to have been a rotten tomato. So, this weekend it's up to Washington for Sequim and Mason Lake.

Life After Racing

Long time, no post. Well, that's cause I haven't been obsessively racing to the point of mental exhaustion for some time now. I was about to write up a little bit on how people who continue their racing season with cyclocross are wackos, but I'll just leave it at saying I'm once again glad I'm not getting my bike all dirty, riding through mud and instead sitting in my somewhat warm condo typing on my computer.

Anyways, it's like November now and um, well, I guess I'll just highlight some stuff that happened between the end of bike racing season and now.

The first thing I realized when I stopped racing bikes was that I had no life besides racing bikes. All the people I hung out with happened to be in the bike race I was racing in. And then I had all this free time once I stopped riding bikes all the time. However, the work picked up at my company so I was sorta good there. I also joined this small group from my church, so hopefully I'll have some actual friends in a bit.

I also rediscovered that I had a fixie! Oh man I was riding that around like the hipster I've always wanted to be once I found that out.

Then I took a vacation to Portlandia wherein I tried to do a bunch of things that people who live in Portland do. I only bought groceries from Co-ops, I only ate out at food carts and microbreweries, I was vegan for a whole week, I played blacklit minigolf, I visited new parks and explored. However, a lot of this got boring by myself. So then, I met up for a round of urban golf. Twas a lot of fun!

Photo from MAJOR DUFF's blog

.

BUT THEN, all of a sudden, there was an alleycat happening up in Tacoma put on by 2nd Cycle. So I cashed in some Amtrak Guest Rewards points and headed up. The evening before the race, I made sure I had an excellent pre-alleycat-race diet which involved getting bought a bunch of beers at the Parkway from my sister's new boyfriend and playing pool unitl 1am. I also left the bartender a hefty $1 million bill tip.

Well, the strategy payed off immensely! I was battling it out on the streets after getting off to a bad start wherein I was last place. We went from People's park to the Red Hot, then to this house I'd been to before at a 4th of July party with 40 people on the roof (I left because I was afraid it would collapse, but it didn't). Then to Vassault park, then to the SR 16 bridge park wherein I was now 2nd place. Then down to Bob's Java Jive and then I miraculously passed the first place guy on the way to the 48th street bar & grill even though we both said we took the same route yet didn't see each other. Then to someone's random house and bombing down to The New Frontier via Pacific (on my non-brakeless fixie). I made a number of mistakes on my route choice, but in the end it was better than all 2 other racers so I got first place! Woohoo! Finishing off yet another season with a win!

Well, after all this, it was a bit of a blur as I was working somewhat furiously to help get a demo ready for my company at the biggest Transportation Technology Conference of the year. We did end up getting a decent demo ready, but gosh it would be a lot cooler if we had a true product - which we hopefully will before TRB in January. As a part of this, I was sent out to the actual conference in Orlando! This was pretty sweet. The conference went well, here is a picture of my boss demoing a navigation console that picked up an alert from our traffic systems and a recommended reroute.

Photo from ITS World Congress Facebook page

After the conference I went down to Fort Lauderdale and fell absolutely in love with the area. Before I had always thought it would be a sprawling and depressing place, but after visiting the area I changed my mind. Firstly, the Everglades are now a nationally protected area, so sprawl won't go further out into it. Thus, growth seems to be limited to the already dense area along the roughly 20 miles width of the east coast. Secondly, the weather is amazing. 70 degrees at night and 80ish in the day. Shorts and shirts or no shirt at all! Thirdly, the beach is an awesome place to play. I saw lots of babes in bikinis, surfers, kite-boarders and I even saw a guy with a harpoon gun go out for a swim. Fourth, it is flat which combined with the warm weather makes for easygoing bicycling.

I was so sad to come back from the south that my body gave me a cold upon returning to Portland.

Reflections on last season

OK, so I suppose I have to reflect on what happened last season bicycling. Lots of people said I did great and all. On the one hand, yeah I did ok picking up a win and a bunch of 2nd places and do have enough points to be a Cat 2 racer (but not enough for a forced upgrade OBRA and WSBA!!). Yet on the other hand, as my coach said I went through a bit of a funk in the later part of the season starting after the Franz Bakery Crit. To finish bike racing season off, I proved to myself that I'm a decent bike racer by getting top ten at the Eugene Celebration.

The biggest takeaway I think I can take is that bike racing is a big mental game - even more so in a long term sense. Bicycle racing and really anything in life is a sport where those who do not die do decent. A while ago, I went to one of my sister's piano recitals when I was still in high school. I always thought it was so annoying hearing her play that stupid piano and the same songs over and over and over and was even bored again when she played the same songs at the recital. Like I hadn't heard that before!! Uuugggghhhh. Then after she was done she got an award from her piano teacher saying she was in the top 5 of all her students in playing the piano and there were like 50 piano players there and even more shocking that she had close to the best record for practicing playing the piano.

What?!?! How could that be? All she did was what she was assigned to do. 45 minutes a day 6 days a week it seemed. So what? Couldn't anybody do that? Apparently yes, but not everybody did! In fact most students didn't! The only people better than her were the piano players truly obsessed and in love with playing the piano.

The exact same thing it seems applies to bicycle racing and I suspect every other area of life where work is involved. I had a really good base training season wherein I rode every assigned workout except when I was sick. My season leading up to Franz Bakery was great. Cat 3 was a bit more challenging, but I found my way to the podium three times. After the Franz Bakery Crit and the Swan Island Crit I let my mental game get out of whack. I was no longer excited about bike racing as much as I was addicted to it and felt like I had to do it and succeed in it to fulfill myself as opposed to be happily motivated to have a fun time no matter the result. I'm guessing that the latter is the more sustainable attitude to have.

Now, another tangent is the financial toll that bike racing has taken on me. Good lord! The stage races cost a lot of money and carbon wheels aren't cheap - even on a team deal. The time I could be spending doing other things is quite a bit too. I have a number of web design projects that I just don't get around to because of all this bike racing.

So really, the conclusion I'm reaching is that I need to race less next year. And more importantly don't race small-time races if I don't want to. It's hard for me to say I'm giving up on some pie-in-the-sky goals I have, but maybe all I need to do is give up on the disappointment if I don't reach goals immediately. There will always be Jeff Hoovers who can execute these things nearly perfectly with natural ability, but bicycling is something I can't do that in. Come to think of it, there is nothing I'm naturally talented in doing except continual learning. As long as I push myself to try new ways to do things and not get in funks when I don't succeed I think I'll be allright.


And one final thing since some people ask me. The Dating Season is going iffy. I just haven't found a 5'11" vegan babe who has won at least 2 Cat 1/2/3 ladies races and is completely horny for me. Actually a few things are going on I suppose. I'm not so skilled in meeting women nor do I fully elicit the values that women find attractive and then I'm scared of approaching women and then question whether I'd be happier developing websites and playing open transport tycoon or talking to women about how cute their ugly and smelly pet dog is.

Bike Racing Season Over

Dating Season Begins! Yes ladies that's right, this man is on the market if you are looking. I like long bike rides on the beach, hanging out with friends on bikes, and living life to the fullest (while on a bike). I'm looking to date a bike (or two or more!). Nah, in all seriousness I am looking. I even made an online dating profile here.

So yeah, bike racing season is over. Yeah, I don't really count cyclocross or races in California. Eugene Celebration Stage Race is really the last big race of the year it seems. Last year I did quite well getting 2nd in the prologue hillclimb and eventually 4th overall in the 4/5s. This year I was expecting a bigger challenge.

I scored a rideshare down with the Cat 3 OBRA Hillclimbing champ and was stoked that he ended up being my 30 second guy in the prologue. I was keeping up until the hill started and then didn't see him until the finish. It also didn't help that my real derailleur was skipping between 4th and 6th cogs. However, I still finished with a decent time of about 12 minutes and good enough for 6th place. The road race I attacked way too much, didn't realize that 2nd and 3rd in GC broke away and then didn't have the magical intuition to know who's wheel to suck in the field sprint. Oh well.

I also like Eugene because it is a really hippie kinda town. Although it's smaller than Portland I'd argue that per capita it is more hippie. It's really easy to find vegan food and lots of people bike! Case in picture:

At the time trial I was a bit worried about losing a lot of time. However, I pulled out a surprising 6th place finish getting a time two minutes and eight seconds faster than last year. This year I had carbon wheels, aero bars, a TT helmet and a skinsuit. But what matterred by far the most was that I went in with a plan to average a specific speed in mph. I didn't even look at my heart rate, I just looked at speed. I found it way easier to force myself to suffer to reach a certain speed than heart rate. It also helped that I was warring with the guy behind me. He had a full TT setup, disc wheel and all and passed me shortly after the final turn. However, I kept passing back this guy probably 3 or 4 times. At the final 500k I pushed it into 29mph and passed him for the WIN, no enjoyment of being an ass, NO - the avoidance of being humiliated by being passed in a TT.

The crit was like the PIR (Portland PIR) of Eugene. So dang flat and straight and no crappy pavement. Yet there still managed to be a crash which kinda got onto my nerves and took away my aggression to find a good wheel for the final sprint. Gotta work on these kinda sprints for next year. After this I had some lunch with the Brownies and then headed back home.

Well, that's about it for this post. I might get around to doing a racing season reflection post or something, but I'm too busy trying to meet a hot babe and planning a vacation to Portlandia at the moment.