{"id":7174,"date":"2014-03-31T07:14:41","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T13:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/?p=7174"},"modified":"2014-03-31T07:34:46","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T13:34:46","slug":"bad-newsgood-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/?p=7174","title":{"rendered":"Bad News\/Good News"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend was pretty laid back… I went out on a group ride with the 901 Racing guys again on Saturday, but, being kinda cold and rainy, everyone was having a good time riding just hard enough to not be cold. We rode through some of the more “scenic” areas of North Memphis, which I always find to be interesting. The air outside of Madea’s Soul Food Cafe smelled like my grandmother’s house. I think it was turnip greens.<\/p>\n

On the way back, Matt and I decided to take another “scenic route,” and rode about a mile on the unfinished part of the Shelby Farms greenline- a former rail bed with no tracks and a little overgrowth. It’s pretty mundane on a mountain bike, but the road bikes added a small level of difficulty. We tried taking a different neighborhood route home from the greenline, but ended up somehow bailing on that plan and grinding it out down Macon Road. It’s a lower speed-limit road (35mph), but it’s mostly narrow, and\u00a0there was a good bit of traffic. Even though we didn’t have and run-ins or close calls with ignorant drivers, for whatever reason, it induced a panic attack. I yelled at Matt to pull over in a neighborhood, and I spent several minutes gasping, shaking, and crying on my handlebars.<\/p>\n

It’s been more than a year now, and I still get caught off guard.\u00a0We made it home, though, and I engaged in retail therapy for the remainder of the afternoon.<\/p>\n

Enough about that- in much more awesome, exciting, and inspirational news:<\/p>\n

LAUREN FREAKING HALL…<\/p>\n

\"Gent<\/a><\/p>\n

…WINNING GHENT-WEVELGEM.<\/p>\n

Here’s a quick summary from the bowels of Velonews… where if you click on the link for “Results: Ghent-Wevelgem,” \u00a0you\u00a0only get a listing of the men’s race. It took a little digging, but here’s the rundown<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you don’t know who Lauren is, we used to race against each other back around 2008-ish, when I was on Kenda, and she had just joined the local ProBike team with infamous local hammer Debbie Milne.<\/p>\n

A random from back in the day… Lauren is in the blue shorts:<\/p>\n

\"DSC_1944\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I bet not many of you have a photo of results where you beat the winner of any of this year’s Euro classics ;)<\/p>\n

\"DSC_1965\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By the end of that season, she and Debbie were prettymuch unstoppable…<\/p>\n

\"Podium\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That photo is from the last race of that season- a crit in Birmingham where she and Debbie double-teamed the field until they escaped sometime in the last few laps. I’d done a ton of chasing, so I had nothing left for a pack sprint and decided my best bet was to attack into no-man’s land with 2 to go. I got away and landed the 3rd place spot behind the dynamic duo.<\/p>\n

P.S. Floyd Landis was really drunk.<\/p>\n

Lauren moved out to Colorado and started working her way up the pro cycling ladder, and now she’s a freaking rockstar with honest World Championship and Olympic potential. It was the highlight of my weekend to see that race result.<\/p>\n

In other “amazing\/inspiring” news, the Barkley 100 Ultramarathon<\/a> is happening right now. It started at 6:45 on Saturday. Out of 35 starters (including local Memphis Badass, Billy Simpson), only one man remains on course (Jared Campbell), looking as if he’s going to finish. I don’t know if “brutal” is really a descriptive enough term for that “race.”<\/p>\n

In other training news, I decided to call off my quest to further lose weight. I hit the mid 140’s last week, but that coincided with feeling like hell on the bike. I’m guessing there’s a reason why my body has really insisted on staying at 142 pounds, so I’m going to quit arguing with it and just maintain 141-142. With the muscle I’ve put on from lifting\/MMAing, I’m definitely a leaner\/meaner 142 than I was this time last year. I’ll take it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend was pretty laid back… I went out on a group ride with the 901 Racing guys again on Saturday, but, being kinda cold and rainy, everyone was having a good time riding just hard enough to not be cold. We rode through some of the more “scenic” areas of North Memphis, which I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa8Uq-1RI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7174"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7174"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7187,"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7174\/revisions\/7187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brickhouseracing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}