Aww, how nice...

We drove our team van to the grocery yesterday. Check out this sweet note we found on the windshield when we came back out.

I travel by bike

After Saturday's disappointing and painful crit (in which I found myself sliding by way of butt cheek down a steep hill on the rain-slicked streets of Wilmington, DE) I hauled my achin' butt out of bed and back on the bike again at 10am the next morning setting out to ride to our next host house in Somerset, New Jersey. I needed about 6.5 hours of ride time so the 100 miles to get there would actually be a little short, but I'd worry about that if and when we actually made it to the house that was two states over.

A mere 2 hours in I found myself on the outskirts of Philadelphia and damn near cracked. Contributing factors to my mental breakdown:

- The route consisted of something like 127 turns.... I swear it never felt like we were on any road for longer than 0.3 miles.

- We were navigating with David's Garmin and, as is expected with his slightly spastic nature, we'd get into a conversation (i.e. he'd start freely spilling random info into my ear, and I would nod) and would forget to look down at the GPS. I'm gonna estimate that we missed 15 turns. And the GPS takes around 10 minutes to recalculate after each of those mistakes. It felt like we were riding blind most of the time.

- I was 2 flats deep and out of tubes.

- There were at least 3 or 4 holes in the tire with shimmering bits of glass or metal sticking out. And they were laughing at me.

- I don't know if you've ever been in the area, but there's no such thing as a nice, quiet country road between Wilmington and Philly. There are entirely too many people, too much developed land, and too many stop lights. And they're all red. All the time.

- David's response for all of the slow traffic lights and neighborhoods we encountered was to sprint from a stand still after every light. And up every hill. I don't do that.

- For the first two hours it seems like I rode next to David for a total of about 15 minutes. Other than that he was either pedaling 75 watts, messing with the Garmin or doing 500 up some hill. If I had had the slightest clue where I was, I would have ditched him in a heartbeat during that first 2 hours.

Philly took care of all my problems. Directed by 4 swole frat dudes to the nearest bike shop and then escorted there by a friendly Philly bike commuter, I restocked on tubes and replaced my shit rear tire with a new one for a whopping $15. Leaving the shop I still felt a little bummed that we'd only ridden about 2 out of the last 3 hours since we'd left Wilmington. Soon enough we were amongst the action of traffic, sky scrapers, restaurants, and people of downtown Philadelphia, and for some reason I got really excited. Being in an urban setting while I was trying to train would have pissed me off any other day, but I had pretty much already thrown the idea of "training" out the window for the day. Now I was in tourist mode. "I've never been to Philly, I neeeeeed a cheese steak!!!!" After luring David into the idea by offering to pay for his cheese steak, we did it. Got a loaded hoagie from a street vendor, hijacked patio chairs from some fancy shmancy restaurant and started enjoying the day.

Something clicked and my motivation was unbreakable after that. We got into a rhythm and started training for real. We ran every red light for the next 80 miles. It started raining.... who cares. Almost just got hit by that car.... eh, whatever.

We squeezed out 90 minutes of harder than necessary tempo at the end and even rode extra after we got to Somerset because we weren't done with the workout. I didn't ride a second less than 6.5 hours which was a huge success mentally. All year I've lacked the sometimes overly-motivated mentality that brought me success last year. It's almost back, and I desperately need it.

Blog Drought

I've done a ton since my last blog and have probably experienced and already forgotten lots note-worthy stories since then. I'm not gonna write about any of them now. The burden of feeling like I needed to play catch up and narrate every single event since my last blog is what has kept me from writing any more since then... that task is too big. So I'm not gonna do it. But I can start from now on. I'm simply writing now to break my blog drought so that I will hopefully be much more inclined to write about events from now on, immediately after they happen. When I wait a few days to write about something totally rad that happened in my life, the memory of it loses most of the vivid details and then I feel like trying to write about it after forgetting half of what happened would not do it justice. So then I end up not writing at all. Hopefully I can stop doing that and start writing.

Hittin' the wall

No, not "the wall" metaphorically. During Sunday's race I literally hit "a wall."

After the first three stages in Redlands I was sitting 35th overall, totally excited about attempting Sunday's Sunset loop circuit race. This day of racing had been built up in my mind as what would most likely be the hardest race all spring, and there I was, 10 laps into the 12 lap sucker, still hanging in the front group. Then "whoa!" bam, my race was over. The field in front of me drifted right around a bend while ascending the climb, and in an instant of fatigue driven indecision, I was in the gutter, scraping my shoulder on a stone wall, and then hitting the ground. I wasn't hurt at all, but by the time I checked my bike, put the chain back on, and remounted, the group was out of sight. I road out the last lap and a half with another unlucky soul, who's work was done for the day, to finish around 6 or 7 min down, eliminating any chance I had to move up in the overall.

The worst part of it all is that if I had made a better choice and just feathered my breaks for half a second, the whole thing would have been avoided and I would have still had a legitimate opportunity to test my legs against the big guns once things really got fast.

Overall, I come out of Redlands actually quite pleased with my fitness. I was there in the mix in the other two finishes prior to Sunday's stage but my mind still feels a bit rusty when I'm trying to think through the haze of pain and decide exactly what to do at the end of a race. While I was towards the front, I was still never able to make a significant contribution to Mark or anyone else on the team to help one of us seal the deal. I was just there....a little too far back to be a player in the races and definitely too far back to get a real result. Moral of the California trip: "Get yo head screwed on right, it's racin' season!"

On Deck...

The Redlands Bicycle Classic starts today and goes through Sunday.

Short but tough uphill time trial today..... hmmm, I start in less than 2 hours. Ima get going.

Owie (San Dimas Circuit)

The ninth time up that hill was balls out hard, and just as I finished sprinting over the “cobbles” (aka fake brick textured road) that lap, I could feel them sneaking up on me. Cramps. Nothing debilitating yet, but the tinge was there, right in the end of my quads, slightly above my knees.

Three laps to go…. I finished off my last gel and even bummed a couple gummies from Mark, in an effort to postpone full-on cramps to make it through the remaining hour of racing, but I think by then I had already started to feel the damage of dehydration.

Holding on by the skin of my teeth, I maintained contact with the front group up the steep section for 2 more laps. My cramps progressively worsened until standing up to pedal was basically no longer an option. On the last lap I stood up for a few seconds just to pop over the top of the feed zone hill, and after about 3 pedal strokes just as I was pressing down with my right foot, my quad completely locked up. I’m talking, as contracted as my muscle could possibly be, hyper extending my knee even. That’s never happened to me in a race before, but it reminded me of playing around with an e-stim machine in the athletic training lab….only times a thousand. I actually didn’t even know that could happen to my body. So after some serious concentration, I managed to force my peg leg back into a more natural bent position, but right as I did so, I shifted weight to my left leg only to have the same painful contraction happen to that quad as well.

Needless to say, I didn’t make it over the final climb intact with the lead group, but with a downhill and then only a mile or so of flat, I finished up just about 15 seconds in arrears.

Apart from crashing, those cramps were by far the worst physical pain cycling has ever caused me.

Back at it....

The bike racing season is cranking up once again. Fresh off team camp last week, I'm now out in San Dimas, CA for my first real race of the season. This race started with a hill climb time trial today and ends on Sunday. After a transfer to a host house in Redlands on Sunday night, we'll hang for a couple days before starting another stage race (4 days long) in Redlands on Thursday. I didn't do great in the time trial, but it's still quite a relief to have that tt, and the pain that accompanies it, out of the way. Now for the circuit race tomorrow...