alex chiang: web 6.0

I hope Colorado Springs will die in a fire. It’s a craphole of a city, and embodies everything that I hate.

It looks like a city, and feels like a city, but has none of the things that make living in a city worth it. What do I mean? Well, first off, it has city traffic. Every morning, between 7 and 9, and every afternoon, from 4 til about 6, you are stuck in stop-and-go traffic. It takes half an hour to go 5 miles. The problem is exacerbated by the construction occurring on I-25, but there is traffic on surface streets as well.

Now I know that some of my precious readers who live in real cities will probably scoff, and try to swing a big traffic dick in my direction, and you may be right, but let me finish, mmkay?

Next, there are no bike lanes anywhere. It’s one of the most bike-unfriendly places I’ve ever been. Hell, I’d even settle for a shoulder, but on many streets, you don’t even get that. One thing that cities in the west don’t lack for is space to build. Why didn’t they just make the streets a bit wider and add a bike lane?

The amount of sprawl is ridiculous. We estimated a different strip mall with a box store about every linear mile. National chain upon national chain was heaped on top of each other. This leads to my point that people put up with subpar living conditions in cities (like traffic, higher cost of living, etc.) for the benefit of having greater access to culture.

Culture is something that Colorado Springs does not have. Not unless you consider “commericalized America” to be a culture. We asked the hotel concierge for restaurant recommendations. Our only requirement was “something local and not a chain”. The response was, after about 30 seconds of silence and furrowed brow, “um… there aren’t any”.

I guess that’s what you get when the town is dominated by white, evangelical Christians, whose idea of a kickin’ time is to eat at TGI Friday’s and then go home at 9 pm to go to bed because everything else is closed anyway.

Speaking of which, we went to the Focus on the Family visitor’s center. The number of people there was frightening. I just hope that they are not a proportional representation of a slice of the American population, but rather, that they all actually live in the Springs, so that when the Revolution comes, we only need to lob one nuke and save ourselves a lot of time manually weeding them out of the rest of society.

In fairness, things were a bit better downtown, but what I’m bitching about above still is within the city limits. And nearby Manitou Springs is such a weird little enclave that it helps to cancel out some of the boring conformity, but not nearly enough.

Oh, one more thing. With the exception of a few (but not all) people in the service industry, just about everyone we met was a complete dick. Colorado Springs sucks.

• More Colorado Springs pictures

Islamist terrorists will continue to plague our planet until the year 2372. How do I know this? Simple math.

Islam dates from the Hijra, or migration from Mecca to Medina. Year 1, AH (Anno Hegira) corresponds to AD 622 [source: wikipedia]. In other words, it started 622 years after the start of Christianity. Alternatively, you can think of the development of Islam as 622 years behind the development of Christianity.

People like to point out that Christians used to be pretty violent too. The canonical example would be the Crusades of the 11th through 13th centuries. After that was over, some other stuff happened, and by the 18th century, we had the Age of Enlightenment, where according to Wikipedia

religion was seen as antithetical to reason. Because the Middle Ages was an “Age of Faith” when religion reigned, it was seen as a period contrary to reason, and thus contrary to the Enlightenment.

So basically, it took between 1701 and 1800 years for Christians to become “enlightened”. Let’s split the difference and call it 1750. (The precise mathematical term for this is called “finding the average”.)

Now we can apply basic mathematic principles and see that 622 (the start of Islam) + 1750 (the length of time to become enlightened) = 2372 (the year that we’ll finally have peace on Earth).

So there’s my prediction. And to prove it, my other prediction is that Google will still be around and my blog will be archived so that future generations can see how prescient I was. Or maybe I’ll just be like Ray Kurzweil and take 180 pills and vitamins per day and get my brain implanted into a robot and live forever.

I bet you’d like 366 more years of my blogging.

Permit me a bit of spam on my own blog.

Jenny Windler has just started up a blog where she makes a new piece of jewelry every day and posts it online. Her pieces are for sale as well, so help out a starving artist by checking out her blog and buying something (for yourself or your girlfriend or your wife or maybe the girlfriend that your wife doesn’t know about). If you have your own website, maybe give her some google juice by linking to her blog. Thanks!

Your efforts will result in good karma, great fashion, and Jenny not having to eat dirt and ramen to survive.

On Saturday, I “competed” in the 3rd Annual People’s Triathlon.

Organized by my buddy Mitch, it’s a more or less ad hoc event between friends, designed to raise a little money for charity and hang out with your buddies. The plan was to arrive at Duncan’s Ridge (a local bouldering spot) to drop off our bikes. We would then all pile into a pickup truck and get driven to Horsetooth Reservoir, where we would swim about 1/2 mile, run the 3.5 miles back to our bikes, and then bike 25 miles to the finish.

Let me say that I am a sucky swimmer and I really hate running. So my goal was to not get left in the dust by everyone and hope to make up some time on the bike.

Surprisingly, the reservoir wasn’t all that cold at 8:30 in the AM. Wearing my fluorescent green Old Navy $5 swim trunks, I gingerly tottered into the water and awaited the start signal from Mitch. Everyone launched into the water, and I vainly tried to swim a few strokes, but my hips kept on sinking. As an added annoyance, I couldn’t open my eyes underwater due to wearing contact lenses and no goggles. As I said, I’m a really sucky swimmer. So I ended up hugging the big orange buoy and basically used it to keep me afloat while I floated on my back and kicked lazily. I think I got lapped by the fastest swimmers twice, and the slowest swimmers only once. Weirdly, once everyone else finished swimming, they waited 5 minutes for me towelling off and hanging out while I pathetically splashed around. Maybe they thought I was gonna die or something, who knows. But that should give you a flavor of the level of “competition” in our race, i.e., not very.

As I dragged myself ashore, people gave me a nice congrats for not drowning and giving everyone a bad name, and then they took off running. I was able to put my shoes on pretty quickly, and began my second most hated event, running. I ended up catching maybe 2 or 3 of the slower girls on the run, but it was pretty painful. Also, I discovered that fluorescent green Old Navy $5 swim trunks are not the best to run in. Major chafage.

Again, staggering into the bike area, people were pulling out as I was arriving. I changed as quickly as I could, and slammed down a Mt. Dew AMP energy drink, which was probably a good idea, but left me burping nuclear fizz for the next 3 miles. At this point, I’d thought that maybe 15 people were in front of me, and they had at least a 3 — 5 minute gap. It was going to be tough to make all that time up, especially considering the bike course was so flat, by Colorado standards, anyhow.

The course went north over Dixon Dam, through Bellvue, up the road to Rist Canyon for a bit, then east to the Laporte cement plant, buzzing the Budweiser brewery, and finally ending at the Country Club. I caught one person and then another, and another while on the dams. Not bad. By the descent into Bellvue, I can see my buddies Benny and Fenway up ahead. I zoom past them on the descent and am in front for a while, but once we start the next little rise up into Rist, first Fenway catches and passes me, and then Benny latches on.

I attempt to eat a Balance bar, but it’s like chewing concrete, so I shove it back into my pocket. Nasty. Once we hit the gravel road to cut over to 287, I drop Benny like a bad habit and I’ve got Fenway in my sights. When I make the catch, I can see two riders up in the distance — Kuzma and Mitch. Although it’s probably futile to catch them, I try anyway, with little twinges of cramps tickling my calves the whole time. As it is, I’m about a constant 400 yards, plus or minus 100 yards from them the rest of the ride.

At this point, I think I’m probably middle of the field or so, since I don’t see anyone else. As I make the final right hand turn and pull into the Country Club, I see Kuzma and Mitch standing there, but no one else. I’m wondering what’s going on, and I figure that Mitch is rearranging one of the balloons that signal which way to turn (red means right, black means left), but as I pull up, they say, “Congrats!”

“Where is everyone?” I wonder, and they inform me that everyone else is in back of me. Hm, weird and interesting, but cool. Apparently, Touchdown Brown, the clear front runner in the race, made a wrong turn somewhere, which sucked for him, but no big deal since it was just a friendly day anyhow. (Still, I got to the finish line before he did, so there ;)

So depending on how you look at it, I either came in 2nd place (since Kuzma didn’t do the running portion, while Mitch did all 3 sections), 3rd place (since Brown clearly would have won had he not made a wrong turn), or 4th place (if you count a virtual win from Brown and the fact that Kuzma and Mitch were there before I was). But whatever, it was fun.

The rest of the field trickled in over the next half hour or so, and the day was concluded by riding to Coopersmith’s and consuming many calories in beer and pizza. Awesome.

Metromint is spearmint flavored water that tastes like someone left a piece of used up chewing gum in a bottle of water for a day or so and then sold it to you for consumption, kinda like what they do with tequila and worms, although thankfully they didn’t leave the gum in there.

Strangely enough, the drink kinda grows on you, and by the time you’re done drinking, it almost feels like you just brushed your teeth.

So my buddy Toots had his bachelor party this weekend. The plan was to chill with a bunch of buddies in the mountains before getting hitched forever. Mikey reserved a few campsites for us just a touch west of Cameron Pass, and I thought it would be fun to take a self-supported bike touring ride up there.

I should have known better, given the following two facts:

• James Perry, one of the strongest bikers I know, mentioned he did it once and said it was really hard
• when I sent out mail detailing my plan via email and asking if anyone else wanted to join me, the response was deafening radio silence

Oh well.

I would have preferred to ride my road bike, but I don’t have a rack for it, so I loaded up my commuter cum touring bike. I tried to keep it relatively light, bringing a sleeping bag and liner, ground cloth, Thermarest, bivy sack, and a few clothes. Maybe the camp pillow was a bit excessive, but it only added about a half pound. What killed me was the water — I had a 100 oz Camelback along with another 16 oz water bottle. All in all, the bike plus gear came to about 50 lbs. So heavy!

I got out of the house at about 8:45am on Saturday, and turned north to head up into the Poudre Canyon. I must admit that I was surprised at how much I was affected by pedalling my pig of a bike, but it was very frustrating to be on a road that isn’t that steep, but to only be doing about 12 mph.

After an hour, I was feeling pretty awful, and I realized it was because I was wearing the Camelback, which was causing me some serious lower back pain. My first attempt at strapping it to my bike rack ended up with my Thermarest and Camelback getting sucked inbetween my wheel and rack after about 100 yards, causing my wheel to lock up and me to veer into the road. Not cool, but luckily, there were no other cars there. I was cursing myself for only bringing one bungee cord, but I jerry-rigged an acceptable solution. Providence prevailed though, as after about another mile or so of riding, I found a brand new bungee cord on the shoulder which I snagged and incorporated into my system. Score!

I took my first food break at 2 hours into the ride, my second break at 3 hours, and then starting from the 4th hour on, I had to stop every 30 minutes due to exhaustion. Again, I was amazed at how much more power it took to move a heavy bike. I definitely had a few bad moments, such as needing to lie down in the shoulder of the road to recuperate a few times, and when my iPod batteries died, that truly sucked. It was a nice surprise to reach the top of Cameron Pass (10,276 ft.) about 5 miles sooner than I’d expected though.

The Crags campground was a mere 3 miles on the other side of the pass, and soon, I was at the campsite, where Monty made me a fine post-ride meal of rice and salmon. I probably owe him my life for that one… Total riding time up was 6 hours, 37 minutes; 67 miles; 10.1 mph moving average.

I initially didn’t want to do the ride back on Sunday, but Mike Brown convinced me that I should, and so I loaded up the Pig with all my gear again, and we headed home. The three miles to get back up to the pass were slow, but once we popped over, the first 10 miles were gravy, as it was all coasting.

Soon enough, it got miserable though, since Poudre Canyon is not entirely downhill all the way, with lots of false flats and even a few middling climbs that you don’t notice on the way up, but certainly do on the way down when you’re fatigued and sore. Add in a mind-numbing 20 mph headwind, and those are the ingredients for a miserable time. Luckily, Mike had some pity on me, and I was able to suck his wheel pretty much the entire way down. Thank the gods he was there, or it would have been ugly. As it was, I cracked a few miles before reaching my house, with no power left in my legs, but we did finally end up making it home. The return trip was 4 hours, 6 minutes; 68 miles; 16.4 mph moving average. A little better, but not much.

Conclusion: the first day of bike touring is going to be hard no matter what. Making your first day 54 straight miles of uphill is stupid.

• to see more pics
• overview map and elevation profile

ps, the party itself was good, but you don’t blog the details of a bachelor party.