free-wheeling

our big accomplishment this weekend was riding our bikes up to mt. vernon.

and back.

we underestimated the round trip by, oh, about 10 miles, so it was pretty slow going there at the end.

but it was also a perfect day for a long, leafy bike ride. and it's always worth it to say hello to george.

lost and found

yesterday was the perfect day for a bike ride. so, that's exactly what we decided to do.

and, on our third attempt, we found the way to the iwo jima memorial!

this was actually AWD's originally intended destination for the bike ride on which we got engaged so, for good measure, he asked me to marry him when we stopped in front of the memorial.

i said yes.

to the point

it got up to 75 degrees on friday (the joy! the ecstasy!) so AWD and i hopped on our bikes after work and hit the trail out to gravelly point to have a picnic and watch the planes take off.

fun fact: did you know that AWD and i met on a bike ride? that is a true story, and it is one way that i know AWD likes me for real. i was wearing bike clothes when we first met and he still called me afterwards. win.

back to friday, we ate delicious salads and played a little game where for every plane that took off, we made up a story about a person who might be on that plane. you know, like a woman flying home to iowa for her best friend's bachelorette party but she's totally depressed about it because she is in love with the groom. or like harry reid.

we stayed until it turned to dusk.

it was divine.

rocky mountain hi(gh)

my first order of business is to inform you that sallee and i rode our bikes for 60 miles on saturday, in three hours and 18 minutes, which we both agreed was a) a personal best and b) a miracle.

in other words, baby birthing and poor training and every other obstacle aside, not only did the little red riding hood not kill us, but we killed it.

and, as usual, it was totally awesome. mostly because the little red riding hood means hours of pedaling and talking and singing john denver with sallee, which i could do every day of the week and not get sick of it. the weather was also perfect, the rest stops were well-stocked with chocolate and red vines and peanut butter sandwiches and delicious diet coke and, in a stroke of amazing luck, emdawg was at the finish line. that's two out of three times she has met us at the finish line of this ride. and that is friendship. plus, we got crowns.

i think i have mentioned before that the little red riding hood totally changed my life when we first did it four years ago and it was really fun to be back and to think about doing that ride for years to come, some day soon with our own little girls in tow. (we figure baby claire can do 18 miles by the time she is two years old. right?)

and, as if that wasn't enough, i managed to squeeze in a few other things during my 50 hours in utah.

like, lunch at greek souvlaki and dinner at mazza with the grandparents and uncle john. some of my most favorite food.

and a bonfire and s'mores with some of my favorite grown-ups and one of my favorite babies, kyle, who is not a baby anymore at all, but who is running around and saying words and generally slaying with his adorable-ness. holly and evan taught him how to say my name ("fwancie!") and my heart almost melted.

plus, for my other main event, i got to meet ms. claire and snuggle her and sing to her and change her diaper and feed her bottles and tell her about all the things we are going to do together and see her be blessed and then eat delicious pulled pork and eclairs (get it?) and homemade root beer to celebrate. oh, and don't worry, sallee and i wore the same dress to the blessing. great minds and all of that.

and then, almost as soon as i got there, it was time to go home. this happened when i picked up claire to say good-bye.



i felt the same way.

pedal pushers

i leave tomorrow morning for utah and the little red riding hood bike ride and so, fueled by last minute training panic, i have spent most of my time this week in spinning classes.

don't worry if you thought the little red was still a couple months away. so did i. obviously.

jaron suggested that i try to take over my spin classes, a la dwight schrute.



i opted for panting and panicking and praying that my head/heart/soul/will to live would not explode instead.

but, i think i am ready to go! sallee and i are approaching this year as a rebuilding year (cause sea-level dwelling for me and birthed a baby two months ago for her), so the motto is, ride until we want to stop, and then eat a bunch of candy. definitely something i can get behind.

wish us luck!

(and if you live in salt lake, come celebrate our survival saturday night with s'mores in sallee's backyard. i'd love to see you, and we'll let you praise us all you want.)

bliss bike bliss

the bottom line about me and halloween is that i hate it. for one thing, i eat candy every day of the year, so why do i need to put on some lame and/or scandalous costume to do that very thing on this particular day?

but the trouble with me and halloween is that that excuse usually doesn't get me very far, so i usually find myself stuck at some party, wearing the same fairy wings (usually over normal clothes) that i have worn on halloween for the past four years.

this year, though, i had the perfect excuse to be a halloween hater. and that excuse was dutch bike dutch.

dutch bike dutch is a fund-raising bike ride organized by some of my awesome new friends here, and held every year over the weekend closest to halloween. which happened to be on halloween this year. some people, who are less lame than me, bring their halloween spirit along.

the ride took us through 30 miles of gorgeous amish country with farms, cows, charming little graveyards (very halloween-ey, no?) and covered bridges.

oh, and hills.

we also said hello to your thanksgiving dinner.

it felt so good (like, really, really good) to be back on my bike after too long of an absence, and i loved pedaling all day with these crazy kids.

plus, there was tons of leftover halloween candy waiting when i got home. just the way i like it.

a bicycle built for one

i haven't been on my bike much lately.

for the past few days, this has been the result of an unfortunate incident involving my bike being semi-permanently stuck on my indoor trainer, a situation which required the brains and brawn of the father of one of aunt joyce's flute students, as well as the sacrifice of a plastic screw cap, to resolve.

another contributing factor is that i am now one of those poor suckers who works all the time and leaves the office with minimal energy leftover for anything else.

but the biggest culprit is my lack of a biking buddy here.

due to my general self-consciousness about all things athletic, i usually opt to do athletic things by myself, but biking is the exception. there are few things i love more than riding along, chatting with a pal. the hills seem so much steeper and the miles seem so much longer when i am pedaling along alone. and it is definitely not as much fun to pull off to the side of the trail and watch the washington municipal airport authority take someone away when there is no one to watch it with you.

sigh.

millie and i will continue to persevere on our own (millie being the bike, you'll remember), but i sure hope someone comes along to join us soon.

(any of the completely hot guys i see on the mt. vernon trail will do just fine.)

a bicycle built for three

when sallee and nathan got engaged i told nathan that, as the person losing my best friend, i thought i deserved some sort of consolation prize. i mean, she got a diamond (not to mention a husband) out of the deal, right? a ring for me seemed like a totally reasonable request. and i was clear that cubic zirconia was fine.

being the amenable fellow that he is, nathan was happy to go along with my request (ok, it was more like a demand) and presented me with a ring(pop) that was not only beautiful but delicious, and turned my tongue and lips a very alluring shade of red. what a guy.

i was also pretty clear that there was going to be a lot of "the three of us" going on (in a strictly non-adulterous kind of way) as i have no qualms about being the tag-along. true to form, nathan was on board for that as well.

and so, for our first triple date since the vows were said, sallee, nathan and i went on a little bike ride yesterday. we met up just west of the airport, did a little bike maintenance...



and rode out to saltair. nathan hung back for a while, keeping our pace, before finally giving up and speeding ahead in what sallee calls "tour de france mode." this involves, among other things, leaning low over the handlebars with a look of intense concentration.

the ride itself is just gorgeous, along some salt flats and the shore of the great salt lake, and the time of day was absolutely perfect. thanks to nathan's speediness, and our attempts to keep up with him, we finished the 21 miles in a little more than an hour, arriving back at the cars just as the sun was dipping under the horizon.



the best part of the night, though, was catching up with my favorite marrieds. i usually have a pretty strict "married people are dead to me" friend rule, but i think i'll keep these two around.

frances cake, take five

in retrospect, i should have written the past two posts in the opposite order, because before marc made a heroic repair of my bike, he came over for a night of delicious frances cake. it was actually marc who introduced me to millie in the first place, so i am forever in his debt. and, he also taught me how to clip in and out of my pedals, so i really owe him my life. he is a for-real hardcore cyclist, but is willing to abide by my three rules: no judging, no making me do stuff, and no leaving me behind. so we get along just fine.

marc and i made carrot cake, and i have to say that it was possibly the most delicious carrot cake i have ever had in all my live-long days. and not a thing went wrong with the recipe. we remembered the eggs, the frosting was the perfect consistency, and we didn't bake it for too long. i think i might be getting the hang of this!




here are some things you should know about marc: he is from texas and has given up talking to his dad about global warming. he is the youngest in his family. he wants to ride his bike across central america. he has a freakishly good memory, especially when it comes to people he has met and the circumstances under which he met them, but he tries to hide it so he doesn't seem like a stalker. he has no sense of smell. he has 14 bikes in his apartment, and a sewing machine. he usually moves every six months.

he also is not super into the idea of eating cake out of people's hands.



but he is always happy to take some home.




it is a good thing we got frances cake in when we did, because marc is actually moving to alaska. as we just became friends, this makes me sort of sad. but we have squeezed in a lot of friendship since we met, so i think it might stick. it is also a good thing we got frances cake in when we did because marc returned my tupperware with a jar of homemade strawberry jam inside, and it was delicious. a perfect end to a perfect frances cake.

why yes, we are hardcore (part 2)

saturday morning and sallee and i had a plan to ride 50 miles, or thereabouts. with only three weekends left until the little red riding hood century, we are sort of out of time to mess around. plus, it was a gorgeous day, and there is little better to do on a gorgeous day than ride around on your bike. we were both a little tired from chocolate fundraisers and the return of fiancees (respectively), so we settled on a later start time and figured we might grab some lunch on our way home.

as i am walking out the door, sallee calls. flat tire. she'll call me back when it's fixed. a few minutes later, the phone rings again. she can't find the leak, so she doesn't know where to patch. we decide she should go to the bike shop down the street, get a new tube and put it in. she'll call me when she's done. a few minutes later, the phone rings again. good to go. but then a few seconds later, the phone rings again. her tire had exploded. back to the bike shop. the phone rings again. she's all sorted out, for real this time.

i hop on millie to ride up to our rendezvous point on campus. just a block and a half or so from my house, i have to cross some train tracks that sort of curve around up the hill (can you see where this is going?). i miscalculate the angle of my own turn (math has never been my thing) and my back tire lodges in that hole between the rail and the road. the bike stops and i, of course, don't. i fly instead, and take about 90 percent of the fall right on my chin. the small silver lining? i somehow, miraculously, came unclipped so my bike did not fly with me.

i call sallee. she meets me a few feet from the scene of the incident and we decide we better head back to my house to wash out my wounds and take further stock of the situation. my chin rivaled jay leno's in size, but otherwise my injuries were minor. i didn't see anything wrong with millie, either, but when i hopped on to ride home i realized that the left-side brake mount was, shall we say, askance, and the brake was being permanently applied to the front tire. less than ideal. sallee loosened the front brake so i could ride home, but riding with no brakes on the front tire is also less than ideal. i definitely needed to get it fixed before we could go much further.

briana, who was trying to enjoy a relaxing morning at home, was understandably a little surprised to see us walk through the door so soon after my departure, but she jumped to the rescue, assessing the damage (moderate), disinfecting my chin and filling me with homeopathic remedies (some of them tasted downright nasty, and i can't remember exactly what they were supposed to do... i heard the word trauma... but i am sure they helped).







meanwhile, sallee called my friend marc, bicycle psychologist extraordinaire. he said to bring millie down to the bike shop and he would take a look.

though he would probably deny this, i am pretty sure marc couldn't help laughing when he saw my face/enormous chin/dirt-and-grime-smeared shirt.




he was nice enough to confess that he, too, has crashed as a result of train tracks, though his chin was not involved. i had no idea how bad millie's injury was, or what it would take to fix her, and i was, frankly, a little nervous. marc took a look, let out a long sigh, took a firm grip on the brake mount... and jerked it back into place. with his hand.

me: that's it?
marc: that's it.
me: good as new?
marc: better than new.
me: that's embarrassing.
marc: i'm a professional.

and we were out the door.

after all our mishaps, sallee and i figured we would just ride a quick 15 mile loop, take ourselves out to lunch and call it good. but, once we were going it felt so good that we just kept on going, for pretty much our whole original route. we made it all the way to the mouth of little cottonwood canyon and then came back around. it was a pretty intense ride with a lot more climbing that we usually do, and i am not embarrassed to say that we had to stop at granite bakery on our way home for some cookies to get us through the last few miles (sallee chose the ones shaped like the temple). but, where even a month ago i would have given up after the first obstacle, or certainly the second, let alone the third and fourth, we rocked that ride and we rocked it hard. because we are...? that's right. hardcore. i would say these bruises on my leg, which appeared later in the day, pretty much prove it.

why yes, we are hardcore.

saturday morning and the bikes are loaded up, millie for me, synergy for sallee. (sallee's old bike, jem, left us last weekend in a most dramatic and unexpected fashion. let's just say bike parts strewn on the road. she never would have made it 100 miles. but synergy is a champ!)



being hardcore, sallee had changed a flat tire by herself the night before. good as new. also being hardcore, sallee thought she could ride in a tank top. but, she was wrong. we rode a few feet and then went back and got her sweatshirt. it was cold.



this, my friends, is what we call clipping in. that's right, my shoe is actually attached to that pedal. and it is just as terrifying as it sounds. but, it means i am hardcore. and that's what matters.



thanks to a very detailed map provided by travis, sallee and i pretty easily completed a 21-mile-or-so loop out by the airport. we even rode over the boundary into north salt lake, which somehow makes it all seem so much more, well, hardcore. and, other hardcore road bikers were waving at us in comraderie, which makes me think we finally look like we know what we're doing. pretty rad. the only not-so-rad thing about the morning? a poorly aimed snot-rocket (what sallee calls a "farmer blow"). the landing spot was (unintentionally) my shoulder. gross. but clothes wash. and it was all ok because, i think as you can see here, frances+millie=true biking love.