Laying Low

I still can't seem to shake this cold that caught me at the beginning of the week, and it's been a disappointing week on the training side of things for sure. I had planned to go down to Merced for the Merco Road Race today, and try to come home with my piece of the $4,000 purse, but I decided that it would be best for me to just stay home and rest, maybe train a bit. I guess my ill-fated trip down to Arizona has turned me off to racing for a little while. Interestingly enough, "resting" turned into "building a land yacht with my friends". Check out the end result:



So we didn't exactly finish it off with the steering pedals and other minor details like seats and brakes and whatnot, but it worked and our proof-of-concept got us up to about 20-25 mph with some strong winds, according to the photographer, who followed in a truck on a couple of runs. We have become quite used to making a spectacle of ourselves when testing out our contraptions (the pedal-powered surfboard and camouflage-badged tandem bike definitely turned heads), but this time we had a first - a couple of guys who happened to be passing us on the west end of Bogue road busted out their phones and slowed down to take pictures of us on our 20-foot-high rattle-trap. We just might have made someone's PIX message. What an honor.

For those of you wondering why I would do such a thing, I will have it be known that this is how most of my weekends go: working on some ridiculous quasi-engineering project in my buddy's garage, between training and other obligations. I can also assure you that doing things like this is in no way dangerous (especially if those who are reading this are involved in team management for Trek-Livestrong). Indeed, I was wearing a helmet.

So I guess thats what things come to when I'm not racing much. I can't write about my races, I don't really pay attention to other people's races, and you wouldn't really want to hear about my training rides. Please don't assume my blog is "going soft" just yet. Before too long, I'll have more racing going on than I can keep up with.