A picture's worth a thousand words?  You be the judge.  It's rare that someone has a camera trained on you right when you're doing something truly impressive.  More often than not the shutter clicks on me when I'm fiercely hanging on to DFL at the end of the first parade loop in the sport race, or perhaps someone will freeze frame me flailing in the middle of T1 when I'm hypoxic and can't remember how clipless pedals work.  Enough of that.  In the last eight years or so my friends and I have taken a few cool looking

Photos

Most of these I took, but a few key ones were taken by friends and family.  My brother-in-law is quite an accomplished photographer, and if you like dance, architecture, woodworking, interesting form or color, or perhaps you're getting married somewhere within a stone's throw of the Bay Area and need someone to take pictures of your wedding you should look him up.  His website is www.barakyedidia.com and you can tell which photos are his by the faint "Barak Yedidia" script in the corners of the shot.  You can also tell because his photos tend to be a whole order of magnitude better than any of the others as far as composition, color and overall execution go.  Take a gander, see if you recognize anything/anyone/anywhere.

I think that my emotional attachment to mountain biking is encapsulated nicely in this shot taken by Kiersten Lo.  That's the major firebreak below the  Mt. Tom radio towers in Glendale.  Down below is the lovely San Fernando Valley.  Hey! I can see my house from here!

I particularly like this shot my brother in law Barak Yedidia took of me at the 1999 Sea Otter Classic.  I may have been barely crawling in to the finish after 19 miles of locking barends with the Sport Racers, but at least on film I LOOK like I'm going hell bent for leather.  And remember, it's not how you feel, it's how you look...

Damn, I look fast!

Take Benjamin Riggs with you on a bike ride.  If Ben can fling a spacecraft the size of a Volkswagon Beetle all the way to Mars and hit the target, he can find the way back to your car.  Plus, Ben took that weekend Wilderness First Aid Course, so when things go all pear-shaped and you discover you've got a manzanita branch sticking out of your midsection, Ben will have a vague idea of what to do about it.

Oh, and in case any of you were thinking cycling wasn't a contact sport, take a look and see what happens when you unhook both your wheels while 25 mph in a wet corner at the Catalina Triathlon.  Gravity is a harsh mistress.  I still have a couple of gravelly lines of asphalt tattooed into my thigh more than two years later.  I'm still waiting for my own Mountain Dew commercial though...

Yeah, I know those are my chonies.  Get over it.

And as long as we're showing off war wounds and talking about renegade mazanita branches...

But enough about my personal scarification rituals, if you ever wondered what was the most beautiful race course ever, take a look of the Fort Ord grounds just past the Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, CA.  My brother-in-law Barak took this one again.  I'm somewhere out there in the squiggly baggage train line of racers.  You can tell, I'm the tall one.