Same Ol' Same Ol'

WOO HOOO!

The past two weeks, although not very productive, left me with some fun, memorable rides. Over the weekend the temperature got down into the teens and, as you can see, affected my face during the ride. The first time it happened it was just little beads of ice stuck in my beard. The second time I had near stalactites forming off my chin. I laughed pretty hard when I first saw them and thought it was pretty cool, but all that stopped when I pulled them off and half my chin came with them. Every time I stretched my mouth I could feel the ice breaking and pulling the hair, it was really weird. I couldn't believe that just from breathing ice actually formed on my beard. On top of that, my water formed about an 1/8 inch layer of ice in my bottle and froze the spout completely shut. I mean I couldn't even open it, not even with my teeth - it was nuts!


The one day I was really rushed to get my ride in so I decided to do a 10 mile ride. The whole time my legs were burning and all I could think of was getting back so that I wouldn't be late to pick Bec up from work and make it to my hair appointment on time. After I got back I was going through my bike computer and noticed that my average speed was 17.3mph. Now for anyone who doesn't ride that doesn't really mean anything, but for me it was crazy. My average is usually around 15 - 15.5mph, so to bump it up 2mph was quite a jump I thought. But when I think about how professionals average 20-25mph over 100 miles it kind of puts things in perspective.

After I started this whole biking idea I decided in order to keep it from getting boring I would need to come up with different types of rides and exotic places (in a 200 mile radius) to go to keep my interest and not have it feel like work. One of the rides I wanted to do was ride in the rain. Luckily for me, I live in PA where winter means it will snow one day and then 2 days later rain so much it'll cause wide spread flooding - and that's exactly what happened. Riding in the rain wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I thought with being all wet I would get really cold, but I never did. The only time I got a little cold was when I would stand up to climb a hill and I had to sit back down on my wet padded shorts. That chill runs right up your crack and into your spine! I learned to only stand up when I had to.

Rain Ride from Jesse McDonald on Vimeo.

After I took off my other sock water came streaming out when I twisted it. That was what I really wanted to show, but unfortunately I chose the disappointing side that had nearly no water. Now I just look like a fool and a sissy for saying I was so wet. I totally would have looked tougher if I had wrung out the other sock.

Well I'm officially one month in and I have yet to be run off the road by a car, fall over from being stuck in my pedals, or blow a tire in the middle of a ride. I look forward to one, or more likely all, of those events happening and getting to post from a hospital. Until then I'll just keep posting the normal boring way... at home.

109 miles in 2 weeks... 2761 to go

Doughman

Ok so a few months ago I was watching this nardly show called "Man vs. Food" on the travel channel. The host, Adam Richman, did an event that was probably the greatest mix of competition and gluttony and inspired me to better myself and join in!
The competition takes place in Durham, NC (so Larissa and Brady we'll be booking a room in your hotel) over Memorial Day weekend and is a 4 person team quadrathon. The "Doughman Competition," as it's called, is set up into for legs: 1 running, 1 biking, 1 run/swim, and a final group run, but the twist is that each leg consists of an eating portion! How nectar is that? Not only are we trying to chase down about 200 other competitors we're also trying to shove food down our gullets quicker than them. There is so much action packed competition in this race I can already feel the nervous farts building up!
It's only been around for a few years, I think, but they've said that each year it increases by dozens of people and is becoming very popular. The money raised goes to the Durham Inner-city Gardeners, a program that helps teach kids life responsibilities through organic gardening. The event was created by a man named Jeff and 3 other friends "It was the brain child of 4 insane people who I happen to be friends with, and we put the event on each year working out of a house in Durham!" Crazy huh? Anyhow, after I saw it on "Man vs. Food" and realized it was relatively close I decided I wanted to do it. So, I gathered up 3 other hard core athletes and we had a group meeting. The group is comprised of Rebecca (my GF), Miriam (our friend), and Nathan (Miriam's husband/our friend). The meeting was basically a planning hour to come up with costume ideas because an added bonus is that we get to dress up for the race if we wish, which we definitely do. We never really came up with one good solid idea so if anyone out there has a good idea let's hear it!

Doughman Training from Jesse McDonald on Vimeo.

There is ONE cuss word in the song so if you have little ears around you might want to turn it down at second 41 and turn it back up after second 43. But if you're hard of hearing or just like cuss words CRANK IT!

So to the real point of this post, the group did a silent ballot and chose me to ride the biking leg of the race. Not wanting to let my teammates down, and wanting to beat some 14 year old girls on the pavement I'm starting a time trial work-out. My original loop was 15 miles because that's how long I thought my leg was, but after doing some research it looks like it'll be somewhere around 7-8 miles. But anyhow, I took the camera out on the ride with me and did another time lapse since the other one was so fun. It took me about 42:oo minutes to complete, but as I think about it that seems pretty fast. My bike computer may be lying to me since it said my average speed was around 16mph... ehhh it makes me look good so I'll stick with it!

Heat Wave

Since I'm riding so often, I figured on posting a new entry once a week. If I posted an entry after every ride my entries would just become repetitive and boring, unlike the thrilling ones I post now. This entry, however, comes a little late.
I recently bought windows 7 - for $10 through CV school district, I love being a school employee - and on Sunday decided to upgrade from vista. Well, I followed Microsoft's "directions" on how to upgrade without wiping my whole computer clean and it didn't work! Over and over I tried to "upgrade" and it wouldn't work. I about threw my computer across the room, but I didn't. To make a long story short after 4 days and 2 complete uploads I finally got windows 7 installed on my computer. After all that frustration I learned two very important things - don't update an operating system until you've posted your new blog entry....... and Microsoft sucks! Anyway that's why this entry is a little late. I blame it all on the conglomerates behind Microsoft.
This past week of riding was really nice. We had some very beautiful sunny days that reached into the upper 40's and was near perfect weather for riding.The one day I had ridden to an animal shelter to look at some cats to adopt. We've been looking to adopt one for a little while and I thought it would be fun to ride to a shelter in Mechanicsburg to look at some. Well I was having such a fun time petting and playing with the cats that I lost track of time. Earlier that day Bec and Juan asked if I could pick up a few groceries so that we could start making dinner at 4:00. Well it was 3:30 and I was still at the shelter 8 miles away. I quickly hopped on my bike and peddled as fast as I could to get back to Juan's and then over to the store. As I walked in the door wouldn't you know it, Juan and Bec decided to pick up my slack and get the items and start on dinner. I will admit it was nice to come back from a ride and know that it wouldn't be long until I got to eat. We had amazing enchiladas prepared by Juan. He is the next Emeril Lagasse... but better.

This is an abandoned house that I really want to buy and fix up. It has a really cool view over this big corn field.


I also got to do a long ride with a friend of mine. His name is Jake (for identity theft purposes I won't reveal his last name, but it rhymes with Roman) and he is actually the one who helped advise me on what brand bike to buy. He's been riding for many many years and knows a lot about cycling and is nice enough to let me tag along with him on rides, even if I slow him down. But when Jake is not riding he's often found reading the dictionary, teaching himself computer programming language, implementing ecological uses for human waste, or running.
So I got an opportunity to go for a spin with him and see the western farmland of Perry County. We covered about 37 miles, some was due to a small detour, and ran into another biker out for a ride. It's not often another cyclist is seen in PC so we of course spoke with him for a few minutes. After that Jake had a close brush with death or an ambulance. As we were zipping down a back road hill we saw a large thick sheet of ice covering about half the road. I quickly move over so Jake could swerve around the slab. Jake, quickly thinking, figured it would be safer to ride right over the ice instead of chancing to swerve and miss and possibly hit the ice at an angle, then catching friction from the road and throwing him from his bike. As I watched him ride over the ice his bike rattled and front wheel jerked back and forth while the ice crunched beneath him. I thought for sure the 1" wide slick tires would lose grip sending Jake into a deathly tumble, but he held tight and didn't let it get the best of him. After he was safely off the ice I was relieved not only because he had made it without injury but also because I wasn't recording and if he had wrecked I would have missed it all! After that the rest of the ride went without incident, unless you call my jello legs an incident? Here's the amazing part though, Jake rode 15 miles to meet me, then rode 37 miles with me, followed by a 15 mile ride back to his house... 67miles without more than a 20 minute break in between rides. He's a monster!

I'm finally starting to feel my legs and riders "butt" getting into shape. It feels great to ride and actually enjoy it instead of thinking "Holy crap my quads feel like they should hire Bill Cosby to be their spokesman" and "I had no idea you could bruise a tailbone just from sitting!" Yeah that's a good feeling!

73 miles this week... 2870 to go.

Week Sauce!

So this whole week has been bitterly cold! With only 2 days getting out of the 20's and almost everyday having winds of 15mph or higher it has made a very testing start. However, I maintain the thought that if I ride in this kind of weather nothing should keep me from getting out on the road.
My rides were pretty uneventful. Often enough something kind of funny, interesting, or crazy happens. Like on my first ride - my last post - I was less than a half mile from the house and I was looking down at my bike computer to see what my total mileage was. As I looked up a large doe was crossing the road about 50ft. in front of me and I traveling at about 25mph had to lock up my wheels. I skidded narrowly close as the doe's hooves slipped on the pavement trying to escape collision. That was definitely one of the better memories I have of riding. But nothing like that happened this week.
Although, with the fair amount of winter weather we've had the plow trucks have been throwing down a lot of salt and the one day as a dump truck passed me he stirred up a lot of dust and all of the sudden I tasted an intense flavor of salt. At first I wasn't able to figure out what was going on and then it hit me "with all the salt on the road some got mixed with the air and went in my mouth." Kind of gross when I think about all the horse and cow manure that falls onto the back roads of Perry County. I guess that's not as bad as having it spray off my tires and on my face and back.
There was one other thing that happened while I was riding that I'm kind of proud of. Monday, the 4th, was probably the second coldest ride at 25 degrees and steady 20mph winds. I rode a hard fought 15 miles in a blistering (the tone on "blistering" is sarcastic) 47 minutes and when I reached the end I grabbed my water bottle for a well deserved drink only to find that it had started to slush up. My water had actually started freezing on the ride!! I couldn't believe that I had been riding in weather that allowed my water to freeze. Probably even more interesting was that I had sweated enough that I wanted to drink. Didn't think I would be thirsty in 20 degree weather.
That pretty much sums up my whole riding week. It wasn't terrible but it sure wasn't the best. It's supposed to warm up a little this coming week so I'll have to take advantage of that, maybe add a few extra miles. As much as I love the winter and snow it sure will be nice when spring rolls around.

Winter Ride from Jesse McDonald on Vimeo.

I figured I would try to take you on a ride with me using some time lapse. But of course due to the cold the camera turned off, but only a mile from the end.

47 miles this week - 2943 to go

I'M BACK!!

For all my 3 loyal fans out there I'M BACK! After a long hiatus and much anticipation I have returned and don't expect to be gone anytime soon. So crack a cold soda, grab a bag of funions and get ready to read some new entries.
Don't forget to brag to all your friends about me so I can get my following up to a solid 10 people.
Also, if anyone has an area they would like to see me ride (within the PA, DE, MD, NY, NJ area) let me know and I'll plan to ride it.
Let the fan mail begin!

Julie & Julia

New year, new post! After about 5 months of dust accruing on my bike I finally got around to fixing it. It took all of $20 - for the tool - and 10 minutes to repair, I really should have done this LONG before now! The truth is I was inspired to fix it from a movie. Although it's a bit of a girly movie I'm not ashamed to admit I watched and liked... Julie & Julia! For those of you who haven't seen the movie it is about a young girl who decides to cook all 524 of Julia Child's recipes from her cookbook.... in 365 days! Being based on a true event I thought that was quite an incredible task. Almost 2 recipes a day, and anyone out there cooking (Hope) knows what a feat that can actually be. So I thought "I should do something like that with riding." That's when I decided I was going to ride 3000 miles in 365 days. 3000 might sound like a lot, but its less than 10 miles a day AND allows me to take off 65 days throughout the year if need be.

Of course I used one of my 65 days on the New Year's day to watch all the bowl games - especially PSU vs. LSU which turned out to be way too close in the final minutes leaving my left ventricle nearly collapsed - that meant my first day would start on the coldest day we've had yet this year. With the temperature hitting a stifling 25 degrees I bundled up and headed out. It had been windy all day but I didn't realize how windy it actually was until I rode directly into it. With 20mph winds and gusting to 40mph I struggled the first leg fighting the whole time, averaging around 10mph. Not only did it wear me out quickly the -6 wind chill about froze my fingers, toes and nose. However, on the way back with the wind with me I warmed up and averaged about 22mph... quite the difference!

Unfortunately, after I had headed out and tried taking some pictures I realized I had forgotten to put my memory card back in my camera! I didn't get any photos of this ride - not that I would have wanted to stand in the cold talking lots of pictures anyway. Luckily, Bec took some pictures of me before I left so I have something to record this ride. But after 10 miles in FREEZING weather, I really didn't need pictures to remember this ride.

10 miles down... 2990 to go!