Drum-roll please...

OK, so many of you have suggested meanings for FITB as pertains to FITB Mike, but sadly none of you were correct. It stands for Fill In The Blank Mike. I know that is super boring, but the point is that we have like upmteen mikes on the team each with a different preceding adjective. For example: Clean Mike, Dirty Mike, Shitty Mike, Hawaiian Mike, even bearded Mike who oddly enough is really some dude named mark that is on the Mizzou team. So following this lead is was looking for you to fill in the blank and give mike a proper name. Perhaps we just have to give it time, but now you should all be on the lookout for something apropos.

As for the others, Here is the breakdown:
Jared: The Breeze
"Well now they call me the breeze, I keep blowin' down the road". -Skynard
You must weigh about 12lbs soaking wet, not a lot of ballast to keep you from getting blown down the road.

Sean H: Sonar
This came out of the redneck fish-finder Incident at the Gander Mountain mountain store. Sorry to say that racism is still alive and well in our culture.

Alex: Boo
Not sure why, but you just seem like a boo. Seems to fit well with your housemates; Claus, Stoney, and the Boo. Like a bad 70's sitcom. Sadly, I lived with you for a year and you never did anything stupid enough to warrant a nickname. You need to work harder.

Steve: Tube Sock
"You do it to yourself you do, And thats what really hurts" -Radiohead.
You had to go and open your mouth and say "i better not be tube sock, they're nasty!" The powers that be (namely Boo and I ) decided that you get tube sock.

Again, none of these are set in stone. more like set in pudding (mmmm pudding). Drink heavily and maybe, just maybe, you'll do something stupid enough to get a better name.

In other news, Illini Cycling got some good press coverage today in the Daily Illini. Pretty nice stuff.

Keep 'em coming...

So I've received a few guesses as to the meaning of FITB Mike. Please feel free to make these as public comments even if they are quite lewd. For example a certain Female graced my inbox with these two gems: Fuck [her] in the butt Mike, and Fun In The Bath Mike. I'll ask him if he is looking for a date.

I've also had a few people asking to connect the monikers to the respective persons, but that will have to wait till later this week, as I still need to consult with the powers that be.

And so it begins...

The MWCCC road season got off to an interesting start this weekend. C-bach, TSK, Claus, Skeeter, Skeefer, the breeze, waffles, FITB Mike, boo, tube sock, sonar, Brett the photo guy, the juicy girl, and yours truly packed up and headed to Ohio for a Crit and RR hosted by The Ohio State University. I've placed emphasis on the "the" ( an awesome 80's band BTW) as anyone that attends the Ohio State University will have no problem reminding you to add that oh so important article to the beginning. Right now most of my readership is wondering who all of the nicknames above belong to. Quite honestly I made almost all of the newbies nicknames up. Some of them have relevance to events that transpired during the course of the weekend, and others I just flat out bullshitted. If you've made it this far, please leave comments trying to match them up with those who attended. Bonus points if you can figure out what FITB means, there are some super secret double bonus points related to that as well, but you'll have to figure that out on your own. Also feel free to suggest some nicknames.

If you have a metallic taste in your mouth right now, feel free to remove the gun barrel as I'll make the race summary mostly pain free and I do not wish to be responsible for the death of all three people that read my drivel.

Skeefer and Waffles (that is a freebie) represented in the C's placing 9th and 6th, respectively. This is very impressive seeing that it was Skeefer's first race.

In the A race, one dude went really fast, TSK went faster than all but the guy who went really fast, Claus and I went pretty fast while skeeter and C-bach went just as fast as claus and I but were "le tired" and the officials told them to take a nap, then fire the missiles.

The RR was canceled due to the poo storm of ice that fell overnite.

Karma...

So in response to yesterdays post about stiff goats the fates decided that I needed to be taught a little lesson. About 8:30 AM, while riding to go see the doctor about my continuing medical troubles, I was smote by some deftly placed black ice. I was in traffic going about 2 mph while standing up waiting for the car in front of me to get moving when I hit said patch of ice. Man, I went down like a sack of grits falling off the back of a pickup truck. Fortunately, traffic was moving slowly enough that i didn't get pancaked by the car behind me. To add insult to injury, while staning on the side of the road trying to get make sure that my body was still working properly, some chick came cruising by on a hybrid, and didn't even bat an eyelash at the ice I hit.

Moral of the story is don't make fun of goats or people that fall off of their bicycle, no matter how tempting it may be.

Tour of Cali and goats...

So I was watching the coverage of Stage 1 of the ToC and witnessed the HUGE crash that took out much of the field (click the "peloton pileup" video on this page). I couldn't help by think aobut those silly little fainting goats. These adorable little buggers freeze up when scared, and if they are moving, they often just topple over. A little news clip on fainting goats is here. Be sure to watch till the end to hear a "goat lover" describe how they "get stiff".

Busy!!!!!

So it has been over a week since my last posting and a lot has gone on.

Last weekend, the majority of the Turin Squad got together to talk shop about the coming race season, meet some of the new staff & team members, and get some testing done. The big surpirse was new member Erik "E.T." Tomlinson showed up with a new hair style. Eric is on the right in the image below. He used to rock a ponytail, now he's gone corporate.



Aside from planning out our race season, we all got our body fat percentage measured. It was a little painful, but not too bad. THe results are in and it is official, I'm in a good range at 7% and the TSK is indeed skinny with a whopping 4.2%. Crunching some numbers that comes out to about 7 lbs. of fat on his skinny frame. I'm willing to be that there are women with at least seven pounds of breast. Oh hell, I just googled "7 pound boobs" and this is the first hit listed. The link is safe for work, and points out another use for a kitchen scale (aside from weighing various bike parts).

Anyhoo, On tuesday we got a shit tonne of snow. Actually it was only about 15". Growing up out east and going university in upstate NY, snow is not really a big deal to me, but the metropolis of C-U is not prepared for such amounts of white stuff. Sidewalks are not shoveled, roads are not plowed and good luck trying to find a rack to lock your bike to. I think we need to make bike igloos out of the six foot piles of snow where the bike racks used to be.

I'll leave you with an image stolen from weatherunderground. It shows the Temperature history for the past month along with the average High and Low for this time of year.

You probably can't tell, but the two smooth semi-horizontal lines are the average high and low, not that the daytime high has been lower than the average low, bloody cold. THey keep calling this weather pattern an "Alberta clipper". Canada, take back your fucking weather!!!! —we'll keep your cheap prescriptions.

Back in the chilly midwest...

So while I was away in DC, winter finnaly showed up. It's been silly cold out with highs in the single digits. To add to the fun old man winter dropped four or so inches of snow yesterday. The warmest day forecasted in the next week is 25F, not really warm enough to clean up the back roads that we ride on. Perhaps I'll break out the MTB if we get a day that is not too cold.

The weather in Malaysia is a bit warmer, and my friend Brad just cracked a top three finish after finishing 4th in several stages at the tour of Langkawi. He's seen on the right of the picture swerving out of the way a bit.


Brad is living the dream and racing with some of the big boys of cycling. I'm curious if slipstream (formerly TIAA-CREF) will get a bid to Paris-Roubaix, it would be super cool to see some of our up and coming American riders get to do some of the real spring classics.

In other news, I've received a mostly clean bill of health from my Doctor. The meds have cleared up my lungs quite a bit, and I think I'll be easing back into training this week. The big issue was that she felt that I wasn't drinking enough, and I'm sure that a cure for that can be found at the Inn on a thursday nite.

D to the C...

So I'm chillin in D.C. for a few days attending a program review. It is basically a symposium where all of the groups funded by the Stewardship Sciences Academic Alliance program get together and present the progress that they've made in the past few years. Generally boring stuff. I was there from 7:00AM till 8:00PM and pretty worn out.

There were some odd happenings today. For one, Ralph Nader just happened to stop by while we were having a cocktail hour to mooch some free snacks. Apparently he has some space in the building that we were in. He didn't even stop by to see my poster. That prick is certainly not getting my vote next election.

After the conference I was heading to a bar to have some drinks with my old college roommate Pat. We called him 'trick in school because the latter part of his proper name didn't get the attention it deserved. So while walking to the bar, I saw one (or two) of the strangest things. A guy was walking two dogs, and each had only three legs. Either this guy is a sick fuck that is handy with a saw, or he has a membership to the DC chapter of the three-legged APSCA.

It was nice to catch up a bit. Everyone I know is growing up and getting married/having kids, Pat is getting hitched next spring. We shot the usually shit about life, and shared some laughs looking back on our younger years in undergrad. All in all a good time.

It could be worse...

So I was back to the doctor today. No earth shattering news yet, but i have some lab work due to come back on Monday. Speaking of lab work, while waiting form my number to be called —they use numbers so that your testing is anonymous so you can feel OK about giving blood for a HIV test etc—a certain course of events took place making me realize that my it could be worse. A young lady walks past me to the window of the lab, hands over her slip to which I hear the nurse respond, "would you like to leave your stool sample with us now, or deposit it at home". Now for one, the nurse didn't shout this from the top of the mountain, but she didn't exactly whisper it either. Now think about the choices this poor girl has: 1. Pinch a stool in a public bathroom where everyone in the waiting room knows what she is doing, 2. Go home only to have carry a piece of your own shit back to the medical center. In the grand scheme this is probably not really a big deal to her for the simple reason that if someone has asked you to shit in a bag so that they can look at it, you probably have something seriously wrong with your plumbing and are willing to swallow a little of your pride in order to get it fixed. So as this girl took off her sweatshirt and marched off the the bathroom to get down to business, I thought that I was pretty fortunate to have a rather pedestrian infection. Just remember, no matter if you feel like a bag of shit, at least you don't have to shit in a bag.