roadcx.net

Dragging, flipping, and dragging some more… moving a big rock up the hill.

I decided to revisit the random banner image thing. I learned a bit too much about php (I knew almost zero just an hour ago…) It is a pretty basic script, but watch out for extra spaces at the end of the line (it does matter).

Here is the first four that I made up (most are from today)

I’ll make this short and sweet.

(1) Andrea and I are getting married, December 12th.

(2) I am changing teams… from Memphis Velo / Smith & Nephew to Mrax & Bensdorf cycling team. The change is going along with my plans upgrade to category 2 in 2010. This year should be a good year to go on top of 2009 (which was my best year yet).

This weekend completes my Fall cyclocross campaign with the Outdoors, Inc Cyclocross race on Mud Island (Memphis). I will race a couple more times this winter, but this is the last of 5 weekends in a row… It will be nice to finish it up with a race at home. (I decided not to race the Lock 4 – six hour mtb race this weekend).

With only 2 races under my belt (as far as TBRA points go), I am actually 2nd in the series in CX1/2. I am miles behind Jeremy Chandler and basically tied with a few others with similar totals, so it doesn’t mean a whole lot. We’ll see how that develops….

Andrea has trained Turbo to stand up…. she is pretty stable, but ends up waving her paws in the air… photos don’t quite do it justice, but I try anyway…

Indy is much more stable sitting up… so much so, that it is almost boring….

After my final road race of the year (Chattanooga), I have been taking it pretty easy. In fact, I took off three days off the bike this week (Monday, Tuesday, and Friday)! Wednesday, I hit the trails with Andrea on a borrowed MTB (that I might buy from him) and Thursday I participated in the hell on wheels that is the AM Peddlar ride. (Which was made even more sketchy as I arrived late and watched the field roll by as I was finishing getting ready… nothing like starting 1/2 mile back and then working my way up from the back.)

Saturday morning, I took my fresh legs to the Trinity ride. The group was a mixed bag, but there was handful of people in there to make it interesting (although a few of them turned off for some reason after 10-15 miles). Did some fun attacks that pretty much left it down to Bryant, Jeff, and I… Sit up and repeat… At the store (BP in Gallaway), a RV pulled up and asked direction to the Collierville antique shop or something like that. After explaining to the gentleman it was about 20 miles south and that he shouldn’t have gotten off the expressway way at Arlington… the group was long gone and Bryant, Dale and I rolled off in pursuit. We started off easy and then did some solid turns, but we only were able to get the group in sight by the end of the ride (Lenow Rd) after picking off a few that fell off the pace of the group. Oh well, the group was super sketchy anyway.

At the end of the ride, I started to think about what I would do later in the day since Andrea went west to the Ouachita mountains to do some mountain biking at the Womble and later at Camp Robinson. She left on Friday afternoon and set up camp at Lake Sylvia. I got it in my head to pack up some gear and our two dogs and surprise her by heading over. I got on the road at 11:30a, grabbed some Subway and started driving the 170 miles to the campground. I made good time despite a especially annoying run of I-40 traffic (i.e. Truck #1 is going 71 mph, Truck #2 is going 72 mph, clearly Truck #2 HAS to pass truck one and then bog down going over a hill… and line up 20 cars behind … and then have a few cars try to zip up the right lane and squeeze in…)

On the way, I tried to call to make sure that she didn’t pull up camp and ended up leaving her a text asking about the ride. I didn’t hear anything (figured she was still riding?) and went to the campground, getting there around 2:30pm. I easily found her campsite (the campground was a ghost town) and waited a minute hoping that the occasional moments of phone coverage would let me know she was done (by text message, probably). I let the dogs run around and then decided that I should run to town and get something to eat (and be in better cell coverage for a while). And the mosquitoes were eating me up at the campsite (I didn’t bring repellent thinking that Andrea took it with her). So I went to Perryville (about 10 miles away) and got a chicken sandwich at Sonic and waited. After a while, I tried to find some repellent, but couldn’t manage to find it at the grocery store or the gas station. I went back to the campsite and planned to lay down in the tent and wait.

By this time it was getting late (around 5 pm) and I still hadn’t heard from her. So I ended laying down in the tent with the dogs…. I was drifting off when I heard my phone ringing- Andrea’s ring. I picked it up and we talked for a few seconds before the call dropped. I tried to get over to where the phone seemed worked better earlier (up on a hill near the campsite entrance) and she called back. I found that she was close and planning to come back and pick up the tent and stay in Conway.

A few text messages played out like this… (I usually had to resend each of these at least twice since the cell coverage down in the valley where the campground is bad.)

A: “Service is spotty. I will call you in a couple of hours once I am at Lance’s in conway”
R: “Conway is lame.”
A: “Yeah, I know”
R: “Lake slyvia [sic] is a better place.”
R: “Much more private.”
A: “?”
R: “Probably pretty quiet out there I bet”
(after a minute….)
A: “Be there in a minute”

30 seconds later, I saw the Element coming up the drive. I brought her sleeping bag that she had forgotten, but that was not why she was happy. Surprise visit FTW.

A few weeks back I picked up a new clincher wheelset. I ended up choosing the Dura Ace carbon reinforced aluminum wheels. The version I got is tubeless ready which should open up some interesting options in the future. For now, I really like these wheels and they roll great, as they should at over a grand for the wheelset.

Our adopted cat hanging out between my road bikes. Chunky Monkey Ninja Kitty. She is settling in well with the dogs and showing them who is boss.

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 and I got up early and made the drive down to Covington this morning with the purpose to make the 2pm tour at the Abita Beer brewery in nearby Abita Springs, Louisiana. After eating lunch, we arrived at the visitor center / tap room. About 1 minute after we got there, they opened up the bar to allow all the visitors to sample the complete range of their brewery. We each tried quite a few partial cups….

Driving around, I spotted this scene… I am pretty sure this is same place I blogged 2 years ago….

Tomorrow is of course the Tour de Louisiane. This has become one of my favorite races on the calender. I decided to race this instead of traveling back to Chattanooga for the state criterium weekend. The format is a bit different than last year with the RR first, followed by different courses for the TT and the criterium on Sunday. Unlike last year’s rain drenched RR, it promises to just hot and muggy.

Instead of heading west to race the Joe Martin Stage race, I went with Andrea for her first mountain bike race. Rather than go small, a little 2-3 hour jaunt, she wanted to start out at Dirt, Sweat, and Gears 12-hour race in Fayetteville, Tenn.

The plan was camp out and for Andrea to race DSG, solo on her new Niner Jet9. I brought my road bike along so I could go out on a road ride at some point during the day. I emailed Kevin Freeman (promoter of Beat the Freak cx series) and he sent me a good route. So we loaded up the car with all the gear and headed east.

Friday night was a bit windy, but otherwise the weather was good. In the pre-race fesitvities, they rigged up a road frame with 20″ wheels and had a time-trial contest over the grassy area where the start/finish would be the next day. Andrea lined up in the group right away and posted a pretty good early time (57 seconds?). The big issue was that bottom bracket height was so low that the pedals were constantly hitting the ground… I went a bit later and managed to post up a time in the high 40′s… The best time ended up being in the mid-30′s. It was all about technique and my start was less than awesome as I barely got going at first until I figured out how to make that bike go.

before

The next day, the weather was supposed to turn rainy… The prediction came true about 2 minutes before the shotgun lemans start. The first lap had the leaders coming around in about an hour, which was expected. The amateurs however, really ended up being stretched out… In fact, by the time Andrea came by the tent after completing lap 1 and doing a bike wash, 2:25 had passed.

It turned out the rain had turned the course to a muddy slog that involved a lot of pushing the bike along… The weather was improving and the sun came out. So after she started on her 2nd lap, I geared up and went out for a ride. It was sunny for the first two hours of my hilly road ride, and then it started raining again, this time for about an hour.

Out on course, the rain, then sun, and then rain again turned the course into sticky peanut butter mud. When I rolled back into the campsite (from my road ride), about 4 hours had passed and Andrea had not came through again… What she was doing was pushing, carrying, and dragging her 80-100# bike through the ups and downs of the 10 mile course…. After a while, she came back to the camp, but hadn’t yet completed the lap yet since it was slow going (one could leave the course as long as you went back to the same place).

Her bike was pretty well encased in mud.

She came back to get to get my road bike… She wasn’t allowed to just run the trail without a bike, but she could take a change and my Felt at ~17#, was much lighter than her 27# Jet9, and easier to shoulder.

Even with the road bike, it took her another hour or so to cover the rest of the course. A photographer got a photo of her riding across the finish line. She did it at the urging of the announcer….

Here are a bunch of photos from the start and a few from the middle of the race….

Andrea and I spent a rainy afternoon moving the stones. I turns out that 2 yards is quite a bit of stone (it was the minimum for delivery).

Anyway, here is the result:

The side yard in front the fence also doesn’t drain well, so we pretty much tore it up like a cyclocross race in the wet.

Even after changing the job scope to include a 3′ wide strip down to the bottom of the yard, we still ended up with 1/2 to 3/4 yard remaining. We consolidated it and decided to wait until it dries up before moving the rest somewhere? Other side yard? Maybe the side yard in front of the fence (muddy part shown above)?