Singlespeed slugfest

Saturday I did a 60 mile singlespeed ride to Fulshear. There were 3 ss cross bikes, 1 geared cross bike that never shifted, and me on my rigid 29er ss mtb with cross tires. I was geared the lowest, so I was spinning the whole time. It was a good workout though. We rode along the bayous and backroads the whole time, so it was a neat route. The pic shows my normally big looking bike dwarfed next to the huge yetti bike in Fulshear. All the rhoadies got a kick out of seeing our ragtag group on our ragtag bikes with knobby tires all the way out in Fulshear. The best part was seeing this dude with a high zoot TT bike getting sagged back home from the station after barely making it out there.

Japanese grills

The last two fridays we have gone to japanese grills for dinner. Last weekend was JT's birthday dinner with the small group, this week Raine's family is in town and they wanted sushi. Both times the food was good, but what is it with these japanese places and their live entertainment? The first place wasn't so bad, a full band playing decent music, but a bit loud in a small restaurant. The second place though, was not good at all. It was a guitar player who could groove ok with a dude banging on the bongos and couldn't keep a good rhythm for his life. Worse though was the fact that they were playing along with canned music and all of it was blaring over huge speakers like 15 feet from our table. You can see the setup complete with the little music box in the picture. It was so loud we were yelling at each other to talk. Finally they took a break and played the canned music much quieter than they had been. That was the best part of our dinner.

Crit race

Last night was crit race #4 at Memorial Park. I've done all of them so far but this has definitely been the best one yet. I was able to stay in the pack the whole time and finish with them on the lead lap. I even found myself on the front a couple of times taking pulls. I expected big attacks when I got to the front, as I thought I would be slowing the pack up, but that didn't happen so I guess I did alright. I thought about going for a prime, but it wasn't as easy to move to the front as I thought it would be and I was afraid of blowing myself up and getting dropped so I decided to stay in the group. I got some new wheels last week, I don't know if they really helped or not, but they definitely should help as they are much more aero and I think lighter than my old wheels. They do look really good, that's worth some speed right there.

My HR numbers were pretty good from last night, I was able to hold a high effort level the whole race and not get blown like I've been doing. My avg. was 184bpm, my max was 196. I spent 32 minutes above 90% of max HR. These races are shorter than my mtb races but much more intense, so I'm hoping this will help me up the intensity level in mtb races. I know that I need to be doing long rides to go along with these races, though, 50 minutes on the bike at a time isn't going to cut it when the race is 2-2.5 hours long.

I don't know if anybody else regularly reads this except me, but I should be updating much more frequently now that I have a new phone and I can blog(with pics) from it. Whether it's a good story like this one or just a short blurb about something interesting I saw I'm gonna try to write something every day.

Dat's a big crawdad

Tonight was a going away party for David and Rachel at Ragin' Cajun. I had a crawfish poboy, it was really good but it sadly wasn't as big as this giant mudbug on the roof. David and Rachel are moving to Florida, we will miss them. They're going to meet us when we go on vacation later this year so that should be lots of fun, i'm really looking forward to it. 4th crit is tomorrow, there's a good chance of rain so we'll see how that turns out.

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I have surpassed my Wii Tennis plateau, i'm ready to give Patrick another attempt. This is also a test of blogging from my phone.