This year’s MS150 was very, very hard-fought, but thankfully, hard-won!

As we watched the forecast last week, we were delighted to see that mild temperatures and dry weather were predicted for the route. Unfortunately, we soon learned that high winds from the north and northwest were also on the way! And the winds were indeed brutal. It’s pretty tough to keep yourself going for hours into a headwind. A lot of people didn’t even finish the first day, and among those that did, many chose not to ride the second, including a few on our team. And to add insult to injury, temperatures dropped into the forties overnight, which made the dawn start very uncomfortable. After waiting an hour in shiver-inducing cold, we started down several long hills, making the wind chill almost unbearable. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, and it was hard to handle the brakes and shifters, my hands were so cold.

But did I have fun? Yes!!! Despite the weather challenges, there were several improvements over last year, along with the same satisfaction gained from doing the ride. One great thing this year was that Caprock hired two massage therapists to give free massages in our tent after the first day’s ride. This was wonderful, and really helped with the recovery.

This year Ed (yes, he rode this year) and I, along with one other woman from our team, took the “Challenge Route” on Day 2. This route goes through Buescher and Bastrop state parks. It is much more scenic than the “Express Route” that I took last year, but has some very challenging hills that scare a lot of people off. Living in Dallas now, Ed and I have been able to practice hills more than our Houston flatlander teammates, so we didn’t find this to be a problem at all. And the parks were beautiful to ride through.

I see I didn’t write about this last year, but one fun thing about the ride is the rural people that park at the end of their ranch roads and entertain the riders. There is one guy who plays fiddle all day on the back of a trailer, and there is a steel drum band out in the middle of Texas farm land (!), as well as lots of people with bells and noisemakers who sit in lawn chairs and yell and wave. This year with the alternate route I got to see another institution, the bagpiper in Buescher State Park. This made me tear up a little, though, as he played “Amazing Grace” as we rode up a hill and it reminded me of Kelly’s funeral. Still, it was a great touch.

So how did Ed like it, you ask? Well, despite being impatient, not liking crowds, the unknown, getting up early or roughing it, I think he was glad he did it. He won’t come out and say he liked it because he spent months saying he didn’t want to do it, but since we finished he has been talking about next year. There is something about this type of event that is a little addictive, and I saw it in other first-time riders on our team as they crossed the finish line, fists in the air, yelling “I did it!”. They’ll be back.

I have not been riding as much this year as last because we are far away from the structure of organized rides that has built in in Houston around this. Also, we are not yet familiar with all the good places to ride here. I still feel ready, though, and don’t think it will be a problem. More of an issue is the logistics of getting to Houston, getting back to Houston from Austin, and getting back to Dallas. Ironically, Dallas has an MS150, but it is much smaller and really just goes from the suburbs to Ft. Worth. Doesn’t seem as grand as riding with 13,000 from Houston to Austin.

Anyway, we had to get up early this morning because we had tickets to the Cotton Bowl, which started at 10:40am. We enjoyed the game, despite not caring about either team playing (Arkansas and Missouri). We were glad our seats were on the sunny side; it was in the 30s when the game started. Still, I managed to get a mild sunburn on my face. Dallas weather continues to confuse me. It’s supposed to be 75 on Saturday.

Happy 2008 everybody!

• 10. Skiing at Winter Park in Colorado It had been years since Ed and I had been skiing, so this partially work-funded trip was a real treat. It didn’t take long to get the legs back, and we really enjoyed this resort for the sheer size of it, and the fact that many of the slopes were groomed on one side only, leaving the other side to develop excellent mogul fields. This allowed us to ski together more (me on the mogul side, Ed on the smooth). A bonus event was when Ed put a pizza, still in box, in the oven of our condo and started a kitchen fire, then ran outside while I put the fire out.
• 9. Getting my road bike Ed has been riding roadies for years, but I had turned more toward mountain biking. I finally got a good bike, my first since my heavy Schwinn bought in about 1979. We started riding regularly in the countryside near Houston, and had an especially nice ride on rented bikes in the Santa Ynez valley while visiting Steeles. We also did our first race ride, a 55-miler called the Tour de Donut.
• 8. Riding Segways My first time on a Segway made my “Best of” list for 2003, but that was really just a short ride in a mall store. During our summer 2006 trip to Santa Barbara, Ed and I took the Old Santa Barbara Segway tour. I will just say here that riding Segways is really, really fun. We enjoyed it so much that the other day when Linda mentioned that this Segway dealership is for sale, Ed actually read through the details of the offer and was thinking about where he would work while I ran it, and where we would live.
• 7. Ed’s transfer to Dallas While the actual move didn’t take place until 2007, the event was set into motion in 2006 and occupied much of our mental and physical energy for the second half of the year.
• 6. Car chases At Caprock, one of our lunchtime haunts was a Tex-Mex dive which always seemed to be showing car chases on its big screen TV. I think it was Fox News; I don’t usually watch that channel, but they seem to have the car chase thing covered. One Friday afternoon back at the office, my friend John Robert IM’ed me from New York City that he was watching a car chase in Pearland (where our office was) on the screen in Times Square. I found a local news station covering the chase, and before long the entire office (plus John Robert in New York) was watching as a driver in a white pickup pulled stuntman moves past many familiar landmarks (including the aforementioned Tex-Mex dive) with dozens of helicopters and squad cars in tow. He drove through the golf course by the Vietnamese restaurant and headed to the intersection with the tollway that would take him past our building. We all crossed our fingers, but no, he passed through the intersection and headed toward downtown Houston. Somehow sensing his mistake, he drove through the massive median and U-turned back toward Pearland and … would he? would he? YES! he turned east on the tollway right toward Caprock. And the entire workforce ran to the front of the building to watch. Helicopters, motorcycles, cars, all chasing a lone Ford F150. After the show passed, we all went back to our desks and watched as spikes were thrown in the highway and the now tireless truck rode through several more towns, sometimes hopping curbs ON ITS RIMS, near-miss after near-miss, finally plopping into a bayou and sinking. The driver was rescued and miraculously no one was hurt in the whole 2-hour chase. Apparently the reason behind the whole thing was the guy had stopped taking his depression medication and held up a dry cleaner for a pittance. Now, you might think that was the end of the car chase entry for 2006, but no. This car chase ended on our block later in the year.
• 5. Dynamo soccer Houston got a major league soccer team in 2006, and it was wildly successful. Both the fan participation and the team’s performance were stellar. The games were the most fun professional sports games I’ve ever been to, due in part to the insane soccer fans with their drums, streamers, wigs, flags, brass instruments, cowbells and smoke bombs. The team made it to the MLS championship game in Dallas. Ed and I drove up to watch the Houston Dynamo beat the New England Revolution in overtime. And the 2007 update is that this year, the Dynamo beat the Revolution for the championship AGAIN, this time in Washington D.C. Attendance at the games in Houston remains strong and loud. Let’s Go Dynamo!
• 4. Meeting Kyle Chandler I met Ed’s cousin Kyle for the first time when he drove to Houston from Austin, where he was filming a TV show, to join his brothers and cousins for a Buffalo Bills game. What a nice guy! He climbed a grapefruit tree in his brother’s backyard in his socks to make me juice for a cocktail.
• 3. Getting a high-tech crown I did write about this when it happened, but here it is on my top 10 list; it was just that cool. On a sad note, my dentist of seven years who did the crown committed suicide a few months ago.
• 2. Jury Duty Well this is an odd choice for a top 10 list (not that the crown isn’t), and at number 2 no less! But serving on this jury is still one of the most fascinating things I’ve done. The dynamics of deliberations (including watching one woman have a meltdown under the pressure to come to a verdict), the interaction between the jurors (two of whom discovered that they had lived in the same house in different decades) and the case itself were all interesting. Best of all was having the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney visit the jury following the trial to answer questions and discuss evidence and testimony which was not admitted for the trial itself. I hope to get the chance to do this again (but not for traffic court, that is boring).
• 1. Two Gallants show at Walter’s on Washington Being a first-hand witness at the concert in Houston where an HPD officer stormed to the stage and knocked down the guitarist of a band while he was playing tops out my list. First of all, it was national news (well, national music news). I’ve talked to people here in Dallas who know all about it. Second, it definitely changed how I think about law enforcement. I still respect the police, but from the reading I’ve done since and the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered from friends who are outside of my (somewhat privileged) demographic, I now realize how many problem officers there are. Third, it was a lesson in how the power of the internet. If not for the YouTube videos and the forums and the online coverage, the charges against the band members would not have been dropped. Fourth, I was able to contribute to the effort to see justice done by giving a statement to HPD Internal Affairs and by giving a statement to the bands’ defense lawyers. And finally fifth, because I was interviewed by the local alternative weekly, so I got to show my friends, but they spelled my name wrong, so future employers can’t Google it.

I walked over three or four times to see the various groups run by, looking out our bedroom window each time to gauge the crowds on Swiss. I felt for the runners; after press coverage during the week about how this might be the hottest marathon in Dallas history (yesterday’s high was eighty degrees), it was forty degrees for the run, with thirteen mile-per-hour winds and light misting. Ugh. I must say though that after watching, I would like to run next year. The problem is that I can’t start training in the heat of the summer, which doesn’t stop until, oh that’s right, yesterday.

On the other hand, I could run just run 21 miles and then saunter a few yards home ….

Dallas does have one climate advantage over Houston though, and it’s not the “oh, but it’s a dry heat” that I was promised. No, Dallas has the NHL! Ed is very excited to have hockey in his life again, and I must say I enjoy going to hockey games, too. They are nice and cool and I think hockey should be played all summer!

I was amused at the first game we went to to hear the crowd shout “Stars!” during the Star Spangled Banner whenever the words “star” or “stars” were sung (the team is the Dallas Stars, the former Minnesota North Stars). I didn’t quite get why they shouted “you see!” at the beginning of the anthem, though. At the second game I got it. We arrived in time to hear the team introductions, and I was just thinking “wow, there are a lot of Finns on this team” when they got to number 36 …. ah ha!

Anyway, the preponderance of Finns was also the reason for the hokey “game” broadcast on the scoreboard during one of the breaks: Finnish or gibberish? in which one of the Finnish players says a sentence, and a lucky fan gets to decide whether it’s, well, Finnish or gibberish. (Hint: no matter what your instincts tell you, it’s Finnish.)