As always, Cross Country Cycle has the complete list of Michigan mountain biking events.
Lots of decisions to make. The holidays are upon us so that means time to get training again as soon as all the Christmas cookies are eaten.
Looking at the schedule I think I’ll probably hit a couple of the 6 hour events (Stony, Addison, Ithaca), and maybe the Boyne CPS race – the only one worth really driving for.
Well my second Iceman has come and gone. I missed last year due to the infamous lottery. This year was starting to look like a disaster in the making after the online registration debacle. After letting in everyone who mailed in an entry, the race was at over 4,000 riders, twice the normal amount. But turns out despite sucking at running the registration, the organizers hit a home run with the actual race operation. Everything went off great, much better than 2 years ago. The busing in particular was much faster, we didn’t have to wait at all after the race to get back to our car.
My night before meal of endless shrimp may not have been the best idea. Stomach felt a little queasy early in the race. I figured with cool weather I wouldn’t need much water and only partially filled my Camelbak – big mistake – it turned out warm as a spring day and I went dry with quite a few miles left at the end. But no biggie. Our hotel had a nice breakfast buffet, loaded up on waffles preride.
Weather was way too nice: sunny and 60s. Not exactly icy conditions. Race start this year was from downtown Kalkaska with a roughly 1 mile paved rollout before hitting the dirt. The start was really fast but helped everyone settle in to the right order. Not that passing was difficult anywhere on the course of 95% two-track.
I held pace with the group through the flat beginning but as usual, the hills separated those who were really prepared. I didn’t have to walk the hills but I was moving at a pretty slow pace near the end. Time was pretty lousy in my opinion at 2:52, only a 5 minute improvement over my last time. The crowds were great too, the climb at Williamsburg road felt like a pro tour event in the mountains with a huge crowd of people shouting and ringing cowbells.
Post race was pretty awesome, with a food and beer tent featuring awesome Michigan breweries such as Short’s and Right Brain.
Couple of links here:
Write Up in the Traverse City Record Eagle
Photo Gallery in the Detroit News featuring yours truly
Postponed twice, with the third date conflicting with a personal engagement, it seemed fate did not want me to complete my first 6-hour race. Then at the last moment – a cancellation freeing up my Saturday for bike racing! So with virtually no prep time, I committed to doing my longest race of the season.
It wasn’t a slam dunk however, it rained constantly for three straight days before the race, evoking fears of a repeat of an infamous prior muddy running of the same race that resulted in unbelievable mud caked carnage – documented in online photo galleries. That did not look like fun.
The rain seemed to keep the racers away as turnout seemed light. The wimps missed out though, Addison held up beautifully to the rain and was in excellent shape except for a few small mud slicks.
I ate a hearty pre-race breakfast of eggs, fruit, juice and lots of toast and coffee. I carefully planned out my nutrition for the whole race budgeting one water bottle for every hour, and a gel and Cliff bar alternated every lap. Fluid wise I was dead on, maybe even a little overboard considering the cool temps. Food was also a little too much, but better than bonking. Gels went down easy but I found that cramming down the Cliff bars was a real challenge after about the second one. Worked out though, never felt I was at a loss for energy the whole race.
I worried most about my back or neck getting sore as they sometimes do after a long ride, but never really was an issue. I think it was somewhere around hour 4 that my legs started cramping bad after every big hill climb. Still had to press on, not that hard since I otherwise felt fine. I succeeded in staying on the bike the whole race, pausing in the pits just long enough to swap bottles and grab some food.
I had good timing and rolled to the time check with 5 minutes to go, perfect chance to get in an extra lap. But by this time I had decided to start listening to my legs and call it a day. I could have moved up 2 more places had I finished that extra lap, but I haven’t lost any sleep over it since.
Ended up completing 7 laps good for roughly 50 miles and 6th place in my class. I’m hooked on the format though. This series has a bunch of 6, 12 & 24 hour races all around Michigan, and I plan to do more next year. The big question is: should I spring for the lighting system necessary to run a race longer than 6 hours? Or just focus on the “shorter” format?
2008 time 1:09:01
2009 time 1:09:49 (course is .5 mile longer this year)
Ever feel like you’re just not making any progress? To be fair I wasn’t well prepared this year, I didn’t ride at all the week preceding, and hadn’t ridden the trail since they did some extensive rerouting. I drank an unhealthy amount of alcohol the entire day before, and hardly slept the night of the race.
No biggie, the race was still fun, the trail conditions ideal, and the hot dogs free. Bike performed flawlessly. I managed to stay upright, though I came unclipped just before the water crossing and struggled to get my cleat back in, and I grazed a tree leving a nice scrape. I still don’t think the short course is my forte, still waiting for a good chance to do a longer race.
I love riding the Poto, it is by far the best trail in the entire southern LP. It just always seems like something goes wrong there. I’ve locked my keys in my car. No matter how perfectly my derailer is tuned at the start of the ride, it always stop shifting right about halfway through. Today was no different.
Aside from the rainy conditions which I pretty much accepted since I started in the rain, things seemed to be going ok. Then I looked down and my computer was gone! WTF!? I did finally find it after backtracking a mile or so. Finally my drivetrain starts making some very unhealthy sounds after becoming caked in sand. Not sure what the exact problem is, but it is not good. So after a loop and a half I decide to call it a day. I had hoped to do more but I didn’t want to take the chance of seriously damaging something.
One of the most critical concepts in Austrian Economics is that of capital malinvestment. This occurs whenever a firm makes an investment in future business that fails to pay off as originally expected. Obviously this happens all the time, people and firms are not perfect and naturally make mistakes. Also obvious is that these same firms are putting as much effort as they can into NOT making such mistakes since the penalty could ultimately be bankruptcy. Therefore in an economy free of outside manipulation such failures would tend to be infrequent and sporadic enough as not to cause serious disruptions. A business may take a heavy loss but regroup and recover with a new investment. Or it may continue to fail, liquidate its assets, and have them put back to use by more productive firms.
This is NOT what is happening in America today. Since the inception of the vile Federal Reserve in 1913 the Federal Government and the Fed Reserve have pursued an openly stated policy of nonstop monetary inflation and artificially low interest rates. This is a very bad thing and one of the key factors in the major economic bust we are currently experiencing. I’m sure you may be asking yourself “What’s so bad about low interest rates? I hate paying interest!”
The problem with manipulated interest rates is that they increase the level of malinvestment in the economy. Instead of sporadic and generally inconsequential malinvestments, you get huge clusters of malinvestment, entire industries blowing up at once. Interest rates are THE key factor that a business uses when evaluating where to invest its money. If virtually unlimited credit is available to every firm in the country for virtually zero interest, suddenly every investment starts to look like a winner. Applied to consumer credit, this causes people to borrow too much feeding right into the malinvestments of the firms that serve consumers. Eventually the bubble bursts. Someone stops spending when they realize what a mistake they’ve made, this cascades through the entire system popping all the bubbles in sight.
The concept of malinvestment is completely foreign to the economists who write economics textbooks, work in industry, and run the federal government. To them, all demand is good demand. All investment, all spending on anything and everything is good. They pursued the low interest rates on purpose, because they believe that if you drive the rates low enough that you can create a bubble that expands forever without consequence. This belief is utterly false. Malinvestment is everywhere you look today: housing, automobiles, restaurants, the list goes on and on.
Still need proof? Here’s an example near and dear to my heart and the well being of quite a few people here in Michigan and the midwest: automobiles. Do you have any idea how many economists and financial analysts and marketing experts are employed by the auto industry? Thousands! Every single one of them in some capacity is given the job of forecasting the future, and evaluating investments to satisfy consumer demand. Smart people, with all kinds of experience and training and fancy degrees and complex computer models. And yet look at what is going on right now, they were all wrong, VERY wrong, and at the same time! What a coincidence!
Automobile demand has essentially collapsed in virtually every market around the globe, at the same time. Virtually every automobile company on the planet overinvested in capacity, and in the wrong kinds of products. Currently worldwide automobile capacity is probably being utilized at about 40%, that means 60% sits idle and unused. That means the entire industry guessed wrong on demand by more than 100% Amazing! Not exactly a near miss. People expect such stupidity from the Detroit 3, but even the untouchable Toyota has made some huge blunders, maybe fewer than the domestics but huge nonetheless. Their new $1.2 billion Austin, TX truck plant sits completely idle less than a year after opening. They’re the smartest guys in the business, how did they screw up so bad?
Whoops, didn’t see that coming…
Everything was looking pretty good for a while there. Demand just keeps going up and up. Then thwack! In less than a year demand falls back to where it was 20 years prior.
Still think artifiically low interest rates are so great? Suddenly you have twice as many auto companies as you really need, half of them could just disappear tomorrow and we would still have plenty of production capacity to serve consumer demand. That’s one heck of a coincidence!
But back to the point I originally started in on: the malinvestments are not being purged. The failed companies are not allowed to fail. The capital is not being diverted to productive activities. The federal government steps back in with bags of free money to keep the failed companies going. Billions upon billions of free money to GM and Chrysler, to keep building cars that no one wants. Oh wait, the government has a plan for that too. Plenty of free cash to the financing companies so dealers can buy inventory and keep the 0% loans flowing to consumers. Still not enough though probably. The Cash For Clunkers bill is virtually guaranteed at this point – the government will literally pay consumers to scrap perfectly good cars and buy new ones. The government is already planning to buy the hybrid and electric cars to be built by the “new” GM and Chrysler, gee I wonder why…maybe because they will be ungodly expensive and no one will willingly buy one with their own money except a few celebrities. And if that’s still not enough they’ll find any number of ways to move that metal (or plastic).
I have raced the innaugural Yankee TT three years in a row now, and the first two years had nearly perfect weather for April in Michigan. I guess we were due for a less than perfect day. Conditions were on the cool side at about 50 degrees, low wind, and very light rain all day. This wasn’t really a bad thing, the trail is very sandy and the rain helps solidify it quite a bit making for easier trips through the many sand pits. The main downsides being all the sand sticking to you and your bike, and the slippery tree roots and rocks along the way.
This is my first year racing sport, and I was ready for a rude awakening. I ended up with a time of 1:05:54 which was good for 20th out of 30 starters. Course length was 11.4 miles by my computer, my ave speed was 10.3 with a max of 21.9 I felt pretty lousy about this result, but then I looked at my 2007 and 2008 times on the same course: 1:16:22 and 1:11:22 dropping roughly 5 minutes a year, I guess it looks better from that perspective.
Still, I had hoped for better after training a lot more for this year than in the past, dropped a fair amount of weight too. This is a good wake-up call to start training with more intensity if I want to really improve.
Needs improvement/negatives: didn’t warm up properly due to time, that was just dumb. My bike was not shifting properly in the low gears which was a bit of a problem on the uphill sections and had me preoccupied constantly looking down to make sure I wasn’t in the problem gear. I also had a bit of a sore throat/congested feeling possibly from spring allergies.
Positives: carefully preplanned all foods and drinks for raceday by the hour, energy level felt good. Bike otherwise performed perfectly, the handling was razor sharp and never let me down.
I might bite the bullet and take the bike to the shop, I can’t race again with it shifting so poorly. Training wise I need to do some hard intervals on the mountain bike, going to stay as far from the road bike as possible.
Right now, a lot of people are rightfully freaked out about the economy. Mainly, they are confused because they don’t really understand why things are happening or what to do about it. If you are the type given to believing in conspiracy theories, you think this ignorance is intentional. Intentional or not, it is the case that almost no one you know, and no one you see on the news has any idea what they are talking about. In particular this includes anyone holding a Phd in economics from any American university.
(effectively) Every single college and university in this country teaches an incorrect theory of economics that asserts that the only solution to recession/depression is increased government regulation and market interference, inflation in the money supply, and manipulation of interest rates. There is no diversity of thought (excepting Ron Paul) within the government, no matter how much “diversity” is celebrated. Obama himself has stated he doesn’t know much about economics, and he will not get the correct answers from the people who advise him. These are the people running the economy now, you are right to be worried.
There is one, and only one, school of economic thought which correctly predicted and explains the current economic recession. None of the people in the government follow this theory, and no one is teaching it in an economics class anywhere in this country. I will let you wonder to yourself why this is. This alternative economic theory is known as Austrian Economics, or The Austrian School. You can learn all about it for free at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website.
A good starting point is the Bailout Reader page. The essential component of the Austrian School is the alternative explanation of the business cycle, nicely summarized here by Lew Rockwell.
Some other good sites, most of which are on my daily must read list:
There you go, ignorance is no longer an excuse.
I just recently finished building my winter project bike: a Sette Reken aluminum hardtail. While my full suspension bike was certainly plush by comparison, I never got used to the tail bobbing of the rear suspension. Plus the bike had some issues I could just never quite solve, so I decided to go back to a hardtail. Aside from being a good learning experience, it would also be cheaper to salvage as many parts from the old bike as possible.
The frame was surprisingly cheap, it is a “house brand” frame from Pricepoint and only ran $90 on sale. Its basic, but solid, and quite light at around 4.5 lbs. I had hoped to salvage the wheels, fork, drivetrain, and headset. I intended from the start to replace the brakes on the advice of a local bike mechanic. Also planned to replace the usual wear parts such as stem, handlebar, and seatpost – they were getting old and it is recommended such parts be replace every few years at least – especially if used heavily.
After tearing the old bike down I found a few problems with that plan. The headset was actually the wrong size, not to mention the bearings were trashed – gotta replace it. The bottom bracket – looked questionable and considering its age, definitely due for replacement. Finally the front and rear derailers had to go – the rear turned out to be bent and the front was the wrong size. Technically I could have shimmed it to work but I didn’t want to half-ass it.
Aside from those mishaps which only required a few extra trips to the bike shop, the process went pretty well. Its really not as dificult as you might think. Only a few specialized tools were required for installing the bottom bracket and cranks. Otherwise its mainly allen wrenches, screwdrivers, and wire cutters. I still have trouble perfecting the rear derailer adjustment, which is quite frustrating.
Well here’s my component list:
Rand was right. A refreshing glimmer of hope.
I read today that Ayn Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged is once again climbing the sales charts as people rediscover the novel’s prophetic description of a world brought to the brink of destruction by government control. The affordable paperback currently sits at #44 on the Amazon sales ranking, and the Ayn Rand institute reports that sales have tripled thus far in 2009 over their 2008 pace, noting that 2008 was the best sales year ever at 200,000 copies. Not too freakin’ bad for a novel first published in 1957!!!
“Americans are flocking to buy and read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day” said Yaron Brook, Executive Director at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “Americans are rightfully concerned about the economic crisis and government’s increasing intervention and attempts to control the economy. Ayn Rand understood and identified the deeper causes of the crisis we’re facing, and she offered, in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ a principled and practical solution consistent with American values.”
