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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.

I don’t know how I evolved to this, but it looks like I have been riding with a low seat height for a quite a while. I know that when I got my Kuota last April, I adjusted it to match my Trek (at least I believe…). Anyway, my new Felt FC and my Kuota before that were setup with a seat height of approximately 31.5 inches (80.0 cm). My inseam to the floor is 35.5″ (90.2 cm).

Since I was setting up a TT bike for the first time (see post #114), I decided to stop by RB’s and get a bike fit… After setting up the trainer…he looked at my knee angle and adjusted my saddle to 34″ (86.4 cm). That number is exactly the classic 96% number (90.2 cm * 0.96 = 86.6 cm) that is used for a starting point.

So, I left my TT bike as adjusted and when i got home I took a look at my Felt. As mentioned before, I had a seat height of 80 cm… I was able to adjust it up 20mm. Andrea helped me adjust the seat fore-aft using a plumb. I was also significantly behind the pedal spindle (pedal at 3 o’clock, plumb bob from my knee). I ended up moving from about 4 cm behind the axle to about 1 cm.  It was a drastic change, but I decided to go with it since it was so far off the mark. (And it is as far as I can extend my seat post safely.. if I want to go further I will need a 40 cm post.. which might be a good idea anyway since the Felt carbon seatpost is a hassle to adjust…

I rode RB’s ride into spring (75 miles) in the early spring chill.. It was high 40’s and generally miserable this morning. Andrea and I started out in the lead group, but stopped in Arlington for the rest room. The group didn’t stop, so we rode trading pulls out to the 35 mile sag stop outside Brighton. Just after we got there the 2nd group showed up.. we ended up riding back with them. About half way back, Andrea wanted to a do a long interval and I rode off with her just ahead of me. I felt pretty good following (a testament to the saddle height fix…maybe). A bit later, I also put in a good effort up the rollers on Memphis-Arlington… all-in-all I like the new position… higher and more forward, but definitely better.

Tomorrow is another long ride with about 75 miles on offer riding from Germantown to mid-town to Shelby Forest and back.

Most of my weekend was taken up by a clinic on training. My racing club, Memphis Velo invited Todd Nodemeyer (a cycling coach) to give a presentation on training with power (and somewhat with heart rate) and then we did some on the road rides as a group. Saturday was a wet day and we pretty much just rode around getting flats with the exception of a very spirited rip down N. Watkins at 35+ mph….

On Sunday, we started out from RB’s cyclery and road out northeast of Arlington to the Long Road loop. It is a 5 mile loop were we did 3 mock races. The rules of the race required two team members (we split into two sides) had to bridge up the other team and tag them out… and in the end had to finish with two from your team. We divided up into team by just alternating off, but it ended up that my team was pretty much the Cat3 team along with Todd. The other team was all the rest (Cat 4).

[bike stand]

The first race played out with Matt and Scott starting out ahead… Jarret and I bridged up to them…and then the group came together more or less. Late in the race, there was a long hill that ended up causing it to come down to Matt, Scott, Todd, and I. Todd and I took that one.

The second race saw some more attacks… but they all came back. There was a small group of us on the hill near the end including John (moved to the other team), Matt, Scott, Jarret, and I. Matt & John attacked away and I had to let them go (although I don’t know that I would have been able to counter if solo) since I needed Jarret with me… They took that race…

[John, Todd, Frogge, Tim, and Scott]

The last race dissolved the teams and it was everyone for themselves. There were attacks, etc…but the hill proved to be the decider again. Jarret had started to roll off the front and got a 100 ft lead or so. I pushed hard up the hill to chase him down and Matt came with me. We caught Jarret about 1/2 mile from the end. Matt lead into the sprint and I could do nothing but watch him walk away with it…

[John]

The results of this don’t really matter, but it was a good fun exercise and I gives us a chance to see how our team is doing this time of year…

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Next race for me is the Ride to Live race near Birmingham, AL.

Last night was the first daylight weekend night ride for the year. I ended up just doing a standard loop out of Cordova of about 25 miles. The weather yesterday was fairly nice, but what made it remarkable was that it was a first ride of the Zipp 900 disc I bought back in January. At first I was riding out in the open down Cordova Park and Lenow Road so it was fairly faint, sounding like an airplane overhead….but by the time I got to the more closed in roads (Latting Road), the noise was unmistakable… the disc whoosh. I hadn’t planned on riding hard (I really didn’t anyway), but it was not recovery ride… That sound just encourages you on…

Coming back in through the neighborhoods Kingridge and Fletcher Trace, kids and adults were looking up at me as I rode past… This wheel definitely gets some attention… But maybe not in a good way… I think I will save it for TT’ing…

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I did not wear my TT helmet, that would have been over the line…

All in all it was good weekend. Mark, Jarret, Andrea, and I drove out to western Arkansas to do some climbing. Memphis has some good riding routes, but nothing that even comes close to climbing. The plan for the weekend was to ride Mt. Magazine (Arkanasas’s highest point) on Saturday and some route around Petit Jean State Park on Sunday. The weather was supposed to be around 50F and moderately Sunday….

Saturday: We got an early start driving out of Memphis and got to Paris, Arkansas around noon. After trying to figure out where to start and getting dressed we were wheels down around 1pm. The start it was in the mid-40’s and cloudy. It felt so cold… As we started out of Paris on AR-309, there is a big hill right outside of town testing our legs immediately. As we came up to the top of the first hill by the reservoir, the sun started to come out…. it would be short lived. The road up to Mt. Magazine from Paris gradually climbs from around 400 feet to 2700 feet (see previous post, Paris-Havana-Paris route). The temperature was fairly chilly… and there was even some residual snow up on the top falling out of the trees in the wind. The grade up to Mt. Magazine was generally moderate since the 2300 feet of net gain are over around 16-17 miles… After doing a loop around the top, we dropped down the steeper side. On the Havana side, a similar amount of elevation is lost in only about 6 miles with another 2 of pretty flat roads to Havana. The worst part of the descent was the extreme cold….

After we turned around at the Havana store, we started up the climb…. Once on the climb we all climbed at our pace to the top. I felt pretty good about my effort. I am climbing better than I have in years. I think it is a combination of maintaining off-season weight, weight-training, and good general fitness.

After coming together we dropped off the mountain starting out around 35-36F at the top down to a still seemingly cold mid-40’s… it must have been the dampness, but the last 16 miles back to the car were some of more miserable riding miles I have experienced all winter. I guess I was just under-dressed.

Here are my Polar graphs broken up to 4 files (each climb and descent are separate):

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Sunday we started out at Petit Jean state park visitor center. We rode a short loop on Red Bluff drive (which turned out to be a hard-packed dirt road) and then rode down off the plateau for about 10-11 miles and turned around to ride back up to the visitor center. This climb was a shorter one with more variation in pitch than the Magazine climb.

Polar plots:

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March is full of potential racing oppuritunities… I was going to hold off racing until mid-April, but I might do some selected racing in March. The first one is the CARVE Crosswinds Classic outside Little Rock. Since it is day-trippable (a rarity from Memphis!), I might go. The course is flat, so I hope I can stay with the P123 field for the 76 miles. I need to get used to that when I race in Mississippi and Arkansas since most are P123 (without the separate Cat III field as in TBRA).

This weekend, I am planning to do some climbing in Arkansas. The routes I am working are based on the old Tri-Peaks race routes (NRC race up until last year).

The first plan is to climb Mt. Magazine strating from Paris, Arkansas. The race route looks like this:

A nasty, nasty alternative would be to go up and over to Havana and then go back over the mountain again to Paris. Both routes are ~70 miles, but the second is twice as much climbing…

Out of Dardenelle, there is the Petit Jean loop (also from Tri-Peaks race courses). The route is already long at 70 miles and I left out Mt. Nebo.

I haven’t posted much since there is not much to say this time of year. Last weekend was another good weekend, a 3-day one at that due to the President’s day holiday (yes, that is one of my 10 holidays at work).

Saturday was a good group ride out of the shop (RB’s). A solid crew of about 10-15 rolled out to the cat pee store and back. During the ride, I felt pretty good and took some fast pulls coming back in.

On Sunday, I decided to bag the Outdoor’s ride since it was still sort of raining when I would have had to leave. Instead, I rode out from Germantown with Andrea down towards Mississippi. It was really, really windy (20+ mph southerly wind). Her plan had her doing 20 minute LT intervals… That wasn’t on my plan, so I hung back and did some sprint work (standing starts and rolling sprints). On her 2nd (and last) interval, I decided to try out an effort… after about 8-10 minutes, my HR was only 163-164 (my LT is about 173-174). So I sat up…

Monday’s ride was an easy ride except for blasting up the Memp-Arlington hill eastbound to Canada road. I liked so much, I did it again.

The last thing is my weight is stabilizing at 166-168 pounds (morning weight). Last year at this time, I was nearly 190# and didn’t get down to < 175# until after Memorial Day weekend.

I fitted my Cannondale cross bike with road tires for the summer / trainer bike. This morning I rode it on the rollers for 10 minutes… very unstable, but I was able to do it (I am just learning rollers this winter). It must have to do with the ‘cross geometry…?

Still waiting on my new Felt frame. I can’t wait to build it up!

Another good weekend weather wise… Got out for two moderately long rides to start bringing my endurance up.  Saturday, a solid core of Memphis Velo riders road out to the cat pee store and back from RB’s.  Taking out stops for a flat and a later incident (see below), the ride was fairly fast, but I felt good.  A few miles from getting back to Arlington, I made a couple of hard efforts and was happy with the results.  It was a good check on where I am headed.   It is going to a good season.   Sunday was the usual Outdoor’s ride riding out from Germantown and back with Andrea.  The Outdoor’s ride was a calm in that as nice rotating paceline ate up the miles to the Forest store.  Normally, that ride can be pretty cut-throat.

Unfortunately, at the end of the ride on Saturday a couple of us had a front row seat for one of our own getting taken out by a dog.  Frogge was riding with the group down Anderton Spring (residential road) when a pair of dogs came out of a driveway/yard and came over to us.  Frogge was the unlucky one as one of them ran right into his front wheel after he tried to evade.  He went down pretty hard and fast.  Fortunately the damage was pretty limited and he will have to deal with some healing on his arm (fracture).  The season is still out there.    The trend seems to be more dogs on the loose this early season out on routes out in NE Shelby County.  Maybe it is just a bunch of new dogs this winter that are being let outside and haven’t yet been run over by a car.

Still waiting on my Felt frame to come in…   in the meantime, I picked up another fish scale to do some weighing.   Here is what I found:

• Kuota Kebel [SRAM Force] with Bontrager Race Lite Wheels (17.4 #)
• Trek 5200 [Ult 9] with Rolf Sestrires (18.4#)
• Ridley Crossbow [DA 9] with Velomax Vistas/Mud2′ (21.6#)
• Cannodale [105 9sp] with 105/Mavic wheels (22.6#)

Putting the race wheels (Zero 038) on my Kebel takes off over a pound of weight.  I was surprised by the weight of my Crossbow since I thought that it was so much lighter than my Cannondale… I guess 1 pound is a lot, but I thought it was more.  Both bikes’ complete wheel sets weigh almost 7 lbs with tires and cassette.  The frame of the Crossbow like the Cannondale is aluminum and is not especially light.

The way I weighed them I got frame/component weights (after taking wheels off):

• Kuota Kebel/Force:  11.5#
• Trek 5200 / Ult 9:  13.1#
• Ridley Crossbow / DA 9:  14.6#
• Cannondale / 105 9:  15.7#

At some point I will do some work with the wheels to give some real world weights, but it looks like most of my wheels are not that impressive.   I like knowing this stuff, but really it doesn’t make that much of a difference in the end, but a lighter bike just feels so fast…

This week was a short one of training due to a number of factors. After racing this past weekend at Columbia, I wasn’t able to do any training on Monday (team meeting after work) and the weather limited me to trainer rides pretty much. On Tuesday, I ended up riding the trainer for 90 minutes at a moderate effort to just spin out the legs.

On Wednesday, I met Andrea and we went through some different explosive power exercises. She is trying to teach me Olympic style lifts and I am a bad student…I mean it is not coming naturally to me at all. I am making progress finally on part of the movement for a clean. She also showed me and I was able to do some wide-grip (snatch style) overhead presses (jerk and/or push style). These pretty much also bring up the awkward movements associated with doing an overhead squat. I guess it is pretty normal, but my wrists were definitely a limiter on those…plus the backward bending of the arms locked out over head.

After probably 30 minutes of that with various combinations of movements (cleans, pushpress, jerks, squats, etc), we moved on to some different style workouts. She put together some crossfit style thing that we did in a descending sets (circuit style) of 20, 15, 10, 5 reps…. We combined squats/dumbell overhead presses (fast), vertical jumps, chin ups, and walking lunges…. by the end the jumps were less than explosive, but I tried to make them that way. I also was pretty much out of breath by the time all of that was done as well.

I then went home and got on the trainer. I put in a tape that I bought 3 years ago probably and never played. It was a Carmichael Training Systems (CTS) tape on sprinting. My legs were tired getting on the bike, but I got through it pretty much okay. After some warm-up 1 minute intervals, the tape takes you through a pair of power intervals sets (3×12 seconds) in a big gear… 20 rpm - 120 rpm (seated) and then 0 rpm to 90 rpm (standing). After that were two pair of lighter gear intervals (2×20 sec) from 90 - 130 rpm (seated) and then 95-120 rpm (standing). At the end were two long progressive intervals that involved 1:20 of ramp and a 10 second all out sprint. By those final intervals, I was pretty much cooked and my legs felt as if they were buckling underneath me when standing and sprinting.  You can see my rpms fell off to nearly nothing at the end of the long intervals (after the sprint).

The worst part was not that day… it was this morning. My quads are incredibly stiff and sore. I have been stretching all day as best I can. I made the drive from Memphis to Chattanooga (about a 300 mile drive) this afternoon/evening so I had to spend a lot of hours sitting still…which didn’t help. I drove over today to do some work in town tomorrow and then show up for the cyclocross race on Saturday. I hope my legs are recovered in time for the race…

Yesterday I showed up for a long group / team ride down from Germantown to Red Banks, Miss. The group was a solid one and included most of the racing members of the team. It being late December and plan being base miles we ended up rolling out in a rotating paceline.

The problem was chiefly on the way back. The route was rolling route and during the course of this two of the biggest issues that I have experienced in riding pacelines for the last 6-7 years…

1. Not pulling through properly. The goal of the advancing line is to smoothly overtake the rider leading the line moving back (who had slowed ever so slowly as they were moving over). This also means getting over as soon as practical in front of the rider in the backward moving line.
2. Not keeping a steady effort up and down rollers. Steady speed is cool but trying to maintain 22 mph up and down rollers will mess up the line and pop off riders.

The number #1 issue above reminds me of something someone once told me. The most important thing you do in a rotating paceline is give your wheel (draft) to the backward-moving line. (Well, maybe 2nd most important…but I assume it is relatively obvious you shouldn’t wreak out other riders.) Staying up on the advancing line too long as the backward line withers in the headwind will achieve two things. It will piss off / tire out that guy moving back and disrupt the rhythm of the line. And you will go slower as group.