5 Days of Sprinting Later ...

This week marks the beginning of my sprint training for Fall Fling coming up, ie, OUCH.

Monday's ride was Metropolis Coffee Shop and back as always, but Tuesday we did some more bike handling drills and intervals. Wednesday was supposedly our recovery ride. I rode up at a decent clip, but on the way back, I somehow wound up pulling into a headwind in front of the cat. 4 men with Bernard. I got into the drops because I was starting to hit the wall, but then Bernard did too(!) and the rest of the guys were like, Yea drops! and sped up ... I got dropped by the time we were going at about 25 mph. Thursday was the practice crit in Calumet Park. The first lap was fast. There's this guy who looks and acts almost exactly like Chad, but whose name is Jeff and confuses me who rode with us one lap, and he set a fast pace. Afterwards though, we worked on pack riding which was really cool because I'm finally learning positive team tactics, as opposed to being on the receiving end of negative team tactics. The counterclockwise rotational drafting was precise like clockwork by the end of the ride. And today was ostensibly the slow recovery ride, but I ended up sprinting 5 times. The first time, Katie sprints past me saying: "J orders to sprint," so I tailed her for the flat stretch directly north of Lakepoint Tower. She's definitely a faster sprinter than me, so as soon as she gains confidence on bike handling, I have a feeling she's going to be amazing. The other times, I just saw people going fast.

I learned a little more about the club yesterday when I went to pick up some knickers (at last!) as part of the team kit. I've been a part of eclectic bunches of people before, but this is just absurd. There's the professional hair stylist from France who travels and competes in hair styling, a retired businessman philanthropist who wears jeans and hoodies and tutors young kids in person rather than just give them gobs of money, biomedical pathology (?) phd student who's being recruited by eminent universities across the country, ecclesiastical scholars who knit in their free time, triathlete ranked 3rd in the nation for his age group, and ... then there's people like me (normal ...). I feel like I need to discover the cure for cancer or win the Pritzker Prize the fit in with these people, but at the same time, what's really unique about them as a whole is that they're incredibly low-key about how amazing they are. For example, I heard this all second hand from J rather than from them.

In other news, I'm puttering along with my Rhino renderings. The site is completely modeled, and the schematic massing and circulation diagram is just about done. I'm so glad I was able to get a hold of a copy of a really clear tutorial because the interface abbreviates a lot of things I feel like it shouldn't, such as IOR for Index of Refraction. Then again, I like that it uses very technically precise nomenclature and units rather than arbitrary numbers because it makes it more realistic. Its camera for example is based off of the settings of a manual camera: f-stop, shutter speed, film ISO, etc. which are pretty standard in real life.

During the week I also met up with some more old friends. I serendipitously ran into Shira Peltzman from UChicago Lab School, and it sounds like she's been keeping pretty busy too. She went from photography to cinema studies, worked for a non-profit in India, and she's off to London soon! Wow. And then Knute (a friend who lived in my dorm freshman year) and I walked around the Fulton St. Market Area in Chicago. I want to try going back there soon. I liked the feel of it. He and his girlfriend have been in Macomb, waiting for her to finish school, learning about ceramics, and participating in Americorps.

Keeping busy :)