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Once again I am headed out to China for a few days.  The trip will be short and sweet, not much time to look around.  Part of it is that I don’t want too long of an interuption of training at this time of the year, the other part is that my first race is next weekend (Rouge Roubaix).  I am coming back on Wednesday after spending only two full days (three nights) in country.  Unfortunately, I am missing our training race tomorrow which should be starting around the time I am flying up to Detroit (first leg of the trip).

I think I am in pretty good shape despite how hard my solo ride today ended up.  It wasn’t terribly long at 62 miles, but it was windy and I was alone out there.  Before I did my ride, I took Andrea’s Bulldog CX tires off my Dura Ace wheelset and put my Bontrager Hard Case tires on.  Those are going to be my wheels for Rouge.  My bike, at this point, will be my Felt.  Andrea’s team Trek Madone came in on Thursday, mine should be soon, but I might not be ready to race it in the few days that I have before Rouge.

Well, I suppose I should pack some clothes.  Andrea is out to race Spa City 6 hour.  It is an NRC mountain event in (relatively) nearby Hot Springs, Arkansas.

After what has been a lower volume January / early February, I have been trying to right the ship by increasing volume and adding some intensity at the same time.  The good news is that I am apparently able to handle it and I just completed a good 3 day block.

• Friday – 2 hours moderate mountain bike (night)
• Saturday – 6 hours moderate road – 100 miles
• Sunday – 4.5 hours moderate/hard – 70+ miles

Although this sort of thing will be routine in a few months, for now, it is a stretch.  So we spent the afternoon watching Winter Olympics on our only “big” television (we finally bought an “HDTV” a few months back, 37″).

On today’s ride, I put in some good efforts through the Forest and generally was very happy about how I felt all the way to the end.  I guess I must have retained more fitness than I thought.  Hopefully, I can continue this through early season racing (and that my next China trip won’t interfere).   Rouge is coming….

A training hole that is…  I really haven’t been riding as much as I did last year at this time.  (To put it in WKO+ terms, my CTL is about 10-15 points lower than last year at this point).   Weather had something to do with, work also was to blame (a bit longer hours and travel to China).  It is not the end of the world, it is just where I am at.

It doesn’t mean I am screwed for the upcoming season, I feel pretty good and have been able to step it up when needed.  Rouge Roubaix is only a few weeks away and I should be okay for that assuming I can go at all (I might be in China again the week before.. not sure yet).

My plans for March include:

• 3/7:  Rouge Roubaix (LAMBRA – St. Francisville, LA)
• 3/20: Hell of the South (TBRA – Berlin, TN)
• 3/27-28: Tour de Tuscaloosa (Tuscaloosa, AL)

I haven’t put together a full calender for the 2010 season yet, haven’t had the time yet, but plan a fairly full schedule all the way to August.

This season promises to a be a good one, I don’t have a lot of definite expectations for early season racing, but expect it will be a good month for the Marx-Bensdorf cycling team.

Some where in the next couple weeks, I should get my long awaited Trek Madone in (Andrea is getting one as well).  They are a the bike sponsor for the M-B team and a good portion of the team will be riding the white & black frames with red accents.  The feedback from the guys that have got one has been positive–I expect to be selling 58cm Felt FC (w/ SRAM Red) sometime in March…   any interest?

R

Since the last race of the year a few weeks back, I have been resetting the training cycle by mixing it up and generally riding a lot less. In fact, I pretty much have been just playing around during the week and only riding hard on Saturday at the Trinity ride.

Part of the playing around has been on a mountain bike. I have never really owned a mountain bike (just borrowed one for one winter back in 2001-2002). Matt from RB’s is similar body type to me (tall and skinny) and he was looking to sell his Titus. I rode it a handful of times and then bought it from him. So now I am the owner of Titus 29′er (Racer X) full suspension kitted out with Deore XT.

Also, I am gearing up for the upcoming cyclocross season. I decided to buy another set of aluminum tubular wheels. Since it was sort of last minute decision, I opted to have Excel Sports build me up a set of tank wheels (heavy bombproof wheels). I also purchased a trio of Vittoria Cross Evo tires to put on these. I decided to get these after continuing to have problems with my cyclocross tubeless setup. I am not sure it is the tire (likely) or the rim, but for now, I put a tube in and will have to run ~40# on the rear wheel of my formerly tubeless Kenda Kommander tires on some basic Velomax wheels (heavy). So far, I have just stretched on the tires and will start the gluing process this afternoon.

Today has me home alone waiting for Andrea to come back from Little Rock (area?). She is racing a long 8-12 hour adventure race with a team. Last night she found out that the race started at 5:30am. I’ll get all the details when she gets home tonight (and she will undoubtedly blog it). The plan is to get up early tomorrow and daytrip the Clear Creek MTB race down in Oxford. If we go (and I do say “if” since this long race may very well break her physically or her bike or something….), it will be my first mountain bike race. As a unlicensed racer, I will be a beginner (cat 3 in the new system), but I want to try racing off road once or twice before the end of the year to be able to make the call at USAC license renewal time if I want to pick up a MTB license for an extra $20 (and if I want to go ahead an upgrade to MTB-2 straight away).

My plan is to straighten up the house (especially the bike repair area) and do some wrenching this afternoon (tubular gluing, installing new SS chain tensioner). I need to put together a mountain bike seat back and recommission my Camelback (it looks like it will be pretty muddy down at Oxford due to all the rain we have been getting lately). Next weekend is the first race of the TBRA CX schedule: Beat the Freak #1 and #2. I booked a room and at this point plan on going with Andrea. This year I could potentially triple up (35+, CX3, and S/S). Probably won’t do that, but will probably at least double up (CX3 and SS).

Here are some good shots I took of our cat hanging out in my paper basket (with my new NightRider HID light in the foreground)… Enjoy.

Well, it is not as bad as all of that, I haven’t raced out of town since the Oxford July 4th weekend. I had an unusually long racing break in the middle of the season. I started off heading up north to Wisconsin and Michigan and generally recharged my mental batteries. Once I got back, I started to ramp up intensity and volume in the sort of stochastic way that I do. Thankfully I got through most of it with my SRM in working order.

Right after the training race at the beginning of the month, my FSA SRM crank decided to start to fail on the drive-side crankarm. Having been experienced with this issue (non-drive arm failed in April), I spotted it right away and stopped using the crank before it got scary. I mailed it off to Colorado and I hope I will get something back before too long.

In the meantime, I have been riding on the road, for the first time in 8-9 months, without a power meter. I put my super light FSA K-Force Light crank that I got on closeout earlier this spring (and which has been collecting dust since then). I ended up capping off my training ramp up with a moderately heavy week with lots of group rides (as I like). I only rode 5 days, but all were at least 50 mile days.

Part of the reason that I rode only 5 days was that, on Wednesday, I attended a new officials clinic put on by Vicki Mackzum to get my USAC class-C officials license. I am not sure when I will use it right off, but it was worth it just for the perspective in understanding how races are judged. Also, I will know which official I should talk to at a particular event when there is a problem.

With all of this time at home (relatively speaking anyway), I have been working on various projects around the house. I have replaced most of the light switches in the house with rocker switches (removing the standard toggle switches) and added countdown timers to the bathroom fans. Is it strange that I find electrical work sort of relaxing? Maybe it is so relatively easier to understand compared to chemical interactions at work or physiological changes w.r.t. to training for cycling.

Another quick project to finally trim out the 2 yards of stone project is installing the loose landscape timbers that have more or less kept the stone and lawn apart. Not really hard, but just time consuming to level the ground and then nail them down (I used 10″ galvanized spikes driven through a hole I drilled in the timbers).

On the bike front, other than shuffling around cranksets on my road bike (SRM / regular crank swap out), I started to mess around with my Polar power meter on my TT rig. On my Sunday ride (previous Sunday), I was getting pretty annoyed at the power readings cutting in and out when I rode my TT bike with Andrea (after riding my creaking SRM / FSA crank about 2 miles before returning to do a bike change).

When I first got the WIND power meter, I had problem with chainline over the pickup, but this problem seemed to be related to the cadence magnet. The magnet that came with was pretty thin and I found out why. I took a magnet from my bin of parts and found that when in the biggest gears, the magnet would lodge in the chainwheel teeth (fun!). I put on a thinner one and made that work. The next day (Monday) I did a long solo ride (3×20 min intervals). The first two went well, but the 3rd one was plagued with constant cadence/power cutouts. It got to the point that had to just ignore it and finish the workout.

On Sunday, I spent a few minutes putting the original Polar magnet back on and this time putting it out past the pedal spindle. A quick run down the street showed the difference… night and day. The power picked up right away and gave reasonable numbers. I will give it a go on a ride on Wednesday night.

With that, I will conclude the post with a quick CX preview. I have my Ridley X-Fire that I build up last January and my CrossBow (flipped over) which I am going to upgrade to SRAM Force (and retire the Dura Ace 9). Does anyone need a DA 9 drivetrain?

My biggest question at this point is whether to continue to just run tubeless or to take the tubular leap for CX this year?

Races…. Meridan/Cuba (1/2/3), then State RR/Oak Ridge (3), and finishing up at BMW Omn./River Gorge in Chattanooga (30+? or 1/2/3?).

Andrea has a passion for back roads and we found a couple that didn’t quite go like the map says they should go…. Just as last post, here is the plan (in red) versus our actual (in blue).

Map from today with notes!

Both days were good rides, but if you are in the area, I would advise against M-35 north of Palmer (Tilden mine location) if you can… Most of the roads around Marquette County are covered up with dump trucks going somewhere, but this highway is pretty narrow with lots of double trailer dump trucks going along pretty quick.

A nice cut over turned out to be Jarvi road connecting M-35 to Old CR-480. It was short, but had a nice short hill on it which made it interesting (and functional).

Here are a 4-pack of photos from Suicide Bowl Road (sign, ski jump, random lake at the end, and end of the road for us). This road is casually paved… or at least casually maintained, leaving me wishing they would just grind it up and turn it to gravel-it would ride better.

Suicide Bowl Rd near Negaunee … dead ends to Cleveland Cliffs private road.

The last part of our ride had us chasing after dead ends almost back to Marquette, trying to find another way back to Marquette (cutting off some riding on US41). All of those attempts led to nowhere.

And for the random photo of the day, this one had to win. This camper / truck combo was spotted down on the Marquette waterfront when we went to go see a short musical comedy (about Ice Fishing, of course) down at the boat house last night.

Our trip started out by heading north to my brother’s in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. We knew from last year that the riding was good in that area, so we were looking forward to that (and this time we wouldn’t have to rely on maps, since I have a Garmin 705 now).

The area is pretty much farms. Both dairy and crops…. And wind farms.

A few wind turbines….. Am I wind powered now?

Dairy machines.

7 Hills Road near Fond du Lac.

One of the roads we worked to get into our long route was the semi-famous 7 Hills Rd. This is an ~8 mile road that includes probably about 12 hills, not 7, but some of them might not count. Each hill goes into the next.

After spending a few days down at my brother’s in Wisconsin, Andrea and I headed further north to my mom’s in Marquette, Michigan. Last night Andrea plotted out a semi-ambitious route from Marquette that was likely to involve some gravel…

We started out right away on the gravel going up and over Mount Marquette.

Gravel road… pretty rideable.

Overlook over the city of Marquette.

After we descended, we rode down the highway to the next section of gravel. It started out pretty innocent, the pavement ending a few miles off the highway, but then as the road narrowed, the sand started…. And deep. We walked through the deep stuff, and managed to ride the not-so-deep stuff (we started to get pretty good at that, some skills that will play out at some point). After another mile or two the road went to pretty ridiculous, turning into a sandy, rocky, 2 track… Just when we were about half way to the next pavement (we think), the road ended at a private road.

End of the road and deep, deep sand.

So we had to turn around and head back…. after getting back to the highway, we continued on finding some more gravel along the way to the east end of our planned route (this time it went back to the pavement again). Just when we thought we were doing well on completing our loop, it happened again… The road (this one completely rideable) ended at two closed gates.

The route we plotted on MapMyRide (in red) and the actual route (in blue) we took on the ride are shown below… The two dead ends are on the south/west and the east end of our actual route.

I left the house and started on my usual 25 mile loop, which I was going to shorten to 15 miles, but really didn’t feel like dealing with cars….so I took a random ride to explorer different neighborhoods…. 9 miles at an IF of 0.45. Perfect.

After a mediocre performance at Tulsa, I need to step back and regroup for my planned 4-week run. Originally, I was going to stay home all weekend, but I have partially reconsidered and plan to camp with Andrea at Mousetail on Saturday night before her mountain bike race Sunday morning.

This week, I took a few days off the bike for various reasons, but mostly to rest. I rode an extended RB’s ride on Tuesday (51 miles) and a pretty moderate ride with Andrea this evening. The pollen is kicking pretty hard after all the rain, so I am either Mucinex’ed up or stuffed up. Fun stuff.

Tomorrow, I plan to make a reappearance at Trinity after 4 weeks of being gone racing. I am pretty rested and feel pretty good.

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We are not going to Mousetail after all…. it is fine, it would be good to a get another long ride in on Sunday (Outdoor’s ride). An entire weekend at home… what a concept!

Since Andrea is away, I had to fend for myself tonight.

Here is the recipe

• 1 lb of whole grain rotini
• ~2/3 lb of shrimp
• 2 cans of Baroni’s meat sauce.
• 1 lb of frozen mixed veggies.
• bunch of crushed red pepper.

Sauteed the shrimp in olive oil to firm them up (were frozen). Made and drained the pasta. Added the sauce to the shrimp.

I ended up microwaving the veggies to get it all together since I was getting pretty hungry by the end of all this. (I went out for a 2 hour ride since I didn’t ride Thursday night.)

I have leftovers for forever.