Pick-Me Up

My mother has called me frail on more than one occasion, and I have to admit that since I hit college I've given her good reason to say that. I seem to get sick a lot, and I've even had some of the weirder "old people diseases" in college, like kidney stones (drink lots of cranberry juice kids), and shingles (...just never get chickenpox). At this point, I wouldn't rule out cancer as a viable possibility for the future. Maybe I can rock out Bike and Build Armstrong-Style.
Anyway, the last couple weeks have been lived in a sort of half, pseudo-sickness, mostly just a bad cough. Naturally, that hasn't stopped me from training with Jamie, even though it probably should have.

On that note, we finished the first week of training on saturday with a four mile run through a very hilly route. Like I've said before, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Valley, there are a lot of hills, so when I say very hilly, I mean very hilly. On the one hand, Jamie and I paced very well together, on the other, we could only get three miles on the route before we had to stop and stretch. The last mile was by far the worst, although the downhill finish was a nice reprieve. I should really take a picture of the decline and post it here, because I didn't realize how bad the first hill really was until I was running down it in the end. Nice warmup, ehh? Anyway, today was our two mile recovery run, and well that it was, because we were both still pretty sore. The run was easy, even with my cough, and a nice easing out of the soreness, plus Jamie made me a delicious lunch! Still, by the end of today, my cough had gotten pretty bad, and my body was less than happy with me.

Luckilly, I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I logged onto the Bike and Build website. I had another one hundred dollars added to my total donations, thanks to the generous contribution of a friend and neighbor. I'm now well into the halfway mark for the trip, and it's hard to believe it. It was just the pick-me-up I needed. I'll be going home next weekend to pick up the jerseys my brother ordered for me and hopefully get sized at my specialized dealer if I haven't done it here already. I'll also have to drop in on the people back home who have donated since winter break.

Peace out, hombres.

8Ks and Mondays

I decided I liked the tact of my "snow and shamrocks" title and repeated it again, only instead of alliteration I chose a limericky rhyme. Expect more of the same as time goes on, I just keep getting lamer. Anyway. Yesterday I started my training regimen for Shamrock Fest with Jamie, which will hopefully become a Monday-Wednesday-Saturday affair. The run was quite pleasant, albeit a little easy for my taste. Jamie's thankfully a lot more prepared than I am, and has already planned out the routes, starting at two miles and becoming increasingly more difficult as the race approaches. We'll actually be finishing training by running eight miles, which is a little over three miles longer than the actual race, but will be taken at a considerably easier pace.

Yesterday's run was just a two mile loop, going through downtown and ending back at her house on Lewis Street off of South Liberty, and was pretty flat. We passed some pretty gnarly hills that I'd biked up before, like one off East Grattan. I'm going to try to persuade her to run some fartlicks with me up them when it's warmer and we're a little stronger. I can't wait to see my calves this spring. Jamie cramped pretty badly near the start of the run but she persevered admirably until just the very end. Next time I'm not letting her stop, hahaha.

After the run I followed my typical ritual of following up something good for my body with something bad for my body. We met some of Jamie's friends over at Daves and enjoyed a few brewdogs and some pseudo-greek cuisine. I can only imagine how my body would perform if I actually ate and drank properly. Thank God one of my group leaders this summer is a nutritionist and will actually force me to eat right. Last but not least, the bike update.

I'd spoken to Brendan about getting my bike from Zanes and decided that I needed to head over to Shenandoah Bike Shop downtown to be sized for the Allez. I'm pretty sure that my lack of bicycle experience showed, because I managed to misinform the guy helping me no less than twice, and left the shop without getting sized. They told me I should ride the Ralleigh in and base my sizing on that, since I seem to be comfortable in that. I may just ask my roommate Chris to fit me if there are anymore issues.

When I'm feeling tired I stop being tired and be awesome instead

Yeah, I know I just posted yesterday, and maybe I'm becoming addicted to this blogging thing, but today was awesome enough to merit another post. As the title suggests, I'm a little tired today. But I'm getting ahead of myself, that's not why today was awesome.

The temperature rose above freezing, apparantly, because this morning the ice that had been on the ground had all melted, so I had the pleasure of riding to class today, and even better, two hours of prime daylight to get a decent ride in between classes. I even managed to score some gloves from a friend I ran into before class. Yeah, she just gave 'em to me. During my exploration, I happened upon a cool little sporting goods store, The Runners Corner, and deciding that I might need some new shoes this year, went in. The shop has a relaxed, professional feel to it, which was mirrored in the man who greeted me. Up until now I'd always bought running shoes with my brother, who besides being a seasoned runner also has a lot of sporting goods experience under his belt. The result is that while I've always had a good pair of shoes on my feet, I never had to give the process much thought.

Thankfully the guy was wicked friendly and helpful, and turned out to be the owner of the business. Along with various small talk, I also found out that I don't favor one foot over the other, have almost no arch in my right foot, and that one foot is half a size smaller than the other. Not particularly pertinent information to me, but I thought it was cool. I ended up getting a pair of ridiculously comfortable Asics, laces that I'll never have to tie again (YESSSS), and a few long sleeved tees thrown in on the house. I also got to speak to him about the ride and solicit a donation. All in all, I think he's got a customer in me for life, or at least as long as I'm in Harrisonburg. I'll also throw as much business at him as I can, and shamelessly plug in his runner's club website here: http://www.svrunners.org/index.php. Looks pretty cool, I may join them for a few runs this winter.

After that, I commenced to have an extremely vigorous ride through the hills of the town before heading back for a history class. The mini cherry on top of the regular cherry on the sunday of awesome that was today, however, was waiting for me when I got home. I had an email from my group leader letting me know that those of us who had passed the $1000 mark would be contacted by Zanes to get fitted for our bikes this week! Looks like we'll be riding the Specialized Allez Triple this year, and I can't be more psyched. We have the option of upgrading, for a fee of course, but unless it's completely necessary I'll be going with the Allez. For now the more pertinent question is Black/Silver, or White/Red? And with that ending note, I'm off for a run, because there's nothing better for mental fatigue than physical fatigue.

Snow and Shamrocks

This morning I woke up to find that we'd had our first substantial snowfall in the valley. That's not to say that class was canceled, of course, just that we all had the unpleasantry of walking through a light dusting of snow hiding patches of ice on our way to class. Suffice to say, I walked to class instead of riding there for the first time this school year. Very likely, my time in the saddle is going to be seriously curtailed until early spring, not just because of the ice and snow, but also because the salt on the roads will rust my bike. Looks like the stationary bikes in UREC are going to be my new best friends until it warms up.

I've been keping my eyes and ears open to find fun ways to cross train for the trip, and recently it paid off. One of Jake's friends is running an 8K during Yuengling's Shamrock SportsFest at Virginia Beach this March. Anyone interested in running a marathon, half-marathon, or an 8K, and/or scoring some good food and beer along the way, should check out their website at: http://www.shamrockmarathon.com/site3.aspx. Anyway, I'll be running the race with her, hopefully scoring at least a couch to lay my head on at her home as well. I'm pretty excited because although I can handle a run of that distance just fine, I've never run an 8K race before. It's gonna be legen-wait for it-dary.

And that's it, finally, a short entry. Pretty gnarly, huh?

school's harshing my mellow

Well, the semester's in full swing again. I used to always look forward to the start of the new semester as essentially a week where I could put up my feet and enjoy the college atmosphere without dealing with the work. Apparently those times are over though, because presently I've got a mountain of novels, plays, and various other literature to pore over for the following week of class. While I am used to and very capable of handling that kind of workload, I'm not exactly a speed reader, so my free time is pretty much nill.

My training's been on the back-burner because of that, reduced to what I can squeeze in at the gym and biking to and from class every day. Thankfully, Harrisonburg is a pretty hilly town, with one of its biggest hills on the road leading to campus and back to my apartment, so my ride isn't exactly leisurely. I also have over a two hour break in between classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which I've decided to devote to biking around town. I explored a bit yesterday during that time, cycling around the grid downtown that I'd never been to, and found probably the seediest bar in town that I've resolved to go to some time next week.

Besides the time constraints, probably the most difficult part of training is finding a route that doesn't intimidate me and is the adequate length. Like I said, Harrisonburg is a pretty hilly town, and flying down an incline at sixty miles an hour(I clocked it) on a traffiky road really doesn't feel like something I should be doing solo right now. I've decided to bike over to my LBS and ask them about some appropriate routes for my skill level, as well as asking about any group rides. There used to be a fairly publicized one that went all through town for an anti-war organization, Food Not Bombs I believe, but I haven't seen nearly as many cyclists as I used to. Then again, it is January.

On a fundraising note, the donations keep rolling in, although certainly not with the frequency that they were, and some that were promised me still haven't come in. One of them is my church, St. Andrew's Lutheran, which was promised months ago. I have to admit I'm a little annoyed, especially since I don't feel quite right heckling a church, but I have a niggling fear that they never wrote my name in the memo section. Hopefully it'll come through any day now, and I can put my anxieties to rest, otherwise I'm going to have to do a little subtle prodding.

I've been playing with the idea of contacting my school's newspaper, The Breeze, and seeing if they want to interview me. I think that with the considerable "cool factor" and phillanthropic nature of the ride I have a pretty good shot at front page. My only qualm is that I don't have a snazzy bike and build jersey to wear for the interview, and I really want to look the part. Another avenue I plan on exploring now that I'm back at school is soliciting old and current professors for funds.

Bike and Build cyclists receive, among other things, a participants manual complete with sections devoted to the cause, fundraising, and training. The fundraising section spends a fair ammount of time addressing the money tabboo, that is, the innate fear most of us have about asking others for money. Up until this point, I thought that I'd put the tabboo into perspective, but for some reason asking my professors for money is a little unnerving, even though by and large I've got a very good relationship with many of them. They also have a whole lot more money than anyone else I could ask down here. Okay, enough blog, time for a light ride while the weather's warm.

I'd been playing around with making this blog for a while now. Its practical use, as a means of keeping in touch with everyone while I'm otherwise incommunicado during the trip, was the most obvious draw. I'll be biking from Providence to Seattle this summer, spanning nearly four thousand miles, give or take three hundred or so, and building houses along the way. If memory serves, we'd be able to bring our cell phones, but who wants to deal with those roaming fees. So here I am, with a blog. Until the trip, it'll pretty much serve as a space for me to ramble, occasionally discuss fundraising and training, and post lurid photographs of myself in biking spandex. First for the ramble.

I was lucky enough to score a lot of what I need for the trip, gear anyway, from family and friends over the holidays. Sadly, you can't box and wrap triathlete stamina and a butt that won't chafe after seventy miles in the saddle. What I did get were several pairs of biking shorts, a few jerseys, a water-backpack (doesn't sound as cool as camelbak), an ergonomic saddle, and several hundreds of dollars in funds. As of right now I'm looking square at the halfway mark in terms of fundraising. Ohh yeah, I need to raise four thousand dollars before the trip in order to participate in the ride, so if you haven't already, donate at: http://www.bikeandbuild.org/cms/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,118/
It's tax deductible and cool, just don't forget to make it in my name, Mark Smiley.

I periodically check the roster of my route to see if anyone else has joined the trip, mostly to get a feel for the people I'll be spending ten weeks of my summer getting to know. For a while I'd been enjoying seeing the number steadily climb until we were at a healthy twenty one strong. Today, however, I was bummed out to find that there were two fewer names on the list than there were before. Hopefully they just changed routes and haven't dropped out of the trip altogether. Ramble/fundraising bit over, now for the training.

I've been riding a Raleigh road bike that my friend Dan, a B&B alum and current trip leader, lent me. I don't know too much about its specs, honestly, except that the wheelset is about three hundred dollars. I know this solely because I already had to replace the back wheel after a nasty run in with a mountain of a speedbump I hit too fast on campus. Thankfully it's a hell of a lot lighter and responsive than any other bike I've ever ridden. I'm lucky enough to have a roommate who is an avid cyclist, which has scored me some free gear like my saddle and SPD pedals, as well as providing me invaluable advice and a regular riding partner. The rides I've done with him have been great, but I'll admit that I've felt a little out of my depth when he leaves me in the dust or while I'm gasping for breath after a tough climb.

The break was so-so in terms of my time on the bike. On the positive end, I spent almost every day (I missed one) in the saddle, even on a day well below freezing without the windchill. On the negative end, I felt I never really pushed myself very hard physically, sticking mostly to bike trails I've frequented for years and spending very little time on actual roads. I averaged about fifteen miles a day, with a few moderate climbs. Nothing abysmal, but nothing particularly noteworthy either. All in all, it was invaluable time though, and made me a lot more comfortable on my bike. It was also nice knowing I wasn't going to die racing down a hill at sixty miles an hour on a road with moderate traffic like I could back in Harrisonburg trying to keep up with my roommate Chris.

I got back to school tonight, bike in tow , and I'm psyched not only to be back, but to push my training to a new level. Tommorrow's going to be in the mid sixties, which should give me the opportunity to do just that. And with that, I'll leave you. Cheers!