Training to Live

macarons are beautiful. they are elegant, fancy, and absolutely delicious. i don’t get to have them very often because they’re not really your every day kind of cookie, and when you can find them, they are usually quite expensive (though quite worth it).

when heather proposed having a macaroon monday, where we could all try something challenging that we’d never done before, i was inspired to attempt the macaron. it was definitely not easy. i had to get almond meal (because i don’t have a food processor to grind my own almonds in), age my egg whites for a few days, and measure out everything extremely precisely on the food scale. i carefully followed helene’s instructions from this article and from her numerous blog posts on macarons (she is the expert)

attempt #1

clearly a fail!

i didn’t do a good job of taking pictures while making them because i needed to be 100% focused on the task at hand. after the above fiasco (mostly cause by my own ineptness, a) at leaving them in the oven too long and b) mostly because instead of making meringue at the beginning, i sort of started off on the royal icing path when i accidentally mixed all the sugar – powdered and granulated – in with the whipping whites. royal icing =/= macarons. that is why i hardly got any lift), i gathered up my courage to go again.

that’s more like it! peaks!

after i mixed in the almonds and powdered sugar (and red food colouring), i had to let the macarons sit for an hour before heading into the oven. this is supposed to help them develop a skin on the outside.

then they had their trip into the oven (12 minutes, at a low 300°F). you can see little feet. not a whole bunch of lift, but a definite improvement on round #1. muuuuuuch better.

i had trouble filling them. they were fragile and i opted not to pipe my filling on, but rather use a spoon. this resulted in broken cookies. (sorry about the terrible lighting). i used some dulce de leche filling that i had in the fridge because the biscuits that i’d made earlier in the day to go with our supper’s soup used up all my cream for the originally planned ganache. i think i basically got the effect i was going for, though in future, i would coordinate colours with buttercreams and flavours (i just went with pink because that’s what i had).

i learned a lot from these two attempts. folding powdered almonds and sugar into whipped egg whites is serious stuff. you really really need to sift the almonds extra (and grind them super fine yourself, if possible). next time, i would add the colouring right to the egg whites instead of folding it in with the sugar/nut mix. you’re supposed to use powdered colouring, which may have worked better, but i couldn’t find any of that, so i used gel. this may have had negative impacts on the results, but i quite liked the pink effect. also, parchment paper seemed to work a lot better at having the cookie bottoms not stick than the silpats. you have to wait till they are 100% cool before you try and remove them. a thin metal flat tool is good for this job.

i am definitely glad i took the plunge. macarons are something that i’d always sort of thought about trying but never really had the guts or incentive to just do it. so thanks, heather, for the extra motivation! i will definitely be attempting these again in the future. i’m looking forward to seeing how everyone else’s brand new challenges turned out. maybe i’ll find another exciting thing to try. we certainly have enjoyed eating these. someday, i’ll be able to package up tissue lined boxes of these to give away as presents, like these. for now, they stay in my kitchen.

i had an extra long labour day weekend because of my work schedule and since we’d planned to have a bunch of friends up to the cottage that weekend anyway (the cottage is about a 3 hour drive away from here), we figured we’d make an entire week of it. as luck would have it, the weather didn’t really cooperate. it was cold and rainy all weekend long. after our friends left and we enjoyed the one sunny/warm day there was going to be, jon and i hightailed it to his parents’ farm, about 30 minutes away from their cottage, for the rest of the week. although the farm isn’t home for me, it sure feels like it.

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we didn’t have the relaxing week we originally planned (thanks, weather), it was wonderful to be at the farm anyway, as always. we ate loads of good super fresh, local food, worked hard at putting veggies away in the freezer for the winter [a great big pot of ultra veggified pasta sauce (which i'm calling my 500 metre sauce, since everything we put in it came from within 500 metres of the kitchen we cooked it in!, 2 gallons of crushed/stewed tomatoes for making chili with this week (and oh what chili we made this week!!! at least 17 quarts put away in the freezer), and a bushel of red peppers chopped up and frozen]. we went to a small town country fair, played with kittens, watched movies (and napped) and it was good.

i think this photo (taken on my iphone with the super fun ShakeIt app) really captures the beauty of the country (big open blue sky), fall, and the colourful energy of the fair. shortly after i took this, i proceeded to eat a big bag of cotton candy. ohhhhh was my tummy ever not happy about that! (it was certainly enjoyable to eat, however). i’d never been happier to see vegetables again.

we came back to regular-old-at-home life for a week, but come monday, the craziness begins again. i am flying off to the great city of winnipeg for a work conference and then immediately after i come back, i have a half marathon to run! my training over the last few weeks has been pretty abysmal (i blame the weather again.) i’m sure i’ll make it through, even if not super quickly! i’ve been to winnipeg once before, but only very briefly (i flew into their airport and had lunch at a quizno’s before driving out northwest to a wedding. not so exciting) so i’m hoping to have a bit of exploration time.

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in other, more creative news, i have been working on a lot of projects, art and otherwise. sadly nothing concrete to share yet though! in august i got an email about a super fun sounding workshop that one of my favourite bloggers (elise) was running on how to make minibooks (like a scrapbook but on a smaller physical scale {hence the “mini”} and with a much more casual concentrated or super stretched out approach). my dining table is covered in all kinds of fun new supplies so i can start making and doing. the workshop was 2 weeks long and i learned tons of neat tricks and ideas.

also, another favourite blogger (kal) is running a different kind of workshop right now, which i am also signed up for. it is called “nurture your creativity and be bulletproof”. i’ve been through a bunch of stuff at work over the past year and a half that i really could have been a bit more bulletproof for (who couldn’t!) so i figured the class would be more than useful just for that. the nurturing my creativity bit is a bonus and pairs perfectly with elise’s class that just wrapped up. i am really looking forward to the next 4 weeks!

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last month i finally joined the twenty-first century and ditched my ultra crappy super old pay as you go plan cellphone, which had a battery that only lasted a day (without use) and no other redeeming features (which meant that it was usually left at home, battery uncharged, with no paid time on it! not so useful). i bit the bullet and got an iphone4 (expensive but SO LOVELY), which i guess i was lucky enough to score right when they were released to canada – everyone is out of stock now. having the internet in my pocket has made things so fun and easy! i plan to do a lot more on the fly adventure blogging, once i find a good app for this. any recommendations? i’m signed up for posterous, so i might go that route, but it would have to be separate from Training to Live here. the wordpress app has left me unimpressed (photos only at the end of the text? no thanks!).

other favourite apps so far:

teuxdeux (amazing amazing. i went through a whole bunch of to do type apps before i settled on this one. i love that you can have multiple accounts. and that it automatically pushes everything you didn’t do today onto tomorrow. i also love that you can go back and see what you did on any given day. and that you can assign tasks into any day in the future). also it automatically syncs with the web version, so you can enter everything on your computer at home and have it with you on the go.

doodle jump – super fun and a great game to play when you’re staying put for a bit. i just downloaded tetris for an alternative for my upcoming trips.

shakeIt – just like your old favourite polaroids

mobile banking

mindbody (so i know what yoga classes are being offered where, RIGHT NOW). i’ve been missing from yoga since june and i’ve made a pledge to myself to try and get to class at least once or twice a week.

starbucks (mostly to seek out free wifi. when i was in chicago last month and didn’t have roaming data, i discovered that just being in the vicinity of a starbucks would give me the internet. it was awesome. plus, you never know when you’ll need a pumpkin spice fix! this is good for being in new cities). also, for newbs to the ‘bucks, you can create your own drinks!

alarm clock pro – my alarm clock that i’ve used for the last 5 years recently stopped working (sort of) and i have since been trying to find a good replacement that wouldn’t set me back a ton of money. i came up short. until the day i decided to try out alarm clock pro, for the low low price of 0.99$, it is everything i’ve ever wanted in an alarm clock without a) having to spend a ton of money and b) adding more crap to my night stand. perfect.

and of course, tweetdeck. i still heart twitter!

what apps do you go to?

in case you missed it, part I is here, II and III were eaten by the universe. i’ll fill you in – there were 13 cobs of corn one week and a watermelon (that was possibly the most ridic) another week. plus all the usuals, of course. peaches, plums, apricots, maybe a few zucchinis here and there, etc. jon had to reinforce one of my panniers the other day because the connection mechanism that holds it onto my bike was getting loose. oopsies! i’m back in business now.

this is how i do it. big panniers and a spare bungee cord just in case.

the loot:

-cable + padlock

-2 bags of cheese curds from thornloe

-some temiskaming cheese (also thornloe. best cheese place ever!)

-a purple bag filled with my work clothes and other sundries (deoderant, comb, etc)

-2X 1.5L of seedless concord grapes, for a raisin making project

-3L basket of delicious peaches

-a big bag of italian plums for some plumjum (i’m currently making the bellaeats plum cake that we loved last year with my last week’s bunch)

this week i actually managed to restrain myself a little bit. i didn’t get any veggies, so we will probably hit up the saturday market. it was the last day that thornloe was going to be at my market, so they had some killer sales and i stocked up. dill flavoured cheese curds are amazing. is this just a canadian thing? at the HLS, when i talked about eating cheese curds, i remember someone looking at me like i was crazy. also when i described poutine…. it’s delicious stuff! really!

for supper tonight, jon made burgers with some beef we got from his uncle’s farm. these burgers were definitely in contention with the epic burger from chicago.

vs

ok. they were both really really good – grass fed beef is where it’s at! i couldn’t tweet about the one on the left and have it displayed up on a screen like at epic.

i have to say that was a pretty cool thing for them to have. the top three posts on the left and right columns were my dining companions: stina, mary and dawn. i couldn’t tweet because i didn’t have roaming data on my phone but i did when i got back to the hotel!

i have some chicago posts to catch up on. they’ll come. soon. eventually. i hope. this week has been kind of crazy.

i ran a 15K race last weekend. i have a 10K this week! i’m hoping to splash my 56:08 time out of the water! one more week of work and then i have a whole 5 glorious days off to relax at the cottage and farm. i have some fun projects planned for while we’re out there, so hopefully also some good blogging will come of that too! in the meantime, i better get back to my cake.

this morning started off very early (for a day that i didn’t have to go into work, that is) – i took a bus to the subway station, then the subway all the way downtown, then a shuttle to the ferry and then a short ferry ride to the toronto island airport to catch my flight to this windy city. i was flying a newish airline that i’d never flown before but had heard awesome things about. every single one was true! the waiting lounge was lovely (free drinks – cappucinos, lattes, tazo tea, all kinds of juice bottles/pop, etc, and lots of snacks plus free wifi and comfy chairs), the staff were all extremely pleasant and everything just went really smoothly. plus all their branding/marketing is extremely sharp, and i’m kind of a sucker for gorgeous design! i’d fly with porter again in a second, even though actually getting to the airport is a little bit more complicated that going to the main toronto airport.

we flew into midway airport in chicago, and that was a breeze as well. i found anne almost immediately and she, rebecca and i headed onto the orange line to make our way to the hotel. i found my awesome roommate hanging out in the lobby. the hotel let us check in early, which was awesome because after an hour out in the super chicago humidity, i really needed a freshen up and a shoe change! then we met sarah and meg in the lobby to head to a lunch place that several friends had recommended to me called Lula’s. it was fabulous – very healthy food blogger worthy and interesting. i got a “taneka” sandwich. i don’t even know what that is, exactly, but it was yummy!

i love a sandwich that is packed with interesting stuff, and as you can see, this one is loaded!

then we decided to make our way back downtown to go on an architecture boat tour on the river, which also came pretty highly recommended to me by friends from around here. it was a bit cooler on the water (just a few degrees!), but mostly it was nice to just sit down and hang out somewhere after a busy morning of running around. chicago has some amazing architecture. i took a whole ton of pictures, but of course now i hardly remember anything about any of the buildings. i’m just going to leave you with a nice little selection to enjoy.

you can already see, just looking down the river, that chicago’s skyline is interesting.

lots of lift and draw bridges!! very cool (although slightly less cool when you’re in a car, stopped because the bridge is up. apparently in chicago, only on wednesdays and saturdays in the summer do the bridges move, so i guess that’s not too bad)

there’s a famous chicago architect who was super into triangles, so there are many buildings designed around that shape. i like triangles too!

trains and bridges! two of my favourite things.

i thought this wavy building in the middle was pretty wacky!

this is navy pier. we didn’t really *go* to it, but it was on my list of things to see. i haven’t decided if this counts or not! luckily i have a lot of time on sunday and most of monday to work on exploring the city a bit more.

after we took a quick cab back to the hotel (we were far too hot, sticky and exhausted to ride the train at rush hour), we checked in and grabbed our swag bags (holy! good thing i packed extra luggage inside my luggage) and came upstairs for a rest before the opensky cocktail party.

getting to the party took us a while, as apparently we walked RIGHT PAST harrison station, but we did eventually make it. it was lots of fun to meet so many people. the food was tasty and we each got a free drink ticket (which is more than enough drinks for this one! i also had many glasses of ice water because i was soooooo thirsty!). the photobooth was cool – mary and jennifer and i squeezed in just before it closed at 9! i don’t have any pictures from the event (besides the open sky prints!) because i accidentally left my camera battery charging in the hotel room. good one!

i met andrea (also from TO), stampy lisa, krista, kristina, callie (callieflower kitchen, who goes to the same university i did my undergrad in! even in the same program i started off in too), sabrina, jennifer, morgan, emily, susan, erin and many many other people i’m forgetting. it was nice to see a few familiar faces (from last year, other meetups, etc): caitlin, nienke, allie. i loved putting together faces and names with twitter handles!

at around 10, after la salle power co turned into a club (and the music started to get a little too loud), mary and i called it a night. there was a bit of a failed froyo mission with krista and kristina (and a few other people whose names slipped through my very seive-like brain). it was raining, but not hard enough to make things miserable. we took the L back to the hotel, and pretty much hopped right into bed! lots of chatting and late night blogging happened in our room before the lights eventually went out.

i am now up ridiculously early (the clock definitely said 4:xx when i woke up) and think i’m going for a little run before the morning begins. i should probably take it easy though, since it’s going to be a super super long day and i will need all the energy i can get later on! ) i really sound like a grandmother some days….:-P

yesterday we attended the funeral of a 24 year old young woman. heart heavy sadness. as with funerals (and weddings), it brought a lot of family together, and i did have the chance to meet many wonderful people from jon’s side. if only the circumstances were lighter… it was a nice service, anyway, and though i never had the chance to meet melanie during her all-too-short life, it seemed to do her spirit right. many happy memories were shared.

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jon’s parents sent us home with a trunkload of farm goods: a big bag of yellow and green beans, a sack of new potatoes, beets, zukes, a jar of blueberries and a big basket of red tomatoes. my own little garden patch is bountiful (even a little out of control) with tomatoes, peppers and varied herbs (basil, mostly). i decided that a big pot of pasta sauce would be a delicious way to use up many of the tomatoes and some other vegetables and be a great excuse to try out my newest toy: (whilst at the same time, crossing one thing off of my mighty life list, which i know, i haven’t quite posted my own yet. it’s coming)

the pasta express! it has 12 different attachments for all kinds of different shapes to extrude. it even does pretzels, bagels, and extrusion cookies!

jon’s sister was cleaning up her house last weekend and getting rid of unnecessary clutter. for some reason, this lovely pasta maker fell into that category for her. i happily took it off her hands, since i’ve been wanting to make pasta myself for ages now AND it’s an easy item on the list to cross off! hooray for fun, new (free!) appliances.

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making pasta sauce from scratch is fun, but it can get pretty messy! i basically used this recipe.

first you have to score the tomatoes, so they are easier to peel. i used a mix of romas from my garden, littlish rounds (also from my garden) and the big rounds from the farm. although my plants originally came from the farm, the tomatoes that stayed seem to have grown much bigger!

blanch for a few seconds and dunk in ice water before peeling

squeeze the seeds and goop out into the compost and squish the flesh

onions are required. i don’t like them much, but they cooked long enough to not be noticable.

basil from the yard along with a few cloves of garlique.

cook down and add tomato

add a bit of alcohol. wine is good, but i didn’t have any, so i went with a splash of fortified and then i simmered my sauce.

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we took a break to visit a nearby farmer’s market for some fruit.

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then it was pasta time!

i sadly don’t seem to have any pictures of the plated meal. i guess we ate everything up too quickly! the pasta was delicious. it’s hard for me to say whether or not it is better than bought, since i am obviously biased, but jon seemed to really enjoy it a lot! there will be much more experimenting with this in the future. much more.

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this is part of our veggie patch (before we finished weeding!!!) taken back in may. tomorrow i will try to get a picture of it now so you can see just how crazy the situation is. i literally have tomatoes coming out of my ears, and those pepper and basil plants in the foreground have been engulfed. my vegetables are a great source of happiness in my life right now.

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bike race tomorrow and a 60th anniversary party!

i feel so far behind on blogging! i’m going to start with this weekend and work my way backwards over the next couple weeks to get back into the swing of things. that way when i go to the HLS #2, i will feel like a real blogger.

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so yesterday, we drove about 2 hours west to the quaint little town of Port Colborne for a bike race jon had signed up for. Port Colborne is right on Lake Erie and the Welland Canal (and the welland river, i think), and this weekend was “Canal Days”, which is a festival of tall ships. This meant that all the lift bridges were raised (i no longer can love lift bridges anymore! now i just find them annoying), and getting around town was a bit (ok, a lot) of a challenge. nevertheless, it was a pretty fun day.

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while jon prerode the racecourse, i walked around town. i came across a lot of antique type cars.

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i’m a bit of a bridge nerd (another post on that to follow, soon!) so i had to capture these.

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port colborne is a pretty cute place.

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on my walk, i saw a non-tall-ship-ship

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i didn’t take a whole lot of pictures at the actual race. on the left is right before the starting line. jon is in the university of waterloo jersey. he came in 1st in the single speed men’s category on the right (in the middled, with the ridiculously large medal)

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then we went to check the festival out and see more of the town.

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the festival itself was a little disappointing. all of the tall ships (there were only 3!) were docked and none of them had their actual sails up. the rest of it was mostly just your average small town fair fare. there were also a whole lot of people. we did see one interesting thing while at dairy queen after the fair (it was WICKED HOT and i needed ice cream, stat)

check out this teeny tiny house! it has it’s own little sort-of driveway, and a deck (which is probably the size of the rest of the house). also note the air conditioning. it has it’s own electrical hookup and a house number completely separate from the white house on the right, which led us to believe that it actually is completely it’s own house, but we were unsure.

this has become a bit of a running joke in my office, and i feel like i should make it into a regular blog feature. every thursday (from june to october) at the park up the street from work, there is a little farmer’s market.  i love it and have talked about it here. as i mentioned,  i have a bit of a problem and usually tend to buy more than i need AND more than what i can manage to get home since i either walk/bus or ride my bike. this problem becomes exacerbated in the fall, during winter squash season. squash are big and heavy!

squash aren’t the only things challenging to get home though – summer fruits, while not as cumbersomely large and heavy are pretty fragile and prone to being squished.

this photo is actually from market a week and a half ago (asparagus season is sadly finished now)

my two panniers contained the following:

• bike lock (cable + combination lock; i leave a U lock at work)
• pair of shoes (the black flip flops)
• bike fixing stuff (tube, co2 cartridges, tire levers, etc)
• 2 pairs of capris (one from my morning bike ride and one from wearing at work)
• 1 zip up jacket
• the shirt I was wearing at work during the day
• various toiletries (comb, deoderant, etc)
• 1 big head of lettuce
• 2 bundles of asparagus
• 1 litre (maybe more?) of small cucumbers
• 1 quart of strawberries
• 1 quart of cherries
• 1 rosemary plant
• 1 lavender plant
• 1 large peashoot plant
• 1 tupperware of cheese
• my wallet
• bike gloves (it was too hot to wear them on the ride home)

in other news, i went for a 3K run in my vibrams yesterday and HOLY COW my calves are feelin’ it today. 3K was probably longer than i should have gone for, given that my last “barefoot” run was only 2K long and that was more than 2 months ago. i plan to try and use them more for actual running lots this summer (i mostly just wear them as walking/around town shoes). my next real race isn’t until mid-late august, so i think i’m going to ease off of serious training for a little while.

out of the 13 races i’ve done in the last 6 years, there have been only two occasions when i have raced a distance and performed worse than i had in the past.

the first time was my 5th half marathon that i ran last spring – it was much hotter than i expected and i was unprepared. i wasn’t drinking enough and i likely hadn’t trained properly. i ran the course 4 minutes slower than i had the year before, and for some reason, it didn’t really bother me. by the fall, i bounced back to my old time (almost a minute faster) and a few weeks later, took 3 more minutes off.

(this was taken at that race, early on before things got really rough)

the second time was this weekend. half marathon #8. it was on a course i had never done before (this year i purposefully sought out new, interesting races to do. i’d seen this one on angela’s blog – she did the 10K last year). the race was super small (only a few hundred people) and not as well organized as most of the other races i do (my race kit had 4 boxes of triscuit crackers and a whole bunch of wrist and menstrual cramp tummy heat packs. random!). there was no elevation map on the race website, so i had no idea how many hills there would be! i knew it would be hilly-ish, but i wasn’t ready for steep hills in kilometre 2. at kilometre 16, it started to POUR. thunderstorms. i was soaked in an instant (squishy shoes), which didn’t help my defeated attitude. i made the same mistakes i’ve made many many times in the past: i didn’t drink enough and i didn’t take in enough calories, and you better believe i hit the wall. my splits were getting slower, i was getting tireder (is that a word?), and i just wanted the whole thing to be over! i had enough energy at the end to sprint the last kilometre and pass a bunch of people, which made it obvious that i hadn’t run hard enough during the rest of the race.

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gretchen rubin says that people feel happier when they are improving and this is true for me! she talks about how having an atmosphere of growth is important. i don’t have any more races until august, but i will take this lesson and work towards growing and improving, not only my time, but my attitude and outlook on myself too! i know i can’t get faster each and every race forever because that is obviously unsustainable. from now on, i will embrace my body for what it can do, even if it’s not always as fast as i wish it were!

although i’ve had a lot of fun with a busy spring racing season, i am happy that i have a few months of “breather” time to refocus and really work hard on my speed and hills without the pressure of getting a long long run in every single weekend.

until then, here are some funny pictures.

i am wearing a bondi band that says yoga on it and has a stick figure in tree pose. i am trying to imitate that here.

although these were taken pre-race, this pretty much sums up how i would feel after!

can you see the pain in my eyes? my legs look so slow, i may as well be walking (oh and i did half to stop and walk a few times up parts of those killer hills). i look a tiny bit deranged on the right, no? it kind of felt awesome passing some people at the end.

pretty things around the web:

new favourite website/blogs that make my days better

1) [i] Lovelife

written by artist, photographer, and ray of sunshine, kal barteski

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2) enJOY it

written by artist, crafter, designer and creator of beautiful things, elise joy (what a perfect name!) blaha

the posts on her wedding are STUNNING. also, she has an etsy shop, and i want one of everything.

3) young house love

an absolutely beautiful home design blog, written by husband and wife team john and sherry. this makes me super excited to completely design/decorate our new home sometime in the next year or two.

4) tea and cookies

the intersection of food and life, written by tea! i don’t need to say any more. this blog is glorious.

i’m excited that the world cup has rolled around again. i’ve been watching (and loving) international soccer since 1986, when i was just 4 years old (cheering for argentina at the time). although i don’t have the patience (or the time or the cable) to watch entire games, i have had fun making my bracket and watching/reading highlights.

today is my monthly day off from work and boy do i need it! i ran a really hard race on saturday (SO. MANY. HILLS) and we spent all of sunday doing chores inside and outside the house. i woke up early this morning to go to hot yoga and then took a nice lon g epsom bath, which have both really helped with my sore quads. i’m planning to spend the rest of the day doing a mix of more chores and fun, relaxing things

last weekend, for the third year in a row, i went to a 24 hour bike race with jon. i was the team’s support crew, although this race doesn’t require too much in the way of “support” because cabins, showers, bathrooms and meals (even sports drink if you’re interested) are provided! i was mostly just there for moral support.

jon had a team of 4 men. there were about 7 mens teams, 1 all women team, a bunch of solo male riders (including 1 adorable 12 year old!), 2 solo females, and 5-6 tag teams. it was really laid back and ended up being an awesome weekend. they had an 11km course set up on the trails and over the 24 hours, the team members took turns doing laps. we started off with a round of single laps, switching to doubles and then doing triples overnight (giving the other team members more sleeping time!). different teams had different strategies- the team in the cabin next to ours stuck to singles. our friends that were a tag team of 2 did 5 laps on, 5 laps off. any way you look at it, racing for 24 hours is kind of insane. the solo riders are by far the most hardcore – the top 3 riders probably rode for about 20 of the 24 hours (stopping only for eating and bathroom breaks). yikes. nutrition is definitely a challenge, as you don’t have much time to really eat OR digest (and you are taking in an excess of carbs for race fuel), so it kind of does a number on the tummy.

we set up a tent next to our cabin for working on bikes in in case it rained. we ended up not needing it at all! (i did use it to get away from the bugs for a bit though)

they always do something a little bit different for the start of the race. the first year we did it, it was a le mans style, with helmets on the bikes. last year was just a regular start. this year they did le mans but helmets were on the racer’s heads. jon is good at these things, and got a spot near the front of the pack, giving his team a bit of an edge.

jon is in the yellow and black jersey.

i wore my vibram five fingers on the first day and ended up making tons of friends! everyone wanted to chat about my shoes. it was pretty awesome. they are definitely a great conversation piece.

some reps from IMBA (international mountain biking association) were there. i love their vehicle!

some pictures from the weekend:

jon on the left // xavier on the right

second solo female and her 12 year old son who rode with her // the two solo females

three solo male winners // female team

mixed team // third place men’s

second place men’s team (team doppler effect!!!) // first place men’s

youngest (and cutest) rider // 3rd place tag team

second place tag team // first place tag team

what i loved most about this race was the sportsmanship. so many people had mechanical issues with their bikes. on our team, jon’s fork was not working 2 days before the race, part of jeff’s fork was damaged the night before the race, jon’s seat post was not staying up during the race, then right before one of his laps, the collar holding the seat post in broke, one of jeff’s pedals came off, some guy on another team cracked his frame, etc, etc, etc. it was awesome to see everyone step in to help each other out. competitors offering up spare parts so other teams could go on – quite inspiring. also, it makes me happy that in my sport, there isn’t much chance of a mechanical failure ending my race.

it was a fun but exhausting weekend. i was happy to have monday off from work to recover and sleep! three years ago, the guys entered a 5 man team and missed 3rd place by a hair. last year, they had a 4 man, 1 woman mixed team and placed 1st in the mixed category (which had 3 teams last year) – they would have been 3rd in the men’s category with the number of laps they did. this year, the 4 man team they put together came in 2nd. improvement is good!