Catching up on open topics

There are a couple of topics I left open when I stopped blogging last year, so I thought I'd wrap those up a bit.

Yes, I still do BSS with the kids, although not nearly as frequently. We did get to tour the 9News newsroom with Ward Lucas. Ward had done a story on Albeo (make sure you check out the video), and I was chatting with him between shots, telling him about BSS, among other things. He graciously offered up the tour. Last weekend, we also attended a robotics competition, which I'll post about soon.

I also completed my personal trifecta: the Elephant Rock Century, the Triple Bypass, and the Copper Triangle. I had made a public commitment to the Triple, but privately I committed to the whole package. For those of you not in the Colorado cycling community, these are all difficult events, from 80 to 120 miles, with several thousand feet of climbing, much of it over 10,000 feet.

The experience of doing three difficult events in a season had several positive benefits:

• I worked myself into my best cycling shape ever
• I achieved a couple of personal cycling milestones on the side: (i) sustaining more than 20 mph on a closed loop for an hour, and (ii) riding up the world's highest paved road to the peak of Mount Evans.
• I had an excuse to get ride of my ten-year-old, heavy road bike and get a new climbing machine

The downside of the whole trifecta thing was that it was a tremendous time commitment, particularly when I had little extra time (hence the lack of blog posts). If you're going to ride strong over mountains, then you have to spend practice time riding over mountains.

That commitment played a part in one decision I made, which I will publish here for future reference. I'm not going to do Triple Bypass again. That's just too big of an event for a recreational rider like me. The logistics are complicated, the weather risk is big, and the potential for stomach discomfort is high (you need to eat a lot of calories to fuel yourself for 8-10 hours of hard exercise, even though you don't feel like eating anything). I have proven twice now that I can do it, but I don't get enough from it to do it again.

I think that wraps up any open topics from my last posts. Of course, it's not like these are the only things that happened over the past year, so if I recall anything you might be interested in, I'll be sure to post about it.