China CX Post 1.

Blogs are dead. I know. But if I dont write it down now, I will forget stuff. 10 years ago I would have had a journal and wrote things down by pen to maybe read later. This is easier.

So in early August CX magazine said they were looking for applicants for China. Short notice brutal trip a week before cross season? I am in.  I applied and got accepted. They bought my plane ticket. Communications were a bit tough through the language barrier. My understanding: Fly in, race a C1 UCI race, race an "amateur ride," extend my trip in Beijing for 3 days. I think it was 10 total days, with 2 travel days.

I cant quite recall the details, but I finally got to the resort at 8:30 PM Beijing time. This was about 32 hours after leaving my house in Pittsburgh.  I got put up in a room with Travis from Team Sonic. "You are American... You live together."   He and his teammate Andy Reardon ended up being awesome dudes during the trip, which made a huge difference.

Day 1: TOURIST
We rode to the Great Wall. It was about a 50 mile ride total. Every road has a protected bike lane. Everybody is on bikes. Driving is insane, but in a controlled type of way. There are almost 3 classes of vehicles: motor cars, electric bikes and bicycles. Electric bikes look like a 125 scooter or a bicycle depending on how fast it is. They sometimes take bike lanes and sometimes are in the road.  The roads had 0 glass. I rode tubular CX tires the whole time. No problems, no worries.

Because we rode there, we ended up on some non tourist section of the wall. We basically had it to ourselves. Fuck yeah. The actual race was about 30 miles outside of Beijing. The town is called Yanqing.  I dont think it was common to have a westerner there just checking things out. The town was cool. There was a HUGE mall. Like 5 stories with probably 2,000 little shops. Some were chains, most seemed to be independent. It was a mixture of indoor and outdoor. It was packed.

Day 2: TOURIST
Me and my new friends Travis and Andy rode to the course, did a few laps and then went back to the resort for lunch. This is why I think we got along, after lunch we went and explored on our bikes. We rode up to the Longing Gorge, which was super beautiful and insane. It was kind of a tourist town. It was super beautiful, but we were unable to go all the way in due to our bikes.

Then we rode to and abandoned ski resort, checked it out and tried finding a pass over the mountains. We found one of the smoothest, least used roads I have ever been on. It must have been paved for the Olympic road race. There were sculptures of bikes everywhere on it.  We found the mountain pass and were turned away at the bottom by a dude who's job it was seemed to be turning people away from it.

Day 3: RACE DAY
UCI C1 Race.  Standard race day stuff.... Rode around in circles. Got 21st. Pretty good for me. It was my first cross race in like 50 weeks, as I tweaked my ankle last year and had to miss 90% of the season.

Day 4-5: TRANSFER STAGE AND ROAD RACE
Soooo there is a huge language barrier. I dont think many people knew that we were going to get into a bus and drive 5 hours to the road race. I surely did not. Also I didnt know what the "road race" was going to be like. I didnt know the name, the location, the distance. They simply had a photo of the race and there were people on mountain bikes. I figured a cx bike with cx tires would be fine.

Now I am not making fun of china, but upon closer inspection, the photo of the road race seemed to be photo shopped.  And I am not lying here, but that photo was then used on bus stops where we were, it was the sign for a bike shop that I randomly encountered, and it was used elsewhere. I think it was the Chinese photo for bike racing.

We get to the hotel. It is seriously baller. Like insane nice. We learn that the road race is like a grand fondo. Suddenly just having tubular cross tires seems like a terrible plan. There is a crazy banquet. They love having celebration banquets. Before races, after races, etc. They love rice wine. It is 52%. North Americans less than 27 years old should not be allowed to drink rice wine.

Road Race:
We rode to the start from the hotel. We had police escorts and they were blocking the intersections. The start was insane. There were bands playing. Cannons that shot confetti. Balloons. Drones. Fans. Grand stands. Sign ins. It was like the start of the tour de france (ive been to the start of the tdf..)

There were allegedly 500 people. On the start line there is an english speaking dude that I can only characterize as a "masters grand fondo racer"... 10k bike, gadgets all over it etc. He is talking about traveling to the race to race it. Suddenly it is real how real of a race this is. He says there is 10,000 yuan to the winner (1610 usd)... I think this is a shit ton of money in China.

So the race was insane. 32 miles into a 4 mile climb. We did literally 30+ mph for an hour. It was the flattest road, straightest road I have ridden in probably 10 years. There was 1 turn in 32 miles. It was a highway. It was closed. Totally insane. At one point there was a guy on a hang glider above the field filming.

Days 6+: Beijing Tourist. 
Beijing is awesome. Bike lanes everywhere. I rode around and felt safe. It is the safest city for its size in the world. I loved it. It was insane. No English. Sketchy food. Everything is weird. There must literally be a million markets or street vendors. Sick time. Was happy to leave, but am so thrilled to have gone.

town we rode to

Great Wall 

Ill dump a bunch of photos later.

Racing Bikes.

I did my first bicycle race in about 7 months on Saturday. It was a fairly flat 4 corner crit.

Racing is a total pain in the ass. This was the easiest race to get ready for, a crit. I threw some clothes in a bag, threw a bike in a car and did it. No mud. No clean up. No gluing tires....

I rode with a dude the other year. I think he was probably a fairly legit pro dude at some point. We rode for about 5 hours. He was surprised when I outlasted him on a hill halfway through the ride. He didnt talk about racing much, but just said that it got in the way of riding.... I can see where he is coming from. The time that I  spent driving, warming up, racing and then driving home could have been spent doing a long ride on new roads. I could have driven half the distance that I did to the race and done one of probably one of the most epic day rides I have ever done.

Then there is training. Instead of going out and enjoying nature or farms or the sun, I end up on a bike bath or a hill not too far away just turning myself inside out for an hour.

THEN there are bike racers who sometimes can be the worst people alive, after real estate agents and lawyers.

I am not going to "make it".... Im on my decline physically at the old age of 33.

All this said, after racing on Saturday I was super pumped to start training and getting in shape. So weird.

Cathedral of Learning stairs. Mt Everest Challenge

With the deep freeze happening there has been little motivation to ride.

Steve K and I decided to try to get into the Cathedral of Learning "Mt. Everest Challenge Club." It is a non existent club that Danny Chew made up that now has 7 people in it. At 6:30 in the AM when we were walking into the cathedral with 10 gallons of water and bags of food, I thought to myself... "so this is the exact moment I became Danny Chew."

Cathedral of Learning stair records and reports via THE CHEWMAN

This consists of climbing the cathedral stairs 66 times in a single day, giving you the elevation gain of Everest from sea level - 29029'.  (440'x66= 29040).

I had not done a long event in years. I think the last 12 hour athletic thing I had done was The Twelve Hours of Granogue  , which I did on a two man team, so it doesnt even count.  Anyway, I knew that if I was going to burn a whole Saturday, I was going to complete it. It was simply a matter of how long it would take.  The only thing more boring than doing it would be talking about it, so Ill just say that it got done. Steve K had some leg issues after 40. If there is something that is literally not worth hurting yourself over, it is this, so he chilled for a few hours as I finished.

 Rest was nice. Unfortunately 20% of the day was spent dealing with elevators...

 Amy took this as as she finished my last few with me..

 VERY Chewish chart. 11:26

 The cathedral is actually a cool building to not exercise in .


TALK TO ME SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The new most gnarls thing I have done.

My cyclocross season was a total bust. I tweaked my ankle after racing 4 races and only got mediocre results at those races. I was riding some and having fun, but something was missing.  Racing is weird. When it is what you eat, breathe, sleep, it is all that you care about. When you are forcibly removed from it, you dont care. I didnt watch any races or look at any results. So weird.

 I needed a goal, something to work towards. For some reason I chose a presidential traverse.   I did a few backpacking trips. One was pretty cold and gnarly.  I thought I was good to go.

I hired a guide named Marc Chauvin. I researched a few guides and paid a bit more for what appeared to be the best.  Amy and I drove 8 hours on Sunday to Vermont to stay overnight with friends and did the last 4 hours on Monday. I met up with Marc and we looked at my gear, he told me what to lose, what to take, etc.

Day 1:
It was 8 degrees in Conway when we left. Above treeline it was -10 to -20 with constant wind at 70mph. Marc made the call to stay at the RMC Gray Knob Hut .  At the time this made no sense to me, but in retrospect it was a great call.  We would get up to Gray Knob, ditch our stuff and make a push for Adams.  This would put us above treeline from the Hut to the summit and back = 3.2 miles or so.  If we did the standard route to try and get Madison, we probably would have been so blown when we got to it that we would not have gotten to the summit, and if we did, the next day would have been a bust after camping so high up and we would have spent the same amount of time above treeline without a summit.

We took the Lowes path all the way up. The previous day it had rained all day then dropped to 20 degrees at 5pm.  Everything was blue ice. We used microspikes on our shoes from the first mile all the way to the hut.  They worked great and allowed us to save time by not taking our crampons off and on.  We got to the hut about noon and ate and drank. We left around 1pm to try and go for Mt Adams. This was going to be more epic than I had expected. It was -20 with 70mph steady wind above treeline.  The second we left treeline it was like being pushed by a wave. Marc would turn around every few minutes to look at my face and have me look at his. I was totally covered with goggles on.  We went over Sam Adams, which I thought was THE SUMMIT,  until we descended down the backside and I looked up at the real Mt Adams.   The rain the previous day had eliminated any snow. Footing was really brutal as it was just piles of icy rocks and the wind trying to push us off.  After getting the summit, Marc yelled "lets get the fuck out of here." I think it was the only time he swore all day.  We got back to the hut, and the caretaker was very surprised to hear that we made it to the top. I managed to let my shell over my chin down and got frost bite a little bit.

Lowes Path was blue ice.

This is a RMC hut a few miles up. It was basically just a shack to break the wind.



The hut was freaking awesome. They now keep them at 40-45 degrees, which is freaking balmy after being outside all day. We cooked dinner, made tea, hung out.  The dude running it had just done the PCT and was living there for the winter. He was a cat 2 bike racer in a former life. Small world.

Gray Knob Hut. Pretty rad.

Mt Adams = most epic thing of my life.

We woke up. Marc had crazy radios and stuff for weather info. It was impressive. He gave us a 50/50 shot of doing Jefferson and Washington.  Once you get past a certain point, you are committed. Jefferson is probably the most remote mountain of the range in the winter. They announced the previous day that all search and rescues were going to be done from the ground, not from the weather station due to the crazy cold weather. This means that you are hoping to survive and probably losing digits if shit hits the fan.

We got to a certain rock formation that has a name that I forget. Marc asked if I was good. I said yes and put down 500 calories in a minute.  We then pushed for 4-5 hours over Jefferson and Washington.  It was honestly pretty easy. Weather was around -10 and wind at a constant 50.  This was so nice compared to Adams the day before.  Again, footing on the rocks was the only issue.

 One of the only postcard shots I got. Just above the cabin right at treeline. At this point my camera died.

We got to the Summit and hid in a nook to talk about the game plan. Did I want to camp that night or get down?  When I woke up that morning I thought that if I got Jefferson and Washington I would be totally content, but standing there having to make the call myself was difficult. Part of me wanted to do it, and part of me felt lucky that we were basically safe from this point and didnt want to push the weather luck. The final summits are formalities (250' of climbing each... all downhill from Washington.)   For some reason, the thought of melting snow in 100mph winds killed it for me. We agreed to roll down Pinkham Notch and go ice climbing the next day.  We missed Madison in the first place, so even if I did get the last 3 summits people would be like "not a real traverse" or whatever. I wasnt doing this to say  that I did a traverse. I was doing this to justify wearing patagonia clothing to whole foods.  We descended like 5000 feet down the Lions Head trail. We needed ropes and crampons for awhile.  We got to the AMC center right at sunset.

Mt Jefferson 

I did wake up that night at 4am and wish that we had pushed on. It would have been an experience, no matter how miserable it was. Standing there on top of Mt. Washington making the call I thought about all of the negative. I thought about the crippling back pain that I had a week prior to leaving. I thought about the knee pain that I had after doing the Rachel Carson trail (37 mile day).  I had self doubt and fear of that pain resurfacing and causing issues.  I sat there comfortably in bed without any back or knee pain.


The next day we went ice climbing on a 350' wall.  I told Marc that I was nervous and he laughed saying that up on Mt Adams was like a million times more dangerous.  Its weird how the brain works.

Can you find the human in this photo?

I made it up Frankenstein cliffs' standard route.

I trusted this dude with my life. Would do it again.




  

ALS

Amy's mom is a daycare nurse. She is a good person and is always becoming friends with her clients. I guess it might be hard not to when you are shaving and bathing adults.

Anyway, she arranged for us all to have dinner last night with one of her clients. He has ALS. His arms dont work. Like at all. He seems to be fortunate enough to be surrounded by a good group of family members that are his caretakers.

He is going in for brain surgery. It has a chance of killing him, and wont benefit him. They are going to implant a chip on his brain and read his brainwaves for 30 days. From this they hope to be able to have robotic arms and whatnot that can be directed by this chip implanted in the brain.

So Amy asked if he is nervous and he said that he was not planning on living past 4 years ago, so it has all been borrowed time since then. He hopes that it can help either amputees or people with diseases like MS, ALS, etc.  

I think we all see stories on TV of people who overcome giant obstacles to have a great outlook on life. It was kind of crazy to do this in real life. The dude goes into surgery next Friday and isnt totally sure that he will come out.


Below is a video of Tim. He was the first of two people to do this. The man I had dinner with will be the third, and the first with ALS to have the surgery.

The biggest project I have ever taken on.

So I find myself showing people crappy photos of this on my phone a lot, so I thought that I would just post here.

Amy moved her business out of the house over a year ago. We were out of space and it was driving me nuts. She rented a store front in a neighborhood a few miles away. Paying rent is for suckers, so when I saw a building that we could potentially afford we pursued it.

This is the dump that we bought. It is on the other side of our neighborhood, would hold value and could work. We bought it knowing that we had to put a roof on and do some other work. Not ideal, but better than renting a similarly crappy place further away.

So we thought we would get rid of the flat roof and put a new sloped roof on. That shouldnt be a big deal, right? In order to get a building permit, we needed the use code to be changed. It was  zoned commercial grocery, meaning that we could use it as a grocery store. To use it as anything else besides a house, we needed to go in front of the zoning board, or just move in and use it and never get a building permit, which is what people had done for decades.

Multiple trips to the office downtown (they dont answer phones or email...) we end up with an engineers drawing of what we needed. That drawing surprisingly costs a lot of money. Also the engineer downtown says that doing what we want to do is "new construction" and we have to abide by new construction commercial codes.

This is what happens when framers find  out that it is new construction. They tore the old frame building down and left the toilet. They used the toilet. No seriously. Also at this point we did not have a building permit, or a change of use. We basically went from having a very small asset to a very large liability. Fun.

This is gnarly yinzer dudes framing a building.

The framing went crazy fast. This gave us some delusion that it would be a quick process. Everything was behind schedule and over budget. If you have children, send them to trade school.

Finally the inside mostly done. We redid the cement floors, added a door and did some trim. Our friend Matt did the shelves. They are huge. That wall is 16' high.

 

 Blurry photo of the shelves and the desk. Looks pretty sick. Matt was so into this, it was really crazy how he built each box, and then mounted them one by one. He left a small gap between them to create that  dark line.

  

 Matt and super fast bike racer Mark Nicol collaborated on making a library ladder here.  It is on a track and moves side to side. Seems easy until I tell you that the floor is like 4" out of line. In the middle there is a ball joint that acts as suspension and allows it to move around to make up for the floor not being level. Pretty smart.

Finally, this is it. We did metal siding and big windows. There is so much natural light inside, it is crazy. There are 4 skylights and those big windows.  Pretty cool.

Google tags: Lawrenceville Pittsburgh 15201 art studio metal sales metal siding garbella studio screenprinting studio  custom shelves  library ladder  DIY library ladder 

Finally some real adventure...

It has been a while since I have done anything super exciting. It takes a decent amount to be in over my head.

I did some research and found the quehanna trail in pa. It is the most remote part of pa and from what I could read online it's pretty out there and remote. 

I packed my scooter up and headed off with the intentions of doing a 50 mile loop. I would start at Parker dam state park and do the quehanna trail to the eastern connector (shortens trail from 70 to 50 miles). 

Overall I was impressed. It was well maintained. Well signed. Lots of trail registers to keep track of progress in case people go missing. 

Being alone was okay and I played it as safe as I could. I would cook dinner a few miles before setting up camp. I would hang my food and my backpack in different places and not wear any clothes that I coined in while sleeping. 

The scariest thing that happened was after cooking on the second day, I was walking along banging my treking poles on the rocks as I stepped when a rattlesnake spooked me. I jumped sooooo far and screamed like a girl. It was the largest rattlesnake I have ever seen. It rattled a few more times as I walked away. Holy shit. I think statistically larger rattle snakes actually put off less venom, but whatever. 

That night I listened to eastern coyotes howl all night. 

Overall a good time.  However compared to out west or when I did the great divide it was not as remote As the Internet made it sound. 

120 miles of scooting to the start. 

Basically all that I saw for a few days 

Cliche

Proud of this bear bag. 

Sunset a mile or so after rattlesnake incident. 

I just want to go for a bike ride.

I just want to go for a bike ride without people ruining it.
I want to go for a bike ride without car drivers shaking their heads at me as they pass.
I just want to go for a bike ride without off leash dogs biting me.
I want to go for a bike ride where no car that passes me has a driver that is texting.
I want to go for a bike ride where cars actually abide by the 4 foot passing law, or even half of it. I would
be happy with 2 feet to be honest.
I want to go for a bike ride where there is not garbage and debris on the shoulder for the entire ride.
I want to go for a bike ride where I actually de stress instead of adding stress.
I want to go for a bike ride where at no point am I worried about coming home alive.

This is my slobber ridden bloody leg after getting bit yesterday. The lady had 9 dogs all off leash.

I have like 50 drafts half done.

I have like 50 drafts in my blog homepage that are half done.
One is about how we bought a commercial building and are totally rehabbing it to move Garbella into it. This story involves dealing with pensioned city workers, zoning, engineers etc. It isnt very exciting, but documents hundreds of hours that I was not doing other stuff. That will come shortly.

Another is about trying to be a better person and joining Big Brothers Big Sisters to try and do something besides ride bikes and make money. So far so good.

Anyway, the wife and I were just talking about a friend, peer, acquaintance. Whatever you want to call him. We grew up in similar fashion, learned to embrace being "athletes" while still trying to be punk, or conscious or whatever. He took to running. He was doing crazy fast marathons, trying to be an olympic alternate... Pretty legit athlete.

Long story short... then he found out he had stage 4 cancer. His blog then went from documenting the struggles of training while working with everyday life, (something that if you are reading this, you can probably relate...)... Now his blog is about his fight against cancer. It is insane, because it could literally be anybody reading this. It could be me, you, your family members...

Anyway, he is inspiring and it is motivation to do what you should be doing instead of wishing that it was cooler outside, or warmer outside, or less windy, or a better hour, or lighter, or less work stress.. etc.

Scott is a solid dude and I know he is going to be back on top of his game shortly.
Run Fast Run Vegan is his blog.

3 races in 30 hours, not a stage race.

Saturday: Rode out to a local crit. Took the bike trail there. Raced, set power records, got dominated, rode home. Close to 70 miles in 4 hours.

Went and showed some houses and did some work stuff.

Me and Babik hopped in the car to head to Bad Andy's and Bad Kat's in Lancaster. This mission was inspired by the time Bad Andy won the State Crit championship and then raced a nighttime mountain bike race.

Sunday: We were on the road by 630 for the MASS Fair Hill Mountain bike race. It is in that weird area that is like Lancaster, Maryland and Delaware all in one. 9 am start. Anyway, much like last weekend at Greenbrier, I cracked on the first lap and settled into the second group. Racing for 4th -7th. I stacked it like a PRO on the last lap. 6th place. Babik had an awful morning and got beat by dudes in baggies with camelbacks.

After getting paid, we headed to Lititz for a crit. I ate some salt and vinegar chips and drank some cokes. The energy levels were very, very low. I was informed that I left my fancy carbon mountain bike wheel at the first race. We hit a railroad track "jump" and my bike mostly fell off the roof. Rain was coming... failure imminent.

Anyway, Rock Tour of Lititz was awesome. It would have been worth going out for without the morning race. Proud to say that the Pro 1/2 field had like 6 dudes from PIttsburgh in it. That is awesome. We raced around in circles for an hour. I barely finished. Last place in the money. Nice. Babik raced like a stud and got 6th, despite not really having a teammate.


Bad Andy took this of us. I have compression tights on. He didnt cut them out like I asked. That is awesome. Mountain Bikes on the roof, road bikes on the ground.



Have to post me representing c3-20/20. Great people. Im in full crypt keeper mode here. Makes me happy to see my right finger on the lever. Old BMX habit to stop yourself from looping out (like landing on your back wheel and falling backwards... you simply tap your rear brake and your front end comes right down)


My bro found this magazine in his basement. That is him getting rad. We used to be good at riding bikes.