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After spending the beginning of the week in St. Louis for a work training class, I drove east to Louisville on Wednesday night and Thursday morning (over-nighted near Evansville, Indiana).  I arrived at the venue around 10:30 am and scoped out the place and later prepared to pre-ride the course.  Unlike the last time I was at this venue (October 2010), the course was muddy pretty much along its entire length.  By the time, I got out ont the course mid-day, some of the off camber stuff was nearly (effectively) unrideable.  The rest of it was a mud slog power course.  So I rode around for 2 laps which ended up taking about 30 minutes at the pace I was going.  Then came the power wash.  The cleanup continued back at the hotel after checking in and I probably put about 2 pounds of mud/sand down the drain cleaning off my kit.   By the time I left, it had started snowing, but was staying a bit above freezing and it was not icy anywhere.

Andrea arrived that afternoon after fighting her way up I-65 in near white-out conditions.  The only thing that was visible at times was the still bare pavement.  Anyway, we went down to pick up our numbers and used the rest of our parking meter time to have some Mediterranean food at a restaurant near the host hotel.  The temperature continued to drop into the 20′s and in the high teens overnight….  pretty much exactly how it went @ 2007 CX nationals at Kansas City (KS).  The result was the same.  Icy ruts.

My heat race was the second of the day with a bit of open course before the first race.  So I used this time to get from abject terror riding to some way of getting around this course in one piece (and hopefully faster than a few).   My start draw (done at registration) was #79.  Which meant dead last in my heat of 29.  Great.

The start stretch was a straight piece of road with a left hander at the end down a hill where the fun began.  I am not sure why I started in small ring, but I did and wasn’t able to improve my position much/at all on that section.  Once we hit the ruts, I passed a handful and then suddenly it felt like I was alone.  The gaps between the riders were pretty significant as riders white-knuckled and crashed around the course.  I took out at least 3 step in stakes.  The first one I slowed, which was a mistake.  After that I just kept trucking along breaking the stake in 3-4 pieces as parts of it were chopped up by the bike.  (What is the difference between a stake that is broke in half and 3-4 pieces…  probably easier to stuff in a trash bag in smaller pieces).  Generally, I felt like I was getting better riding in those conditions but there wasn’t much time for that, 2 laps and done.  17th out of 21 that toed the line.  Yikes.  Not good at all.

Probably the biggest issue that slowed me up is not really having a good feel for how fast I could go.  Every time I pushed it (either during pre-ride and during the short race), I would end up flying through the course tape or crashing.  During the pre-ride, one was a bad one that sent me to the ground on my left knee and my left hip (crash was when I playing around with keeping weight off the front tire, probably over did it.  This is probably the right technique and just hoping for the best).  EXACTLY the same places that I tore up last Saturday.  They were mostly healed, but now they are reopened.  Nice.

My race tomorrow is at 3pm.  The forecast is for above freezing temperatures.  The exact timing of how that “warm” front comes in could mean more of the same (or worse, if it is just wet ice!) or back to Thursday’s conditions.  Probably a bit of both or no change if the 25F temperatures hold through the day.  The weather forecast has missed the mark today with actual temperatures about 5 degrees colder than expected so far.

During Thursday’s pre-ride, I must have injected mud into my bottom bracket.  Andrea, always the good wife and a great mechanic, was checking over my A-bike when she noticed that the BB was frozen.  She commandeered a BB tool and swapped it out for hers so I could race my carbon bike/carbon wheels.  That bike was running Challenge Fango’s 33 at 23/25 psig.  I had the same pressure in my B-bike with Challenge Grifo’s 32 when I crashed hard.  I am not sure that made a difference, but maybe it did.   Andrea swapped back the BB’s after rehabbing mine.  It probably was just literally frozen with water + 20F temperatures.

Short post,

#1.  Today was the maiden voyage for my new Trek Speed Concept time trial bike.  Nothing like taking it out for a first ride of 65 miles or so.  Initial take is that I like it.  It is vast improvement over my Kuota time-trial conversion, which was full of compromises and not nearly as adjustable as this bike.

#2.  Also this was the first full day at the house in a long time (early December?), so I moved the pot rack that I previously installed over the stove.  Now, it is over the sink (and doesn’t hang down in front of the cabinets).

That is all.

This dialog came up as I was installing Dropbox on one of my computers.  It ended up sounding really funny.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like Dropbox, so I put a Dropbox in your Dropbox folder, so you can be Dropboxing when you are Dropboxing.   Yo Dawg indeed.

I decided to pop up north for a quick hit trip to see family up north for Christmas.  A week or so ago, I booked a 4-night trip up to Wisconsin to meet up with my brother, his wife & daughter as well as my parents.  Andrea was to work most of it and the high $$ airfare meant that I was to make the trip solo.  I would say that the holiday is not hugely significant to either one of us, so all was good.  Fast forward to a week ago when a sudden work trip came up to Muskegon, Michigan.  4 days becomes 7 days off the bike and away from Andrea.  We definitely have had longer stretches apart for this and that, but some how it seems to feel a bit longer when not occupied totally with work and/or training.

Master’s worlds is only a few weeks away in mid-January up in Louisville.  The schedule has been posted with a lot of possible events for my age group (35-39).  Since there is already over 40, signed up, they will have short 3 lap / 20 minute races who start order is set by random draw.  If there are more than 80, they might have a repecharge (2nd chance to get to the final) and a consolation final in addition to the heat start ordered final race.  At this point, I need to sharpen my fitness once again before heading up to Louisville to make sure that the only races I have to run are the heat race and the final.  That may the only ones that can be done if there are <80 total, but the heat race will remain key for start position in the final.  For the most part, I do my best work in the 25-50 minute part of the race, so I need to have a good start to make sure that I am not in the bottom of the pile.

Life has been pretty busy for me lately, so I am a bit late on this report.  Andrea and I day-tripped to Nasvhille for the state championship race up at Lock 4.   The course was out on the peninsula of the park and featured a lot of up and down and tight turns around the 3 sides of the road to the end of the peninsula.  The day started off pretty well with Andrea delivering a commanding win in the Womens 1/2/3 race.   The CX 1/2 race was larger than the typical TBRA affair with 11 starters.

I got off to a slower start (not that unusual) and was chasing everyone through the tight course.  By the 3rd lap or so, I started to overtake some riders that were falling off.  In the end, I was only able to improve my position to 8th.  Not a great show.

Here are a couple photos that Andrea took of me racing….  We have a bunch of photos that I will work through at some point next week…  Did have time to compile the albums yet.

After getting back from Nashville around 8:30 pm or so, I had to pack for business trip into a heading up to see family in Wisconsin.  The business trip came up pretty suddenly (on Friday), but it ended up working out okay since it was heading up to SW Michigan (Muskegon).  The only bad part is that the trip is going to limit my training options heading into Master’s Worlds in a few weeks.  At this point, it is looking like I might have to spend the beginning of that week in St. Louis.  I guess being busy can be a virtue.

Andrea and I live in Tennessee, but the timing was right so we headed to Little Rock to get a bit more cyclocross action in before the Tennessee State CX race next weekend.  Format of the race was A/B with subcategories for medals.  Since the B-race had no payout, Andrea decided to race the A-race with (or against?) me.

We got to the venue at Burns Park in time to preride the course.  The front section of the course was pretty “normal” cyclocrossing with tight turns and some pavement.  The backside was the dreaded  singeltrack.  The recent weather meant the clay soil was pretty slick.  I rode it enough to figure out which places I could drift and which place I had to hold back / slow down to not hit a tree.  The good news is the field was small, so the singletrack didn’t make it too bad to pass after first lap or two and most of it had set up / dried out by the time the A-race started.

The start was on pavement and the field started out as normal.  I was about midfield as we hit the barriers, which was not where I needed to be.  I moved up a bit, but lost it a bit when a stick or something jumped up into my rear wheel.  This meant I hit the woods behind a bunch of people and a place or two behind Andrea.  Either on the 1st or 2nd lap, I got a little loose in the soupy mud off of a small bridge and I had to bail over a log.  I remounted and then proceeded to claw my back one-by-one until I passed Andrea on probably to the 4th lap or so.  I actually caught her and then proceeded to miss my remount (landing on the tire)… it took another 1/2 lap to get back.  At that point, I was in 3rd and couldn’t make up the balance of the gap to the 2 leaders and I ended up finishing in 3rd.  Andrea held off the rest and ended up a bit behind in 4th.

Overall, it was not my best race, but I managed to recover something from a mistake filled adventure.  We ended up netting $32 over entry which pretty much covered the gas from Memphis.  Break even day.

Here are some photos that Cliff Li put up on the series FB page…

A win.  Finally.

After my T-giving day tumble on the red trial at Syllamo, I have been nursing a lingering deep muscle bruise on my lower left side.  It has meant no drilling and trying to train around it.  By the end of this week, things started to feel a bit better and I decided to go through with the plan to race today @ Cordova and tomorrow at Little Rock (Arkansas Championships).  Anyway, the Cordova Cross race was about 4 miles from the house, so Andrea and I rode to the race.  The temperature was about 30-31F when we left, but at least it was sunny.  The course was a varied course around a church property with some soggy grass, some short mud sections and a decent amount of elevation.

At the start, it was clear who my competition was.  Hart and Boomer have beaten me all year, sometimes by a little, sometimes by more.  We got off to a good start as a group.  Two of the early barriers were singles and could be hopped if one were good at that.  I am not, so I dismounted.  The first one put me at a disadvantage due to the amount of hill remaining after, the 2nd was pretty neutral because you could get around the 180 turn after it a bit better.

The way the race played out it is that I was able to use the power sections to get past Boomer and Hart and then keep extending the lead.  Not much to say about it.  I am trying to be in prime shape for next weekend and Louisville in a few weeks.  The plan is coming together.

I am really happy with my ride and hope that I can hit it hard for both the Tennessee State Championship and the Masters Worlds.   All of this prime shape in January will probably mean that I will get a slower start for the road season that starts in March.

Perry was out there taking photos, I’ll put up what I find when he does.

Andrea rocked her race as well.  She easily was the first woman finisher and was 4th overall a few minutes back.  It was a very profitable day and we got these trophies to boot…

In other news, I unexpectantely received plaques for the last two years of cyclocross.  For the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 I was 2nd in TBAR point for cyclocross (to Jeremy Chandler both years I believe).  In 2011-2012, I am currently ranked 2nd as well in CX1/2 (behind Bert Hull).  Not sure I can hold it, but I am planning on racing the BAR finale which is the state championships next weekend.  There is a race tomorrow that I am not doing way over in Kingsport (about a 8 hour drive).

It seems like it has been a long time since I have had a normal weekend day at the house…  4 race weekends followed by a getting ready / going to mountain view weekend meant that I haven’t been attending to things…  So I peeled off from the group on our team ride with tired legs and ended up with about 2 hours of ride time.  On the way back to the house, I deposited our second chance check from a recent race.  Andrea and I had the pleasure of a trio of returned check fees on top of the missing money from a recent race.  The promoter made good (at least I hope so this time) and we are back to that weekend being a nice payday.

So I decided to run down the hill to the nearby Lowe’s to get a motion light for the front porch.  The street lamp coverage of our house leaves a dark corner when coming home at night, so I wanted to replace that light.  Got that and then hit up Kroger to restock the house from what seems like weeks of just getting by (although it was only probably a week).

The installation of the light went pretty smooth…  the only issue that the space between the centerline of the electrical junction box and the trim piece was about an inch too short for the fixture I bought.  I liked it, so I committed to that light and got out the tin snips.  Problem solved.  This fixture also has the advantage that it doesn’t make an enticing home for wasps.  The front porch and the back porch fixtures both harbor abandoned nests.

Got that installed… and since I had the ladder out, I decided to check out the gutters.  The ones in the rear were full of dry leaves (meaning at least the downcomers were not plugged as they were in the past).  Matt discovered why the downcomers plugged so readily.  The builder had crimped the gutter downcomer to fix in another piece.  He cut out the excess metal and the problem was solved.  The downcomers in the back were not plugged at all.  The gutters did capture some leaves, but they were easy to remove since they were dry.

At the front of the house, that wasn’t the case.. I modified the two front gutters and should prevent the logjam of leaves that I found in each one.

Tomorrow is a rainy day by the forecast, so I will turn my attention to the inside of the house.  Andrea is working again (sort of unusual as she normally has weekends off).

On other random news, I decided to take the plunge on iTunes match.  I was interested easily improving the quality of poorly ripped tracks and replacing my older Apple DRM tracks with DRM free tracks.  This doesn’t happen automatically but can easily done once your older tracks are “matched” with some in the iTunes store.  You blow them away off you computer and then redownload them as higher quality files.  On my iPhone / iPad all of my “matched” or “uploaded” tracks can be downloaded on the fly in case the mood strikes for a track from archives.

I plan to use this to help clean up / consolidate my music, etc.  Of the nearly 5000 songs that I had in my library, it found all but about 750 of them.  That upload process is pretty slow.  It has been about 24 hours, and about 500 of them are already done.

Ended up spending an extended period of time up at Syllamo with Andrea.  We hosted Bruce Dickman for the duration and Matt was up there for a few days…  Andrea and I rode all 5 days with a few tough gravel road days thrown in when the (heavy) rains came.  Solid week.   Here are handful of photos from the trip…

First, a warning… this is not a bike post.  My job is a controls engineer, so I am big on DYI troubleshooting / repair.   So this is how it went down the last several days.

It started on Thursday…  I went to work as usual and had a pretty busy day… Andrea texted me in the morning and let me know that the system was blowing cold air (not desirable on the cool autumn day).   After work, was in a credit union board meeting and she texted me to let me know that the A/C was running most of the day and was all iced up.  I had her throw the breaker and pull the thermostat off the wall (the thermostat is modular leaving the disconnected terminals on the wall).

This story has a bit of a history.  We have been in the house for just over 3 years.  At some point soon after moving in, I decided to replace the basic thermostat with a programmable one.  I ended up buying a semi-fancy one in a touch screen Hunter.  Over the last several years, it has behaved badly from time to time in where the screen indicated output did not match what the relays inside were doing… Mostly it was it would say heating/cooling and not be doing anything.  This time, it was saying “heating” and was giving a cooling signal to the A/C component of the HVAC system.  Nice and crazy.

By the time I got home, my options were limited.  I put the thermostat back on the wall and went outside and saw the condenser fan / compressor running.  Great.  I pulled the batteries out of the thermostat to reset it and it seemed to working okay once I put them back.  Unfortunately, the furnace was not.  I went upstairs and started the troubleshooting process.  I have never even looked the furnace the 3 years in the house, and now I was trying sort out why it wasn’t lighting.  I checked all the components one by one and though (mistakenly) that it was lighting off (poorly) and not getting all the way across the furnace (4 burners).  So I spent some time studying the, burner orifices, the burner cross-ignition ports and the flame rod (detects flame on burner #4).

Friday morning, I spend some time and convinced myself that it wasn’t any of the flame safety limits or the flame rod (I cleaned it just to make sure).  Friday I took a bit longer lunch, bought and installed another thermostat (3M Filterate w/ WiFi).  That worked well (in terms of sending the correct signal), but that wasn’t going to fix the problem.

By Friday afternoon, I realized that the orange glow was not a bad mixed flame, but instead just the HSI (hot surface ignitor) glowing for 5 seconds before giving up on the ignition.   It turns out that there was no gas coming through the valve.  All of this troubleshooting was done in 1-2 hour chunks before and after work.  By Friday afternoon, I ordered a replacement valve online (couldn’t find anything like that a normal hardware store locally).  By Saturday, I realized that it was the wrong type and ordered the correct replacement valve.

After I ordered the valve, I pull to the gas assembly which consists of a feed pipe, a solenoid valve, and a gas orifice manifold for the 4 burners.  I had noticed that I couldn’t read a resistance through the coil.  The design of the solenoid is a rectifier to smooth out the 24 VAC power signal to the coil.  Both the hot and the neutral leg break through a 2-pole switch.  I pulled off the cover and noticed that the coil tested out okay (0.5 ohm) and the neutral back to coil was fine.  It was the hot to the coil.  The switch and the rectifier are on a PCB that had exposed solder joints that I could test out.  The on/off switch was the issue on one pole (one switch lever, two circuits).  I worked the switch back and forth a few times and it tested good.  At this point, I decided that it was probably it, so I reinstalled the gas manifold/valve into the furnace.

Once I got it back in and the thermostat set back to heating, it worked straight off.

The only issue remaining is that I had to re-purpose the 4th wire in the thermostat cable (normally cooling) for a power return for the WiFi enabled thermostat..  Need to pull a 5-wire cable at some point over the winter so I the A/C will work come spring.  The WiFi thermostat is registered with a website that allows remote monitoring and changing of mode.  It is pretty cool.  I will probably have to change out the upstairs one as well later on if this one proves to be reliable.