Last Hurrah!

With 5 weeks left until our first conference race of the season, I decided that this weekend would be the last chance to go out hard. Friday night was the start of pledging, so I showed up to the fraternity house to meet and welcome the new members. Upon arriving, I found a Deadmau5 mask lying on a table, so I decided to put it on and take a picture:

(Look at that craftsmanship!)

Apparently, a friend spent a few hours making the mask for an actual Deadmau5 concert, which is a pretty cool idea considering how popular the music is becoming. Needless to say, the rest of the night involved quite a few Deadmau5 remixes and house tracks on the speaker system.

The next day consisted of a road trip to the Western portion of the United States (just across the Mississippi River) for some Asian (and other international) food. My new candy stash is composed of Japanese and German chocolates, and there is a smooth supply of regular and diet Australian ginger beer and Japanese Ramune in the fridge. For some reason the Australians call it ginger beer, when the rest of the world (America) calls it ginger ale. What gives? It's a good soda nonetheless, and you can actually see bits of ginger in the bottle of the Aussie stuff if you hold it up to the light. Oh, and opening the ginger beer is the best part because it's like pulling the pin to a hand grenade (there is seriously a pin that you pull to get the bottle open).

That night, I promised myself I'd have a slow night with a relaxing movie and some new Cinnamon Burst Cheerios. Neither of those things happened, and I ended up at a good friend's house shooting the breeze with some track stars. All night (whoops). At least I wasn't shooting other things, right?

I found this somewhere on the Internet, and it beautifully sums up the weekend:

Do what you want to do, be who you want to be.

Looking back, I'm glad that I got so much done and had so much fun with friends. I'm paying dearly for the lack of studying that occurred, but it was absolutely worth it. I even did a couple of training sessions (I think). And as the picture above states, it was exactly what I wanted and I didn't leave any room for regrets. I guess now is the time to stop thinking about training and to actually get some serious training rides logged. It's a lot harder to pedal 50 miles with 20 extra pounds of weight hanging around in your torso. Remember: nobody likes a fatty, especially one who still has to play catch-up with the rest of the team.