Road trip!

September 1, 2011September 2, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Should've seen him yesterday. ... — I'm not dead yet. ...

Back in the day I had a dog, name of Jojo. Leave a door or a window ajar and Jojo would shoot through it like a bottle rocket, a decidedly unguided missile.

He would come home, eventually, looking like he had been shot at and missed, and shit at and hit. But he always seemed to have had a good time.

Jojo never learned much from me. But I clearly learned something from him, because every time a window opens … well, you get the idea.

My window opened yesterday, and I shot through it with the idea of cycling through Pueblo to Penrose, there to stay at a nearby hot springs overnight before returning to El Rancho del Perro Loco to ride herd on the cats, Herself having planned to toddle off to Texas with Buddy to visit family.

What the hell? It was only 80-some-odd miles, and who cares if I get the traditional late start, as in 10:30 a.m.?

Fountain trail — Riding the trail south from Bibleburg through Fountain beats the hell out of the alternatives — Interstate 25 or Highway 85/87.

Well, me, for starters, once I finally got to Pueblo three hours later after fighting a headwind all the way with a couple dozen pounds of this and that lashed to the rack of my Soma Double Cross. It was 98 degrees at Bingo Burger, the skies were looking decidedly ominous toward the west, and despite having packed and consumed three bottles I was so dry I was farting dust.

I slammed two IZZE Grapefruits with my burger and fries, reloaded my bottles with water and ice, took one more look westward — goddamnit, the wind is out of the west now! — and made a command decision: Fuck Penrose, I’m staying in the Hampton Inn & Suites, where there is air conditioning, a swimming pool and a liquor store within walking distance.

Plus I got Hilton points, which also scores points with Herself. This is important if one is not supposed to be staying in a motel in the first place.

This morning I got up bright and early, took advantage of the Hampton’s free breakfast, and snagged Herself via cell phone en route to Texas as I departed. We met, I took Buddy for a quick walk, Herself took herself for one too, and we agreed that we would not kill me until she came home.

Railroad bridge — An old railroad bridge paralleling Old Pueblo Road near the fabled Hanover Loop, a death march of a ride favored by the Mad Dogs back in the Nineties.

My ride north was a good deal easier, though longer. It helps if one starts before the sun is on full fry-the-fat-guy mode.

• Extra-credit bonus snark: The movie “Unstoppable” is one of the silliest flicks it has been my misfortune to stumble across with a remote control, a mild case of heatstroke and a six-pack of Odell’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale in an air-conditioned motel 30 miles from where I had intended to park myself for the evening. I actually have been hit by a train, and I would gladly endure that indignity again if only I could be driving a bus containing everyone responsible for this miserable piece of shit as we hit the crossing in front of old Triple-7 doing 70 per.

Down in Denver, down in Denver, all I did was die

August 28, 2011August 28, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Associate editors Turkish and Buddy provided valuable oversight during the Vuelta a España and the USA Pro Cycling Challenge.

The (Not the) Tour of Colorado® raced to its conclusion in the Mile High City today, and I couldn’t be happier. These occasional stretches with stage races across the water and right here at home make for some long stints in the old VeloBarrel, especially since management decided there were too many necks still wearing heads.

For example, today I arose at 7 a.m., grabbed a cup of joe and sat down at the iMac. The VeloNews.com site was missing a little something — what should have been the marquee photo from Saturday’s USA Pro Cycling Challenge stage was instead a blank white box — so after a bit of frustrating flailing about in the website tool I re-edited and reloaded the pic and harmony was restored.

Next came a bit of Intertubular surfing, intended to find out what the hell was going on at the Vuelta a España. I touched base via IM with Charles Pelkey over at LiveUpdateGuy and contributed a bit of pointless snark as he interpreted the stage for his audience; then, once the streaming video from stage nine kicked in, I started writing the day’s race report.

Andrew Hood, the mainstay of European coverage for Velo and VeloNews.com, is following the Vuelta around Spain, but if someone can throw up a rudimentary stager to keep the punters occupied and buy him some time, it frees him up to do other stuff — gather quotes, write sidebars, compile his Vuelta notebook, and whatnot.

The Vuelta stage finished, I posted my report, results, a Graham Watson photo gallery, and two sidebars from Hoody — one about the toll the race has taken on worlds hopefuls, the other his notebook — plus a writethru of the stage report augmented by his quotes and on-site observations.

Next up: results from the GP Ouest France. Easy. No reporter there, no Agence France Presse report in English, so just results. Fat city.

The pièce de résistance: the Colorado race, the one drawing all the eyeballs. Short and sweet, that one. I got video about the time the break and chase were coming off Lookout Mountain, so it was the same drill —compile data and and write a stager while onsite staff ran the live updates and gathered intelligence, wait for a writethru, post a Casey B. Gibson gallery and finally swap out the marquee photo.

And suddenly it was 3 p.m. Time to dash to the grog shop for a sixer and then cool my heels (and my tonsils) while awaiting the final torrent of bits and bytes from the Colorado contingent.

It doesn’t sound like much, and frankly it isn’t. But it does take a fair amount of time, a commodity which is always in short supply.

Tomorrow I plan to swap the office chair for a Flite saddle and take a nice, long ride to somewhere. Please don’t run alongside me wearing a penis costume and beating on a giant IUD with a rubber sperm. It’s been a long week.

It’s a dog’s life

August 26, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

I signed on for a couple extra shifts in the VeloBarrel during the Vuelta and (Not) The Tour of Colorado, and also have been chiming in mornings at Charles Pelkey’s newest venture, LiveUpdateGuy.com, so I’ve been scurrying about like a roach on a griddle the past couple of days.

Being a professional slacker who hasn’t had a full-time job since the fall of 1991 it always comes as a shock to my system whenever I actually have to work anything close to a full week. How the hell did I do it all those years? How the hell does anyone do it?

Every aspect of the literary and artistic life suffers as a consequence. Grocery trips become hectic affairs instead of leisurely noshing expeditions, and mealtime the equivalent of filling the tank at a Conoco. The quality and quantity of training declines. The liquor tab takes on Pentagonesque dimensions.

But at least no one has cut me, and I’m not wearing a cone. There’s an upside to everything.

Hot town, summer in the city

August 23, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

August is going out like a dragon that breathes fire from both ends. We just had two consecutive days of record-setting heat, as in 93 yesterday and 95 today, and may get the hat trick tomorrow, when the forecast is for 90-94.

Toss in a 5.3-magnitude earthquake near Trinidad that was felt as far north as Fort Collins and it’s already been quite a week, though it’s only Tuesday.

Tomorrow our new dog Buddy goes to the vet for the third time in a month — this time, he’s going under the knife for bladder stones — and Herself’s Wednesday I won’t even tell you about, other than to say that it starts at dark-thirty and ends at dark-thirty and involves work, study and more than a hundred miles of driving.

And Your Humble Narrator? I actually have a day free, so who knows? I might ride a bike or something, like those dudes contending (Not) The Tour of Colorado. Only slower. Much, much, slower.

Semi-prologue: a dog’s-eye view

August 22, 2011August 22, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Ridge Road, USAPCC — People too destitute to buy their own bike parts in this troubled economy wait at the corner of Ridge Road and Pikes Peak Avenue in hopes of being able to salvage some bike jewelry from a pro who overcooked the corner.

I spent midday rolling around the course for today’s prologue to the Vuelta de Vagary, otherwise known as (Not) The Tour of Colorado®, and found pretty much what I had expected: a bloodthirsty mob at the corner of Ridge Road and Pikes Peak Avenue; small clusters of fans elsewhere, mostly at the course’s few corners and at the finish; and … not much else.

I got to grade this thing, I give it a D.

The start made for good TV, as did the few shots of Ridge-Pikes Peak, but the finish was so-so, despite having Pikes Peak for a backdrop. The expo was tiny, though well-placed in a downtown parking lot, and with a packed valet bike-parking area. And I heard plenty of cheers but few complaints.

The long, straight shot down Colorado Avenue into a wind out of the east was the biggest turd in the punchbowl. I chatted up one cop east of Old Colorado City about the crowds, and he waved one hand at the spectators — a smallish herd you might see outside any Bibleburg bus stop, assuming you can still find one, which mostly you can’t — and said, “Pretty much what you see.” He also said he hadn’t heard any grumbling about the road closures, so we have that going for us.

For now, anyway. The comments section in Tuesday’s Gazette should be interesting. From what I saw of the route through the knick-knack shops of Old Colorado City, there wasn’t exactly a ton of tifosi clamoring to buy shit they didn’t need anyway. And the traffic downtown — denied use of Cascade and Colorado — was moderately hellish on Tejon Street.

And complete results didn’t appear until hours after the finish. C’mon. This was a prologue time trial, not a mountain stage. A chimp with a Timex could give you chapter and verse in 30 minutes or less or Dominos would give you a free pizza and then run the chimp over with a Ford Festiva.