Thanksgiving

Dave says: It has been a busy semester and I haven't written a blog for awhile. Fortunately the semester will be over in 2 weeks and I'll have a month to recover. Right now I have a few papers and tests coming up. I'm also working on some exciting research which fills up the rest of my time at school. Alisha has already started training for next season and I've been doing my best to get some riding in as well.

The only day of the break that wasn't crammed full of stuff was Thanksgiving itself. Alisha and I rode to Saddlebrooke with Alex, Doug, and Tulio on a Thanksgiving day that was a bit cool by Arizona standards but warm enough to make all the cyclists in SLC jealous. We had Thanksgiving at my grandparents' house with my mom and the kids as well as Christine and her family.

On Friday, we met the Toussaints for breakfast at Einsteins. Next, we worked out some of the details with the short sale that my parents are trying to purchase here (hopefully more details to follow soon), and went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. I find it unfortunate that all the "bad guys" in this movie are extremely powerful while the "good guys" are a bunch of kids who spend most of their time hiding in the woods and arguing amongst themselves. For dinner, Alex and I went to see our old friend Clay. I hadn't seen him for several years and he is climbing up the corporate ladder at Exxon. Even after a decade, we all still seem to have a lot in common. Clay's mom made some fancy pizzas, we also saw Clay's younger sister Amanda who we used to torture, and we all watched Arizona lose at football to No. 1 ranked Oregon.

Saturday began with a leisurely bike ride but as soon as we got home it was time to travel up to Phoenix. We went to the Mesa Temple with my family and did some babysitting for Christine. We drove back late and slept in this morning. After a windy bike ride and an afternoon of church, it's back to homework and preparing for the coming week. I can hardly wait for Christmas break.

SRAM Commercial Bloopers

SRAM - The Bloopers from Jim Fryer/BrakeThrough Media on Vimeo.

Alisha says: Here are the bloopers from the SRAM commercial. It's amazing how hard it was to say the line "I'm Alisha Welsh from Peanut Butter and Co./Twenty12 and I chose SRAM". Quite a few of my team mates made the bloopers, I make a great face around the 7:40 mark.

Episode 2 - The Heat Is On

The Heat is On - Ep 2 "Building Champions" from Jim Fryer/BrakeThrough Media on Vimeo.

You can catch me for one split second in this episode at minute 1:29 :)

Visit Home

Fishing at Navajo

Brody in his monkey Halloween costume playing the penguin computer game

Homemade doughnuts for the party

The sheep making their way down Main Street

Alisha says: Last week I flew to Cedar to visit my family. There is just something fun about returning to the place where you grew up. We started the week out with a trip to the St. George Temple. Tuesday we went fishing at Navajo Lake and gathered some firewood for the fireplace that my parents had just installed in their home. It was really cold but we still caught two small trout.

Halloween seemed to last all weekend as it started on Friday with a Halloween party that my little sister planned. My Mom, Mandy and I made homemade doughnuts and two different kinds of chili while Shane made dry ice root beer. Several of my cousins came and brought their children. Saturday we went to the Livestock Festival Parade. The livestock route to bring the animals off the mountain for the winter goes right down main street so they turn it into a parade. It was actually very entertaining watching them herd a couple thousand sheep down the road. That night we took Brody trick-or-treating and to a carnival.

I had a ton of fun playing with my nephew Brody. He is a crazy active two year old. He pronounces my name "She-sha". He loves me to chase him and run so all week I heard Shesha run, Shesha run, which meant chase me. He could probably run at least a quarter of a mile without stopping. I also taught him how to play some games on the computer. His favorite was the penguin game so I also heard Shesha penguin, which meant he wanted to play the penguin game. His favorite movie right now is How to Train Your Dragon so I think we watched that about seven times.

I love hanging out with my family and ended up seeing and visiting many friends including my Coaches from high school and college as well. I was taking the week off the bike before starting up training again so instead I went on a couple of my favorite runs from high school and college. It was nice and cool while I was there but no snow as Dave was hoping for so that I would want to return to Arizona sooner. It was such a fun trip. I love my family so much!!

Yard Work

Dave says: The off season is here and we finally had a Saturday without anything major going on. This week was fall clean up in the neighborhood so Alisha and my grandparents spent most of their days doing yard work. My grandpa was climbing up ladders and my grandma was up on the roof of the pool house sawing dead branches. I pitched in on Saturday and we generated a giant pile of branches in the front yard.

Alisha and I took a trip out to Agua Caliente which is a cool little oasis on the outskirts of Tucson. There is a big pond with a natural hot springs and lots of palm trees. We also rode up Mt. Lemmon to Bear Canyon with some of her cycling friends. The weather has finally cooled off a bit and we are even wearing arm warmers on our morning rides.

Last weekend we drove up to Phoenix for a crit. It was still crazy-hot and when Alisha's race went off it was 103 degrees outside. It was a small turn out but she did well to win on a really twisty course with some tight corners.

On the way to the race, we blew a back tire out on the freeway. It was a warm tire change to complete right on the freeway in downtown Phoenix. The rim had rusted to the lug nuts a bit and I had to give it a roundhouse kick Napoleon Dynamite style to get it off. We were laughing about that for a bit. You never know when leaving early for a race will pay off (or when you'll need to bust out a little Rex-kwando). Maybe I should have saved a bit more energy for the race though because I was overheated and half dead on the race course. For me, it was a good time to concede that the off season has arrived.

We drove on the wussy donut tire to Christine's and spent the night. We had fun with Kaylee and Rachel who have decided that they like their weird uncle after all. After watching the Sunday morning session of General Conference, we got a new rear tire and headed home.

Pegasus

Alisha says: This past weekend Dave and I competed in the Arizona State Hillclimb Championships up Mt. Graham. We enjoyed great company for the trip as we carpooled with Doug and Roberta. The 20 mile climb with 6000 vertical feet was awesome. We started out in the hot valley with the mountain looming in the backgroud. It was really hot for the first half of the race, I even took a couple of waterbottles from spectators and dumped them on me. After about halfway we went into the clouds and the wind picked up which really cooled things down. It was actually really cold at the finish and we were thankful for Roberta driving to the top so that we didn't have to ride down.

My version of the race went something like this. It was a mass start so we all started at the same time. After a couple of miles there was a split in the field with the fastest guys up front. I just missed it and ended up leading the second group for a little bit. Eventually we started to catch and pass the guys who had gone too deep and blew up. I got with a good group of four guys and was happy to sit on for as long as I could. At one point I passed Dave (he decided to go big at the start and was paying for it) and was in front of him for a couple of miles, then he and one other guy caught back up to me. This was awesome because I knew there was some flat/downhill sections towards the end that I wanted to have a wheel to follow through.

I was the top female finisher in 1:43.55. Dave was fourth in his category and Doug came within a minute of his goal to break two hours. The trophy I received was one of the more unique ones; a winged horse named Silver Lining. If we had a mantel Dave says that he would keep it on the mantel to remind us of our good time at Mt. Graham.

Passed

Dave, Alex, Elizabeth & Thor hiking on Mt. Lemmon

Alisha says: Big news!! Dave passed the Utah Bar Exam! He spent so much time studying for this test so he was very relieved to see that all of his hard work paid off. I am very proud of his big accomplishment. He is such a smarty pants!

We'll we've gotten a little behind on our blogging so this is going to be a quick update of the last few weeks.
-We hiked Box Camp up Mt. Lemmon on Labor Day with Alex and Elizabeth. It was really nice to be up in the mountains where it was a bit cooler. We got rained on but luckily it didn't start pouring until just as we were getting back to the car.
-I raced a 40K flat time trial near Casa Grande.
-I got a church calling to work with the young women (Mia Maids).
-Tom, Christine and her girls came to visit us for the weekend. We spent most of our time looking at houses. We saw some pretty crazy houses along with a couple of good ones.
-Dave and I both raced the Kitt Peak time trial. It was an 11.6 mile climb with 3400 ft. elevation gain. I finished first and Dave was second. That sounds like I beat Dave but I didn't. That was our places in our categories.
-Dave is getting a paper published in the University of New Hampshire Law Review.