2012 Original Growler Race Report

To sum the race up in one word, amazing!

Race strategy

For this race I decided to have a completely different strategy than usual.  Usually, I put myself toward the very back of the field at the start. The reason for this, to be candid, I am lazy. The guys in the back usually have a slower pace. This allows me to sit back and take it easy. Something that I think is good when you have to ride 64 miles of technical single track. With this strategy I can pass when the time is right. In the past this has been pretty successful. This year Jenn talked me into placing myself toward the front of the field. Somewhat reluctantly, I went ahead and followed through with this idea. It changed how the race went drastically. Usually I don't get passed that much and I pass a couple of folks every now and then. This time I still didn't get passed much, but I also didn't pass many folks. The most passing that happened was when someone, either me or someone else, had to take a bio-break or something like that. The other huge difference is that sections that usually were a hike a bike were not. The reason, I think, is that everyone could clean sections that the back of the group would not. This could be either because of skill or there are just so many people piled up at this point that you can't keep your momentum. I think the later is more likely the truth. The biggest problem I had riding with this faster group is that I wanted to be competitive. This caused me to regress in behavior and not consume enough fluid and food. I kept thinking "I have to keep up with these guys" rather than "I have 64 fluid miles ahead of me, I need to drink some". 

Falling

This sort of mentality also led to me watching the guys in front rather than watching where I was going. Doh! I let my front wheel turn 90 degrees to the frame and then boom, I was on the ground. Fortunately I was not going fast, hence why I call it a fall rather than crash. At the time I didn't think anything of it. It didn't hurt, wasn't bleeding much and really didn't seem to be an issue.

Jenn as support crew

Not to sound like a total suck up that is trying to make his wife happy here. Jenn is an awesome person to have in your support crew. I won't try to sugar coat it. I was shooting for a 6:30 finish and came around loop one at 3:30. I was grumpy about that and the fact me stomach was revolting on me. Also my knee was starting to feel pressure from the fall. I think that it was starting to swell at this point. All of that combined didn't make me the nicest person in the world. Jenn just kept a smile on and told me that I needed to drink more water during the second lap. That is all I really needed to hear and she was totally right!

Drinking water

During the second lap I took a completely different mindset. Instead of worrying about how fast I was going I went for finishing the race comfortably. This was for a few reasons. One, I really wanted to be lively and fun for Jenn when I finished the race. After all she had taken her whole weekend to come to my race. Not only that but she also skipped out on her softball tournament that was over the same weekend. I didn't want to finish the race blown. Two, I wanted to enjoy the event more rather than just trying to destroy it. Funny thing is that my time was only increased by 15 minutes slogging around rather than pushing my pedals hard the entire time. I almost wonder if I would have done better taking it "easy" the entire race rather than pushing it so hard the first lap. With this new mentality of taking it easy and enjoying the race my stomach started to feel much better and my mood was drastically improved. My knee on the other hand, was a separate story. What was originally just pressure building in my knee was turning into discomfort. I just kept pedaling on and really did enjoy the rest of the day.

Ride back into town

After getting back to the finish line I said hello to Jenn, complained about my knee, put a jacket on and headed straight back into town. The reason I didn't spend any time at the finish line shooting the breeze or seeing what free stuff I could score was because I didn't want my knee to stiffen up any more. I figured the sooner I got those last 2.5 miles finished the better.

Post race celebration

The post race celebration was pretty cool. They gave me a filled growler of beer, Shift beer from New Belgium and price money! Yes you just heard me right. I won prize money. Here is a picture for proof.

Okay I'll tell the real story now. Rather than hand out tickets or something like that they gave you $8 to spend at the food vendors. I like to think of it as prize money rather than a post race meal :-) After all that concept is a lot more fun.

Learnings

There are two things I would have liked to have done differently during this race. One, I would have liked to not have had the mentality that I need to keep up with these animals that are near me in the field. The second is that I wish I would have hydrated properly.

Summary, pictures and results

The Original Growler is by far one of my favorite races. The reason for this is that no matter how fit or number of times I do this race it will always be a challenge. This is because it does not play into my strength of long steady climbs and also because it is a really technical race. This is the first year that I have felt confident on many of the technical areas, where in the past I have not felt that way. If you want to see all of the pictures that Jenn took you can follow this link 2012 Original Growler photos. Also you can check out race results, just my result by age group and the overall results.

If you made it this far, thanks a lot for reading.

Car free for 2012

According to Reuters in 2010 44% of Americans planned to make a New Years resolution. Here I am in 2011 drinking Ranger IPA from New Belgium trying to figure out how I am going to reign in the New Year. Well, that isn't 100% true as I already know I am going to dress up as "The Situation" on Jersey Shores at Devon's New Years party.

"So we got a situation", I have been kicking around the idea of going car-less in 2012. To clear any crazy ideas that may have just sprung to life in your mind the intent is not for all travel to no longer be powered by the internally combustable motor. Rather there will be restrictions I would place on my transportation. So far the best idea I have had is that I will not drive if it is solely for my transportation, "personal transportation". I think this subverts many of the socially awkward situations I could think of. So if my wife wants to see a movie in February for valentines day I am free and able to driver her there and not feel the need to try and make it seem romantic for us to ride our bikes there.

One of my biggest concerns is poor weather. Specifically precipitation that is in the solid form, also known as snow. The cold is not of any concern. What really bothers me is CO-5's last leg up to CO-392. There is zero shoulder and it is up hill, prolonging the amount of time I get to compete with traffic.

To solve this problem I first turned to Fort Collins public transportation system. One important fact for this discussion is that it takes me about 20 minutes to drive from my house to the office. Unless I am missing something obvious it would take me about 2 hours to get to the office taking public transportation. At this point I am thinking that in order to meet my objective of avoiding personal transportation I am going to have to either find some sort of commuting group or plan to work from home if the weather is poor. Both are not ideal. Time to hit the chalk board...

FYI: I got the idea of "personal transportation" from Carfree.us.

Expanding Mac iPhoto shared library

Today Jenn wanted to add photos to our library from the CSU vs. CU game yesterday (9news report of the game), but couldn't because there was no free space out of the originally allotted 20GB. She told me about this and I looked at how to do this. The good part is that it is actually very easy. Because we have separate accounts I set up our iPhoto library as suggested by Apple here (sparse image placed in shared users folder). Here are the steps taken to expand my volume from 20GB to 40GB:

1. Unmount your sparse image
2. Open Terminal
3. Type
1. hdiutil resize -size 40g iPhotoLibrary.sparseimage
4. Mount your sparse image and load photos

After you do step 4 and look at the available size (command-i) you may ask your self why it is not reporting the size you requested. The reason is because 40g is actually (2^20) * 40 = 41,943,040 in base 2.

Hope you enjoyed.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 7

We all slept in a little bit. This was really nice given we had to get up early most of the days to do various activities. After having a minimal breakfast with everyone we went for a hike. The objective was to find the water falls that are on OSA mountain property. I left about 40 minutes into the hike in pursuit of a machete.

During the hike poor Jenn was climbing over a log to traverse a steep ravine when it gave loose. She was not able to recover from this and fell.

Hopefully you can see how this could go wrong.

I was not able to get the machete while others were hiking. What happened was everyone except for Tyler, he was feeling ill again, ended up coming out by Tyler and Jess' villa. I wandered around trying to find them for quite a while until finally finding them at our villa.

Back at our villa Devon and I watched the beginning part of Terminator Salvation while the girls showered. While watching one of the workers brought my machete by. Awesome!

Coolest thing in the world!

We packed up and head out after this. I mean what else was there to do! On the way we stopped in San Isidro again for lunch. We went a little out of the way because pizza was the requested meal and that was the only place that our GPS knew about pizza. Turned out that after San Isidro there were a bunch of pizza joints, go figure. After getting lunch we made our way for San Jose. Because Jess and Tyler are rock stars they took portrait pictures of us on the way. We really did not do the best job of managing our time so we ended up driving the rest of the way in heavy rain and in the dark, not fun.

That covers the adventure that was Costa Rica. Hope that you have enjoyed this series of blog posts.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 6

We all woke up around 7 so that we could go on the canopy tour. It was a really good time. Jenn did really awesome for not being comfortable with heights. I mean just check out this picture (Thanks Tyler and Jess).

Isn't Jenn one bad A!

One of the "rides" was a monkey walk. I was a little worried that she was going to get frustrated. Fortunately she did not and was able to complete the obstacle. Here is a picture showing what that looked like.

After the canopy tour we went back to the villa for lunch. We ended up doing left overs. I made myself a burrito and Jenn made her self a taco salad thing.


After lunch the girls took a nap while Devon and I smoked a Cuban cigar on the deck and talked about life. We talked about everything from concerns about our siblings, thoughts about our wives, relation with the in-laws, ten year reunion for high school to having kids. An hour later the both of us had a killer buzz from the Cubans. Wish that I could have brought a lot of those back! Good way to relax and take the day in with a great friend like Devon Bruntz!

Doesn't the guy just look like a future politician!

After getting ready we went into town for dinner and to get Tyler some drugs that seemed to do the trick. Dinner was really good. Jenn had a slug crawl over her foot while being served bread as an appetizer. That was pretty comical.

Costa Rica 2011 Part 5

We went to Manual Antonio to see all of the wild life. This included: iguanas, howler monkey, spiders, walking stick, frogs, snails, crabs, sloths and raccoon.

Baby iguana (that is our guess at least)

Iguana

"The Lazy Path"

Howler monkey

Sloth

Jenn and I on the Lazy Path

We had lunch at Sanchos in Manual Antonio. If you ever end up going there I would suggest you stop there for lunch as well. It is awesome. Plus the owner speaks english fluently as that was his first language. This can be a nice break from having to understand spanish. We finished the day off with Tyler's pool side 30th birthday party.

Us guys enjoying a nice cuban cigar

Costa Rica 2011 Part 4

On the forth day there we went to Dominical and San Isidro. On the way back to Dominical from San Isidro we stopped by a couple of shops. We did not end up getting anything but did get an impression of what the local markets had to offer when they were not commercialized like the Maxi Bodegas (scroll down a little for the Costa Rica section) of the world. When we tried to get to Playa Ventanas beach the road was completely washed out.

Road just vanishes

Me standing in the bottom "Where did the road go?"

Jenn got a coconut drink that was the coconut and nothing else. The locals called this "poppas fritas".

The girls thought these were yummy

We all had lunch at a pizza place on the way back to Dominical. What was cool about that was the bee hive in the restraunt that had the smallest bees known to man. At least I think that they are the smallest bees known to man.