End of the road season. (Thank God!)

Well, the end of the road season is winding down. It has been a disappointing one at that. I started the year out really well, unfortunately, I did not do my traditional weight workouts thru early April. So I started out slow and little by little, I died out completely! I do have a couple more events with one that I'm particularly interested in doing well in. The Long Street Tour in Columbus, OH on my birthday, September 5th. That would be a heck of a present to myself, but I'd also take a win from anyone on the team. In this race a few years back, I was just coming out of an injury plagued season after a very nasty crash early in the season. I'd had a couple good races but no sprint. So I was the guy who monitored the front or chased the whole race for out team. Of the 22.25 miles out of 25 that I was in the race, I was on the front for well over 10 miles. If an attack went and one of our team members was not in the it, I'd go to the front and raise the pace 1 or 2 mph. Then motor til the gap came down and a counter could go. From there, I would park myself in third place and just be a total jerk to everyone trying to organize a chase. It took a lot of effort and just when I was thinking we were going to pull off the race as we wanted, I popped. Right after that, the final attack went and the 2 other riders on my team didn't respond. I hated putting that kind of effort out to have it wasted like that but hey, that's baseball. I'll probably be in the same kind of role here, but I will be looking for the opportunist moves. I was able to cross a huge gap at the westlake crit a few weeks ago and I'm pretty sure I can handle repeated moves like that especially as there is a lot of cornering in this race. To prep for it, I will finally be getting down to the track in Pittsburgh for the fixed gear races on next Friday. I've been trying to work that into my schedule all year. Up til 2 of the individual events last year when I was competing on a gear that was too small for the track size we are on, I'd not lost there since I started going down once or twice a year starting in 2003. I did finally get a 15 tooth cog and set matters right in the final two events, a miss and out and then a 10 lap scratch race. This year, I hope to get down there and kick everyone around and now that I know what gearing to use, I'll be there from the gun and going for it. I find that the intensity of track racing really gets the legs going for a crit as long as it isn't the next day. It also works for cross which starts up in a few weeks. I'll be tag teaming my first couple cross races with the finals of the WVMBA MTB Short Track series. The last time I was at one of those, I won handily. Everyone else showed up for a MTB Short Track race and I showed up for a Cross race. Even on the old steel Fort, the race was decided in about 200 yards. The next 20 minutes were a formality. I hope the others work the same way. We'll see in a few weeks!

Strong finish for the road and a history lesson.

I'm finally feeling like I've got something in the legs. After going through several weeks of dealing with some health issues dealing with fatigue, the body feels like it's responding. Last week, I got some really good cross training in. I was riding the bike around Gettysburg and then jumped in with the Boy Scouts hike around the battlefield. I caught up with them after I'd done about 25 miles. They were about halfway thru their hike and were at Devil's Den on their lunch break. As long as we were on the road, I was on the bike, but once on trails between Little and Big Round Tops and then the fields back up through the left side of the Confederate lines on the battle field, I had the bike shouldered. I road the couple miles to the starting point of Pickett's charge. I acted as a communications man between the front and back of the scout troop as a few had gone on ahead and then a couple stayed back with the stragglers. After having a tough time in the mud coming down from Big Round Top, my boy Ryan got his second wind and was making a point of staying near the front. The battlefield hasn't changed much since I saw it as a kid though they did have a new Visitor and Museum center. It was good to get both my boys in for a bit of education on one of this countries most prolific battles and have them understanding why the conflict was taking place. The final leg of the hike was retracing the steps of Pickett's charge and we were most of the way across when one of the scout leaders realized he'd lost his phone. I hopped back on the bike and took the roadway back to where he figured he'd lost it. A couple other tourists saw me riding by and had found the phone flagged me down and was asking me if I was with the scout group who'd lost the phone. That made looking for it easy. After retrieving the phone, I got back to the start of the charge trail through the field again and I ran the whole way. It's hard to imagine what it's like to do this in a battle. I was trotting my bike and a few extra pounds of stuff in a backpack. The soldiers that did this were marching across with their guns, haversacks, canteens and in uniforms. To top that off, cannons that were firing canister shot (old era version of machine gun fire), and infantry volleys were sending a shower of metal that knocked most of these men down by the time they got across. In the time it took to cross the field which for me was about 6 minutes, for the charging rebels, I would imagine it was around 15 minutes, over 5000 men fell. That is a very sobering thought. In dealing with any of the conflicts that we are faced with in the world, I think it is best to remember the words of Robert E. Lee when it comes to armed conflict: 'It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it.'

More time in the mountains

I'm spending the weekend in the mountains again. Last week, I got a great ride in the Laurel Mountains and got 4 ridge climbs in. I think I'll follow it up again this week and start back up racing at Westlake on Tuesday. Nothing like the scenic climbs on the backroads to help re-ignite the motivation to race.

Second half begins

Well, the first half of the season had some ups and downs, though usually i've been on the more disappointing side of things. I sat on the wrong wheel at Barbour earlier this month and kinda fell asleep on the initial climb. I finally started paying attention towards the top and all of a sudden we were 25 yards off an accelerating front. No worries, I thought. We'll chase back on as soon as we top off with the 8 or 10 people here. BUUUUZZZZZZZ, wrong answer Bob! I looked back to see who was still with us. Where'd everyone go? Ahhhhhh, crap, now I was forced into chasing mode with Skip Rodgers, who was a decent time trialist, but didn't have the steam to really help get us back. We got to within a few seconds but after a particularly hard pull heading into a climb, I popped. Oh well, it was now a training ride. I got into a group of other riders most of whom were working well, but certainly had problems going hard when I started pressing the pedals. In the end, I was set up for the sprint for 8th or 9th and for the first time in a couple years, I had a mechanical on the bike. I coasted in and was a bit depressed as this was a race I've owned for a couple years now. My race the next day at the Lil' Moes' mtb race was going well and I was sitting in third and I had another mechanical. This time it was a biomechanical as the back started barking big time. So for the second day straight, I was having a long drive home. I continued this string of woes by going to Westlake on Tuesday with a teammate. I wound up popping a spoke on one of my Zipp carbons. Dammit will this never end? I got a spare and since my race was effectively over, I started busting ass for Ted. I closed down a couple dangerous breaks and was telling him where to be and when. He just missed getting to the front in time to get the winning break but did get the second one and finished up in 7th. The one good thing that I was able to take away from this race was my ability to move around in the pack at will. The other teams were using my chasing accelerations to set up moves as I would string the field out quite a bit and even caused a couple splits in it. It was good to be able to hear 'Ok, here it comes' when I rolled up to the front and really pressed on the pedals for a good half mile. Hopefully the second half of the season will go better and then it's time for cross!

The 70s memories are fading....

A sad passing came upon us this yesterday as one of the great all-time icons for men (and women too) succumbed to cancer. Farrah Fawcett was one of the greatest all-time pinup girls. Adolescent boys as well as men had copies of the famous poster that sold more than 12 million copies. Her stint on Charlie's Angels cemented her into pop culture and her hair was copied by women all over the world. After dealing with her personal relationship issues over the years, she wound up dealing with cancer. I won't go into any special eulogies for her as to how she dealt with it as that is a personal thing, but everyone who lived through the 70s will not forget who she was as well as that famous picture.

24 Hours of Big Bear

I did my first 24 hours MTB race this past weekend as part of a relay team. The Highland Pirates were Danny Welsch, Steve Green, Rich Raesly, Sara Lampo and myself. We started out well and were holding down 3rd and were pretty close to 2nd. I was on my lap when things started to go awry. I was plowing thru the course and feeling pretty good. Just when I felt like I was at the height of my hero status, I flatted for only the 2nd time in 3 years of MTB racing. Damn, I was just at the part where the downhill was really starting and to lose my pace there really hurt. After getting it fixed, it took me a bit to feel the flow again and I didn't really get it back til I was almost all the way down the hill. That was the first time cost for us on the day. As the night settled in, our second rider Steve took a few tumbles and gashed his knee. Our third rider Rich lost both of his lights and had to follow a junior rider in. I lost one of mine about 30 minutes out. I also had to learn how to ride in the dark. It took me half of the lap to realize that it's best to have the handlebar light positioned right in front of the bike and to use the helmet light to scan ahead. That probably cost me about 10 minutes alone as I was sliding off the trail and bumping around into things that I shouldn't have been. One benefit of the dark though was I wasn't thinking like a single-speeder. I wasn't getting off the bike before I felt I had to and therefore got up some of the bigger hills that I'd walked earlier in the day. It helped that I'd geared down for the night run though. I wound up feeling like I'd gone at least 10 minutes slower than I'd hoped. The girl on our team Sara, unfortunately had issues that were hurting her pedaling and she really had a time of it getting back in on her night run. After the first riders came up for the 3rd round, we were about 17 minutes down and in 4th place. We lost about 4 more then we started a comeback. Steve and Rich got us to 11 minutes down and I began what wound up being our final lap. I did an all or nothing lap. I went out hard and just kept the pressure up being careful not to send myself anerobic. I'm not sure if I lost my bottle or it was yanked from the cage, but I found myself without water for the first 3 miles which later would hurt me. I found a discarded bottle on one of the bumpier sections and stopped to snag it up. That saved me as the day was definitely getting warmer. Unfortunately, the gas was running low and towards the end of the lap, I got into the very technical rock garden and on the climb out, I began to cramp up and popped completely. i did recover but the legs were hurting and i knew that i'd come up short in the attempt to get one more rider out on course. In the end, we wound up 5th overall. Without the miscues and injuries we had, we could have easily been 40 minutes faster. Well, next time, the Pirates will do better.

Making old man noises.

Today, I've spent the morning making old man noises anytime I've moved out of the desk chair. Yesterday's race was a tough one made tougher by the mud on the course, the mud in my eye, the many crashes because of the mud in the eye, no water on the course and the many crashes because of the mud in they eye. Did I mention I crashed a lot yesteday? I was a bit pissed with the race organizers who failed to have an aid station along the course. The reason given was 'well it was cool in the shade when I was up along the trail'. Ummmm, guess what dude.... There were plenty of parts where there was sun on the course and also, it's just a bit different when you're on the bike than when you're just standing watching. I wound up catching a clop of mud in the eye about an hour into the race. It made it completely impossible to ride with any speed as the eye would tear up as soon as I'd get any speed. I stopped at least a dozen times to try to get the dirt out. If they'd just had the water jug out on the course, I could've irrigated it and been on my way. So I had to fight a nasty muddy course without being able see out of one eye and constantly stopping. I was completely unable to open things up on the sections of the course where my bike typically flies. In the end, I wound up wrecking about 6 times. I would figure I added on at least 20 minutes onto my time. I wouldn't have won but I would've been top 3 or 4. Oh well. I guess nothing works out great all the time.