Pulled my Achilles tendon at the Sellwood cyclocross practice this morning. Jamming up the runup. Getting a massage tonight from Molly Carlson in anticipation of the final road stage race of the year, the Eugene Celebration. The cross season is coming up so quickly, got to get all these race wheels built before our race in Hood River on the 24th!

Got a couple of cross sets in this morning before an aggro dog walking lady decided to declare our activities illegal and send her dog into the way of our little route. It is kinda tiring to go through this every year, "We HAVE talked to the city about this, we are allowed to use the park." We cut practice short and I went home before running down to work.

Sold that Ipod! I was honest about it too, let them know the run time was pretty crappy, 2 hours at best. What do I get a new one engraved with?

Spent the night at my ladyfriend's house. We had a talk. It went great. Now we are closer. Funny how that works. Often relationships get to this point where you can take stuff personally and think for a second that the other person is TRYING to hurt your feelings. When really, we just need to work on communicating.

I do not have ANY free time. The time I do have I fill up with training or recovering from training. (read: watching the shittiest movies you can imagine, Planet of the Apes series, Mean Girls, Best in show.) I am so particular about when I have to get to bed and eat etc. My life is pretty structured and dating someone takes a real effort to make it work. I let her know I was conscious about making time to spend with her. (Hangouts are typically on my terms. I have the big obligations.)

That meant shooting pool at Dot's cafe last night and eating dinner together at like 11pm while watching a movie. It was sweet, though, I had the worst stomach ache while training this morning. Glad we only did 2 sets, I may have barfed on the third time around.

I finally bought an Ipod, used, for about $100 from some jerk. It is a piece of crap, has like a 1 hour battery life. Oh well, I'm going to sell it today and just buy a new one. There you go. I guess it is about $60 to get a new battery installed. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

I raced the local PIR training crit last night and snagged 3rd, again. Woke up this morning for a couple of hours on the Vanilla cross bike and had some shoe trouble. Sat around the Stumptown coffee shop on Belmont waiting for Brian to bring me some tools. 7am phone call: "Hey Brian, wake up, remember that ride we are supposed to be on? I'm on it, and I need you to bring me some tools! Get out of bed and come up here!" Now I forfeit the ride and head dowtown to the other Stumptown coffee for MORE coffee and a vegan muffin+cookie courtesy of Veganopolis and, I'm at the shop oogling some Exustar carbon fiber mountain bike shoes on the interweb.

Went home last night and showered, waited for a lady friend to stop by and accompany me to Jennifer and Tony Kic's BBQ. We headed over there, stopping at VegeThai to get me some dinner and things were just kinda tense the whole time. I felt like I did something to piss her off in the ten minutes we had been hanging out. She said nothing was wrong but, when we hugged goodbye, we had this REALLY long hug, and I kissed her on the cheek, "You SURE there is nothing going on? You, ok?", "Yeah, I'm fine." But then she abrubtly left and we did not make out. We ALWAYS make out. Wierd. Well, she was late for a prior engagement.

My first Elite XC win of the season! And my last, seeing as the season is over. My expert class teammates Patrick and Steven took silver and bronze respectively while I snagged the gold medal and the cash! I did not have a great feeling about the race beforehand. Had a stomach ache but, decided to start really fast, cross style (I took the hole shot) and just suffer for the whole race, wanted to work on trying to recover after forcing a hard start. It went ok, I had a mediocre race to be honest, my shifting was all over the place and I got misdirected off course once. I caught up to Doug Ollerenshaw (after he flatted) and we drilled it on the climb, it was grueling to hold on to his wheel and then he let me past on the boulder strewn-descent. Passed a bunch of riders with mechanicals, busted pedals, chains, flats. It was a tough course. I have ridden better for sure but, sometimes you just have to actually finish the race to win.


Brian Ellin won a thousand dollars in the raffle! That was crazy, we are all walking off to the car and, they announce his name. Crazy. He did not even race the XC! He was across the street at the Oregon hillclimb and came over to watch our race finish up.