So, those 5 obscure facts about myself. This is difficult, as there isn't much about myself that I don't tell anyone about. I asked my wife last night for help - she laughed.
So, I've dug around in my past and present to try and find something.
1) My earliest cycling memory has me as a kid racing in a neighborhood "crit" - being the non-competitive type that I am I tended to push pretty-hard in some of the corners. My dad, being the thrifty individual he was, and not seeing any value in spending hard-earned dollars on a "toy" went to the dump and salvaged a rusted out bike for me. It was a piece of garbage - literally and figuratively, but I'd hammer it out with the other kids regularly. One race I was hammering hard through a corner when the bike fell apart - completely. The frame literally came apart at the head tube and the forks folded. I got pretty bruised and cut-up, but I was so mad at my Dad for not buying me a real bike that I remember carrying all the pieces home, throwing 'em on the front step and storming through the house. My kids all of pretty good quality bikes now.
2) In my mother's house is a picture of me holding a string of fish. It's supposedly the first fish I ever caught - it's not. Every year we used to go down to Kalispell, Montana to go fishing during Canadian Thanksgiving. The salmon run fell during that time period, and the river was literally over-flowing with fish. The limit was 30 fish/day/person - my family and grandparents made 9 - and we'd break the limit every day. I grew up thinking everybody had smoked salmon! I never had tuna sandwhiches, alwasy salmon. You get the idea. Well, one year the run was late, and there weren't any fish to be caught. I was down fishing with some friends of my parents, everybody else had left and for the whole morning they'd caught about 6 fish. They put the fish on a string and told me to go tell my parents that I'd caught these fish. Mom was so proud she took a picture and had it framed. Mom knew nothing of it until just a couple of years ago when I was telling the story to a friend - and didn't realize Mom was standing behind me...
3) On a more serious note - if you don't know me in the "real" world you wouldn't know this - but I have the GREATEST WIFE IN THE WORLD! She's supportive and helpful in almost every way (though when it comes to weight loss she sometimes is a little devil - like last night when she brought home Chinese, "this is for me and the kids - you can have a shake...") I don't talk much about her on-line, but she really is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. She makes me want to be a better person. I was told growing up that I should try to marry "above" myself - I sure did that. How she puts up with my "ocd" tendencies constantly amazes me.
4) I long to kick SombraGato's butt on Triple Bypass next year. Hold it, I guess that's not something that is unknown. Oh well. I'm running out of ideas and this one works just fine. TBP is my motivation for everything I'm doing right now.
5) The final obscure fact of Rob01? While in college my best friend and I would ride our bikes everywhere. One night we had both been dumped by our current girlfriends and it was a "preference" dance. Small college town, when there was something going on socially at the college there was NOTHING going on anywhere else. So, we rode our bike around campus, up and down stairs, etc. That got boring and so I jokingly said, "let's go ride the stadium stairs". He said ok and we spent the next half hour at the top of the stairs with the following conversation:
"you ready?"
"yeah"
"ok, one, two, ... you sure you're ready?"
Until finally my buddy Dave went - and fell. I went and endoed... but then the challenge was on. After many falls we finally made it all the way to the bottom. Later we went back to get some pics of our antics - here they are:
and on the way back from that was when I met my wife (a whole other story.)
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