Monthly Archives: June 2012

Shitty Flight

This entry was posted in Racing, Totally Irrelevant on by .

Yesterday I didn’t get out of California until nearly 6 pm. So it was going to be a late night already, but it got worse. There were a bunch of thunderstorms mulling around Eastern Kansas all night, so the last 30 minutes of the flight were pretty choppy. Coming in to land, it got much worse. Bad enough that I got motion sick during the landing. I didn’t like it at all. It takes a lot to get me motion sick on a plane. Guess that was the case. On top of it all, the flight was late, so by the time I got my bike and took the shuttle to the car it was nearly 1:45am.

It was raining like crazy for the 80 mile drive home. I decided to stop at a Waffle House to eat a waffle and get some hot tea, thinking it might calm my stomach. Plus, sitting out the storm for a little bit wasn’t a bad idea either. There were two guys and a girl that worked there, standing outside under a awning, smoking, watching the storm. No one was inside. I said hi as I walked in and they all followed. I told the all I needed was a waffle and hot tea.

One of the guys asks me about the my van and if it came diesel standard. I told him yes. We talked about the van for a little bit and then he went back and made the waffle. The three of them were talking about just lots of different stuff. They started about their hours and how none of them planned to work the next night, but all of them thought they might have to. Then it was about brothers and sisters. They had talked a little bit when the guy that was making the waffle says he has 6 brothers and 5 sisters. The other two didn’t really say anything about his comment. I was thinking, “Wow, how could you pass up a comment on that?”

Anyway, when I left, I asked the guy if he really had 11 siblings. He said yes. That is why he was so interested in the van. He said they all drove around in one, but a bigger one with 4 rows of long seats. I wished the 3 of them a good night and then thought most of the way back upon my 15 minutes at Waffle House. Those guys were working all night for 7 something an hour. The one guy grew up in a family of 14. I felt a lot better after eating. But I think I felt better because I got a stark reality check on what it is like to have a hard day/life. Their situation made my life seem enchanted. Even with the shitty landing.

I ate lunch at the Torrey Pines Glider Port yesterday.

Here's Sue at the Glider Port.

I finally made it to my favorite bakery, Thyme in the Ranch, at Rancho Santa Fe.

I got a cinimmon roll, which was great.

I love Waffle House waffles. Especially at 2:30 am in a thunderstorm.

On a sadder note, the artist Leroy Neiman died yesterday. He was most famous as the artist of the Olympic Games, even though he did much work for Playboy magazine. He was 91, so he lived a long, productive life.

Strava Death???

This entry was posted in Racing on by .

Since I haven’t really done anything with Strava other than plug my Garmin into it and download some of my rides, I didn’t really have much information on the whole deal. I’m not a premium member, I don’t even know what extras you get for that, so I pretty much just get the same thing as what you have downloaded at Garmin Connect. The extra you get is the ability to see the times and routes of what other people that used Strava have done.

So, I wrote a little about looking at some Strava segments while I was out in California last week. A few of the segments that I compared my times to were total BS. They must of put their Garmins in their pocket while on a motocycle, because the KOM’s and descending times were not close to being realistic. But, most of segments had pretty legitimate information.

Anyway, I saw this article at Velonews.com about a family that is suing Strava for contributing to the death of one of their family members. Turns out the guy was trying to reclaim a Strave segment record for some descent in Northern California, lost control, crashed and died. Obviously, it turned out badly for the guy.

But having the family sue Strava for this is ludicrous. The family says that somehow Strava is at fault, “claiming negligence and that the website encouraged him to speed.” The article has a quote from the families attorney say, “They don’t put cones out. They don’t have anybody monitor and see whether a course, or a specific segment, is dangerous.”

Wow. They don’t cone the segments? Maybe the family and/or attorney doesn’t realize that every road in the country is potentially a Strava segement. Maybe every road in the World, I don’t know. So, for the website to monitor every “course” they record times for is obviously not gonna happen.

There are lots of good comments at Velonews about the whole thing. It makes me wonder what the United States is all about with all this litigation happening everytime someone or something gets hurt. I wish people would just take some responsibility for their own actions. Not everything is someone’s fault, shit just happens. Bad luck. Wrong place at the wrong time. Trying to set a Strava segment record and falling.