Go flag yourself

Wow - what a stage in yesterday's USA Pro Challenge To Make A Race in Colorado That Has No Mention of the Word Colorado in the Title!  If you were like me, you were watching the race on your work computer in a tiny window covered up by lots of bigger windows opened up to porn websites so that everyone else in the office would think everything was status quo.  But I almost gave myself away toward the end of the stage when I started yelling at the computer  - which I almost never do when I'm watching porn....other than that one time.  Anyway - what a nail biter...

Tommy D, barely holding off the chase group for the win!

 

I know I wasn't alone in my excitement either when I saw what MO State Crit Champ Austin Vinton Twatted in this Tweet:

 



If Tommy D wins this I will swallow a garmin whole
— Austin V (@austinjosephv) August 22, 2012
 

To which I responded:

@austinjosephv Upload the data to Strava - I want to see if the transit time of your GI system is as fast as mine. #KOMturdmaker
— COMO CYCO POOBAH (@COMOCYCO) August 22, 2012
 

Well, this must have hacked Mr. Vinton off, because he sent me an email challenging me to a race.  And, I'm happy to announce I took Austin up on his challenge of going mono a mono, (or colon a colon as the case may be) - and after a lengthy discussion between his agent and my agent to get the details sorted out - a gastrointestinal match sprint commenced last evening.  Both he and I swallowed our Garmin 500s precisely at 6:00 PM. Upon retrieving them this morning (mine after three espressos and a bear claw), we uploaded the data to Strava.  Here's Austin's mapped segment:

GI transit time: 11 hours, 32 minutes

 

And my data:

GI transit time: 13 hours, 22 minutes

 

On first glance, it would appear as though Austin beat me.  However, I have it on good authority that he chased his Garmin 500 with two tablets of Ex-Lax and a Metamucil shake.  Therefore I issued an official protest and had his entry 'flagged' - which means that I have actually claimed the KOM crown (KOM = King of Movements).

 

Never heard of a flagged Strava entry?  Well neither had I until recently when my trusty sidekick, Pickle 2, did a little experiment on Easley hill.  One sunny Saturday morning, Pickle rode up the hill with his Garmin....only it was sitting in the passenger seat of his car.  He uploaded the data as though he had made the ascent on his bike and posted the data to Strava.  Not surprisingly, he was instantly awarded the KOM for ascending the 0.8 mile Easley hill at 19.2 m/h.

 

That Pickle can flat out MOVE!

 

Approximately 6 minutes after Pickle posted his KOM-worthy ascent of the big hill, he got a response from someone, whose name I've changed to "Mr. Rogers" for the sake of anonymity.

 

Was this Easley climb on a bike?

 

When Pickle didn't respond, the ride was 'flagged' and the KOM status was rightly returned to Mr. Rogers.  By the speed of Mr. Roger's response, and his sheer dominance in KOM crowns around COMO, I wonder if he keeps constant surveillance of Strava, maintaining each of his KOM segments open on his desktop computer and mobile devices at all times. Once an alert pops up on his smart phone that one of his KOMs has been bested, he assesses the data, and dashes over to a fire pole that descends into his garage where his bike lies waiting, tires inflated, chain lubed, skinsuit draped over top tube, bottles full of a 50:50 mix of Red Bull and Cytomax, ready to go at a moment's notice like the Batmobile, eager to reclaim his glory. 

 

The problem with our experiment is that Pickle went up the damn hill too damn fast resulting in him getting called out by Mr. Rogers and subsequently flagged.  But in light of the recent lawsuit surrounding Strava, I'm a little worried this was a reckless stunt to begin with.  What if Pickle's KOM didn't get flagged, and it inspired a whole host of COMO's Strava-teers to go out there and try to best it, and someone stroked out while climbing that stinking hill trying to beat a time that was actually set by Pickle's Bugatti (yes, Pickle drives a Bugatti - I really need to figure out how much we are paying him).

 

At any rate, now that I've flagged Mr. Vinton for inappropriate use of cathartics - I think my GI King of bowel Movements crown will remain safely on my own colon, thank you very much.  And rather than laying down the gauntlet, I will lay down the adult diaper to any COMO Strava-naut that thinks they can best it.  I may not ride a bike up a hill very fast, but I've always taken the advice of "shit or get off the pot" to heart and know how to do just that.

 

Speaking of flagging results, I still have no idea how Christian VandeVelde took the yellow jersey from Tejay VanGarderen yesterday when they finished in the same group.  To add confusion, BMC had previously filed a protest over the Crested Butte stage saying Tejay had gapped VandeVelde coming into the mountain finish on Tuesday suggesting that he should actually have a couple of seconds on the Garmin rider.  One would think the race officials could have reviewed the televised finish (or alternatively just looked at this photo).....

 

and made an immediate ruling on it, but they said they wouldn't make a decision until today - two days later?  And then BMC's director Michael Sayers decided to lash out at Team RadioShack for not doing any work in helping bring back Danielson yesterday and made the quote regarding the possum-playing RadioShack squad, "I think they forgot that the women's race is later in the week." Not a cool thing to say from the BMC leader as firstly, his team leader's wife, Jessica VanGarderen, is the race organizer for the women's race, the Blue Ribbon Alpine Challenge.  And secondly, the women's race was actually run yesterday and had to be shortened to a single day's criterium versus the previous 3-day event last year because of an absolute lack of funds.  Sayers can rip on the Shack all he wants, but slighting the women's race like that was pretty low...I think his ass needs to be flagged for that comment....

Speed....with style.

The Olympics are over.  And I'm very, very OK with that.  Watching the Olympics is kind of like eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  When you start eating it, it tastes so good that you are pretty sure you could easily ingest your own body weight in the stuff, but somewhere into the second box, you're thinking you should have probably stopped at one.  Similarly, when the Olympics started, I wanted to see it all.  This is the only explanation I have for watching people swim back and forth in a pool 4 different ways night after night.  But after a couple weeks of watching different swimming strokes, the whole thing started to strike me as a little ridiculous, because at some point I came to the realization that swimming is not necessarily about being fast.  I mean, shouldn't swimming be like running, or cycling in which the athletes perform whichever stroke gets them from point A to point B the fastest?  Why do the backstroke for 200 meters when the freestyle will get you there quicker?  It would be like repeating the 100 meter dash only making all the runners run backwards, or better yet, on all fours.  In this way, by the end of week one, any non-freestyle swimming competition started to remind me of the Ministry of Silly Walks...

.

Then I remembered that swimming already has its own version of the ministry of silly walks....which is actually the ministry of silly walks on acid.

But before any swimmers start sending me hate mail - let me say, I think I get it.  It's less about being fast and more about being fast in different ways.  And speaking of which, Saturday was the Missouri State Time Trial Championship, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that being fast wasn't nearly as important as being fast with style.....I'm talking about anyone who, say, made their own rear disc wheel out of some packing tape.

Quite possibly the coolest TT rig to ever have graced the Missouri State TT championships (photo courtesy Roger Hinson).

You can have your $2100 Zipp Sub 9 tubular carbon disc wheel and stick it in your chamois, I say.  The real recipe for speed with style is:  One 32-spoke wheel slathered with one-half roll of some Scotch Super Strength ($2.99 a roll), mix with an old-school chocolaty Masi, add one Austin Vinton lightly marinated in Gatorade, bake for 53 minutes, 44.6 seconds and out pops either the fifth fastest man of the day or the only UPS Store clerk you know with shaved legs and funny tan lines.  And whereas Austin (Mercy Cycling) might tell you he could have done better in the TT, it would have been hard for him to have improved his performance in the Missouri State Criterium championship the next day (which he won) besting among some other seriously talented cyclists, pro and mentor Brad Huff of Jelly Belly.

(Photo courtesy of Flannery Allison)

Another year, and another incredibly talented cyclist is showered with the pinnacle of achievements.  Meanwhile, we, the less-talented cycling horde of COMO are showered with the detritus of every day cycling life.  Case in point: a regular contributor to the blog has sent me the following photo of what was found by the bike rack outside of a friend's office here in COMO recently:

1 small tube of Crest toothpaste, 3 razors, one fork and a condom.

Fancying myself as a bit of a Sherlockian devotee, I've tried to piece together what we might deduce about the individual who dropped this assortment of items, assuming they fell from one's saddle bag.  At first I was convinced this individual must also be a roadie, hence the need for the razors.  But then I realized the collection of items must have actually been owned by a tri-geek because a) a tri-geek is more likely to need three razors versus one: one for each leg and a special one only used for the "bikini-area", b) serious roadies would never be caught actually eating anything in public, so would have no need for a fork and c) only the tri-geeks in this town are fully expecting to get laid by someone in their group at any given moment during a training ride.