A Retrospective on 2009

I always get quite melancholy around the new year. I very much look forward to my plans for the upcoming year, but I spend a lot of time lamenting the chances not taken and the experiences I'll never get to have again. My heart breaks all over again reliving the losses of my loved ones who've exited my life over the past year. But this year I resolved early to focus on the positive experiences, and to that end I've been constructing this post for a few months now. And in order to avoid melancholy this evening I'm gonna finish it off. Below is a list of bike things I'm looking back on with gladness. pride, and other happy thoughts.

I created & solidified many riding friendships:

• Justin
• Mike
• Gatlin
• Michelle (thanks for finally getting me into your commute routine)
• The Brothers Wiley
• Steve

Two 700-mile months

My first century (thanks to the Wileys there too)

5000-mile year

Races:

• Jason Broome TT
• Lyle Pearson (and heres for a fun 2010 race!)
• State Crit
• BBHC
• State TT
• Hidden Springs
• Nearly every ride of the season with Gatlin

Thanks to:

• Tyler for support - material, logistical, emotional, nutritional, organizational
• Gatlin for the rides and the encouragement (and making me look damn good in the duathlon . . . not so much for making me look like a fool on Bogus)
• Mike for the support and the self-deprecating humor on rides
• Justin for stroking my gearheadedness and pulling me (especially homeward in the heat)
• Kate for putting up with all my crap, for standing alone in the cold to watch my first race ever, and for plucking my back hair
• Will Lindsay and Scott Hoover for doing far more than their share of standing around on Thursdays
• McT for all of his support, advice, and encouragement
• Bruce & Ken for keeping us riding through the cold
• All of you for reading this garbage and supporting me

And now I'm gonna go spend some quality time...

Next Season

It's been a while. I guess I should post something. Perhaps it's a bit premature, but I'm getting pretty fired up about the 2010 race season already. My team is now registered for the Lyle Pearson 200 in June and I'm talking about getting into spin classes for some conditioning.

But my fear is that I'll be forsaking some good riding (or at least not enjoying it as much as I could) through the winter. Thanks to my friend Bruce, my friends and I have been getting out for rides every weekend and lucking out with some dandy weather so far. Okay the space bar on this keyboard is sticking and it's driving me nuts. This post is over.

Veterans' Day Ride

Now that I've got a bit more stuff installed on my new laptop, I can post a new entry for the Vets' Day ride I took yesterday. Speaking of that, to any & all veterans tuning in, happy Veterans' Day wishes (belated) and thanks (as always) to you for your dedication and sacrifices.

My own service to veterans this year was a bike ride with a salty old sailor. Mike & I went for a fifty-miler. Down into the Snake River Canyon, past Map Rock (stopping for a look), back up near Marsing, and then around Lake Lowell before rolling back into Nampa. We got rained on just a little and dealt with more wind than we'd have liked, but all in all it was a great fall ride.

Mike is tantalizingly close to his own goal for the year. After our fifty on Wednesday, he's just twenty or thirty miles shy of 3000. We've got another ride on Saturday, so barring a catastrophe he'll make his goal then if not before. Awesome job Mike!

Goodbye October

Yesterday was the inaugural ride of the group ride that has yet to be named but is all about riding through the winter. We've kinda decided to start at one of Nampa's coffee shops and ride to a coffee shop in one of the neighboring towns - plenty of opportunities to get warm! This was all Bruce Wiley's idea - and what a great one! A quick search of Google Maps around Kuna a couple nights ago yielded the Trellis Bistro. We were fairly pleased - I'm sure that we'll end up there again this winter.

Mike flatted on the way back, and that ended up being just what the doctor ordered. Most of the riders decided to keep on riding and leave Mike, Trevor, and me behind to catch up after fixing

the flat. So we fixed it and got jamming again - kept it above 20MPH for pretty much the rest of the ride. Got stopped by a train just before catching the lead group, and ended up having to work hard to catch up again before rolling back into the barn.

Mike & I were chatting on the way to Kuna when Mike mentioned that he was over 400 miles for October. "Excellent!" I said, "That's farther than I've ridden this month by a long shot." He expressed his doubt at this, so after returning home I took a look at Cyclistats for a resolution. Well heck, I'm over 500 miles for October! That's actually more miles than I rode in July! And

compare that to the 82 miles from last October - holy shnikies! So that's cool. And I'm now past 4900 miles on the year. 5000 is pretty much a sure thing now (I'll hopefully have that by next weekend), and my ultimate goal of 5300 is well within sight. If November is as good to me a October, then I'll have it before the month is out.

Mileage update

Crested 4700 miles today. If I wasn't such a lazy shlepp then I'd be closer to 4800, but I didn't ride to work even once this week. First time for that since January.

A new infatuation

With my ride to Emmett yesterday, I'm over 4500 miles now. 800 more to go. There's a light at the end of the tunnel - I just have to reach it before the end of the year.

Anyway, I've recently become very enamored of this screen from Cyclistats. It's a bar graph of my daily mileage since I started recording my ride stats. Each blue bar represents a day, and the height of each bar is the total mileage for that day with the scale on the left (so multiple rides per day get stacked on top of one another). The vertical green line is New Year's Day 2009. The difference between the two years is remarkable, no? One thing that struck me is that giant two-week gap with zero rides in May 2008 - our honeymoon. Without that hiatus, I'd likely have gotten over 3000 miles last year. That woulda been great, but there'd be no way I coulda doubled that this year. So thanks to my in-laws for sending me away. :)

The most striking feature though is the large number of 50-mile days this year. These are almost all commute days. Last year I rode to work several times but rode all the way home only occasionally, opting instead to hop off the bus at Gold's for a 33-mile day. You can see lots of them in peak season 2008.

After looking at this for a while, I realize that I need more long days next year - 70+ miles. Kinda funny - that 67-mile day in 2008 (LeBow metric century) was the longest of my life at the time. I wept that afternoon as I barreled homeward ten miles out. A year on, 60+ is almost routine. I had a similar experience with my 30+ mile LeBow ride the year before. Does that mean that my 108-mile record this year will be commonplace for me next year? Here's hoping!

Hidden Springs Duathlon

After Gat & I'd discussed going out to Glenn's Ferry for a road race out there today, we decided instead earlier this week to enter the Hidden Springs Duathlon as a team. That suited me just fine - I didn't have to run. :) Our friend Steve's lips are faster than his legs. In the Land of Talking he does mighty fine, but we had to go show him how things are in the Land of Doing. There's a beer riding on this so stay tuned.

Gatlin's a machine. Having not done any running in months, he still managed to get through the first of his TWO 5Ks in ~21 minutes and put me on the bike course first of all the teams (that I noticed anyway). I was riding with the elite riders. I fell in behind a guy on a TT bike right after the start and hung with him a few lengths behind him all the way up to the pass and down Seaman's Gulch, then I took the turn onto Hill Rd FAR better than he did and passed him after exiting. But he made me look foolish on the flats (Hill Rd) with his aero bars (I chose my Look rather than the TT bike because of the climbing, descending, & a couple tight turns), and he was soon a good distance ahead of me. Two or three more riders passed me after that as well but I didn't pay much attention - I was holding what I felt was a good pace. In hindsight, maybe I coulda pushed a bit more. Maybe it's time for a heart rate monitor. Anyway I got back into the transition area, gave the timing chip back to Gatlin, and he was off again for the finishing leg. Got that done in fine fashion as well, perhaps even faster than his first.

Anyway one of the people that passed me must have been a team rider because no one passed Gatlin and we ended up taking second for male road teams and 11th overall for the road course. The results are here (look for "CREAGER, Gatlin" near the bottom of page 2), but no splits are reported yet, so it has yet to be determined (no later than Monday according to the website) who's buying whom a beer in the near future. The picture shows Gatlin taking off after transition 2 to make up the time I lost. :) The best part about that picture, though, is the tan line on his leg indicating how much biking he's done this season.

OH! And Rusty will be happy to know that we beat the team that included a guy wearing a Harvard jersey. I even talked a little smack to him for you - thought about busting out "Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow!" on my way out of the transition as he was still standing there but decided against it. :)