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little bit of my work recently.. the digging never ends. will randomly update this thread with progress

I'm probably just going to do a lap on Saturday due to some stuff that has come up on Sunday. Hope y'all have a good ride and the rain holds off.

Skinnies are the new worldwide rage in biking...

Your floor looks a little bendy too.

the SSlayer segment which someone made last year starts at Russell. That is why it did not register.

Maybe they could be used as trail decoration somewhere ... after a Shinerider modification procedure is performed.

Paint it! Wait...

The drink mix was Hammer Nutrition Heed. There will be more of it again this year. You will be able to fill up at base camp. They sent me a ton of stuff for the event. As for riding between now and then: 1. Do a 2 hour ride on Wednesday of 18-24 miles on trail, or less than double that on road, staying zone 1-2 pushing at times into zone 3 to get over rollers. Stay well clear of threshold efforts. 2. Thursday would be a 1 hour recovery ride on flat terrain staying in zone 1. 3. Friday take a day off the bike with minimal activity. 4. Saturday first thing in the morning, entirely on mostly flat terrain, ride 15 minutes building slowly into mid zone 2, then "ladder" sprints of 10 seconds, 20, 30, 20 and 10 seconds with 3 minute recoveries in between. Then a 60 second full effort with a five minute rest then a 45 second full effort finishing with 15 minutes spooling down into a zone 1. This is a low "training stress score" workout that will get the junk out of your muscles and system. 5. Finish each ride with a quality recovery shake. I use First Endurance Ultragen.

Not sure I'm good enough to give advice, but here is my routine for the week. Light 2 hour rides on Thursday and Friday. These will be on paved trail and just to keep my legs moving. Not ideal, but I'll take what the weather gives me. Upper body gym workout today or tomorrow which I usually do once a week. Will make a big pot of spaghetti for the family tomorrow and will eat that daily until Saturday. Saturday will do chores and family activities to make up for being away all day Sunday. I've put in 70-100 of road and/or urban miles per week for the last few months, but have only ridden my full suspension once since I busted the linkage on the dragon pre-ride in August. Really have no Idea how i will fare on three laps since I'm in 'bike' shape, but not necessarily 'mountain bike' shape. But I'll get in 2 and see if I feel like doing a third. Last year there was a water stop at cedar breaks and there was some sort of electrolyte additive in the water. Anyone remember what it was? I want to buy some and put it in my water bottles. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Take Friday off, do your light ride on Saturday. Thursday shouldn't be a hard ride. Not easy not hard.

Watching some of his behind the scenes stuff let's you know just how sketchy some of these moves are. Hard to believe he could even come back from the kind of injury he sustained back in 2011.

My favorite Chris Akrigg video is a Hill in Spain. I like the music too.

Yes. Over and over again. There is no pure capitalism, there is no pure socialism. These two concepts are on a continuum and every country fits somewhere along that line. You would not want to live in a country of pure capitalism because capitalists are for shit when it comes to doing things for the public good. Roads. Yeah, everything is a toll road. Hope you paid your police monthly service fee because if you are robbed they won't answer your call. And for all that is holy, do...not...get...sick. Now, on the other end of things you would not want to live in a pure socialism environment. Yeah, everything is provided by the government, but you'd never be able to get what you need. Don't crap a lot, toilet paper might have been mis forecasted. Don't bother trying to go out to dinner, you won't find good restaurants. Every country is somewhere on the continuum. And there is no "free market". That thing that people love so much does not exist as long as businesses can lobby the government to write laws that favor their business and hurt their competitors.

this 1000x You must have a balance of socialism and capitalism to keep each other in check. They both have their place in society and our "leaders" are failing to provide that balance and are instead shifting us towards a corporatocracy. We apparantly like being under someones thumb and being told what to think and feel. The rising resurgence of nationalism and fascism across the globe is alarming and i think is a result of a feeling of hopeless and fear. People are either deluisional about their plight or have given up hope because the ship has sailed and they're not on it. Those homeless people in downtown austin passed out on the sidewalk are a reflection of our society whether we like it or not. We rely on non-profits to carry the burden and nobody i know wants to hire a mentally ill person. The whole "get a job" attitude can go f@ck itself. Even Salt Lake is doing something productive about its homeless population and Utah is a super-red state. Since you touched on health insurance and big business ill add my 2c. The insurance companies are in business to earn a profit and continue to increase earnings every f@cking quarter to satisfy their shareholders. That means all sorts of underhanded practices that results in innocent people dying through rejected coverage, or at best having to declare bankrupcy. Meanwhile I'm told to be afraid of a migrant caravan. I'd bet not one of those people seeking asylum denied any of my claims or pushed opioids over treatment, foreclosed on a houses after getting bailed out, used loopholes to cheat pensioners or declared an illegal war to enrich themselves and their buddies. Rant/Off

In simple terms: In EVERYONE'S backyard or NOBODY'S backyard. Every morning (including the weekend) I hear the construction start at the Grove at 7am. It is in my backyard. Adler, the developer, and his cohorts all said density was great and that we needed to do this "for the good of Austin." I would be fine with that position if all of Austin was pushing density, but density conveniently skips many neighborhoods. It literally is about wealth and political clout. Either we're all in it together or we're not. When we start targeting certain areas and bypassing others, it all falls apart.

This works well when industrial leaders are well principled. Unfortunately greed has gotten in the way of that over the years and it isn't working so well anymore. When I worked for a catholic health system, one of the founding Daughters of Charity told me that the original leaders had a self-imposed rule that the top pay in the organization could only be 20 times that of the lowest pay, e.g. if the housekeepers made $25K per year, the CEO could only make $500K. That seemed fair to me, but at that time our system-wide CEO made 250 times that of a housekeeper. And that was in a not-for-profit, faith-based organization! A for-profit health insurance CEO makes 700 times what a claims examiner makes. I'm all for rewarding talent, hard work, results, etc, but free enterprise has become more about greed and corruption than about building the strength of our nation in my opinion. Even the CEOs and other top executives who fail miserably end up leaving companies with enough money to retire on. Where's the equity in that, and how is that helping the vast majority of Americans who struggle to just make ends meet? The era of the 1%ers, who by the way control 38% of the nation's wealth, is going to get worse, not better, unless something changes.

I just paid $2,700 for this, I guess I'll blame the rain too.

I've been running carbon bars for 11 years across multiple bikes, had countless crashes, but never had one break (chips on the surface too). I may replace them every 5-6 years, but this isn't unusual for other parts on my bikes. I never considered carbon bars having a bling factor, only lightweight and functional. It mentions in the article that both bars are designed with similar ultimate strengths (I think you used the term breaking strength), but each material has different failure modes. Clamps can deform the outer diameter of the carbon bar when overtightened and can cause the weakest area for failure. Once aluminum alloy goes through it's stress/strain proportional limit (rebounds back without deformation), it then goes through its yield strength (bending), strain hardens, and then fatigues out and breaks. The carbon fiber yield strength is so close to it's ultimate strength, the impression is that a failure happens unexpectedly and at a much lower ultimate stress than aluminum. We could go into lattice slip planes of Al, dislocations, propagation, inclusions, but that gets boring.. I think we're all set in our own beliefs and experiences. Ride aluminum. Ride Carbon. Signed, Chuck Yeager- a weight weenie, pro wannabe, weekend warrior