Race Report: 100MON Houston Picnic Loop Edition

Yes, we did, indeed, survive the 100 Miles of Nowhere ride last Friday!  Although the "official" day of the ride was Saturday, June 4, we did ours on Friday because the Memorial Park Picnic Loop is mostly closed to car traffic that day.  (When I originally talked people into doing it that day, I thought it was closed for the entire morning and afternoon, but it was actually open from 11am to 3pm.  However, it was such an extremely hot day that it turned out not to matter so much.  There weren't many people - or animals for that matter - out in the heat of the day like us...)

Anyway.

The day started off late because HISD decided at the last minute to tack on another day to the school year so what would have been the first day of summer vacation for our kids turned out to be the last day of school and we had to take them to school that day before we could start riding.  (But I'm not bitter about that.)

We gathered in the parking lot, trying to ignore our impending doom.

Everyone looks so happy!

There were nine people who showed up to do the ride with us, including a father-son duo whom you can make out on the tandem bike there to the left of the picture.  (I could add a comment here about the fact that they live out in Katy and the Katy ISD system didn't make the stupid decision to extend the school year by one day, but would that make me sound bitter again?)

After unloading and setting up the food, water, and cold, wet towels (learned that one from my husband who grew up here in this heat!), we rolled out at about 8:40am.

We chose to do the ride at the Memorial Park Picnic Loop because it's a small loop that is twisty enough to not be boring, but still conforms to the rule of " riding an infuriatingly small course for 100 miles".  The course:

Memorial Park Picnic Loop (1.18 mi)

At a lap-length of 1.18 miles, we would have to go around the loop 85 times to get to 100 miles.  The course looks deceptively easy - it's nearly pancake flat - but there's one section of the loop that we lovingly referred to as "The Wall".  It's a slight incline, just enough that you can notice it in your legs, but nearly impossible to capture in a picture.  Luckily, thanks to Fatty's guest post a couple of weeks ago, I was able to take a representative photo of it!

I captured the incline like a true professional

The first 10 miles were a breeze.  We all chatted and loosened up and then the one guy in the group who still avidly rides many times per week sort of took off (I'm pretty sure he gave us "The Look", too), not to be seen again until around the 40-mile mark when he had put an extra 12 miles on us.  The rest of us were content to line up and work together a bit, still not pushing too hard and still being able to light-heartedly joke with each other and pretend to be like that talking dog from the movie "Up" and say "SQUIRREL!" to each other every time we saw and almost ran over a squirrel.

At around mile 40, we broke into the doping products:

Preemptive Ibuprofen - a necessity once you hit 40 years old.

We managed to make it another 20 miles before stopping for lunch.  By this point, though, the people who were only going to do 50 miles were beginning to finish, so I had to start giving out awards.

Winners of the Simultaneous Relay Division (they each rode 50 miles)

Winners of the Father/Son tandem-then-switching-to-individual-bikes Division

The son in this father/son duo really, really wanted to ride 50 miles.  They started off on their tandem and rode about 15 miles and then switched to individual bikes.  I think in the end, they were a couple of miles short of the 35-mile mark on their individual bikes, but we're assuming that there must have been a couple of extra miles on the tandem that they missed in their counting.  Way to go to this awesome 8-year-old!!!

After lunch, I really started feeling it.  When it was 1:30 and the sun was directly overhead - providing only minimal shade to the route - and we had only gone about 65 miles, I was seriously doubting the intelligence of choosing to do this ride.  I actually started getting chills, which I couldn't decide were a result of dehydration or the pain that was shooting from my feet up into my legs.  I ended up assuming that it was dehydration and tried to force even more water into my already-water-logged stomach.  After soldiering through that trough, we managed to make it to 75 miles and another awards ceremony.

Winner of the Spontaneous 100K Division (a co-worker of mine who just decided to show up and ride!)

By this point, it was hot.  So, so hot!

The heat.

My God, the heat!

But, ignoring all remnants of sense we may have had left, we got back on our bikes and started turning the pedals once again.  We told ourselves that we would stop at 88 miles (when the avid-cyclist would be done, since he had 12 extra miles on us) and if we needed to, we could finish the rest of the 12 miles the next morning... in the relative cool of the day!

My Facebook updates throughout the day tell the story succinctly:

• Almost to 40 miles.  Starting to really feel it!  Got all day to finish, though.  We'll make it.  :)
• Up to 60 miles now! Lunchtime.
• 75 miles.  The heat, my God, the heat!  Gonna try to do a little more, but may have to finish this tomorrow in the interest of not passing out...
• 88 miles.  Past the trough.  I think I can, I think I can.
• Finally!  100.31 miles of nowhere!

100.31 Miles of Nowhere!

 When we made it to the 88-mile point and stopped to let Mr. Avid take his leave of us, he decided he just couldn't leave us to wallow in misery without him for the last 12 miles and he ended up riding them with us.  So!  The winner of the 112 Miles of Nowhere Division:

Oops.  Either I forgot to take the picture, or it didn't actually take, so this will just have to do.  Not quite quads the size of Fatty's, but still...

And the rest of us...

Winner of the 100 Miles having "flatted" twice during the ride (he missed a couple of laps, but we treated it like a Crit and didn't make him ride those last two)

Winner of the Most-billable 100 Miles (my husband is a drilling engineer and had to work during every break)

Winner of the Women's-age-40-who-talked-all-her-friends-into-doing-this-with-her Division (Me) (Also? Nice hair!)

We finished at 4:44pm and sat around, recovering while watching people as they showed up after work to put in their workout for the evening.  As we were sitting there, we started noticing that the squirrels had come out from hiding in their cool nests and were running around again.  Until that point, though, we hadn't noticed they were missing!  So, on that realization, we packed up and went home.  We decided that next year, we'll do it in April, instead.

One more before the end of the month...

I felt bad leaving the month of May with only two posts (even though that's twice as many as the month of April saw!), so I thought I'd better just write something on here - just because.

We've had a pretty busy month at our house, but not with anything specific.  We're still trying to clean and organize the house and this past weekend I finally cleaned out all the stuff from "my side" of the bedroom that had been piled there since we had our new closets installed!  It's finally almost looking like a bedroom again when you walk into the room...

We've also been trying to get ready for Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere bike ride.  We're going to be riding it on Friday this week - only three days away! - at Memorial Park.  We'll be doing 85 laps around the 1.18-mile picnic loop starting immediately after we drop the kids off for their last day of school.

So, in preparation for this event, we've gone to Memorial Park for the last two Fridays in a row to ride as much as we could in about an hour and a half.  And "as much as we could" turned out to be only 25 miles.  And I was in severe pain.  My butt just isn't used to riding for long periods of time on my road bike saddle.  Yowch!

We're headed to Memorial Park for "date night" again tonight to get in some more riding... not that it's going to make much difference at this point other than to cement in my mind how painful the actual ride is going to be on Friday.

The good thing is that with this 100 Miles of Nowhere event, everyone gets to declare themselves the "winner" of their category.  Which reminds me, I need to come up with my category before the ride on Friday!  Hmmm...

8 years is a long time

So, it turns out that 8 years is a long time to not have ridden your bike for "speed".

The husband and I used to ride our bikes obsessively every weekend at least 40 miles each day (otherwise we didn't think it justified loading the bikes up on the car and driving out to the countryside) and ride three to four nights per week at the Memorial Park Picnic Loop.  And on those nights we would average 20 miles/hour.  People used to draft off of us as long as they could stay with us, but when we got tired of having "wheel-suckers", we would put the hammer down, ramp it up, and just leave them in our dust.  *sigh*  Those were the days...

Last night (date night!), in preparation for Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere, we loaded up the road bikes and headed off to Memorial Park to get a taste for how painful this ride is truly going to be.  And on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say I'm going to be at about a 7.  (Reserving 10 for something like passing a kidney stone or having a ruptured abdominal cyst or something like that - both of which I've heard were excruciating.  I'd say that natural childbirth was about an 8.  So, not quite as bad as that.  But close.)

Anyway...  We attempted to ride fast enough to make forward progress, but not fast enough that we didn't feel we would be able to sustain the effort for 100 miles.  I think we failed at the latter goal.  There's no way I'm going to be able to keep the pace that we were going and we were only going about 17.5 miles per hour.  And that was pushing it.  Oh, the pain that we are in for!!!

In other news, 8 days is also a long time.  I'm trying to see if I lose fat any faster by not drinking alcohol.  It's been about 8 days since I've had any alcohol.  I'm surprised my system hasn't gone into complete shock.  But the jury is still out regarding whether or not my middle is getting any thinner, so I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it...  ;)

Ding, dong!

The husband was awake at "ding" and I was awake at "dong".  It was a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning at 2am and our doorbell was ringing.  What the?...

It would be strange for someone to be ringing our doorbell at 2:00 in the morning, but what made it a little frightening was that our front gate was locked, which meant that whoever was ringing our doorbell actually climbed over our fence to walk up the stairs to our 2nd floor front door to ring the doorbell!

We were completely baffled by what to do in this situation.  We didn't want to go out to the hallway where the person at the front door would be able to see us, but we can't see the front door from our bedroom, so we couldn't see who in the world this was.

We spent a couple of minutes looking around, pacing, and then eventually wondering if we really did hear the doorbell in the first place.  Then...  *Ding, dong!*  They pushed it again!

Finally, when we didn't answer the door, the person went back down the stairs - to where we could see this late-night visitor - stood at the bottom of the stairs for a minute, then climbed over our fence and started pacing around in front of the house.  He looked nice enough - not a homeless person or anything like that - probably a person who just left one of the bars down the street.

But we called the cops, anyway!  The police showed up about 20 minutes later, well after he had finally walked off down the street.  But, we kept vigil at the window for awhile longer, making sure he didn't come back.  And while we were looking out, we saw another police car drive by, shining their spotlight at our front gate.  That made us feel a little better.

It took a little while to get back to sleep, but we've managed to avoid any additional late-night disturbances so far.

And other than that, apparently nothing interesting and blog-worthy has been going on!  ...except that I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago.  But we'll just keep that a secret amongst ourselves, mmmm-kay?  ;)

Six pounds in one week?

Six pounds in one week?!  Nope, not even going to try that.  I've officially given up on my weight goal for my 40th birthday.  Really, I gave up on it about a month ago when I still had 8 pounds to lose in a month...

However!  I'm still considering my fitness and health goal a success.  My clothes are definitely fitting much better and I can feel the muscles in my legs and core.  I feel great.  And I look great, if I do say so myself!  :)

Plus, I went out riding on Saturday morning and after going around all the construction and actually getting to a trail that was rideable, I realized that I don't even notice the little inclines that left me huffing a puffing 6 months ago.  Success.

My next fitness goal is to ride Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere!

The back-story: Three years ago, Fatty was talking about a Christmas present he gave himself and was trying to make himself not feel bad about buying them for himself.  It was a set of rollers - basically, a treadmill for bicycles.  He was justifying the purchase by saying that he could probably ride 100 miles on the rollers.  And he dared everyone to bet him that he couldn't do it.  If he did, they would have to donate money to Livestrong, if he didn't, he would have to donate money to Livestrong. Of course, he completed the 100 miles on his rollers and an annual event was born.

The following year, he had people sign up to ride 100 Miles of Nowhere, donate money to Livestrong and then send in a "race" report.  Some of those reports are really funny!  Go to the sidebar and peruse Fatty's blog for 100 Miles of Nowhere.  (I would link to it, but then his comments do that funny ping-back thing and link back to this blog entry and...  well, I still like my relative anonymity.)

The idea of the event is to either ride rollers, your bicycle trainer, or an extremely small route for 100 miles.  And then document the experience.

The "official" date of the ride is Saturday, June 4, but our plan is to ride the Memorial Park Picnic Loop, which is a 1.18 mile loop.  The Picnic Loop is only closed to car traffic on weekdays, however, so we're going to do it on Friday, June 3 instead.  And we have several friends talked into doing it with us!  It's going to be a blast!  Or something like that...  :)

Dogsledding

While we were off in Colorado for Spring Break, we also decided to go dogsledding.  We tried it out last year and the kids loved it so much, we had to make it part of this vacation, too.

The way it works is that you go meet your guide and your team.  The guide introduces you to the dogs and tells you a little about them and how they got to be there.  For instance, one of our lead dogs, Lily, was a little less than a year old and had been trained to run the Iditarod for this year!  Unfortunately, her team's funding fell through, so she "retired" to this place to take tourists dogsledding.  Sort of sad that her "talent" is kind of wasted here, but she's an extremely friendly puppy and she LOVES to run!

After meeting the team, you get to move the dogs one by one, hook them up to the sled, and get ready to go.  The kids got to ride in the dogsled and the husband and I took turns "mushing" the dogs - We each took turns standing on the back of the sled and when the guide said to stop, we put the brake down and jumped on it.  It takes quite a bit to stop a team of 8 dogs!.  The guide rides a snowmobile up ahead of the dogsled and has a sleigh that holds anyone not currently on the dogsled.  About half-way through, you switch people on the dogsled.

This is Buffy.  She's super-nice, we just got a funny picture of her!

Fellan took a liking to Willow.

Marxo was the Dog Whisperer.  Lily loved her and so did Buffy.

Surrounded by friendly dogs!

Dogsledding family

Rodeo!

The week before Spring Break was a whirlwind.  We went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans the weekend before (and stayed for about 40 hours, total.  You see, now that the kids are in school and the state will take us to court for the kids missing too many days of school, we're completely beholden to the school schedule.  So that means that we don't dare take Friday or Monday off from school.  See Section 25.094!).

Also, now that the kids are in school and we have to take vacation during Spring Break, it means we've missed the Rodeo the last couple of years because it happens to coincide with Spring Break and we're gone for most of the time that the Rodeo is in town.  This year, however, the husband was given four tickets to go on Wednesday night before Spring Break started, so we put on our gear and headed to the stadium.

Turns out the tickets were really good!

Down by the action!

We also like to go through and look at all the animals that are there for the Livestock Show.  We stopped by a Longhorn to take a picture for the husband's brother, who went to the University of Texas, but Marxo decided to just totally ham it up...

"What?  I was concerned!"

Back from Spring Break!

Well, we're back from Spring Break!  Apparently I was gone too long, though, because when I went to work out today, someone was riding my exercise bike as if he owned the thing.  I'm going to have to get down there earlier tomorrow...

Anyway.  We went skiing last week and enjoyed the record-amount of snow they've gotten up there this year.  It was really nice!  The kids took ski lessons for a couple of days at A-Basin and then we spent another three days skiing together in different places: Breckenridge, Loveland, and Ski Cooper.  We went to Ski Cooper on Friday, which turned out to be a great decision.  They got about 2 inches of fresh snow overnight and the runs there are perfect for the kiddos.  It was a great finish to the vacation.

Fellan's class apparently read a book about Flat Stanley before Spring Break started and he had an assignment to either send Flat Stanley to someone over Spring Break, or take him along on a trip and take pictures of him along the way.

Since Fellan got a camera for Christmas, he was pretty excited about doing this, so we have quite a few pictures of Flat Stanley which will be affixed to posterboard along with a map tonight to show where each picture was taken.  Here are the highlights...

For the first day of driving, we didn't make it out of Texas, but we did see lots of wide open spaces and a few energy-related things:

For Grandpa

For Daddy

The next day, we pushed on through New Mexico and into Colorado!

(We actually had to take this one on the way back home because we missed it on the way!)

Once we got there, skiing ensued!

A-Basin

Loveland

We took pictures of the rest of the places, too, but you know, sometimes enough is enough!  :)

On the way back, we stopped and took pictures at the state lines for New Mexico and Texas, but the picture that Fellan took of the New Mexico sign turned out to be only a small sliver of the sign!  Anyway, we already had one of those and the Texas one is good.  :)

And we couldn't resist taking one more the last morning on the road.

The Replacements

Since we had to take everything out of our closet and I'm not allowing anything back into the closet until the decision has been made that we NEED it, our bedroom is an absolute mess.  We still have old shoes, clothes, and general junk that had been stashed in the closet all over the place.

Two of the things that we had stashed in our closet were The Replacements.  When Lamby got lost 5 years ago, we were determined to have back-up attachment objects, just in case the need ever arose again.  We kept them hidden in our closet for all these years, but we had to take them out in order to re-do the closet.  Well, we were still trying to keep them a secret from the kids, but Fellan discovered replacement Baby Tarah on Friday!  :o

Since the cat was out of the bag, we went ahead and showed Marxo that we had a replacement Lamby, too.

The Replacements! (From L to R: Baby Tarah, Baby Tarah 2, Lamby, Lamby 2)

Check out how clean those replacements are!  They're still hanging out on our couch at the moment and whether they become permanent members of the "lovey" community remains to be seen.

Now, the amazing part of this story is not that we were able to keep these babies secret for so long.  The amazing part of the story is what Fellan told us after we told Marxo the truth that this one was not really the original Lamby.

We were explaining to her how the husband had gone out looking for Lamby and had spent an hour roaming the neighborhood in search of her, but he was never able to find her.  So we ordered two more, kept one as a back-up just in case it ever happened again, and passed off the other as the original Lamby.

As we were telling this story, Fellan chimed in, "Yeah, I found her for you under a bunch of pillows!"

The husband and I were floored.  We didn't remember the specifics of "finding" Lamby, but Fellan was less than three years old at the time, and he remembers the whole thing.  Scary.  On the one hand, I think it's awesome that he has a memory like that, but on the other hand, I figure he's going to need a lot of therapy later in life to un-remember all the horrible parenting he's been subjected to thus far in his life...  :/

Amazing Closet Transformation

I finally got the husband to send me the pictures of the closet from his phone since my grainy phone just would not have done the glorious closet justice.  :)

The Spaceman guys showed up exactly on time Saturday morning and were psyched about not having to rip out the existing closet appurtenances.  However, their joy was quickly replaced with dread when they realized how many trips they would be making and what they would be carrying up to the third floor for the next half an hour or so.

After they finally got everything upstairs, they started the installation.  I couldn't help myself - I kept going in there every 30 minutes or so to see what it looked like.  Finally, at about 1:30pm they finished installing everything and then used an industrial-strength orange furniture polish to clean everything up.

Yikes.  It was overwhelming.  We ended up having to open all the windows and leave the house for a few hours so the place could air out!  I even had a bit of a rash on my face and chest and poor Marxo looked like death warmed-over.

Luckily, however, we were able to return to the detoxified house after dinner and bask in the glory of our new closet.  I'm not allowing any clothes back into the closet until they've been washed (just because!), so we don't have everything loaded back in yet and I don't have final-final pictures, but at least you can see how awesome it looks without clothes.

(Also, I should tell you that we didn't clean up our closet at all before we took the "before" pictures - we wanted the difference to be as drastic as possible!)

Husband's side - before

Husband's side - after rip-out but before Spaceman

Husband's side - after [note the hamper, belt rack, tie rack (back side), and valet rod!]

 

 

My side - before

My side - after rip-out

My side - after (there's another hamper under those drawers!)

Looking from husband's side - before

Looking from husband's side - after

Built-in - before

Built-in - after

We had the guys who did the rip-out of the old closet paint this so that it would match the stuff that Spaceman put in.

AND the pièce de résistance - the jewelry drawer!  :)