Modesto Road Race (35+ cat 4): May 15, 2011

The Modesto road race (which to me seems more like a circuit race) is notoriously FLAT. I recorded a total of 292 feet of climb over 54 miles of racing! I -literally- get more climbing than that over the first mile out my front door. As a result it's a race that's suited mostly to a pure sprinter though a good mix in a breakaway can steal the show if the pack is too lethargic. Team tactics can pretty much guarantee a podium finish if you show up with enough numbers and those dudes are fit enough to control the race and make a leadout train. With just Ted and I, that wasn't going to be our game so our strategy was for Ted to play it like a pure sprinter staying out of the wind and out of danger all day and I would do what I could to reel in breaks. Since I'm not much of a field sprinter type, the plan wasn't so much for me to lead him out as it was to try to be a stinker in the final kilometer or two to try to keep the final pace strung out and fast. It kind of worked out that way.

Most of the race was uneventful. After two laps of gofastslowdowngofastnowaitslowdown two guys finally established a break that, eventually, turned into one guy dangling off the front for quite an impressive amount of time. He was finally brought back (by a flat front tire?) on the sixth lap. There was a counterattack that was nothing but weak sauce but that did string out the pack pretty good. Ted had found the guy he was going to mark in the sprint so, with the pack strung out with 4 miles to go, Ted got on my wheel as if we'd done this sort of thing all the time, and I brought him back up to his mark. I had a head of steam going so I decided to move to the front and do my part to keep the hot pace hot. Really my only intention was to hit the front hard and just keep the elastic stretched but I suddenly had that sinking feeling that no one was on my wheel.

A quick look back revealed a surprisingly large gap back to the pack. "Ah crap," I thought, "Get ready for some hurt..." To add to the benefit of my timing another field passed ours and then me. Oh it was tempting to jump in a cheat a little but I stayed away and they stayed away and I remain guilt-free. Nine minutes of pain, panic and pursuit of glory (haha, as if I didn't know it was suicidal...) found me still solo off the front through the final corner. Past the 1K to go and I was still chugging. But very shortly after that the familiar sound of a ramped up pack with no mercy for the idiot off the front solo ruined my fun. Ted looked good sitting 4th or 5th wheel but, as is typical in a dead flat, dead straight, dead challenge-free sprint like that, luck of the draw spit him to the front too early and he had to settle for 9th. But hey! Top ten is good! I'd take one of those right about now.

Here's the link to Ted's perspective (just substitute "teammate" for "That idiot Roy") http://teddyv.wordpress.com/

Somehow my legs didn't actually explode and I kept them moving to get a 17th (of ~35). So once again, if you split the field size in half, you get my result. But this was a team day so I'm okay with that. In fact it was a good confidence builder to be able to get away and stay away at a crucial part of the race like that. My recovery after the race was very good and I was doing difficult 12x3 intervals on Tuesday and rode 60 miles with 5900 feet of climbing on Wednesday. It's fun to be fit!

Shaking the cobwebs out at Hellyer: May 10, 2011 Edit Blog Entry

I managed to get my track bike converted from fixed gear road rider to track racer in time Tuesday morning so, with no excuses, headed to the track for some Tuesday evening fun after work. My track "season" ended in a heap of dissappointment and failed goals last year so I spent the winter pondering if I was even going to bother with the track this year. But the Hellyer community is tight and after only being inside the gates for a few minutes I was catching up with racing buddies and sharing "where you been's" with guys who, in a normal crit or road racing environment wouldn't even look down their carbon fiber stem at a muffin racer like me. Dang, to think I was just gonna skip that this year? FOOL!

My goals for the night were to get comfy in the pack, get a good heart rate up and get at least a couple of good sprints in here and there. With a different format this year, I may be able to achieve last year's goal of getting a Cat. 3 on the track but only if I can get my sprint in gear and only if I feel satisfied with having notched either a couple event wins or an omnium win. I really hope I'm not in fantasy land but I was doing it last July and started my track campaign around this same time last year and this year I have a very solid base under me, and a much better training approach. Anyway, I raced three events in the Cat. 4/5 field of 16 racers.

Race 1: Win-n-out (15 laps, winner on lap 15 wins, winner on lap 16 is 2nd, lap 17 1st and 2nd are 3rd and 4th). My strategy was to race for third or fourth. If you go for the win and miss it you end up too pooped to try for 2nd, 3rd or 4th. The 15 laps were kind of hot and I was undergeared so I was only able to surf the back and not move up. On the final sprint for 3rd and 4th I dug in but missed the top two spots. Results had me in 5th, one place out of points - D'OH!

Race 2: 12 lap Tempo (2 points for leader on every lap, 1 point for second on every lap, 5-3-2-1 points for last lap): With a better gear and a slightly slower pace surfing the pack was pretty easy but I didn't seem to have the horsepower to move up without burning too many matches so I just bided my time until the final when I did my only sprint of the race. A pen. velo rider was off the front but I won the field sprint. The results somehow missed this fact, but with only 3 points won there, I was still out of the omnium points so we'll just let that one go.



Race 3: 20 laps points race (4x5): In a points race this short my only hope is to either put all my eggs in one sprint basket or get a good breakaway going and steal points from off the front. I decided to let the first sprint play out and counterattack the sprint if the field bunched up. Sure enough everyone bunched up into the wind on the back stretch so I broadcast my attack by going underneath and rolling off the front. Around the banks across the front stretch and into turn one and I decided to see what happened. Nuts! The pack was off turn 4 and I was solo. I was really hoping to bring one or two guys with me but it wasn't to be. I dug in for two more laps but then was swarmed on the next bell lap. I got gapped in the sprint and almost got back on by the back stretch but just didn't have the umf. I chased for a few laps and then decided I was better off getting back in the pack and working on skills instead of the futility of a solo chase. Back in the pack, round and round and call it a night.

So. Get comfy on the track with the pack etc? check. Get a couple of good sprints in? check. Regain some of my love for the track? checkitycheckcheck. I'm hooked again.


Photos by my buddy and all around great human, Steve Anderson (http://www.flickr.com/photos/youngsloat/)

Mental Toughness (is perhaps what you'll need to work through this blog today...)

My rest week last week was kind of weird. I backed off too much. I ate too much. I stressed too much. I slept too little. By the end of the week I really felt like I had come off the rails a little bit. So ending the rest week two rides and two hours short of my training schedule just kind of set me up for this week all wrong.

Monday was an off day so that was cool -except I actually felt like riding. Then Jasper got sick and I took my turn at home with him on Tuesday and

couldn't get on my bike. I tried to tell myself, "no biggie, you get two off days this week, you'll just have to get on top of things the rest of the week." But the off-the-rails feelings of frustration were creeping in around the edges stronger.

Wednesday I rode. But I felt horrible. I couldn't get on top of my gear and I ended the ride feeling kind of exasperated. Fortunately, this feeling eased off a bit later on when I realized that the fixed gear I was riding had been a 42-14 that I had set up for roller riding instead of the usual 42-16 I spin on the road. Still...

Today I simply couldn't wedge a bike ride into my work day and the need to get home since Kris is sick now too. Not going to make this week's training goals. Off. The. Rails.

Saturday was going to be my big ride of the week. I may not get much of a ride in at all. Off. The. Rails.

But is this a big deal in the grand scheme of things? No. Is it a big deal for my bike racing plans (hahahaha)? No, not really. As long as I exercise some mental toughness.

I used to think mental toughness was the ability to ignore pain, endure suffering, and tune out my brain to push past my physical limits. I suppose that is one definition but I'm learning now that mental toughness is the ability to realize your limits, whether they be emotional, stress, physical, dietary or viral/bacterial and make the proper adjustments to get yourself back on track.

In literature, the "back on track" is called your Ideal Performance State. So, right now, I need to be mentally tough enough to just not let the missed training days get to me and move forward with my eyes on the prize. And in this case the prize is not alienating my family, doing a solid job at work and not driving myself into the ground. The fitness and performance will still come and I'll be right back on track with training as soon as things mellow out a bit.

Work gets busy. Loved ones get sick. Hey, that's life. And if you let it get to you then you aren't in control. And if there's one glorious lesson I've managed to soak up in the last three years or so it's that this is my ship and I get to steer it.

Damn, I mixed up my metaphors there. I started off like a pothead engineer on a train going off the rails and ended up on a ship sailing it with steely determination (or at least grasping for a mask of steeliness).

"Steady as she goes!"

Working, Training, Sleeping, Building

Working:

I'm in one of those typical four-weeks-before-deployment last minute do everything meltdown panic phases at work. You'd think I'd be sick of this and find something else to do by now but I kind of like it. I don't like the stress so much but nothing stirs the juices like delivering on time and having a successful field campaign. I probably just jinxed the shit out of myself so I'll just leave it at that. The downside is the distraction from the real things that matter at home. This time around it's not too bad but being gone at work for a few weekends and then going away for ten days isn't such a nice way to treat one's spouse. This one really sucks since Jasper's spring break falls on the week before I go and the last week is usually particularly hard to get away. I'm trying to do the front end work so it won't be too bad (yeah right).

Training:

Ug. I think this will be the first week that I simply can't notch my training goals since I decided to embrace an actual factual training plan. The above work foo combined with rainy weather and the deterioration of my rollers have conspired against me along with an unnecessarily long hard day last weekend that was off the program and a good lesson on why you stay on the program. I found myself walking up from my garage yesterday morning in the rain at 6:15 after having spent 90 minutes on my decrepit rollers wondering, "WTF am I doing?!!??" But I couldn't sleep anyway so it made sense to get up early and hit the garage.

Sleeping:

Sleeping has been weird lately. I've gone through some real lapses in regular sleep in my life but, in general, being fit and regular exercise brings some balance. But that has kind of not been working lately. I either find myself too wired to get to sleep and stay up too late or I am bone weary exhausted, fall asleep too early but then end up waking up at 2:30 to 4:00 in the morning and then laying awake. (Of course I always end up falling asleep 5 minutes before my alarm goes off...).

Building:

One of the things I lay awake thinking about is how to improve my fleet of jalopy bikes. The bitch of racing four disciplines is that I have four times the race bikes to maintain and wish I could improve. If I spring for a set fast track wheels, I have to continue living with 12 year old components on my road racer. If I buy new brakes for the cyclocross bike, I have to keep clunking along with a low shelf level fork that is falling apart on my mountain bike. It never fucking ends! So I decided I'm just going to go ahead and concentrate on one bike at a time. And after careful consideration, I decided my mountain bike is the bike most likely to fall apart. I ebayed, I bike shop talked, I online shopped, and in the end I decided I actually like my Tomac frame so I'm keeping it and tossing everything else. It's going to cost about the price of a new bike but when I'm done I'll have a better component group and wheels than a similarly priced new bike. And I'm thinking it won't be too unrealistic to see the old Johnny T come in under 21 pounds. W00t!

So that is that. Why? Why not?

Zzzzzz: Shh, don't wake the blog. It's sleeping.

So this is what it's come to? If I'm not race reporting or thinking about racing I don't post diddly-doo? It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time I used this as an attempt to keep the writing gears lubed and there was more substance to it.

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It's true! Just look! There's also plenty of pictures of me rocking an extra 50 pounds! Wowzers.

BEFORE... AFTER...

See kids! Just keep riding your bikes and you too can lead a healthful lifestyle driven by guilt, self flogging, pain, suffering, starvation, binge eating, guilt, and heaping doses of self importance.

Where was I. Oh yeah, the blog. When I started out I had the goal of forcing myself to continue a lifetime of neglectfully practicing writing by committing to two posts per week. At some point I grew quite tired of this and when I started riding again, I went through a strange period of posting blogs as if this were a training log. That was even boring to me and that, my fair reader (yeah right, as if that were anyone else but me and I'm not very fair. In fact I can be a pretty biased mother fucker when I really let my hair down. Not that I have much hair to let down. In fact I think cycling has rapidly increased the deforested real estate above my increasingly busy eyebrows. I blame it on helmet usage and clogged pores from too many lunch time rides followed by hasty spit baths in the sink. Did you know I have a sink in my laboratory? It's damn handy. I'm not really sure why they call it a laboratory. I grew up thinking of a laboratory as a room filled with boiling beakers and steaming vials and a monster being built over in the corner. My lab is really just a big room where I spend the day doing shit. Mostly that shit involves wondering how the heck am I supposed to know how to do any of this stuff they think I know how to do? It's astounding really. If they knew how truly incompetent I am they'd probably change the locks and throw away the key.), was quickly followed by a rapid decrease in content and a rapid increase in self congratulatory bragging about my mediocre racing adventures.

You know what? It's almost 10 PM and I have a really annoying date with the rollers for 5:15AM tomorrow morning. See? Bike racing is really healthy. Unhealthy people lay around in bed getting fat and "resting" for their "work" day while us healthy goody goods spend 90 minutes on the rollers chasing an elusive M1 tempo workout staring at a heart rate monitor and making sweat puddles on the garage floor.

I probably should just let the blog sleep. I think I've risked over-sharing enough for now.

Sacto Cyclocross #7 @ Laguna Del Sol: January 8, 2011

Despite this being the first race of the year it felt more like the last race of last year since it concludes my cyclocross season. I feel good and Kris gave me green light to race the upcoming weekend but mentally I'm done and ready to move onto the last Winter event, the Early Bird Road Race out of Patterson. But I'm getting ahead of myself! Have I mentioned yet that this race was held at a Nude Resort?! I shit you not! Check it out: http://www.lagunadelsol.com/Her

Now I know this opens the door to so many jokes you probably can't decide wether to open with "where do you pin your numbers" and "well that gives a new meaning to 'skinsuit'" but with the race time temperature at about 40 degrees, there was not a saggy naked butt in sight (or pert ones or any other kind for that matter).

Here's my GPS trace from the race (I finally got the nerve to use my Garmin 500 in a 'cross race).

The course wasn't necessarily technical. There were a couple of muddy sections that sent the front and rear wheels in different directions but they were manageable. There were several little climbs. To the right there you can see they incorporated one of their patented "spirals of doom." This spiral was just as endless as the other one but it was broken up by being located over a hill so there was a mix of descending and climbing to break things up. Other than the spiral there was one tight turn into an uphill that was good for creating gaps.


Right at the go I felt pretty good. I didn't start superfast but did alot of passing on the first lap. On the second lap we had a nice little group of five or six of us sort of working together. They seemed to be faster on the long flat sections but I was able to follow wheels and wait for the hills where I was able to climb strong and even accelerate across the tops to force them to close the gap back up to me. Believe it or not, sportsfans, I was the strongest climber in our little group. It's kind of like when Captain Kirk met his evil twin with a goatee or something. On the penultimate lap (No matter how hard I try, that is a term that is really hard to keep out of bike racing reports. I always picture some academic cartoony character with a pencil up his butt declaring, "penultimate" rolling each syllable with perfect annunciation.) Where was I. Oh yeah, on the penultimate lap two guys from our group suddenly grew third lungs and quickly rode away. I tried but couldn't keep their gap small enough and they just rode away. I knew I had two or three guys on my wheel and just ignored them and kept a steady pace on the flats and attacking as well as I could on any little bump of a climb that there was. It worked and I rode the last half lap solo with no one to sprint with.




Most importantly, this was a fun race since there was a good race going with swapping positions and some tactics. Nothing is more fun than having the fitness in a cyclocross or mountain bike race to randomly stick little ten to fifteen kick accelerations in here and there and throw off the momentum of anyone on your wheel.

And yet I walked away from the results a little disappointed! As good as I felt, as much as I felt I couldn't have had a better race and as much as I feel this is close to as fit as I can be this time of year I ended up 12 of 24. I really thought it was a top ten effort but, instead, it just barely put me in the top half of the field. What's a guy gotta do? Oh well. Despite that it was still a fun race and so I was happy to finally leave the Sacto area for once this 'cross season feeling good about a race instead of grumpy.

And just like that, my cyclocross season is over. I'm kind of sad about that but I'm going to resist the temptation to squeeze in one or two more unplanned races. Though I started off way out of racing shape I was happy to finally ride myself into some semblance of form and enjoy some good races there at the end.

Bikewise, my white bar tape has turned brown and my bike is in need of a thorough cleaning, coat of wax and a new set of cables and brake pads. And since I didn't actually get to use this bike in '09 I was very happy with it this year. It's been a really great and reliable race bike. The frame has that aluminum responsiveness and the 1x9 setup running a very wide range with a 42 tooth chainring was absolutely bulletproof. The only thing I was consistently wishing to improve were the brakes but really the good old Onzas did the trick with a little love here and there to keep them lined up. Oh, and typical of a good cross season, my saddle has not survived! The rails are bent, the right side is lower than the left side and the pleather is cracked and coming apart.

Fianlly, I didn't get to fulfill my fantasy of getting a podium finish for the year on the road, track, mountain bike AND cyclocross but I can't complain. I'm really just happy to be out there riding and racing at all.

2010 review part 2 of 2: Numbers... boring!

Like any good neurotic racing cyclist I kept track of many things this year and the following is what it is. Since the family has all crashed early for new year's and I'm getting nostalgic with old training diaries (the ones I could find anyway) I'll put a few tidbits in parenthesis for comparison/fun.

2010 Hours on the bike = 312:13 "outdoor" + 13:01 trainer + 28:47 rollers = 354:01 (up from 312:29 in 2009 but keep in mind I lost three months of that year to broken wrists so this year is actually less time per month.)

2010 Miles = 5156.0 (yielding a surprising 15.1 mph for the year. Avg of total miles for 1992 to '95 = 7,980 miles. I really wish I could find my '96 and '97 logs. '96 was probably my heaviest racing year and '97 was a high mileage year. I don't even think I kept a '98 log and in '91 I started one up at some point but can't find it.)

2010 days with bicycling of some sort = 206 (up from 175 in 2009 but again, that was a nine month year essentially).

2010 races = 3 road + 1 crit + 20 track + 1 mtb + 6 cyclocross = 31 ('93 = 23, '94 = 60, '95 = 55, 2009 = 18: The bulk of the 2010 races were really weeknight track races and those mid 90's races were about 1/3 mid-week races)

2010 Hilight Results:
1st: July 6 Tuesday Night Track (scratch plus omnium win)
1st: July 27 Tuesday Night Track (points plus omnium win)
2nd: Copperopolis Road Race
3rd: Central Coast Mountain Bike Series Race #6
5th: Klamath Falls Cyclocross
6th: July 23 Friday Night Track Omnium (first place Cat. 4 in omnium)