I was thinking about this while eating the winner of the “Best Snack 2001, 2003″ in the Fiery Food Challenge.  Everyone is talking about Floyd but I’ll tell you what is not being said outloud:

1. Blame is falling on whiskey and beer.  Whiskey and beer are consumed when testosterone levels are high.  High testosterone levels are caused by the consumption of whiskey and beer.  It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.  What is not well known is that Floyd is a victim of Alcohol Induced Megatestosterone Behavioral Disorder.  He might be able to get help for this as studies have shown that shaving off mustaches, not listening to Kid Rock, and trimming one’s mullet by an inch contributes to a break in the behavioral cycle.

2.  Floyd got caught in the wicked cross fire between American cycling greats: Lance Armstrong and Greg LeMond.  Sources confirmed that a public argument  ensued at Interbike in 2005 where Greg and Lance exchanged heated words including, but not limited to, “…He’s MY friend.  He’s on MY side!!”, and “!@$# you, Lance!  Floyd is MY Best Friend.  If I can’t have him NO ONE WILL!” Meanwhile, Floyd was seen befriending Levi over whiskey at the Double Down Bar.  Levi should watch his back.  Arrangements are made in Vegas at Interbike nearly every other minute. 

3. Memos circulating among the current administration have included Mennonites as “Threats to American Security”. Reports state that their ’simple, non-debt acquiring, quiet, ethical lifestyle’ as ‘UnAmerican’.  In one memo specifically, the Commander In Chief was quoted as writing, “Americans feel safe with a Texan as their hero.  Heck, Americans don’t even know where Pittsburg IS.  How are Americans gunna buy gas if they have some buggy-drivin’, bicycle ridin’ folk on the cover of Time Magazine?!”

4. Testosterone masks amphetamine use.  Floyd, after having a couple nips of whiskey, actually got talked into going out and raving with the boys that were in the country and were not able to start the Tour.  Many, like Jan, had little to do in the coming weeks but had the fitness and energy to do a lot.  The nightlife was teamming with dancing cyclists on X and Floyd assumed his Tour was near its end.  When he left the ravehall near start time, his guilt set in and they arranged a way to hide the X.  The rhythm moved him.  He is only human.

5. People don’t know this, but when the GUNSLINGER beat Floyd at El Tour de Tucson, a similar situation developed.  Floyd gets MAD, real mad.  His testosterone levels naturally rise to astronomical levels when he gets mad.  Pure and simple.

Yours,

BB

I headed up to Flag for respite this past weekend, hoping to give my buddy, Jake, a training partner as he puts the final touches on his Leadville 100 preparation.  He suggested we do some races.  I managed my first wins of the season: winning the Snowbowl Hill Climb Champs (a 2500 ft ascent over 6.5 miles which Jake and I re-did slower right after for good measure) and I won the Waputki Road Race today, also quite climby.  Jake won, too, so we are both up to some good deeds for a change.

Today’s course (more…)

or I’ll smash ya…..RFK Criterium, DC the night after Charlotte’s Bank of America Crit in NC. SUNDAY Aug. 6th. Easy to make the transfer from Charlotte to DC and $5000 in cash money.  Don’t think, just come.

www.hubracing.com

www.citybikes.com

beckybroeder@hotmail.com

for more info.

Thanks!!
BB

I just got back from a little tiny race in Boise called the Boise Twilight that turns out about 20,000 spectators.  Made a bit of a vacation out of it (yea, my life IS a vacation, I know, I know) but I’m shopping for a new town so I’m staying longer at all the places on my list that I visit this year.  Well, I’m staying longer at ALL places whether they are on the list or not.  Boise has had a soft spot in my soul since ‘98 when I won the Boise Marathon.  I think it was called the Great Potato Marathon, and I recalled all of this during my warmup with the Lipton girls when I recognized part of the course. I tried to describe the trophy to one of them: it was a giant styrofom potato glued to a plaque.  The trophy is in storage somewhere in Missoula and the potato fell off and is floating around said storage facility.  They had an enormous potato feast at the end though. I had never seen so many potato toppings.

(I will provide a proper list of the towns and cities I am considering later. I’m looking for some sort of feedback, I suppose.)  Now, onto what I’m blaming Global Warming for and why.

I went to An Inconvenient Truth last night.  It’s that Al Gore slide show movie about all the scientific data supporting what is happening and how badly.  I don’t like Gore, I always find myself weeding through too much rhetoric, but he is courageous in this regard.  And the science doesn’t lie.  I specialize, and will get better at this, in green design.  I thought the whole movie was interesting and a must see.  And it did get me to thinking about Global Warming and how it related to some things I encountered this weekend in Idaho.

1. My good pal, Hoppy, has a mullet rouge that rivals those in the panhandle of Idaho even.  I think it is an unnatural occurrence and has come about because of the higher than average red pigment levels in his hair mixing with unusually high CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  This is tragic but exciting somehow. He’s got a lot of loft up top and a lot of length in the back.

2. I have gotten a lot of flak about the Candace/Wolverine girl holding hands incident captured on cyclingnews during a sprint finish in superweek. This is the whole “CHICKS DON’T RACE” debate.  I hope and pray that what they were doing was coming together to fight Global Warming.  It would have to be a cold day in hell before you see a dude pulling that stunt in a one up sprint. If it were me, I’d slap that hand down, attack too soon, and lose cuz I wasted so much energy slapping someone.

3. Like I said, Global Warming caused record highs on Saturday night.  I was thrilled though because I went there for weather cooler than Tucson and strangely got it.  Kristin and I got away for a minute or two during her hometown crit.  She let me get a prime then attacked the crap out of me.  I remember thinking, “bye bye bud.  see ya after the race”.  She stayed out there and the nation’s best TTer managed a win–go figure.  I went back to the field and got some more money.  After the race, Global Warming caused my face to be purple.  I saw Kori immediately after saying, “hi.  how did you go?”  she replied with, “I puked a little at the end”, I go, “huh.  I puked in the middle.”  Dang Global Warming made us both puke.  My personal puke rate has gone up: once in 2002 in a solo win, once in 2005 when I pulled over into the crowd during the Downer’s Grove warm-up race, and once in 2006.  Rates are clearly increasing. It’s due to Global Warming.

4. After a night out, I planned on doing the Morning After Crit, which ultimately kinda turned into the Still The Same Night Crit.  Global Warming made me lose track of time, then made me promise my Aussie friends that I would stay up with them until their flight at 6 am. It was so warm, I thought it was still only evening. Conversely, the flipside was the opposite effect of me hitting my alarm and somehow getting inspired to race.  It’s part of a strange and violent cycle. I made it to the race only to find that the high CO2 levels in the atmosphere had also caused cars to be parked on the course.  That allowed another hour for me to get my own levels back to normal.  GLOBAL WARMING! I HATE YOU! You hurt me. 

Hang on, folks.  It’s only gonna get wilder.  Just wait til Florida falls into the Gulf.  I personally can’t wait until Tucson erupts in flames.

oh man, bedtime.

BB

Sometimes, I stop and think.  I’ve been getting some heat for being a ‘friendly’ ’social butterfly’ for a few months now, more often lately.  And after three decades of living in our society, it has been revealed to me that I have something all wrong.

Here’s the deal.  I like people.  I talk to everyone who talks to me first.  Sometimes, I initiate conversations, I don’t see myself as rude or obnoxious.   I saw a guy in the dentist’s office with a purse shaped like a fish and I hoped to talk to him.  I talk to EVERYONE: people on the street, peers, security guards, bikers, bums, governors.  That said, I genuinely, on some level, care about each and every person i talk to.  Apparently, that is socially unacceptable.  We had a joke in my family created by my dad, who talks to NO ONE.  He told me one time, “Becky, not everyone is your Goddamn friend!”.  really? Sidenote: I swear to this day he thinks I had a conversation at some point with the methheads that robbed us thinking I somehow got myself into that one. 

But anyway, this has become clear to me because of comments, actions, and an interview.

So I interviewed the guys I work with cuz we have loads of time to talk about things like this:

Me: When a girl is friendly and nice to you, do you take that to mean that she wants you? (more…)

Here’s the quick recap of my racing in Wisconsin.  Note, my memories have faded and I can’t recount every one on the team’s experience.  Just my mundane experiences and what I took from them. 

Host family: SUPER great.  Flickr is down right now, but I want to show you the olive oil/dishsoap cunnundrum.  THey were in the exact same container.  Same color.  Same consistency. They looked exactly the same.  Oooopsie.  Pam and Jim were insanely nice.  They fed us Super well and even though we wrecked the plumbing in their house, they grinned the whole week.

Road Race #1: Alpine “ski resort“.  I am from Montana so when I saw this mound of dirt with some lifts on it, I was puzzled, to say the very least.  We checked out the run map during our two hour race delay and saw some black diamond runs, even, on the ‘face’ facing us.  The run in the middle was termed “midway” and I figured it would take maybe .00045 seconds to get to that run.  It was like a bulldozer moved some earth into a pile. Sorry.  I shouldn’t be that way.  Maybe it looks more majestic in the winter? The race was shortened due to some citizen upheaval.    I was away solo for just under a lap and a little Kenda rider came up to help me.  Unfortunately, she was about the size of my calf.  My lead out was about 300 meters too short for my fitness level on that one but we faired ok.

Road Race #2: Rainy day, the Kiwis came, including my favorite teammate from last year, Michie Highland. She’s prepping for Mountain Bike Worlds, her second ever Mountain Bike Race.  I was aggressive and mad most of the race because the yellow line rule was apparently being enforced.  Two problems, there was no yellow line and half the peloton was advancing on the left shoulder of the road with complete abandon.  Call me a prude but I decided I didn’t want to die that day from oncoming traffic so when I saw my teammates over there on the last lap, I screamed to them that “I don’t want to see any of you over there!!” right after my teammate told them to go for it cuz no one cared.         I went for glory at about 2 km to go.  Solo, caught the lone Kiwi that was away and got gobbled up with about 150 meters to go.

Road Race #3: Roller Coaster.  This course is my favorite right next to the Sea Otter Circuit Race.  So much fun.  Little climb.  I gulped down my first ever COKE BLACK and went agro. For only the first half. The move that sticks out most in my mind was my counter attack to myself where I remember thinking, “HOLY @#$@ing GOD”.  It hurt.  I asked my teammates, “Who likes crack?!?! I DO!”  COke Black should be illegal.

Crit #1:  I sat out at the last minute and chilled with Corey, my favorite King of the FIxies.  We watched a woman run out of gas on the crit course and the cops rallied and pushed the car out of the way in the nic of time.  I videoed it.  I later had a chat with the cop about his Tazer Gun.  He told me he volunteered to be Tazored and Pepper Sprayed cuz he wanted to know the pain he was inflicting on others.  Pepper Spray is WAY worse.  I asked him if he would Tazor me if I kept lipping off (he was Super serious) and he said, straightfaced, his only joke ( i think), “I am thinking about it”.

Crit #2: Downpour averted.  Severe humidity and heat comes.  I started a bit slowly.  Had developed a heat sensitivity from the medication I was on in high doses (Cipro).  It is now clear to me that the warning on those pharmacuticals should be taken more seriously than with a “huh. weird.”.  I had the itchyest skin, mostly hands and feet and thought I would have rather been skinless altogether.  I rode off the course and to the Walgreens, asking the security guard there if he wouldn’t mind watching my horse.  I loaded up on Benadryl and Hydrocortazone cream and had a nice chat with the security guard (who took me over to see his beat up townie).  Once the allergy settled down, I was able to speak more than grunts and sighs.

Crit #3: Pissed off at myself and determined.  It was so unbelievably hot for us.  We raced at 2 pm, with no cover. I was totally lame, but there. With about 4 laps to go some big primes were offered up.  I was rushing the left side so I figured I’d gas it.  Lo and behold, my first sprint of the year perhaps and my 4th maybe ever, and against Kelly Benjamin.   I won the most pathetic looking sprint award.  She is so fast.  I was sprinting and admiring her acceleration as she got smaller and smaller.  The day before, we had joked with the massage people about putting up a TIARA prime, saying that may actually inspired me to sprint.  THEN, I heard it announced.  It was early, but I was yelling at Jeannette: “THE TIARA!!! GET THE G__DAMN TIARA!!”

Crit #4:  See previous Post…..I wish we had more days.  Everyone do us a favor and lobby for more days for the women, less humidity,  and less cheese.

I am excited to announce that some persuasion from a certain Lipton Chick inspired me to cash in some miles for a quick trip to Boise for Twilight and The Morning After Crit.  I really wanna make some money.  I was also inspired to GO TO BERMUDA.  ah. Bermuda.  Everytime I tell myself I’m sitting it out for this or that reason, I start to shake and have to quit lying to myself to stop the tremors. No matter what my mother says…Oh, and I forgot to mention awhile ago: CONGRATS to KStrong for the DOUBLE National Championship! Speaking of inspiring, Kristin has been an inspiration to me for years.  I truly admire that personality trait that causes people to look adversity straight in the face and give it the finger. 

aight.  keep it tight.

BB 

I have to start with the women’s finale. Our last day. I’ll write the redux version of all of Superweek, with pics, tomorrow. Let me begin with the fact that I messed up on Sunday and we lost some places for our leader (s). I had a hell of a time in the heat and humidity on Saturday but gutted it out somehow, nonetheless. The next day brought a surface temp of 131 degrees, little shade, no air-conditioned recovery, and a heat rash on me that had been going strong for four days. I admit that when I accelerated in the drops on Sunday, it looked like I was actually grabbing my brakes. I took a brief dirt nap on the side of the road then a sprinkler shower. It was rough. I don’t think the ice that was packed in my bra was even melted yet.That said, what is a girl like me to do after letting my team down? Well, I apologized. A lot. Then I loaded my Timbuk2 Asylum Messenger bag with High Life, Old Style, and some local Gucci Microbrew stuff, and Nikki and I headed over to keep the pit hydrated. We had acquired a HECKLE section the day before (more…)