little walton

Our own little Walton with the nerdy gotta love em glasses pulling a major nob-end move alongside the ToC pro riders. Well god bless his little heart. Despite destroying a ton of people at the track last season in Portland, the guy is trail hooking the ToC with M.A.S.H. Will he be back in PDX for the summer? lets hope so.

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The first EPIC ride of the year

A lot of things have happened in my life recently, but I write about one thing because of it's epic-ness.

Yesterday, Sunday I set off on a ride, a ride which I thought was going to be normal. Team Beer, Ironclad and myself wearing Yakima kit, met up front of the PSU library, the destination : Multnomah Falls 75mile round trip. Sounds like a nice ride init ? - read on...

Multnomah Falls - on a nice day! 36miles east of Portland

While we were meeting at the library- we recruited some PSU riders, so the group was pretty big. We all rolled out on the beginning of a nice day. Temps were reasonable (42f /6 celcius), it looked dry, as we got further out of the city center the wind started picking up, by the time we were on the historic highway the winds were well over 20mph and I would say gusting to 40mph, this makes a 10mile gradual uphill climb up to Crown point pretty difficult with all the energy being sucked from you resulting in a slower net speed. In fairly minimal riding gear the high winds only served to reduce body temperature and energy. As we got to Crown Point, the highest point of the ride, the winds were so bad, I was actually scared of being blown off my bike, several times on the decent, you would enter a corner, hit a wall of wind that would slow you from 30 to about 15mph!

Crown Point, note this was taken on a nice day, not the thundermomma day that we were there.

After bombing the decent from Crown Point we got to the Falls, admittedly a bit cold. Stopping for a few mins, warming up and headed back towards Portland. A nice climb ahead of us, which George from Team Beer absolutely destroyed, we regrouped at the top of the climb, to the West all we could see was darkness - dark dark rain clouds.
By now the temps had dropped a tad and yes a sea of rain awaited us, sure enough in the next few minutes it started raining heavy, this combined with a low temp made the rain heavy and cold. Dressed for a dryish day, 30 miles to home.. no fenders very very wet and cold...

a nice view from Crown Point, i'm sure someone has a shitty view, like the one we saw.

.... 20 miles of riding still left to go, no talk in the group, we were all suffering in silence... violent upper body shivers kicked in which were transferred down my arms to the handlebars , my front wheel looked like it was wobbling! Keeping speed above 22 to try and stay warm, I couldn't feel my legs, feet or hands, soaked to the bone no warmth. We lost the PSU group 15 miles ago, hope they got home ok. Visions of hot showers and warm clothes kept us going.
At this point in the ride, I found my mind drifting off, maybe it was trying to lock out the numbness that my body was going through, it was sort of strange and scary, in the kind of "am I going to get pneumonia" scary.

75miles later Team Beer, Yakima and Ironclad rolled into Portland. Well done chaps. Epic.

I later got word from the PSU guys that they got back ok, they had a few flats and eventually got a car ride home from Troutdale.

To rattlecan or to spraypaint?

look closely - someone paints skulls on exit signs, wonder who that could be.

Do you know how much time is involved in spraypainting things? of recent I took it upon myself to get the paint system at work dialed in , it seemed that after many years of neglect there was not a system in place to get good paint results, after all, we have a nice paint booth, fan extraction etc, but basic things were not in place, clean air supply, decent paint guns, a set up of base colours and chemicals. So spending away with the company money gave me an excuse to learn about stuff along the way. I decided to go with the Automotive PPG paint system, I have seen this used in the past at other jobs and it has a ton of colour options from OEM vehicles. The location of a paint supplier was also critical and luckily there's a PPG place about 5 miles from my work and has some well sorted peps to help me out. So today i'm finally getting this dialed and should be producing some nice results in the next few weeks, oh and also bike frames seem to fit in our paint booth at work, who would have guessed!

modern toss . com

www.moderntoss.com

Team Beer Bowling invite 2009

This Friday night was well sorted , the 2009 Team Beer Bowling Invitational. 10 of Portlands cycle teams were invited to compete in a night of ten pin.

Dressed in white painters suits (coveralls) representing with Yakima Logos and Spray painted skulls, gold chains and gold $$ signs, we managed to win Best Costume trophy. (remember these are bike guys so they think they have to wear spandex everywhere)

After making it through to the 1/4 finals we got closed down by Bike City Racing before the semi finals, only by a few points (I think less than 50 total game). We lost to a team which included a pro bowler, read wrist support, own custom ball and big dollop of lame.

We got a lot of props for our unique warm up jives, which include Lane Lame Push ups and Striker Saucy Situps before our turn to roll.

Team Ironclad won the night, with strike after strike - with a lot of talk on the street about an outside ringer being employed ;)

update* the guys rolling were actually Obra racers - Ironclad wanted to make sure that was known.

So it's true, Yakima Vigilantes have balls and can roll em.



Oh yeah and teh superbowl was this weekend... nuff said ... bunch of loosers.