andy reagan only the interesting stuff

4Sep/11

Campbell MTB Race Weekend

Dear VT Cyclist,

I’m emailing you because there are serious, very serious, choices to be made, and made immediately. On the 3rd of October of 2010, Virginia Tech Cycling accomplished one of its greatest feats, Winning the ACCC MTB Conference Championships.

Today, on the 2nd of September of 2011, I officially lay before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial ASU cycling team and its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its every vessel to destroy the VT Cycling Team and Claim the ACCC MTB Conference Title.

This announcement shows I am a concerned Alumnus. I fear for the well-being of the VT Cycling, as I see the lack of participate in the 1st MTB race of the season. I fear many of you have lost the motivation, the feeling of what it is to be a Champion, and never quenchable thirst for victory.

Though it is hard to fathom such a fear when VT Cycling is under such great leadership and carries such great potential.

How can VT Cycling not succeed with:

Lil Jake Anderson traveling at light speed on his 29in wheels.

Andy Reagan providing his bearded man wisdom and enthusiasm about every course.

Kay Comer making even the fastest men cry as she leaves them behind.

Jan G speaking in a language no one can understand while speeding by.

Cecil “The Legend” McAllister(enough said)

Brian Luster who’s so fast he had to take a year off school so everyone else could catch up.

Andrew Roberson who does tailwhips over people in order to pass.

Andy Wentzel the greatest keep secret of VT cycling.

Christian Probst who is fast as **** and should be racing this weekend.

And Of course World Class Coach JUSTIN MORRISON, a legend in his own right.

I can only hope the preceding greats can win the ACCC title for us, while the rest of you act like scared freshmen, or indulge in binge “road soda” drinking, or attempt to talk to the opposite sex but then realize you can’t, or all of the above.

The presence of the ASU Cycling Team is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against the Hokie nation. The ASU Cycling team has the strength, the numbers, the potential, and the willingness to defeat the VT cycling team and claim the ACCC MTB title.

Each VT cyclist must decide for themselves how it will meet this presence. The choice you make for yourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a cyclist. Our motive will be revenge and the victorious assertion of the physical might.

There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our team to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.

Made the right choice!

Email Andy Wetzel(Arwentz@vt.edu) and State the following:

I (Your Name) will not allow my team, my pride, or my country be subject to the evils of the ASU Cycling Team. I will defend the honor of my team, myself and my country. I will be attending the race this coming weekend at Campbell and I will take whatever actions are necessary to make this happen including pay my dues and fill out the release waiver / driver release form found at the Rec Sports website.


MAKE US PROUD!

GO HOKIES!

Sincerely, 
Ben Warren

Called into action by none other than Ben Warren, the VT Cycling MTB Team headed to Campbell this weekend for an awesome weekend of racing and fun.  The racing was good, some delicious road sodas were consumed, and some people in particular laid it on the line for the team.

Short Track

Typically my favorite event, as it is the most friendly to strong legs and less technical, I was still a little nervous for my first race in Men's B. It's a lap race, with this one having about 3min laps and my race was 30min long.  I started near the back, and there is a seriously steep section for half of it, with one crazy steep kicker, and then a flowy downhill, then up the hill all over again.  As I got to the crazy steep part, someone had put a foot down and the whole group was falling over and a mess. So what usually happens, the first few people to get to it and clean it got a decent head start. I slowed up and passed some people who were walking it by riding up, but still had to wait at the top for people to get back on their bikes. On the downhill, the dude in front of me slid out and rather than let me by, took up the whole trail and I had to stop and wait while he got back on... so it wasn't a great start, to say the least. On the uphill, since I could ride it, I passed people for pretty much the whole rest of the race.  No idea what place I was in with like 3 laps to go, I asked the guys on our team watching and I had actually picked people off up to 4th place.  Unable to catch the guys who had a huge head start most likely, I finished in fourth and was really happy with that for my first B race.

Other than myself, Jake A finished 3rd in Men's A, Andy W took 3rd in my race, Kay took 2nd in Women's A, and Bill Lucy got 3rd in the Men's C race. Bill was winning the race by a good but, until he caught a hanging vine with his neck, and it clotheslined him straight off the bike. He somehow continued to ride and hang on for 3rd, pretty intense.

Downhill

The "downhill" race was a few hours later, and is a timed race down, well, the side of a hill. There were some pretty decent jumps and some huge burns, as well as a real gnarly rock garden.  I went pretty fast down for a normal person, but rolled most of the jumps and tried to generally keep my wheels on the ground. Definitely got air a few times, but I need to get more comfortable before flying airborne down the side of hill. Brian Lusher and Jake put in some really fast times, Brian with full gear and Jake just beasting it on his 29er.

Super D

Perhaps the most interesting style of race that I'm not sure why the ACCC is so fond of, the "Super D" is a mass-start downhill race that is mostly downhill but also includes some flat sections.  To make the situation slightly better, it is usually started Le Mans style which means that the riders pile up their bikes, and the race begins with a run to the bike.  The advantage is that we're more spread out before hitting the hole shot onto the single track (trail only wide enough for one bike).  The start pretty much determines the outcome of the race, so with a few properly executed swim moves through the sprint, I was the second guy on my bike. The first guy was in front of me, and even took a few seconds to get as I yelled at him to ride haha, but per usual, someone really messed up and the rest of the group was stuck behind. So it was pretty much me, an ASU guy, and a WVU guy on a downhill bike heading into the downhill. I let the WVU guy go first on the downhill because he had a full suspension downhill bike, but I kept up with him the whole time. The ASU guy flew down the hill, gapping even the WVU guy I was behind. Problem with the "downhill" guys is that they don't really have any fitness, so they can't pedal hard on the flats. Regardless, I finished in 3rd at the bottom, since there isn't a chance to pass.

Brian Lusher and Bill took 1-2 in the Men's C which was sweet, but Jake had an encounter with a tree (not bad) on his run and Kay came through with 2nd, not losing much ground to Ashley on this one.

Course Run

Still in marathon-training mindset, I felt like I needed to get some miles in, and Kay is looking to get back into running form so we went out for an easy fun of the BURN course, the course that we were to race the next day. It was a fun run, and tired my legs out a little for the next day, but was good.  Kay had ridden the BURN 24-hour race on the course earlier in the year, so it was cool for her to recount some of the experiences she had during that race.

Sunday, Cross country race

With slightly tired legs, it was time for the long race.  We were to do two of the 7-mile laps, and I was ready to go hard, but my legs werern't there for the whole race.  The beginning was a sprint to the trails, and I definitely took down some of the markers to get into fourth going into the trails. I particularly didn't want to get stuck behind on a part that it was possible to clip out on at the trailhead.  Going along we were just flying, these are fast trails with burmed courners that are built to MTB. I got a little high on one burm, and slid out. A few guys passed me, and as we got the big uphill I was starting to fade. I fell back a little more, getting passed at the top by Jan, and just crusied and enjoyed the trails for a while. I'd lost quite a bit of time with my slide out since it took a few minutes to get my chain back on. Nearing the end of the first lap, a dude was catching up to me and said that Ashley was gaining on us too. She's a women's pro rider, who rides for ASU and is fast as shit.  I told him "damn, getting chicked on the first lap," not realizing that she was actually right behind him. But he let her around, and so did I, but I decided to see how long I could keep up with her. So I just stuck her wheel for awhile, and we actually caught and passed a whole bunch of the other Men's B's together. I hopped in front for the downhill, then let her take the lead again as we started lap 2. I hung on for awhile, but she was flying on the uphills and eventually she rode away from me.  That was fun, and then I just rode along until I was actually catching two NCSU guys near the end. I starting going hard to reel them in, and caught one of them before the final downhill. I passed him on the fire road since I knew he was a faster downhiller and he couldn't pass on the downhill. He was right on my wheel on the downhill, so I was nice and let him by, and came out for the final half mile on the feild about 20m behind him. I was looking forward to sprinting it out, and so was he. But when i went to pedal, it turned out that on the downhill my chain had come off the big ring and wrapped all the way around the crank. So damn, couldn't sprint by him (which I'm pretty sure I had), but I had time to get it fixed before anyone else had come through.

It was a hot day, and my clothes were soaked to it felt great to hose off and get cleaned up. We didn't take much time packing up, I had left my tent out to dry and it had, so that was good.  The drive back felt short, and then I set to work on my Abstract Algebra till 2AM, taking a break to Skype with Mom and Dad, and to go to Mass.

That's all for now, this weekend is the home race!

 

 

 

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25Aug/11

Back to School

"Back to school, back to school, to prove to dad I'm not a fool." -Adam Sandler

I've been back for nearing a week now, and I just love it down here in BBurg with the town and how accessible everything is and the mountains. Seeing friends from cycling and tri that I hadn't all summer was awesome.  I've even had a chance to work on, and finish the tall bike that Alex Brown and I started this summer. Riding that thing around campus (it's literally one bike frame welded onto the top of a full bike) I have gotten some fun comments, mostly like "woah that's the coolest bike ever." I am 6 feet tall, and the bike is 6 feet in the air. I'll post of video of my sweet mounting technique  in due time.

Classes are going to pick up soon, I know it, so while I have time I'm excited to go this weekend and pick up my finished CHRIS KING R45 WHEELS! They're done today (Thursday) and they're gonna be soooo nice. Best bday present.  Also I got all of my stuff shipped down that I left at home, namely my running shorts.

That's all for now, here's a quick breakdown of my classload this semester (an excuse to not post for the next three months):

  • MATH 4225 Real Analysis: touted to be hardest undergraduate course at Tech, I get what follows in an email this summer, and then Dr. Rossi finds it necessary to read out loud at the beginning of class Monday: "The word “elementary” in the title of the course is not a commentary on the difficulty of this course but rather it is the traditional nomenclature that differentiates the topics of  this course from a graduate level course in Real Analysis which involves Lebesgue measure and integration. In my opinion Math 4225 is the most difficult undergraduate math course that we offer. If you have never taken advanced calculus (Math 3225) or did poorly in that class or you have always had a difficult time with “proofs”, you may find another math class more appropriate."
  • MATH 4124 Abstract Algebra: this shit's so abstract it's in the title! I was warned to say as far away from this class as possible by a friend Jason on the tri team, but Dr. Brown is teaching it and he's awesome, I've had him for a few others and I think he likes me (not that that helps though).
  • MATH 5515 Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems: seems so far to be an ODE class, but good that I have a biking friend from VBI in the class. But it's still a grad class. We shall see.
  • MATH 4... History of Mathematics: Taking it P/F, because I was to take it and think that it's going to be super interesting. The teacher is Dr Andy Norton, and I really like him a lot, but I've heard the class is a lot of work.
  • MATH 4445 Numerical Analysis: the first semester of the Numerical Analysis sequence shouldn't be a killer, but it ain't easy and we're going to be doing a lot of programming. Dr Boorgard *spelling is teaching it, and I like him a lot too, so should be okay.
  • World Regions: possibly the largest college class ever, Dr John Boyer (JB, Boyer, the Plaid Avenger, J-Bizzler, The Professor...this guy's a celebrity) finds it as his calling to educate our generation on what's going on the world now, because it does all affect us, and it's important that we understand how our decisions affect the world. the class seems awesome so far, and is the same one that I took part in a stunt in as part of our Spartan Army. I'm only taking it as an audit

So maybe some themes that I've picked up on, a couple classes are killer and the others are hard, but they'll all add up and I might become a math-nerd-hermit. But I doubt that. Talking about them, I knew all of the professors, and all but two knew who I was when I walked in the door, which is pretty awesome. Kk, really gotta run now (literally, 12 miles today!).

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25Aug/11

REU Conclusions, Being home and the Great Race

The same day as the aforementioned Draper Mile marked the conclusion of the MSSB REU which was my job for the summer, and I miss everyone in the program but am excited as well for the opportunity to continue this research.  I took the two weeks I had at the end of summer, and went home.  This year for the Great Race, my Mom was the captain of Team Reagan, and we recorded the best race I've ever been in, by nearly 7 minutes.  Now I'm back at school, and have 20 minutes to burn before a class so here goes.

REU Conclusions

This past summer, if you hadn't heard, I spent doing mathematical biology researching at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, located on Virginia Tech campus.  The program was a Research Experience for Undergraduates, specifically in Modeling and Simulation of Systems Biology and was sponsored by the NSF. Thank them.

I got to work with Dr. Julia Chifman as a mentor, who obtained her Ph.D in Math from University of Kentucky, now at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute and the work was done under our program director, Dr. Reinhard Laubenbacher of VBI and VT.  On my team was Jim Brunner (UMich), Paul Vines (Roanoke), and Emily Hendryx (Angelo State).  Our team was awesome, and the research we did in making a discrete model of iron metabolism was very well received by the biologists at the Wake Forest Cancer Biology Department who study iron metabolism and cancer.

Spending 8hrs/day getting up close and personal with a discrete model, I learned a great deal. Jim had greater experience coming in with ODE models, which are in general much more popular, and towards the end of our time got frustrated with the shortcoming of the discrete modeling framework. This current semester I am taking a graduate class in Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems that, from the looks of it so far, will focus entirely on ODE's.  I am very interested to gain this perspective.

I titled this conclusions, and so there are some that I can share. I have made a decision to study applied mathematics in graduate school as a result of this experience. Math can be very useful in giving us more information about real systems, and this is what I want to do.  The specific application of mathematics is something with which I am still struggling, and am still hesistant about going into math biology specifically. For one, biology isn't my favorite subject and doing research in biology increased my level of frustration with the understand we do have of biology.  There are many experiments that are done, and we are able to elicit the functions of many protiens, but there is still so much that is unsure.  Some of the other applications of math that I find appealing are climate modeling and traffic modeling.  These are both very real problems that face us, and they're not isolated from each other. Looking at different schools and figuring out which ones to apply to is actually quite difficult, and I sent my GRE scores to VT, Boulder, Univ Maryland, and Univ of Minnesota.  One professor who I have found specifically whose research sounds very interesting is Dr. Chris Danforth at the Univ of Vermont: http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/main/research.html.

Being Home

After the program had concluded, with our final Research Symposium, I came home pretty quick. The Draper Mile was that night, and I headed home on Saturday. I got a late start, at something like 10:30 in the morning so it made for a long day of driving but I made it home safe n sound.

My two weeks at home were very much like a vacation, as both of my recent trips home have been.  I lounge around, eat great food, ride and run like that's my job, and go out downtown with my friends.  I ended up playing more disc golf this break than I did going to dtown SYR, and it was good.  The first Sunday I was back, Sam from Bport came and visited, and her and Dan and I went and played a nice round of disc golf. Unfortunately it was one of my few losses of the season (I ended the summer series a half game down), but Sam was there so we could make fun of how Dan looks like he's going to fall every time he throws ;) .

Not much unlike coming home in the beginning of summer (whence I was told that I had been signed up for a bike race and a 5K the coming weekend), my Mom captained a team for the Great Race. I'm really glad that she took the initiative, in making this my 7th consecutive great race and with my broski Kyle paddling, we dropped 7min off our previous best time.  Losing only by 30sec the year before, this year we were second by 5min, as the other team in our age category had brought in a ringer in the kayak that with a 18ft kevlar machine put 5 minutes into Kyle.

It was also exciting to see that my Dad is getting back into great shape, only 6 months after having a heart attack.  We got to go on some great walks, and my Garmin Connect "Walk with @rumblinstumblin" (classified as Speed Walking) will testify to this shape, 2 miles in less than 30 min is a pretty mean pace.  And my Mom is in as good of running shape as ever, and she came out and put the hurt on me a little at the end of one of my longer runs, as I had to tell her to slow down more than once!

One of the biggest things that happened while I was home was that my parents bought lake property on Skan Lake, and it is awesome.  When my Dad told me over the phone as I was driving home that he and Mom "found some lake property they were going to put an offer on" all I could do was chuckle because oh how many times I'd heard that. But they did it, and are currently closing on 5 acres with shared access to a 280ft lakefront. The property itself is wooded, and I love it. Would be a perfect place to build a cabin. I'm less fond of my Dad's idea to buy a 10k pop-up and haul that thing in, but he's also looking at building a garage-house that would be cool. Problem is that it all adds up with a septic and well, and then up goes the assessment.  It's just hard to now have the land, and not want to build on it.  But I think they'll be patient.

I looked at my title again for the rest of what I was going to talk about and saw great race, but I already talked about that. Perhaps some other things to mention there are that my Mom suprised me again coming in at just over 23 minutes.  My Garmin data puts me at winning a minute with no transistion time, but with our high number (longer transisition) and the volunteers making my brother walk that whole 1/4 mile, it took 3 minutes for just the handoffs and I had come in two minutes behind the leader in 13th place.  And it was definitely the transisitions, because on the course I caught up to two guys that were going hard enough that it seemed they could stick with me after awhile.  This was after passing roughly 100 people (I passed 120-some total), which is crazy. I'm almost over the yellow line, laying down 24-ish MPH whizzing by, and ocassionaly weaving through, a literal crowd of bikers to the right.  The two guys could in fact hold my draft (do 30% less work than I was) but after two miles of this, when we got to a hill, I wanted to let them do some work and pull up. It's not even as much more work to be on the front on the hill, but instead (feeling fresh from drafting off me for so long), the one dude sprinted around me and the other followed him. Like, really, what was he thinking? That I had caught him, pulled him for 2 miles, and that now he was just going to leave me in the dust? Annoyed, I reeled them back in, and sat on their draft for 15 seconds before sprinting around them so they wouldn't have a chance to sit in my draft. Recovering from my attack, one of them made their way up to me, a guy from Skan who races for Notre Dame.  He was actually cool, and would take a short pull when I asked him to.  His pulls were very short, and 19MPH instead of the 22 I was doing, but he was doing what he could. And he wasn't a jerk and let me come into the transisition area first after pulling hard into it (it was downhill going into it). But his time was a minute faster than mine, when I know mine should've beaten his by at least 30sec (I had to first catch him), so that little anecdote just speaks to our transistions. But, we still wouldn't have been able to catch the team in our category ahead of us. Luckily we bead the team the guy that I helped was on, because they were actually in the same category haha.

That's all for now!!

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My name is Andy Reagan, welcome to my website. I'm a hokie, an aspiring mathematician, and am into racing bikes, running, adventures, living sustainably, and am enjoying every minute.

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