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Back-to-back weekends over in Lebanon (Tennessee). This weekend is the Tennessee state road race (Cat 3 = 60 miles) plus an omnium that adds a 10 mile TT and a 50 minute criterium. The road course is a new course, but all the reports that I have seen is that it is fairly hilly 15 mile loop.

The plan (for Andrea and I) is to leave out of Memphis this morning (took the day off work) and drive out to Nashville to pre-ride the course this afternoon. It will be good to get a look at the hills and the landmarks even before we do the first lap. It might be possible that something will go on the first lap and stay away taking the race.

Tuesday, I went out and did the usual pre-race ride at Bikes Plus. This ride is a slower pace ride overall, but always features some long lead-out type sprints. The bike-handling of some of the group members is less than the best, so I tend to like to do the lead-out or attack. Most of the time, I don’t even really contest the sprint because I have led the group out at 30 mph+ for a while by the time we come to the final yards. Near the end of the ride, I decided to jump early on Winchester Road (west-bound) as we rode towards the Nike factory. I did a hard effort to separate and drilled it up the long gradients. The group was chasing and by the time we got to the last pitch they were getting to the point they were 100 feet back. In the end, only Aaron Parker jumped out and around me before the turn. He came by me like I was standing still. At least I confirmed (to myself) that I am ready for this weekend.

One thing I did notice this week is that my legs were still feeling bad on my TT bike. On Wednesday, I went out for my usual 23-24 mile loop (Cordova out through Country Woods, Fletcher Trace, Davies to Kingsridge, Canada to Monroe, Chambers-Chapel to Sumac, Airline/Reed-Hooker, Four Winds, Windcliff, Latting to Pisgah, new neighborhood to Far Rd, Macon, etc…) This loop is up and down after Canada road and allows some fast and some good long grades. By the time I got to Four Winds, I stopped in the heat (it was probably about 100F) and raised my seat about 1/2″. What a difference that made. I think the issue is that I tend to ride on the nose of my saddle which means my effective seat height is lower than if I rode in the middle of the saddle. This field adjustment gave my legs the needed extension. I will see if this helps on Saturday (10 mile TT). I wish I would have picked this up last Saturday for the State TT, my legs felt really stuffed up…the issue might have been ridding without full leg extension.

I was looking at some photographs that Mark Allen took of me out on CD Smith Rd. during the 4 mile TT (part of the Smith & Nephew / Marx & Bensdorf Gran Prix).  He was down by the start and the finish, so I have two photos to compare.  My start photo is pretty good showing more or less that I was settling into the correct position (although I am looking down change gears in this photo).

At the end of the 4 miles, I have obviously poured it on at the end up the slight grade to the finish, but it clear that I have let my position slip.

The state 40 km TT is this Saturday, and I can see that I need to lower my stem some, but it sort of late to make big changes. I might try to move the 25 mm aero spacer to the top of the bar on Wednesday to see if I could tolerate it.  That would put my integrated bar right down on the headset.  I would need to get a different, probably TT specific frame to go any lower…

Another sort of annoying problem is the Vision Tech brake caps.  They started to pop off on me (I had to chase one down on a busy road a few weeks back).  I ended up just using a bit of electrical tape to keep them on the bike…

Well, it has been a while since I have posted up anything, but it has been a busy time since I got back. Work had a bunch of things going on & visitors, etc. And my training has entered a higher volume phase. The last two weeks I have logged about 15 hours each week with 273 and 252 miles for the last two (Monday to Sunday) weeks. The plan was to get some volume in before doing a couple of races.

Next weekend is the Tennessee state TT. This will be my 2nd long time trial on my Kuota Kebel TT rig. The first was the day 1 afternoon TT at Tour of Arkansas (22 miles), but this was only hours after the Mt. Magazine road race stage. The state TT (40 km) will be by itself, so it will be a good test. I was able to average 25 mph at ToA, so I should be sub-60 if the distance is a true 40 km.

The next week (August 2nd-3rd) is the Tenn. state RR (Allanti RR). The course is a new one this year that looks to be slightly easier in terms of hills, but I haven’t looked it at too hard. The weekend includes at 10 mile TT and a Sunday parking lot crit (uses the large parking lot at Titan’s stadium).

After those weekend, I will be headed to Estonia for a work trip, so I will miss the Meridian / Cuba challenge down in Mississippi / Alabama. I am coming back about a week before River Gorge / BMW Omnium in Chattanooga. I think I can carry most of my fitness through my 10 day trip if I pick up running and maybe finding a rental bike to ride some. After the BMW Omnium, I will probably race out a Oak Ridge (September 6th/7th) and then do the Pepper Place crit (Sept 13th). The Pepper Place crit has picked up a common sponsor (Smith & Nephew), so this race went from a race I was going to do to one that I am really going to do. They even set it up to allow a Cat 3 to double up doing both the Cat 3 and the Cat 1/2/3 race.

Today was a good cap to long hot weekend. Andrea and I joined a large group at RB’s on Saturday to do the B-ride (easier pace, but more like the A ride of this description), to knock out a total of nearly 88 miles in the heat. We didn’t roll back to my apt until almost 2 pm. Today, it was the usual… from Germantown to the Outdoor’s ride and back (70+ miles).

After getting back and eating lunch, we went out to catch the end of the Trek factory demo at Herb Parsons. They had all sorts of bikes there (including road), but we went to ride some full suspension bikes. Both of us had never ridden a suspension bike, let alone a full suspension. I took out an aluminum Gary Fisher 29′er, while Andrea road a pricey Trek carbon bike. We both pretty much don’t know what we are doing out there, but at least these bikes are pretty forgiving.  I might have to reconsider my plan about getting a fixed gear bike and instead get a mountain bike for winter training.

We (Andrea and I) went out for a longer ride today out of Marquette. We choose a hybrid route looking at numerous roads on my mapmyride.com. The route wasn’t bad, but started out on small highways with too many double (and single) dump trucks.

After winding around to the open pit mining area south of Ispheming, we got on some smaller county roads. Unfortunately, they were pretty rough. Right away on one of the hills, I spotted “feed zone” and then we started to count down the kilometers from 5k to go… at the end, we sprinted for the finish line… well sort of……

I am 50% Finnish by blood, so I felt right at home leading attacking and winning that sprint. Andrea won her share out there including the all important final city limit sign… for the City of Marquette. The cool thing is that right after that city limit sign was one of those speed measuring signs… we ramped it up again and I saw 35 before we passed the sign. Not too fast, but we were just putting along on the ride, so it wasn’t too bad.

And finally, as Andrea has already blogged, we ran across a historical landmark. The county road we rode on used to be the US-41 highway. This was first use of a roadway centerline. This concept is familiar to all road racers…the centerline rule.

After racing the previous three weekend, it has been good to stay back in Memphis this weekend. Next week is Tulsa Tough (3 one-hour crits). So this week, it was back to the usual local rides. Tuesday and Thursday did the RB’s - BPAC double which riding to/from is good for about 50 miles. Saturday, Andrea and I showed up at the RB’s B-ride. I decided to assemble my Ridley ‘cross bike and ride it with the Michelin Mud 2’s pumped up to 75 psig. The bike rolls fairly well at max inflation but makes a lot of noise… ;-P

Sunday, did the Germantown out-and-back from the Outdoors ride. A good group showed up including all the original Memphis Velo cat III team (newly upgraded III’s weren’t there). We didn’t drill it as a group too much, but we had some moments coming back in on N. Watkins and on Mud Island to the Auction Street bridge. On the way out to store I made a long pull through the woods and up the hill… sweeping down through the twisty woods with a group in tow is a good feeling. Lots of fun, too. I am feeling good in general and now have to start thinking how to setup for this weekend.

Here is the plan. Friday, get up and leave Memphis for Tulsa. Get there around 3pm (6-7 hour drive probably). My first race is that evening at 6:45pm. It looks like that one may only be 40 minutes given the schedule. Saturday looks to be about an hour at 3pm. Sunday is also about an hour at 10 to noon.

The way I see it I have two choices…. ride hard on Tuesday (GPAC?), take Wednesday off / easy (TT bike?), and the go short on Thursday with some short tune up efforts. The other plan would be ride easier on Tuesday (RB’s or even Bike’s Plus), take Wednesday off, and then do BPAC aggressively on Thursday. I have done both plans in the past with good success, I think. Since this weekend is a set of crits, I don’t think I have to worry too much about wearing myself out, but instead need to stay sharp. Weather might also play its hand in this since I think it is showing PM thunderstorms the next several days due to the humidity / temperature

Today, I realised that after many years of mediorce riding & racing, I am back to where I left off.  I moved to Chattanooga in the spring of 2002 coming off a good Cat IV season in Maryland.  I was the Cat IV RR District 20 / Maryland state champ and was in the mix on nearly every race.  I was getting ready to upgrade…

Moving to Chattanooga meant that I not only moved, but changed job role to one of a traveling engineer.  Along the way, I became a better engineer, substantially improved my salary, traveled a bunch (400+ days in Estonia!), and generally got away from the sport… although I didn’t fully stay away, I continued to race when I could and racked up bad results for most of the period 2002-2005 especially.  2006 and 2007 were better and better, but mostly still rebuilding years..   So here I am now in Memphis for over a year, back in a plant role at back where I left off.  My traveling life meant the first four years were a spiral of worsening fitness…it took two years to tunnel back out.  I am glad to be back…unfortunately I am seven years older… but it is not too late.  I am still only 32.  I am riding a better bike than I had in 2001 and have much more experience in training / racing.   So, R.I.P. 2002-2007.  It’s on.

I haven’t written anything in a while since I have been pretty busy the last two week since coming back from Brookhaven. The timing has been good for that since I planned to take last week as a rest and recovery week. That meant that I still rode, but I cut the intensity way back and did some different rides for variety (like Tuesday’s Bike’s Plus ride and RB’s B-ride which both are 17mph group rides…).

This week, I tried another group ride for the first time: the GPAC Tuesday ride down in Germantown. Like RB’s, this ride is pretty easy to ride to / from being only 5 miles from my place. What was different is the speed… I had a couple teammates at the ride, but the amount of Marx/Bensdorf, Los Locos (local tri club) and Memphis Thunder (another local tri club) riders made it a pretty fast ride. Despite numerous stop lights, etc we managed to average 24-26 mph for several of the 5 mile segments (I have my computer setup to mark out 5 mile segments). So it was a good ride… maybe a bit tougher than I was looking for coming off a rest week, but it will be alright.

Yesterday, I rode my TT bike for maybe the 2nd or 3rd time outside a race situation. Tour of Arkansas in a few weeks features a 22 mile TT, so I need to get used to sitting on this bike for more than 10-12 minutes…

My dad is coming down this weekend from Michigan to visit.  We are going to go down to Sunny King to watch me (and the pros) race. This will also be Andrea’s first race with a lot of teammates, first NRC race, etc. I am set to race the 2-3 race myself. We both will have to step up for what promises to be a fast, fast criterium.

Earlier tonight I had my first experience riding a fixed gear bike and riding in a velodrome. All I have to say is how cool was that! Since I am in Atlanta this week, I arrange a opportunity to try out this sport at the Dick Lane Velodrome in East Point (southern Atlanta suburb). I wish I had a track a bit closer to Memphis to go ride on….

Brian leads some beginner classes, that he let me jump into to the middle of… After playing around with the track bike (they have new loaner bikes at the track), I got a feel for how a fixed gear bike works and I was zipping around the track in no time. It was a really cool night. As a part of the class, he gave a lot of good information about track etiquette and technique that really helped me understand how to ride the banks, etc.

Before I got a chance to ride around, there were a handful of juniors riding around as a part of the youth cycling program at the track… The photos show the concrete track which is set in a suburban Atlanta neighborhood. I took some photos using my Blackberry (not the best quality, but better than nothing).

In the end, it was a very cool experience… I hope to be able to get out to a track again to improve my skills and test myself. I will have to stick with the road for now….

Tonight, I met up with the Outback bikes/ Aaron Cycling group ride that winds through mid-town Atlanta. The course has about 30-40 turns and probably as many red lights & stopsigns, but it was probably a good ride for me tonight. Generally the pace was moderate with a few points where the speed picked up a little…

The route can be found linked off this site listing Atlanta group rides… The map is here. The ride was a bit crazy, but not bad considering all the turns and the stop signs… At least they didn’t run red lights!

Tomorrow night, I plan to visit the Dick Lane Velodrome after my training class to learn a bit about track racing. I never got down to the track when I lived in Chattanooga (or up to the one in Trexlertown when I lived in Maryland) and there is not really one close to Memphis. I think it will be an interesting experience to try it.

Today was a good long day in the saddle.  Andrea and I rode out to Outdoors (as usual) but we added some extra bits…  At the Shelby Forest Store we heard that the river (the MIssissippi) had flooded out the access road (Jackson Hill Road)…so we diverted from the group to check it out…..

So after looking at the flooded road, we doubled back up the hill (one of bigger ones around town) and rode back to mid-town.  She remembered seeing a good stencil on a boarded-up gas pump on Union Ave, so we decided to stop and capture it on my phone…

I am not sure what this (”we win”) has to do with a boarded up gas pumps (this station probably was robbed too many times), but the artistry is pretty good and well done.   In the end, I do hope more people will realize how many useless trips are taken and endeavor to reduce them….

In all, I got about 79 miles which is probably the furthest I have ridden in a while in one go.  In the middle, there was (as usual) a sprited section going through Benjestown to the Shelby Forest Store..  I was able to put in a few good efforts that make me a believer in the longer leg extension.  I probably will try to get up to the position that Rod suggested, but I am going to leave it alone (at part of the way there) through the next couple weeks (including Chattanooga Georgia Cup race and the Mississippi Gran Prix).

And I pulled the trigger on my e-file for my taxes…  I had to pay $300 this year instead of the usual $100…  Sold my Apple stock last year at pretty big profit (on a small position) to buy my Kuota.