What Now?

As I am finishing my paper that covers the research I did in Albuquerque, I wonder what will I do for the rest of the summer. I don't have a job lined up. I'm really hoping that my brother gets his grant, so that I can help him with his graduate school research as a paid assistant. I originally had planed that when I got back from New Mexico that I was going to be a lifeguard at the pool, but I thought the training was in early April and not late March and missed it. They only other local lifeguard training was the weekend before finals week for 8th block at Cornell, so that timing on that one was pretty bad.

Right now it looks like I will be able to watch the Tour de France two to three times a day, so I'm not complaining. All I have to do now is convince myself to start riding my bike now. I've had no motivation to workout at all since I got back from New Zealand. It just has been a hard semester on me mentally and emotionally. I had Petrology (study of rocks and their formation) and Speleology (study of caves and cave formations) back to back after my trip to New Zealand, both of which where my hardest and most time consuming classes at Cornell. Hopefully I'll find the time to go for a short ride later today.

Studying in Albuquerque

I've completed another year of school and now I'm at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque for my internship for the month of June. I have been here improving the chronology of some stalagmites from Australia and Portugal using the Uranium-238 to Thorium-230 decay series with one of my professors from Cornell, Rhawn Denniston. The basic steps of what we do are as follows:

1. Drill some powder from a stalagmite.
2. Do some "cookbook" chemistry to concentrate the uranium and thorium from the powder and to remove all of the junk that we don't need.
3. Send the samples through a $700,000 mass spectrometer and obtain uranium and thorium ratios.
4. Plug some numbers into a spreadsheet and then push calculate. Once the computer is done processing our numbers in some crazy complicated equation it spits out an age.

Sounds pretty easy right? Well the work itself is pretty easy, but understanding it all rather complicated. The more I learn about this process, the more complicated it seems. All of the chemistry and mass spectrometry has to been done in a clean lab in order to reduce the amount of contaminant uranium and thorium. Calculating the age has several corrections to account for such as the initial thorium in the stalagmite along and corrections for alterations done to the stalagmite after it forms.

After we are done working Rhawn has field trips planned for us in order to see the awesome geology that surrounds Albuquerque. So far we been to Tent Rocks National Monument, Bandelier National Monument, and the Valle Grande Caldera. We also plan on see the Great Unconformity near Sandia Crest, some ancient volcanoes from the Rio Grande rift, and Carlsbad Caverns.

Tent Rocks National Monument

Bandelier National Monument

Valle Grande Caldera

Albuquerque also have a pretty nice cycling scene. There is a lot of bike paths/lanes throughout the city and there is always people on it. And unlike Iowa, Albuquerque has a pretty nice "hill" that you can ride up. The climb is about 10 miles away from where I am staying and is 25 miles long and gains around 4,800ft. Here is the profile:

Unfortunately for me, I have not been riding very much. Along with Albuquerque comes the goathead plant, which is a weed that produces thousands of seeds and each seed contains 3-5 thorns. Every ride I have been on so far I have flatted about ten-twenty minutes in. I even bought some Continental Gatorskin tires and I still flat about ten-twenty minutes into the ride. Except with the gatorskins I only have to pull one or two goatheads out instead of ten-fifteen of them with my old tires. I guess that's a plus right?

Overall Albuquerque seems like a nice place to live. Maybe I'll come back sometime after I am done working here.

Summer Jobs

So, it is officially summer and I am loving it. I am staying at Cornell over half of the summer studying Ornate Box Turtles, with two professors, Andy McCollum and Bob Black. We are trying to determine if digging false nests around real nests will protect the eggs inside the real nests. However, after a few nights most of the nests where dug up and the eggs eaten , so our experiments are pretty much done and we still have three and a half weeks left of the internship. There are two shifts that we have been working. The day shift is pretty short and easy we look for turtles in a prairie for about an hour and a half and measure any that we find. On the other hand the night shift is terribly long and quite demanding. We tromp through thorn bushes, wetlands, and poison ivy in order to find turtles with transmitters on their back. Most of the time its raining or the dew is really bad, so you're soaking wet while looking.

Ornate Box Turtle

After the internship is done I'm hoping I can find a job elsewhere, but by the looks of it I'll be hard pressed to find one. A lot of my friends have not found a job yet and who is to say I'm better qualified than them. However I think that Bob Fulwider will be able to get me a position at his insurance agency, where I will sit behind a desk and organize stuff. It's pretty good for an office job, but that's just it. It's an office job, I would much rather get rained on in the field then have to sit behind a desk for hours upon end. I wouldn't complain though I would be earning money for school next year.

Trip Report and What Not

I have been back from the Bahamas for a little over two weeks now and I am gonna say that the trip was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work. We studied some of the coral reefs down there and learned how coral fossil assemblages can be used to solve problems in modern reefs. Another topic that we studied was beach dynamics and how to map and profile them. It was surprising to see how much these beaches change. Yeah, so I spent a lot of my time at the Bahamas either snorkeling or walking along a beach. Its OK I know you're jealous.

It was a great time and I saw a lot of cool things such as stromatolites, a nurse shark, and an octopus eat a pretty big crab. Here is a picture of the professor holding some stromatolites for the class.

(Picture courtesy of Dana Friend)

On a different subject, I am getting some pretty good training in lately. I am well beyond where I was last year at this time even with me taking two weeks off the bike to go to the Bahamas. If I keep this up I should be able to put up some pretty good results early in the season. My first race is hopefully two weeks away with Le Tour de Notre Dame du Lac, which is a collegiate race series put on by my brother Tim. The only hold up with those races is that I might not have a collegiate license by the time the races roll around because I am waiting for the Cornell College Cycling Club application to be processed. Hopefully I will be giving a good race report here within the next few weeks instead of just watching everyone else race.

Thanks for reading!

Bahamas

So I leave for the Bahamas this morning to go study limestone, coral, and such. It should be a pretty good time. I'll get back on the 21st, so I have little over two weeks there. I'm kind of disappointed because I have to miss a lot of cool stuff such as Aaron might make it to the state wrestling tournament and the Tour of California. I'll post a full report when I get back.

Later

Goals for 2009

I realize it has been a while since I have posted in my blog, but what are you gonna do about?

I have been thinking on what I want to accomplish for next Cycling/Triathlon season and have come up with a small list.

1) 400 hours of training: Last year was a year of learning on how to train on my own and I feel that this year will be much better. I did the math for the amount of training I did last year and only came up with 161 hours. That's not even 30 minutes a day. The big problem is that I took too many days off, so with this goal I hope to be more consistent and which in turn make me a much better athlete. Last year was a year of learning on how to train on my own

2) Upgrade to Cat 3: Last cycling season was kind of a disappointment for me. It was my first season (second season ever) as a Cat 4 and only had two good results last year with a 10th place finish in Snake Alley and 5th in the Iowa State Crit. I had the chance to well in other races, but made a few mistakes which cost me some good results. I have learned from those mistakes and should be able to put some results on the board.

3) Snake Alley: This my favorite race of the entire road season and I would really like to put a good result on the board for this race next year. I love how the fans line the alley and how the race has a European feel. I will be in peak form when head there this coming spring.


Picture of Me at Snake Alley last year (courtesy of Mike Moritz)

4) Pigman Half-Ironman: My last goal is break 5:20 at the Pigman Half. I really don't have much to say about this one expect that it would be a 25 minute PR from last year. It might be a stretch, but I think I can do it. (I am really bummed that I don't have a picture of me at Pigman Half)


I'll try to keep blogging it up. Thanks for Reading!

Complete Turnaround: Race Report

Last weekend I did my first two cyclocross races. My first race was the beginner Cat 4 race at Psyclofest. The race was only 30 minutes long and the official decided that everyone could complete three laps in that time. The course was fast with lots of flat sections on packed dirt or pavement, but the run up Phil’s Hill was quite brutal. Only seven people signed up for the race which was kind of disappointing, but I was expecting this kind of turnout. Everyone at the start of the race was pretty timid and things were pretty slow for the first lap and I remember thinking that my practice lap with Chad Bishop was faster than what we were going. The group was still all together when we reached Phil’s Hill for the first time and I decided to make things interesting and went up the hill hard. I looked back shortly after I remounted my bike and discovered that I a pretty sizeable gap, so I went with it and never looked back. Two laps later I won my first cyclocross race and I was pretty excited. The guy in second came in around a minute thirty after me and third came shortly after that. I went and got my trophy and it has a guy running on top of it. I’m thinking about gluing a toy bike to the guy’s shoulder.

I was feeling pretty good, so I decided that I would do the Middle Park Madness race too, but I did the Cat 3/4 race instead of the Beginner Cat 4. This race was forty-five minutes long or about 6.5 laps (we started in the middle of the course) and there were more hills and corners than the Psyclofest course. It also had a run up, but it wasn’t as bad as Phil’s Hill. The Cat 3/4 race was much faster than my other race, and for the first two or three laps I was hanging around 6-9 position, but I couldn’t hang with them for long and slowed down for the rest of the race. I finished 17th out of 21 which was fine with me considering the competition I was going against. A lot of riders that race Cat 1/2 on the road did this race, so I can’t be too disappointed with my result even though it was a complete turnaround of the day before.

Tomorrow is the first day of Jingle Cross Rock and I’m racing at 9:30 in the morning. Hopefully I will put up a good result and/or win a door prize. I’ll post a race report and photos from the Dice races and Jingle Cross sometime next week.