Work Update

I want to share my excitement with you. It's totally work related, yeah yeah, yawn right. so click away now if that bothers you.

track : happens

Track : Happens

This is why my bike shit wears out:

1620 miles
105,120ft Asent
67,000 Kcals burned (95.7 chipoltle burritos)
145hrs in the saddle

all over 11weeks.
the majority of this is my commute to and from Yakima.

Goldsprints, Track, hopefully summer soon

May brings the track season to a start, am I ready, heck no. I have only ridden the track once this year, partially to test out my new tire wheel combo, which is a great success (thanks Alan for helping me make a right mess in tyre over gluing everything). The problem with April / May in Oregon is that it's still rainy, unpredictable and velodrome plus rain = big no no. The past few days have been very cold for this time of year... 4 degrees C the other day.
If the weather clears up and gets a touch warmer  I will be heading out to the velodrome at lunch for some practice sessions. Things go so fast and the first track race of the season is this Saturday 8th, so I will see what happens with no practice! it will be good warmup anyway!

Earlier this week, I went to a Goldsprint race. I actually went to help set up, as it was setup by Team Beer. It was held on the outside patio of the Doug Fir restaurant,venue and lounge (mum and ruth have been there). We set up a projector and the bikes. These races are a monthly occurrence by Team Beer and get quite popular in the summer. A few of the lads and lasses from Team beer entered the competition along with other members of the public and local bikers who heard about the event and came along to win prizes. I also entered the race, just to have a laugh, turns out I got through to the mens finals and then won! must have been no fast people showed up. Regardless, it netted me a prize of a new bike tyre, free concert tickets at the Doug fir and $25 coupon for dinner. Sweet.

 above is Andrew and Justin, god know why they are shirtless, it was bastard cold.

Me and Beth : Beer Winners : gayest pose ever, not that theres anything wrong with gay poses.

My shoulder injury from last year has re-occured to give me some grief. It has been sore of recent weeks, sore when using the computer mainly with a dull pain. I went to see my PT again. He basically said I need to do some more strengthening work to get my shoulder back in proper alignment. But why hurt now? he suggested that since I spend a lot of time (5hr+per day) on the computer at work, I should look at the ergonomic position and optimize it so it doesn't put stress on my shoulder. My position has been poor and thus been incrementally detrimental over time, to a point where it's reached my pain threshold. So... more exercises... ergonomic evaluation of my computer setup at work and a lot of ice. It's starting to hurt when I ride my bike, so I need to get this sorted quick smart.

The rest of it... oh only 40 or so hours of my week! yeah Yakima / Kemflo... going good...blar... blar.... we have been doing some decent product research on a few new lines, nothing extravagant but other than that i'm really chomping at the bit to get going on something innovative, things need shaking up, the mentality of some is like we are living in the depression. Consumers are up buying stuff and being real people, lets exploit it!! whoot whoot.

Design, Design, Design, Design for Life. BBC

So are product designers so transparent? I had a strange experience the other week, I visited a persons house whom I did not know. Looking around, I could tell the person was in the design field from the contemporary super thought out schemes that only a designer would labor at. Then I started picking up a theme. Brushed aluminum, clean lines, concrete floor, sleek kitchen, contemporary light fixtures, simple forms. Further visual analysis.... a Juicy Salif (designed by Phillipe Stark) on a visible shelf in the kitchen..... mark rothko in the lounge.... bingo a product designer!!

So this prompted me to look up Stark again. When I was studying ungrad design Stark was one of my role models , just like anyone else I suppose, at the time it was the Juicy Salif (lemon squeezer),  toothbrush and the Hot Bertta (kettle).
Then a friend of mine reminded me of the BBC series Design for Life, where Phillipe Stark hosts the show, entertaining design students on a mission to find the best design talent in Britain by way of a  in a reality elimination game of design tasks.
I watched episode one, watching three right now. Pretty entertaining.

Philippe's thoughts on ecology with the role of design are refreshing and it's not the same thoughts from 10yrs ago, it's a matured Stark that doesn't want to fill the world with crap. Even though a few years back he managed to fill Target with injection molded useless landfill but thankfully it seems his ideas have changed.
Check out his series on Vimeo

Design for Life Episode 1 from Robert Meredith on Vimeo.

Design for life | Episode 2 from designforlife|episode2 on Vimeo.

One of the things that impressed me was I liked the fact that when asked about Design philosophy, Stark's response was no philosophy. "I don't have a design philosophy, I think it's a little too small, I try to have a philosophy for life" A designer can change the world through design.
His philosophy really comes out as Democratic design, affordable sustainable products that can benefit everyone. 

Right on Philippe

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.

Windmills, Foampits, Jetlag and lack of motivation.

Being wide awake at 5:30am on weekends is not fun, I blame this on jetlag.
Now that i'm back in the US I have such mixed emotions, each time I go back to the U.K. I am reminded of what I really love and what I can leave behind. There are so many British attributes of the culture that I dearly love. But the freedom and public cycle paths of America still win.
My family is well and my gran has no clue who i am - she has alzheimers, but she is well.

Really , I will get my UK photographs sorted and posted to flickr.... soon, soon.

Anyway onto something totally different. This weekend was a big cyclocross deal. The Single Speed Cyclcocross World Championships were held about 10miles from my house. On the was a 20ft windmill with rotating arms and a well wicked foam bath. I did not race this weekend, apparently I have a problem with motivation.

The foam pit - people rode through this mess.

The windmill about to chop some bloke.

Heat wave, time trials and sunsets

So, has been a little strange here the last 3 days - it's been close to or above 100 degrees (38 c), a touch abnormal for Portland. Finally this evening it has cooled down. Most houses in Portland don't have A/C (mine included) but it is heat which is more on the dry side. Been killer, but glad it's down now, little rain tonight would not go amiss.

Crazy Sky Sunday.

Cool Sunset (Sun Eve) looks like LA dunn it?

Even with the high temps, still managed to get some riding in, did a little loop on Sat, prolly more than I should have right, but yeah 38miles or so. Then Sunday AM went out to a long stretch of road a did a time trial with some other Yakima riders. 10 miles, ride it as fast as you can. You might well be saying, why the bugger would you do such a thing at 8am on Sunday morning. - well the 8am is easy because it much much cooler out.
So why else would you want to do this.... well coming up is a wicked race, it's a 155mile unsupported team race hosted by the Rapha Continental blokes (Rapha is out of London ain't it), each team has 6 riders and since a whopping 11 people from my team wanted to do it, we had to sort out a way to decide who gets to go and what not. Needless to say, being one of the weaker riders on our team, I don't think i'll be doing it, but still wanted to try out anyway.

James laying full weight into the bike off the start line

There were 6 of us at this decider TT on Sunday and each one left with 1min interval, Final times were pretty close with less than 30 seconds betwen each one of us, still I ended up bottom of the pile :(. but i think I had a good ride, I did not burn out and shortly after passing the finish line I nearly puked, which is a good sign that you spent all your energy at the right moments.

What else? well it's the start of the Cyclocross season real soon and in fact we had our first team practice Friday lunch in a park near work, yeah were nuts, it was 89 degrees out, so we went and sweated it up like mad. Not sure how excited I am and all about the start of this season, but my bike is in working order, new tires, new bottom bracket and a smashing pair of wheels which you saw a few posts ago and i'm working on some new techniques for dismounting my bike before barriers, let's just say fixie meets cross,

Oh and another wicked sunset from my Saturday ride with Uma blog.
That's all for now, have a good one.

The last night of Portland short track

Last night was the last in series of Short Track Races (Short track is the high intensity off road riding of laps). I snapped my seatpost off in the first race and did not ride again till the last, several weeks later, you can see that last night I rode my Cyclocross bike, which is a little bit of a bummer, since it has no suspension like a mountain bike, which is what is the normal weapon of choice. last night was special because at the end there was a Team relay, each ride rode 1 lap, and 10 team members... Yakima placed #2 out of 17 strong teams!.
A number of our team have been doing really well and took podium spots, Dave Condon has been leading out the Sport class consistently coming in top 4, Tony O killing the Masters 40+ getting a 3rd and Nick G took 3rd in the Experts.

See those nice red Chris King wheels in action!

Joel with his crazy mad helmet.

Sweet Sunset shining out of my neck.

James hauling in the relay race.

Nick G for yakima takes Overall series 2nd in Expert class.