Nicole The GREAT

Thought ya'll should see what was posted on the Bates Athletics page yesterday about our beloved captain! I am lost without you all in my love. ~ABNER

LEWISTON, Maine -- For the second year in a row, Bates College junior Nicole Ritchie was named to the Pocock Division III All-America First Team, the College Rowing Coaches Association has announced.
Ritchie (East Dummerston, Vt.) led the Bates women's rowing team to the NCAA Women's Rowing Championships for the second year in a row. Bates competes with seven other Division III teams and two at-large eights at nationals this Friday and Saturday at Lake Natoma in Gold River, Calif., the home course of the University of California at Berkeley. Bates finished third at nationals in 2007 and is currently ranked No. 3 by the CRCA and US Rowing.
Selection criteria for earning CRCA All-America honors include strength of schedule, regular season record, end of season regatta results, nomination rank, coaches' comments and 2,000-meter erg score.
Ritchie is also a NESCAC All-Academic honoree and a member of the Bates Nordic skiing team, for which she has been elected captain for the 2008-09 season!!!!!!!!

I am Ironman

I arrived home just a few days ago after narrowly escaping the pink eye plague of Bates College.  So far I have only had one training experience that is deserving of a post... actually you can decide if it is worthy.  Yesterday, I was running a loop by my house, which usually takes me around an hour and a half to complete, but for some reason I was running a lot faster than I normally do.  Anyway, long story short I was approaching the top of a dirt road which heads straight down to my house when I decided to look at my watch and realized that I was running the loop almost 25 minutes faster than I normally do.  At the same time that I came to this realization, I remembered that there is a chain fence hanging across the road that I was getting onto.  I reflexively turned to my hurdling instincts, which I clearly did not have because I caught my back shin and fell flat on my face onto the dirt road.  Luckily there are probably something like 10 people who live within a mile radius of me so nobody saw this incident, but I was still pretty embarrassed and my shin is still swollen.  Later that night I went to the movie "Ironman" with a group of people including our alpine teammate, Megan Papineau, which is where I came up with the title for this post.

Otherwise I have been perfecting my cooking skills, which I will be needing later next month for my position as a co-cook for a camp.  My previous cooking experience is limited to middle school Home EC classes, but so far I have made banana muffins and tomorrow I will master the art of cooking lasagna.

Wish me luck - Moogs

also, I don't know why this post is all underlined... I couldn't figure it out

Pink Eye

Yo yo!!! So i have been reading the blog and everyone seems to be up to some really fun activities! I figured I would take the time to let you guys in on my life. So recently I have been diagnosed with Pink Eye. Allow me to set the scene for you guys. I was in new rand hanging out with the McClelland family. I was checking myself out in the mirror and I noticed that my eye looked a little red and had an excessive amount of "gunk" in the tear duct. So I obviously cleared the gunk out and showed Kir who came in for a quick visit. Kir is into that kind of thing......I think. After this I lay down on Megan's bed and smear my eye into her pillow. So then Abner came in and looked at my eye and thought just maybe that I had pink eye. I never thought that I could have it so we just kept chatting until i decided that we should just go and check it out. So all of us walk to the health center together which was mildly entertaining to the nurse...i think.  It was decided that I did in fact have pink eye and was given drops. Such a downer but i went on with my night gave Matt one too many butterfly kisses and he came down with pink eye. Anyway good luck to Nicole!!!!!!! And just some advice for all of you: don't give butterfly kisses and make sure no one farts on your pillow. Over and out-Ing  

I like to ride my bicycle

On memorial day, Sylvan and I decided to drive down to Kennebunkport, ME to take part in the Cape-Able Memorial Day Classic bike race. It was the first real road race for either of us (I have done two legs of a triathlon before), so our expectations and goals were all over the map. I have been riding a fair amount this summer, so I decided to be ambitious and sign up for the A race. Sylvan is relatively new to biking (this is his first summer ever riding), so he signed up for the B's in order to get a feel for riding in a pack and experimenting with tactics.

The race began at 4:00 PM with the A's going out first. The course was twenty eight miles and flat. It began with a two mile stretch that connected with a four mile loop that we did six times before heading back on the two mile stretch for a sprint finish. There was a tail wind heading out the two mile section which ultimately meant for a brutal headwind coming into the finish (this was not fun). On such a flat course, breaking away was nearly impossible. I found this out on the first four mile lap. I knew I was in a competitive field, but everyone was sticking in a huge group, so I tried to break off with two other guys who looked pretty good. Needless to say, this was an awful idea as it was only four miles into the race and my legs were already screaming with lactate. After the pack came screaming past us, I decided I would sit in for a while before trying the same stupid move a little later. I tried two more times with some bigger groups of guys, but it was too hard to gain any distance on the 30+ riders in the main pack. I stayed close enough to the front to watch a certified professional, Dan Vaillancourt, break off of the front with one other guy, and that was the last we would see of them until the finishing stretch. I stayed in essentially the same position until we headed back on the two mile finishing stretch. I tried to get into a good position heading into the last two hundred yards for the sprint. I saw a few guys take off from the front and when I moved out to the left side to sprint, my legs said "NO!", and the head wind gave me the big middle finger (I also suck at sprinting on a bike). I got passed by a few guys in the last little section, but finished anywhere from 10th-15th (I think), but haven't seen results yet.

Sylvan experienced similar events in his race. He tried to break off the front a few times, but realized it was nearly impossible. At one point, he and another guy made a move, and were riding extremely hard (hard enough to think they dropped their competitors), but turned around to see that the other races were sitting in their draft (a real pansy move). Sylvan says that he tried to sprint too soon on the finishing stretch, and eventually got passed by about five of the guys in his pack. His legs also told him "NO!" during the sprint. It is interesting that, while we raced in different races, we both experienced similar occurrences with cycling tactics and our bodily reactions.

We are quite sore today, but are taking the day off to go camping with Chewy the graduate, Abner, Ingrid, and Connor. Hope everyone is enjoying the nice weather. PIECE.

Bates Rowing in Sacramento

this blog thing is pretty sweet. I like the pictures.
Anyway, if anyone wants to check up on some racing at NCAA's you can check it out:
http://www.ncaa.com will be posting a webcast. For division three, heats are this Friday and finals are on Saturday.
It should be pretty exciting - Williams and Trinity have traded off winning the past few years, and at Easterns and New Englands this year. We are currently ranked third, but have had a couple injuries this week. We will see how it all shapes up!
-Nicole

Summer Plans for Sam EB

So some of you may know this, but for those who don't, in hopes of re-calibrating my Spanish to an Argentine accent and ditch my Spanish (as in: of Spain) lisp, I'm headed to Tierra del Fuego this summer.

The plan is to live and work with a guy name Marcelo Echazu, who owns a variety of ventures including a "centro invernal" or winter center in Valle de Tierra Mayor. There has been a lot of concern over the presence or absence of snow down there during the summer, but the way I see it, it can't be any more unpredictable than in Coastal Maine!

There's good news though, relayed to me by a guy named Matt Muir who leads trips down south. Behold---------->



I know I'm excited. Are you excited? Well, get excited.

Killin' It In Keene

There are no flat roads out of our driveway. Only UPs and ROLLERs. Gotta love it. Life has been great in Keene so far...some very sunny semi-warm days and some frigid days. Hova and I have been biking a lot (something that I just got into thanks to Dumpling's bike and some urging from friends). I love it...don't be surprised if Hova and I come back in the fall looking like two thigh-building freaks. Nothing super exciting from our neck of the woods quite yet though besides the gas prices, $3.99 right down the street. Hova and I are trying to conquer the 46-4600 foot Adirondacks this summer. We are hoping to get all of them by early August before I leave and we have 4 down so far (we need to get on our horses) and have climbed the second highest Algonquin with an eclectic mix. Bates, University of Utah, UNH, and SLU folk...and one soon-to-be Bobcat. Thats it for now. Miss y'all.

First Post

Hey Everyone,

So this is what posts will tend to look like! You can put pictures and videos in them, change the font color, add links, and generally do whatever you wanna do with the menu at the top of the posting page. Go nuts!

Oh, and if you don't like the way the colors look, we can change them.

-seb