My new Blue. Its black. And has red components.

As promised it has been less than 3 months since my last post.  Read it and weap momma.

One of the new advancements of this spring is that I have upgraded my bike.  Back in 2011 at Age Group Nationals, I had the fastest overall bike split and "won" a Blue Bike Frame.  After sending +/- a zillion emails to various employees of Blue, I never received a frame and so I entered 2012 basically giving up.  Then, I had the fastest bike split at Collegiate Nationals in April 2012 and "won" another Blue Bike frame.  So at this point, I emailed them and was like, look guys, if you just send me one full bike (not 2x frames) that would be cool.  I even contacted the CEO to try to light a fire under their buns.

So finally they said ok yeah they would send it in May...I wasnt fooled.  I tried to put it in the back of my mind for the summer and sure enough, after "warehouse problems" and "shipping problems" and large chunks of time without contact, I finally got a bike in November approximately 15 months after "winning" the first frame.  Better than never I guess! I still got a brand new bike although, looking back it was hardly free--for the time I spent contacting them and the value of the bike it worked out to about $3.50 per hour which I am pretty sure is less than minimum wage.

Anyway, when I "won" the 2x bikes they put you up on stage in front of everyone so every random person seemed to know I should be getting a new  bike and have been asking about it for like 15 months.  So here you go, here is the story.  I finally can say yes it came.  And here are some pictures.  They ended up sending me their limited edition Matte Black frame so it looks pretty cool, but it doesn't actually have red components like they said it would, surprise (it has SRAM force).  Still, they have won this battle, I concede, I am not sending it back to them.  By the time they got back to me there probably wouldn't be roads anymore.

And of course the old Cervelo P2 is now out gunned.  I got the Cervelo back in December 2008 and have ridden it all over the US, won a couple national championships on it, got 16th at Hy-Vee on it this year, taken it on century rides--not to mention all the quality trainer rides we have had together.  In deciding what to do with it, I was talking to my friend Drew Scott who said that his dad Dave still has his first bike that he raced Kona on back in 1980.  Its probably steel and has like 5 gears and some downtube shifters.  In short it is pretty much worthless to anyone except for the personal nostalgic value it holds for Dave.

I know I know its sad but, I decided that although that bike and I have had some great times together that it was time for it to move on and get on with living its life.  So, I sold it to a nice guy who promised to treat it well (I think he could tell it was meaningful to me).  I figured, (a) this guy could get good use out of it or (b) it could sit and collect dust for a couple years by which time the value and usefulness would inevitably decrease leaving me with a rusty dusty outdated unridden bike that would be viewed as 'junk' by anyone other than myself.  (Its probably good too since I still have like 5 bikes.)  Maybe I will even see it out there on the roads sometime!  Until then, it will be remembered:

Besides the bike news, my dad recently sent me a bar of dark chocolate.  Normally this would not be noteworthy, but in this case the bar in question weighed 5kg or about 11lbs.  It has like 125 servings, 30,000 calories (roughly) and enough caffeine to jump start Sonya Sotomayor's rate of speech from its dismal state of 40 words/min to the audiobook recommended level of 150 words/min (I'm speculating but the world can only hope).  I also ate too much last night and couldn't get to sleep until like 4am...

If you want one for yourself, good luck... the bar was imported from Belgium.  My hobiless dad (to the endless vexation of my mother) apparently has nothing to fill his time since there are no more soccer tournaments and little league baseball games, so he started going to this french bakery every morning at like 4am (since he apparently doesn't sleep either).  Now he and the baker are BFFs and this baker imports all of his chocolate from Belgium because it is of higher quality than is obtainable in the US.  He gave my parents a chunk of a bar at one point (which was sitting in our freezer at home) and over Christmas I pretty much demolished that stash.  Sensing that I like dark chocolate, my dad arranged to have a whole bar sent to me!  HAH!  11lbs...it will  probably last me like 3 weeks.

Side note, the bar is like 2 inches thick so you cant bite it and you cant break it.  Apparently my dad cut his with a band-saw in the garage (which I think is terribly wasteful), so I got a chisel and a hammer and have been shattering mine to get it into bite-able sizes. 

Thats all for now, hopefully my arteries wont clog up with saturated fat before my next post. (Each serving of the chocolate bar is 50% of daily value).

Rudy