Month: July 2016

Andrea

Dis-Organized Training

You may have noticed that my race report was absent following the previous Winter Park race weekend (way back on the 9th). I went to bed the night before with a slightly sore throat and woke up the next morning feeling like five pounds of shit in a 10-pound sack. I still raced, and I still won singlespeed, but I didn’t have the punch to pull off another overall win, finishing 3rd out of the women’s starters.

The next day, I went to my second ever jujitsu tournament. It was pretty small compared to the previous one, meaning I only had one other person to compete against. My lone competitor was fierce, but I won the first match via armbar and the second via triangle, giving me the gold.

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I’m testing for another stripe on the belt Thursday night, and I’ll be racing again at Winter Park this weekend.

I have to admit, I’ve somewhat lost my drive to do any sort of organized training plan. The dis-organized riding here is so great that I basically hit up Valmont Bike part before work a couple of days a week and try to get out for some sort of longer adventure on my two days off and Sunday mornings before work. The result is a general tapering off in fitness gains, but a gradual onset of awesomeness everywhere else. So, I’m not too concerned about it.

Since the last time I posted, I’ve ridden a big loop at Buffalo Creek, including the new Little Scraggy trail (sorry, no pics), I’ve taken Brandon, the service manager at the shop who just moved from Chicago, up Mt. Falcon and down Lair of the Bear, explored the Bard Creek trail with Jake, and went on a pre-work trail hunt with Clayton (which also resulted in nabbing a Boulder Strava QOM as we were hammer-down descending back to the shop, trying not to be late).

If you have ever lived someplace else besides Colorado, and then you move here, it gives you a whole ‘nother level of appreciation for the fact that, in an hour and a half of either riding or driving from the house, you can be in some pretty amazing places.

The Bard Creek trail is one of those places. Jake and I made a shuttle out of it, parking a car in Empire, and driving another to the Herman Gulch trailhead. We found out rather quickly that, while the trail is 100% legal for cycling, it is 100% a hiking trail. Most of the trail was extremely narrow (that is, in the places where the trail actually existed as more than just a sight line between cairns) and extremely steep. It also runs mostly above treeline (from about mile 1.5 to mile 10.5), making it as awe-inspiring as it is aerobically challenging.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that we likely hike-a-biked for 7 of its 15 miles. Our average speed was 3.6 miles per hour. You can see the map on Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/651266584/overview

That’s about as solid of a trail as you get up there. The rest was cairn-hunting and following a GPS track on Jake’s Garmin:

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You know you’re way up there when the elevation makes your Gu packaging all puffy:

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A high Alpine lake… you almost can’t tell that there’s water in it because it’s so clear:

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Spot the cairns #1:

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Some hike-a-bike:

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Spot the cairn #2 (hint, it’s not the bush in the middle):

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Eventually we made our way down through some thick aspens and a soggy creek bed

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The final big view of the day on Empire Pass. It’s pretty amazing that the entire time, we were so incredibly isolated, yet never too far from a major interstate:

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It’s hard to convey in pictures and words on the internet the feeling of being in such a remote and beautiful place so close to where I live. It’s like every day off is a single-day dream vacation.

Working doesn’t suck, either. I periodically get to be a bike wizard/hero and save someone’s vacation/race/charity ride…

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…not trying to brag with the postcard pics…

I just know that posting them here will make my mom happy.

Andrea

Realm of Possibilities

Have you ever watched a situation unfold and realized that it’s something that would never happen to you? Or could happen to you? What’s your Realm of Possibilities?

For example- at my gym, there was a laser tag night. I joked that one of the coaches has probably been kicked out of laser tag before for being too rowdy. He laughed and said that wasn’t outside of the realm of possibilities.
Example two- I see a couple unloading three children from a van. One is screaming, one is pestering the screaming one, and the other is drawing on the side of the van with a marker. That situation is so far outside my realm of possibilities that it will literally never occur in my lifetime.
Example three- It’s 11:30 pm and you and your friends decide you want to go to Taco Bell. Everyone hops in the car, windows down, music up. Along the way, you change lanes without signaling. Suddenly, the police officer you just drove by (not speeding) dives behind you and pulls you over. He wants you and your friends to get out of the car for no specific reason. He calls for backup because you have no idea what you did wrong and you’re questioning his authority because of it. Things escalate, and you and your friends end up drug out of the car on the ground in handcuffs because you didn’t think you were doing anything wrong and didn’t comply with an officer acting as if you did. Oh yeah- I forgot to mention- You and your friends are black.

How far outside of your realm of possibilities is that third one? I’m going to go ahead and assume that most of my readers are white, and therefore, that situation is 100% outside of your realm. All the way. Just like me and a heard of children in a van. You will never be stopped and questioned by police because you “look suspicious.”

When things are outside your realm of possibilities, you tend to ignore them- especially if they’re unpleasant. I’m white and was raised in a middle-to-upper-class suburb by two parents. It’s easy for someone like me to deny that racial profiling by police even exists because it’s something that is so far outside of where I exist.

I can ignore it.

Last night, Black Lives Matter protesters shut down the “M” bridge in Memphis. If you’re unfamiliar with the Memphis landscape, that’s one of the two major arteries across the Mississippi River in to Arkansas from the city. As a cyclist, I can tell you, people feel ownership to roads. When you slow their forward progress by even a handful of seconds, they lose their shit. My social media feed was full of white people screaming about how that’s not the answer. It was also full of white people saying they’d like to take bulldozers, guns, grenades, etc. to the protesters.

Suddenly, the plight of Black People became something they couldn’t ignore. It was suddenly within their realm of possibilities that the profiling of a race could effect their lives in some way, shape, or form, and there was nothing that they could do about it.

And, that’s where I’m going with this. A lot of people ask, “what good is it doing to shut down an interstate?” That’s what it’s doing- it’s making the lifetimes of anger and frustration caused by racial profiling everyone’s un-ignorable problem. It’s bringing attention to someone else’s realm of possibilities. For most people reading this, being profiled by a police officer because of your race is far outside of your realm of possibilities. So, you don’t pay much attention to it. It doesn’t matter to you. You may have even decided that racial profiling doesn’t exist because you don’t do it yourself. Being stopped/questioned by a police officer because you’re “black and in the wrong place” or, in more politically correct terminology, “looking suspicious” is something that has not and will never happen to you.

People wouldn’t be shutting down interstates if a problem didn’t exist. I don’t have a solution, but I know that empathy and admitting that the problem exists makes a hell of a first step. I still claim Memphis as my home town, and I’m proud of Memphis for a peaceful protest on both the protester and the police side.