Recently I've been racing my bike a lot, working a lot and thinking a lot cause I'm not in school so I actually have time to think... One subject I had been considering the most was what makes a person happy, what defines happiness and what influences it most greatly. I started thinking about this in part because I have raced Cyclo-Cross (CX) all throughout the fall with good results which made me happy but made me think whether I'd still be happy if I didn't receive praise from my peers. This is something I've considered before in art as well; do I make my art for me or for others to see? I've always arrived back to the conclusion that peers are an important part of why I do what I do, it's important to me for people to recognize what I do, to recognize me to some extent I suppose. I don't mean any of this in a narcissistic manner, I feel it's normal for people to feel this way, maybe I'm wrong but it's rare to meet someone who doesn't appreciate praise. Anyways, I've noticed that happiness seems to be a fleeting emotion that can change as quickly as the wind does. Happiness also seems more superficial when it is reaped from achievements such as successful race results or people appreciating art. What I have seen that makes me think otherwise about these things in particular is that they often represent improvement within a person's life; It's quite gratifying to see physically how a person can improvement in terms of oxygen capacity, seeing your lactate threshold increase from one year to another, seeing how you've improved at painting or photography. These things are not as shallow a joy as temporary things like wins or gallery showings because they offer you improvement that you've worked for over a sustained amount of time.
I just recently got my first win in a CX race. The feeling was fantastic, what I have always wanted. The start was a mass sprint as it always is in CX and I was the first to hit the first turn, a term known as getting the "holeshot". I usually feel so completely destroyed after the first few turns after a strong start that I feel the need to back-off to avoid losing spots from going too hard. This race was different, I decided to push through this pain I felt, to push through while my lungs were struggling to increase the amount of oxygen that was entering my body, I wanted to see how much damage I could dish out to the guys behind me. This was the first race I had done where this thought even occurred to me, to attack the rest of the field, it's risky cause it's easy to blow-up. I'm usually the one who has to react to other people's attacks and to chase after them without losing positions. Racing is like a dance and you have to feel out the rhythm of the race, you have to read the riders who are around you. "Does he look like he's hurting?" If the answer is "no" then it's probably time to attack and pick-up the pace so he is hurting which means it's gonna hurt a lot for the person attacking as well. Racing is so mental; who will break first? After a lap I secured my position leading the race and now all I had to do was keep the heat on for the next few laps. As the race progressed my lead increased to the point where I could see the person in 2nd just now entering the turn I passed through 20-30 second prior. It was a feeling I hadn't experienced before but one that I wanted to keep. This was my day, my race to win, avoiding mistakes was my biggest priority. I ended up winning that race and placing in 2nd as the overall Cat. 4 racer of the 8 race series.

Crossin' it up this season.

I've had this entire past semester off from school. It has been a nice break free from the boredom that usually comes with time off of school. I have filled this free time with a new job, also at a restaurant as my last one was but this new job is less pretentious and more laid back. Casual fine dinning, downtown, further from my house but it's downtown so we have a very different demographic and being able to walk around downtown after my shift is over is a nice feeling. We serve "modern southern" food which is good, things like shrimp and grits, country fried chicken served with some of the best mashed potatoes I've had and sauteed spinach, sounds simple but it is so good.
I don't work all that much though and since the beginning of September I have been racing my bike. My favorite sport, cyclo-cross, the beautiful combination of road racing on mountain bike like terrain. I was fortunate enough to find a local cycling team to join. Every cyclo-cross race I've competed in thus far has been while riding in the Velosports colors of green white and blue. It has been great getting to know my teammates and racing competitively with a select few people, some people I now consider to be my rivals, people I can compare myself to, to test where my abilities are at. Some of these people are on other teams but one of the reasons I'm so glad to be on a team is because they help provide me with goals. I have found, and I find this is true with all things in life, if you pick someone stronger than yourself to emulate then you will become like them, if they climb mountains well, you will learn to stay on their wheel through the toughest climbs, etc. In many ways cycling can be related to the difficulties and stresses of life. I hope to harness this ability in my studies but as it's been so far I have failed to do this.
I still have a difficult time slogging through school and all the bullshit that is associated with it. Fortunately I am nearly done at A-B Tech, the community college that it seems I've spent an eternity at. I'm hoping to go to Appalachian State University in the Fall with an associates of arts. ASU also has a really good cycling team and I would look forward to competing with them while living in Boone if that's meant to be. I still am not certain as to what exactly I would like to study but I have a feeling that I would enjoy something like Global Studies which is the degree I checked out while visiting Boone a few weeks ago. Global Studies involves learning a foreign language, preferably minoring in it, and also traveling abroad, neither of those things I would mind at all! It would make most sense for my focus to be on Japan as I speak some Japanese already and I've been there twice and enjoy it. At the same time I would very much like to study other cultures and their languages. I suppose graduating with a bachelors especially with a foreign focus would open up new doors for me across various worldly locations anyways. As long as I have opportunities to go to new places to learn, and of course race my bike I think I'll always be happy. The trick is that traveling with a bike is so expensive... Maybe country hopping after a few years is the way to do that to make it worth it. I'm excited for my future after college, the degree means very little to me but it seems as though it is the key to currently locked doors.
My best friend recently came back to visit over Thanksgiving break; He just recently graduated with a degree in film. I've always dreamt of doing something big with friends, traveling the world, professionally dancing, making movies, etc. Since my friend has just graduated he is now desperately looking for work in the industry. I suggested to him that it would be fun to make a documentary together. For the past few years I've had ideas of becoming a photo-journalist but the industry is dying out in part due to the rise of consumer photography and the mass explosion of cellphones, everything is recorded these days and it's not been necessary to send a TIME photographer to shoot pictures of a massacre in Africa There are now citizens around the world who record the events on their mobile devices and upload them online. This is considerably cheaper for the editing agency. I fear the days of beautiful photo-journalism are dying out. The photographs that came out of WWI, II, Vietnam, etc are extremely emotional, powerful photographs of human destruction and at times moments of hope. Anyways, I hope that once I graduate that my friend and I can go to Japan and shoot a documentary possibly about the aftermath of Fukushima, shot both from a photography and cinematic point of view. We are both somewhat versed in Japanese and if my studies of Japanese continue at ASU then I should be well versed in the language to translate and work with people in Japan. I still have thoughts of teaching English in the back of my head as well. The JET program still looks appealing as does teaching in Korea...

Fear's impact

I love riding my bike! It's probably my most favorite form of enjoyment, exercise and suffering. Sometimes the suffering is why I ride; I love trying to find the biggest and baddest of mountains because the mountains are a place to test who you are and what you're made out of. Of course with all ascents come descents which can be as fast as 50mph or more on straights and through sweeping turns. When I first started riding I was completely stressed out about descending, I would tense up, my palms would perspire twice as much as usual making my grip slippery and unsure, and every corner I came across I would be on my brakes. In the beginning I hated the suffering of the mountains and I hated the speed and danger of the descents. I eventually became a stronger rider, taking pride in my climbing ability, my ability to suffer more efficiently than others. In time I even grew to enjoy descending. There's no greater or more terrifying feeling than sweeping around a tight turn nearing speeds of 40mph at a 50 degree angle. The feeling of speed and always being on the edge of to far makes descending a rush like no other. I eventually became someone who enjoyed the speed, the thrill, I embraced this feeling because for my entire life I've had this image of myself as someone who didn't like to take risks, someone weak. Now I race bikes, I've grown out of the shell I previously perceived myself to be in. During races you have to push the limits to attain results, my downfall was while chasing a friend down a highly technical descent full of hairpin turns. I knew in the back of my mind that chasing someone descending was probably a bad idea, let alone someone clearly better at descending than myself. I flew through the first few hairpins until I came to a sharp hairpin, I was on my brakes... to make the turn I had to lean deeper but because I was on my brakes I didn't have good traction and my real wheel flew out from beneath me. The bike hit the ground with quite a bit of force and then I slid across the asphalt just as a hockey puck would slid across ice. My upper thigh was thoroughly ripped up, my lycra bibs were torn to shreds and I was sprawled across the ground in slight shock, it was my first major road crash (all the others ended, relatively, peaceful in grass). It's been a month and a half since that crash and since then I have been in search of my confidence. I have crashed on two separate occasions while trying to gain normality in my descending. I have a fear of speed, of dropping hard into a turn, of spotting my line (your bike follows the facing of your head), too worried about hitting gravel, or worse, overshooting my line and flying off the road at high speed. Good descenders require a good dose of insanity stirred with confidence and topped with impeccable technique. I rode with my friend today with the intention of practicing my descents. All I felt was nervous, scared and occasionally excited. He would lead, dropping into sharp corners and achieving 60-70 degree angles! I was definitely impressed but for some reason that didn't do much to reinforce my confidence, occasionally I would try to copy him, the force of gravity flowing through you as you hit the apex, completely amazing. On other corners I felt like I had too much speed and would bail into a driveway or in one case, crash, almost off the mountain... I've never felt more frustrated, more angry with myself than during and after that ride. I don't know what to do to find myself, to find that confidence again.

Dining in hell

The last week and a half was restaurant week in Biltmore Village, or more colloquially referred to as "Hell week", by the people working at those restaurants (I made that up but I'm sure my co-workers would agree with me). Working the past week has been like swimming through an endless sea of stress which did in fact eventually come to an end each day to the surprise of my cohorts. I honestly felt like quitting today, it just doesn't seem worth all of the bullshit I put up with. I take pride in the fact that I work at an upper scale restaurant which has complexities involved with the basics of the job that most food service employees never have to deal with but with complexity comes more room for error and when parts of your team aren't pulling their weight then it usually ends up making other people look bad as well. I'm a responsible person, if I foul up I don't mind taking the heat for that, but when I'm called out for other people's mistakes, that really gets on my nerves. I love my co-workers, that's really what makes me love my job at all, but there's always certain people that will always let you down, and unfortunately in my case that person was promoted for some odd-ball reason.

It's lucky for me that after work I'm able to jump on my bike and ride away from all the stress that comes from my job. Discovering biking has been the greatest relief of stress and the largest source of constant joy that I've experienced from anything. It's parallel with having a crush or loving somebody but unlike a relationship, the only ups and downs you experience on a bike is when traversing the path ahead. A bike can take a person anywhere they want to go, all under their own strength and perseverance. Cycling is like an extension of a persons spirit.

Going hard in the saddle

No posts for over seven months... That's impressive even for myself. Well since August a lot of things have changed. Cycling is my new passion at the moment, as pottery was eight to nine months ago. Last Fall I raced cyclo-cross with one of my really good friends who I met near the end of last Summer. Everyone calls him "Noonan", he's one of the finest bicycle mechanics a person might meet and he used to work at the bike shop I frequent. I learned most of what I know from him and we rode together fairly often on training rides when we weren't traveling to races. If anyone is curios as to what cyclo-cross is, it's racing road bikes equipped with knobby tires for traction on dirt, through mud, snow and whatever else might get in your way. It's one of the few kinds of bike racing where you are required to dismount off of your bike to leap over barriers which tend to be about knee height. Some of the more skilled and daring riders will 'bunny hop', jump the barriers while riding which is always exciting to watch. cyclo-cross is an all-out sport, an almost full-on sprint that lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to an entire hour. Each lap usually lasts no more than two to three miles. As I only started riding a few months ago, I never achieved much endurance or speed, not enough to place well in races anyways.
So now 'cross season has ended and the road season has already commenced. I've taken part in my first two road races, it's an entirely different experience from cyclo-cross, much more team oriented, much more focused on being more aerodynamic because of the much higher speeds during a road race and a lot more stuck-up roadies to deal with. 'Roadies' as some like to refer to them as, are road bikers who generally, worry way too much about the weight of their bikes, the smoothness of their shaven legs and overall worrying far too much. I've enjoyed road racing so far, it's faster than cyclo-cross and more boring because of so much straight road but also more strategical which I appreciate, I'm definitely keen on strategy. Cyclo-cross is more entertaining to me because you have to weave through a unique course, created only for that race, and you have to fly through the course while tapping your brakes as little as possible because that's a huge waste of energy. I love cycling period so be it road or 'cross I'm happy to be riding but I'm really hoping that the road season will prepare me physically for huge efforts when the 'cross season rolls back around.
I need to increase my training time but going to school and having two very part-time jobs has sucked up a lot of my time that I might use to train for races. On the school front I'm very ready to be done with it, I guess I just need a break but I'm not even done with my associates degree which is saddening to me. I just want to travel, I feel like that's the most efficient and effective way to learn. I'd also love to tour Europe or Asia on my bike, I think that'd be the ultimate experience. Thanks for reading (assuming anyone still checks this old blog).