The "herd" grows (doug)

I hesitate to call my small group of bikes a herd, especially since the first three members consist of Frankenbike (aka CrossMutt), my 1988 Giant Chinook commuter/utility, and my used 2000 Bianchi road bike, HOWEVER, I recently may have inproved the credibility of the herd a bit.

Remember how happy I was when I got my wonderful wife the Kona Jake for her birthday, hoping that she'd fall in love with cycling like I had? Well, as you know, she didn't ride it, so I just finally sold it. Settle down, I'm not a total ass...I tuned up her old 1993 Diamondback so she'd still have something to ride in case she got the wild desire to do another sprint Tri or ride with her friends on a neighborhood ride. The "proceeds" from that sale (a mere $200 loss) were just enough to help me jump to a new discipline that I've been wanting to get involved in.

Check this out!

Keep in mind that this picture was taken immediately after I got the bike home (can you blame me for being excited, it's my first real new bike), so I didn't have time to take off the reflectors and "pie plate". Apparently, that's a no-no. If you're a Facebook friend of mine you know this already, but I took a bit of hazing for the reflectors in this picture. You'd have thought I actually raced with them on the way my Rogue teammates went after me. They WERE going to come off, of course, but now I'm half tempted to race the whole dang season w/reflectors just to piss 'em off.

Anyway, this is my first new bike, and I am freakin' psyched. I'm going to jump in full force just like I did with cx, and I think I should be o.k. I want to get into a race or two as fast as possible (planning on finishing last and figuring out how the races work), trying to stay out of the real racers' way for the first couple races, then seeing what I can do at the lowest class. I already got my USAC MTB licence (which includes CX, so I don't need the road licence at all), so I'm good to go.

All this said, I've had the bike since Saturday and haven't been able to get it on a trail yet because of work (and the fact that Alison has been on jury duty all week -- in some sort of interesting case, apparently). It's KILLING me! Imagine a kid getting his first bb gun for his birthday, then telling him he can't shoot it for a week. It's freakin' torture! Anyway, I am going to do my first trail ride on the GF tomorrow with a group from KyMBA. Really looking forward to it.

After that, I'm jumping in with both feet. I'm trying to find some local races, including (but not limited to) the local STXC series and the KyMBA series. Might as well see what I can do.

Lastly, I think B and I have essentially run our last significant training runs before the Derby Festival Half Marathon, and both went fine, so we should have some fun in a couple of weeks and cruise in around 2 hours for that race, too.