The parents were in town for the holiday weekend, and we decided to shoot off some of our own fireworks instead of going to one of the shows. Only 1 neighbor complained, so I feel that it was a success 
Got a couple of good shots, one of which I really like. I need to start doing more photography again! I haven’t touched the 40D in almost 6 months.
Archive for the ‘All’ Category
4th of July fireworks
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Dupont State Forest MTB Ride
Monday, April 26th, 2010Was heading up to VIR this past weekend, and on the way there I decided to do a stop just south of Asheville to hit the finest MTB that NC had to offer. After looking through some connect.garming.com logs from other riders, Dupont State Forest seemed to be the winner. I fired up a 28 mile ride onto my Garmin 705 and got going. Thursday night I camped out in the truck at the trailhead and got going early Friday AM.
The Garmin was an absolute awesome tool. I didn’t have to worry about getting lost in any way and any time I hit a fork in the trail, I just looked down at the map and went the right way. Awesome purchase, and I would highly recommend one to anyone doing any “unfamiliar” riding.
The ride that I ended up picking out was also awesome. Started off with some fire roads and rode next to some waterfalls. Then after some single and doubletrack climbing, had a long climb up to hard rock trail. This is Moab style riding on just rock. The uphill was difficult as it was hard singletrack, but the downhill was AMAZING. There was a bunch more awesome singletrack with super rocky descents and some of the most technical downhill stuff I’ve done including a challenging section that had a couple of trees down in the middle of rocks that I tried to go “under” and got my camback snagged on a tree. The ride ended with some very flowy downhill and jumps straight into the parking lot.
If you are in this area, I would very much recommend this ride! Here is the link to Garmin Connect http://connect.garmin.com/activity/31413904
Working on the race car again, finally
Monday, April 5th, 2010So after almost 5 months off from race cars, its time to get back into the swing of things. I decided to take the beginning part of the year completely off and then also have a light racing season. I’ve been slacking a bit on getting a roommate so the racing budget is going to be a tad tight this year. I also didn’t want to get out on track with the same setup I had last year, as I wanted to improve some things. I guess I could have run more events as is, but I don’t think I would have been happy and would have been less safe. I’ll be doing the May 9/10th weekend at VIR, July 17/18th at Road Atlanta, September 4/5th at Barber and the ARRC at Road Atlanta. Depending on what happens with the budget, I’ll add August 1/2/3rd at Mid Ohio, August 7/8th at Daytona and October 9/10th at Roebling, but those 3 are “if’s” at this point.
Having said that, there are a few things getting upgraded for this year. After much much much deliberation I decided to go with the final drive. I think the $$ outlay will be worth it. Definitely at tracks like Mid Ohio, CMP, VIR and Barber, and also hopefully Road Atlanta. If/when I go back to Daytona I’ll have to run a 225/50/15 on the front to not run out of gear, and I might be a tad worse off at Roebling, but I’ll take that trade off. I also got a new ASR rear swaybar. The 1″ solid bar I have now isn’t cutting it anymore, so putting a 1.25″ NASCAR style bar on the car. The softest setting on this bar is stiffer then the stiffest setting on my old bar, so I’m just going to slap it on the car and hold on. Also doing some things for power such as a crank scraper, thermal intake gasket, and also getting my header collector reworked. You can see in the pictures my “exhaust leak” and how bad it was. I bet that was mucking with things in the exhaust flow. Lastly, after watching a Porsche 944 on fire at Daytona last year, a fire system is ready to go in as well.
Along with those upgrades, I also did some off season maintenance. Wheel bearings, ball joints, fresh calipers, and a rebuild of my leaky power steering pump. I also noticed today that my front brake pad seperated from the backing plate, so that’s also on the list to swap out before my first race at VIR on May 9th/10th.
GU Energy Gel. You’re my best training buddy.
Monday, February 1st, 2010On one of the message boards I frequent, I got some advice to take GU energy gel before my snake time trial at the beginning of the month. I did. Despite being what I thought was out of shape, I sort of kicked butt and felt great, during the race and also afterwards. I then redid the snake 2 weeks after that. I wrote up about it, and damn I bombed. I was slower, didn’t feel as good and totally bonked on that ride. Also recently I started running 5K’s once a week. The only difference between last week and this week was that I took a GU before this week’s monday run. I knocked 3 minutes off my time! Woah! Last week, I remember about 3/4 of the way through I was struggling. Had to focus on deep breaths, slow up on the uphills etc. Today? The further I went, the better I felt. It was weird.
I don’t know exactly what type of junk is in this little magical package, but its gotta be something that isn’t on the label. Maybe its all mental, maybe its all something else, but I totally feel like superman after taking one of these things.
We’ll see how they work again this weekend. Got time trial #2 at the snake. First official TT was 3hrs 1 minute. I’m going for a real goal of 2:45 and a stretch of 2:30. Not sure if I’ll be capable of doing that, but I’m gonna GU up every 45 minutes like the box says, so with my month of “training” and a ton of energy crack, we’ll see what happens.
Goo.gl URL shortener bookmarklet
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010I know there are already a bunch of tools for doing this same thing, but I’m a big google fanboi. The nice thing about goo.gl is they have an API which makes accessing the shortener easy. Matthew Flashen already wrote some JS for a bookmarklet for this. You just save that into your bookmarks, I saved it to my Delicious bookmarks, and you can call it on whatever URL. It alerts you the shortened URL and just copy and paste from there. Sweet!
Updates on stuff
Sunday, January 24th, 2010It’s been a fun and relaxing couple of weeks. Its been kind of nice. Not to say that work and my normal weekday has not been super hectic, but just been a bit more relaxing and fun during my time off and weekends, including a great weekend that is finishing up.
I’m still riding the heck out of bikes. Rode the Snake Creek Gap again, and will be heading back for Time Trial #2 in a couple of weekends. Was actually harder the 2nd time around. I went with a friend and we pushed harder for the 1st half. I also didn’t take any Gu gel with me. Took a wrong turn about 75% of the way in and added an extra mile. That totally took all my energy and desire away and I ended up “bonking” finishing 20 minutes over what I did 3 weeks ago. Just hit a wall with 2 miles to go. Took a couple of falls too and scraped up my rear derailleur pretty good. Almost seems like these $$$$ mtb parts are almost expandable when one is going on rock gardens every 2 weeks. I’ll make sure to have plenty of that super gel and more desire and training when I visit again in 2 weeks.
I’ve also re-started working on the house again. Got inspired by Lauren to worry about fixing what still needs work rather then looking at things such as hardwood floor upgrades. Got some new art for the walls and Lauren got some great photos of mine framed. Sure wakes up the downstairs. I’ll be working on finishing the crown molding this week, and then tackle that damn bathroom eventually.
Lastly, started work on the race car too. Kind of scared me when I realized just how much crap there is to be done in the off-season. I did decide to make this year a bit light and only hit the big and important events. Going to Road Atlanta twice, the SARRC/MARRS at VIR, one of the Daytona doubles (or Barber race) and then the ARRC. Going to skip the ITFest as thats just too much of a haul and $$ expenditure at this point.
On second though, scratch that whole “more relaxed on my time off” thing off the list. Going to be a crazy busy and fun spring!
5k!
Monday, January 11th, 2010Nothing really that big, but I ran pretty much my first 5k distance today. Jogged for 3.1 miles around the neighborhood in right at 33 minutes. Nothing spectacular as far as speed, but then again, 6 months ago, no way I could have run that. I’m getting in shape! My goal is a 25 minute 5K, so now I have a nice path to follow and can track my progress.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/22177607
MTB at Blankets Creek
Sunday, January 10th, 2010Did a ride at Blankets Creek a little north of my house this morning. Was a beautiful day, 30 degrees, nice and sunny, and half the trail was still covered with snow, the other with mud. Here is a video from the GoPro. Gotta fix the angle a bit for next time to show more in front of the bike, and also, gotta get the GoPro HD. Its amazing how spoiled I am in saying “man, this standard definition footage from a camera stuck to the side of my bike, kinda sucks in quality” But it totally does compared to the HD stuff that comes out of the in-car cam.
Forgot to post my pics of my Pinhoti ride
Thursday, January 7th, 2010About 3 weeks ago I went for a cross country ride in the Chattahoochee National Forest along the Pinhoti trail. There was some awesome singletrack and it was a pretty challenging ride. Was great prep for the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial that I did last weekend. I’ll be going back one of the next two weekends to get more training. Zoey had a great time as well and rocked out for all 15 miles. She made fun of me the whole time for going so slow, running up and down the hills as I was pedaling my ass off. I only was able to outpace her on the fireroad descent on the way back to the car. I think her max speed is ~15mph and I was going 20+. Been uploading my rides to garmin connect. Pretty cool tool for mapping rides and especially useful to see how much of a better shape I’m in now. http://connect.garmin.com/activity/21292424
My first MTB race: Snake Creek Gap Time Trial
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010Did my first MTB race this morning. Damn it was fun. It was the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial run by the NWGA Sorba chapter. Snake Creek Gap is on the Pinhoti trail and the time trial is 17 miles of singletrack along the trail. The trail was everything from nice climbs to awesome downhills to crazy crazy rock gardens like I’ve never seen. About 2700ft vertical feet of climbing over the 17 miles.
The day started out way cold. 24 degree temperature with wind chill at 12. Brrr. The trail started with a fairly easy but long climb all the way to the top of the mountain. I didn’t push hard as I was unsure of myself over the distance, so I did a bunch of granny gear spinning, and I felt really good as we got to the top. Shitty news was that the GoPro screwed up again, so no video. Sending that thing back next week. There was some absolutely rocking downhill after this. Everything from a few switchbacks to rocks hidden under leaves. Wish I had the camera. After the downhill, climbed a rough fire road to the 1/2 way point and had some water and fig newtons.
From here, the trail got way hard. Rocks here, rocks there, rocks everywhere. Uphill on rocks, downhill on rocks, man lots of rocks I cleared a lot of the climbs and all of the downhills. Only had 1 fall and it was pretty much at no speed as I didn’t carry enough speed and the front tire got caught on a boulder. Again, did a lot of granny gear spinning instead of trying to push a lower gear, which was a great idea considering my current level of fitness. There was also a decent bit of hike a bike, including a big uphill section that was straight damn uphill. I got passed by a couple of the “money class” riders and even they walked it.
Got to the top of that climb, to the cell towers, and the rest of the way was downhill. Some gravel, some singletrack, and then the last mile was pavement. I pushed on these, and ended up with a 31.5mph top speed on the road.
My original goal was “to finish”. I finished in right under 3 hours, which isn’t bad at all. I’ll be back for the February time trial, and I’ll be able to push more on all the climbs. New Goal? 2:30, which would put me into the Top 3 in my class. We’ll see what happens!
