Fun With a Helmet Cam

Santa brought me one of these for Christmas.


Finally got around to messing with it and took it out for a few spins on my "Tour de Park" loop. It's a route from my house to around Oak Grove Lake to the Chesapeake Arboretum and back. Depending on how many laps around the lake, the miles can range from 20mi on up.

I ended up doing two 20 mile loops today because my first attempt I had the cam on my helmet and I had it pointing too far down. Great pavement and trail shots of 3' in front of the bike. After my morning ride. I grabbed some lunch and decided to hook the cam up to the handlebar and give it another try. It was almost 60 and it's calling for rain for the next few days so I wanted to get some non-trainer rides in while I can.

I have about 60 minutes of raw footage but youtube will puke if I upload 900,000 KB so I split it up into 2 vids.

The first video is of Oak Grove Lake. The "tagging" in the tunnels and glass on the path to the park is part of the adventure - especially at night. The second track is some old school pre-757 (804) music. Remember hitting The Boathouse and Kings Head Inn to watch these guys?



The next video is of the Chesapeake Arbortem, aka The Mulch Trail.



Thanks for watching. Next time I'll try it in a group ride and it'll definitely be used for some early season practice crits.

Fun With DMV

VA Drivers love their vanity plates. There are over 150+ specialized plates a vehicle owner can purchase in the Old Dominion.

Back when I spent more time on the surfboard and less time on the bike, I had this plate.


"Dude! No, it doesn't mean to surf high, Officer...Haven't you heard of Hatteras Island?"

After too many stoners drove up beside me and gave me the thumbs-up on their approval of my plates, I had to get rid of it. It's still available.

I was back on dmv.com again to renew the vehicle registration and played around to see what "Bike Enthusiast" plates are available. This is what I came up with:



For you single speeders/fixies:










Multigears:




The 2-9 crowd:




Crossers:












Big upfront:



Junk in the trunk: (and get your mind out of the gutter!)



Other plates:





(Sorry, CAMPY was taken as well as SRAM)










For the peloton:

All Work and No Play

It's been 72 hours (and counting) since my butt has been on a saddle and it's making me feel like "Jack".


Granted it's been blowing gale force winds and rained (another similarity to the movie except the rain is snow). My new neighbor has a limp similar to "Scatman Crothers". I couldn't even get myself to take a few circles around the block - just like the little kid did on his Big Wheel doing laps in the Overlook Hotel.

With the holidays coming up, my riding opportunities will greatly decrease. I guess I'll treat this as some forced off-bike time.
Then it will be time to make my reappearence.

Mitchell Report

Looks like the hammer is dropping on the old pastime today with the release of the Mitchell Report (Clemens and Pettitte named already). This will be the equivalent to Operación Puerto in cycling. Like Floyd, do you think Barry Bonds will be doing a US tour to defend his drug accusations to save his home run record? (Ed's note - I'm a big Bonds fan. I saw him play when he first came to the Pirates A team in Prince William back when he was all of 150 pounds. He had incredible bat speed and hit the ball 450' back then.)

Good to see the mainstream sports are finally going public with performance-enhancing drugs in their sport. Since cycling has had it's downfall in the past 2 TdF, maybe it will be ahead of other sports in cleaning up it's act.

It's Casual Day Everyday

Commute to work: 30 seconds - would have been 25 seconds but I gave the bambino an extra hug.
Began this week with a trial run of working from home everyday. If everything goes OK - I'll do this everyday beginning in January and give up my cube downtown, sitting in traffic and wasting gas. I already work from home 2 days a week so this isn't a big adjustment.
Besides the obvious advantages of working from home, I'll be able to get in morning or lunch workouts easier. I could do my AM ride up to 9:00 and then hop on the laptop and begin the workday. If mornings are hectic, I can get a lunchtime ride or weight room session in.
Now if I can only get my wife to make me delicious sandwiches at lunch like they do at The Gourmet Gang - I'll be all set.

Banana!

I don't know why I find this pic so funny - maybe because I ate dirt a few times this cross season.

Photo by Matthew Cardinal.

For us Mid-Atlantic crossers that had the luxury of 70 degree, sunny and dry race conditions, see more pics on how the other half lived in the soggy PNW at race.cx.

Choice of Words

I should be more careful in choosing how I word my blog entries - (Man's)Ass and a Pole. While searching thru my Sitemeter stats I came across this below. I'm sure the searcher was disappointed when she(he?) saw no man's rear-end and had to settle for a cross race report.


I'd hate to see how many extra hits Trek rider "XXXTodd" gets.

Macadamia Nuts and other goodies

Since I failed to ride today - it snowed some (a trace) while I'm visiting my mom here in Frednecksburg. I got lazy so my bike and trainer never left my truck. Rather than spinning and sweating on my mom's hardwood floors, I did the next best thing: dropped in a DVD and ate a bunch of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, dried mango and other contraband she smuggled back from her trip to Hawaii and the PI's. Having logged zero miles this week, my legs will either be really fresh at C-ville on Sunday or I'll be dialing up the hurt and get dropped like a bad habit.

Since I was technically working today (isn't telecommuting great), I got tired of doing real work tonight (it's 2am) and played on the blogger. Since I had not been riding, there is absolutely nothing cycling related to write about so I just added some new widgets and thought I'd point out some older widgets while I'm at it.

The new ones are the Archive Calendar (N Minus 1) and the "Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk?" widget. The calendar is just nifty (does anyone say "nifty" anymore - I think it's back, ya know, like it's retro) and it highlights the dates where you have blog entries. Yep, pretty nifty.
The "Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk?" widget is a spin off of the Google search tool "Feeling Lucky". Nothing too exciting on this widget (not as nifty) as it will randomly display one of your past posts.
The above widgets are courtesy of phydeaux3.blogspot.com.
Then there's the Sitemeter widget. Adding this was part of the contractual obligations to GamJams.net (terms and conditions of the contract are undisclosed).
Go to www.sitemeter.com and install one on your blog. My sitemeter is located at the bottom of the page and is different from GamJams. It's a great resource to see your traffic. I just like use it to see who reads my blog, how they got to my site, their location (and IP) and how long they stayed on the site. I also run Google Analytics and that shows basically the same info but with better trending tools - nothing that I would use anyway.
The other widgets are site feeds that have been on the blog for awhile. These come in handy so I can catch the latest headlines/blog entries without going to the site.

Hopefully my next post will be a race report and not another post on eating chocolate. Unfortunately, that's the last race until the spring road racing starts (unless I do some of the winter WCCX series in Jan).