I’ve been all over
the place this week. On Tuesday, I went up to Charlotte for our first team meeting
of the year. Check that out over at the team site: factorydevelopmentteam.com.

I went back home
that same night, so I could go bikin the next morning. Fortunately/Unfortunately
the SRM was back from being fixed or whatever it is they do to those things
in Colorado. Getting it back and running on my bike, being the mental midget
that I am, is quite the task, so it took me a good long while to figure it out,
plus a lengthy trip to the bike shop, plus the traditional contemplation time:
just how does this thing work again?

I wanted to do
a big ride on Thanksgiving, but it actually rained, and it rained like hell
too, and since I melt in water, I waited till it stopped raining, but by that
time it was wet, so I just went out for two hours and rode really hard and tried
to make pretty numbers on the little computer screen. They weren’t too terribly
pretty, but my come apart with twenty minutes to go was truly spectacular.

On Friday, I did
some cross practice with Jacob…it was a ‘tempo’ session. The last tempo session
I attempted with Jacob, he dropped me inside of ten minutes, probably more like
7 or 8. That was the day after I got back from Europe. This time around went
much better – I actually made it the full 40 minutes. Not exactly easily per
se, but I made it through nonetheless. I was starting to harbor illusions of
a good race in Winston on Sunday…

Saturday was all
about getting my new iPod, or rather my old iPod that stopped working, fixed,
and by fixed I mean they gave me a new one. Cool. My new iPod required material,
so I purchased the first season of 30 Rock to keep me occupied for…

…my four hour
drive to Winston Sunday morning. Yes, I watched eight episodes on my trip to
Winston, and I laughed the whole way and had a fine time. I was disappointed
to actually get to the race and stop watching my new almost favorite show (The
Office wins).

So the race was,
as always, something different. Every cross race I do presents some new feeling,
situation, etc etc. This one was a lot like this: my best ever first half, followed
by a flat, followed by the slowest wheel change in the history of wheel changes
done by none other than myself, followed by a mental come apart, followed by
a physical come apart when my body finally realized that my really good first
half was a lot too hard to keep doing for the second half. So I went really
slow the last half and had the pleasure of getting lapped by Hamblen, et al.

Hey, at least I
got to see how real cross bikers look when they go fast. They go fast for sure.
It hurts. I felt like there was a lot of sprinting going on. I felt like I was
sprinting for the whole damn lap in fact. It was awful painful, so I ‘decided’
that I wouldn’t ride with Jon and Pendry anymore. I waited for the next lapping
duo of Andy Applesauce and Will Black to try their pace, but that was even worse,
so I once again ‘decided’ that my pace was better and went slow.

I ended up 6th.

I’ve never been
lapped before in a cross race (well, that first one, but that didn’t count,
I did pull-ups and push-ups and stuff), but I’ve also never actually had the
chance to race in a cross race, so today was a significant step in that direction.

The course was
cool, really really short, and hard. Full on hard or completely off, full on
as hard as you could go, completely off, repeat for something like 18 laps.

Ok, enough bike
talk. I’m going to be in Winston till Friday…then I’m going home to Athens…then
I’m there till the 18th, then I’m going home to Colorado till the 5th…then
I don’t know anymore.

Ok, so I’ve been
home for awhile. Kinda fell off the earth with the journal keeping in Europe,
but it got hectic and it was a lot of – went here, saw this, loved it, ate good
food, drank good wine, ate a lot of goat cheese. Something along those lines.

Took something
like 3000+ pictures. Still haven’t made it through a portion of them.

I’m all moved into
my ‘new’ residence at 119 Paper Street, but it’s not really new, it’s the old,
it’s about 30 feet from my old room at Casa Fetty. Samantha likes my room. She
never leaves it, but I don’t think that’s a sign that she actually likes me,
but rather, evidence that the sun does shine in massive amounts through the
window in my room.

I finally got my
license renewed today. I’m very glad that I went there in peace, because on
any other typical Jered day, I quite possibly might have freaked out. Well,
that’s an exaggeration, it’s hard to freak out when it’s plainly obvious that
I was at fault. What? Do tell.

So, I got a ticket
back in July of 2005 near Council Bluff, Iowa…of course I didn’t pay it. Somehow
word got ’round to Georgia and some time in the past year or so, my license
was suspended. Of course, I didn’t know that, because I’ve been doing my damndest
not to get pulled over for over half a year now, because my license has been
expired for that long. So there’s that.

Anyway, so after
chatting with a friendly lady in Iowa and forking over 196 dollars to settle
that old debt, I paid an extra 35 dollars to get my license re-instated and
another 20 dollars for the license.

Finally, I’m legal.
I’ll be legal to drive my car until March 16, 2013. Holy crap, I’ll be 30. I
wonder what life will be like when my license goes expired again…how long
will I wait to get it renewed? where will I be? Many more questions are coming
to my head, but I don’t feel like pursuing them.

I’ve been riding
my bike a lot. Jacob built me up a sweet new cross bike and it has been fun.
I’ve done two cross races so far, and am looking forward to #3 in Augusta this
weekend. I’ve been riding a lot during the weeks as well, and gradually getting
fitter, emphasis on gradually. Doing longer rides has really been painful. I
did my first two long rides in awhile this week – 5 and 4 hours.

On Tuesday, I was
fairly certain that my 5 hour ride was one of the more awful experiences I’ve
endured of late, but after Thursday’s horrendous 4 hour stroll southward, I
realized that my view of Tuesday’s ride was outright silly.

Thursday will go
down in the annals of my biking conscious as one of the most miserable days
on the bike I’ve ever had.

1.) It was windy.
Really really windy. Of course, my first thought was to go to the dirt roads,
because the dirt roads are sheltered and lovely. Great.

2.) I should have
ridden the mountain bike in the woods like Jacob said to, but I was hellbent
on going to Penfield, big mistake.

3.) I left the
house, and I felt like I could ride to Savannah. Being the idiot that I am,
I forgot to take note of the fact that that was that WNW wind of 30-40 mph at
my back. Of course, let’s ride in a nice southeasterly direction for two hours
and then TURN AROUND INTO the wind to come home.

Brilliant.

I’m going to stop
numbering now, don’t know why I did that.

By the time I got
to Penfield I was pretty sure I’d never ride another dirt road again, they were
in awful shape, even for a cross bike – so bad that I actually FLATTED on them.
I rode all winter last year on those roads and never once flatted, in fact,
I flatted twice last winter and both times they were on paved roads.

Anyway, so I made
the decision not to go home on the dirt, the dirt had wrecked me already. I
figured I’d ride to Woodville and then head up 77 till I felt like riding on
dirt again. This is when you have to question my mental competence – of course
this section from Woodville to Maxeys was the perfect tunnel for the perfect
wind. 8 miles of mostly flat road…it took me 40 minutes. That’s a 12 mph average.

Of course, being
me, I did my traditional ride departure calculation to start the day…so it
gets dark at 530, I want to ride for four hours, ok, I’ll leave at 130.

With this in mind,
you can see that my 8 mile section that took me 2/3 of an hour was starting
to really put paid to any plans I might have on getting home by dark. When I
got to the 10 house town of Maxeys I had to make the decision – dirt roads home
or paved.

Dirt meant awful
washboardage, paved meant throwing my bike at an oncoming semi and lying down
in a ditch. I opted for the dirt. Of course, somehow the wind followed me into
the densely wooded dirt roads and I got to shake hands with the mistral all
the way home. Maybe shake hands isn’t the correct term, I might say more accurately
that I got to do another 10 rounds in the ring with the mistral and she knocked
my ass out each and every round. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a real boxing match,
so I had to keep getting up and plodding along…

Then there was
that big final downhill leading to one big final uphill. This brought me to
the bring of madness.

Whew, just got
over a big hill, almost home. I’m going to coast down this big hill…coast
coast cooooast, wait a second I’m slowing down. No shit. I just about came to
a halt on a downhill. I was so beside myself at this point that I spent the
final 5 minutes muttering to myself about unutterable things.

Needless to say,
I took today completely off.