Summer Fun Update

Just had to check in with an update and some pics documenting how awesome these past 4 weeks have been. I have to make this relatively quick because I am leaving for Albany today to see my ladyfriend, "M."



First, I am sure you are all wondering how the bike trip went. In a word: awesome. It was, after all, the Tour de Awesome, so I guess it is a fitting word to describe the weekend. You can read all about my drinking exploits here. In terms of biking it was a great success, 40 miles on day 1, camping in William O'Brien State Park, then 80 additional miles to D'bury. About 60 of those 80 miles was on a County Highway F in Wisconsin, and we pace lined for probably 50 of those miles (meaning we all lined up and drafted off the guy in front, who would just pull off the lead and get on in back once he was too tired to pull anymore), which really helped us conserve our energy and had us biking at a pretty good clip. I believe we averaged 17 miles an hour for the whole 120 miles, but were pace-lining at about 20-22 mph. I will also add this, should you ever find yourself needing to draft behind someone on a bike trip, you better hope you are with the Angel Moroni, homey is HUGE (in a good way) and cuts a very large slipstream that you could draft a Mack truck behind.



OK OK OK, here are some obligatory sat night drinking pics that document the end of the Rossi (Rossi is deathly susceptible to snakes and, more accurately, being snaked).
Note the patriotism that cabin life brings out us.
This is me, killing the Rossi under the banner of our great nation (yeah, it's backwards, F-off).
And below we see one sad Beta, realizing the Rossi is no longer. Hey Beta, nice Ocho you pulled off on that pontoon, Carlo never saw that one comin.'
And that is just the biking trip. The weekend before that I was in Duluth, MN, visiting an old friend who is leaving our shores for the island territory of Saipan. My buddy likes fire, likes to dance with fire and throw it around. It's pretty neat...
We also went cliff jumping... Dangerous you say? True. But fun as hell. The first one was a warmup. The second pic is big Elgin Falls. Holy crap that was scary. Took a lot of talking to myself to convince me it was a good idea.

And yesterday I was out on Lake Minnetonka, pontooning and drinking beer and most importantly, celebrating the new apartment we just landed in Seattle!! Whoot whoot! After months of trying in vain, something finally came through for us, thank thee Jebus.



More later kids, but I gotta run for now. Keep on keepin on, we'll be on summer hours through labor day, after which you can probably expect a lot more frequent posting. Probably too frequent.

FUNemployment

I suppose that you might be wondering what happened to your ole pal, me, since there has been no follow up to my last triumphant post about our successful arrival to the Middle West. Well, it turns out, now that I am unemployed, I have way less free time than I did back when I was working to blog. This is counterintuitive and illogical, I admit, which is why I am naming this the Paradox of the Funemployed.



Instead of sitting in front of a computer screen all day long, which really just invites people to goof off on said computer, I--your funemployed Domestique--have been keeping rather busy with a wide array of actities. For instance, yesterday I washed and waxed my new hoopdee, which was gifted to M and I from my old man. A very kind and generous contribution to grad school, since I was going to have to buy one otherwise. And after the 5 hours I put into it yesterday, that damn thing sparkles.



I've also been logging 35 miles, give or take, rides each day. Which, depending on wind, seem to be taking me between one and a half and two hours. Today I am going for 50 I reckon. I think I am headed down to Lake Minnetonka to tour around that a bit, but not sure yet. I figure I need to keep logging serious miles, because at the rate they are kicking guys out of this year's tour, they may start looking for schmucks like me to compete. No? Ok, probably not.



I have been playing some tennis too, if you can call it that. I got thrashed by Jakes on Tuesday, and on Monday lost an epic one-setter 7-9 to my old high school buddy, Burn. Turns out I am not very good at tennis.



I've also been playing the role of Uncle Domestique, as my 16 month old nephew has had a GI problem that has kept him out of daycare for the past two days, meaning his Nana, my mom, watches him for the day. He's cute as can be, but given this GI problem I gotta admit I am a little apprehensive to pick him up when he comes running to me. Just kidding, I am not some heartless prick, I love my shitty nephew. Get it, shitty nephew? [Crickets chirping] Ok, enough with the lame jokes already, I apologize, I have been in suburbia for a week, give me a break.



Not sure what else is on tap for today, but I can assure you that with all that I do not have to do, I will probably not be able to check back in with you all for at least another day or so.

PROFOUNDLY Strung out...

We listened to about three or three and a half hours of Chuck Klosterman's new audiobook (also in paper form for you literary types), and it struck me that Chuck Klosterman (apparently pronounced KLOH-ster-man, not KLAW-ster-man as I had always thought) utilizes a lot of adjectives. One of them is "profoundly," things are "profoundly this" and "profoundly that."



He also uses a lot of impromptu segues from one thing to another with the use of an exaggerated "ANYWAYS...." Despite this, Chuck Klosterman is a tremendously good and well respected writer.

ANYWAYS, we finally made it to our final destination: mi casa de padre (which Babel Fish tells me is the translation of "my parent's house," but I find this highly dubious because it clearly translates into "the house of my father." But my mom lives there too, and it's not just his house. I really ought to learn Spanish.)



Things got a little hairy, maybe even a lot hairy, in that last push from Madison to the Twin Cities. We hit Madtown around 2 or 3 in the morning and after 16 hours of driving, we were both a little road weary. HOWEVER, I mentioned elsewhere Beta was born to haul the big rig, and I just fed off his energy and we crafted tall tales we would tell about all the Lot Lizards we saw and did along the way, and next thing you know, the sun is rising and we are 30 miles from Hudson. Home clear. Once the sun was up Beta, a creature of the night, was overcome with fatigue. I, however, was feeling revived and somehow managed to guide us safely to the NW Burbs.

Like I was saying, we finally made it to our final destination, and there is only one way to describe how Beta and I felt upon arrival: profoundly strung out.



He crashed right away, with visions of sugar plums and tooth fairies dancing through his head. I was waaaaayyy too juiced from the Red Bulls and McD's cofees to fall asleep right away. SO I unpacked a bit. Well, just my bike stuff, really. But I got them back in working order, so I can go for a ride tomorrow morning, which I am itching to do after 20 hours in a fucking Budget truck. Oddly I have lost five pounds in the past few weeks, which at first I found exceptionally hard to believe considering all I have been doing is eating out and drinking and getting 6 or less hours of sleep every night for the past two weeks. But then it occurred to me I probably lost muscle mass, so I really gotta get back in the saddle.



ANYWAYS, the kat is adjusting, sorta not really, to his new surroundings. If you are willing to accept that sitting under the bed and only poking your head out for food and water is adjusting, then he is doing great. I think it's progress considering he didn't eat or drink at all in the past 22 hours (or wazz or shat, for that matter). He was also greeted, less than warmly, by my parent's cat (mi gato de padre, methinks), whom we will refer to as Fuckface. But I am sticking up for my homeboy, I got out the spray bottle and tormented Fuckface until he capitulated and went away.



And that my friends brings to a close Beta and Domestique's Excellent Adventure. We plan to get a little R&R at my 'rent's house for at least a night before we unleash Slurry on the 612. He needs his beauty rest.

Reveille & movin' out

Hey there Domestiques, sorry for the lapse in posting, but we've been busy scrambling to get everything boxed up and packed into the moving truck. Thankfully, we are finally done. Just a quick cleaning of the place and we're finished.



If you are only going to do one thing at work all week, make sure that it is checking out this great new web site ("zine") covering local (mpls) and national indie tunes,Reveille Magazine. This is a project of a bunch of local (again, mpls) writers and critics, most notably our boy Bobby Digital. Also Jim Walsh, so it's definitely got cred. But Bobby is my boy, not Jim, so check out his work when it's up. Here is his first submission, a great review of a great new album by Spoon.



Next time you see a posting on this blog, it'll be from Tha Grove, betta recognize.



Happy trails to Mish, Beta, and I!!



PS -- The going away party was absolutely mega. Shoulda been there, biiiiatches!

Day 2

Here it is, Day 2 in Le Tour D'Awesome. Our trek begins in Taylor's Falls, and as we say goodbye to Minnesota and hello to Wisconsin, we see our only real climb of the day. Starting around the 2 mile mark we bottom out on our mini descent (30' of elevation!) and we start climbing. Over the next three miles we put in a ridiculous climb of 235 feet of elevation, topping out at about 1008 feet about sea level! Alpe_d'Huez*, the Tour D'Awesome is not. By the time we get to the cabin destination, we'll have pedaled about 58 miles in a day and over 100 in two days.









* The most famed climb of the Tour de France, it has 21 hairpin switchbacks that kill a riders rhythm as he attempts to climb a mere 3642 feet over 8.6 miles at an average gradient of 8.1%. Knee burner, to say the very least. Lance did it in about 37 mins in 2004. Wow.

Grand Old Party Of Family Values

Family values MY ASS!

Enviro health concerns for urban athletes

The New York Times seems to have a lot of cool articles these days on public health. Maybe all papers do that, but the other two I read a lot (WaPo and Strib) don't really come close to the Times in this type of journalism. Anyhoo, I just read this NYT article on how athletes in urban areas are more adversely affected by an area's air pollution than sedentary urbanites. Not a surprise by any means, but it is becoming confirmed by science and medicine, and is yet another sign that our careless disregard for how our actions impact our environment is causing us harm. So get this, now we can work out in a warmer city AND kills our lungs and hearts in the process! Rad!

Kenneth Rundell, the director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., said, “Athletes typically take in 10 to 20 times as much air,” and thus pollutants, with every breath as sedentary people do.

Here is the skinny on what is going on:

...Today most experts agree that, as Dr. Lippmann said, the “greatest overall public health impact” of air pollution comes from fine particulates, which can be seen only with an electron microscope.



They are ubiquitous. Cars, trucks, and diesel buses — the main culprits in the creation of particle pollution — spew untold millions of the microscopic pollutants into the air daily. Exercisers should take precautions against particles, experts said, by not exerting themselves near traffic, or, if they must use a path next to a highway, staying a few hundred yards away from vehicles.



Particles can sail past nasal hairs, the body’s first line of defense, and settle deep in athletes’ lungs. Some remain there, causing irritation and inflammation. Others, so tiny they can bypass various bodily defenses, migrate into the bloodstream. “Blood vessels do not like those particulates,” said David Newby, a cardiology professor at the University of Edinburgh.



Dr. Newby has seen, in action, the effects of those particles on active people. In 2005, he and his colleagues had 30 healthy volunteers ride exercise bikes inside a laboratory for 30 minutes, while breathing piped-in diesel exhaust at levels approximately those along a city highway at rush hour.



Afterward, the researchers did a “kind of stress test of the blood vessels” in the participants’ forearms, Dr. Newby said, and found that the vessels were abnormally dilated, meaning blood and oxygen could not flow easily to the muscles. At the same time, levels of tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, a naturally-occurring protein that dissolves blood clots, had fallen.

But of course, my dear Domestiques, the answer is not to stop working out just because you live in a city... the answer is that we should ALL BIKE TO WORK!

In the calculus of health concerns, “Breathing air pollution is not nearly as bad as smoking,” Dr. Lippmann said.



“The bottom line is that running and cycling are healthy and, over all, good for the heart,” Dr. Newby said. With proper care, he said, outdoor exercise does not have to be harmful — and, done en masse, could even ease pollution.



“I ride my bike back and forth to work every day,” he said. “If everyone else did that, too, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all, would we?”