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My time home in NY
Aug 19th
In the morning, about 6 hours from now, I’ll be headed down to Virginia Tech to start my third year, driving down with my girlfriend Lauren. I’ve spent right about two weeks recovering and having withdrawals from this summer on Bike and Build at home in Marcellus, NY and have spent most of my days sleeping in and drinking around a bonfire haha. Lauren came up on the 14th and I have really enjoyed showing her around my home town, more like eating around my home town, and I think/hope she has had fun too.
For the first while I was back, I did manage to ride my bike after sleeping in till noon every day but with playing basketball with my dad and spending time with Lauren this most recent week, I’ve got a chance to spend this past week out of the saddle. Every day it’s weird because I feel like I should be riding, and just have the urge to ride my bike all the time…adjusting to the real world where not every day is a 70 mile day haha.
I’ve tried to take some pictures of what I’ve been up to, and played some with my new 50mm f1.8 lens as well, which I really like. So here’s what I got:
More cycling clothes, racing this past weekend!
Apr 20th
I’d hoped to write up a nice post about races this past weekend, and about all of the clothing stuff that has been going on….but haven’t had a chance and I probably won’t, seeing as I have two tests in the next two days that I know little about. Here’s a touch on both of those (clothes and racing).
Cycling Clothes
Finally they got here, but I was in Roanoke with Lauren when DHL was out to deliver them…..and after many phone calls was able to get a hold of Josh to be there and sign for them. DHL called me when he got to Tech about where to bring them, and thankfully all went smoothly because when I got back at 6PM, there were 16 cartons in the hallway. The 17th was all Men’s M jerseys, which were all extra so that was the best one they could’ve not delivered.
Lauren and I spent that whole night counting the order, and putting together individual orders, and by 2AM I called it a night, with just people from the team’s orders together for the race tomorrow. The system of putting orders together worked great, Lauren was crushing them Friday and I got really fast putting them together Saturday and Sunday when I spent probably 20 combined hours in the hallway assembling them. I got a good three hours of sleep Sunday night…
Friday Night's setup in the study lounge
My Lee Hall packaging center, where I spent Sat and Sun
Yesterday I spent three or so hours at the post office shipping the orders that needed to be shipped, writing the address (from and to) by hand wasn’t really that slow though, I just had >50 to ship. I made it back in time for class, barely at 2:30, in pretty rough shape. Monday night I lugged the ones for pickup to the meeting, and got rid of a lot of them! So far, it’s actually went pretty smoothly on the whole!!
ACCC Conference Championships at Tech: Road Race and TTT
It definitely was not my weekend for racing….Saturday on little sleep and after being the lead vehicle for the B race (sitting for the three hours prior to mine) I wasn’t where I needed to be in terms of health or fitness, and made it up the climb but not with the lead group. We worked to catch them, but it looked unlikely and I was doing almost all the pulling….here’s a picture of my race haha:
Max effort, trying to break to the finish
I’m not really sure where I finished…but it wasn’t so great. The TTT, was is one of the most fun events out there and we only get to do one a year, was a complete failure, dropping James in the first mile and then Matt Londrey’s shifter breaking…so we didn’t hardly make it 5 miles before turning around.
Sunday’s Crit
The “Grandpa Frink CRC Safari” had some great potential, but short story: a guy crashed and slid right under me, taking me out completely….and so I was left with a DNF and no skin on my upper left leg. I was pissed. I was scraped up, gloves ripped, bibs destroyed, jersey ripped, jacket scraped, bike scraped up, pedal and cleat broken….I don’t even want to tally what it’ll cost but all the clothes were brand new and I was feeling strong for the race, and this is second race that Lauren has come to this year and my second crash and I don’t want her to think that bike racing is just crashing and getting hurt….it’s usually pretty fun haha. Since we’ve been dating, every race she’s come to I’ve crashed haha….bad luck. This scrape was incredibly more painful that the last crash, and I’m pretty sure I tweaked my right knee as well, but won’t know for awhile until I get back on the bike. I’m alright really, just got two really nice and deep scrapes on my upper left leg, which make it challenging to move my leg very much….and are really just one more thing I’m going to have to deal with these next two weeks.
I have pictures of my leg but they’re pretty gruesome…
Here is one that Lauren took of the crit pre-crash:
How to not slide into other riders in a corner
The Plan
I’m pretty overwhlemed right now, with the clothing and two tests in the next two days and our bike ride this Friday and trying to keep up with all the Earth Week events and to be able to see my Lauren!
So, I’m going to keep limping around campus, working on clothing, studying for my tests, promoting the ride, taking two weeks off the bike, and hoping that this week comes to an end. Apologies for the pessimism haha, that’s the mood I’m in.
Clothing Order Madness
Apr 13th
I started working to order clothes for the team this year, at the beginning of the fall semester. It has been an incredible roller coaster, and I’m not done yet, but can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
There are a few reasons that the order this year has been so much more difficult than last year, here are some:
- Over the past summer, we had listed extra clothes on the website, and I got tons of emails about them. I quickly sold all of those extras, but hung on to names and emails. In this way, there are significantly more people who ordered clothes this year, beyond just the team. Right now, I have 136 orders.
- We switched companies this year, which made us jump through some hoops to pay them and just generally made it more complicated.
- The VT Purchasing Department couldn’t get the lead out of their ass. (apologies for the language haha, it took them over three months to make the payment).
I’m going to switch gears a little to keep this from being a complain-fest haha. A week ago, I got word from Funkier that the order was done, and they were shipping it. That was Thursday morning, and was great news!
So, I realized that I needed to figure out a way to keep track of who needed what, to put the orders together, and ship them efficiently. I had wanted to find a way so that I didn’t need to do it all by hand…but couldn’t really think of one. So I took information from the spreadsheet (which is pretty much unusable for practical purposes it is so large), and put them into Word, with one order per page. The goal is that when the clothes get here, I can take each page with an order on it, fill that order and put it in a plastic bag. It has the name and email and address on it, and the order itself so I can check it off as I add things to that order.
It took me a little over five hours of straight Alt+Tab and Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V and typing to move all of the data. It was painful, but I listened to some music and just cranked that sucker out. The result: 136 pages in a binder, each with the details of one order on it! Here’s a look at my own page haha:
My own order in the printed form.
So that’s my update haha, OH and tracking it…Monday I tried putting in the tracking number in at DHL.com and couldn’t find it, I called them and after 15 minutes on the phone they couldn’t find anything and so I emailed Funkier. It has shipped, just strangely, and as of April 11th it was leaving Israel. Things I’m scared about: paying the customs charge (12% of invoice total) on a $22K order….
More to come when it gets in!!
Where the heck are the clothes?
I just spent 30min on the phone with DHL…didn’t really get an answer as to where they were, other than that they might be between Germany and the UK…but that’s hard to see from above! They could be here as early as tomorrow though! And the Winter Jackets from LG should be here tomorrow for sure (UPS tracking doesn’t suck).