right brain update

long radio silence. been busy; been sick. 'cross season has been going well; that is, it *was* going well until i succumbed to ye olde swine flu. i've spent the last week mostly in bed. the worst part is the brain fog... even when i'm not on nyquil my brain is moving at about 1/25 normal speed.

i finished my NSF grant on time, fortunately before i got sick. i even turned it in a few days early. it feels very good to be done with that deadline... though the next deadline, the comprehensive exam, is imminent (contingent upon me recovering from this flu). i have a topic and i think i understand it pretty well, but i still need to pick which testable hypotheses i am going to propose experiments for. it's interesting, since there are so many unanswered questions in biology, it's like low-hanging fruit. which one of these will i test. and since it's a proposal exam, i don't have to have any intention of actually *doing * those experiments (in fact i shouldn't). so i can suggest expensive, or time-consuming, or radically new procedures, as long as i can defend why i picked them and what they would show. and so it goes.

a large part of what i wrote about in my nsf personal statement essay was how my... *ahem*... "unique" background has prepared me for studying and communicating science. i chose to draw (no pun intended?) from my background as a visual artist/designer - although not a very experienced or good one, since i tend to be way too self-critical to be good - to visualize and communicate science. and i've been doodling today with my new wacom bamboo. it's a really fun toy - opens up completely new frontiers. so far nothing i've produced has really been scientific at all, but i am having fun playing with my own perception of visual objects. the little picture at the top of this post is one of the things i've spat out - this one probably took 10 minutes tops. i'm not sure if she's princess leia, or if she's got huge ears, or even if she's human, but i kind of liked her and felt like i could maybe let the world see her too.

it's almost like the virus has shut down the left hemisphere of my brain. my right brain seems to be functioning just fine - or maybe even better than usual. without that annoying left brain timekeeper ruler metric voice i can just produce things that resonate with how i feel. hopefully later on this will translate to me being able to communicate the ideas i am nurturing that have to do with development and neural circuits.

i also expect there to be bicycles in the near future. a future without bicycles is grim indeed.

Cross season begins! CC #2 race report

This past weekend was my first 'cross race of the season (finally!) I was a little late to the game because first, I was tired from road season and wanted time off, second, my 'cross bike was in pathetic shape, and third, I caught a little virus that ended up keeping me down for awhile.

The time off was great, but it couldn't last forever, because I get antsy. I finally got my Surly back in some sort of racing shape, and I'm mostly recovered from the virus, so this Sunday I headed up with my friend Jon to the Cross Crusade race at Rainier High School. I have to say, RHS is a damn near ideal 'cross venue. One complaint: It's a high school, so there's no alcohol on campus (and the whole venue is on-campus). No beer garden, no pre-race whiskey nip, no post-race pint of homebrew. Oh well - it was perfect in every other way... and it is, after all, a high schoool. I can respect that.

The weather was partly cloudy and kind of chilly, but the sun poked through in the afternoon before my race, and the course was bone-dry (and thus dusty). I didn't get a chance to pre-ride the course, but I did tool around campus and checked out most of the course from the sidelines. The crux of the course was the long climb - since the campus is built into the side of a hill, there was a lot of climbing, and most of it all in one section. More on that later.

My race didn't start until 2, and we had arrived around 11:30 or so, so I had plenty of time to warm up. The ride from the car to registration/start/portopotties was downhill, which meant it was a climb to get back. So just riding around I got a pretty decent warm up. But I had brought my fancy new impulse-buy trainer (a pink kinetic road machine, from biketiresdirect - great deal AND super-fast FREE shipping!) so darned if I wasn't going to use it! After the singlespeed men's race started (which my friend/carpool buddy Jon was racing in) I went back to the car and set up the trainer, plugged in my iPod for a good 30 minute session - easy, then some harder intervals. Around 1:30 I popped the trainer back in the trunk and rode down to the course.

I was feeling surprisingly good after my warmup, and also surprisingly, given it was my first race of the season and my first race as a cat B, not terribly nervous, at least until well after callups as we were all corralled in the start chute. I lucked out on the callups - they do it randomly, based on the last digit of your number (after they call up the series leaders). My number is 172, and they called the 2's maybe 4th out of all the digits. So I was in maybe the fourth row for the start. The start was tricky, too, because the start chute was pretty much all gravel. We were fortunately staged on the grass, which made it easier to get started, since gravel is much kinder when you have momentum. So that was good. The Masters women had to start in the gravel, which I really don't envy them for.

The Masters A women went off first, with a 30 second gap before our start. Then we went off - all 54 or so women in the B field. I had practiced starts the week before, so I felt pretty good about mine: push, shift, push push shift, keep clicking into higher gears as high as you can go, picking off as many people as possible before the course bottlenecks. After about 30 yards of flat gravel, we turned onto the course just above the GRAVEL HILL OF DOOM, and started the paved part of the climb. I passed some women in the start, but I also got passed by a few. I think was in the top 15 or so by the top of the climb, where the course took a left hand turn off the pavement and onto a running trail. It was flat, and straight, and fast. A tricky turn with a big gnarly root in the middle of the trail, then another section of straight trail, with a slight downhill. Another left hand turn onto a section of LONG, FAAAAAST descent. Some bumpy roots in that section, but not too bad. At the bottom of the descent was an off-camber left, into a section with a lot of off-camber turns and a loop around a tree. Another turn, more descent, into a really rocky bumpy section at the bottom. Short rocky kick, gravel trail section, and the first pit entrance. It was at this point that I blew past LK, last week's winner and all-around monster (in a good/fast way). She was clearly having bike issues and was trying to get to the pit. that sucks: you win some, you lose some. Anyway. Around a practice field, a set of double barriers - hey, look, I've been practicing my dismounts and remounts! My barrier hops, not so much. That's still hard. Single track through the wooods, a couple of short kicker hills. Back out onto the grass, a really bumpy grassy off-camber section. More turns, a fast off-camber descent, then a blind corner into a barrier before a run-up. This dismount killed me on most of the laps: if you didn't get off before the uphill started you lost time. Pushed my bike up that hill every time, instead of shouldering it, because I ride 28 lbs of surly 4130 cromo, what's your excuse? Remount at the top of the hill and fly down another fun steep descent, a couple more turns on off-camber grass, past the pit again, then onto the gravel. This is where you know it's coming: THE HILL. OF DEATH.

You can see all the riders in front of you struggling up the hill. It makes you want to slow down, so you don't get caught behind them. But you know it's better to build momentum before the climb, then shift down just as you hit the incline. There are only two tracks through this brutal climb, because it is doubletrack gravel road. And it is steep - probably 18%. The rocks are not your friend. Neither is the dust. It's alright on the first lap since the only people in front of you are the faster girls, but on the subsequent laps there are slow beginners and juniors slogging up the hill, complicating things. I think I only cleaned this hill once out of four laps - I had to unclip at the top on two laps, and actually was forced to dismount on the third.

After you cleared the top of that GRAVEL HILL OF DOOM, though, you weren't done, because you had just come to the point where the start chute meets the rest of the course. The climb leveled out a little when the pavement started but was still very much up hill until the finish line. Then, past the finish, it kept going up. Up and up and up, until the flat fast part, and then the descent. Off-camber turns, u-turns around trees, flying past teams warming up by the bottom of the descent. Bumps. Rocks. Barriers and dust. And on every lap, as much as you didn't want it to come, before you knew it you were back at the HILL OF DEATH. Grinding up that stupid unpaved ridiculous brutal climb. As I finished the third lap, and heard the bell, the woman next to me gasped, "i don't think I have another one in me!" Like i felt any better. Seriously, after that hill, my eyes were blurred, I was breathing like an asthmatic emphesymic whale. And I was fully focused on not throwing up. But there was just one more lap. So you have to crank it out, even if you don't think you have it in you. (Turns out she was lying: i know, I saw her finish.)

Push as hard as you can - without puking or passing out - on that climb. Take the descent a little hot. Clean those turns at the bottom - blowing past that beginner rider who's clearly unsure of this part. Show her how it's done, just like they showed you last year and the year before. Push through the bumpy section and dismount cleanly for those barriers because it takes less energy to do it right. Don't cry as the lactate builds in your muscles as you crush the little kickers in the woods. Just keep going, pass that girl in front of you, but don't knock over the junior in your way. Go go go - you've done all this three times before. Totally botch the dismount before the runup, because you forget to get off in time. But run - RUN - that run up, and don't even slow down as you jump back on for that screamin' descent. Doesn't matter if you're not clipped in until you get to the bottom. Clear those corners, don't worry about cutting off that girl (she's a beginner; she needs to learn) in the u-turn by the pit. This will be the LAST TIME you have to climb that HILL. OF. DEATH.

Build up momentum on the flat. Go go go. Hill starts. Downshift. Stand up. Push. Weight over the back tire prevents slippage but you need to stand up for leverage, and to keep your front wheel from popping up. People in front of you hate this hill too; they're just as tired as you; use that to your advantage. See up there, not too far ahead? That's Tori, who's been your rabbit slash battle buddy this whole race. She is really cooked. You can catch her! Bump up onto the pavement and upshift a gear - this is the climactic sprint finish. Push it until you're tire and tire with Tori. She accelerates. You accelerate. She gains an inch. You stand up and MASH. Tori yells a profanity (you'd do the same!) as you take the sprint - the "sprint" - for 13th place. Yeeah!

Downshift all the way. Soft pedal another ten yards. Get off the course, come to a stop, and start hacking up all that dust that's gathered in your lungs. That hacking noise? It means you gave it what you had. Your pulmonary cilia will take care of the dust.

Chug something sugary if your road trip buddy is as awesome as mine and hands you Powerade when he finds you at the finish. Collapse briefly onto the grass. Try as hard as you can not to vomit. Complain loudly about how much you hated that course - pure sweet hell. Commiserate with everyone else at the finish line - wow, that hill was BRUTAL! Wasn't that horrible? That was no fun at all!

For some reason we all maintain this spirit at the end of a race: wow, we hated that, that was horrible. But we all know that we're all lying: in the middle of all that pain, that suffering, that flavor of bile and stomach acid in your throat and the juicy wheezy rumble in your lungs, is the most fun you have ever had in your life, on or off the bike. Pure, sweet, unadulterated hell. Until you try it, you probably can't understand; try it once, though, and you're hooked for life.

Yeah, I think that was a pretty good first race for the season. Great course, awesome weather, very respectable competitors. I'm looking forward to next week, which is supposed to be a similar course, except it's not at a high school which means BEER. Which is correct and appropriate for cyclocross. AND, I found out on Sunday that if I just jump through a few red tape hoops, I can qualify for the Collegiate National Championship race this December in Bend. Holy crap yes please! My first nationals - way sooner than I'd expected! My friend and teammate Sonja will be there too - we have just about exactly two months to prepare. Cross Nats, here we come. But in the meantime, Cross Crusade, here I am. I've missed you!

My name is Kat Reinhart, and I'm a cyclocross addict.

Balance nutrition bars

Confession: I LOVE energy bars. Clif bars make up an embarassing proportion of my diet. I've tried most of the bars on the market - especially the ones under $1.50 each - and Clif remains consistently my favorite. But they were $1.19 (good, but not awesome) at the market today, and another bar caught my eye at the same price: Balance nurition.

I glanced at the ingredients and nutrition info, and found it to be inoffensive enough to buy: 210 calories, 15 g protein, no HFCS or hydrogenated oils. Okay.

Bought a couple, brought them home. Am now eating one. It's hard and chewy, like many of the high-protein bars on the market, and claims to be "caramel nut blast" flavor. Meh. The caramel is inoffensive enough, but for the texture of the bar, I would expect it to have more than 15 g of protein (out of a 50g bar). Chewy. Not really tasty. Meh.

Think I'll go back to Clif bars.

good bye road season

Well, I finished up the road racing season last weekend with the Eugene Celebration Stage Race. I really enjoyed the whole race, ended up taking 5th overall in cat 4, and got myself a stage win in the crit. Stage racing is so much more difficult than single-day races - it's hard to recover and eat enough food and get enough sleep in order to get up the next day and race again! It was really fun though. I'm kind of glad that road season is over, but am definitely looking forward to 'cross, and to next year.

Up next: Psycho Cross #1 this Saturday. I just need to install cables and a chain on my Cross-Check and it's all ready to go! Can't wait. 'Cross season is going to be off the hook.

In the meantime, I spent the past week out in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada riding a cruiser bike around the playa, climbing no hills whatsoever, but learning a lot about holding my line in a sand pit. I wasn't expecting my trip to Burning Man to be anything vaguely resembling training, but I actually got quite a bit of exercise riding around the city and the playa. Black Rock City is something else entirely - a temporary city, built by volunteers, populated by artists, intellectuals, freaks, geeks, hippies, celebrities, and "normal" people. I could probably spend a couple of hours talking about everything that I did and saw, but I think I'm going to leave that for later, or for another forum. I survived my first Burn, and I have a feeling that there will be many more to come! What a week. I think that's all I'll say about it here and now.

Co-Motion Criterium

I went out and raced the Co-Motion Criterium this afternoon. The Co-Motion Classic is a stage race for tandems, and the final stage was today's crit. Fortunately, the promoters decided to let us non-tandem riders[*] have a go as well. Unfortunately, they didn't have the turnout or the time to run more than one womens field, so it was a combined field - from Cat 1 through Cat 4. Even so, only 7 women turned out.

It's getting late and I don't really have the energy to write a whole race report right now, but here's the abbreviated version. The field was shattered early on due to a couple of attacks by the stronger riders. I suffered like hell for a few laps alone against the wind after an attack got away with 3 riders. I thought I could catch them, then they would open the gap. Just as I was nearly spent, they rang the bell for the prime lap - and the 3 leaders sped up. Crap. I was pretty much toast at this point. Halfway through the prime lap, someone got shelled from the lead group of 3, and not too long after that lap I caught up with her. It was Pam Archer, Lisa's teammate on Therapeutic Associates. I sat on Pam's wheel for a few seconds, but she was pretty cooked too, so I took a pull... we traded pulls for the rest of the race, maintaining our lead over 5th place, but not gaining at all on the lead group. It was Lisa Turnbull and Cara Bussell off the front, and, well... those two are dang strong girls, especially Lisa, who had just raced the tandem stage race with Galen - and won overall, beating all the guy/guy teams! So basically it turned into Pam and I trading pulls. After a good solid effort of team time trial style riding, she rode off away from me for 3rd place (because HELLO, she's a cat 2 and I'm a 4) and I pulled in for 4th. It was hard, especially with the really strong cross winds, but it was really fun, as always. I think that I am getting better at crit riding, but I still need to work on following wheels through turns.

Mad props for the day go to my UO teammates Mike Brunelle, for winning the Cat 3 mens race with a ballsy solo attack FTW, and Galen Mitterman, for not only winning the Tandem race with Lisa, but also making the Pro/1/2 field hurt a good bit with a (perhaps ill-advised) solo flyer early on. He stayed away for 5 or 6 laps, but eventually the field caught up. Damn impressive pain tolerance, man. Mark Hibbard won the P/1/2 race, setting a good example for his son, who was there to see his win, even though he won't be born for another 4 weeks or so.

Next weekend is the Eugene Celebration Stage Race. It'll be my first stage race ever. I'm nervous and excited... especially for the prologue stage, which is the 5K uphill time trial up McBeth Road. That hill is my nemesis!

[*] You will never catch me stoking a tandem - I am *way* too much of a control freak. I'd captain one, though.

Fight Like Susan

If you read any bike blogs at all, you are prbably already aware that Susan Nelson, wife of the Fat Cyclist, passed away last night. For someone I never met, Susan was (and still is!) such an inspiration. Via his blog, Fatty inspired me to get personal in the war on cancer; because of him, and Susan, I rode my first century in the LiveStrong Challenge in June. Because of Susan's courage, thousands of people are stronger and more courageous as we face the scariest thing in the world. I don't know anyone who isn't scared to death of cancer; I know that my family and I have been lucky - my mom's cancer was caught early and she is now almost two decades cancer -free; my grandmother's battle has also been comparatively easy. We have been lucky. But we are still fighting, every day. Cancer is evil and horrible. It robs us of people, of time, of health, without remorse. So we have to fight it remorselessly. Tirelessly. Endlessly. Fight cancer with every fiber of our beings, like Susan did. Because she sure did fight, with courage that even her family didn't think she had. Fight like Susan.

Thank you, Fatty, for sharing your family's battle and inspiring all of us. Thank you, Susan, for showing us how to fight. And thank you Lance, as well, for everythig you have done. Cancer sucks, but if we all fight we can win, just like Susan.

Fight on. Fight like Susan. And fuck cancer in the face.

(sorry if this is ridden with typos, I am posting from my phone.)

Eugene-Roubaix

well, that decided to auto-publish for no reason. apologies for the phantom feed, RSS subscribers.

This past Saturday was the now-fabled Eugene-Roubaix road race, put on by Midtown Racing. It was an absolute blast.

I rode out to the course because it was a beautiful day, I didn't start until mid-afternoon, and it isn't really all that far at all. The ride out was scenic - midday Saturday on the bike path, with the sun shining. Not terribly crowded, but definitely populated, with people and birds.

To get to the start/finish from the bike path, the most direct route took me up and over the one big climb in the course, Oak Hill Road. It's a bit of a climb. Not really terribly tall, but quite steep, and going the direction of the race, a really sketchy off-camber turn at the bottom of a flying descent. I climbed up this hill in reverse, watching lots of guys negotiate the descent as well as the climb as a warmup for their race. I got to the start area, registered and paid, and soon it was 2:00 and the men started lining up. Cat 3 and Cat 4-5 fields - both huge - went off before the women lined up.

I counted 12 women at the start, in a combined Cat 4/Masters field. We rolled out, neutral up and over the first hill, and started climbing, then descending, turning, up over a roller, a right hand turn, and then suddenly the lead car honked and we were racing. The pace quickened quite a bit immediately as a few girls started attacking. No one really had teams to speak of, so tactics were a lot different than in the races I've been used to. I planned ahead with Mackenzie, and based on what I've learned racing collegiate, figured i could get her the win (and place well myself) by exploiting a little strategy.

Crow road, heading south away from Eugene, has a little riser, and then a long descent, with some twisty sections but mostly flat for the most part. Coming up over the riser I attacked a little, then someone else would attack, but for the most part everyone toward the front of the group seemed intent mostly on holding onto the wheel they had, not sharing in the work, and certainly not letting in one who had just made an effort. So I got pretty tired of the fact that I had to attack from the back and then fall all the way back when I got tired.

Coming off a right turn onto Petzel (?) Road, the course started climbing a bit with a series of rollers. Nothing too high, but enough to break up the monotony of the flats, and wear some people out. The pack still held together for the most part through this section, then the course turned again, and the road was much flatter, with a bit of a head/crosswind. Again with the pacelining attempt, this time it got a bit more organized, and I thought we had it down for awhile. Then Mackenzie attacked, we chased - Serena attacked, we chased... and so on. Another right turn and we were onto the final stretch, with a few miles of flat plus a little kicker or two, and pretty soon the gravel section was coming up. I was leading going in when Mackenzie attacked and jumped into the gravel section right in front of me. I grabbed her wheel, and in we went.

I was so focused on holding onto MK's wheel I didn't really notice the point at which a gap opened up behind me; all I know is that at one point I could see someone's shadow behind me and then awhile later I couldn't. I stole a quick glance backwards after we hit pavement, and couldn't see anyone - though that doesn't mean they were far behind. I focused again on the race, gave Mackenzie a tow across the finish line for the first lap, and started to fade before we started climbing.

That hill - Oak Hill - crap. It seemed so easy when we did it neutral at the start; this time, though, I was chasing a rabbit all the way up, in hopes that we could work together to hold off the field. MK is a much better athlete in general, and a stronger climber in particular, than I am... by a long shot. (She is an elite triathlete after all.) So I was in full-on suffer mode, trying not to throw up, by the time I made it to the top. She was waiting. We descended, taking the turn cautiously, with me chasing the whole time to the corner of Crow Road again.

What happened for the next half lap was exactly this: Me focusing on MK's wheel, watching the pavement blur by, hanging on for dear life. We had a couple of updates from our lead and follow cars as to the time gaps: 35 seconds on the first chaser (Serena), and then 1:30 on her, 2:30 on the next chaser, and back from there. We had shattered the pack - oops! Er, intentionally.

So I hung on as long as I could, but at one point, I needed to swap out my water bottles and I couldn't use one of my cages, because I hadn't tightened it enough when I installed it that morning and it was rattling like crazy. I couldn't have a bottle in it or it got much worse, so I kept one in my jersey pocket for most of the race. But toward the end of the hilly section on the back side of the course, I wanted to swap bottles because the one in my functional cage was empty so I rolled back and handed the bottle to Galen. By the time the handoff was finished, Mackenzie was just far enough ahead that as hard as I chased, I never caught back onto her wheel. My race became a time trial. The only thing that mattered was holding off 3rd place. Time trial time... sufferfest time. I was slowing down. I knew I couldn't catch the elite fucking triathlete ahead of me, so I guess I dialed down the effort... well, it was enough for Galen to notice in the follow car, so he pulled up beside me to yell at me a bit. You're slowing down! Push harder! Catch her, dammit! "Ha! That girl is a fucking beast! I can't catch her!" STOP TALKING AND RACE.

Head down. Maximal effort plus 10%. Last right turn. Last kicker before the gravel. And then the gravel. Hold the line, avoid the holes, don't slow down. Halfway through the gravel section, a couple of cheering guys fixing a flat. Another group by the port-o-potties, a few more cheers and words of encouragement. Suddenly, the 1K sign. A quick backward glance: phew, no one right on my wheel. Head back down. Hammer time. 200M, flat becomes false flat, and then perceptibly uphill. The last few meters pass and I'm across the line, people are cheering, wow, that was so much fun. Holy cow I got 2nd place! I worked hard for it, definitely... but... wow, my efforts are actually paying off. That, I have to say, is the coolest feeling ever.