Week Wrap Up (10/18/10-10/24/10)

What's the best way to start a weekend? Pouring Goose Island at Wildcat Alley with the Spider monkey's! Perfect number of people, perfect number of taps, and a ton of fun people made for a super fun time! Thanks to Grace, Katie, Trent, Kristi, Rachel, Joe, and Tim for helping out - we all had an awesome time! I heard there was celebrating afterwards with chocolate martinis?? Only one more home game left!

The fun continued into the next day where some Spidermonkey's raced cross in Bartlett. It turned

out to be a beautiful day despite the bad weather forecasts. Congrats to Trent on his first cross race: "24th place, but the best part, besides from being able to remount my bike successfully (thanks to my hard practicing this week), was cause I got a twizzler, donut hole, and a dollar during my race!! Best day ever!!" Word on the street is that Trent is now looking for a cross bike...and huge congrats to Kristi who got her best finish to date - woo hoo!Lil V found a bike to borrow and got in on the action too: "My heart rate was over 190 for over 20 mins during the race..." You rock Lil V! Congrats to all Spidermonkey's who showed up and raced...can't wait to see the cross race over halloween weekend!

Coming up this week:

Thursday: Wintertime Cycling Class & Chili Cook-Off at Get a Grip Cycles

Sunday: Cross race in Campton

Spidermonkey's of the week: Drew Kushnick and Stephanie Levin (soon to be Kushnick!)

We both started riding at Indiana University in our efforts to race in the Little 500 (which no one probably knows). After riding for four years at college, we both wanted to continue our passion for cycling. I moved to Chicago and tried to find groups to ride with, and Steph was in Indianapolis and rode with a group there. I first started riding on the Lake Front Path and met someone from a team that we may call yYy. I went to one of their rides, but it was not a friendly bunch of people.

I then heard about Spidermonkeys, but was a little skeptical because of their interesting Halloween motif uniforms. I decided to go on a ride and everyone was so friendly. I continued to come back for rides each week and was soon deemed a member without officially joining or paying. Then Steph came to Chicago, in the famous “Summer of ’09.” For some reason, people in Spidermonkey liked her as well, weird? We both had a blast and then joined and made this our first official Spidermonkey year (I even got my first ever win on the bike this year). We are both very thankful for all that Spidermonkey offers and look forward to continuing our fun on and off the bike with everyone.