Ready, set, go... The new race season is upon us. I have updated the Bandwagon Race schedule at the bottom of the team page with most of the races worth doing in the rocky mountains. If you have an event you think should be on there drop me a note. I'm planning on racing all the local stuff along with the Whiskey 50, Growler and Breck 100. No CTR this year. I'm working on my 500hr yoga certification at Pranava Yoga Center. But don't be surprised if you see me at an enduro or two! We are called Bandwagon Racing after all! These classic photos were taken from the bathroom of my new place of employment, Criterium Bicycles!  Stop by when you get a chance it is right on the bike path! You can still catch me at Pranava on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. A bikepacking demo/workshop is in the works for the spring! Stay tuned for that. As you can see we have trimmed(Big Guns needs to get added tho) the team down a bit which means I will have to actually bring it at the races this year. Winter "training" is going well riding, running and yoga nearly every day and I can't wait to get after it every morning which is always a good sign.

I'm heading to the 24hrs in the Old Pueblo to support a few friends, hopefully get in a couple rides, drive endless hours thru the night, serve up some delicious stew, and take photo or two. Look for some crazy road trip pictures on the FaceBook . The solo start list looks solid! Should actually be some exciting racing for a 24hr event!

 Me, relaxing with Joey and Sandhya in 2010. If you missed it, 3 Dicks and a Johnson... Joey is racing the solo this year look for him to be ripping in the Velorution kit.


Dan Durland working the #netipot way back when, doing his part to keep the #3Dicks running strong.

                                     If you could have one " super power ", what would it be?

Quinoa Almond Stuffed Squash, just add brewer's yeast ... super powers abound!

You guys most likely missed my workshop at Breathe in Denver on February 2nd. It was awesome if I don't say so myself. Our tiny group had such a great time! Next workshop is in April at Pranava Yoga Center , Demystifying the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, it has nothing to do with cycling... or does it, haha!

The reason is Love. Just like all the random gasses and basic building blocks of life hurtling thru space that came together to form this wild, wondrous and at times confusing planet, so did we(and by we I mean the Royal We) come together, a mere “chemical” reaction, a mere testament to what Love could be. We need each other like hydrogen needs oxygen to form water, but alas they still exist separately.

Come Saturday our solar system, the sun, the moon and all the rest will align with the center of the galaxy, right? Not exactly. But there is no denying the effect the sun, moon and stars have on our physical bodies and moods. The moon’s gravitational pull not only effects the tides in the ocean but the tides within us all. The winter solstice rings in the shortest day and longest night, with longer days full of light to follow. That is still pretty cool! Hopi, Mayan, and Hindu mythology all predict the end of a cycle around this “time”. Like a new moon or the solstice, but on a grander scale.... It’s not the end, it is the beginning of a transformation. Maybe the whole thing is meant to be taken symbolically? We are all made of stars... Everything we do, say and even think, effects all the other stars, because we are all One and we are still One, we just seem like random beings that come together and fall apart for no reason. Me must first have balance within ourselves to realize this interconnectedness.

Cultivating balance comes in many forms. Starting with the balance of nourishment and toxins both physical and mental. Cycling and yoga cultivate balance in my opinion. They won’t fix everything, but they will help you bring balance to the universe and connect with all forms of energy. You are the best place to start or continue as it were;) Yoga means union, the unity of existence, not just human existence, but all forms of energy, rocks, trees, bikes, flowers, weeds, pigs, kids, old car tires, cats, dogs, the sea, the stars, the moon, the sun... Love and compassion come from seeing yourself in everyone and everyone in yourself.

Search the sky brave pilots.

Happy Holidays, Solstice and New Year!

 I decided to drive back to Illinois to see the family for the Thanksgiving holiday. I took my time getting out there doing some site seeing and looking for the ghost of Mark Twain along the way.
 Weird Harold's in Burlington has the hat you are looking for, along with old prints, records and the biggest costume collection I have ever seen. Worth the stop.




 The cobbles of Burlington. This hill is right next to snake alley. They should race up this and down snake alley in my opinion.

 There is only one rental car place in Galesburg and they were out of vehicles, so I took the train back to Denver. Chooo choo, the train is a more civilized way to travel anyway.

Riding up to the house today after work I notice a note stuck to the door. Those of you who have been playing along at home may remember some notes from years past . Well this one looks more like a card. Who could this be from?? This would not be the first, second or third time a random, or not so random letter has shown up on my doorstep. I’ll let you in on a little secret, the best way into someone's heart or to make them smile or to say I’m sorry, is a good old fashion handwritten letter. Actually the best way is to tell them in person, but the best way to make sure they hear you is to put pen to paper and hand them something unforgettable, or tape it to their door.



This card happen to be from an anonymous 5th grader. He or she, left this hand-made Thanksgiving card taped to my front door. Looks like the handwriting of a he if you ask me? Complete with a poem!

  “Happy Thanksgiving.
   We give joy to the living
   We eat much turkey
   On this day!
   Good lurkey
  From,
            5th grade at
 Divine  Redeemer
  Bad poem I know, Sorry!” 

So awesome, love the universe and it's little bundles of energy. No worries about the “bad” poem. They can’t all be gems, trust me I know. Any poem that describes giving joy and has a made-up word is good in my book anyway. Thanks kid, best Thanksgiving card EVER!




This is a picture of the Divine Redeemer, a Catholic School down the street from my house. I wonder if that 5th grader took it on their own to go handing out random Thanksgiving cards, or if it was part of a school project. Can't imagine the school would send a 5th grader off to a strangers house tho.


This next piece is part of a bigger “note” that you may find bound together and on your end-table one day.


                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                    2/4
W,
What if we were somehow able to eliminate the part of our being that understands chronology as we were taught it? All the logic, all the order, all the inevitable consequences of it? All its limitations and lockdowns imposed on our seamlessly abundant spirit. All the ways our psyche has leaked out into this land of the day before night, spring before summer, life before death. Those moments, the moments we seem to know something we are not logically suppose to know. All those awakenings of intuition and insights into other lives; that knowledge we seem to posses or witness from other worlds - it does not hide entirely. It exists. Maybe at its greatest expression in the hearts of lovers. But its these moments that don’t lie. Its the paradoxes of non-logic that appear to me as the purest truth out there. It is the unimaginable lack of understanding we have for our current situations. Its the weight of our given traits, our unescapable childhoods and the context in which we were or were not loved in all the days proceeding now. But days... what is a day measure by? What is the start and end of a lifetime measured by? What if all our past and all our future lives are all bundled up into this one and each and every one of us have imagined it just the way we like it best?
Who knows?
All I know is I had to write you this letter.
Until next time... Love, V 

  The above letter was handwritten and sent thru the good old U.S. Postal Service, long after we had split-up. Ours was a correspondence from another time. She constantly sent friends and family handwritten letters and postcards. I loved that about her. 3-dimensional mail is so wonderful. We wrote each other tirelessly. Nearly every day we weren’t together we wrote an email or an actual handwritten letter with artwork half the time.  This was on top of text messages and talking on the phone for literally an hour, if not two, nearly every night. Not to mention love notes and poems scattered about each others houses. Some not found until months or even in one case years later. It was wildly romantic and a little psychotic. She would demand poems, “Write me a poem, even if it is one you wrote for another girl, put it on a new piece of paper and send it to me.” Ha, madness! A lengthy book could be written on our correspondence alone. I’m afraid I won’t be as honest here as most of those letters and notes. The thing about putting pen to paper is you are committed at that point and the pen may take you somewhere you thought you’d never go. From there you have no choice, you have jumped. You could crumple the paper, but you'd most likely end up at the same place next time. The art of writing a letter the old fashion way is like being drawn to taking the long way home, sometimes we cut thru the alleys, sometimes the long way back through the north side of town and sometimes just bushwhacking your way through the drainage trying to get back before dark.

“Sometimes we plan a trip to one place, but something takes us to another.” -Rumi

 Most relationships fail because of a failure to communicate, as I’m sure you have been told. “What we have here is a failure to communicate!...” And it’s true even the simplest of friendships or everyday relationships suffer from a lack of communication. Most of the time we can’t be bothered or are afraid or the listener does not want to hear or she is being inundated my a million other thoughts and can not hear fully. I used to say that V and I had a problem of over communicating. We covered more ground in 6 months than I did with my x-wife in 10 years. With all due respect to the x-wife, if I may interject, even tho I only talk to the x a couple times a year we have gotten much better at listening to one anther. Anyway we hear want we wanted a lot of the time, especially if you are making, or would desire to make, a naked pretzel with the person you are “listening” to, your hearing tends to get selective. Sex, love and insecurities definitely change what we think we hear. Oddly enough rereading these letters now, the ones that seemed like complete crazy-talk then seem to make the most sense now and the ones that made sense then were merely want I wanted to hear at the time.

 “Those moments, the moments we seem to know something we are not logically suppose to know. All those awakenings of intuition and insights into other lives; that knowledge we seem to posses or witness from other worlds - it does not hide entirely. It exists. Maybe at its greatest expression in the hearts of lovers.” This in a sense is were the pen has taken me, or is taking me. Exploring Truth through Love... “Eternity is Truth.... The poet (or prophet) who penetrates to the human fundamentals see past, present and future simultaneously... Eternity is the real Now”, from A Blake Dictionary.

 Ahhh... The offseason!! Now we can get back to poetic verses of my maudlin career that have nothing to do with cycling, well seemingly nothing, in the immortal words of Lauren Hill, "everything is everything". I'm actually reading  Women in Love in the picture, although the quote below is from a Neruda book of poetry. Neruda is solid and so are his words.
Women in Love, fascinating stuff, Ha! Can't believe it has taken me this long to read this book but I just found it, or rather it found me, while walking home a few months ago. I came across a box of abandon books by a dumpster. I paused at the former owners' excellent reading tastes and thanked them for leaving them to be picked over rather than tossing them to the mice. Several titles I had already read or owned. I snatched up the ones I hadn't like the flowers being discarded after a funeral. Frued, Kierkegaard, a selection of short stories by J.D. Salinger. Not pulling Lawrence out of my Jenga stack of books until just this morning. More about that in a couple days.
Welcome to the offseason. I normally spend spend the fall racing 'cross, but I sold my cyclocross bike and have been working on other adventures. Some running and yoga tales will soon follow.

The dates are set for a couple Yoga for Cyclists: Connecting with the Process workshops in 2013. I will be at Pranava Yoga Center on January 20th. For you northerners I will be at Breathe, Yoga, Cycle, Art studio in Denver on Feb. 2nd.

Halloween yoga tomorrow at Pranava Yoga Center, 5:30pm. There will be tricks and treats. I hear Krishnamacharya will be guiding the practice. And for those of you who will still be up Thursday morning at 6:30am practice, followed by morning meditation.