People will never cease to amaze me

First of all, I got an email from the folks at Backcountry Research last night. Sales of the new Awesome Strap Race were impressive. That was expected. What I did not expect was the overwhelming amount of people that bought the new Awesome Strap Race in the rainbow trout colorway.

I'm thinking infected penis for some odd reason. Segmented freckle worm. I guess the whole Tomi inspired bike/fly fishing lifestyle is catching on. Whodathunkit?

Secondly, Jeff Schalk has been keeping busy during the off season, but not as he had planned. I'm piecing the story together, but apparently he violated the Trek corporate policy regarding porn hording...

and has now been served with three months of community service cleaning up roadkill hedgehogs in Waterloo, WI.

I could be wrong on this one, but I doubt it.

My third amazement with the human populous was found over at my arch nemesis in the cycling media world, cyclingnews.com (they loathe me over there). They have chosen another select few racers to blog on their site to join Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjaa and America's world traveling sweethearts Mike Broderick and Mary McConneloug. The new bloggers are Sam Schultz, Lea Davison, and Alex Grant. I know none of them, I wonder how well they can photo shop heads onto things (very important to a successful blog), and I wonder why I was once again not selected. The only thing they've got that I don't are successful racing careers... that's it. Cyclingnews.com snubbed again.

Pffftttt...

And fourthly my amazement is at myself and this guy:

photo cred: chines37

This is Brian Toone. I saw him on the front of the start line at the Southern Cross race this past weekend. I looked at him, and then I looked at his equipment. He was riding a 1999 Rockhopper with V-brakes, an old Manipoo with shock boots, 9" long bar ends, and his feet were shod in some lace-up shoes (photo annotated by Brian himself). I thought to myself "What the hell is this guy doing on the front row?"

Moments later, the race started, and as I mentioned I was in second place going into the first turn. I wasn't lying.

Photo cred: Jason Kohrt

Who's that in first? Brian Toone on his hoopty. What was I thinking at that moment?

"What the hell is this guy doing up here?"

Well, now I know. He was busy taking fifth place, fifth fucking place. Honch.

I was an ass. I should know better than to judge a guy by his bike, but almost twenty years of racing later I'm still doing it. Brian handed a lot of people their respective asses that day, and he did it on *urp*... that bike.

Kudos Brian Toone, even if you are a super computer geeked out roadie.