Biking

Last weekend’s Swisspower Cup was a bad race. The organization, weather, competition, and course were all ideal, but for me, things didn’t go as I had planned.

I’ve become good at shrugging off such bad days (of which there have been many), but this one's bummerness was compounded by a few factors. Firstly, distractions from racing are hard to come by in Aigle for various reasons that I briefly whined about in my last post. Though single-mindedness seems ideal for improvement, I’m finding that it tends to make me a bit of a head-case. Secondly, when racing poorly at an NMBS race, you can usually find a crew of similarly disappointed but friendly guys to finish with and take solace in the fact that you’re still in front of a big name like Ryan Trebon, who’s likely cursing his equipment somewhere in the woods. You can then pout a bit, drum up some excuses, and call it a day. At the Swisspower Cup though, the short course and thus spectator-friendly style makes agro-euros race till the bitter end, and there’s hardly an English speaker, let alone friend or family member, there to console you when you finally get pulled from the race. Long story short, slow riding met distraction-less atmosphere and caused one of those rare moments when I questioned, though only momentarily and not at all seriously, why I race bikes. Aside from the obvious—chicks and money—I suspect it has a lot to do with rides like the one I did today.


A place where the beer flows like wine and beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano…I’m talking about a little place called…Gstaad. Notoriously wealthy, Gstaad initially seemed modest and quaint compared to many other resort towns. Only when I got close to one particularly dilapidated garage did I realize that it was renovated on the inside to house an Ashton Martin, Ferrari, and Land Rover. It’s as if Gstaad is so wealthy that it hides its ostentatiousness, which is so much more ostentatious than just being obviously ostentatious to begin with.

Did that cow just wink at me?

Maybe it’s just the endorphins talking (according to Science, they’re actually quite potent), but there’s nothing like a long sunny bike ride in the mountains to erase any doubts about why I bike race.

mmmm, that sounds good...I'll have that.

Not much is new here in Aigle. Not much at all. Still living without TV, internet (at the house), car, cell phone, English speaking friends other than Sam or Ethan, young locals in general, establishments open past 6 pm, and, and, and... That pretty much leaves bike riding, which, when one is sick as I have recently been, isn’t much of an option. We all deal with the overabundance of free time in different ways. Vitamin G has been using his newly acquired French to translate trashy American rap. Here’s his take on “money in da bank, shorty what’s your drank?” with his own personal flourish at the end.


I’ve been reading a lot and putting my passion for cooking to good use. Actually, “passion” and “cooking” might not be the right words to describe my fondness for ogling cooking magazines and napping while watching The Food Network, but nevertheless, I have a few recipes that the world deserves to know. Here are two new chocolaty spreads for when your Nutella runs out:
-Stir a bunch of cocao powder into jam. Simple enough. Saturate the jam with cocao powder (like the straight-up sugar-free kind or else it’ll be too sweet).
- And secondly, stir a bunch of cocao powder into mashed up bananas. The key here is lots and lots and lots of cocao powder. Cocao powder mixed in plain yoghurt on waffles or pancakes isn’t bad either. Or oatmeal with cocao powder. Cocao powder in pretty much anything actually. But I’ll emphasize that the key is a lot of cocao powder.

Another winner is coffee oatmeal. It’s a little tough to cook the oatmeal in coffee without giving the coffee a burnt flavor, but it’s nothing a little milk and sugar (even if you don’t usually take it in your coffee) can’t fix. I know what you’re thinking: “why didn’t I think of that!?” You too could probably be a culinary innovator; you just need to clear your cabinets of all but a few key ingredients (a few starches, coffee, and cocao powder in my case). A little open-mindedness helps too.

I wonder if by periodically highlighting recipes on Racechild I can tap into the growing celebrity chef phenomenon and expand my readership…

We’re not the only ones with free time.
Drinking beer at 11:00 AM? Mandatory military service might not be so bad after all.

Obligatory cycling blog coffee shot and other miscellaneoses

Once caffeine-free Ethan can't resist the Euro cafe lifestyle. Pretty soon he'll be sporting a faux-hawk, puma's, and man-capris.

The Tour of Romandy coming through Aigle:

I've just discovered that making your color pictures black and white instantly makes them artsier.
Look out Ansel Adams.

Swan popo:

Pretty self explanitory--don't pick up bombs

Mature Content: Way too graphic stick figures. Apparently those who wear their hats backwards are of the same demographic as the scofflaws who dare to pee standing up.


Look closely and there's a rainbow.

View from my old room:

And if you zoom in on the building in the upper left, there's this:
A sign? Defininitely. I just don't know what of, and I've since moved out. creepy kind of...

A brief rest day recap turned ramble:

A couple of days ago Ethan and I took the train to Geneva for the day. The trip was fast and stress-free given Switzerland’s amazing train system, and once there, getting around without car or cab would have been super easy too. For simplicity’s sake, we opted to walk, but we could have easily joined the rest of the city and got around by riding trains, busses, bikes, or scooters.
Unlike New York or Paris or something, Geneva isn’t nearly a big enough city to mandate such awesome public transportation (I think it’s way smaller than Colorado Springs). For whatever reason though (higher population density? Better foresight? Excess money?), Geneva has built such a seamless public transportation system that owning a car just wouldn’t be practical, and this seems to be the case in most of the European cities that I’ve visited.

Not owning a car strikes me as so novel and cool because it's such a necessity for most Americans, both socially and practically. A guy without a car is pretty much the stereotypical doomed bachelor (think 40-Year-Old Virgin). Can you imagine a hotshot American attorney stepping out of his high-rise office, tucking his suit legs into his socks and pedaling his bicycle home? No way in the US, but it’s common here. Even in supposed conscientious Boulder, where public transportation is relatively great compared to most other US cities, the bus system is mostly reserved for pimply high-school freshmen.

It’s like the question of the chicken and the egg; I don’t know whether Americans first became addicted to cars and then cities were built around them, or whether cities were so catered to cars that an addiction was inevitable. Probably neither, or both, but whatever. For some reason, aside from the devout environmentalists and those fortunate enough to have the luxury/health/infrastructure to get to work without a car, Americans just don’t have many alternatives. I face it myself—there is no practical way for me to get from Colorado Springs to Boulder without a car (excluding a cab, which is not the point).

This leads to all kinds of questions regarding energy independence, global warming, etc. etc. etc., to which neither I, nor anyone else for that matter, has any real answers. Undoubtedly though, oil will run out, and therefore the US will eventually run without it. It has to. After visiting Geneva, I think Europe was lucky not have the rise of the automobile coincide with the building of their cities--their adaptation to an oil-free world will likely be less apocalyptic than America’s. On second thought though, maybe the world is small enough that we’ll all be hit pretty hard. This placard at the Geneva Museum of Modern Art thinks so. I’m not sure how I feel about it and will reserve comment, but thought it might be a cheerful note on which to end this odd post.

No common theme.

Porte du Soleil—just like the ball-in-the-cup game

Castle. Seeing old stuff everywhere is so new.

Still a long way to up go up…

…and it’s pretty steep too (picture taken at an equally steep angle).

A perfect reading bench, you just have to climb a few thousand feet to get there…

...or you could catch one of these, which cruise up and down one-way streets and single-lane mountain passes. Given the hysteria caused by some relatively benign sections of Independence Pass, hazards like these trains and the abundant single-lane mountain passes would terrify drivers in the US. Here though, such unmarked dangers are common, and drivers seem to embrace the challenge by accelerating through blind corners and narrowly passing cyclists. Oddly though, people drive with such confidence and assertiveness that I feel pretty safe, and I have yet to see an accident. I thought maybe the difference was the imported cars—the BMW’s, Mercedes, and Audis--that everyone seems to drive (maybe because here they aren’t that imported after all), but then again, most Aspenites have fast cars too. Must be all the F1 racing on Eurosport.

And to wrap-up this random post, here's a woos that crawled out from under Fraggle Rock:

Funny link

I heard this and cringed:

http://www.theonion.com/content/radio_news/four_year_descent_into?utm_source=slate_rss_1

Living in a model train set...it needs to be at least...three times bigger than this!

Before going abroad, or any new place for that matter, I leave home with a stereotype in mind of the place that I am going to visit, which inevitably doesn’t prove to be entirely true; it’s just a stereotype after all. For example, before going to Scotland, most of what I knew I had drawn from Babe. Though I did see green countryside and border collies, the hills were less well-lit and the border collies didn’t talk (most disappointing!). There were also plenty of Burger Kings and Britney Spears tabloid headlines to mar what I had thought of as quintessential Scotland. Another example: Quebec does indeed have the lush woods that it purports, but no, Canadians’ jaws don’t entirely unhinge when they speak. My idealized and stereotyped ideas of places don’t often bear much truth (meaning my ideal world resembles Southpark?). Switzerland however seems to be the exception. The mountains, valleys, villages, people, and animals are all straight out of one of those elaborate mossy train sets. The cows even have giant bells and the old men really do wear long wool socks and sturdy leather hiking boots. I’ve yet to see one of those giant Ricola horns, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. I’m not so naïve as to think that Switzerland is exempt from the problems of the rest of the world, but at least in terms of postcardableness, I’ve yet to see any evidence to the contrary. Like seriously, even the water in Lake Geneva is as clear as the pools of glue in train displays.
Because of this, I fear that every post from now till July will read “today I went riding and here are some pictures of the pretty things I saw.” For now at least, why fight it?