On Sunday I rode the shortest distance of the MTB Marathon series in Złoty Stok (Golden Slope). Truth be told it was also my very first time on a mountain bike this year. Somehow between snow on the ground till April and riding my motorcycle I managed to forget about my Marin bike. But my boss keeps me in check with constant reminders of “Are you riding or hiding?”. In a way he bullied me into riding.

Here’s a short film I put together from the event, mostly GOPro material.

Out of shape and out of practice, getting through 18km’s wasn’t exactly easy especially considering the first half was a constant fire road uphill. And then just when I thought I was done walking the bike up, I had to walk it back down as it was way to steep for me to even considering riding. The event seemed to be well organized and there was a pretty good biker turn out. It’s still embarrassing to be getting passed by dudes who did twice the distance and only left fifteen minutes earlier, but I treated this ride more like a simple bike outing than a marathon. I did however finish third, again. haha. Third counting from the end of the list. Need to ride more this season. Below are a few photos from the event, the thing about being a photojournalist of sort is that I’m always the one taking photos. No photo of me this time.

Now I’m not that huge of a cross fan, and this being a second post on motocross in as many days in strictly coincidental. To me a day a the track simply meant a cool ride on a Sunday morning. Kacze Doły (Duck Holes) motocross track is located 120km north of Wrocław near the city of Wschowa. It would be my furthest ride yet, and it was a learning experience fo sure. 

I will be the first to admit that a supermoto bike is a shit load of fun around a city. I will also however admit that anything outside of it, on a long stretch going anything above 120km/h is just plain tiring and no fun at all. I know that now, and for now it this bike will do fine. But between worrying about running out of gas and feeling like a human parachute I am this much wiser for the purchase of my next motorcycle.

It took me about an hour and half to get to the track. It was a little funny parking my bike next to all the cross motorcycles. My FMX was born of a cross bike, but sitting next to true cross it felt oddly out of place with its mirrors, street tires, license plate and all. Mariusz offered me his XRF450 for a spin around the track but I wasn’t feeling like making a fool of myself in public just yet. I will gladly take him up on his offer one day but I need to try a dirt track with no witnesses first, or just man up but with better gear than jeans and a close face helmet.

At one point I did consider off-road tires for the FMX and found this photo online. But I don’t think it would be a good idea at all knowing now how the bike handles.

Here are a few photos from the day.

Except for the sound. That was nowhere near the noise level one is used to at a cross event. I’ve been to a few cross races, the familiar “waaaaaamp” was nowhere to be heard, and to me that took the soul right out of this motocross race. Instead, all you heard was the unwinding of an electric motor and a funny clunk every time a motorcycle landed, like something was just not right. That was of course the rear shock and the noise of the heavy bike simply landing, but since everything’s dead silent, you heard that instead.

Actually, it all sounded like an electric off-road remote control car race. I’ve done a few years of that and it all sounded too familiar. Close your eyes and instead of a person on a bike you can imagine a Team Associated RC10T2 truck or a Schumacher Cat2000 which is what I used to race.

The track seemed to be we well prepared and a lot of fun for the riders, but there wasn’t much space for spectators and we were all forced to stand on a large dune with limited track viewing angle. This could be improved.

Between heats, everyone followed riders back to their pits where battery exchange took place. Now that’s the future; bang-bang, battery swap done, and back to the race you go. Except for the physical weight of the battery, the swap seemed pretty painless.

The entire thing seemed pretty KTM driven. There were a few Swiss made Quantya bikes on site, but they just stood there for show with no actual representation. Unlike KTM which everyone rode, and who showed up with a big orange KTM truck…

Final thought: while this has to be the future, it lacks the fun factor of a regular gas-powered cross event. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about it was just a little boring-ish to me. I guess I just want my “waaaaaamp”!

Now there’s something to be said about Tesla Roadster racing; it’s quiet! To be honest I felt that a ZERO DS electric motorcycle taking off made more noise, cooler noise, than the Roadster. The DS taking off sound a little like a small jet engine unwinding, the coolest sound ever. While the Roadster just sounds fast, but doesn’t quite catch the ear. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but cool factor considered, and electric is all about the cool factor, DS does a better job.

Racing around the track all you heard was a quiet ‘wooosh’ when cars passed you by, quite a change from the MotoGP-like racing that took place a day earlier.

While the Roadsters were out casually racing the Model S took in all the glory by simply being parked nearby. Inside the Model S seems like a luxury living room, white leather big screen and all, from the outside it simply looks like a well made luxury car. Unlike the Fisker Karma I saw not too long ago which just looks ridiculously futuristic and sexy.

I saw the Model S go around the track a few times, but that’s just a family sedan going around a track, not much else to say about that.

Of course we entered our fleet of scooters into the competition but we did come up with one little surprise scooter seen above. Dubbed GO! Fast, it is a total prototype that’s got very impressive specs and the power to put a smile on anyones face.

I will write about the event in more detail at a later date, but I did want to post a few photos today as I took so many and wanted to show off some right away Like this Tesla Model S all the way from Florida!

A few of us took a photo with Maja, naturally I provided a scooter for her to try out around the parking lot. I can’t officially say if she liked it or not, some sponsor bureaucracy stuff, but I’ll let my photos speak for themselves.

She’s a very cool and down to earth person, very easy to talk to, and we all wish her all the best in future races. Here are a few photos from her Facebook page. Cool as person, an MTB champion, and a good looking redhead? What a day!

I’m gonna repeat myself saying it, but ripping through the Polish countryside on a Sunday morning is fun! This time I noticed more farm equipment on the road, but that’s not a problem to pass. I stopped by a few places to take photos, I was in no hurry and felt like ‘smelling the roses’ and enjoy a moto day.

Getting to the lake was pretty easy as I remembered the way exactly from the kayaking trip, but I managed to get lost wanting to ride all the way around the reservoir. Always keeping the lake on my right, and always making right hand turns, somehow managed to get me elsewhere. Nothing a quick look at Google Maps couldn’t solve, and I got to ride over more interesting terrain than just smooth (by Polish standards) asphalt. I passed a couple of towns where people were very surprised to see me, as in “no one ever comes here” haha.

As I mentioned earlier, there were quite a lot of people around. Biking, jogging, fishing, some just drinking beer on the side of the road. I got a scare when one tipsy big dude walked up to me and wanted to see photos I had taken on my camera. I’m not sure which way that could have gone, me fighting him with my helmet on or me running away leaving behind my motorcycle with a key in the ignition, but luckily his buddies called him back and left altogether. Hadn’t felt so threatened in a long time and I’m gonna think twice before picking a place to stop that’s for certain.

The dam itself was pretty cool to see, I’ve never been to it before. It’s rather small, but once I stood at the top and felt the water rushing beneath me I couldn’t help but feel very little in the scheme of things. I met a couple of motorcyclists at the top of the embankment, on their motorcycles, so I politely asked how the hell they got up there, this is how the conversation went:

Me: Hey, isn’t it illegal to ride on top of this dam?
Them: There’s no sign saying this.
Me: Well, there is a gate…
Them: Yeah
Me: And it’s locked, I was just there.
Them: Yeah… (laughter)

They looked to be local and they looked to be checking the water level of the lake. Maybe they’re checking for potential flood danger… but I still didn’t care for them riding where no riding was meant.
In either case it was a good sunny day out on the Funmoto.

A couple years later I now make sure that valve always says ON, yet when the bike started choking at around the 130km mark I was a little surprised. Of course the reserve got me to a fuel station but 130kms didn’t feel right at all. So I checked online…and sure enough that’s exactly what I should be getting.

I found this site called Fuelly.com, I’ve never heard of it before and never really needed it either. But that’s where I found another FMX owner in Greece who’s been logging fuel ups for the past 3,000kms and basically proved to me that I’m just about average on my fuel consumption.

This information I could have figured out before ever buying the bike of course, I knew of the 11liter tank and I knew that Honda listed 6.5liters/100km as average fuel consumption. A little math and this wouldn’t have been so eye opening for me now. Perhaps I was just wishful thinking that I’d get something better, I don’t know. The bike is a shit load of fun around the city and just beyond it on the Polish countryside, but I was semi-hoping to do a long distance ride here and there, like the Odessa trip I had mentioned. However 1,400kms with a fuel stop every 140kms is out of the question…I think.

Ideas? Hmm… a used Honda Transalp for the 2014 season? Trade in the Funmoto at the end of this year? Get a second bike? We’ll see how this season goes, after all, it just started.

Here’s my beginning of Fuelly.com gas consumption tracking. I’ve only logged in two fuel ups so far, but I’ll keep track from now on.

My first thought just after showing up at the event was “damn I’m old”. To me it seemed as though the sold out theater in which the talks took place was filled to brim with university youth. Those days have long waved bye-bye to me. Don’t get me wrong, I can totally hang with the kids, except that I can’t, cause when I wanted to talk to someone about using the practices discussed in a particular talk the kids around me had no idea what a day spent at a full time job felt like. Maybe that was just me. The truth is that going alone to an eight hour talk with multiple breaks and a long lunch feels like crap. Somehow I couldn’t catch the vibe, find people to talk to… so I just left and watched the rest on a live-feed web cast back home. Turns out I should have done that to begin with.

Out of 16 scheduled appearances two were a musical number, one was a magic show, and one was a no-show altogether. The conference started off with a bang; there was a young man talking about how his video game playing turned into a riddle website with millions of hits. His presentation was just on the edge of creepy while keeping you interested and wanting for more. His website screenshots gave me goosebumps but everything made sense when he explained why things were the way they were. It was cool.

Presentation fallowing that was given by a woman who really wanted you to draw out everything you did at work. To draw out your plans, your daily schedule, your tasks, draw draw draw! It was a great talk, I learned a lot and really wanted to try the stuff she spoke off back in the office…except for the fact that she had microphone trouble throughout her entire speech and that was pretty much all I remembered at the end. That productivity at work begins with properly mounting your ear-mounted microphone. Sorry.

I did buy a CD from a musician Joao de Sousa after he played and sang four songs, each in a different language: Portugese, Spanish, English, and Polish. There was a woman of Jewish descent talking of preserving history, there was a double amputee teenager who spoke how he was motivated by a complete stranger to become the youngest person to travel to both the North and the South Pole. That’s right, a Pole at the Pole! Geocaching, woman stereotype in the mass media, how to dream and make money off of magic tricks… it was all there.

I felt that there was no connection at all between the divided topic (hero state of mind, superpowers, etc.) and the talks given in that slot. At one point I got a little irritated of the guy giving a talk on “Being an Expert” when couldn’t properly say the word “expertise” in English and kept mispronouncing it so badly even the youth around me was whispering the correct pronunciation. It was an interesting talk, I just couldn’t get past the broken English it was given in. That is of course my own opinion.

Overall the conference was a good experience, I enjoyed hearing the things I heard and give mad props to all those who have the cajones to go up and talk about their stuff in front of hundreds of strangers. But I do feel there was something missing and I just can’t quite put my finger on what it was. Maybe it’s the fact that on TED.com I can play and listen to whatever talk I want and if I don’t like it I can simply close the window. Here, when I was sort of bored (along with everyone else) of a talk, you still had to sit through the rest of it.

Am I glad I went? Yes I am. Will I go again? If they have a web feed… probably not. But I did learn a thing or two, for that I believe the conference has served its purpose.

]]> http://polvadis.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/tedx-wroclaw-my-thoughts/feed/ 1 polvadis 20130413_082059#2 20130413_113923 20130413_112122 http://polvadis.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/karma/ http://polvadis.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/karma/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:43:36 +0000 polvadis http://polvadis.wordpress.com/?p=6312 Continue reading →]]> Seeing a Fisker Karma in L.A. I probably wouldn’t even whip out my phone to snap a photo. I mean even Bieber has one!

But we don’t get too many toys like that in Poland, well, none at all actually, so when I saw this Karma on my current visit to Munich, Germany I had to take a closer look.

Parked just outside our bar for the night, was this beautiful pearl white Fisker Karma. Just sitting there in all its glory, charging from a standard wall outlet. My first impression was… this thing is HUGE! My second, it will take a week to charge from a regular 220v wall outlet. Size wise, this is not your standard sports car. It’s a sports family beast. It’s so big in fact it simply didn’t fit in the assigned parking spot while every other car fit in just fine. With 21″ wheels, solar panels built into the roof, this thing has a cool factor beyond anything I’ve  ever seen. This ain’t your family Prius, that’s for sure. I didn’t even enter the bar for a good 20 minutes once I saw it parked outside, and nothing keeps me away from a cold brew that long

The owner of the car is most likely the owner of the bar, too. We witnessed him a few hours later wrapping up the charge cable and all. I kind of thought one would get a more sophisticated charge cable recovery device for a cool $100k other than simply using your arm to wrap the cable around. “One day Slav” my boss said as we kept staring at this awesomeness of a machinery,  ”one day!”.

My trips to Munich are often short and filled with good work vibes. This time was no different. Got a lot done, discussed everything with the additional benefit of a human touch rather than a Skype conference, and then had a drink, or two, or three… with the people that make electric scootering so much fun.

Sure afterwards I felt just a little like that guy…

See you next time Munchen!

Ohh, and by the way, Munich is full of cool cars. This thing sits parked in a dealership just steps away from our company headquarters. I will visit them on my next stay and write it up.