Introduction.

I have the feeling that writing a blog is a little bit like recording your voice and then playing it back to yourself later: it's mortifying, and you always sound like an idiot.

This is my first attempt at a blog, I've no idea what to write, and frankly I have no idea why anyone would want to read it, but here it is nonetheless. Soon, I'll be leaving Chicago to move to Caracas, Venezuela for a year, while my wife conducts her fieldwork. The blog will give me both something to do, because I don't yet speak Spanish, and an easy way to record the experience of moving to a different country. In the meantime, I'm going to post up a couple of race reports that I wrote but never got around to adding to my team's blog, and the usual bullshit like photos, videos, and wildly misguided opinion.



Since I doubt that anyone who doesn't know me will be reading this, I should probably dispense with the formalities in short order. I grew up in Raheny on the northside of Dublin, Ireland. I'm 32. I'm married to Amy, who is the best. Obviously. I'm studying for a Ph.D in anthropology at the University of Chicago. How I got into the U of C remains a mystery, and apparently a source of some consternation to my department. Feck them! My dissertation is about the recruitment of Fijians into the British Army. After Caracas, Amy and I go to Fiji for a year so that I can conduct my fieldwork. It's a tough life!

I ride for Team Pegasus, the preeminent hipster cycling team in the Midwest. We're the shit. For real. We compete on the track, the road, in cyclocross and in mountain biking. We go out there to have a good time, first and foremost, but we also like to win and even though we've only been around a year we have a growing reputation. Check out the team blog here. I ride track, and just finished my first season. I did pretty well, competing at Northbook, Kenosha and Hellyer velodromes, progressing from Cat5 to Cat4, and managing to finish in the top three at least once every race night, except for my last night of racing, which sucked.

That's all you need to know. Next, I'll post up a couple of race reports from the summer. Don't worry if this is all a boring load of oul' shite now, I'm sure it'll get funny and interesting once I'm strolling around Caracas like a lunatic, desperately trying to blend in even though I'll be the only person slathered with factor 45 sunblock...