If you live in Alberta and you’re a cyclist, you’re likely aware of the two big rides happening to raise money for the fight against cancer. The more established one, the one we likely all know at least one participant of, is of course, The Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer. The other is new. It’s the Ride with Lance Armstrong. Both are going to be vying for your cycling and fundraising efforts this summer, so just how then is a rider to make the call. Which ride will you choose?
I always think it’s cool when some aspect of science-fiction finds its way into our reality. Most of the time, if you look for it, you’ll find all kinds of examples and one of the most common ones has got to be the proliferation of the cyborg. Wikipedia defines it as ‘a cybernetic organism (i.e. an organism that has both artificial and natural systems). Fictionally speaking, as in science-fiction, this is usually thought of more like the Borg from Star Trek. This month, WIRED magazine published an article called ‘Advantage: Cyborgs’, by Clive Thompson, which looked at how in the world of chess, the best of the best aren’t the Chessmasters, or the Super Computers, but instead the computer-aided humans – this combination is unbeatable…
How awesome is this… I remember the excitement of peeling off the cellophane packaging and opening the box of a new model. Carefully placing all the plastic cut outs onto my table and painstakingly dissecting the parts prior to starting the intricate build process… I can almost smell the model glue now ;-)
Artist Michael Johansson has taken this visceral experience and augmented it to a real-life proportions in his exhibition “Some Assembly Required”
As Michael explains:
As a child I was fascinated building models. I remember breaking off the pieces from the surrounding plastic sticks that were leftover from the casting process and subsequently gluing the pieces back together in the right order by following the instruction manual.
A real bike is turned back into a space of imagination. By this I wanted to address the similarities between different contexts and spin concepts such as size and belonging.
Worth a look for sure!
via Prolly
I can’t be unique in ‘thinking/dreaming’ about getting a new bike every time I walk into a bike shop. If you’re a rider, you just can’t help it. I think it’s the smell of the rubber… haha… I don’t know. Maybe it’s something the shops pump into the air – some kind of ‘buy-a-bike’ mind melding gas. You walk in and the bikes sit there, gleaming, in their racks, just calling out to be ridden. And, really, who am I to be so cold hearted that I can’t give at least one of them a good home. Well, today I got the call, ‘Sheldon, good news. You can come pick up your new bike!’
Sometimes, although it’s rare, I can have trouble sleeping. I recall vividly, summer holidays between grade 5 and grade 6 was the first time I experienced this. It was so strange to me. We were camping at the time, spending all day outside, running around, biking, fishing, hiking. Come night time, I would be tired, ready to go to bed, but then I’d just lay there, and the lay there, listening for grizzly bears outside the tent. Good times, good times… So that was my first memory of having a hard time falling asleep, and since then, I can likely count the other times on two hands. It’s as I said, a rare thing for me. When it does happen now though, it’s normally due to some excitement, or stress in my life surrounding change or uncertainty. My brain will stay active long after my body decides it’s time to fall asleep. Lately, I’ve been wrapped up in a lot, between work, home life, training and riding, helping out here and there with some other side projects and so on. I’ve got lots on my mind, which is how I like it, as the vast majority of it fun to think about, but come 11pm when I want to shut the ol’ noodle off, it hasn’t been happening. So, what now?
7:15am. My alarmclock radio goes off, and as I come to, what do I hear? Lance Armstrong is coming to Edmonton! For two days, Aug 25-26, he’ll be in our fair Capital City to raise awareness and funds in support of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.
It’s not every morning you wake up to the news that one of your HEROES is coming to town!
Happy Monday to you all! Winter in Edmonton (Alberta Canada) for me is mostly a long, dark and cold expanse of time devoid of any real biking. Winter means it’s time to get out the trainer and start to think about which new movies and which TV series I want to get caught up on; last winter it was Rome, and Seinfeld. Ken on the other hand, has been consistently riding all winter long for a few seasons now, and of course, he’s been givin’ me the gears for cowering inside as much as I do. This year though, I’ve managed to get out there ‘a bit’ more, and let me tell ya, once you get movin’ and warmed up, it’s pretty sweet and in some ways more fun than summer riding.
A friend forwarded this to me, and I thought it too priceless not to share. Ladies who choose to ride bikes with skirts on should be careful of their saddle choice ;-)
(via jameslv)
CYCLE CROSS BEND OREGON 2009(sat. last race mens) from FARfromEARTH Films on Vimeo.
In Ken and my last post, we laid out our ’10 goals, and one of mine was racing Cyclo Cross again. Now, time does a funny thing to memory, in that it usually chooses to remember the good times most clearly. I think this is what my memory has done with Cyclo Cross. I think back and sure I remember how intense it was, but I can’t say I recall the pain anymore, though I’m sure there was a lot of it. I don’t really remember how cold it was at Nationals, or how hard the frozen ground was when my front wheel slipped out and I went down on lap 2. I don’t really remember just how slick and muddy the climb and descent was at the Diary Queen Double Dipper now. Mostly I just remember, it was fun :-D
I love this video because instead of focusing on the race, it focuses on the rider’s expressions. Despite the obvious ‘discomfort’, the snow, the ice, the mud, they’re out there tearin’ it up. Why? Maybe it’s the spiky, blue-haired demon with the pitch fork?
With the flip of the calendar, it’s suddenly 2010 and like many people out there, I recently took stock of the state of things in my life. I pondered on things like my general happiness, my place in the world, my family life, my career, my dreams and goals, and on my physical health. All in all, I like where things are at, and where they’re headed – I’m looking forward to 2010 for a lot of reasons. That said, when it came to my health, my body is changing, and not for the better. I’m about to turn 35, and I’m well into ‘the slow fade’ so to speak, which comes with a slower metabolism, which in turn brings, you guessed it, more body fat. I can say with certainty that today I am fatter than I have ever been in my entire life (excluding when I was a wee baby of course). So now what?
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