The Tour of Utah Rocks!

You should all be very surprised and shocked that I am actually writing this. Yes, this is Matt making my first ever attempt at the blogging world. I guess though that this would be the most fitting post for me... So here we go. Prepare yourselves for bad grammar, punctuation, and "run on sentences."

As Christy has mentioned before, I am a big fan of cycling and was excited this past week that the Tour of Utah was happening. I went to two different stages and it was great!



The first stage of a stage race is often called the Prolouge and is a short time trial (each rider rides against the clock by themselves). This one was up by the capitol and it was awesome to see and be around so many other cycling fans.

This guy, won last years race. As you can see they get to wear all that cool spandex and the long helmets. They also have a solid rear wheel to cut down on aerodynamic drag (ask me about it if you want and I can give you a detailed answer on that.)

For those who missed going to the Prolouge, here are some videos. They get to start in "The Start House". Those of you who did watch the Tour De France, you might recognize the announcer voice is Bob Roll. I especially like the one in the "Start House" because he is riding my favorite brand of bike!


As you can see, it made me smile!! Gotta love the "five o'clock" mustache, eh?

Then on Saturday, we went to watch the end of the "Queen Stage" up Little Cottonwood Canyon. It started in Park City, over past Jordanelle, up Sundance, up the south side of the Point of the Mountain, then up Little Cottonwood.


It was very toasty up the canyon; so much so that we had to use Christy's silly "Eyore" umbrella.



The Canyon was crowded with all sorts of people, and there were a bunch of people trying to get up the canyon on their bikes before the racers got there.

Of course, I had to take a picture of my favorite team's car, Garmin Slipstream. (Best bike computer I have ever had.)


Here is the Floyd Landis, he won the Tour de France the year after the Lance Armstrong retired the first time, but was busted for cheating and had it taken away. But here his is on his comeback.

Isn't this such a pretty bike? Ah, the Pinarello Prince...

Here is the peleton (main group of riders) coming through. The crowd was really enthusiastic and were really getting into the whole race.

They were getting into it so much that some people were even "encouraging" some of the riders on their way up.

Here I am getting ready to "encourage" this guy up the hill. He rode by while asking "push"? I know how hard some of the climbs in Utah are, so of course I was going to "encourage" him on his way!


Hooray for the Tour of Utah!!!

So what does everyone think? Should i do this blogging stuff more often, or leave it up to Christy?

The lost living room

This weekend we went hiking with our friends, Rachael and Josh. They took us on this hike called the Living Room, which was supposed to overlook the Salt Lake Valley and have rocks that looked like tables and chairs and coffee tables and stuff. We took a picnic and had big plans to watch the sunset from the Living Room.

Well we never found it! But we still watched the sunset and had our picnic and had tons of fun. We think we know where we took a wrong turn, so we are going to try again soon. Besides the part where Josh was talking about mountain lions and scaring me death and Matt almost falling off a cliff, it was lots of fun!

I broke it!

So as part of this conference that I am working on we have this lesson where the students break wooden boards. They write their goals and ambitions on one side and then on the other side they write their fears and obstacles that are getting in the way of reaching their goals. And then they break through the board with their bare hands. It shows that they can break through their fears to reach their goals. Pretty cool.

Anyway we decided to have a practice session before we make the freshmen break these boards. You know...just to make sure that the boards are breakable. All my students (like 6 of them tried) were able to break the board just fine. And then I tried. And I failed. I could not break it. I tried multiple times with no luck. And my hand hurt for three days. One of my students kept bringing the board into my office every couple days and would say things like, "time to defeat the board..." and other things. Still, no success.

We even came up with an alternate way for the students to break the boards with their foot if they were weaklings like me and we talked about how we are going to console those who feel like failures if they can't break it. So maybe it was a good thing that I couldn't do it so we could prepare for stuff like that.

Anyway, yesterday I BROKE IT!!!!! With my hands! I'm not a weakling! Yay for me!

White trash event of the summer

On Saturday we finally made it to a demolition derby! We have been trying to go all summer, but you know how it goes...things come up. Anyway, we went with our friends, Tyler and Almarie, down to Spanish Fork to enjoy a great derby.

There was the usual...cars going up over the barracade, cars going on top of each other, big crashes, there were even 2 grudge matches and a powder puff round. There were no fights or any flipped cars. But there was a car fire...

Gotta love those firemen! The best part was that we were sitting next to this lady whose grandson was driving one of the derby cars. She was freaking out every time his car got hit. And she was missing some teeth. It was classic. I love the derby!

My new friend

This is my new friend. I'm LOVING it! My hot pink Camelbak water bottle is so great. I never could do the nalgene thing because I didn't like the screw-on tops...they were too hard to drink out of. And those ones with the weird straws were too hard to sip. So I just stuck to my plain old plastic bottled water bottles. But I was getting sick of that so I decided to try this blessed invention. Anyway, it's made out of non-cancer-causing materials, the straw is easy to sip through, and it doesn't leak at all. I've discovered that since I got my new friend I have been drinking 2-3 times more water during the day. I love it!

Tan grandes!

This is one of my favorite families from my mission in Argentina, the Tello family. They are so awesome! Anyway, they just sent me some pictures and the kids are so big I hardly recognize them. But I love them so much and teaching them was one of the greatest experiences of my life. At the end of my mission I was able to go to the temple with them and see them get sealed as a family. It was amazing. And I am so happy to know that they are still strong in the gospel.

My little Jazmin got baptized! She was 4 when I left. I miss them so much and just want to squeeze their cheeks they are so cute.

Mountain West

This weekend I took some of my students to a conference with all the student leaders from the different schools in the Mountain West. It was at the University of Utah this year. (I was hoping for San Diego State!) Anyway, it was really interesting to meet the students and advisors from these other schools. One of the purposes of this conference is to promote good sportsmanship between the schools. I really hope these student leaders will take that attitude back to their campuses and influence the students to have good sportsmanlike conduct. I think that athletics is a huge part of college life and that good sportsmanship is so important among rivals.

It was really fun to be able to put those rivalries aside for a weekend and unite together in a common purpose to work to acheive something like this that hopefully will carry through and have a greater impact.

I always enjoy learning about other universities and how they are structured and everything. I especially loved meeting the cadets from the Air Force Academy and learning more about what they do there. They rock! And I got to stay at the beautiful Fort Douglas. Good times.

All the way to the top

So most of you who know Matt know that he is VERY into cycling. He loves it! He even watches the whole Tour de France. He can tell when we pass a biker on the street what type of bike they are riding. It cracks me up! One of his favorite things to do is ride his bike up the canyons.

On Saturday I decided I would join him on his ride up Mill Creek Canyon. He said it is the least steep and shortest of all the canyons so I thought I'd give it a try. I told myself that if it got too hard I could always turn around and come back. Well, I made it the whole way! And it was so fun. It was very tough...9 miles of climbing....but I made it! The coming down the canyon part scared me to death though. Maybe next time I will have Matt come and pick me up at the top. :)