Winter Formals, Christmas dinner, and getting my fingers pricked

WOW it has been a while since I last posted!  I have been to Winter Formals with Nicole (she was gracious enough to pay me back for going to her Semi-Formals--VERY fun time!  I am really lucky to have an awesome friend who I can take to stuff like this [and impress all of the dudes]).

I also went to a fancy Christmas dinner at the Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein was a prof there . . . need I saw more?).  My great aunt and great uncle (Mr. and Mrs. Jaffin) are Friends of the Institute and have been kind enough to take me to a lot of these cool galas!

Then I got my first lactate threshold test with Bob Blaisdell--he took his show on the road and came up to the Princeton Bike Room to test the Men's A TTT team.  Very good to get a baseline in like this, at this point in the year, so that we can really see how the team's form is coming along in preparation for Nationals in May.

Marc Hollander gave me an awesome interview for CyclingUpdate, and you can read Part I and Part II.  Part III will be coming soon, just go to the main website every once in a while to check (don't go there just because of my interview--it is an excellent site!).

Enough talk, now pictures!  (By the way, the bamboo photos document our second trip to the Delaware River to gather bamboo for the SICK fixed gear we are creating . . . that story to follow in mid-January!)

TT CLINIC!

Register for the 6:00 class or the 7:30 class!

NEW FIVE HOUR RECORD!

Well, I cannot complain about living in Princeton, New jersey . . . it is beautiful riding country, the weather is nice most of the time, and I have an elevator in my dorm building and all-you-can-eat dining halls just a few hundred meters away!

I don't know if those factors had anything to do with my new five-hour-record average power on my favorite loop, from Frenchtown, NJ to Califon, NJ (the highest point in Hunterdon County).  Maybe it was due to my nice rest week over Thanksgiving, and I am just now realizing the benefits of 130 hours in the saddle during the previous five weeks!  Whatever it was, I had a beautiful ride today.

I woke up to sun shining into my south window, and the coffee (yes, friends, I have a Rancilio Silvia machine in my room!) was especially tasty (I only made espresso because I didn't feel like taking a leak every 30 minutes on the ride!).  I read Erica Allar's new blog entry and laughed a lot, and I just knew it was going to be a great ride.

Enough gushing about roads in NJ . . . I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!  Classes are done for the semester in exactly two weeks, and I am really looking forward to a great time back home with the parents, my old girlfriend, and (OF COURSE) my awesome riding buddies as we tough it in conditions that cause ones balls (balls are required on rides like these) to disappear . . . a good friend of mine once coined the term "sport-mode."  The Murphy (mom's side) family Christmas Eve is a great tradition of drunken debauchery and revelry, and I cannot wait to see everyone I haven't seen all year!!  Then my dad and I are driving out to Colorado for 4 spectacular days of skiing at Copper, Keystone, and Breckenridge.  We are meeting up with Nicole Clarke (who took me to the Charter Semi-formal) and her summer roommate and star Vanderbilt runner Amanda Scott for some skiing and dinner.  We are also going to chill with Shawn and Karl Heidgen of Pactimo, two of my best friends who I just met [ironically] on the Courage Classic charity ride for Denver Children's Hospital!

My dad and I will be back just in time for a fun New Year's Eve (hopefully with some old high school friends) and then I am going to the Iowa Democratic caucus on January 3rd . . . that should be very interesting as I have not attended them before and I also do not know for sure who I am supporting!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to have some more good stories during the holidays!