Brian Creasy

Race Report: Pace Bend 2017 - Revenge

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 22:05:00 -0600

Two years ago, I entered into my first road race at Pace Bend and ended up getting a flat on lap 3 of 4. I skipped it last year, but this year, I got my revenge on it.

Just as a refresher, Pace Bend is a Texas state park that has a 6.2 mile road running around its edge. It is a very well-maintained surface that is mostly rolling hills with one short 8% punching climb on the back side and a 0.3 mile 4% grade uphill finish – a nice and varied course. The category 4 race I was in this year was 7 laps for 44 miles.

This year, I hadn’t been riding all that much, mostly because of poor weather conditions and the usual general darkness of winter days. I don’t feel like I’ve really lost much fitness since the end of the Driveway series last year, and I haven’t gained much if any weight over the winter. I raced in the first annual Oatmeal Road Race in January and did relatively well for having not been riding much.

Leading up to Pace Bend this year, I just felt sluggish and almost didn’t even go. I’m really glad that I did, though.

The Race

This year, it was only myself and Jason representing our team in the category 4 race. We met up before the start and went to staging. Jim, LJ, and Andy were all there to cheer us on and I saw them on the sideline cheering every single lap.

I ended up feeling a lot better than I expected once we started rolling.

The first lap was very interesting, with many attempts at establishing a breakaway. Jason and I started out toward the front, so we kept trying to follow any of those attempts. None of them stuck that lap, though.

On the second lap, I decided to have some fun on the front for the second half. It’s pretty amazing being in the very front of a race with 75 people behind you. I hung out near the front for most of the second half of that lap, and I did the same thing on the third lap. Very fun, but also pretty dumb. Jason had some fun on the front on one of the laps, too.

After having our fun on the front, we both sat in the rest of the race. With the exception of two crashes - one on the third lap, and one on the final - it felt pretty safe.

For mid-race nutrition, I brought a pre-opened Clif bar and a squeeze bottle of Hammer gel. I probably should have eaten more gel than I did during the race. In the morning, I ate a bowl of muesli with almond milk and chia seeds at home, and two bananas spaced out over a few hours.

The final lap, per usual, saw an increased pace. On the previous lap or two, a 3-man breakaway had established, and we had to catch them. We ended up catching two of them, but Freedom stayed away and won.

Second and third place were two of his team mates from Violet Crown. They’re really killing it this year so far in races.

On the final rise and sprint finish, I couldn’t hang on and ended up fading back to finish in 47th place.

Overall, I’m very happy with how I finished, considering I almost didn’t start. I felt great and most importantly, I finished and didn’t get a flat like last time.

Strava Log of the Race

Tommy Ketterhagen

Sun, 29 Jan 2017 20:53:00 -0600

Today, I rode bikes with 550+ fellow cyclists and friends, all of whom were affected by and brought together by the loss of a single young man last week. Not all of them knew Tommy personally, but each and every one of them understands how important it is to stand by each other. We all want to bring awareness to motorists that our lives are fragile and have value - not just to ourselves, but to every person we touch in life. We’re all affected by the senseless and 100% preventable loss of life such as this incident.

This is not the first time this has happened, and unfortunately it likely won’t be the last.

I believe cyclists have a unique perspective on the road. Among other things, we have a deep appreciation of how fragile humans are.

One thing I want is for non-cyclists to be forced to experience what it feels like to be passed by a 2,000+ pound car traveling at 2-3 times their speed within 3 feet, or occasionally even 1 foot, of their flesh and bones. Maybe then perspectives will change and motorists will be considerate and pay attention while driving.

Yes, this happens often. Even on roads with bike lanes. Even in Austin.

As a motorist, your highest priority while operating your vehicle is to not injure or kill anyone outside of your vehicle. The moment you received your license to operate, you agreed to this.

Here are two easy things you can do to keep us safe while driving your car:

Slow down. While you may feel safe in your wheeled-sofa cruising along at 10mph over the speed limit, you’re putting the safety and lives of those outside of your vehicle in jeopardy. Just slow down. Your destination will still be there if you arrive 1 minute late. I promise.
Put down your phone. This one is pretty easy. Just don’t use your phone while you’re in your car. The average travel time for someone in Austin to get to their destination is about 15 minutes. The person on the other end can wait. If it’s an emergency, pull over to the side of the road to take care of it.

The next time you see a cyclist on the road, remember that we just want to live and enjoy our lives - just like you.

An Apple Phone?

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 15:00:00 -0500

Back in 2013, I wrote about my decision to switch to an Android phone. I started out using the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. When I switched my phone provider to Ting, I needed to get a phone that could work on Ting/T-Mobile’s GSM frequencies. Giving up on the idea of a modular battery, I ended up getting a Motorola Moto G. On the Moto G, I continued to use Cyanogenmod without all of the Google apps. I still kept my phone usage to a minimum, preferring to keep it dark, silent, and in my pocket most of the time. My Android phone combined with my low usage resulted in a consistent monthly phone bill of $26. But I’d started to consider switching back to an Apple iPhone.

Apple v. FBI

Early in 2016, Apple became wrapped up in a legal case with the U.S. Government’s FBI when they were approached by the FBI to help them break into their phone to retrieve personal information of a terrorist suspect. Apple’s response was very interesting (paraphrasing): “We literally can’t with the version of iOS on that phone.” And when asked if they could write a back door patch for the government to use, they said “No.” Simply put, Apple’s encryption is strong enough that the government couldn’t break in, and Apple refused as a company to give them the keys to the kingdom.

As a result of Apple’s public position on encryption and privacy (two things I am very in tune with), I came to like them much more than I already did. While it’s definitely possible for me to enable strong encryption on my Android devices, it’s ultimately up to me to secure it - and I’m not a security professional, nor do I have a ton of spare time to do the research and maintenance needed to keep up to date with the latest software. It was at that time that the thought of switching back to an Apple phone started poking me in the brain. The problem was, none of the latest phones that had the strongest encryption fit my size criteria.

Along Comes A Smaller iPhone

Maybe Apple does listen to potential customers like me, because only months later, they announced that they were releasing a new iPhone model that has the same physical dimensions as their iPhone 5. Those dimensions are the standard I hold to any phone I consider using because I think it’s a perfect size.

So when Apple released their iPhone SE that has the same strong encryption and privacy features as the iPhone 6s, I really started to struggle with the decision to switch back to an Apple phone.

Moto G Fading

My Moto G phone had been suddenly shutting down on bike rides, and suddenly rebooting while sitting on my desk. Sometimes, it would get to the first stage boot loader and complain about a corrupt boot partition. I could usually get it to get past that, but it took some time. On one occasion, I left it unplugged overnight with a battery charge of about 60% and woke up to find the battery completely drained to the point where it couldn’t even start charging. I needed to press and hold a series of buttons on the device just to get it to start charging. Apparently this is a known issue on this phone and, based on the amount of internet questions about it, relatively common. Hugely inconvenient.

Then this past week the battery issue happened again overnight, and this time it wouldn’t start charging even after doing the button-pressing dance. I took it with me to work and tried to get it to boot or even start charging. Eventually, I took it apart and re-seated the internal battery connector and then did the button-pressing dance to find it finally able to start charging and eventually boot. That was at 2pm.

It took me 7 hours of waiting and trying periodically to just get the phone to a point where I could potentially use it, and another 3 hours for it to fully charge. This all happened 4 days before I was leaving for 10-days worth of travel, so this put me in a time crunch to find a solution.

I had to quickly choose between three options:

I could continue to use the Moto G and risk it completely dying while traveling. If that happened, I would have to buy a phone while traveling which would be inconvenient to say the least.
I could buy a new Android phone at Frys.
I could buy a new iPhone SE phone at the Apple Store.

I ruled out the first option almost immediately because I didn’t want the extra stress while traveling. That left the decision of either a new Android or a new iPhone.

Considerations

Setup Time and Security

With any Android phone, I won’t use the stock ROM that comes with it. They come with too much garbage pre-installed. If I got an Android, I’d want to continue using Cyanogenmod with software firewalls and privacy settings. On the Moto G, that process took me a full weekend to make sure everything was set up the way I wanted. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have time to do that before I left for my trip. Additionally, I wouldn’t have time to research the current best practices for securing an Android phone. I’d admittedly fell behind on software updates on the Moto G.

If I got an iPhone, I could be up and running in a few hours with all of the software I needed to travel and stay connected with people. It’d have the default strong encryption as well.

An iPhone wins out in this area.

Cost

It’s no secret among friends and family that I’ve been focusing on radically reducing my expenses in many ways, aiming for and achieving a 65% savings rate. Even spending $200 on a phone I feel is too much, considering how little I use it. So the thought of spending $500 on an iPhone legitimately makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.

It’s the frugal move to choose an Android phone. But the time spent setting up an Android phone to my liking represented in my hourly rate makes up for the difference in the cost of an iPhone. Time is money, I suppose. An Apple phone has a much higher resell price, too.

An Apple Phone

So at lunch on the Tuesday two days before my trip, I went to the Apple Store and bought a silver iPhone SE, with 16gb of memory, plus Apple Care.

I got a silver one because it doesn’t show superficial damage (scratches, etc) as much as a black one. This increases resell value.

With the Apple Care, I’ll have full hardware support for two years. My plan is to keep it for two years and then resell it. In that time, it hopefully will not become too obsolete.

In iOS, I locked down most of the privacy settings and keep cellular data turned off for most apps to keep my data usage down (with Ting, I pay for what I use).

The phone is fully encrypted, and I decided to use the fingerprint biometric authentication. A feature of the fingerprint authentication is that it stops allowing that method if you don’t use it in a 48 hour window.

Soon, even iCloud backups will be fully user-encrypted so that Apple can’t be compelled to give that data to officials.

All in all I’m happy with my decision to switch back to an iPhone, even though the cost took a chunk out of my savings rate for July.

Dry Hands

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 18:30:00 -0500

Last week, I came to the realization that I don’t need to use disposable paper towels to dry my hands.

No one does.

For a while now, after seeing this TED Talk, I’d been using only one small sheet of paper towel to dry my hands in public restrooms. But here’s the thing: I don’t even need to use a single sheet to dry my hands after I wash them. I wash them with soap and water. I shake them to get a lot of the clean water off. Then, instead of tearing off a paper towel that will immediately be thrown in the trash, I simply dry my hands on my shirt or pant legs. The small amount of clean water on my clothing will dry in a minute or two and no unnecessary waste has been created.

This is just one more small step toward reducing my ecological footprint on this world.

Please join me in making this tiny change with a significant impact.

Race Report: 2016 Megan Baab Memorial Road Race

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 23:50:00 -0500

The first road race of the year down here is the Megan Baab Memorial Road Race in Copperas Cove, Texas in the middle of January. This year, it was held on January 16th. It’s a 52-mile course that’s in the shape of a big lollipop with mostly rolling terrain. In my first time participating in this event, I raced in the 4/5 race and finished 18th place in a field of 70.

Last year, in 2015, I participated in my first road race at Pace Bend. That ended up being my only road race last year, so I wanted to do more of them this year. The annual race in Copperas Cove seemed like a good starting point. I had the option of doing either the 3/4 race or the 4/5, but I chose the 4/5 because a handful of guys I race with at The Driveway had signed up for that one - I wanted to make sure I had people I was comfortable being around. Since I’d never been to Copperas Cove, the plan was to drive up the Sunday before the race and ride the course for some recon. Unfortunately, that Sunday was cold and windy, so I decided to just sleep in and ride locally later in the day. I did make sure to get some tips from friends who have done the race in the past, however.

Pre-Race

On the morning of the race, I packed up and left home around 6:30am to make sure I got to the race with enough time to pick up my race packet and pin up my jersey without rushing around. My race start time was at 9:25am and the drive took about an hour and fifteen minutes, so this left me with plenty of time to relax and warm up before lining up to roll out. After getting everything together, I started to roll around to warm up and eventually met up with Bryce, Andy, and Brandon, three of my friends who I’d be racing with.

Wheels Down

The start of the race was fairly slow, and it honestly didn’t pick up much at all throughout the entire race; It was mostly a conversational pace for the first three-quarters of the race. I just sat in, chatted with people, and occasionally the pace would temporarily be pushed a little bit. There’s a turn onto Harmon Road around mile 27 that everyone warned me about where “the field will inevitably split and a breakaway will happen”. That didn’t happen. No one attacked at all for that entire stretch of road.

Finally, Some Action

The first round of attacks came around mile 39 after turning off of Harmon Road and onto FM-580 where there’s a relatively significant 1.2-mile climb. That was hard, but I kept up with the front of the group. After that climb, there’s a downhill into a short punchy climb which I still managed to get through.

Shortly after finishing the lollipop section of the course, the guy right in front of me managed to overlap the wheel of the guy in front of him and ended up crashing. I saw it coming and was able to quickly maneuver past it, but I had to burn an extra match to catch back up to the front group. There were two more climbs after that going into the finish, and I legitimately got dropped from the front of the pack on the first one. I watched as the front of the pack was pedaling away from me. I was pretty sure that was going to be the end of my race, but as I crested the first climb, two other guys came around me and I latched onto them on the downhill. I stuck to their wheels and suddenly I was back with the front group! Then, on the second climb, the same thing happened: dropped, and then brought back to the pack by the same guy. I never did find him after the race to thank him.

The Finish

After those two climbs, I recovered pretty well, but focused on just sticking on the wheel in front of me. I lost track of the terrain and had no idea when the finish was coming up, but the pace was really starting to pick up and I started to see the cones in the road. One of the lead cars had pulled off the side of the road, but not all the way and that almost caused a big crash as racers panicked. Suddenly, I noticed we crossed a white line on the road and people around me sat up…

Apparently, the race was over. I had no idea that was the final sprint! I feel like I could have put a little bit more effort in at the end to finish a little higher up, but oh well. I finished in 18th place in the first road race of the year! I’ll definitely have a better idea of what to expect when I do this race again next year. One thing I need to make sure to do is eat more during the race. During the 2.5 hour road race, I only ate one bar and a little bit of gel. I think if I ate more, I would not have been dropped on the last two climbs and would have had more for a sprint finish.

At least I didn’t get a flat tire during this road race!

Strava Log of the Race

Permalinks

Sun, 21 Feb 2016 01:30:00 -0600

After much internal hemming and hawing today, I decided to update the URL structure of the log posts on this site: URLs no longer include the publish date.

It’s my hope that this will look cleaner, and that it will encourage me to write with mindful attention to the name in the URL. Having the publish date in the URL was also redundant, as all log posts display the publish date below their respective titles. Matt Gemmell offers some more good reasons why this format is superior.

For the time being, a 302 redirect is in place for links using the old URL format. After some time, I’ll switch to use a 301 redirect.

My apologies for the RSS clutter — this will hopefully be the last time that happens for a while.

My Cycling Story

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 22:00:00 -0600

Note: I had originally written this back in early 2014, but it was never published.

On May 24, 2008, I bought my first road bike at the age of 26, a brand new white Specialized Allez with triple chainrings. For over ten years leading up to that point, I had not ridden a bike at all.

Bicycles had always been part of my childhood growing up as a kid in the ’80s and ’90s: An obligatory toddler tricycle, a kid-sized bike with and without training wheels, a big kid single-speed bike, and two mountain bikes. They weren’t always the best quality bikes, but I rode them like hell with the other kids around my neighborhood. I used them as transportation across my neighborhood and for fun playing bike tag, doing tricks and going off sweet jumps. I went through all of those bikes before around 1996 when I got my driver’s license and I had little use for a bike. For most of that childhood, however, even though a bike of some sort was part of it and I wasn’t completely inactive, I was always one of the overweight kids mostly because I ate too much. So when I stopped riding a bike in high school and started getting really into computers, I didn’t get any focused cardio exercise. Being in marching band through all of high school and college helped me get a little bit of exercise, but still I led a mostly sedentary lifestyle. After college, I continued living a sedentary, computer-centric lifestyle: wake up, drive to work, sit at a computer for 9 hours, drive home, sit at a computer for 6 hours, go to sleep, repeat. This continued for four years or so after college until two friends, Michael Ahlers and Brian Seklecki, started talking to me about the bikes they ride. Michael had even been racing his! I’m not really sure what part of it appealed to me, but I decided that I wanted to start riding a bike again. At first, I was torn between whether to get a road bike or a mountain bike, and briefly considered getting a cyclocross bike. The last bike I had ridden was a mountain bike and I had never ridden a real road bike before. But Michael convinced me to get a road bike and “don’t get a triple!” I ignored his chainring advice, but it was probably for the best since I was in horrible physical shape and made much use of the triple gearing.

It was 2008 and I owned my first real road bike in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Admittedly, I didn’t ride it much the first two years I owned it. I lived about a mile from work and was able to ride it there, but, because the weather isn’t so nice up there, I didn’t. So two years of infrequent riding passed, while the bike just sat there in my apartment collecting dust for half a year at a time. In autumn of 2009, I started going to a gym to try to get in a shape other than round. At a height of 5-foot-7, I then weighed in at 215-219 pounds. Twice a week most weeks, I would use the elliptical machine for cardio and do relatively light resistance training. It was a nice gym, albeit pretty damn boring, but it was at least something during the cold and dreary winter months. Spring of 2010 came around and I started taking my bike out for longer bike rides. I was still riding in street clothes with platform pedals and distances were usually less than 10 miles. But I enjoyed it. A lot.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2010, I rode a couple of times a week. Always by myself. Always the same route of riding to downtown from my apartment on the east side of the city, through the park, and back; There weren’t many options of safe places to ride in Pittsburgh. In October of 2010, I finally got my weight below 200 pounds for the first time in what I estimate was ten years thanks to a combination of periodic cycling and going to the gym. I bought a set of rollers that winter so I could continue riding when it was cold outside, and I sometimes did.

2011 was the year I planned to really focus on cycling. I was still living in Pittsburgh and I wanted to be strong enough to try racing. I even made it a point to symbolically ride on my rollers on new years eve as the clocks changed to 2011. I got a dose of life perspective that February when Mark Freese, a friend of mine, suffered heart failure and died, which helped motivate me even further in becoming healthy. In March, when it started getting warmer, I finally bought real cycling clothes and upgraded to clipless pedals.

Minor Setback

A minor setback happened in mid-April, though: I managed to tear the medial meniscus on my right knee. While it wasn’t a major injury, and didn’t prevent me from cycling for the most part, it required surgery to repair. The tear wasn’t actually diagnosed until late May and I postponed surgery until after I did the MS 150 ride in June with Michael Ahlers, the friend of mine who got me started with cycling. But after the surgery, I had 2 months off from riding or any exercise at all.

On August 11th, I went for my first ride after surgery. Since the MS 150, I’ve been logging every single time I ride a bike. That September, I went to Annapolis to do a metric century ride, again with Michael. I rode a dozen or so times that August and September, all very easy rides to make sure I didn’t re-injure my knee. That September, I got a job offer that brought me down to Austin in November of 2011.

Austin, Texas

After moving to Austin, an entirely new dimension of cycling was made available to me. Finally, I could ride all year round and have a variety of safe and challenging places to ride. One of the first things I did when I moved down here was visit Nelo’s Cycles, the local bike shop just down the street from my apartment. I introduced myself there, made friends with the people who work there and eventually started doing their shop rides when they started up in the spring. Until that point, I had always ridden solo. So the group rides gave me the opportunity to meet new people and a better reason to challenge myself.

In the beginning of 2012, at 30 years old, I hit my highest weight ever: 220. But when March came around, I was riding consistently both solo and with a group, at the very least 3 times a week. At the same time, I was doing resistance training and eating a generally healthy diet. Overall, living a healthy and active lifestyle. Gradually, just by loving cycling, the weight just kept going down and I kept getting faster.

Through Nelo’s shop ride, I met Todd Musick and he eventually introduced me to Bicycle Sport Shop where he worked. I upgraded my old Allez triple to a new Specialized Roubaix Expert from Bicycle Sport Shop in August of 2012. While my old bike may have gotten me started with riding again, as soon as I test rode the Roubaix, I realized that my potential had been held back by Allez.

Getting Dropped Will Happen

When I started out riding with the Nelo’s shop ride group in the beginning of 2012, they dropped me almost immediately and I wouldn’t see them until the next regrouping point. But I kept showing up to every single ride and eventually I was strong enough to hold on the whole ride. Starting in 2013, I began riding at least 100 miles a week with multiple shop rides and occasional solo rides. I even bought a cheap, used single-speed commuter bike that year so I could ride to work and park in public places without worrying about it being stolen. In 2013, I rode 4000 miles total. Probably more than the rest of my life combined. Even now with being able to hold on to the groups I ride with, I like to take on the strongest riders in the pack on climbs and sprint sections and often lose. This makes me work harder and strive to be even better.

I’m currently (as of January 2014) at what I feel is my optimal weight of 155 pounds. I still have plenty of muscle to gain and flab to lose, though. Simply through eating a healthy diet, light resistance training and consistent challenging riding, I lost 65 pounds in a year and a half. At the same time, I’ve made friends in a culture that embraces cycling and fitness as a core lifestyle activity.

No Regrets

I do not regret spending those 10+ years of my life without a bike, but I sometimes wonder what my life would be like today if I had never stopped in high school. 2013 was a good year for me and cycling. I’m 32 years old now and in the best physical shape of my life. I think I’ll do it again in 2014, only better.

(2016 Addendum: I did do it again, better, and I’ll continue until I can’t.)

Site Redesign

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 14:30:00 -0600

I spent nearly all of my time this past weekend working on switching this site to a new and updated framework: just plain old Jekyll.

(Apologies for any RSS migration issues. I’m 301 redirecting the old atom.xml to the current feed.xml.)

Since 2013, when I brought this site to life, I’d been using Octopress as its static content generator. Octopress started out as a fork of Jekyll that was highly customized, but over the years, it’s seen less and less development. I was in the mood for redesigning my website, but the amount of work that I would have needed to put into working with the old version of Octopress just wasn’t worth it. So I decided to just start fresh with plain old Jekyll and no third party stuff.

A nice thing about Jekyll is that it’s pretty minimal as far as features go. Like Octopress, Jekyll uses Liquid as its templating engine. Because it’s stripped down, I had to do a lot of customization to get things to behave how I wanted them to.

Some of the features of Octopress I wanted to bring over were:

Post archive page
Browsing of categories and tags
Pagination with excerpts

Because Jekyll’s documentation is also fairly minimal, I had to dig through all manner of discussion threads and github source code of other peoples’ sites to find solutions or examples.

I eventually got things functioning how I wanted, though. You can see my commit history leading up to where I felt it was ready for production here.

During this project, I had to refresh my memory on writing SASS and bring myself up to speed with modern web standards. Not to mention having to dig deep into how Liquid templates are developed.

The site itself is still statically generated and contains zero javascript. This ensures a fast page load times with the added benefit of being very secure. I simply clone my repository, commit/push whatever work is needed, then run jekyll build. This generates everything to a _site directory which I can then just rsync up to my server. I like this workflow.

Now that I’m on an up-to-date framework, I’ll likely start playing around more with redesigning the site often. I may actually write more content. I have a long list of post ideas written down.

Some TODO items:

Find somewhere to put the little “about” blurb on the main page
Maybe include Twitter and Strava feeds again

Race Report: Driveway Series Week 28, 3/4

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 12:30:00 -0500

I finished 19th in a cat 3/4 race! (Sept 17th)

Amateur bike racing is split up into categories (cat) based on experience and skill. I was able to upgrade from the entry category of 5 to cat 4 earlier this year because I had done 10 races as a cat 5. That’s really the only requirement for moving up to cat 4. So even though it’s a higher category, the ability of cat 4 racers varies wildly. However, the racers are generally more safe to be around than the cat 5s. What makes cat 4 interesting at the Driveway Series races is that they combine the categories. So you have a race for 4/5, a race for 3/4, and a race for pro/1/2/3 (among other age and gender combinations). Because of the way cat 4 is grouped, I currently have the choice of doing two races each week. As soon as I upgraded to cat 4, I began doing both races each week: 3/4 followed immediately by 4/5.

I ride to the track every week, leaving my place around 16:00 and arriving around 16:45 and 17:00. My first race, 3/4, starts promptly at 17:32 and lasts for about 40 minutes. I plan to arrive a half hour early just in case I get a flat on the way or have other issues to take care before hand. Immediately after the 3/4 race finishes, I have 5 minutes or so to swap in a new water bottle, suck down a gel, and get myself to the start line for the 4/5 race – just enough time for my heart rate to recover and my brain to reset and race again for another 30 minutes.

I spent the weekend prior to this week’s race in the mountains of Colorado on a bike vacation with Velo View Bike Tours. I’m pretty sure I partially have that to thank for my finish this week, since I probably still had an elevated level of red blood cells from being at altitude.

The course this week was the Championship Loop Counter-Clockwise. This course has become my favorite over time. It’s just the right combination of technical and fast. My heart rate for the whole race was a steady 165-175, spiking to the 180s on the final lap. My max is usually 182, so keeping an average of 173 is pretty rough, especially for 40 minutes straight. The more I race, the more I find myself staying toward the front of the pack. However, I’m finding that most races, it’s hard to stay up front because of a constant flow of traffic moving up on the outsides. Eventually, unless I manage to sneak in as people move up, I’ll end up moving back with others. The trick seems to be just to move up again after that happens.

This race was fairly uneventful, yet extremely fun. Steady pace throughout, with the last lap being full gas. I was able to save enough energy for that last lap so I could sprint at the finish. Usually, in the 3/4, I end up not being able to keep up in the second half of the last lap. But this week, since I’d been in the mountains, and being very confident in my ability on this course, I was able to punch it to keep up and stay up to finish 19th out of a field of 55 riders. What’s really cool is that when compared with the other cat 4 people in this race, I placed 3rd!

The crit season is rapidly drawing to a close, so I’ll soon start training and conditioning for next year. I’m hoping that next year I’ll be able to place in the 3/4 race more often and maybe even upgrade to cat 3. It’s all up to me and how much I want it.

Strava Log of the Race

Why I Hand-Write Business Cards

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 21:00:00 -0500

I give out hand-written business cards. I’m told that when people first look at them their first reaction is something along the lines of “That’s an interesting font”, followed by “Oh wow, this was written by hand. That’s weird and different.” Then eventually, “This is actually really cool.”

The first time I made my business cards was for attending Devopsdays Austin in 2014. Prior to the conference, it occurred to me that I should be prepared for a lot of networking with people in my industry. I’m not supplied business cards at my current full time job, so I would need to make some on my own to identify myself to others. This got me thinking about how I would present myself and make it easy for people to remember me. I tend to take a do-it-yourself approach to most things, so making my own business card is fitting. I could have easily used a boilerplate design and printed them out on high-quality cards. I would have designed them myself, so why not just go the extra step of creating them myself literally by hand?

Making the Cards

Because deciding to make business cards was a last minute decision, I didn’t have time to buy pre-cut blank business cards. Instead, I used some 3x5 index cards I had lying around. I used my trusty art knife to cut them down to standard business card size. Using an index card meant that the back side would have lines on it which would come in handy eventually.

The information I chose to put on the cards answers standard questions:

Who am I?
Where am I?
How can you contact me?

Additionally, I included my PGP public key ID as a unique touch, letting people know that I’m conscious of encryption and privacy. If they don’t know what it is, it offers an additional opportunity to talk about something I’m interested in.

On each card, to make sure the words are consistently lined up, I lightly pencil guide lines which I erase after finishing. I’ll then pick one section of the card to complete at a time, and finish it on each of the cards before moving on to the next section. This helps speed things up a little bit.

A Personal Touch

The most important part of my business card is that I carefully write and draw every part of each card, making each one unique. This year, I added something to the cards that I’ve never seen before, but something I thought would be useful and memorable. Whenever I meet someone at a conference or even talk to someone at any sort of length, I try (but often forget) to write down in my bullet journal who they are, where we met, and what we talked about. So, on the back side of my business cards this year, I included a semi-personal message to the recipient of the card.

In addition to adding a personal touch to the card, it provides them a convenient place, right alongside my information and where we met, to write down what we talked about. Assuming they hang onto business cards like I do, the information will follow the card for as long as they have it. I have a ton of business cards that I’ve received over the years whose owners I can’t remember aside from their name. But years down the road, holders of my card will know exactly who I am, where we met, and what we talked about.

I took it an extra step at this year’s Devopsdays, and offered my cards as this year’s “numbered limited edition” (I actually did number each one). This adds a little bit of a marketing feel to it and encourages me to be more outgoing.

Future Editions

I do plan on making a unique batch of my business cards for each conference I go to, and I want them to be part of who I am. I carry around a couple non-specific ones in my wallet, so feel free to ask for one the next time you see me!

The next edition will be for DEF CON 23, although I don’t expect to make or hand out quite as many as I did at Devopsdays.