2014 Wrap-up (make-up for laziness?)

Somewhere around the start of summer, I seem to have stopped posting things here. I suspect it might have something to do with the first few pictures here. We scraped and painted our whole house and when we were done with that, we roofed our garage. It was all quite an undertaking.

We've lived in our house for over ten years but have never painted so we don't know when it was last done. Some of the paint was so checked that it looked like the varnish on antique furniture. The internet told me that if you make sure to re-paint as soon as the paint is getting chalky on the surface, you don't have to scrape the old off in order to re-coat. Good to know, my guess is that it was chalky when we bought the house. What you see here was a pretty typical average, where about half of it came off down to the wood. Thankfully the siding is original redwood so even the bare parts don't rot or anything.

I'd noticed a while back that the insulation in the roof of the garage was starting to look saggy and then later it started to pull its staples and fall down. There was obviously a moisture or ventilation problem but this didn't make sense because it'd been fine for the last 8+ years, why is is screwed-up now?

Enter the '90s roofers. This was a crew which laid nice straight rows, trimmed all the ends to be even, put on a good ridge-cap, all without noticing that they didn't use a starter strip on the end of either eve. This meant the grooves in the three-tab shingles on the first row had nothing under them but tar-paper! Credit where credit is due - that tar-paper and later, sheeting, held on for a long time. What I discovered was that I now had a roof which looked like brand new underneath except the end 8" or so was pretty much non-existent. I could actually look through from above and see the board under the eve. I can't imagine how moisture was making it's way in there.

Thankfully the previous owner kicked in some extra cash when building this garage to make sure it would last - all the eves are fiberglass/composite underneath and cedar on the ends with all cedar trim. Other than a couple rafter-tails, nothing but the actual roof sheeting was rotten! I just walked down the ends with a circular-saw, cut it off, and patched it in with strips.

Then it was cyclocross racing season again! We hadn't planned to do much of this in 2014 but were inspired by working at our Pella race and started up shortly after.We did a pretty full circuit and traveled as far as the East end of the Quad Cities. It was, as usual, fantastic and I enjoyed all of it. Traveling, racing, spectating, it was all great and I look forward to next year!

These pictures should pretty well summarize how Corrine's season went. She spent a LOT of time on podiums and has now upgraded to the next higher race category! Nice work!

Then it snowed and winter was here:

And that meant it was time for stouts:

Spooky Cross

Spooky Cross has changed a lot - it got new management last year and now this year get a brand new venue. Previously run on the Living History Farms property ie: forest, I was skeptical about the move to a park in Altoona. It turned out to be pretty well arranged and there's a lot of property here. 

It was a two-day race and it's always fun to see what changes from one day to the next. A quick rundown on that would be that day-1 had no large barriers, no sand, no off-camber sections, and huge amounts of riding in a straight line on pavement. Basically designed for all the road-racers to get their fix on a course that's not so hard.  Day 2 saw the addition of a couple pairs of max-height barriers, some extra tech. from hill switchbacks and a large reduction in the road riding by removal of an entire section that did nothing but add distance. Much better - I'm guessing there were at least a few verbalized complaints about the first day's arrangement. It was all good in any case.

Myself staged. This event used rank staging so I was in the 3rd row on day one and 2nd row on day two. As far as riding goes, I had a much better 2nd day. On day-1, my legs felt perfect for the first lap and then were suddenly so shot that I felt like I had to cut my speed in half. The next day, they felt great the whole time, weird. 

This is the Altoona Aquatic Center, which is technically the property this whole thing is on I think. 

Corrine doing some warming up. 

Staged and ready to roll. These events were running tight - almost no time for pre-riding between races.

Corrine currently beating some Nebraskans -

There was some equipment carnage early-on. This one was a tubular tire which rolled completely off the rim (these are supposed to be glued on). 

Hecklers.

Corrine doing some crushing--

And a finish on the podium to round out the day!

Night Cap!!

We'd all been looking forward to this one for a while and it delivered as usual. The only downside was, if you were Cody, then you may have tried to register after the race capacity limit had been reached at 100 riders. The existence of this limit was only made known on the bikeiowa.com website late the night before and it wasn't on the flier or anything. I'd seen this one hit the 70s before but wouldn't have guessed we'd need an artificial cap. There was a waiting list to fill slots left by no-shows which helped, but there weren't enough no-shows to let Cody in.

Men 4/5 went off right before sunset and it actually wasn't too cold yet. The leg and arm warmers were about right. This one was another category-staged mass start, which is kinda poor because I'm still in my auto-demoted category-5 and I have to ride through a big chunk of the 4's to get into a comfortable position. This whole split category start thing works much better when staging is done by USA Cycling rank. Fortunately, I'm good at start sprinting and got way up there before we made it onto the main course. Several other 5's went with me and then back half of the 4's kinda balled-up in a pile behind us. 

There was a nice stretch of tarmac (yes I really have been watching that much Top-Gear) to really fry your legs right after a tough climb.

Topping the big climb here. A fair amount of people were dismounting to run up it. It was pretty close to the practical limit for my gearing, especially since there was a corner at the bottom and you could only carry so much speed into it. 

With a couple races in between, Corrine went out well after dark. I ate hamburgers.

Mechanic pit! We've been making sure to keep a B-bike in the pit after the Bobber's Cross ordeal. It seems to reason that if we always put one in there, then we'll never need it? It was all manner of professional here - there was even a SRAM truck doing free repairs. 

Start!

As you can see, there are lot of turns and lots of two-way traffic, this place really is great.

Corrine heading into the big climb, well placed in the group.

I have no idea what this is...

The band was the best yet and actually played the whole time this year!

Finishing up a lap.

Corrine doing some passing. 

And also eating hamburgers...