These two friends, Ike Nicoll and Kristine Schaal, had me laughing this morning.  They are both competitive cyclists…very competitive cyclists.  When they began to compliment each other, it was also competitive.  They really could not stop trying to out-compliment each other.  I had to laugh, but they are both very accomplished and have a strong respect for each other as cyclists.  That is always good to see.

Ike hails from the Washington D.C. area, but he had some family in Indiana, so he went to college at Bucknell University in engineering.  In a somewhat circuitous professional career, he worked for IBM for eleven years and ended up in as a business manager in venture-backed health care.  

He first moved to Colorado in 1988 because he was a rock climber.  Then he took up cycling about twelve years ago.  He has been to national championship races as a road cyclist, a mountain biker and a cyclocross racer, finishing second recently in a long course mountain bike national championship in Maryland.  He has ridden Lookout 350 times in a year with a PR of 19:30.  He plans on riding the Break Epic six day mountain bike race that covers about 250 miles with 35.000 feet of climbing……that is, of course, if he completely recovers from the pulmonary embolism that might have done him in recently. 

OK. You are both right.  You are both “serious badasses” on bicycles.