I found the passports. They were in our change box above our kitchen cabinets…I apparently put them up there before going for a run yesterday. Don’t ask how it happened. I’m just happy. So happy. I’m not nearly as worthless as I thought, just a sort of faux-worthless. Ha. Next update…from Rome!
It hurts to be this dumb that is. I lost both my passport AND Ashley’s. Maybe they were stolen, I’ll never know, but the long and the short of it (as the cliche goes), is that we are passport-less and leaving for Rome in a few hours. Oh the fun I manage to concoct.
In other news, we get the privilege of going to Vienna to get new passports. Yahoo.
I just really really hope that we can make it to Rome. I can’t say enough how hard my fingers are crossed. I’ll pay a hefty time and money punishment for losing the passports when we go to Vienna to fix it, so please please please whoever doles out lost passport punishments…let us across the border to Italy.
It’s raining outside…it’s snowing just a little bit up the way. It’s also really dark. This whole daylight savings time is a real downer, but I’m getting over it.
I went running today…2.5 miles in 18:30…by my reckoning, that’s 7:24 pace. I’ve got a future in running ahead of me…ish. I need to start running longer, but ah well, there’s plenty of time for that.
Yep, that’s a church tower in the middle of the lake. They left it to commemorate the town that was eliminated when the dam was made back during the Fascist times (this is just over the border in Italy).
I just uploaded a whole bunch of pictures from the weekend – the first from a class trip Ashley had on Saturday that pulled a nice country trifecta: Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. It’s pretty cool that I’m usually invited on the trips…it was a great day.
Not too much snow anywhere except for the race course.
My parents came into town that afternoon and early Sunday we were on the road to Soelden to see the first World Cup Giant Slalom ski race of the year…holy moly that was awesome. The climb to the Rettenbachferner (stage finish for the Deutschland Tour twice) is evil…12k at something close to 13% I think. You won’t be seeing me on that road anytime soon.
Yep, that’s steep.
It has been great having my parents in town. We’ve had a good time, well, I have. Ashley and I are traveling down to Rome with my Mom on Thursday – we’re taking the night train. We’re staying in a five star hotel in the middle of the city courtesy of mom’s many hotel points for Starwood Hotels (Sheraton, Westin, etc). We’re pretty excited.
I also just saw that there are flights to Stockholm from Innsbruck for 55 euros. Um, I’m ready to go. Now. I guess Rome is pretty ok though. Ha.
Red Bull is putting on some kind of big contest in Europe right now, it’s called Red Bull Can You Make It? 150 Teams of college students from all over Europe have to make it from a certain starting city to Paris in 8 days with no money or phone – just Red Bulls. They have to perform tasks in various cities, travel as many kilometers as possible – and make it to Paris in eight days. It’s just kind of hard, because they don’t have any money, so the traveling part is wholly dependent on bartering or convincing a train conductor to give them a ride…stuff like that. It’s really cool.
Anyhow, so, we ran into one of the teams, the Flying Threesome, yesterday in Innsbruck. They were super cool and this writer is wholly behind their effort – so you should be too.
Check out their adventures: HERE!
We just checked their site, and found this:
Tonight we were sitting in front of a pizzeria in Innsbruck (the owners refused to trade a few slices of pizza for some cans of red bull) when a group of 4 people walks past us.
This is the picture they took with their team phone, which is only used for taking pictures. The phone uploads the pics automatically to their team site almost instantly.
in our normal civilized world we dont even think about talking to them. We ignore them, they ignore and walk past us. We might still be sitting there. Hungry, cold and discouraged.
OR, in this different, new, interesting, adventurous world we talk to them, ask them whether they would like to buy a few cans of redbull so we could get ourselves a dinner. They agree and wonder why we dont pay with money like normal people. We tell them about CANyouMakeIt. Its done. They give us a few spare US-Dollars “you never know where you might use them – and you never know what these are worth”, tell us that they have a flat around the corner and invite us there to spend a few hours with them until our train to zurich is leaving. We get there, they make tea for us, they let us use their internet and THEY EVEN COOK PASTA FOR US TO TAKE ALONG THE WAY!!!
A pic of their breakfast this morning in Zurich…we made those! I love it.
dear fans: aint it beautiful how generous and selfless people can turn out to be even though they dont know you at all?
this might make us think that the saying “there are no strangers, just friends you havent met yet”. maybe this should be a lesson to all of us… maybe this could change the way we think of the people we pass when we are walking down the street. You can never judge a person just by the looks. You just cant.
That’s pretty cool to read. I almost feel nice. Check out their site though for sure, I’m rooting for them!!
Ashley and I have been busy with a whole lot of nothing today, but in the past 24 hours, a few good things have occurred…for instance:
1. We made a PEZ Cycling News group on Facebook, so if you’re on Facebook, look it up!
2. I finally finished my pre-game article from Lombardia. It was fun.
3. We finally started going through our endless library of pictures…there are some cool ones hidden in the huge pile. I might post a couple.
My parents are coming into town tomorrow, I’m looking forward to it.
Oh and I almost forgot, Gavia over at PodiumCafe found an awesome article in Italian paper La Stampa concerning the potential Giro route for 2009…
1° TAPPA LIDO DI VENEZIA (cronosquadre)
2° TAPPA JESOLO – TRIESTE
3° TAPPA GRADO – CONEGLIANO
4° TAPPA PADOVA – SAN MARTINO DI CASTROZZA
5° TAPPA SAN MARTINO DI CASTROZZA – ALPE DI SIUSI
6° TAPPA CASTELROTTO – MAYRHOFEN (Austria)
7° TAPPA INNSBRUCK (Austria) – CHIAVENNA
8° TAPPA MORBEGNO – COMO
9° TAPPA MILANO – TORINO
10° TAPPA CUNEO – SESTRIERE
11° TAPPA PINEROLO – GENOVA
12° TAPPA SESTRI LEVANTE – LERICI (crono)
13° TAPPA LIDO DI CAMAIORE – FIRENZE
14° TAPPA CAMPI BISENZIO – BOLOGNA/SAN LUCA
15° TAPPA BOLOGNA – RIMINI
16° TAPPA PERGOLA – MONTE PETRANO
17° TAPPA CHIETI – BLOCK HAUS
18° TAPPA SULMONA – BENEVENTO
19° TAPPA AVELLINO – NAPOLI/VESUVIO
20° TAPPA NAPOLI – ANAGNI
21° TAPPA ROMA (cronometro)
Most of the stages look cool, but whatever, check out Stages 5,6,7 – yep, one of those says INNSBRUCK. There’s a mountaintop finish about 100k south of here at Alpe de Siusi…that’s awesome. I want to do some pre-rides before the snow comes.
…but I’m playing on the internet.
I’m uploading a ton of pictures to the flickr site right now, so if you’re bored, give em a gander!
I’m also famous…I somehow ended up on the Seigler Sports website with my sweet Seigler ALR. I don’t know how that could have happened. I do love that bike.
I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to train during the awful winter months, so if you’ve got some ideas for places in Europe where the high isn’t 30 degrees fahrenheit for a couple of months – feel free to let me in on some secrets!
I don’t have any fun stories to tell right now, my brain isn’t so spry at 215 in the morning. Who am I kidding, my brain is never spry.
Ok, I’m done, thanks for reading, I promise there’ll be something worth reading very soon!
Alright, so I’ve got EuroTrash done for today, I still have my Lombardia report to write (pictures are edited at least), an Ed Hood piece to take care of, and PeloPics…and I need to go hang out with Ashley and her family before they leave for Roma. Well, Ashley is staying here cuz she has school, but her family is headed down to Rome. We went hiking yesterday. The weather was absolutely perfect. I’ll post a few pics from the hike a little later.
I’m going to take today pretty easy, and then rattle off some good training the rest of this week before MY family comes for a visit starting this weekend. We’re going to go to Soelden on Sunday to see the first World Cup ski race. I’m pretty psyched about that.
I was just going to comment on the fact that there isn’t much snow around, but I think that’s about to change in a hurry – we’re due for some cool temperatures and rain here in Innsbruck starting Wednesday, which means snow, snow, and snow up a bit higher.
Anyhow, I hope you like the pictures. We drove up to Axamer Lizum and hiked most of the way up to the Nockspitze. It was fun. I’m starting to feel a little bit fitter. Yahoo.
We had an awesome dinner last night in the Altstadt. I had venison. It made my heart sing.
Ok, back to work, no more distractions.
I’m in the press hall of the Giro di Lombardia right now. I should be editing pictures, but I wanted to say hi for a second.
I’m about done with pics for PEZ, and then there’s the matter of that five hour drive home. Ouch.
Today was probably one of the coolest days I’ve ever experienced. I was a cyclotourist/journalist. I think I’ve found an interesting new way to cover bike races: drive to a certain area, and then hit the bike and cover WAY more than otherwise possible. Really, the only thing that beats my strategy is a motorcycle. I win.
I also got to do the rally car thing. Driving on cleared roads with no rules…so fun. Even driving on uncleared roads with no rules is lots of fun – check out THIS picture. Holy moly. We just drove right down the middle of the typical narrow Italian roads and somehow didn’t hit anybody. Incredible. It was probably not the smartest idea to take this picture, but what’s an extra degree of danger between friends?
Well, I win until I double flat and I only have two tubes and I’m riding around Como with a flat rear tire. Woops.
They weren’t too happy about me bringing my bike into the press area, but it’s in here with me and my Seigler never looked so pretty. Check out this picture. Yeah.
Alright, back to work…much much more to come next week on PEZ and here. Keep an eye out for it, and give me a holler.
k bye.
I’m almost a little stressed right now. So much to do, lots of time to do it, but I want to get to Como as fast as possible, because it’s Como and it’s great. Ashley is coming with and she’s pretty psyched up about it too.
Anyhow, a couple of pictures before I sign off for a couple of days to do my first real work as an at-the-race journalist.
I caught up to a scooter yesterday evening and followed her around for awhile, we eventually ended up on a dirt road because of some detour. I thought it was funny that I was motorpacing on a dirt road, so I stopped to take a picture.
Then I got lost in some construction of a big ol train tunnel. I bet it would be fun to drive really fast down that thing. It was fun to ride my bike in there. I hope nobody saw me, I was hollering for echoes and swerving the whole way through it. Fun fun.
I went kinda hard for the first time in a long time yesterday…it was bad. Ah well, I’m still going to Como. Yeah!
Thanks for reading.
I did my longest ride in a long while today – 4.5 hours. It involved me going about 50k down the valley, turning up Oetztal (that’s the Oetz Valley), then riding up a big long climb to Kuehtai, going downhill for a long ways, then 10k back home. That climb has over 4000 feet of vertical to it. Ow.
Elevation is in meters. I would have preferred feet. That would be a third less. Sweet.
The following might sound like whining, but it’s really not, so don’t think that it is.
Anyhow, so this would have been hard enough by itself, except I took the wrong turn to go to said climb. Maybe I was a little over-eager, but I turned off early on a side road that said Kuehtai. I figured that it would be steep little shortcut to the main road…and thus began the pain.
I can’t whine too much looking back at these pictures…
The next 6k AVERAGED 13.3%. I have a 39×27 at this point, and it wasn’t even close to enough. I averaged something like 5 mph for those 6k. True, I wasn’t going all out, but I was going hard enough.
Vee don’t do sveetchbacks in Austria!
The worst part about it? When I got to the top of the 10 kilometer climb (the last 4k were bad, but not THAT bad), there was a descent to the climb proper. I checked into the real climb with about 6k to go, just in time for the steepest part of THAT climb.
Those are some crappy fall colors.
I was falling apart in ways I wasn’t and still am not familiar with. It was bad.
I started in that town way, way down below.
I finally got to the top, and it was an ugly ski town and bitter cold, so I put on my jacket and shivered my way back down. I dropped my water bottle part of the way down…I couldn’t feel my hands anymore…but I was thirsty. It didn’t work so well.
Yahoo.
Check out that Seigler…yeah, it’s hot (I’m referring to that white bike in the pic above).
I stopped at a gas station for some cola gummis at the bottom of the descent. I was incredibly excited about munching on them the rest of the way home, but somehow managed to drop them all over the dirt road I was riding home on just a few moments later…after eating ONE. That really bummed me out. I had been thinking about those gummi’s for many a painful pedal stroke and there they were all covered in dirt.
Oh, but it did hurt a lot.
But then I got to thinkin…I was on a tiny dirt road bike path thing outside of Innsbruck, I had just made it over the most ridiculous climb ever, and Ashley was making something for me for when I got home. My attitude improved substantially after that. Well, I only had about 20 more minutes of riding to go, but still.
They even made me a dirt path to make me feel more at home in Austria.
I don’t think I’ll be checking out that climb again anytime soon though. Well, it’s going to be covered in snow soon, so that works out just perfectly for me. I’m perfectly content riding elsewhere thank you very much.
|
|
