snippets

Took this picture over break and wanted to share it here:

Crows dive-bombing a bald eagle at Seward Park in Seattle, taken the day after Thanksgiving 2008. There are some other new ones up on my flickr.

In the past week I have:
- started eating right, thanks to Precision Nutrition (and a bit of willpower)
- ridden every day, including around 70 miles on Saturday, an hour on Sunday, and an hour and a half today, bringing my 3-day total to somewhere around 100 miles
- turned 26 years old
- gotten an Oregon drivers license (goodbye, ever paying sales tax again!)
- assembled some sexy bike parts for a major upgrade to the Serotta
- thrown a pretty kick-ass birthday party
- reached the fundraising minimum for my liveSTRONG challenge participation (thanks to everyone who has contributed!)
- started lifting weights again
- started running (just a little, don't die of shock!)
- and begun my second quarter at grad school.

My schedule this quarter is pretty conducive to being able to ride a lot, provided I get my ass in gear in the morning: all my classes and other responsibilities are after noon, and on Wednesdays, I don't have anything before 4pm. I predict many mornings out on the road resulting in a silly shit-eating grin on my face all day.

I've also discovered that I can run to the top of the hill behind my house and back down in around 10 minutes, giving me a fast workout to do before breakfast, which will almost certainly pay off come 'cross season. Eventually I'll start doing it twice, but for now, I'm just running up and down once. And by "running" I mean jogging and intermittently walking uphill and running downhill... though my goal is to be able to run a bit further before I have to walk each day, and eventually I'll be able to run the whole thing. Ultimately I hope to get to the point where I can just sprint up that fucker like it's nothing... but I'm a long way from that.

Life is good.

LIVESTRONG Challenge: help me raise funds!

Guess what? Cancer sucks. If you don't have a close relative who has had cancer, chances are several of your best friends do. Cancer therapies and survival odds are improving, thanks to research, but there is still a long way to go before we can say we've beaten cancer.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation does a lot of great work, from funding basic research on cancer and cancer survivorship to supporting cancer victims and survivors as well as their families. The work that the foundation has done is amazing, but since cancer hasn't declared defeat yet, there's still work to be done.

That's why I'm going to participate in the LAF LiveStrong Challenge in Seattle on 6/21/2009. I'm registered for the 70-mile bike ride, which is farther than I've ever ridden in a single day, and will definitely be a challenge for me physically and mentally. I'd like to ask all of you to help me in this pursuit. I have to raise at least $250 by June to be able to participate, but I really want to raise a lot more than that. I'm teaming up with Elden Nelson of Fat Cyclist, and hundreds (if not thousands) of other cyclists, runners, and people who have been affected by cancer for the 2009 LiveStrong Challenge as Team Fat Cyclist: Fighting for Susan. (Susan is Elden's wife, who has been struggling with metastatic breast cancer for a few years now. The team is named for her, but I am also riding in honor of my parents, Bill and Cindy Reinhart, who are both cancer survivors, as well as my grandma, Sally Hightower, who is currently fighting - and winning - against breast cancer.) Our collective goal is to raise a million dollars together - and if we all chip in as much as we can, we can easily exceed that. Even if you can only donate $5, every little bit adds up!

To help out, visit my fundraising page (also linked in the sidebar) and donate now, donate later, donate early and donate often! It's all tax-deductible and all goes directly to the LAF to help people with cancer. (Registration fees, which I have already paid, cover the event overhead.) Give $1 or $100, every bit helps!

Thanks for your help!