To kick off the 2011 pro tour during the Santos Tour Down Under, Radioshack was giving way autographed Lance Armstrong jerseys to its twitter followers for correctly answering Team Radioshack trivia. Two correct answers were chosen each day of Tour Down Under as winners. And it wasn’t just the first answer wins, but a drawing of all correct answers for that day submitted between a specified window of time.
My question…
Sounded easy enough. Robbie EcEwen! Shortly after the contest closed, this appeared…
Boom!
I sent my info over to @Radioshack and about a week later, THIS arrived!…
And this is what is said…
That’s right ladies and gentlemen. A Team Radioshack jersey “from the 2010 season and is signed by Lance Armstrong. I hope you enjoy.” Indeed, Ms. Sarah Barnes. Indeed, I will.
And here she is in all her glory, raw and untouched. Except by 7-time Tour de France champion Lance Freaking Armstrong. “Unworn”, I should say. By yours truly.
After a snapped these quick pics with my iPhone I put her back in the box she came in and put her in my closet. Just until I get her a better home in which to reside, like a wall frame with glass encasement.
Thanks, Radioshack for taking care of your twitter followers. And be sure to keep up with Team Radioshack as well.
So I know I said in an earlier post that I was going to campaign for a one Mr. Lance Armstrong to do a #TwitterRide here in Arizona. Well, my dear friends, according to Google Maps, it appears that @lancearmstrong is within 105 miles of my current location. How is this so? Well, he is in Tucson for Team RadioShack’s first team training camp of the upcoming pro season. In fact, all the big ballers should be down there. Levi Leipheimer, Ben King, Chris Horner (who I’m coming to find out is pound for pound one of the best interviews on television. He rivals Dana White). And we can’t forget that The Man, The Legend: Johan. Freaking. Bruyneel.
Lance Armstrong hopefully setting up #TwitterRide in AZ.
Now, I know I’m no Fatty Cyclist. I don’t have the social and financial pull that some of these fans have that would actually get me invited down to camp. But gosh dang it, I’m a twitter user, I’m a huge Lance fan, and I’m a huge Team RadioShack fan. Shoot! I’m even a former Nike employee. Lance, at one point we worked for the same employer. We both don the Swoosh! We have both reaped the seeds sown by Steve Prefontaine.
(And while I’m thinking about it, I tweeted you, Lance, last week about any possible return of the consumer line of Nike Cycling. Do you know how hard it is to find good Nike Cycling products on eBay these days in good condition? Everything is at least 2 years old. Luckily, however, I just recently was able to get a brand new pair of 10//2 cycling shorts. I’m pumped about those.)
Lance Amrstrong on a #TwitterRide
Getting back on track…or Trek! Lance, AZ needs a #TwitterRide before you leave back to Austin…or Colorado…or where ever you’re going next. And if you can’t make it up to the Phoenix area, we can do it down in Tucson. I was just down there for El Tour de Tucson. I’m confident those roads will remember me. Just gotta give me enough time to ditch work, go grab my bike from home and make it back down to Tucson. Two and a half hours should be enough. You give me at least 2.5 hours, and I’ll be there. Rain or shine. Rest assured, I’ll hold up my end of the deal.
Let’s go, Lance. Let’s #TwitterRide!
Some day this will be me!
***UPDATE***
WHOA!!! Stop the press! Stop the press!
Upon further investigation, I have just learned from Team RadioShack’s official website that the team’s training camp is taking place in Scottsdale this year. Is this for real? This changes everything! Google Maps now has @lancearmstrong at within 30 miles of my current location. Lance, if you’re listening, now I only need 1.5 hours to go get my bike and get back up to Scottsdale. Something around midday would actually be helpful. That way I’m not battling traffic on the 101 to get up there or on the way back. Much appreciated!
If you’re in Scottsdale, Lance, I have to assume you’re riding up on the Beeline and around Bush Hwy. If you’re not, you should. It’s pretty. Alright, Lance. I’m waiting. Just tweet me and all of Twitter back and let me know when we’re doing this…
Ok, Qatar?!? Really?!? How in the world does Qatar beat out the USA as the appointed host nation for the 2002 World Cup? I don’t even know where Qatar is. Hold on, let me Google it……………………………………………….Ok, found it! Ok, maybe I’m wrong. It appears to only be a stone’s throw away from hot vacation spots such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. I hear those are great tourist destinations in the summer time.
I mean, c’mon! Is soccer even a sport in Qatar? There’s no way that 64 games are going to be played in a country of that size. Am I missing that some of these games will have to be played in surrounding nations? Is that the case? Iran perhaps? I hear they love Americans!
It’s perplexing to me that FIFA would opt to not go with the United States in this instance. Forget the fact that we already had a Cup in ’92. Let’s start with the infrastructure. We have some of the most state-of-the-art stadiums in the world. The average temperature of our host cities combined is still in the double digits. And lets talk accommodations – travel, housing and food. I think the TSA will get things figured out by then. I also think a country the size of Connecticut might have problems hosting 31 nations and their respective fans over the span of 30 days. And now let’s just be honest. Do we really know what the one war-stricken corner of the world is going to be like in the next 12 years?
I mean, does Qatar even have a national team. Ok, ok. They do. I just Googled it again actually, so I’m trusting Wikipedia on this one. But they have never even qualified for a World Cup. And I’m willing to bet that they won’t be qualifying for 2014 or 2018 either. Maybe prior qualification should be requisite to the bidding process. It’s like “Hey, we don’t really care about this sport. Our excuse for a national team isn’t even good. We’re obviously not suited to host one of the most important and prominent sporting events the world has ever seen. Really, all we care about is the commerce that this event will bring in to our country. We’re not so concerned about growing the sport of rugby………..soccer. We mean soccer! Bring the World’s Cup to Qatar. I mean the World Cup!”
Now I’m not letting Sepp Blatter off the hook either. For all you less-educated soccer fans, this guy makes Bud Selig look like THE greatest sports commissioner to ever live and MLB look like its currently THE most well run sporting organization in the history of our country. Instant replay? You would think Bud Selig invented it! FIFA’s pooling system makes the BCS look like a gift from heaven. The World Cup earlier this year saw more ultra-controversial calls go completely unreviewed, altering not only the outcomes of games, but the advancements of teams to the next round. Even in the midst of this controversy, Mr. Blatter insisted that instant replay would play no part of future tournaments. Let’s just say that public relations or tact isn’t really in his arsenal. Neither is the idea of progression. Or humanity!
The only way this incendiary fire will be quenched within me is if the United States meets Qatar in any of the knock out stages of the tournament. On their field. In their backyard. In their kitchen. And Sam’s Army dominates, demoralizes and embarrasses their national team….before halftime.
Ok, so I slacked off a bit after getting this blog up and going. It happens to everybody. You sign up. You’re all excited and pumped to type everything out and give it to the world to see. You keep up on your posts every few days or so. And then….nothing. All of a sudden you miss a day. Then another. Now it’s been a week. Now a month. You started off so well, but posting 5 times never turned into a habit
Well I can’t go back now and change any of it, so for starters I’ll give you a few links to catch up on. First is my recap of El Tour de Tucson. This is a 109 mile bike race and happened to by my first century ride.
I work for a pest control company in AZ, so if I’m not talking or thinking about my next ride, or the 2011 Team RadioShack roster, I’m blogging and thinking about pest control. Ants, Spiders, Roaches. Even the famed scorpion. We love our little critters…..right up until we blast them dead.
As far as cycling goes, I probably won’t be talking a whole lot about it right now. For one, I myself am taking a little break from all the riding, hopefully to get back in the gym for lots of reconditioning. And two, pro cycling is currently in the off-season, so there’s not much to talk about anyways.
So what can we expect from SteveOnTheBike for the next several months? Definitely the NBA. A little bit of college sports. Maybe the NFL by the time the playoffs roll around. And of course a couple other odds and ends along the way.
Oh. Almost forgot. I wanted to share a post from one of our San Antonio pest pages about a talking tree. No joke!
So, like I’ve mentioned before, I work in the pest control industry. No, I’m not the one out doing service calls at the houses. I’m tucked away in a little office with not even as much as a sign on the door with the company name. I work with with a bunch of dudes, so our office is pretty non-glamorous, a little scattered and pretty informal. Most days I come in here with my Nike Jordan shorts and a t-shirt.
Aside from from 4 or 5 worker buddies, we have an aquarium full of scorpions. 27 to be exact! And as of yesterday we dropped in a smaller sized container with a black widow and it’s 200 nearly born youngins. The baby widows are really, really small. In fact, they can easily slip threw the vents in the top of the container, which they’ve already begun to do. Working here I’ve come in pretty close contact to lots of little, creepy crawlers. But something about having all these scorpions and spiders in one container on our web coder’s desk started to creep me out. It was that sensation of just by being near all of it, you start to feel like something is on you for the rest of the day. I was even scratching around my body last night after I got home.
It finally hit me why I was itching and scratching so much last night. It wasn’t the 27 scorpions all living together in the same place. Or the additional 200 plus black widows. Or the fact that most of the black widows are small enough to escape. Or the fact that a few probably have without us catching them, and now we have baby widows living somewhere in our very own office. Nope. One of that.
I have actually been itching and needing to scratch for one Specialized Roubaix Elite Compact in all white. Apparently it’s on its way and was either suppose to get here today or hopefully tomorrow. I still have an hour and 10 minutes before the store closes tonight, so I’m still holding out hope that they’ll call me before then. I’m tempted to even call those guys up and ask them if they have a tracking number I can have so I can monitor its arrival to the store. Maybe I’ll stew on that one for another hour or so…
Yesterday was a big day for me, as I would imagine it would be for any cyclist. Thanks to help and support of my wife, the guys down at Global Bikes (Gilberet, AZ), and the 2010 close-out specials, I officially bought a BRAND NEW bike. Oh man, it was exciting! It was like buying a brand new car. They didn’t have that exact model in my size in the store, so they had to order it. It should be here by the end of this coming business week. And you can bet I’ll be throwing up pics and videos of that. For now, here’s a stock photo of my new Specialized Roubaix Elite Compact:
Specialized Roubaix Elite Compact
Now I considered going with the Elite Triple, so I’d have the infamous “granny gear”, but I figured “I can’t be showing up with a “granny gear” anymore, especially on a new bike that I had complete control over whether it had it or not. (My current bike is an Allez Sport Triple, but I bought it for 200 bones off a buddy of mine, so it is what it is.) I figured being as young as I am a triple gear isn’t something that you should be showing up with. A hand pump being another.
At any rate, it’ll be here later this coming week. And yeah, I took the all white…’cause it was the only color left. Oh! I also changed the cleats on my new shoes. I found a pair of hard to find Nike Altea shoes off Craigslist a few weeks ago. Like I’ve mentioned, I’m a former Nike Employee, and huge Nike fan, so there was no way I could pass on these for the price he wanted. I’ve wanted a pair like this for a really long time, so with new shoes and a bike on its way, it all seems to be taking shape for the next long time.
So if you’re a Lance Armstrong/Livestrong/cycling/twitter/Nike fan, you might know that Lance Armstrong (a god in my book) is a big social media guy. He has a facebook account, twitter account, a truck load of YouTube videos, not to mention a repeat of all those accounts in collaboration with his many sponsors and/or ventures. To be quite honest, it’s pretty dang cool how accessible he makes himself to us common folk. Take this video for example. Here you have a big-shot, worldwide icon, taking time to play “college student” for the afternoon with a group of buddies. This is straight from the streets.
Anyways, the title of this post is “#TwitterRide in AZ”. What exactly is a #TwitterRide? Well, a #TwitterRide can happen at any moment. It can also happen anywhere. That’s the glory of it. You never know when or where a #TwitterRide will strike. In fact, one happened just yesterday across the country in Vermont. I believe one struck a month or two ago back in Wisconsin. A #TwitterRide is when @lancearmstrong decides he wants to go on a ride with as many strangers as he can get to show up with a bike and helmet. He’ll tweet in the morning “Hey, how about a ride at X location at X:00 pm?” And that’s it! Now you can imagine that with 2.6 million followers, that tweet is gonna spread like wild fire. And sure enough, more than several hundreds (sometimes thousands) of riders will show up at that X location, at that X time and go on a ride with the one and only Lance Freaking Armstrong.
Sometimes he will ask where the next #TwitterRide should be. And of course, everyone blurts outs locations across the world. But I’m gonna take this up a notch. And if this isn’t a enough, I’ll take it to the next level. And then I’ll keep going, and going, until the man himself, @lancearmstrong, finds himself doing a #TwitterRide here in the East Valley of Arizona. I’ll even let him pick the route. I’ll even bring the @Gatorade. Heck, I’ll even pick him up from the airport if he needs a ride. But as heaven as my witness, mark my words Lance, you will do a #TwitterRide in Arizona.
Ok, sorry, it’s been a while since I was here last. The fam and I took a week-long vacation to go to Southern California (where I was born and raised) and hit up Disneyland and see a couple old friends. After a little rain, the trip turned out to be a blast.
Well, before the trip I hit 60 miles. That was the furthest I’ve ever been on a bike. I almost made it the whole way without any complications, actually feeling better than I thought, but with about 3 miles to go we pulled up to a stop sign. At that moment the exhaustion and fatigue set it. I noticed I was about to stop right next to a pile of sand and debris and thought “Oh, I don’t want to put my foot in that!” At that point my bike was pretty much stopped, and before I knew it I was tipping in the opposite direction. No real serious damage to me or the bike. Although, a couple of teeth from the chainring found their way into the back of my leg. Again, nothing major.
And now that I’m back from CA, someway, somehow, I managed to throw my back out. So I’ve been poppin’ the Tylenol for the past few days and hoping to feel better ASAP so I can get back on the bike and logging in miles. Also, my Nike Altea shoes should be waiting in the mail when I get home. I found them on a Craigslist post in WA a few weeks ago and offered to pay shipping. I used to work for Nike and I’m a HUUUGE Nike addict, so I jumped on these shoes which are top-notch, but now discontinued.
Hello everybody. My name is Steve. I just got into cycling about 6 months ago and just recently decided to register for the Tour de Tucson at the end of November. I figured I would go ahead and chronicle the weeks leading up to the big event and maybe hit a few other topics along the way. I’m a big sports fan, so I’ll definitely be hitting on that. I also work for a local pest control company managing our paid online advertisements and our social media accounts. (So if you have a pest control question, feel free to ask.)
On to the daily minutes… I got back on the bike this morning after almost a full week off. Last Saturday I blew a hole right threw the top of my back tire, so it took a couple days before I could get a new tire, couple new tubs, etc. and get ‘ol Faithful up and going. And then the past few days I would just flat out tired and couldn’t wake up in the mornings. So I got back out this morning for a quick ride. I haven’t measured yet, but I think it was around 18 or so. I’m doing 45 tomorrow, so I didn’t wanna ruin myself before that.
*Sidenote: We just spent the last 15 minutes in the office playing with one of our resident scorpions. My boss finally decided to pick it up by its tail. As soon as we chop the footage up, I’ll post it up here.
Boom!
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