The new season is upon us

It's Thursday.  It's June.  It's time for track bicycle racing season in Colorado!  The Colorado Velodrome Association summer track racing league starts tonight.  Therefore, it is time for tea to provide some pre-race caffeine.

Some PG Tips and a little light reading get me ready to race.

A month has passed since my last post.  What have I been up to?  Lots and lots.

During my trip to California at the end of April and beginning of May, I finished up the 6th and final week of CrossFit competition.  I performed the 6th workout at CrossFit Santa Clara.  It went well, with a small incremental improvement over what I did here in Boulder at the beginning of the week.

Near the end of the trip, I raced the Friday Night track event at Hellyer Velodrome in San Jose.  It was my first track racing since traveling from Manchester back to the USA, and my legs felt pretty good considering the months off the track bike.  In the 5-mile scratch race, I won Matador of the Night for being the most aggressive rider.  For being Matador, I took home a nice bottle of Chilean wine.

Upon returning to Colorado, there was a day to do laundry, pay bills, check the mail, and then turn around and head to Colorado Springs for two weeks at the Wounded Warrior Games.  I was brought in by Team Navy/Coast Guard to help out with the cycling team and pilot a tandem for a visually impaired rider, Dan Peters.

The first week we had a training camp with daily rides at the Air Force Academy and the 2nd week was the competition.  With the exception of tandem pilots who could be civilians, the athletes were all military veterans.  At the end of the week, Dan and I took gold in the tandem road race with Dan really stepping up his riding to a higher level after falling ill with bronchitis earlier in the week which took him out of a couple of the track and field events.

After the conclusion of the Wounded Warrior Games, I headed back to Boulder for some more engineering work.  Then on Friday last week, I caught the bus to DIA and flew to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for a long weekend training on the tandem with another visually impaired rider who I will race with at Paralympic road racing nationals later this month.

We put in about 145 miles on the tandem in three days and experienced all the weather that eastern Wisconsin could throw at us: sun and wind on Saturday, rain and hail on Sunday, and then breeze and heat on Monday to cap off the weekend.

Over the weekend, I finished reading Helmet for my Pillow (pictured at the top of the post next to my cup of tea), a memoir written by a US Marine who fought in the Pacific theater in World War II.  The timing for reading this book was oddly coincidental since I participated in the Wounded Warrior Games in the middle of May.  Reading a first-hand account of our country's most significant military engagement of the last century that carried a most gruesome cost in terms of lives was an interesting contrast to helping wounded veterans, many of whom have participated in a lower-intensity but already longer-running conflict that is reshaping the world for this century. 

On a lighter note, last night after work, I hopped on the bus to Denver and checked out an improv comedy show at the Bovine Metropolis.   A CrossFit friend was performing with a class of students who were capping off their studies and evolving into full-fledged improv practitioners.  Everyone beware the Great White Swordfish.  It is fast, amphibious, walks around on four legs like half a tarantula, and is being pursued by a harpoon-armed man with vocal-chameleon-like accents and mysterious organized crime connections.

With the Colorado track racing season starting up today, it's going to be a busy couple of months, so I can't make any promises about when the next blog post will come.  However, I can guarantee some interesting adventures between now and then.