Oh my, that went bad!

This past Saturday was the second mountain bike race up in Winter Park, the cross country super loop. I was looking forward to this race, last year this was my first mountain bike race ever. I got second and was dreaming of a repeat performance (despite moving up a catagory).

After my week spent traveling and the stress of getting a big proposal out the door, I was hoping I would be nice and rested. Ready to go.

I wasn't. More than that, I wasn't even close.

Everything went wrong! I would guess that within a minute of the start I was going backwards. Dropped like a stone, a road block everyone wanted to get around. The biggest problem was my back. A few miles in it was hurting so bad, I just couldn't put any power in the peddles. Funny, my back actually started hurting at home before I left for the race. Injury or stress, I don't know.

The course was pretty muddy and slippery. Had to be careful out there. A lot of people went down. The rocks, tree roots and river crossings were treacherous! Despite the coarse, I was seriously deep in the pain cave and never got to enjoy any of it!

Sadly it was one of my worst days on a bike. Despite my utter meltdown, I have to look on the bright side, I didn't finish in last place. Honestly, I was supprised about that.

Time for some training changes. I am trying to stay optimistic. At least I am sure to improve at the next race.

In a Previous Life......

Have you ever been someplace were you said to yourself, I think I’ve been here before. Things are vaguely familiar. You know you’ve seen this place before but you can’t put your finger on it. It’s almost like you’ve been there in another life.

That has been my week.

I traveled to a conference for work. The conference location has made me break a promise I made to myself to never visit this place again. What kind of location would be so traumatic and bring back feelings making it somewhere I wouldn’t want to return?

The location, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Why is this place important? Eighteen (18) years ago, almost to the day, this was the site I began my short adventure in the Army. Basic Training! Eighteen years! A lifetime ago…I would argue three or four lifetimes.

As I got to the location of the conference things felt strange as I felt I had been here before but things were not exactly as I remembered. The area looked similar but there were new buildings, a swimming pool, structures were a different color and new “features” had been added. I soon discovered that I was directly across the street from the barracks I lived in during my previous 8-week visit back in the summer of 1991. What gave away the location was a towering structure that over looked the site. Sure, the water tower has been painted and it’s a different color but there was no mistaking the shape. I took a walk over by the chow hall, supply depot and barracks. Even the phones, were I spent time waiting to call home and inform my parents “I think I made a mistake,” were present. How many times have they heard that conversation during the past 18 years? To my surprise, it ended up being a little refreshing to visit the site remembering all the good and bad times. I felt a little closure; it was almost peaceful without a drill sergeant yelling at you.

Even with the trauma of returning to this location, I think of the things it has done for me. The opportunities and doors it has made available as well as the lifestyle it instilled. As the commercial used to go, a statement I believe is very true and accurate, “It’s a great place to start.”

On a funny side note, my anxiety was so high that even last night before returning to the base I had a dream. In it I was returning to basic training. Standing there tapping her toe with her hands on her hips was my four year old daughter saying “Daddy, how are you going to be back in two days if you go in there?” My dream was full of all the things I had done during basic and my fear of having to come back to her to say I might be a little longer. Thankfully I woke up and realized I only had to visit for a conference. Thankfully I won’t have to let her down.

I digress but would like to add; people in the Military make an incredible sacrifice to do their jobs far away from friends and family. The sacrifice was more than I could give. People that perform this duty are something special. They deserve our gratitude, no matter your politics.

Photos were from my phone camera so some of them aren't that good.

The Definition of PRO

It's How I ride

This past weekend, in addition to being my Birthday, was our wedding anniversary. Twelve years......... 1..2.years! And I would have to add, going strong! This year we (I) bucked tradition, we (I) bought us both a gift. Road ID's

It's like a dog tag for when you do your outdoor activity. Since we do a lot of out door activities, sometimes (many times) alone we(I) thought it would be a good idea. Yeah, I know.. kind of morbid, but so is a will. Why for our anniversary? Well I had been thinking about it for a while and the date was enough to get me over the activation barrier. Hopefully we'll never have to use them... except if the cell phone dies and I can't remember my home number because it's in my cell phone, now it will be right there on my wrist :)

Due to my (our) purchase, if you order a Road ID you can get $1 off, use Coupon Number: ThanksChristopher496694. Or you can use coupon number: Levi and get $2 off. Bastards, isn't my testimony worth whatever he would say. I mean, he's always riding with Lance and they have a support car following them. I have a car following me too but it always has a texting teenage girl behind the wheel.

Yesterday I went for an early morning mountain bike ride, 21 miles and 3454 ft of climbing. My friend Josh and I hooked up at 6:15am and hit the trails. This way we miss the heat of the day (which hasn't been all that high) and we miss the potential afternoon rain. Even more importantly I got to go to the vacation bible school concert/recital last night. The ride included a lot of climbing, similar to my craptacular performance at the Winter Park HC. Guess what, I still can't climb. Damn it. Under trained or Over trained, that is the question. My legs were hurting but I still feel like riding so I am going with under trained, just out of shape..... even though I have ~2500miles in the legs so far this year, how is that possible? Oh.. incorrectly trained, I see.

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Happy B'day, you Still can't climb hills!

This weekend I rolled another year older. As a coincidence it was also the start of the Winter Park Mountain bike race series.

I raced a couple of these races last year and decided this year I was going to give the entire series a try. Last year was my first mountain bike race so I entered in the beginner categories and did pretty well. My first race I finished second (with a teammate in first) and my second race I broke my chain, ran about 2 miles and finished 6th. So this year, I bumped it up to the sport class.

This year, like all the previous years, things were kicked off with a hill climb. From the base of Winter Park to the top of Mary Jane. I am no little dude, going straight up hills is a little scary for me. This is a bad thing for a Colorado racer when most of the road races during the summer are either HC, dangerous crits or a few road races.The coarse was a simple run up the service road that had obviously been repaired since the snow melt. It was in great condition, non-technical, a simple race to the top.

I thought I was being sneaky. Instead of riding my super heavy mountain bike I thought I would ride my 19 lb Ridley CX bike. I never got a chance to pre-ride the coarse but had gotten reports from other teammates. The CX bike even had lower gears for the anticipated steep sections; a 34 front ring and a 26 rear cassette. According to the information I had, I made the right bike choice.

There were 39 people at the start. When we started everything was great. I had a teammate shoot out the front and I found a pair of riders on the same team that were trying to chase him down. So, I just sat on them. Soon the smaller of the two started to move ahead and the bigger guy feel off the pace. I thought sweet, I am in third place. I didn't feel like I had gone too hard in the beginning but the road continued to get a steeper and steeper. No problem, I'll just down shift...... damn it! No more gears. Not many choices now, time to grind it out. It wasn't too long until riders were passing me.... and passing me..... then more riders came by. At the top, I was cooked. Before the race, I felt I could hit around 45 minutes but missed that mark by a couple of minutes, 48:21. If I had a few more gears I would like to think I could have gone a lot better but.... too bad so sad. I went from that 3rd place on the road to 22nd at the line. Ouch

The entire trip home I was questioning my training plan. Where had I gone wrong? Has my training plan be working on the wrong things? How could I fix it? Should I be going harder? Should I make some changes? What changes should I make? Or should I not worry about it, continue with the plan and just see what happens?

Wow, that's a lot of difficult questions for the self coached weekend warrior. I'll have to think about this one before I make any major changes. After all, this wasn't a high priority race (sure, I wanted to do better but....) and I have never performed that well in HC drag races anyway. Had I made the correct choice moving to sport from beginner. Well, if I had raced beginner I would have been second, that would have been great but felt wrong. So, I am in the right place, now for the challenge of improving and chasing down the rabbits in front of me!

Proof we road together

Our Elephant rock photo.

I don't know what the magazine cover crap is but the photo is ok... it would have been worth buying if the photographer's eye peice wasn't broken and they could have centered the shot on us.

Great start to my ride

How can you go wrong when this is at the start of your ride.
Beautiful, hanging over Golden! And a great ride too.

Getting back into the groove

The training plan had me back on the bike today for nice little ride with a few short efforts. My body however was not feeling up to the task. A little achy, I would have rather took a nap. But I pushed on. My legs actually began to feel pretty good, improving as the ride went on. By the end of the ride I was patting myself on the back and saying... see you did want to ride. The weather was nice, cloudy, cool, calm and overcast. Someday it's going to get sunny and hot, so I am enjoying it while I can.

I did get to ride in a new jersey today. It's a jersey I won at a Winter Park race last year. After the race there was a bunch of drawings for prizes and I won "a new saddle." Cool. Except it was $80 off and their POS saddle was like $80 and the next saddle was $120. So, they just wanted you to fill out the form and send in your money and you can have your "free" saddle. No thanks, fortunately, they also had an option for a jersey (supplies limited). I didn't have to send them more money so I took the jersey. I mailed in the form last December. I figured they just decided to forget about it and to be honest, I was ok with that. Its not like I use their products. Well, guess what showed up in the mail yesterday. A new jersey that I won... 10 months ago! It doesn't look too bad and it fits pretty well, so ... I guess I'll wear it. Free that looks good is... good.

Thanks for reading.

Peddling Through the Weekend

This weekend Melissa planned to ride her Century (100 miles) for the year. She signed up for the Subaru Elephant Rock ride down in Castle Rock, CO. I was planning to watch the kids but she informed me her parents were coming down and my services weren't required. So I got signed up to ride with her. The last time we road a century together was 2004 in Oregon (Reach the beach, Portland to the Coast) and the last time either of us road Elephant Rock was 2003.

Saturday morning I to took a short easy ride to shake the legs out before the long day in the saddle on Sunday. The weather was nice and freaks were out. Since it was a recovery ride I selected a scenic bike trail for my ride. It started out a little scary and I had to quickly get my camera phone out for evidence.




But things quickly improved.

Sunday morning we got up early and drove to Castle Rock for the big ride.

Long lines for parking had us waiting to exit from the highway! After about 30 minutes parked on I-25, we found a spot in Castle rock, got ready and hit the road at about 6:45am. It was a cool morning, and great riding weather. The crowds on the road were large... scary big! No.. I mean really scary, riding your bike is really hard, or at least that's the impression I got. I planned to take picture of all the fools on the road but there were so many I was afraid to get my camera out of my pocket and take a hand off the handle bar!! You had to be ready for anything, people were swerving all over the place. The first hill complicated things as people got off their bikes to walk. (on the first hill? WTF) Within the first 15 miles we came across our first crash with about 6 people. I am not sure they were riding together or just bouncing off each other. There was no way a paceline would work with all the fools out on the road. Right after the 2nd rest stop (mile 23ish) we saw another 3 go down going up a short hill. Everyone got up and appeared ok but we gave each of them plenty of berth. It became pretty obvious what had happened when we saw one of the crashies look in a direction other than were he was riding, he quickly shot across the road. It's amazing these people survive the training to ride in events like this. Glad we knew to stay away from him!

All in all we had a good time, the weather was nice. Sunny, cool and a little windy. I was able to pull Melissa a long in the windy sections. We ended up finishing pretty well and more importantly we survived the Rock! Our ride time was about 6 hours.

I was impressed I did as well as I did. I hadn't done any training for a century and the longest ride I have done so far this year was like 55 miles. It was good base miles.... for CX!

7am Col de sac Crit

For some reason this moring was go time. Everyone was up and ready to go. We ended up out in the col de sac wooping it up with our own little family race. Fun was had by all!

The Burn

This past weekend I raced The Burn. A mountain bike TT near Bailey Colorado starting and finishing at Wellington Lake. My team, Team Evergreen Racing, was putting on the race. The promoter had done a lot of work to get all the permits for this event. It's a lot of work and basically a thankless job. I wanted to make sure I helped him out at the race... as well as get a chance to try the coarse.

I showed up early and jumped in the registration booth. Basically I checked everyone's license and paper work before passing out riders numbers. I spend a couple of hours trying to quickly get everyone ready to go. After getting through all but about 20 people I dashed off to get myself ready for my race. Unfortunately I left myself with about 20 minutes before my start and I needed to get completely ready and my car was on the other side of the lake. I got ready as quickly as I could and warmed up riding back to the start line. (not a good way to start a race like this)

It wasn't long after the start that I knew things weren't going well. My son had been up most of the night before, so I was already tired and I felt a little dehydrated before the start. A couple of miles into this 22 mile TT, I thought I was going to puke! The worst part was the first couple of miles are all down hill and on a coarse with 4000 ft of climbing.. that's really bad feeling to have so early.

Well.. time to back it down a little. Start eating and drinking and see how things go. They got a little better but not much. By the second of the three major climbs I was clearly suffering! My back was killing me, my right knee was hurting and I was melting in the hot sun.

By the time I made it to the finish I was done. I grabbed a burrito and sat down, before I fell down. My original time goal was under 2 hours and after all that suffering I finished in 1:59:47! I wasn't even in last place, I wasn't anywhere near first either. The after party was good, I got a couple of giveaways and tried to start the recovery process. Everyone I saw and talked with had a great time. It was fun to see and talk with some of the CXers I had raced against last fall.

Overall, it was a great race and I look forward to hitting it a little harder next year. With a little preparation I should do better. I am going to ride the E-rock Century with my wife on Sunday, my next race.. Mid week Crit next Tuesday Evening.