The Pursuit of Rad Skills

Done Campin'

2011-12-29T15:51:00.000-08:00

I've just finished packing my bikes and wheels, and as soon as the dryer is finished, I'll have my clothes packed as well. Today was my final race of this year's Belgian campaign, and my 3rd whoopin' (race) in 4 days. I'm heading to the airport tomorrow morning at 6:45am and will be back eating a pizza in Bloomington by probably 7pm, Indiana time. I'm ready to be home, but I'm also not really ready to be done here. I'm not sure where to start catching you up on the developments of the last few days, but I'll try.

The 3 races since my last post were: a World Cup in Zolder, a GVA in Loenhout, and just a regular old bike race in Bredene today, all 3 of which I did last year.

Zolder is one of my favorite courses and the fact that the race takes place on an F1 track makes for a generally awesome scene. Awesome like, garage bays that would normally house Formula 1 cars are now Frite shops. As you know, hard field, hard course, hard conditions, blah blah blah...

Strangely enough, I actually felt like I was participating in a bike race. I was in a decent sized group for most of the race, but one bad lap that included a few, maybe a bakers dozen, crashes. In the world in which I'm racing over here, there just isn't room to make many or any mistakes and expect a decent outcome. I did come away from the race feeling pretty ok about my technical skills, especially dealing with those massive drops where everyone congregates to laugh at your expense. My legs also started to feel a little recovered from the flu earlier in the week.

Loenhout was my worst race of the trip last year, and I would probably say the same for this year too. The course is just muddy and a total power course. It feels like doing leg-press at the gym for about an hour. This year we were treated to a 200m or so run on the flats, directly after long tractor pull like section. Torture. Time gaps were bigger at this course than most because of the difficulty. Huge crowds, but, no amount of encouragement could have gotten me on the lead lap on this day. I finished with a group of Americans and American types (Craig Ritchey). Agenda for next year: learn how to make watts.

Finally, today was a race by the coast in Bredene. Being near the coast, the soil is sandy and thus there's not too much mud to be found. Thank you, 8lb 6oz tiny infant Jesus. Since the race wasn't part of the GVA, Superprestige, or World Cup series, the field wasn't quite as big, but still had Stybar, Niels Albert, and a bunch of their meanest friends. (Editors note: my roommate Jake Wells just sent my a message on Twitter telling me to stop punching my keyboard. Good thing I'm moving out tomorrow, or Ryan Knapp might have to choke a bro.) With my semi-inflated status due to my American racing calendar, I got the very last call-up in the second row, right behind Niels Albert and Stybar. The guys with the cameras were trying to get some great photos of me, but those two a-holes were getting in all the shots... I decided to not say anything at the time and just lets my legs do the talking, or crying. Minus one minor detail of hitting a spectator with one lap to go, the race was a smashing success. But, since that did actually happen, I was denied my first official finish on the lead lap with a legitimate field, and instead rewarded with a smooth DNF next to my name. However, the guy that walked out in front of me was unbelievably nice and apologetic. He actually found me on Facebook and send me another apology message.

So now the trip is over and even though it was full of 5 course meals consisting of only Humble Pie, I'm glad that I decided to come back for another round, because there is really no limit to the number of things you can learn from dealing with the challenges of racing your bike here. Once again, thanks for following along and supporting me throughout the process. Luckily, I'm dumber than a box of rocks, because otherwise, trips like this could be a bit demoralizing...

BMC Service Course

"SAMSONITE! I was WAY off!"

It wasn't even that nice on the inside...

Lots of not Zipp wheels.

Because I sure don't have any other plans...

2011-12-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

Since I'm obviously not drinking Egg Nog and sitting around a fire place with my family, I figured I could probably squeak a blog entry into my schedule on a race-less Christmas day in Belgium. I really wanted to write an update right after Diegem on Friday, less to inform anyone who actually reads this blog, but more to vent for myself. However, the late start time and a few other things have put it on the back burner until now.

If you're a follower of my Facebook or Twitter account you may know that I got sick with some sort of bug and was dealing "flu like symptoms", as they say. This had me doing wind-sprints to the bathroom for the better part of an entire day. Openers? Not so much. I had to miss a race in Holland on Tuesday because of the sickness and was still too laid-up to muster much more than a light 45 minute spin on Wednesday. Fast forward to Friday and I was hoping to have the sickness banished and be ready to preform at Diegem. Anyone who's ever had the flu knows the exhausting feeling of walking up the stairs while in it's grasp. Although the major symptoms were gone, the effects like that were still around.

I told Jake the morning of the race that I was still feeling pretty zapped, but wanted to give it a go because it was such a cool race, and my personal favorite. I did, what I feel, was a pretty good job staying optimistic about the prospects of racing well and blocking out any negative thinking. I absolutely loved the course during pre-ride and had no technical issues with any sections, and the mud was even manageable for someone like me. I did an appropriate warm-up and headed to the start line.

Warm-Up

Another American, Jeremy Durrin

Jake and I were kind of early, so we spun up and down the starting straight with Sven, Jeremy Durrin, Styby, Mitch Hoke, Niels... you know, the gang. The atmosphere was honestly, Superbowl-like. The fans we all jazzed up just to see us spinning our legs. That scene was as much as cyclocross racer can ever hope to feel like a legitimate professional athlete. We all took our spots on the line, with an American in almost every row of the grid. It was very cool to have so many of us at the start. My points got me a second to last row call up. Pretty much what I had expected, and I was ok with that.

The start was hectic, but usual. No issues on my end as I exchanged elbows with my 50 closest Belgian buddies in search of the left turn off of the pavement. In general the start went well and I even surprised myself by hoisting my bike over my head to run through a tiny gap where all of the other rider had dismounted at an off camber turn. I've never actually used this move, but I'd seen the Belgi's use it previously. I snuck between a racer's bike and the barricades at the side of the course, nearly swiping the fans in the face as I wielded my steed above my head. Surprisingly effective actually.

Still running off the rush of adrenaline from the start I was able to turn the pedals at an acceptable rate for the first lap or so. Once I started to settle in, the totally zapped feeling was back in my legs and I was struggling to push the pedals over. I rode another lap, or maybe more, but it was painfully clear that I wasn't ready for this effort level just yet. Maybe stick to conquering stairs first instead of a Superprestige.

I pulled the plug the next time through the pits and thanked the guys for all their work on my bikes. It's really a shitty feeling pulling out of a race when you've got a whole crew there to support you. They were understanding and reassuring, and I tried to be for myself as well. It just wasn't very easy.

See, Belgium has been on my radar for a while now. I have been planning my preparations around performing well here, not DNF'ing. I know that things out of your control do definitely happen, but that doesn't make it any easier to stomach my first illness in who knows how long.

Geoff told me that tomorrow is a new day, and I told him that saying should be the slogan for Euro Cross Camp... In these conditions and in this environment, there are a lot of things you've got to put behind you. I'm more than prepared and the disappointment from Diegem is definitely pushed in a rear-ward general direction. Tomorrow is my first World Cup of this trip, in Zolder. I'm really looking forward to having a good ride and finally posting a positive race report on this blog. Thanks for supporting me, and also for taking the time to read what I've written.

Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad. I wish I could be at home celebrating with the family, but thanks for always supporting me.

Muddy Pits...

Bikes straight to the shoulder in the pit

Before

After.

Settling In

2011-12-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

The stench of Belgian "mud" (read: cow poop) has officially infiltrated almost every room in the Euro Cross Camp house, my once bright yellow Mavic shoes are now looking quite mustard like, and the heating radiators in our rooms have turned into makeshift drying racks. Ahh, yes... the racing block here has begun. Before I catch everyone (mom and dad) up on the first race of the trip, I'll back up a bit and get you up to speed with the first few days in Belgium.

After my nightmare travel adventure from last year's trip, I was repaid with as painless of a Trans-Atlantic flight as one could have. Window seat, skinny row-neighbor, tolerable meals and everything was on schedule. Our old pal Josef from last year was waiting for us once we came through baggage claim and we were on our way to Izegem, with all of our bikes, luggage and optimism in tow. I had a weird home-like feeling as we got closer to the house. The awkward handshakes and introductions were replaced with hugs and updates on each other's lives over the year since we'd last spoken. I knew things would be easier the second time around, but I was surprised how much easier things felt just knowing what to expect from the situation. I've got the same corner room but a new roommate in Jake Wells of Colorado. We get along pretty well, I guess. If our rooming together were a first date, I'd say he's totally going to call.

We've only had one training day so far, but I went with my go-to route to Kortrik, plus showed a few of the new guys around "downtown" Izegem. We made a trip to the store to buy the necessities: Nutella, Speculoos, and rice cakes. The rice cakes aren't really my favorite, but they help us avoid the judgmental eye of the locals to some degree.

My sleep schedule hasn't been ideal over the first few nights, but that may have something to do with the 4 hour nap that I took in the middle of the first day here. Geoff warned us not to take a nap and to stay awake at all costs during the first day, but I couldn't help myself. I've been having these weird 4 hour blocks of sleep with 2 hour periods in the middle where I'm wide awake. Not ideal, but I feel like I'm getting closer to a normal schedule.

Contrary to popular Internet belief, I did not do the World Cup today in Namur. Thank God. It looked outrageous. I did however do a "National Race" in Maldegem, which is about 45 minutes up the road. Belgium has been getting some pretty intense rain over the last week and there's lots of flooding in West-Flanders. Our course had to be cut short because an ocean appeared in the field where our race was located. The truncated course consisted of a very narrow start straight (think cart path), with a right turn onto poop-covered cobbles, and then a lot of long straight sections, many of which it was faster to run. Everyone's favorite! Although, I'm pretty sure I had enough UCI points for a front row call-up, I got the standard American issue call-up, none at all. I tried to make some hand gestures and Flemish-like sounds to the official, but he just looked at me funny. How rude (90's kids better get that reference!). I moved up a bit from my last row starting spot on the road, but not much. There were absolutely no technical aspects of the course, just pick a rut and pedal feverishly. I pedaled and got pretty dirty doing it. I'm not sure of the result, or how to gauge the people that I finished amongst, but regardless, it was good to shake the travel out of my legs.

Tonight we were home by 6pm, and had dinner shortly after. By the time we got all of our dirty kit power-washed and into a washing machine, it was almost 9. A bit of social time and a blog post thrown in and it looks like bed time will be around 11:30. Racing in the mud definitely extends the time involved with the race, but it make you strong like bull.

Some of the guys unpacking and building bikes.

I've laid claim to the sweetest mug in the house. Yes, that's Pocahontas. Boom.

My phone is in the middle of that bag of rice.

Training. I wear all black so people know I mean business.

Our mechanic Dave with Belgian legend, Johan Museeuw. He parked right next to us!

A Christmas (in Belgium) Story

2011-12-07T05:34:00.001-08:00

I've been holding off writing a blog update about my Christmas/ Holiday Cyclocross campaign for a while now, mostly because so much of it has been up in the air. As of this last weekend, I finally nailed down all of the details. Sorry, Mom and Dad. I won't be home for Christmas, again.

Originally, I had planned to stay with the extended family of a few of my friends from IU, but it turned out that car rental/ transportation was going to be so expensive that it made that route a no-go. About the time that was falling through (last month), Craig Ritchey messaged me about an opening at The ChainStay in Oudenaarde. The ChainStay could offer housing, some meals and most importantly, transportation to all of the races I was looking to do. I spoke with Craig, and also Gregg Germer, the owner, about the opening and put down a deposit to secure my spot at the house. The opportunity to stay in Oudenaarde was pretty exciting because the riding in that area takes you over many of the famous "Bergs" of the Tour of Flanders and I was also looking forward to the opportunity to see a new city for a few weeks, but it was not to be.

The most recent (and final) development started unfolding in the last handful of days, and it has hinged around Ryan Trebon's knee injury. Geoff Proctor called me on Friday to see if I would be interested in filling Ryan's spot if he officially backed out, which he did on Saturday. I had always planned on doing the Belgium trip on my own, not because I didn't love the camp last year, but I just to leave a spot open for someone else to have the same awesome Belgian experience that I was able to have last year. Part of the reason behind my invite is that the only other Elite rider attending Camp this year is Jake Wells, and he is an awesome dude, but also a first timer (because I've obviously been, like, so many times), but Geoff wanted to have another Elite around the house with some experience as well as someone to keep the Juniors, and Zach McDonald in line. The support and whole experience that the Cross Camp can offer is unbeatable; so needless to say, it didn't take much convincing.

Now that the final details are in place, I'm able to stress a little bit less and focus more on the fact that I'm just excited to be going back for another crack at all of these races that slapped me around last year. It really is amazing the difference that a year makes. Last year I was watching videos of the Belgian races and nearly having heart attacks thinking about lining up with those guys. This year, I'm still nervous, but I know exactly what I'm getting into and feel much more confident about where I am with my training and mental state at this point in the season. No, I don't necessarily think I'm going to go over and finish on the lead lap of every race, but I'm excited to fight the Belgi's as hard as they plan on fighting me. Imma kick someone in the stomach! WATCHOUT!

My schedule for the trip will look something like this:

Dec. 17th- Lichtervelde (Local Race)
Dec. 18th- Balagem
Dec. 20th- Surhuisterveen (Way up north in Holland)
Dec. 23rd- Diegem Superprestige (Night race; Probs my favorite race EVER)
Dec. 26th- Zolder WC
Dec. 28th- Loenhout GVA
Dec. 29th- Bredene

So that's 7 races in 15 days, ranging from a World Cup, to a Superprestige, and even a couple midsized and smaller ones sprinkled in, too. 5 of the 7 I've done before, so I'm hoping that those experiences will count for something this time around.

As I'm sure you're aware, all of this ain't free. Traveling across the Atlantic and living for 2+ weeks is never a cheap proposition, but when you throw in the costs involved with air travel, equipment, mechanics, food, transportation, housing, and racing, this opportunity gets a bit spendy. I'm budgeting around $3,500 for the trip, and that's with me planning on stealing the airline peanuts as snacks. I would never expect to get all of this, or any where near all of this covered by anyone other than myself, but I do have a Paypal donation button set up on the side of the blog if you would like to help me defray some of the costs. If you're not into the Paypal thing, shoot me an email at knapprd@gmail.com and we can work something out. For the right price, I could be persuaded to get your name tattooed somewhere visible, or even drop your name Nascar style in an interview or my Cyclingnews blog entry. Seriously though, every little bit helps. Regardless if you donate or not, I appreciate you even checking out my blog.

Keep checking back in the weeks to come, because I plan on making it rain blog posts.

Here's a bit of media from the UCI race in North Carolina a few weeks ago...

Watch more video of North Carolina Grand Prix 2011 on cyclingdirt.org

And just to refresh your memory on what exactly it is I'm getting into...

Easy.

Cocky Block

2011-11-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

You know, like struggling with your confidence? Let's face it, if you've got a blog, you must think you're pretty awesome. The whole basis of a blog is thinking what you're doing is interesting and cool enough for people do give a damn about it. Well, I've obviously got a blog, and apparently I think my cycling endeavors make me pretty awesome and that you would probably want to hear every detail about how I almost got a really great result. Well, recently I haven't been feeling (or racing) like myself, thus no blogging. Honestly, how can someone be expected concoct a lengthy story and put a cocky, self-important spin on things when they've got no recent events to back up their story? Well, good news, I'm back feeling really important and awesome.

To be quite honest, I've been racing like trash this cyclocross season. I've had a decent ride here and there, but it's been pathetic in general. The cause? A little bit of everything. I've been struggling a bit with motivation, mostly because I'd been racing poorly. And I'd been racing poorly because of my lack of motivation. It's a vicious cycle, you see. It basically all boils down to me needing to get my head out of my ass.

I went to New Jersey 2 weeks ago and just got absolutely destroyed by sub-par fields in some of the nastiest conditions I've ever had the pleasure of racing my bike. You know how they say you've got to hit rock bottom? Well, New Jersey was my 'rock bottom". It was a good wake up call. I needed to stop expecting to see benefits for just being present. I wasn't doing the required work and it was painfully obvious. I've got no one to blame other than myself and no one can fix it other than me, either.

Since my self intervention, I've been sorry-for-myself sober for 2 weeks and counting. I've been training well, eating well (better), warming up, actually pre-riding the course, and not being a weak quitter on race day. Although the race results aren't exactly where I'd like them to be just yet, I feel like I'm finally taking the steps to get there. I know it's going to be a process, but I fully intend to take advantage of the second half of the season and race and train as hard as I can, every opportunity I get.

Seeing the way that Tim Johnson has taken his less-than-TJ start to his season has been a source of motivation for me. He's freaking Tim Johnson, and if he can handle getting 12th, I can sure as hell deal with the results that I've gotten.

Watch more video of USGP New Belgium Cup 2011 on cyclingdirt.org

I'm making this public declaration so that I can be held accountable. If you see me this weekend in Louisville, don't be afraid to ask me, "Hey, Ryan! How's keeping your head out of your ass going?"

I'd really appreciate that.

Disk Brakes for Life?

2011-09-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

Do they make them? I'm feeling the need to slow everything down for a second or I may be treading dangerously close to premature heart failure. In the last few weeks I've closed the book on my road season and started on my next not-so-short story, Cyclocross Season.

The road season concluded with some racing in St. Louis at Gateway Cup. I went into these races only 5 weeks post collarbone break and knowing I needed to be careful not to have any mishaps and really derail my cyclocross season. I knew going in that this wasn't the most wise decision I could have made, but my desire for the training these crits would provide, as well as my general cabin fever was clouding my judgement too severely to see the right decision in this situation.

I went. I raced. I felt surprisingly decent. I crashed. I broke... my bike, but not my collarbone. Victory!

I was the recipient of some less than wholesome racing by one of my competitors on the last lap of one of the crits, but I did escape with mostly just a road rashed left side and a partially missing ass cheek.

The next goal became getting rid of the road rash before Cross Vegas, because nothing looks less pro than road rash. I failed to accomplish my goal. In fact, I was still sticking to the sheets in Vegas.

As a whole I had mixed feelings about my trip to Nevada. The racing aspect went fairly decent, all things considered, but that place is so damn stressful . It's just the whole culture and structure of that week that stresses me out, but I felt like I hadn't breathed for 2 days when I toe'd the line with Bartje Wellens, Lars Van Der Haar, TJ, Powers, Mr. Peters, and other assorted men.

One of the main causes of my stress immediately before the race was my tire selection. Las Vegas is in the desert, right? So, why wouldn't you bring file treads to the desert? Well, apparently, the desert is quite the moist environment where it behooves ones self to bring mud tires. I thought for sure I was going to crash and pulverize my barely mended collarbone, the only thing I really had in mind to NOT do. It turns out the Challenge Griffo XS is a fine mud tire, either that, or I've got Sven like handling skills. But if that were the case, I doubt I'd be nursing this whole collarbone thing.

Anywho, finished 23rd. Some things could have gone better, but I'm not about to complain, all things considered.

I stayed up all night Wednesday night, trying to get my flight bumped up so that I could get back home for a few minutes before I had to drive to Baltimore for Charm City. It worked, kinda. I got a 7:45 AM flight on Thursday, but after delays and "maintenance issues" (that never makes me feel all that comfortable when the pilot says that), I still ended up back home at 10:30 PM.

I needed badly to sleep in, but had too much to do to prepare for Baltimore. I got on the road around 1 PM and arrived at my friend Thom's around midnight. I had fairly grand ambitions for these races, based on the fields from previous years, but that was before they came. All the dang foreigners. The fields were much better as a result, but I also don't feel like I brought my "A" game either. I just didn't have the legs or anything really. Too many mistakes sent me home with much less than I came for. I ended up with a 6th and 9th place on the weekend, but as I said, not what I was looking for.

The drive home went fairly quickly and I was back in my bed by 2 AM. This week has been spent catching up on things that I've neglected, and paying the never-ending stream of bills from my hospital visit. I'll be back on the road this Friday for the USGP in Madison, WI. I've had some pretty good luck at these races the past 2 years, so I'm hoping for some more good rides.

Watch more video of Charm City Cyclocross 2011 on cyclingdirt.org

Coming Down

2011-08-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Literally and figuratively. The Colorado trip was an awesome experience and a great way for me to keep my mind (kind of) off of the fact that I'm missing races with my teammates. We woke up Saturday morning and hit the road around 8AM Colorado time. We drove straight through to Bloomington, getting in just after 2 AM. We probably could have made better time, but my brother got 2 speeding tickets last time he drove back from Colorado, so he wasn't pushing the pace quite like I was during my stints. Gotta take advantage of those 75mph speed limits out west.

The trip all together was pretty exhausting, since we were running non-stop most days, in an attempt to get maximum value. Needless to say, when I crawled into a bed for the first time a week, I was out. I hate to keep talking about elevation all the time, but maybe it's just because I'm sensitive to changes in elevation, but I really felt a big difference in quality of sleep at higher elevations. Last night was the first time I slept through the night since I left. I sound like an infant. Maybe I just needed fed or burped.

I had my cyclocross bike in Colorado with me and have been riding it most of the time over the last few weeks, but I got the road bike back out today, and it was glorious. I think it was a combination of the adaptation to altitude I made over the last week, then coming back home, but the gear was turning over nicely today. I definitely didn't have a single day in CO where I felt decent. This very well could just be a coincidence, but if it turns out to gave me the benefits of a mini altitude camp, I might be making some return trip to the mountains before some key event in the future. I guess well just have to see.

It's been tough to watch all the racing going on around me over the last few weeks and not be a part of it, but I think I'm going to be change that this coming weekend. There are 4 crits in St. Louis over Labor Day weekend that would be good training and a chance to race with the team some more before cross season. The collarbone is doing awesome and I have no problem executing all the necessary moves, including sprinting, so I think it's a go. I'll probably throw some Rock Tape on it again for some extra support (and sympathy) just as a precaution. I just feel like it would be pretty tough to replicate the training that I'll get from this weekend and it should go a long way toward helping get me back up to speed after the time off.

I'm off to bed. I hope my legs feel as good tomorrow as they did today.

Here's a quick video I shot from our ride up Cottonwood Pass last week.

Insert Dumb & Dumber Quote Here

2011-08-26T06:51:00.001-07:00

Because of my broken collarbone, I've obviously had some time away from racing and therefore a pretty clear schedule. The collarbone is doing well, the Tour of Colorado is going on, I needed to get some training in, and it always a good time for camping, soo my brother and I decided to take a trip to Colorado to see how much awesomeness we could cram into 9 days.

We drove through the night last friday and got to Boulder (we both have friends here) at about 9 AM local time. We alternated driving full tanks of gas while the other rested, so we were able to roll it pretty good and make great time. When we got here we went to a coffee shop to watch the crit nats live feed. We went to a place on Pearl St. called The Cup. Great people-watching down there. Since it was delayed, we left the shop to go to our friends house and watch the last few laps once they restarted. Eric freaking won that SHIT! I'm no psychic, but I texted him 2 days before the race and told him that he was going to win. I don't really know why, but I literally could just feel it. When it happend I freaked out a little bit. It was probably a good thing we left the coffee shop because I would have caused quite the ruckus, and probably been arrested. The kid's got some game. And I know I referenced it in my last post, but no matter how much he achieves, I'll make sure the crit champ never forgets that he had to be picked up by mommy on our big ride a few weeks ago. Hey, I've gotta have something to hang onto, right? Congratulations, dog!

Back to Colorado.

We've been doing some awesome riding here is Boulder. It's not really that hard to figure out why everyone moves out here. Sure, there are some people with douchie tendencies, but every city has people like that. The first few days I wasn't doing very well with the elevation. It felt like I was back to having mono, because you're just so restricted and can't go anerobic at all without blowing up. Also, why didn't anyone tell me to bring an easier cassette? My 39-25 is too damn hard for the steep stuff out here. You can muscle just about any gear over a climb in the midwest for a few minutes, but not out here for 2 HOURS! Honestly, it's been fine for most of the stuff, but I have been tempted to "stop for a picture" at a few key moments on some of these steep climbs.

So we went down to watch some of the stage race that's going on in CO at the moment. We went to to ride the dirt road climb up to Cottonwood Pass on Tuesday and then watch the Stage 1 finish in Crested Butte. It was an uphill sprint from a pretty select group. If Phil Gilbert had been here I think it would have been right up his alley. Cottonwood was sweet, but not really that hard to just ride, but it was pretty damn scenic. We also descended back down the dirt side, and that was a good test for the stability of my collarbone on some of the washboard sections. It was strong like bull.

The paved side of Cottonwood

Dirt Cottonwood

Crested Butte Finish

After Crested Butte we drove to Twin Lakes, which is basically where the race turns onto the road that goes into Aspen and over Independence Pass, and we had planned to camp there, at about 10,000 feet, but decided to go camp at the top with all the other bike race watching hooligans. The pass is 12,100 feet and it looks and feels every inch of that. Camping up there was crazy. Cars lining the road, with lots of little car parties going on. My sleeping pad died in the middle of the night, so I was sleeping on the lumpy top of a mountain with no oxygen to breathe and it was a balmy 30 degrees. Can't they just bulldoze some of this untouched mountainside for a nice Hilton? I mean, there are, like, plenty of mountains in Colorado.

My brother is getting some camera skills. Independence Pass at night.

Party cars at sunrise.

Upon getting out of the tent at 6:00, (I didn't wake at 6:00, because that would imply that I actually was asleep. False.) my brother and I decided to hike up to the top of a neighboring mountain for some pictures of the scene at the top of Independence Pass. We didn't think it would take very long, but real summit was behind what we could see from camp, and we weren't about to not summit that shit. America. It ended up being a nice 2 hour hike up to just shy of 14,000. I was wrecked and we hadn't even gotten on out bikes.

Putting out the vibe at around 13,000 feet.

We decided to coast down the mountain to Aspen for some very reasonably priced breakfast... On the way, our friend Graham lost his crank bolt, and therefore, his drive side crank was falling off. This could quite possibly be the best stretch in the world for this to happen, a 19 mile descent into a town with certain bike shops. We only had to push him over a few rollers near town.

We got breakfast at some corner cafe and sat outside and got race faced by all of the Aspen dwellers. They weren't even on bikes, they were just life race facing us. They needed to make sure we knew that based on our scruffy faces and bikes instead of Land Rovers, be were obviously worse at life than they. AYHSMB.

Once we were back climbing the 19 miles to the car and our spot for spectating, everyone decided to go their own pace. I was starting to feel better and wanted to do some efforts, so just started riding a good tempo. I was smashing all the people on mountain bikes and multi-sport bikes, even blowing the doors off the masters racers with the carbon wheels. After about 30 min of climbing, and having not been passed yet, I checked my side view mirror on my helmet, and found a bogey on my six. Some dude was coming up fast. Phhhh, like I'm gonna let some fred blow my doors off. Well this "fred" happened to be none other than former bad ass pro, national champ, Olympian, Little 500 Legend, Shimano Big Wig, Wayne Freaking Stetina.

I've ridden with Wayne before at Little 500 related events, so I knew that he could motor. So when he caught me it was clear he wanted me to ride with him and wasn't going to just blow my doors off. He immediately started chatting and I was locked into "his pace" for the remainder (1;15) of the climb. My semi comfortable tempo ride turned into an hour at threshold. He was riding threshold too, because I could hear him breathing pretty hard when he wasn't telling my stories of wearing the yellow jersey in the old Coors Classic. We we're both pushing it, and stopped chit chatting all together for the last 30 minutes or so.

Once over the top, he was nice enough to claim I had him on the ropes... Thanks Wayne. Legend.

This blog post is reaching an unbelievable length. If you're still with me, sorry.

Some dudes racing.

So, anyway, we watched the race come over them climb, and it was pretty cool. Some say just as crazy as a real euro climb. Definitely a fun experience, but I prefer to be on the bike racing instead of spectating. We came back to Boulder on Wednesday night because I had a ride scheduled with Boulder cyclocross heads of state, Greg Keller and Brandon Dwight. Today imma do a big ride up to the Peak to Peak highway and try to smash myself real good before we head back to all that oxygen on Sunday.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan's Health Blog

2011-08-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

I know this blog used to be about bike racing, but it seems it's turning into a place to update everyone about my health, or lack of health. I would imagine that most of you who have made your way to my blog, probably have checked my Twitter account at some point, but in the event that you don't or haven't in the last few days, I've got an announcement to make: Like an idiot, I broke my collarbone, again. Not ideal.

I was out riding one of my shiny new Stevens cyclocross bikes on Friday, and was doing a bit of practicing bunny hopping barriers. I'm always practicing my bunny hops, even on my road bike, so this isn't out of the ordinary, however, this was my first time wearing my cross shoes since I came back from Belgium in the winter. They actually still smell like the Belgian cow shit/mud. Apparently, the cleats were pretty worn and I didn't notice until my foot came out of the pedal, mid barrier hop. If you've ever come unclipped unexpectedly, you know that it can be a pretty violent experience. In my case, my left foot came out and I sprang from my bike as if it were a diving board, landing on my right side pretty heavily. Stupid.

This is my 3rd broken collarbone and second time I've broken my right collarbone, however this is a new location for the break. I knew it was broken right away, so I was naturally pretty pissed off. I spent the afternoon in the ER getting xrays and being treated like an infant. Quite annoying. I think my spine/ pelvis are pretty out of whack as well because I have some serious nerve pinching going on when I walk. I'll be making a trip to the chiro tomorrow to get that sorted.

This fracture is the least painful of the 3 I've had and it's also the widest range of motion I've had immediately after the break. I'm sure the doctors would advise my differently, but I don't think I'll be taking much time off the bike. Like, none. The most annoying part of this is that I was just getting ready to hit a nice block of crit racing to help tune me up for the cross season. I did however just finish my first cyclocross based training block on Thursday, so I guess it could have been worse had I missed that.I'm just bummed that this effectively ends my road season. It started late and ended early, not what I would have hoped for.

Outside of breaking bones, life has been good around these parts. Last week, me, Mike Sherer, Eric Young and Erik Hamilton decided to do a solid day on the bike. We did a 90 mile loop in the afternoon, known here as "The 90", and then followed it up with the Wednesday Worlds training race, which tacked on another 40 miles. 130 miles in any conditions is a tough task, but that distance in the 95* heat was shattering. I drank 14 bottles and didn't pee once. DEEEEHYDRATED. I was bonking so badly the last 10 miles that I could barely hold the weight of my head. Great fun. At least I didn't call my mommy to pick me up like BISSELL PRO Eric Young. He did destroy us in every sign sprint throughout the day though.

Erik Hamilton's wedding was last night, and that was a great time with a lot, a lot, of bike dorks drinking and dancing. Congrats to he and Caitlin. Now, I'd appreciate it if no one would get married for a while, because I feel like it sets me back a month on my fitness every time I go to a wedding or wedding related event.

The pre-wedding ride yesterday. I started with my sling on, but it was too restrictive, so I stashed it in my pocket.

The bull that bucked me off.

Alright, I'm going to have a glass of chocolate milk.

Madeira/ Hyde Park/ Grandview

2011-06-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

I decided to skip out on heading to Georgia for the Nationals Road Race, in favor of staying semi-local and doing the USA Crit Series weekend in Ohio with pretty good prize money, as opposed to driving 12 hours each way and racing for some funny looking frock and zero dollars. Frocks don't feed all my babies and baby momma's. J/K LOL.

Friday was a twilight crit in a nice little area of Cincinnati call Madeira. Good crowds, good course (unless you're scurred of the dark and 180* turns), and it's conveniently located next to our sponsor's, family's home. Which is more like a hotel. I had good legs coming off Nature Valley, so that racing was fun for me. The 3 of us Panthers were aggressive and we had Paul in a solo move for the middle 30 minutes of the race, which let Kirk and I relax for a bit. Jamey Driscoll of Jamis slowly, bus surely pulled it back together and the remaining 20 laps or so were very aggressive as we tried to get a break to go. No break went, but we did whittle the front group to 25 guys or so. I got bumped off Kirk's wheel by Clayton Barrows in the final 180 and tried to fight him for it, but he is a large man. I had to settle for 6th with Jamis stacking the top, but Clay Murfet got the win.

Got you tix to the gun show?

Saturday we hung out by the pool, went for a little spin and I took a 2 hour nap, all before heading down to the course for the Hyde Park Blast at 8:30. For some reason the course is always pretty brutal. Lots of attrition again and it wasn't even that hot. Clayton Barrows was away solo for a looong time, Paul (our Paul) and Jamey Driscoll, Clay Murfet, and 2 others bridged up and lapped the field. Once It was all back together Greg, Kirk and I took the front with 4 to go to hopefully shepherd Paul to the W. Greg did what he does best and smashed out a few strong laps, all the way down to 1/2 lap to go when a Jamis guy jumped and then I followed with Kirk and Paul on my wheel. We came out of the last corner sitting pretty well and Kirk opened up the sprint from a long way out for Paul. It was probably 350 meters to the line and Paul drag raced his breakaway companions to a 2nd place on the day and a nice chunk of the 10,000 bucks. Kirk and I rolled in in 9th and 11th to collect a bit of change for the team as well.

Greg, Me, Kirk, Paul in hiding.

I headed up to my regular host house for Ohio racing, the Chartier's, after the race and we ate some delicious Wendy's Dollar Menu items and tried to get rid of our late night racing buzz so we could sleep. That happened around 2AM... We had breakfast over a live feed of the Belgian Champs and I was on my way to Columbus for the Tour de Grandview, one of my favorites. 40 trips up the hill always seems to soften the legs and it's an uphill sprint that I tell myself is good for me.

The race was aggressive early, but nothing was really going anywhere until I unleashed the mother of all attacks. Not actually, but I did attack on the hill and dragged 3 others with me. We had a nice gap immediately and had some critical teams represented, so we worked our gap up to a minute inside the last 3 laps and then started thinking about how to sort things out from there. One of the guys in the move was none other than recently upgraded cat 2 Jon Atwell from Bloomington. He's much stronger than his category would suggest. I knew this and tried to make sure he didn't try any funny business and ride away from all of us Fabian style. Since he is a bit of a newb, he got stuck on the front leading it into the uphill sprint. From here I can let the photos do the talking:

So Jon lead the sprint out and still got me. Piss. None of us had any clue at the time who'd won. But if I had to lose that though, I'm glad it was to another Bloomington racer. Some consolation was that my 2nd place moved me up to second in the Omnium for the weekend and netted me and my baby momma's some mo' money. Hollerrr!

Oh, Hey There!

2011-06-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

That's right, your favorite comma splice-laden blog is showing signs of life! Just what you always wanted!!! As you can imagine, lots has happened since I last wrote an update, but most of it is hardly news worthy. But you're gettin' it anyway.

So just a quick re-visit of my last post about being past a knee injury... I wasn't. I ended up being off the bike until the 8th of April and spending approximately $72382198u27.03 (yes, I know there's a "u" in there) dollars on treatments and voodoo of different types. But since that date I've been able to train with no knee issues and gradually been trying to acquire some fitness. It's been a somewhat slow process, and I'm just now into my 12th week of training, which some (including my new coach) would still consider the period where one should be working on "Base". I'm still a bit behind where my power numbers would be normally in the middle of a race reason, but considering my start to the year I feel ok about things.

I've been training more/more specifically/longer hours than I have in previous seasons, and it seems to be bringing results along more quickly. I know, imagine that?!? I have been doing some races for a little over a month now and just got back from the first real test of the year at Nature Valley. Things weren't fantastic, but it was definitely good to raise the racing level a bit and get some harder miles in my legs. Thanks, United Healthcare! The rest of the team raced pretty well and our little Canadian was 3rd in the Best Young Rider Competition, with a great ride (12th) in the Stillwater crit on the final day.

I was also planning on going through this whole post without mentioning cyclocross, but I just can't. It's coming! Schedules are being made, emails are being sent, and supplies are being supplied. #cantwait. Hoping this new approach for the road season will also be convenient for my legs at the end of the season, too.

Don't look now, but the 4th of July is just around the corner, and around here, that means Trucker hats (of the SRAM variety), cut off t-shirts, Budweiser and a trip to the local dirt race car track for some racin' watchin' and the longest fireworks show you've ever done seen. 'Merica.

A Hurt Locker of a Different Kind

2011-02-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

If I can't muster up a blog entry in my current state, I'll never write one again. I'm currently in my 4th day of being completely leveled by some kind of virus. Lauren had it last week and she was TKO'd for 5 or 6 days and now I've been down since Sunday afternoon. I think I've only been off the couch for a handful of minutes since I fell I'll, so I figured I should be able to find the time to compose an entry. However, since I wrote my last blog entry, it wasn't time that was keeping me from updating, it was motivation.

Normally, I'm motivated to write blog entries when things are going well or I have positive news on which to report, but recently, around these parts, things have been the exact opposite. After my Belgium trip I scheduled a couple weeks completely off the bike to let my body and mind fully recover from the season. Once my 2 weeks was up, the motivation was flowing, so I jumped back into it. I made the stupid mistake of moving straight back over from my cyclocross bike/pedal/shoe set up to my road bike/pedal/shoe set up and did 4 hours and 3.5 hours the first 2 days back. Idiot. I wanted to catch up with everyone I hadn't seen or talked to in a while, and turning around an hour into a weekend group ride isn't very cool, but neither are knee injuries, as I found out.

I was having a knee cap tracking issue due to some muscle imbalance in my right quad. I had a tough time getting the inflammation to go away completely, so I ended up taking lots of time off the bike, 4 weeks on top of my initial 2 week scheduled break. Well, I guess they weren't all completely off, I did ride probably half of the days on average at about 90 watts to try to re-educate the muscles as I was rehabbing my knee.

This whole ordeal was pretty tough on me mentally. 6 weeks off is by far my longest break since I started riding competitively and it was even harder listening to all my friends talk about their great 5 hour rides and training camps. Oh yeah, well I did 194 kj's in an hour yesterday... Anywho, I think the knee issues are behind me now and I'm trying to stay optimistic that this slower start to the training season will have a positive impact on the longevity of my season.

I'm also excited to report that I started working with the Cycle-Smart coaching family this season. Being a numbers dork myself, I'm particularly excited to work with these guys because they seem to enjoy power-dorking as much as I do.

I hoping to be back on the bike by the weekend, just in time to watch Het Volk and Kurne-Brussels-Kurne and then go out and hammer down the gravel roads around here with my hands on the tops of the bars, my favorite thing to do.

Keep you fingers crossed for a pair of Lars Boom victories this weekend!

The People That Make It Possible

2011-01-16T16:33:00.000-08:00

Now that I've been home for a while, I'm settled into my routine again and have had some time to process the trip, rehash the experiences over and over with friends and family and just generally reflect. The conclusion that I've come to is that I'm very lucky to have a life situation and support system that allows me to do the things that I do. My training and effort that I personally put into cycling is only a small part of the equation and would almost be for nothing if I didn't have all of these people going out of their way to help me.

Even before I made the trip to Belgium, I had been overwhelmed with the level of support and general good will I had received this season. Then on top of that, the level of support and supporters that came forward to make the Belgian adventure a reality absolutely blew my mind. My usual support crew stepped up as they always do and produced in a big way. I had lots of unexpected contributions, as well as a number of donations from guys that I'm directly competitive with on the road and cross bikes. I'm not sure if the donors want to stay anonymous or not, so I won't name names for the most part, but I just want to thank all of you who contributed in one way or another, with moral support, product, monetarily, or with just a "hey, good luck not getting your ass kicked in Belgium". I really appreciate every bit of support and feel quite lucky to have so many great people and great companies in my life.

I do want to give out a few shout outs though:

My family- They all bend over backwards to make my life and schedule flexible enough that I can be away more than I'm home. And sometimes they're the ones taking on extra responsibilities so that I can go race bikes. Thanks!

Lauren- She has had to make numerous airport runs at 3 AM and then come back and go straight to work on no sleep. Dealt with my bad attitude numerous time after a poor race. And she's been the number one positive influence in my cycling over the last few years and has helped me learn to have confidence and be a more positive person in all facets of my life. Thanks for keeping my head in the right place!

Stu Kaplan- The man behind all my plane tickets. I obviously couldn't do it without his contributions, but now he's as much of a friend as a sponsor. He's taken a genuine interest in my racing and always has some great words of wisdom and support when we see each other.

Toby Cole- My do it all sponsor, life coach, friend. Always makes it happen. Always believes in me and keeps focused on my goals. Thanks for another great year, TC!

Steve Roszko/ BikeReg.com- Unbelievable support. Always coming through and giving me more than the necessary resources to travel the world and race my bike. Treats me like a member of the family

Andy Clarke/ Panther Expedite- The sponsor of my road team and just a huge supporter of the sport. Came through so huge for the Euro trip. Absolutely wouldn't have happened without him.

ZIPP Speed Weaponry- I was one of their first cross riders a few years ago, and you may have noticed that they've signed a few other "decent" guys since then, but they still treat me like they did when I was one of the only guys. I feel so lucky to be involved with the best company in the biz. "BOOM! Hit em with a Freeze Pop!"

Spooky Bikes- Mickey always takes care of business and works hard to keep his riders happy and dialed. Whether it's dealing with my annoying emails and calls or overnighting some derailleur hangers to Portland, he always makes it happen. I've never had as many inquiries about a bike as I've gotten with these Spookys."Pssst... There's that guy with the sick Spookys!"

Sorry if this all sounds a bit sappy, but this season is about so many more people than just me. I owe all of my opportunities to the contributions of these people. Thanks for another great year!

Loenhout/ Bredene

2010-12-31T12:43:00.001-08:00

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Sylvester Cross- Bredene

2010-12-31T11:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday our fourth race in five days took us to Bredene, a town northwest of Izegem, right on the coast. Sylvester Cross isn't quite as big of a race as the World Cups, Superprestiges, or GVA's from the previous week, but it's still a UCI C2 with Nys, Stybar and Albert on the startlist. Although we woke up to a typical Belgian morning with a foggy drizzle in the air, the course in Bredene wasn't as muddy as I'd imagined it might be. The soil was more sandy, as opposed to the greasy mud of Loenhout the day before, with only a parts of the course being rutted and muddy. The course featured the typical long start/finish straight and a barriers that were bunny hop-able.

The Elites and U-23s were racing together in Bredene, so we had a bigger American crew lining up. We made or way to inschriptjion, which required navigating through a smokey bar full of fans staring each rider down as they passed. That's the thing about Belgium and their cyclocross fans, they have no issue staring you down, and watching you watch them stare you down. They don't smile or or say anything, they just look at you like you're a race horse or greyhound at the dog track almost checking to see if you look fit, or pro enough, to put a wager on. After the sea of stares, we paid our 3 Euro and got our numbers. I may, or may not, have been right in front of the Belgian Champ himself in line, and may have asked for a picture. So sue me.

We ripped a few laps of the course and I decided on Rhinos, even though it was probably dry enough for Typhoons, the Rhinos gave a little extra security on the greasy corners. I was actually called up in the second row, right behind the big boys. I got a good start and moved up well the first few tight corners and eventually found myself inside the top 10 going through the pits near the end of lap 1. Once we hit the long road section, a few Belgies jumped around me and absolutely dropped me. The power of some of these guys is unbelieveable. They were going 5 mph faster than me on the road sections. I lost a few spots here and there, but settled into a group in the top 20. There were some quality guys in the group, guys who were finishing inside the top 30 in the World Cups. I was actually feeling relatively comfortable, then early in the 4th lap I crashed on a slippery transition from grass to pavement and my front wheel was messed up and I couldn't get it sorted so I started running to the pit. I probably ran for a good 4 minutes and lost all of the good work I'd done leading up to the crash. I got my pit bike and remounted, trying to at least avoid a DNF in my last race. I quickly realized I'd hurt my arm in the fall and hadnt notice until I tried to hold the bars. It became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to finish, so I rode one-handed to the other pit entrance and pulled the plug. My last position check had me in 16th place...

I was afraid I may have broken my arm considering where it was hurting and the fact I'd used it to brace my fall. Once I got undressed and could get a better look I could see that I looked like I'd hit it on something during the fall, rather than jammed it in a way that would typically lead to a break. It still doesnt feel very well, but I'm going to give it a few days and if it's still in bad shape, get it checked out stateside.

I'm really disappointed to end my trip with a race like that, but such is cycling. I was actually having a positive race experience and still turns out badly. That's how it goes, just enough good to keep you coming back. It was definitely nice to race near the front and a glimmer of hope for future races in Belgium.

Now, It's officially my "offy". My bikes and wheels have already been packed and taken away by the shipping company, so I won't be doing any more rides before I leave. I'm planning at least two, maybe three weeks of down time before I start thinking about 2011. This trip was unbelieveable and I have so many people to thank for making it possible, but I'm going to save all of that for another post. I've also got a ton of pictures and post worthy material from my trip to the Tour of Flanders museum and my trip up the Koppenburg, so stay tuned.

I don't leave until Sunday morning, so I'm going to ring in the New Year with a few Belgian beverages and then watch the GP Sven Nys on the TV tomorrow. I've also got a huge jar of Nutella to finish before I go. Back to work!

Diegem

2010-12-29T13:05:00.001-08:00

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The Muscles from Brussels

2010-12-29T11:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening was the Superprestige in Diegem, basically downtown Brussels. The elite race started at 5:30, which meant we'd be racing under the lights. The atmosphere was unbelievable. The only American event I can think of that is even similar would be Cross Vegas when Lance raced. And that's still quite a stretch to compare the two. With temps at, or below freezing all week, it meant another snowy, icy race.

I felt decent on most of the course, but there was a lot of pedaling and certainly no where to hide on the big climb. My start was mediocre at best, but I was upright. The first time up the stairs, my front wheel clipped the heels of the Belgie in front of me as we were running. He took issue with this and decided to stop, turn around, scream at me, then proceeded to kick me in the stomach. I tried to run around him, as to not let the race run away while he did his best Jean Claude Van Damme impression, but it was so packed that he had a clean shot at me. The kick caught me off guard, but luckily it didn't do any damage.

After the initial sorting out, I found myself in another very familiar group of North Americans. We pretty much took turns dropping each other and always ended up back together. We got pulled with 2 laps to go, but it actually felt like we were racing. The biggest thing is trying not to lose so much time on the first lap, due to the congestion. With snow and ice on all of these courses, there's only one feasible line, so this makes for more crashes and huge time gaps from the leaders. At Zolder I lost 3:30 on the first lap and only 45 seconds or so per lap after that. That's pretty much been the story every day here.

I must have appeared to have been racing a bit more than the previous days, because when I was walking back to the car a fan said, "American!"... and I turned and looked at him, and he said, "Respect!" Or maybe he's just noticed me suffering at the back of all these races and feels sorry for me, but either way it was nice to have something positive said, for once.

The late start made for an even later evening at the house. We had dinner waiting for us and I was tired, but at the same time I couldn't sleep because the adrenaline was still pumping. I eventually went to sleep by 1:30 am.

Tuesday was a non-race day, which was nice because we had a mix of rain and snow during the time that we were supposed to do our training. I opted to just ride the trainer and watch a movie. I got a massage to try to speed up my recovery for today and Thursday.

Right now I'm in the car on the way back from the Gazet Van Antwerpen race in Loenhout, near the Dutch border. The weather was slightly warmer today, which meant all of the snow on the ground was melting and turned the course into a muddy tractor pull. There were a few sections today that were comparable to the slow mud bogs in Bend a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what to contribute my extraordinarily bad legs. Maybe the massage wasn't a good idea since it's not something I do regularly. Maybe it was the fact that today was my 31st cross race of the season. Who knows. All I know is that this was a horsepower course and I had no horses. I got crushed and it was so quite frustrating. I feel like I'm making lots of mental progress and also some good improvements on the technical side of things, but I can't seem to find any legs for the life of me.

I'm definitely feeling pretty bummed by today's performance, or lack there of. I'm not saying I'm cracked or anywhere near cracking, but I just wish I could find my legs for one more day of this season. I've gots lots of work to do on all of my mud/ cow shit covered clothes tonight, then get up and do it all over again tomorrow.

Thanks for all your support.

Final 2 Laps from Diegem

Watch that video. As usual, the video/ their skills make this course look flat and easy. I can assure you, it is far from it. Definitely my favorite venue of all time though.

Zolder World Cup

2010-12-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

If you watched the race, you probably think it was "crazy" or "epic", and yeah it kinda was all of those adjectives. But, you really have no idea. This was another level crazy. This course was hard in the first place, then throw 10 inches of snow on top of that course and have people chew it up all day. What you get is a course that is wildly entertaining for the spectators and nearly impossible for us mortals.

I did manage to make some Belgians friends and fans today though. During warm up on the course, I was trying to ride a certain section and ended up basically coming to a stop at the edge of the course right in the middle of a big group of fans. The was an awkward silence as they waited to see if I was angry about not riding the section cleanly. I turned to the woman to my left and gave her a big, accented, "Hallo!" The crowd found it quite funny and from that moment on I had my very own cheer block on that section of the course. I also gave out about 30 of my new rider cards and even signed a few autographs. These Belgians eat that stuff up! I think the rider cards worked well because I heard some "Go Kaanopppff" cheers from the crowd mid-race.

After preriding and trying to get my head around the task at hand, I was slightly scared, but ready to giver. It didn't help the morale when I returned to camp to find Trebon in street clothes, opting out of the festivities due to the conditions. The majority of the rideable lines were trampled and obliterated by the womens race, to the point that the course us men were racing was nothing like we'd warmed up on just an hour before. Riding in a straight line on flat ground became nearly impossible, especially with the traffic issues at my end of the field.

I dismounted my bike at the first corner and didn't ride it again for the next few minutes as the mayhem sorted out. Rides were all over the course trying to navigate the tracks in the snow and dodge the corpses of those less fortunate riders. I finally got to attempt to ride my bike just before the major decent about mid way through the lap. Let me back up and tell you about this decent. Im not sure how far it drops,elevation wise, but its a good bit. It's covered in sharp rocks, snow, ice, ruts and a plethora of Belgian fans waiting to laugh at your expense. You know it's going to be intense when during warm up there is a line of racers at the top surveying the drop in like its a a skate park. One of those surveyors was Bart Wellens. The fans were giving him a hard time about his cautiousness and so he got off and picked up his bike and tried to hand it off to one of them to see how they would fare. They declined. It took me four tries before I rode it without crashing in warm up.

Back to the racing. I just struggled with every inch of this course. There were no sections that were easily rideable. Even the sections that I remembered from watching previous editions of this race, that seemed mundane on the TV, were treacherous and scary. There is no way to relay to you how much more intimidating the course was in person. I've never been scared for my safety on a course, but that was par for the course today. It was a good exercise in just nutting up and chucking yourself off of an obstacle, because I really had no other options.

I obviously got my ass kicked today, but I feel like this course made me grow as a bike racer more than any other racing experience I've ever had. This course totally re-aligned my perspective and showed me another world of bike racing. I've never felt so helpless, but at the same time it was liberating to know that I did everything I could and that's just how it went.

We've got 3 more races here and as usual I'm going to be back on the grind, trying to squeeze every bit of positive experience out of this trip. Thanks for following me back home. I'm trying guys. It's hard over here, but I can promise I'm not going to waste this opportunity by quitting out there.

And one final note, I lined up directly next to eventual race winner Lars Boom today, which makes what he did today even more amazing. And what I did even more humbling. He did actually spark up an conversation with me before the start, which I was glad because I was getting cold feet, like a 4th grader going for the hand-hold at the movies.

Sorry if this post seems a bit jumbled. I'm having some trouble putting all of these experiences and feelings into a coherent, readable state.

Kortrijk Photos

2010-12-24T12:18:00.001-08:00

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Thursday Kortrijk Trip

2010-12-24T11:10:00.000-08:00

It seems that our default ride around here has become the trip to a neighboring town called Kortrijk. It takes around 45 min to an hour depending on how lost you attempt to get on the way. The town is a bit bigger than Izegem and seems to have a quite a lot more going on too. We'll normally do the ride, with some curb jumping and sign sprinting and a coffee stop in the middle. The weather has been so cold and the roads so wet, that the stop in the middle had been almost a necessity.

On Thursday we it wasn't raining, but we did get our first experience of that wind that people normally associate with Belgium. One downside to these stops is that the coffee shops normally are serving beer also and had a good number of locals smoking cigarettes in your face. Chalk that up to the "Belgian Experience", I guess. This trip we also decided to make a waffle stop, my first shot at tackling one of these famous chocolate covered Belgian waffles. It was pretty good, but tough to get you legs turning over again after that, especially with the nice headwind that was waiting for us. Our crew for the ride was: Myself, Joe Schmaltz, Jeff Bahnson, Gunnar Bergy, Cody Kaiser, and Zach McDonald. That seems to be the core of the "Kortrijk Riders" on most days.

As usual, photos to come.

Wednesday Photo Drop

2010-12-22T12:17:00.001-08:00

A few photos from training the last few days. A photo from the Sports Psych visit. Kalmthout WC. The training race today.

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Mark It 8, Dude!

2010-12-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

Just got back from a heated bowling session down the road at the lanes. The Big Lebowski quotes were running rampant. Good times though. One of the idiot juniors, that will remain nameless, decided he would try to jump the sensor for sensing "over the line" offenses and onto the lane after he let the ball go. he didn't realize the lanes were waxed up real nice and ended up parallel to the lane and body slammed himself from about 4 feet in the air. Looked painful, but he tried to act like it wasn't.

Today may have been the warmest day we've seen so far, which meant melting snow and slushy mud for our inter-squad training race down by the canal. Trebon came over to the house, hung out for the day, did the race and then showed us some good routes in the area. We ended up getting in some good hours on the bike by the end of the day.

Yesterday we had Jonathon Page's Sport Psychologist, Mindi Wisman, come to the house to give us a talk. It was interesting, with some good stuff to take away. I've always been pretty fascinated with the power of the mind.

I've been trying to think of interesting content for the blog, and thought I might do a video walk-thru of the house and mechanics area here. That way all you guys back home that actually care what it's like, can have the next best thing to actually seeing it for yourself.

Also, I just submitted my Cyclingnews Diary tonight, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Photoz

2010-12-20T14:21:00.001-08:00

A few photos from the drive to the race. A big stack of Dugasts in the Rabobank van. Sven Nijs' son, Tebow, ripping around in the snow. The Canal, some Belgian scenery and me playing in the snow.

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Kalmthout World Cup

2010-12-20T13:19:00.000-08:00

That just happened. What an unbelieveable experience. I was literally fighting back a smile as we raced down the start chute on the first lap. Considering I get goosebumps when I watch the start of a World Cup from my desk chair at home on weekend mornings, I'm unable to relay to you what it felt for me to be hearing the sound off all the fans banging on the boards that line the start/finish straight. It sounds the same as on the Internet, only louder. It was honestly surreal. I felt like I was watching it happen from outside my body. The taste of the salt from the freshly salted road, and the sound of those boards. I will, honestly, never be able to put that out of my head. Or ever want to.

I started between Joachim Parbo and John Gadret. I knew a surprisingly large number of guys at the start, it felt just like coming home... Well not really, but it was nice to know a few. Trebon and Page gave me the time of day. Matter and Marko were nice as usual. The 3 Canadians, Mike Garrigan, Craig Ritchey and Shaun Adamson, seemed pleased to see some more English speakers. And Babcock and I were feeling it all out. Once the light turned green (they use a stoplight looking thing to start you here) it was game on. There was an 180 degree turn on wet pavement at the end of the start chute that was fairly sketchy, but then the poor start position started to take it's toll. With the snow and slick conditions, there was really only one line and everyone wanted it. I ran a lot of the first technical section until things stretched out to a rideable state. From there I found myself in group with a bunch of familiar faces, guys I might ride with in the US. I rode in that group for a few laps before taking a good spill and losing contact. I got shot awkwardly out of a frozen rut and towards the barriers at the edge of the course, where I hooked my shifter and my bike came to an abrupt stop. I didn't. I was slung down the course and a bit shaken. The Belgians made fun of me, or so I guess.

In conditions like I was facing, confidence and aggressiveness in the corners is a key component to driving you bike fast. My confidence had
been shaken and I just couldn't get recomposed. I tentatively rode the remainder of the race, taking bad lines and botching the technical stuff. It was all a mental thing, but none the less, I wasn't going fast enough in that state.

I was bummed with the end result, but I'm not crushed by it. I really don't know that level is so unobtainable, but I think that being composed and under control will be a huge component if I'm to have any success here.

With all the snow that fell during and after the race, it turned our 1.5 hour trip into one that took over 3 hours.

I could probably write a novel of a blog post about the PRO-ness of Sven Nijs. I kid you not. You have never seen anything "PRO", until you have seen Sven Nijs and his entourage and his race day cars, trucks, vans, trailers etc. Sven makes everyone else look like the Ryan Knapp who used to wear long sleeve T-shirts for base layers in winter.

I've got some photos for You, but they'll be in the next post.

Thanks for following me in this journey. I really appreciate all of the positive emails, and message, and general support I've been getting. Please bear with me, I'll represent the Midwest better before this trip is over.

RK$

Photos Day 2

2010-12-18T12:10:00.001-08:00

Assorted photos from today. My post with words disappeared today and I don't feel like re-writing it currently. World Cup in 18 hours.

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Photos From Day 1

2010-12-17T07:43:00.001-08:00

A few from the streets and the ride today. My new labels for my tires/ wheels. And the bikes outside the bakery.

Enjoy.

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Belgium Day 1

2010-12-17T07:32:00.001-08:00

Pardon my less than original title, but I'm trying to save all my creativity for my Cyclingnews Journal entry later this week. I did finally make it to the house here in Izegem after a pretty terrible travel day yesterday. I was supposed to get in at 8:15 AM and ended up getting in at 10:00 PM. I had cancellations, delays, missed connections and weather issues. And it seemed like there was an ever present Euro couple publicly displaying their affection for each other practically on my shoulder. Pissin' me off a little bit.

When I got to Izegem, everything was covered in a fresh layer of snow and all the people at the house were asleep. I found my room and went right to bed since I had basically been up for 30 hours or so. I slept like a rock. I woke up an 9 AM Belgium time, did breakfast and then watched the mechanics build and dial my bikes. The mechanics seem like good guys, so nice that I almost feel guilty making them work on my stuff. Steve Fisher, Jerome Townsend and I went for a ride on the "roads". Some of them were more like narrow ice skating rinks. Steve was the only one to crash, but lots of close calls and two wheel drifting.

It constantly smells like something... either cow poop, some kind of grain, or a bakery. We also rode down the famous Canal Path and stopped at a coffee shop/ bakery. It seems like the snow is here to stay for the near future, so the World Cup should be awesome. I've got a strategy for adding some pictures to this post, but I'm not sure if it's gonna work, so if they don't show up, you'll understand. Maybe racing a race for openers tomorrow. Haven't decided yet, so maybe tomorrows entry may be a race report... YOUR FAVORITE!

Thanks for reading, silly Americans.

Bend Over

2010-12-15T16:17:00.000-08:00

I'm currently sitting in the Salt Lake City airport in the midst of a 4 hour layover. I should find my way back to Bloomington by 11pm or so tonight, giving me a whopping 36 hours before I'll be leaving for Belgium. I feel like I've got most of my ducks in a row, but still a few major things to take care of before then.

Portland and Bend have been really great times these last few weekends and have had great atmospheres at both of the venues. My results haven't really been anything to write home about, but I'm starting to feel better every day, as some freshness returns to my legs. It's definitely a weird feeling not focusing solely on the national championships, but I'm hoping that will pay off in the next few weeks.

We had our first Euro Cross Camp gathering on Saturday night in Bend to talk about logistics and race schedules and what to expect as a first timer. I'm excited to get to know the group of guys, because apart from a few of them, I haven't really spent much time around the group. Geoff Proctor seems to be a really nice and welcoming guy. He seems to be really focusing on not just the results side of the camp, but that the riders can grow as people as well as bike racers through the experience. During our time at the house we're going to have a Sports Psychologist come by and chat with us, which should be really cool to see what he has to say. I'm down with Sports Psychology. As far as racing goes, it looks like my first race will probably be on Saturday in Lichtervelde, and then there is a World Cup in Kalmthout the next day, but we haven't decided if I'll be doing that one yet. If not there are some other options for racing on Sunday. I literally can't tell you how excited I am to get over there and mix it up.

It was nice to finally get some nasty mud to race in on Sunday at Nationals, because I was really hoping that I wouldn't get to Belgium and have that be the first mud I'd seen all year. Bend was good practice, but I'm hoping that at least some of the courses in Europe will have a little less "heavy" mud than we saw in parts of the course yesterday. Either way, I guess everyone has to ride through the same stuff, so come on wit' it!

I really want to thank all the people who have been taking care of me of over the last few weeks. First, the KCCX crew. Bill Marshall and Tom Price have been working the pits for me, transporting bikes, gluing tires, washing bikes and just generally take care of all my needs. It's hard to roll it solo at some of these races and these guys have gone out of their way to make my life easier, so thanks guys!

David and Kate have taken care of me off the bike for basically the last two weeks. Taking me to and from the airport, feeding me, laundering my clothes, letting me use their car and just generally being hilarious. I really enjoyed getting to hang out with them so much.

The guys at Zipp have been a huge part of making this trip to Nationals happen, as well as the entire cross season. From product, to transportation, to meals, to hotels, these guys have taken such good care of me and gone out of their way to help. I'm really lucky that these guys will still give me the time of day considering the other cross racers that they take care of.

And the last shout out goes to Corey Greene and the Cincinnati cyclocross crew for driving my bikes the 46 or so hour journey back to Indy from Bend, effectively saving me 400 bucks in airline fees! And also Spencer Petrov for washing and polishing up my bikes after the mudfest on Sunday. You guys are awesome!

EDIT: Since I started writing this blog entry on the way back from Bend, I've been too preoccupied with prep for Belgium that I hadn't had a chance to finish it until now. I'm back in the airport again, this time I'm taking THE trip. After some flight issues, I'm about to board for Belgium. Earlier in the post I said I wasn't sure if I'd be doing the Kalmthout World Cup this Sunday, well now it's a go. Thrown in at the deep end... I'll be kickin' my legs.

Excuse me, Sven.

2010-11-30T15:53:00.000-08:00

So if you scour the internet like I do, then you've probably already seen the news. If you have a life, then I guess you can find out here... I've been selected to go to Belgium with Euro Cross Camp and the US National Team Director, Geoff Proctor. I'm going to BELGIUM TO RACE CYCLOCROSS! SORRY FOR YELLING, I'M JUST EXCITED!

I'm leaving on December 15th and coming home on January 2nd. While I'm there I'll be living in Izegem, Belgium at the National Team house. There are 8 potential races while I'm there, including 2 World Cups (Kalmthout and Zolder), a Superprestige in Diegem, a GVA Trophey race in Loenhout, and the GP Sven Nys in Sven's home town of Baal. Serious stuff. I'm excited, motivated, and a little scared, but the good kind of scared (if there is such a thing).

Knowing that this was on the horizon has made this last block of training so much easier, it's unbelievable. Thinking about cutting that last interval short? Better not. If you do , Sven and his pal Zdenek will lap you in 20 minutes. Not a difficult decision to put in the effort.

I know that this will be a humbling experience as well as one that can teach me so much, so quickly. I'm not going into this with any individual goals, but more the goal to go over and race as hard as I can, be as mentally tough as I can when I'm in these difficult environments, and gain every possible bit of knowledge that I can from these 3 weeks. Oh, and have fun. I think that this will be a life changing experience and hopefully give me lots of knowledge to take away.

As you can imagine, a three week trip to Belgium isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm working on raising some money to help offset the cost of my trip. We're guessing it's going to cost somewhere around $3,500- $4,000 to make this happen, so any little bit helps. I'm going to put a PayPal button up so that anyone who's interested in helping can make a donation. If you don't have a PayPal account, shoot me an email at knapprd@gmail and we can figure something out.

I should be able to update this thing quite a bit while I'm over there, so check back for updates during the Holiday season. And also before then, because I've still got some racing to do stateside first.

Thanks to all of you who have supported me along my journey so far. I really appreciate it. I know that I wouldn't even be in this position if it weren't for so many of you helping me over the last 3 years.

2010-11-30T15:25:00.000-08:00

As you know, Cross Nationals and the USGP Finals, and some other important races are just around the corner for me. I'm nearing the end of my final training block for the year and just got back from Iowa this weekend. Before I can give you the short and not so sweet low-down on Iowa, I need to report on my racing in North Carolina the previous weekend.

My dad decided to make the trip to NC with me and it was nice to get some time with him rather that karokeing in the car by myself during the drive to and fro. We got in late Friday night and I decided to ride the trainer for a little while to see if it really did any good for my legs the next morning. Well even though I had put in some pretty hard training days that week, a little trainer riding and foam rollering had my legs feeling pretty nice for Saturdays race. I guess I'm gonna be one of those trainer riding guys from now on.

Saturdays and Sundays courses and races were nearly identical in all aspects. The front group was pretty big because there were long open sections in between the technical sections and that would always allow things to come back together to some degree. Although the groups were a bit bigger, there were really only a few guys showing their face at the front and "racing". It became pretty tactical and a lot about positioning for the last lap of the race. Luckily there were a few harder sections at the end of the lap that allowed the race to be sorted out and didn't result in a big, road style, bunch kick.

I felt good through the entirety of both days, but think I wasn't quite strong enough to match Matter and Fratinni at the end. I also think I should have raced more aggressive in the finale both days as well. I ended with two 3rd places, but I was nearly as pleased that I had good legs after such a hard week of training. I really believe that taking care of them better after my rides and the drive down played a bit part in still being able to race at a decent level in the midst of a training block. Learning is FUNdemental. And good for UCI points.

I don't have much time, and don't really want to, so I'm not going to say much about Jingle Cross. Crashes, rolled tubulars, bad legs, bad bike handling, and who knows what else. I'm glad that weekend is behind me and I can focus on the bigger things coming down the pipe.

My crash as a result of a rolled tire on an off-camber. If I had known how the rest of the weekend was going to go, I'd have just kept rolling down that hill, all the way back to Bloomington...

You win some and you lose some. I'm still feeling pretty good about the way things are going. See you in Portland.

Kenny Tarmac

2010-11-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

"Hey, Guy, I just landed! Yeah, IND to BDL!" Sorry if you don't get the reference. What I'm trying to say is that I've been on airplanes too much recently. Those things just fall out of the sky for no reason, ya know?

I've racel a lot lately and some have gone well and others haven't. I really raced poorly at the USGP in Louisville, then I went to New Jersey and raced a lot better, but still not great, and finally, I was in Northampton, MA last weekend and didn't really ride very well either. Kinda bummed about it, but I feel like I'm going the right direction since I shit my pants (not literally... ahem, collegiate nats RR 07) at the USGP. I was happy to get a "real" podium at Beacon Cross, but besides that, I feel like I've just been a bit off from where I need to be, should be and would like to be.

New Jersey was an experience all together. I flew with two bikes in two giant hard cases and took the train to John Minturn's place in Manayunk for the weekend. I aint from the city, so that was a bit of an experience, especially with the two giant boxes. John was an great host for the weekend and staying with him/ carpooling to the races saved me millions of dollars and actually probably made the rest of my cross season possible. Because I got dinged 350 big ones by the effing Delta bitches, I was looking for a way to avoid flying my bikes home and then right back to MA the next weekend. Adam Myerson and Lyne Lamoureux from Podium Insight each came through for me and each took a bike from New Jersey to races in Massachusetts. That potentially saved me 700 bones. So thankful that bike racing isn't like golf. Many less dousches. John Minturn even fedex'd the empty boxes home for me. Nice people are awesome. Not to mention all the nice people with the C3 team from Baltimore who were trying to help me out with my bikes situation too. Sorry to make this so sappy, but I've really just been amazed with all the great people going out of there way to make shit happen for me.

Northampton, MA was my next destination for Adam Myerson's Cycle-Smart International races. I got home from NJ on Monday night and was back at the airport again on Friday morning at 6 AM, a bit too short of a turn around for my liking, but then again, I'm going to race my bike, so I really have nothing to complain about.

Massachusetts was perfect. I don't know why I like that area so much, but I've been looking forward to going back since Fitchburg last season. I stayed with Steve Roszko, the owner/ founder of BikeReg.com. He lives right on a bike path that runs directly into the park where the CSI races were held. Rough set up, I know. Steve and his wife took care of all my meals and I had a nice bed to sleep in thanks to their 7 year old son, Oscar, lending his out to me. I was able to do the 10-15 minutes spin to and from the course every day and it couldn't have worked out any better. I almost forgot, I got off the plane and Steve was waiting by the curb with the BikeReg team car and my bike already picked up from Myerson, waiting for me in the back. Unbelievable. I felt like Burt Reynolds or somethin'.

I'm glad that I've refrained from giving you guys the boring details/ excuses about these recent races,I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it. I've been thinking about how I just wanted to do a post about all the people who have been helping make this last block of travel and racing possible. Thanks to all of you who have been going out of your way to let me play the bike game this year. It's fun. I'm not really traveling to race this weekend, so I'm actually going to do some hard training and sleep in my own bed. I've gotta put some serious efforts in the bank during these next few weeks, because Nationals and the USGP finals are just around the corner.

Anyone around Bloomington want to motorpace me soon?

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I decided not to post any pictures with this entry, even though there are lots of good ones from Podium Insight, because I'm sick of seeing the stupid face I'm always making when I'm racing cross.

P.P.S Jonny Sundt is a nice dude. We've been talking a good bit at these races recently and he might be the nicest bike racer I know. I told him I used to hate him because he yelled at me. He didn't remeber, but didn't doubt it.

Ice Socks... Wha?

2010-10-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

That was some seriously un-cyclocrossy weather! The Cincinnati UCI3 Weekend has come and gone and I employed the ice sock tactic at a cyclocross race. Unbelievable.

I seem to forget how hard these 3 day cyclocross weekends are. Stage race hard. So, I was talking to (name drop coming up) Jeremy Powers on Sunday and we decided that this was definitely harder than Joe Martin. You try to do 3, one hour time trials in a row and see how you legs feel. Anyway, it was all in the name of fun and UCI points.

Friday was a new course from last years slog in the mud, but no less brutal. Very, dry, dusty, and some said "mountain bikey". It was one of those courses where you couldn't really ride it easy. With temps in the mid 80's too much time above red-line and there was no coming back from it, the theme for the weekend. I got an uncharachteristicly good start and slotted in 3rd wheel behind Powers and Trebon, exactly where I didn't want to be. I was afraid I'd go too hard, too early, following those two, but the pace wasn't terrible so I decided to follow for a few. Eventually I settled into a group with Chris Jones and Troy Wells, racing for 6th place. We weren't really close to catching anyone, or being caught. I was comfortable for a while, but started feeling it with a few laps to go and went out the back. I was able to ride the last few laps solo and avoid being caught by Jake Wells in 9th. I was toast afterwards, but pleased with the placing.

We stayed at Chris and Kim Chartier's as we do every year for these races and it was awesome, as it is every year. I knew my legs were milked, so I tried to do the "professional" thing and drink water instead of beer and give my body a good shot at recovery.

Saturday was hot and dusty again, but the course had less elevation change and was more wide-open. I spent the time before the race trying to convince myself that my legs felt ok and that they'd be fine once we started racing, and I did a good job of it. I lied. I felt like trash for every second of that race. Not only did I have shit for legs, I had shit for brains. I couldn't seem to hit any of my lines and I felt like I was giving up 10 seconds a lap, in about 5 different spots on the course. It was just one of those days where I couldn't put it together. Group after group spat me out the back until I limped in in 13th place. Bummed, but optimistic for the big C1 on Sunday.

My legs felt infinitely better turning the pedals during warm up for Harbin Park. With all the traffic, the course was disintegrating by the hour and I spent a good amount of time pondering tire selection. I checked the with others and some were riding Mud tires and others, semi-slicks. There was no continuity as to the tread du jour. I Felt like my FMB semi slicks were hooking up well, so I went with them. I decided not to ride the course between the women's race and our race, which in hindsight, may have been a mistake. I got an average start, but I guess I was just far enough back that I felt like I had a million bees buzzing around my head through every corner, so I took to moving up through the first few corners of the course. No sooner than I take the "hot line" through a slippery off-camber corner, I find myself on my ass. Crashed. Chain dropped. Race riding away. I scrambled to right the ship and get to chasing. After one balls-out lap, I found myself in the group racing for 13th. I'm ping-ponging off of riders trying to get through that group and in search of the next targets. Just as I'm about to head out the good end of that group I come up on Derrick St. John at the bottom of the screaming descent with the "g-out" at the bottom. Since I was in kamikaze mode, I didn't touch the brakes. Apparently he isn't familiar with the Ricky Bobby mentality and was just fine with 13th place and taking it easy through that corner. Before I knew it I was on his ass, and soon after that we were rubbing wheels and I was body slamming myself on the fastest part of the course. Perfect.

I ate it hard. While I was going down, I thought to myself; "welp, there goes the collar bone. I can't believe you've done it again." I managed to tuck and roll and avoid breakage, but I had knocked the air out myslef and proceeded to roll around on the ground for a minute, regaining composure. I thought about dropping out, but decided that was for losers (so is finishing 23rd, but less loser-ish than quitting). I found my bike, straightened the bars and shifters and set out riding hard out of anger and desire for gas money.

It was really nice to hear all the cheers for me even though I wasn't preforming well. There are so many awesome supporters in the Ohio Valley and honestly, I didn't want to set an example for all those Red Zone kids that quitting is the thing to do. I was nearly last after the second wreck and managed to make it up to about 19th or 20th, but riding with reckless abandon for an hour caught up with me on the last lap and I gave a few spots back as I limped in.

It's hard to say that the weekend was a failure, because it was so much fun and I managed to get one decent result, but it was nowhere near what I was looking for. I feel like I missed a huge opportunity by letting the C1 points slip away, but as they say, "that's bike racing". I wish I could personally thank everyone who came up to me with something nice to say, or encouraging words during the race, it really means a lot to have such a home field advantage when I get to race a UCI in my area. Thanks to everyone who cheered, regardless of how fast or slow I was going this weekend.

Coming up we've got our OVCX race in Bloomington this weekend, BloomingCross. Barry Wicks is coming down to do a clinic on Saturday at 4 pm and then we're doing a bonfire/party after the clinic. The after the bonfire/party we're taking Wicknasty to Kilroy's for a Jager Bomb, Bear's for a Hairy Bear and Upstairs for an AMF. All the while, I'll be drinking water. Gotta find some way to beat him on Sunday.

See you this weekend!

Thanks to Lyne from Podium Insight for all the photos!

Madison USGP's

2010-09-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

Leading up to these races I wasn't really sure what my goals should be. I had been racing for a few weeks and feeling decent, but hadn't raced against this calibre field yet. As I browsed the start list, I did the ol' "yes, no, no, no, yes, no, no, no, maybe" as to whom I thought I could beat, or had beaten in the past, I didn't come up with that many "yes" answers. I was trying to be realistic, but this field pretty deep, probably the best field I've ever been a part of. French National Champ, Francis Mourey was still hanging around soaking up UCI pts before heading back to Europe, so was former Swiss Champ, Christian Huele, Belgian Tim Van Nuffel and pseudo Belgian Jon Page. After them it was pretty much anybody who's anybody in 'cross filling the grid.

I decided that a top 15 would be a really good ride and a top 20 would be pretty solid too. I was hoping my 33 UCI points from last year would maybe get me into the second row, but in fact, I got number 22, one of the last spots in row 3.

I kicked at my pedal for about 30 seconds after the gun went off, but somehow managed to not lose too much ground. I slithered though the first few corners with my elbows out, pin-balling my way forward. I noticed I had made good progress because Todd Wells was driving our group and Barry Wicks was on my wheel and a few other quality guys were surrounding me. I knew I had good legs almost immediately because I never felt the need to let off the gas and recover after the initial shock of the intense first lap. I tried not to think about where I was or who was behind or in front of me, but it was hard. I almost crashed in a gravel corner and that helped me refocus on the task at hand. As our group splintered after a few laps, I found myself chasing Troy Wells solo and he was chasing the back of the lead group. Behind I had Barry Wicks and Brian Matter chasing me, not the worst company to be in, for sure.

I dangled in no-mans land for a while, but was picking off guys who had been blown out of the lead group. Two of these huge fish to catch were Ryan Trebon and none other than ol' Frankie Mourey. Trebon was cool to pass and drop, but he obviously wasn't having his best day, but when I caught Mourey, Matter and I were racing pretty hard and I was afraid I would get gapped off of Brian while we were overtaking Mourey. Mourey doesn't speak English, so the thought crossed my mind, "how to I say 'inside' in French?" I obviously didn't know, so I just gave him a nice assertive pass in the corner and he didn't seem to care. I couldn't believe I had just blown by the guy I was watching videos of earlier that week. I thought about retiring on the spot. I tried not to star-gaze, but come on, it's Francis Freaking Mourey!

Anywho, Me, Wicks and Matter raced the last few laps together and couldn't really drop each other. I made a move into the last technical section and was able to put a few bike lengths on those two and hold them off on the run up before the final road section. I wasn't sure how far up I had made it, but I was pretty pumped about the days events. It turns out I was 11th on the day and since it was a C1, that was good for 8 UCI points.

Wow, that was a bit long for just one days recap, so I guess Sunday's recap will be the condensed version... I didn't feel very well at all and didn't do as much slithering through the field at the start, but I still found myself in no-mans-land chasing the front group, with the same guys, plus a few others chasing me. This time I was hurting from being out in the wind so much, when I really didn't have the legs to pull it off. Barry dragged a big train of 5 guys up to me and I tried to get in that group and recover, but that wasn't happening. I got dropped and passed by all 5 of 'em on the run up after a few laps and rode the rest of the race pulling Luke Keough around trying to help him get the U23 jersey. He's a nice kid and couldn't really pull through, so I didn't have a problem dragging him around to help his cause. I ended up in 18th on Sunday, kind of disappointing when compared with the previous day's result, but I would have taken it before the weekend started, so I was fine with it... I guess.

You know you've been driving too much when the 6.5hr drive home from Madison seems short. Looking forward to a local race this weekend, then trying to kill it for the Cincy UCI3 and next round of the USGP in Louisville.

Photos by Caitlin Coar

Nittany Lion Cross

2010-09-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

I decided last minute to drive out to Allentown, PA for the first UCI cross race of the season. There wasn't too much going on around here, so I figured I could make it a quick in and out trip and hopefully get a decent result to kick off the year.

I left early Friday morning and got to the venue around 6:30 that evening, with just enough time to do some laps before dark. Pretty similar course to last year, and pretty straight forward. I grabbed a bite to eat and set up my accommodations for the evening, the back of my car. May sound terrible, but it really wasn't bad at all. A Grocery Getter with the seats down makes for an ideal "cheap hotel". With not much in the way of entertainment in my "room", I was asleep early and awake even earlier. If I wasn't already a loser for sleeping in my car, I definitely solidified my loser status by getting a "table for one" at Panera for breakfast. I took my sweet time at breakfast and was back to to venue by 10am.

The promoter was nice enough to not leave the UCI races for the last races of the day, so we were racing at 1:15. I was nervous. Seriously nervous. I always get pretty keyed up before the first race of the year, but I think I put quite a bit of pressure on myself just because I had driven all the way out there for 1 hr of racing, so it had better be a good hour. I was fine once the gun went off, but I was mess on the inside before hand.

I got a good start and slotted into 4th wheel. I just wanted to get a lap under my belt with no mishaps. Before I knew it we had a little gap and there was a group of 5 or 6 of us, with another equally sized group not far behind. Adam Myerson, Luke Keough, Valentin Scherz, his other Swiss teammate, plus me. This was the group I wanted to be in. Once we settled in the pace was pretty tolerable, so I decided to test the waters with small attack. It got rid of Scherz's teammate, but it was too early for me to try to go away alone and no one really wanted to work. Scherz was waiting for his teammate, Myerson didn't mind a group sprint and Keough fancied a sprint as well, so I didn't have much in the way of allies for keeping the pace up.

A few laps later I tried again and this time I dropped my chain shortly after I gave it a go. I couldn't believe it. I probably let out a few expletives, but I couldn't believe that the chain decided to drop now. I probably had 5 or 6 hours of riding on that bike in race like conditions, and the chain decided to come off NOW???

I surprisingly kept my composure and got the chain fixed quickly and chased the front group down within the next half lap. Then it came off again in the wooded/rooted section. It looked like the chain keeper had come loose and moved away to where it wasn't doing it's job at all. I spent the next few laps trying to baby it through the rough sections and still make up time. I eventually dropped my chain 4 times, the last one being with 1.5 laps to go. The legs still felt decent, but I had fallen all the way back to 11th. I chased my ass off and finally caught back on with just under a lap to go, but when it came time for the final throw down, I just didn't have enough left and pretty much had to watch the sprint from the back of the group.

5th place and 10 UCI points is noting to scoff at, but I couldn't help but think what could have been if I didn't have to waste so much effort making up for my mechanical issues, I'd like to think a podium at the very least. Coulda shoulda woulda, I know. Lucky for me I have another chance at redemption this coming weekend when Mike and I head out to Baltimore for two more UCI C2's.

I made it back to Bloomington late sat./early sun. morning and after a night's rest I decided I'd rather do a local cross race and potentially win a little cash, than go out and train hard by myself. I made the relatively short drive south the the Huber's Apple Cross near Louisville KY and was able to beat my head against the wall for a solid 60 minutes and come out with my first win in a bike race in way too long. Thank god for cyclocross.

CX Magazine Write-Up

It's a leaf

2010-08-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

I wrote a partial blog entry a few weeks ago, but my motivation died mid post, so it lies in the drafts folder. We'll see if I can pitch a complete game today. I'n my writing absence I pretty much raced the entire second half of the road season. I took a break in July to try to get myself fresh for the second half of the year and then transition to cross. My racing in the second half of the season was just so-so. I felt good, but couldn't seem to put it together. The team raced ok as well, but in general I just felt like the team, as well as me personally, we're operating at less than our potential. I guess that's how it goes sometimes.

I've been enjoying some time at home in the month of August and it's been everything I thought it would be. I've been trying to ramp up my training with cross just around the corner, and being able to stay at home and still race a bit has been nice for the mental side of things. The equipment side of things is also coming together finally. I've just got to do the gluing and Aquasealing this week and then I'll be all caught up. I can hardly tell you how excited I am for this coming season. I feel like I barely got to race last year and now I can get a clean shot at a healthy schedule.

Bloomington is crazy right now, with all the college kids coming back. It's great entertainment to walk or ride through campus right now. I constantly find myself saying "I'm glad I didn't act like that." I probably did. I bet I would have called college Ryan a douche. Not even I can escape my own scrutiny when it comes to douching around.

Anyway, the leaf is turning. New motivation, new weather and new bikes.
Coming to a cross race near you.

Nature Valley: The Rest of the Week

2010-06-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm firmly planted in reality, I feel like I can give a decent recap of the rest of the events from the NVGP. I'm sure if you've made your way to my blog, you've probably already seen the results, so here is a little background on each day of racing in Minnesota.

Thursday was supposed to be a 65 mile road race, but mother nature had other plans. The race typically breaks up pretty significantly under normal circumstances, but with tornaders brewing off in the distance, the winds were whipping around at 30-50mph all day. With the conditions like this the field was amazingly antsy. I've never seen a field of confident professionals fight for position like this. Everyone was really nervous and sketchy even during the neutral rollout because we knew that in the crosswinds the field should be blown to pieces in no time. I just kept wondering if this was what it was like in Belgium or Holland. We raced nervously and defensively for about an hour with no smaller groups really developing. Soon we heard the moto referee coming through the field yelling about tornado's and he said he had to turn around and go home.

I "bridged up" to the "lead group" of people hammering back to shelter. Rory Sutherland was driving the pace and I sat on, amazed that he was just cruising at 27 mph or so dragging us all around on our way back to town. I guess Rory's JRA pace is similar to my Time Trial pace. So THATS why he took 1:30 out of me over 6 miles...

Once back to town, the Start/ Finish area had been torn down and everyone was high-tailing it outta there. We did the same. The race refs just decided to act like the day never hap pend and we moved on to the next stage.

Friday was another criterium on narrow streets and at high speeds. Not much going on for me here. Paul took his call up and used it to go from the gun. He started a break that stayed out front until; the halfway prime, some solid face time for the team. I felt more comfortable that the first crit of the week, some of that probably had to do with not hitting a parking meter. The finale approached and the chaos commenced. I participated to a mildly lame extent and was able score myself a "Top 23", a result that I'm sure got the attention of all those pro teams.

The Menomonie Road Race was on Saturday and it was a new course with a handful of steep climbs that the promoter intended to break of the race. We didn't really race the harders climbs hard enough to cause the devastation the promoter had in mind, but the cumulative effect of all the climbing over the first 80 miles did start to wear down the field. As we approached Menomonie, after a series of decent little climbs the field finally started to break up. I was on the good side of these splits and with the front group. My legs felt decent enough and we started the decent into town and I must have hit something because I blew out my rear tire. I drifted backwards out of the group with my arm in the air.

I pulled over to wait for out team car. All of thr groups and team cars passed me as I stood with my rear wheel in my hand. When our car arrived I got it changed and started to attempt to motorpace myself out of DFL on the road. I got a solid 30 second of helf from the car and then we hit the 5x2 mile finishing circuits, where no motor pacing was allowed. Shit. I waved our driver away and set out alone to complete the last 10 miles. Needless to say I went significantly slower than the field. Being realistic with myself, I decided chasing in vain wasn't the best idea, considering the damn Chilkoot Hill was looming in the next days crit. I rolled the 10 miles at a steady but conservative pace and conceded 7:30 or so to the main field, plus another 20 second penalty because I didn't get out from behind the car soon enough once we hit the circuits. Aaaand tack on 50 bucks to USA Cycling for my infraction. Annoying day to say the least.

Prior to the day's debacle I was steadily climbing the GC into a spot in the money, but that was out the window with the most recent developments.

Sunday was the infamous Stillwater Crit with the 20% grade Chilkoot Hill and 150 ft of climbing per 1.2 mile lap, we were slated for 20 laps. Some say this wasn't as bad as Snake Alley, but I think those in that department must have had better legs than I on Sunday because I thought it was brutal compared to the Snake Alley and the Joe Martin Crit. Either way, the mission was simple: stay with the front group as many time over the hill as possible.

I felt pretty decent for the first 10 laps and was able to climb it as fast as anyone in the front group and feel like I had a bit left in the tank in case of emergency. After lap 11 I began to feel the burn. I started to go backwards each time up it and lost contact on the 13th or 14th time up. I rode a few more laps with Phil Gaimon and we caught up as we were waiting to be pulled and given a time. Phil got tired of waiting and gave the commisares the "throat slash" and pulled off to the side. I did another lap alone and was allowed to retire and still get a spot in the overall, even it it was a poor one. I watched the last few laps and waited for Rory to deal his death blow. It was as impressive as I'd imagined it would be. 53x15 or so at the base of the climb and he made the rest of the field look like the belonged in the kids race. Impressive sir.

I was glad to have completed the NVGP without too much difficulty, but definitely left myself plenty of room for improvement. Plenty. My legs still feel pretty good after a few rides this week, so hopefully I can parlee the racing up there into some good from down the road.

Off to Maderia, Hyde Park and Grandview this weekend.

I've been pondering the douschiest maneuver I saw performed by any pro during the week's racing, and it's been tough to sort through the many I catalogued. Nick Frey was at it again, but even though he hearly killled me once and wrecked his own dumb ass out off Stillwater solo, he doesn't get the D-bag Maneuver of the Week Award. That honor goes to Phil Douschejachek (Zajichek) of Fly V for blatantly shoving Alex Wiesler for no apparent reason at the least critical moment in a very boring part of the Menomonie RR. Alex was not in his way and Phil had absolutely no grounds for dousching it up so severely. Get off your high-horse Phil, you're a dousche.

Nature Valley Grand Prix

2010-06-17T10:43:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of the NVGP, an it was a double day. We had a 6.1 mile TT in the morning, then a 75min crit downtown in the evening.

I felt decent in the time trial, but couldn't manage to get my pacing right. The course was a bit tricky because it was downhill with a tail wind on the way out, and obviously the opposite on the way back, plus you had a little kicker and a 0.7 mile climb to the finish.

I really tried hard to conserve, but I just couldn't get myself to o easy enough. I went way too hard on the uphill at about 1.2 miles to go and then was too far into the red at the base of the climb and was basically crawling up it. I thought it would never end. My legs did feel pretty good, but I need more TT practice.

I finished around 100th out of 150, but the times were so close that if I'd have gone just a bit faster I could have moved up 30-40 spots. Oh well, one of these days I'm going to crack the top 50% of an NRC TT. And I know that's still not great, but its slowly coming around.

Paul and I went back to our host house for the afternoon and hit the grocery store and tried to kill some time, a tough thing to do with no cable or Wi-Fi.

We ended up watching the Disney DVD, Earth. If you've seen one nature show, you've seen em all. This one was no different. Needless to say, my Droid has been getting a workout this week (this post is coming from my phone too).

The Downtown St. Paul Crit was seriously downtown, a cool scene for bike race. Paul got a call up because he's in the Best Amateur Jersey for the race. Looks like we'll be riding the front all day in the road races to protect "the Jersey"... psych. For the most part I don't think there will be much Jersey defending for that jersey. Anyway, back to the racing. It was hard as hell to move up. I started mid pack and went full gas for the first 10-15 minutes to crack the top 30 or so riders. Every time I looked down my heart rate was near 200. I eventually made it to a spot where I was satisfied to hang out, but it didn't really get any easier because it was a full time job just trying to hold that position.

This crit was cutthroat. I don't think it was due to the quality of field, because I've raced with these guys before, but I think this tight downtown course really contributed to the chaos. The fighting for position in the field was insane. Everyone was chopping everyone, elbows and fists were flying, it was pretty gnarly. I avoided most of the drama and had started creeping towards the back of the pros train at the front when a wreck happened on the inside of one o the corners and send a wave of bodies my way and eventually launching me an my bike into a parking meter, head first. My body and bike are fine for the most part, but when I rammed the meter with my bars it broke my SRM head, so that's pretty annoying.

I took a free lap and got myself back in there. They wouldn't let me back in at the front so I had to work my ass off to get back up in time for the finish. I never regained my position at the front, but I was able to avoid most of the carnage and roll in just inside the top 30. I think with the right luck and enough stupidity on my part, I can get amongst it this week.

Paul and I are off to the Mall of America to kill some time. Check ya later.

Update from The Bearded One

2010-06-08T19:37:00.001-07:00

No, my brother isn't writing this entry, I am. So why then am I claiming to have a beard? Because recently I've received no less than 5 comments about my increasing level of facial hair. I haven't really been trying to grow any fuzz, it's more that I'm just trained to only shave once a week, if not less. With my new found pubescence, my old shaving rate doesn't seem to be cutting it (get it... cutting it). Although I may now be capable of growing what is generally accepted as "facial hair" I dont plan on shaping it into anything or changing my methods, I guess I'll just be looking slightly more white trash than usual.

Any-who, back to the normal bull that I write about on this thing. I raced in Kentucky this weekend, instead of going to Tulsa. Tulsa would have been some serious critting and some serious driving, but Kentucky had a nice little Omnium to offer. with Nature Valley coming up in just over a week, I figured that an Omnium with a TT and a 90 mile road race would be better prep.

The race was in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky and the race took us through the foot hills of the Appalachian mountains.

Friday evening was a 7.4 mile TT in which I participated. I performed as I usually do in that discipline, mediocre at best.

Sunday was a 51 mile road race with a few small rollers, but nothing like the map in the race bible would lead you to believe.

The scale is wack. There really was hardly a hill you couldn't roll over. Anyway, a group of 8 or so rolled off kind of late in the race and we had Greg in it, but didn't really like our odds so we decided to chase. Other teams had similar numbers to us, so we thought they might help us chase. No one did. Kirk, Chris and I tried to bring it back, but we fell a little short and the group had about 5 seconds on us at the finish. Greg sprinted to 4th place, so it wasn't too bad, but it would have been nice to give Chris a shot at the sprint.

Sunday was the Queen Stage, as they say.

The scale on this one is less wack, but it still didn't have as much climbing as I was hoping for. The race was pretty standard, a group of us would make our way to the front and get a gap over the field, then we would get dragged back. This happened over the first 3 of the 5 "major" climbs, then we finally hit the longest climb of the day and got rid of the field for good. The front group had the usual suspects represented, with Rolf, Greg Strock, Erik Hamilton, some other dude who raced like a pussy, Greg Christian, Wes and another Nuvo, and Niel Forbes, a 17 yr old from the Turner team. The omnium made the racing kind of lame because some were interested in racing for the win and some were just racing each other.

The rain was off and on all day, making the descents pretty sketchy. Rolf crashed early on and took out Uberti, and Dan crashed solo off the front and dropped out too. Bummer, because those guys would have been in the front group for sure. Greg and I took turns trying to get away from the group. Greg ended up launching a counter to one of my moves at about 4 miles to go. He is such a monster. He had a good gap immediately and I knew he was gone. I just surfed around the remainder of the group and watched the "GC guys" attack each other. I helped drag back the guys I didn't like even though there was nothing in it for me. I was just sick of the way a few of those guys had been racing.

We sprinted it out and I got 2nd in the sprint from our group, giving us 1st and 3rd on the day. It was definitely nice to have a break from all the hour long crits around here. I think with a little bit of rest I should be in decent shape for the NVGP in a week's time.

Melon City/ Quad Cities

2010-06-08T18:58:00.000-07:00

It's a week late, but here's a brief update from the second half of the Iowa weekend.

The Melon City crit is a mile circuit located Weed Park in the majestic Muscatine Iowa. There is a bit of a climb before the finish and obviously a descent on the back side of the course. Traditionally this is a tough finish to play because the back of the field has so much momentum at the base of the climb that the people from the back can almost coast around the people at the front who have just hit the hill.

Temps were in the 100 degree range, so I was employing the ice sock tactic like I used the day before. We were took our usual turns covering moves and rolling off the front. Soon enough we had Chris Uberti off the front in a nice group with all the necessary components and plenty of horse power. We were content to let it ride. While the rest of us were just hanging out in the field, I swore that I saw a guy in a Panther kit standing on the side as we passed through the start finish. Next time by I confirmed my fears, it was Chris. It turns out he had wrecked out of the break and with no free lap, we were up a creek.

Greg and I took some pulls to try to bring the gap down and Paul took off to try to get across. Nick "I'm gonna sit on and not work then sprint you like a bitch" Frey followed Paul. Paul got to within 5 seconds but couldn't close it. So he stayed away, between the break and the field, while "professional" Nick Frey sprinted him for 7th and Paul rolled in for 8th.

Us low-lifes back in the field were left sprinting for 9th. I managed to play my cards decently at the base of the climb and came into the final corner at the top of the hill in 3rd wheel behind Andy Crater and Steve Tilford. Crater crushed us all, but I was able to come around Tilly for 10th, one spot worse than I got there 2 years ago... I thought I was getting better, but I guess not.

I don't feel like writing another recap from Quad Cities, so you get the copy and paste from the Panther team site...

The Northern Panther p/b Competitive Cyclist contingent celebrated Memorial Day with a day of good, old fashioned crit racing. The eight corner, hour glass shaped course is a notoriously fast track where positioning is crucial. We lined up with 6 guys as well as had sponsor Andy Clark from Panther joining us, fresh off his win in the masters race earlier in the day.

Our goal was to be represented in any moves that rolled off the front early, as well as be prepared to get organized is the event of a field sprint. We did our jobs early and raced aggressively as did the other contending teams. The pace didn’t have too many lulls, and couple that with the hot spot sprints and crowd primes being thrown in, no groups got much more than a handful of seconds in front of the field. In the closing laps Greg and Paul were attacking and countering each other which resulted in Paul off the front with one other rider. It was looking good for Paul’s break to go to the line, but as the leadouts kicked in Paul’s group was swept up inside the last 2 laps. Chris and I were trying to take care of each other over the final few laps, but the chaotic nature of those laps found us both jumping to the Aerocat leadout with a half lap to go. The mad dash for the second to last corner ensued and Chris and I both made it through upright,(no small feat) but a shade too far back. The short stretch from the final corner to the finish wasn’t quite enough for us to make up the ground and Chris and I had to settle for 7th and 9th respectively. Despite Paul’s late lap efforts he was able to hang on at the front and sneak into the money in 23rd place.

Well, that wasn't all that brief.

I uh wuh

2010-05-30T08:43:00.001-07:00

I bring you this update from a doubley male occupied queen size bed in the Muskie Motel in the booming metropolis of Muscatine, Iowa. And yes, The Muskie is a nice as it sounds.

We're out here for the memorial day weekend races that include a Friday RR, followed by 3 crits, one of which being Snake Alley. So far we've completed half of the weekend so I figured I get you up to speed.

Well we nearly missed the start to the road race because we rode our bikes to the wrong side of tracks, literally. We went to get a bite to eat (a six inch sub and three cookies), and the worlds longest train blocked us from getting back to the start. The train was about 7 minutes long but we arrived with a whopping 3 minutes to spare. So I just finished my cookies on the neutral roll out.

In an unusual development, a break stuck and we weren't represented, so we fought for scraps in the field sprint. Chris 7th, Paul 10, yours truly 12th. Nothing to write home about but we all kept our skin on the sketchy run into town.

Saturday was the main event of the weekend, the Snake Alley Criterium. We did 20 laps, whick meant 20 trips up the short but steep Snake. Its a rough brick climb with 5 switchbacks and is only 30 seconds long or so. The race normally blows up completely except for the group of leaders.

This year I found myself in the lead group of 15 or so with Paul off the front with some crazy Ukrainian dude. Well Paul dropped his chain and was coming back to the field so I tried to get on the front and set a little slower pace, but all that my efforts on the front accomplished was putting me into the red, and with 90 degree temps, there was no recovering.

The leaders dropped me with 1.5 laps to go, just going over the top of the snake. So I rolled in alone to finish 18th. That doesn't sound like much, but it really isn't terrible considering the parcours. I am kind of disappointed because if I had been a little mire conservative and stayed out of the wind a but more, I'm sure I could have stayed with the leaders for the remaining 3 min of racing and factored into the sprint for 5th. I guess you learn from your mistakes, but an extra 500 bucks sure would be welcome in my pockets.

We still have two crittier crits left this weekend and those are just what I like, so hopefully we can pop off a win and get errbody's pockets phat.

Here's a link to the race coverage Geraint, the man behind Bloomington Velo-News, wrote for Podium Insight.

http://www.podiuminsight.com/2010/05/29/starchyk-miller-win-snake-alley-criterium/

Winona Lake

2010-05-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about writing a blog entry, because I've been doing some racing and some other blogworthy (in my opinion) stuff, but it just keeps getting put on the back burner. I finally got the motivation to put some of it into writing, but I'm going to do it in a few separate installments, to avoid one mega-post.

At the start of May I headed up to Warsaw, Indiana for the Fat and Skinny Tire fest. For us skinny tire types, it was a weekend with a 60-some mile road race and an hour long crit the next day. The turnout for the road race was great, better than almost everyone expected. We had 3 guys there, Roadhouse had a handful, Nuvo had a small gaggle, Verizon had a few, RGF had Rolf & Co., Kenda sent Kamikaze Chad B. up to do their dirty work, and there were a few other strong men from assorted teams.

The course was a windy flat square and the racing was hot from the gun. It took almost an hour to get any type of separation, but when it did we had Greg in it. He was only one of 7 or so, so I tried to get across to it... for like 15 miles. As we were about to get to the break, Chris Uberti and David Williams came blazing past us and finished it off for us. This was nice because it ended my suffering and also gave us 3 Panther riders in the break. Eventually the break split again with Chris, Erik Hamilton and Will Nowak getting away together. We were fine with that because Chris has an almost .500 win percentage on the season. As usual, he didn't disappoint. With Chris winning the 3 up sprint, Greg and I threw down mediocre sprints from the remainder of the break and were able to bring home a small amount of additional bacon for the squad.

Sunday Greg and Chris went home, leaving me to do work alone. It was a pretty nasty day with thunderstorms rolling through periodically. A similar, yet slightly smaller field was assembled for the crit. I knew a break would go, so I was prepared to be on my toes. I started in the front row and nailed my pedal right away. I was in a bit too large of a gear and kinda sprinted to get on top of it by the first turn. I ended up taking the "hole-shot" and diving into the first corner. I rolled it steady through turn 2 and check behind to see what was crackin'. Nothin. John Puffer and I had a nice little gap, considering we had been racing for 15 seconds. We both took a couple hard pulls and stretched out the gap. Some of the other well represented teams sent guys across and we all rolled it nicely. A few of the initial members of the move got dropped, so we settled in with 5 of us and lapped the field real quick like. We spent the remainder of the hour trying to separate ourselves from each other, but the guys with teammates weren't letting that happen.

Once it became evident that we would be sprinting with the remainder of the field, Ben Renkema offered to lead me out since I was solo, he was solo, and hadn't lapped. Sounded good to me. Ben can sprint very rapidly. I found him on the last few laps and went into the last corner on his wheel, and came out of it sliding on top of his bike...

I got up and wobbled my bike across the line for 5th place, suffeciently bummed that I couldn't get a little more out of that situation. So it goes. Joe Martin on tap

Comin' Down the Pipe

2010-04-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's actually Little 500 weekend already. That means it's almost time for some real road racin' to kick off around these parts. I think this is the least I've ever traveled for bike racing in March and April. I like it. Tomorrow is the Women's Little 500 and my girls shot at a(nother) ring. It looks like rain off and on all weekend and in the Delta Gamma pit, we're hoping for a dirty day of bike racin'. The hay is is the barn, as they say, and we're ready to give it a go.

I did a couple races last weekend. They went ok. Saturday I got in a break of 14 with 4 Texas Roadhouse, 5 Marian University kids, Erik Hamilton, Tom Cox and a couple others. It was a good time, but I forgot how hard it can be when you're racing solo. It's definitely a good workout and a good refresher course on how to race your bike. I feel like racing with 7 teammates all the time can make you soft. Well I ended up 3rd on Saturday and got to split 105 dollars with only me! Woohoo!

Sunday was a similar crit/ circut race with a similar field. I jokingly attacked from the gun while screaming about "starting this thing like a cyclocross race" and was soon brought back to the group, probably for acting like an idiot. Well as punishment for my stupidity, the move that countered mine was the break that stuck. Bummer. With 5 guys up the road, I got into a chase group with Erik Hamilton with Alex Wiesler sitting on/ working just enough to keep us away from the field. Well when our chase formed we were 45 seconds down on the break, and we actually pulled it all the way back to 8 seconds and it was looking like we might join up just in time for the finish. However, as we were about to catch them, they lapped the field. Sure enough, all their teammates in the field upped the pack and they rode away from us again. I ended up getting 8th place and a pretty good workout. My legs felt like trash, but I was surprised to see some decent power numbers from the weekend.

I've been on the grind for Cyclocross sponsorship the last few weeks and it's actually not looking too bad. Spooky Bikes in going to come through for me again and hook a brother up. I don't know why, but they treat me pretty darn well. Hopefully I'll have all my stuff sorted out earlier this year, instead of building my bike two days before the first UCI race.

Joe Martin is 2 week from yesterday. I'm excited to do this whole block of races that I had to miss because of mono last year. It looks like we're going to send a full squad to JM and even have a house to stay in all week. That's a far cry from paying for a hotel room by myself like I did 2 years ago.

Hopefully on by the time my next update comes around I'll have some good pictures of my DG's winning Little 5.

Doing the Bull Dance, Feeling the Flow.

2010-04-15T20:33:00.001-07:00

I felt like writing something on the blog, so here we are.

Have you lost anything lately? Cell phone, GPS, sunglasses, a snake? If so, I've probably found it one the side of the road in the last week or so. Seriously, I found a fully functional Garmin NUVI on the road last week and this week I've already found 2 cell phones and three pairs of sunglasses. None of the phones or glasses were keepers, but the GPS is money. I actually gave it to my brother to make up for being a mean older sibling. As for the snakes, been seeing like 5 a day. The majority are dead, but I've seen some fatties that were still alive and scheming to eat me.

I've been scouring the racing websites for something good for this weekend, but there really isn't much worth traveling for. There are 2 crits within an hour drive of Bloomington this weekend, but I don't really want to waste 2 good training days on 1 hour crits. The solution, ride to the race and get a ride home. The race on Sat. is going to be about 50-55 miles to get there and then tack on a 75min crit at the end and it should be a good training day. We'll see how the legs feel on Sunday morning before I decide if I'm gonna do the same thing again.

With Little 500 coming up next weekend, I'll have the next two weekends at home, and that will be nice. I'm trying to save some of my "travel bullets" for later in the year, because if I don't, by the time cross rolls around i'm sure I'll be needing all the mental strength i can muster to deal with the full-on cx schedule.

A couple more weeks of training around here and then it'll be full time racing and recovering in-between.

Alright, I'm outta here. The blogging energy I was feeling earlier is dying out, so I'm off to bed.

2010-04-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

Where to begin? I'd really like to just jump to this weekends developments, but I owe you few readers an update from 2 weeks ago and the Marian University crit too. Here is the race report I wrote for the team website...

"The race was a crit/ circuit race hosted by Marian University in Indianapolis.
The day consisted of a full morning of collegiate racing and then USA
Cycling sanctioned races in the afternoon. Chris Uberti and Greg
Christian said that they’d be making the trip down and were planning
on doubling up. Well, as I rolled up to the course, the Collegiate Men’s
A’s race was about half way through and what do I see but Chris off
the front in a 2-man group and Greg slaving away solo trying to chase
him down. I was thinking maybe they’d take it easy and save a little for the USAC Crit coming up, but I was wrong. Chris won and Greg got 3rd.

When we all met up at the line for the second race they said I might
be on my own for a bit while they catch their breath, which was
understandable. The USAC crit had a pretty nice turnout of 60-70
riders. It felt nice to be in the group again and testing out freshly
glued Easton EC90’s. They felt pretty awesome and miles faster than
the heavy 32 hole training wheels I’ve been on for the last few
months. Well the attacks started flying early and often and with the
high winds I figured I better make sure I was at the front to keep an
eye on things. Although they were on their second race of the day,
Chris and Greg were doing their part to give us a presence at the
front. After only a few laps of the 1 mile course I bridged to a group
off the front and as I was getting there the group was splitting and
so I went through the fragments and with a handful of strong guys. We
worked well together for a while and cemented our gap. Once I had a
chance to look around I saw that all the decent teams were represented
in out group of 5, but that we had 2 pretty good sprinters in the
group. I started taking it easier so that I didn’t bury myself just so
I could get beat in the end by the faster finishers.

Soon, the good news came that Chris was bridging up with Jake
Rytlewski of Kenda Pro Cycling. This was music to my ears and so I
started skipping pulls and sitting on in hopes that Chris could get
across quickly. When Chris arrived with 3 to go that gave us 2 of
7 and Kenda 2 of 7, with Kenda having the fastest finisher in the
group. It got pretty tactical in the last few laps and everyone was
looking at everyone else to make the move. In the windy section about
800 meters out, Greg Strock from Texas Roadhouse attacked and we
looked at the PRO’s and they looked at us. Finally someone went and
chaos ensued. Chris was gassed from his days work and I didn’t play
the sprint very well either and the Texas Roadhouse rider held us all
off. The best that we could manage was 5th for me and 6th for Chris.
Definitely not what we were looking for from that situation, but
luckily it’s a long season and our communication will be better in the
future."

So that bring us to the racing from last weekend, Hillsboro-Roubaix. This is the 2nd time that I've done this race and I really look forward to it over the winter. It's honestly not really anything special but it gets 125 rider fields every year and if you ask me, I think it's just because it has "Roubaix" in the name. Regardless, it's a good early season fitness test and it seems to be pretty selective considering there's hardly a hill on the course.

We were slated to do three, 29 mile laps of a new, more twisty course. It was was more windy that the previous year and I thought it might split the race up a little earlier as a result. In the pre-race meeting Kirk told us to stay up front because he was thinking the same thing. I'm always a little paranoid of getting caught behind a split and being taken out of a race for lack of concentration, so I tend to overcompensate and really really ride at the front and maybe fight for position at times when it really isn't as crucial. Well I was really on my toes for the first two laps and I might as well have been tail-gunning the whole time because the racing was slow, boring, and almost non-existent. It maybe got hard for a few seconds here or there, but I couldn't believe how big the field was when we were going through the start/finish at the beginning of the last lap. Well the "racing" that didn't happen on the first two laps was made up for on the last one. I'm not really sure if the wind actually picked up or I'm just imagining that, but either way we were racing in the gutter and racing hard. At one point I was seriously suffering at the edge of the road, hoping to catch a sliver of draft while simultaneously praying for a right turn so I could catch a break. Once we turned and had a more favorable wind, I looked around and saw that the field had gone from about 100 down to about 30. That's more like it. With some more gutter racing and crosswinds on the run back into town it was looking like a small group might break off to fight for the win, but it wasn't to be.

We assembled at the front on the last trip up the hill about a kilometer out. And when I say we, I mean Kirk and Greg. I'm so damn glad those guys are on my team. Together they took care of Chris over that last K and dropped him off right on the doorstep. Chris took a few hard pedal strokes out of the saddle and won by a handful of bike lengths. Noah Singer and I tagged on to the back of the train and were able to take 3rd and 4th on the day. A Panther p/b Competitive Cyclist 1,3,4 in out first race with the new squad. Now I understand that this wasn't Paris-Roubaix or anything, but having success like that as a team was one of the most fun days I can remember at a bike race.

Chris looking like he's just won another bike race with Noah on the right with his hand up and me behind John Grant with my hand up celebrating as well.

Unfortunately I don't have much good racing to do the next few weeks, so I'm just going to be trying to hit the training hard so I can be ready for the big block coming in May and June. We've got some new races on the schedule that should be a nice step up for the squad. I'm getting pretty excited, but my girls gotta win the Little 500 first.

Less is More

2010-03-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

Less posting on this blog probably means I'm doing more riding, so I guess I've been riding a lot. March has been pretty kind to me. I've been busy with Little 500 stuff and trying to complete this training block. The weather around these parts has been pretty awesome, trying to make up for the crappy February. My Little 500 team, Delta Gamma, just had their big spring Break training block here in town and I took a bit of time off of work to be around the track and watch their workouts, which they have been killing. I like the way things are looking for them on race day.

Actually lets back up for a second. I almost forgot to mention that we had our Panther pb Competitive Cyclist team camp a few weeks ago in Ohio. This was the first time we could get everyone together and get all of our sweet new gear distributed, talk race schedules, and have a few beers. We also got some decent riding in even though the weather was absolute crap. I feel like I've been getting in some pretty good training so far this year, and it seems I'm not the only one. I was pretty surprised to see how strong everyone was at camp. We had a few impromptu sprints up some hills and some good half-wheeling battles on the front. It was fun to finally get to spend some time with the man, the myth, the legend, Kirk Albers. We spent some time on the front together and he talked quietly and calmly as we rolled along at 350 watts and I tried to act like I didn't notice the pace. Really looking forward to racing with version 2.0 of the Panther squad.

Today was my first day of a rest week, a rest week that I feel like I actually earned by beating my head against the wall for the last three weeks. It was statistically and physically the hardest block of training I've ever put in, and my legs are officially toast. I capped off the three weeks with a suffer fest called the Brown County State Park Road Race. This road race is about 25 miles from Bloomington and is on most of the same roads as the Pan-Am games back in the 80's. The course featured a 5+ mile lap with just a shade under 500ft of climbing per lap. We did 12 of those babies. It ended up being 65 miles with 5,800ft of climbing. A few weeks ago when we realized the race was coming up a few people made some bets with me that I couldn't ride to the race, complete it, and ride back to Bloomington.

Being that the race fell at the end of my training block, I didn't want to waste training days just so that I could be fresh for this local race, so I decided to train straight through it and bury myself real good like. Well, I did all the training I had planned and even won the bet. I made it to the race and back, and even completed all 12 laps of the race. Predictably, my legs were pretty tired from the start, but I think it was a good experience. I got dropped by the front group with 2 laps to go and rolled in with a small group for some meaningless places.

Now I'm taking it easy for a few days and gonna ride around real slow to let my legs heal up. I don't think I'm racing again for a couple weeks, but this weekend is Quals for the Little 500 ladies, so that's the next thing on the agenda. Thanks to the couple people who came up and said they liked the blog. I'm going to try to keep it updated a bit more now that there might be some more news worthy material.

Not Just Go-Karts and Putt-Putt

2010-02-22T06:05:00.000-08:00

There is a running joke that I have with my brother about going hiking anywhere within 100 miles of Gatlinburg, TN and that's that he's just going down to play Putt-Putt, ride Go-Karts and get 3 for 1 deals on Cowboy boots, the kind of thing most Red Necks do in Gatlinburg. I do this because I'm a mean older brother who likes to make my younger brother feel small and unaccomplished so that I can feel better about myself. Well for last weekend's trip we had to drive right through the famous G-burg in route to our planned destination of Black Balsam Knob, North Carolina.

In order to get to our destination and carry out our itinerary it required using a good chunk of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a road that was questionable due to the 36 inches of snow that some of the higher elevations had gotten recently. There is a number you can call to see if roads in certain areas are open or not and Aaron claims that the recording said the Parkway was open, but when we got down there it was closed and didn't look like anyone had attempted to remove a flake of snow. So we called the local sheriff's office and they confirmed, "don't expect that area to be open for another month"... So we pulled into a parking lot to throw together a new plan. The first night we found what we thought would be a decent little overnight hike down by Fontana lake and up to see some waterfalls and other bull.

My dad about to sneeze mid picture

A little scope: That icicle in the middle is close to 20 ft long

Well, we got to the trail head and it turned out to be much less extreme than we had hoped for, with a school bus full of 3rd graders, a big church group and a couple pushing a baby stroller down the first part of the trail. Aaron was pissed, I just laughed at how pissed he was. To be fair, the most touristy part of the trail was just a waterfall that was 0.2 miles from the parking lot and that's where everyone was heading, except us. We hiked as far away from the Billy Madison Field Trip and found a decent little place to camp while we adjusted our plans. We decided on a trip up Mt. LeConte, one of the highest points east of the Mississippi. We had heard the trail was impassable due to snow drifts, but we figured that might make it more fun.

The best part about camping this time of year is how much sleep you get. You go to bed pretty much when the sun goes down and get up when the sun comes up. This time of year that means near 12 hours of sleep and that is awesome. So we hiked out first thing in the AM and drove an hour to the LeConte trail head. The hike to the top was around 6 miles with three thousand feet of elevation gain. The trail wasn't too hard or technical for most of the first half, but the snow did add a few slippery situations. The real action took place in the last mile or so of the climb. This was the area where it had been impassable earlier in the week.

We weren't the first people to hike to the top since the snow, but it was definitely less traveled once we got higher up. The trail got really narrow and with that much snow you couldn't tell if what you were standing on was actually supported by the mountain, or something that was ready to break loose and send you bouncing down the mountain to your death. Tight. We just tried to step where other had proven to be safe places and we were alright. There were a few situations where we were looking 6 inches to our left and there was a good 200 feet straight down. That added a little spice to all the Go-Karts and Putt-Putting.

We "summited" in just enough time to cook dinner and watch the sunset. Then it was off to hang our packs and food away from the bears and be in bed by 7. The night was damn cold at around 10 degrees for the low, but we all survived. The next morning we went to see the sunrise and started the slippery trip back down to the car. We all had a few little slips on the ice coming down, but nothing too serious. There was one spot where we took turns baseball sliding about 20ft down this slope that was too steep to walk. As we were almost back to the car, we passed a group of German tourist who smelled like Cool Water cologne and they asked "Vas it vorth it?" Oh yes, German's, It was "vorth" it.

Dear "Innernet" Friends...

2010-02-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

This weather is trying to drive me into the ground and I need to whine about it for a minute, will you listen?

This shit is trying to kill me. The average high for February around these parts is supposed to be in the mid 40's and I'm not sure if it's been above freezing yet this month. Not to mention we've gotten something like 20 inches of snow in the last 10 days. Snow doesn't go away very quickly when it's 24 degrees and overcast either. One of the main problems I've run into is that I went out too hard on my trainer riding and used up all my tolerance for for riding inside, and since I'm in the process of Hardening myself The Fuck Up this off season I refuse to skip workouts and skimp on hours. If I les out, someone out there is dragging their ass into the wild, doing their workout and getting ready to rub my face in the dirt come race season and I ain't havin' that shit.

The most recent reason I wanted to hang myself was the 10 inches of snow we got on Sunday/ Monday (I know, cry me a river. D.C. got like 30 inches). The problem is that all this snow has come right in the middle of crunch time in this training block, so today I found myself playing in the snow for 4 hours while pounding out a sizable amount of Tempo into what seemed like an ever-present headwind. My legs tried to convince me to quit after each of the three 30 minute sets and I almost gave in, but now that I'm warm and dry I'm glad that I didn't. I know that I'm in the home stretch of this training block and hopefully the same goes for this foul weather. I'm sorry for whining, but it's just a really tough time to be a Middle Class White American bike racer.

2010-02-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

Things are cruising along nicely here in the Midwest, in a mostly uneventful fashion. Despite the never ending below freezing temps I've been able to get in the best early season training I've ever done. I did have to invest in a few critical pieces of apparel, but since then it's been smooth sailing.

This month things are starting to ramp up a little, but still trying to enjoy some off season like activities at the same time. This weekend is Lauren's birthday as well as Valentine's day, luckily my significant other enjoys a good pedal herself, so I imagine it will be a good weekend with plenty of riding thrown in. Next weekend I'm going on a little camping/ riding trip in North Carolina with my dad, brother and Lauren. The trip is only for a long weekend, but it should be great to take in a bit of nature as well as ride the Blue Ridge Parkway for a few miles too.

Following the trip to NC, we've got our Panther/ Competitive Cyclist team get together in Ohio for a weekend of riding and distribution of all our gear. Seriously, I couldn't be more excited to ride for a team with a great roster and that's sponsored by the sweetest online retailer around.

After all of this stuff, it brings us almost to bike racin' time. Now, I'm not going to be driving all over the place to race every little spring race on the calendar, but I'll pin a few numbers in March and try to get myself up to a decent level for April and continue to take my time building my form for the summer.

And last, but not least... Cross Worlds to Louisville. Can't believe it, but pretty excited by it. Some of you know that I have aspirations to go to Worlds as a racer and some of you don't, well now it's out there. That's what I'll be working and training for over the next few years. Hopefully making a public declaration of my intentions will keep me accountable, and remind my friends and family to help me stay on track. In years passed, guys like Tristan Schouten and Brian Matter have been able to represent the Midwest at Worlds, and guys like that are my inspiration. Worlds selection is an interesting process and when those guys raced Worlds, they got a spot thanks to a few of the top guys not wanting to make the trip. It's safe to say that with the U.S. hosting worlds for the first time, there won't be any top U.S. crossers skipping it. I realize that this makes for a pretty lofty goal, but what's the point in making a goal if it's just to be mediocre? Plus, when you think about it, I really just need to make a couple minutes improvement in a 1 hour time trial over the next 3 years. Totally do-able.

Nose to the Grindstone

2010-01-21T19:51:00.000-08:00

Since we last spoke, there hasn't been too much to talk about around these parts. I'd say that's a good thing, and just what I needed after a long season and maybe a little too much talking and not enough action.

I'll quickly recap of what I've been up to since I was in Oregon in December. There was CX Nats and that wasn't anything to write home (or on my blog) about. There was Christmas and unwrapping the Perfect Push-Up, which will cure all my problems in this new decade. Ski trip to Wisconsin with Lauren, Mike and Pam, and the Chartiers. I pursued rad skills on cross country skis and it's safe to say that I have much pursuing to do in that department. New Years was great. Old Style, Doritos, Saunas, Fireworks and kicking snowmen. And now I'm fully back in road bike mode and just a few days away from completing my first training block of 2010.

I don't want to count the number of races I entered last year or do a full on recap, but I do feel like I should say a few words about the season. I guess it was a season of what could have been's. Starting in the spring, things were going great(according to my powermeter...) and then I was mowed down with mono and had some decent days on the bike, but never really felt great all season. Cross was a new leaf and it started out great too, with a whole bunch of UCI pts early in the season, only to be derailed by the broken c-bone. So although I got some of the results that I'm most proud of in my relatively short cycling carear, the season still leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth and a lot of could shoulda woulda's...

That's OK though. It has also left me with a new found motivation and understanding for what kind of dedication it takes to be good bike racer. This year I'm clicking it up a notch all across the board. I've got the training plan set. Got motivation for days. Got the goals in writing. And I've been listening to Rap on Pandora.

Good talk. See ya out there.

Oregon Trail

2009-12-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

Half was through my first trip to Oregon, the jury is still out on how I feel about this supposed bike capitol of Amurica. The trip so far has had pretty unusual weather for this area. For the last 3 or 4 days in Portland, the high temps have been below freezing and I don't know if I've seen a cloud since we got here last Friday. Not really sure what I prefer, sub-freezing and dry or kinda cold and wet. Either way, the course conditions were very un-Portland. Virtually no mud all weekend and as a sign of the apocalypse, a bunch of people were actually running file-treads on Sunday of the USGP. Insanity.

The story for my racing continues to be the same since I came back a couple weeks ago. Just no where near the legs that I had before. Saturday was an extraordinary case of no legs and a poor result, "and that's all I have to say about that." I did still have a pretty good time racing with so many fans out to cheer me on. It was also nice to see some familiar faces all the way out here in Oregon. So thanks to all you guys who helped me get through that long day on the bike.

Sunday was a new day and I tried to go out there with a positive mindset, even though I haven't had much success of late. I just keep telling myself that there is just as good of a chance that I'll have good legs like the "old days" as there is that I'll have bad legs again. Well, Sunday was a definite step forward. I didn't get a result to write home about, losing out on a sprint for 19th, but for the first time in a while I felt like I was racing and not just trying to stop a life raft from sinking. Although I feel like I'm still a long way from what I'm capable of, or where I was pre decimated collar bone, I look down the list of people who finished in front of me and I don't really see too many people who I'm embarrassed to finish behind, those were quality fields.

After the GP's we killed some time in Portland with a few cool rides/ coffee shop tours. We met up with THE cyclocross Portlander, Molly Cameron for a little ride around the eastern hills of "PDX". The riding and scenery is pretty amazing, I think it would be an awesome place to do some training in the summer, but as far as winter riding goes... give me Bloomington. We made the trek down here to Bend yesterday with a cool drive through the Cascade range and a trip to Mt. Hood. Bend has a handful of inches of snow and it looks like it's going to lead to come crazy conditions for my race on Sunday. Think KC Nats 07, with more snow and a little colder temps. Can't wait.

The course is open for some pre-riding today at noon, so I'm out of here.

You can find some good course condition previews here:

Podium Insight

Jingle Cross Report

2009-12-01T15:32:00.000-08:00

Not much to speak of on the results side of things from Jingle Cross, but the weekend was about as good as it could have been considering I was creepin'.

Anywho, my dad decided to come out to the races with me and it turned out to be almost necessary to have someone working the pits for you, so that was nice. Plus it was some quality time with him away from work. He learned the ropes of pitting pretty quickly and seemed to be enjoying it. The only problem was that he was tied to the pits all race and couldn't do his usual sprinting around the course yelling for me like you may have witnessed before.

So about the racing. Friday I ripped my rear derailleur off a long way from a spare bike and so I DNF'd.

Saturday we spent all morning at Lowes and the local bike shop Geoff's Bike and Ski, trying to get my other bike working again. Long story, but with some handy mechanic work, we got it up and "functioning" with a whopping 30 minutes to spare. Yeah that's right, I got to the race 30 min before the start. Never done that in a cross race before. So I got kitted, guessed on a tire pressure and tried to guess what would be around each corner for the first lap. It didn't really matter in the end because I went pretty slow and was a non-factor in the race.

Sunday we took our sweet time in the hotel and ate a nice breakfast and rolled to the course plenty early, but non of that really mattered because I had shit for legs again. Not really sure why, but it was more than an inconvenience all weekend. It was quite apparent that was was going nowhere fast and really wanted to save myself the embarrassment and drop out, but I really needed the workout anyway, so I kept trying and kept going backwards. I do want to give a huge thank you to Brian and all the guys from Geoff's Bike and Ski for getting a massive cheering block together for me on Sunday. After all that time we spent together working on my bike on Saturday, we became pals and so Brian told his pals that he and I were now pals and before I knew it I had an embarrassingly large gallery running with me and following my slow ass all over that course, causing a scene and slapping my but on the regular. It was pretty crazy that I went to Iowa knowing no one other than a few of my competitors and my dad, and by Sunday had a mob of about 30 people yelling for me. Thanks a lot guys! You made a pretty miserable day on the bike a whole lot better!

Next update will be coming from Portland. See ya out there!

Jingle Cross Roomate Anyone?

2009-11-26T06:41:00.000-08:00

Alright, now that my plans for Jingle Cross have changed about 7 times, it looks like I will be heading up to the races solo. I'm really hoping to not have to cover all of these espenses by myself, so is there anyone out there with some floor space in their hotel or someone who is also looking to split hotle costs?

Leave a comment on here or email me at knapprd@gmail if you've got any leads!

NCGP Day 2

2009-11-24T14:59:00.000-08:00

Day 1

Day 2

As great as the weather was on Saturday, it was equally nasty for Sunday's race. Low 40's and raining. Pretty crossy weather, but it was miserable for every second before the race and every second after the race was over. However, while the racing was going on, it really wasn't terrible.

Things were going pretty much the same as day 1 about half of a lap into the race. I was camped out on the back of the leaders, hoping to follow them around for a while. Well we hit a long pavement section and I tried to shift down into my 11t cog on my cassette and instead over-shifted it and got the chain wedged between the cassette and the frame, so I couldn't pedal. Really the only way to solve this problem is get off and take the wheel out. I wasn't too terribly far from the pits where I had a back up bike waiting, so I decided I'd just run and get my other bike. After running for about 20 seconds I realized that I needed this bike because it was the only one with mud tires on it. So I stopped and took the wheel out and got the chain fixed. By that time I was literally in last place.

I thought about dropping out because I was so frustrated, but decided I needed the workout either way, so I put my head down and tried to see how far up I could get. With about 3 laps to go I made it up to a small group racing for 5th place, which was a lot better than I thought I could do. I tried to recover in that group, but my legs were pretty crispy. Then the chain got jammed again trying to shift down into the 11t on the same section of road the very next lap. I guess I'm an idiot for trying that again. I jumped off and fixed it, then just avoided the bottom of the cassette for the rest of the race.

Now back in 13th place or so, I tried to claw my way back up to the group I was with, but was out of gas. I managed to make it back to 10th place and snag 1 whopping UCI point on the day. I wasn't really pleased with the end result, but the sensations were good and I felt like I could actually race my bike, where as Saturday I felt like I was just riding around getting in the way. Hopefully my racing legs will continue to migrate towards me this weekend in Iowa and hopefully they'll be fully within my grasp for Oregon after that.

North Carolina Grand Prix

2009-11-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

I know all 3 of my blog readers have greatly missed them, but long no more, my race reports are back!

So I'm down here in Hendersonville, NC, just a little south of Ashville for my first races since breaking my collarbone 6 weeks ago. Andy and I drove down yesterday to get some time on the course. The drive was pretty scenic and was pretty stress free until we got rerouted because half of a mountain fell on the road about an hour from Ashville. So we had to back-track and take some tiny little roads just to get here right before dark. We hammered out a few laps and then the two of us had a special little evening at a plce called Applebees... you may have heard of it.

Today I choked down my hotel breakfast and headed to the course around 10, which is a bit earlier than usual, but this weekend the UCI races are not the last races of the day and our's started at 1:30. That's going to be great tomorrow though when we have to pack up and drive home. I don't know why more promoters don't do it like this.

To the racing!... I have number 3 for the weekend so I got a nice starting spot/ start, but I knew well before the start that my legs weren't on my side today. During the pre-ride laps I was constantly trying to convince myself my legs felt ok or that they'd be fine. Well I got the start I wanted and hopped on the back of the lead group and let them tow me around the really roadie friendly course. It actually reminds me a lot of CrossVegas. So I was in the lead group of 5 for the first few laps, but I knew that I was comin unglued soon. I popped off and pretty much spent the remainder of the race going backwards. It wasn't a spectacular explosion on my part, but I just really didn't have it in the legs today. I had hoped for more, but I'm not really surprised that my legs weren't great. I tried to train to get myself ready, but doing intervals and racing are pretty different. I ended up 9th on the day, but let 3 dudes pass me in the last 2 laps. I think I should be quite a bit better tomorrow, with that initial shock out of the way. I'd really like to get up into the top 5 tomorrow. It's supposed to rain a lot, so it should be good practice for Oregon in a few weeks.

There were some Cyclingnews reporters there today, so if some photos pop up, I'll throw them up on here.

Recovery Trail

2009-11-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

I feel like I start every blog post theses days with "I know it's been a while" or something similar, so I'll spare you guys this time. I just haven't really been leading the most exciting life of late (or ever).

It was quite enjoyable seeing how "the other half" lives with no bike races to occupy my weekends and not much training for a few weeks, I was able to act like a regular-ass dude and have a few beers, or a few more than usual, do some tailgating, sleep in on Saturdays, actually hang out with my girlfriend somewhere other than a bike race on a weekend... and it was fun. With that said though, I've been getting the itch pretty bad recently to pin a number and it looks like thats an itch I'm going to get to scratch next weekend. I'm cleared to go, so I'm going down to North Carolina next weekend for 2 smaller C2 races. I've been training pretty hard the last 2-3 weeks, so I'm hoping I won't embarass myself. As long as I don't break my arm off down there, I plan on hitting Jingle Cross, Portland for the final USGP's and then Bend for Nats. So anyway, that's where bike racing is right now.

While I was off though, I picked up a bit of a drinking problem. Ya see, it's these White Russian things. A friend of mine, turned me on to them and so I decided to pick up the ingredients one night at the store, and it was all downhill from there. Now I'm not saying I have a drinking problem (thats what they all say....) They just taste so good. I don't even care if there is booze in them or not, I'd eat a White Russian Popsicle! So I'm trying to cut back on those things for a while. Moderation.

This weekend is going to be my last racing free weekend until after cross nats, so I'm going to enjoy it and probably even take my cross bike off-road for the first time since I broke the c-bone 5 weeks ago. I didn't need no stinking Dr's to tell me I was better though, I've been giving myself the weekly Bunny-Hop Test. The first test didn't go so well and I almost had to pull over and cry, but they've gotten to the point where I'm back to my old hoppin' skill level with no pain, so I figured that must mean I'm good to go. Luckilly the Doc concurs. The Bunny-Hop Test... it's Science.

Alright, thanks for stopping by.

I didn't race this weekend

2009-10-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

...Obviously.

Although I'm not going to be pinning a number for a few weekend, I did find myself at a 'cross race this weekend, it was my (and Andy's) race, BloomingCross. We've been working on this race for a handful of months now and it actually went off this weekend, with relatively few catastrophes.

BloomingCross was part of the Ohio Valley Cyclocross Series and it was both of our first endeavours into the world of race promotion. It had it's annoying times leading up to the race, but I think it was well worth it hearing all the feedback on race day. Some people were skeptical of our course and the layout, but I think everyone was pleasantly surprised with the venue and from what I heard from the racers, it was the hardest venue many of these guys and gals had ever raced. Kinda makes me glad I was gimping around the sidelines instead of kitted up. We had picture perfect Fall conditions with nothing but sun and temps in the mid 50's. It was an awesome day across the board.

I want to share a conversation I had with one of the Red Zone Cycling junior riders from the area.

Red Zone Jr.- Do you get paid?

Me- Not to race my bike, nope.

Red Zone Jr.- Why not? You ride with like Troy Wells and Parbo and those guys and they get paid. You Should get on a new team.

Me- Yeah, well... what team should I get on then?

Red Zone Jr.- That 9 Ball team!

Me- Well can you get me on that team?

Red Zone Jr.- Yeah, I know Jeremy Powers, He helps me with my homework when he comes to Louisville.

Me- Alright you tell him that you know someone who wants to be on his team. You let me know what he has to say.
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.
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If only 12 year olds were running cross teams... I'd be a P-R-O.

So this weekend is the USGP in Louisville as well as the Hilly Hundred here in Bloomington. Since I can't ride the Hilly or Race the GP, I think I'm still going to go down and watch in Louisville. Hopefully I can fully embrace this whole spectator thing and try to enjoy watching my peers suffer while I sip on a Micro Brew. Doesn't really sound that difficult.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully this thing will return to its normal race report form sooner rather than later.

One last thing. A huge thank you to all those people who helped make BloomingCross happen. All the riders who showed up to help break in the course, the volunteers, the parents, the girlfriends, the wives,the sponsors,the announcers, the tear down crew, the staking and taping crew, 2 Wheel Sports, everyone who helped us make up for our lack of organization... THANK YOU! We'll be back next year to do it bigger and better!

2009-10-14T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a few days to get the motivation to write an update from this weekend, because we all know I sure haven't been busy riding... Well lets talk about the good stuff first. Friday was an absolute mudfest, probably the muddiest race I've ever done. I got the 4th call up spot after J Pow, Trebon and Parbo. That was pretty choice. Front and center start spots sure didn't hurt my chances all weekend. So back to the mud... I started well and just steadily made enough mistakes to drop myself all the way back to 11th. I just didn't have the power to make up for my infinite bobbles and spills. Not really what I was looking for, but I wasn't crushed to be outside the points on such a tough day.

Saturday the new course was much more dry and fast. The same front start spot slotted me into the front of the race nicely. Soon I found myself in a group with Parbo, Brian Matter and Troy Wells racing for 4th-7th place. I was suffering like crazy trying to hold on, but it wasn't to be. Troy attacked with just under 3 to go and I shot out the back of the group. Lucky for me I had hung on long enough that I had a nice gap over the group chasing us and I was able to hang on for 7th on the day.

Sunday I woke with pretty sore legs, but I'm sure everyone was in the same boat. Didn't quite have the legs to make the B-Matter/ Marko Lalonde group that was dangling about 15 seconds up the road all day, instead I found myself in a group racing for 8th-11th. Mike was part of this group for a good while and was riding well until his mishap over the barriers. I made lots of mistakes in the sand and at various other points around the course, but kept clawing my way back to that group. We were all together coming into the long, slow, uphill, grassy drag to the finish. I was sitting in the back of the group and hit it with about 200m to go. The guy 2nd wheel let the wheel in front of him go and so the guy on the front was probably out of reach, but I was coming around and after I got half way around the first guy he decided to swing left and put his bars into the middle of my bike mid sprint and take me out... so I ate it hard. I remember thinking I couldn't believe I was getting chopped in a sprint in a cross race and that I wasn't gonna get any points.

I know you cant see much from that video, but Erik Hamilton's girl friend, Caitlin has a frame by frame of the whole thing.

One of the better shots:

Once I hit the deck, I heard the trademark crack of the collarbone. I knew I had popped it and popped it pretty good. I dragged my corpse across the line for 11th so that I could at least get my share of that $9200 purse. It was (is) pretty displaced and I thought might even be a compound fracture. Good thing it wasn't because I'm not really down with blood and stuff.

So now I don't know whats going on. Not sure if I'm getting surgery or just going to let it heal. Last time I broke my c-bone I was back racing again in 4 weeks. That was a less severe break, but I still think my body is a pretty good healer. I've gotta go back to see the doc in about 10 days to see how things are going and make a final decision. In the mean time I'm taking calcium supplements and drinking 2 litres of milk a day. I've already heard a few murmurs that people think I won't be back this cross season, well sorry peeps, I'll most certainly be back racing this cross season. At very worst, I'll be back for the final USGP and Nats in Oregon.

Thanks so much for all the people who have called, messaged and tweeted and all that stuff, to say they're thinking about me or wishing me a speedy recovery. I really appreciate it, because it's not really the easiest task right now to stay optimistic about things. Like I said though, I'll be back "asap as possible".

Tour De Louisville OVCX #2

2009-10-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

This weekend was a nice chance to sleep in my own bed on the weekend and do some cross racing close(ish) to home. As you may or may not know, Lauren got a cross bike recently and has been riding it pretty regularly and coming out to Cross Worlds every Wednesday, so this weekend she took the next step and pinned her first number in a cross race. She was nervous because of the uncertainty of a discipline she had such little experience, but she ended up having a very nice debut. She got 4th place out of 15 or so, but the real victory was that she had cross cough when she was done and had tried so hard to catch the girls in front of her that she fell over and fighting back the puke as soon as she crossed the finish line. Ya can't teach goin that hard. Well done Laur.

That being said, I'm thinking about trying to convince her to quit so I don't have to get up so early to get her to her races, since she is one of the first of the day and I'm normally the last one.

I was a little worried before the race because last year this course abused me and I had my worst OVCX finish of the year. I just couldn't get it and was creepin' all day. Anyway, I was hoping for more this time around. Since after an "order of registration" call-up put me in the back, Aaron Hawkins kindly offered up his front row spot for me. Thanks brother!

I went into the first corner 3rd wheel behind Andy and another guy, but didn't like the congestion and wanted to get out front so I could avoid the cluster-f that always seems to ensue on the first lap. I hit it hard on the first section and started to draw out a gap with Mitchell Kersting. I wasn't really paying attention, but just knew I wanted to have a few people in the race as possible. Soon Mitchell had given me a handful of bike lengths. Since we had just finished the first lap I wasn't sure if I wanted to go it alone for basically the whole hour, but I figured I would stay on the gas and see what happened. My gap grew to a comfortable margin where I wasn't killing myself the entire time and I could just hold it steady until the end.

With 4 or 5 laps to go Kim Chartier gave me a gap to catch Chris and put a lap on him. Now Chris and I are boys and what not, but I know if he were given the chance to do anything demoralizing to me back in out little 5 days, I know he'd have taken full advantage, so I did.

Blood in the water

That being said, Cross is a little on the back burner for Chris this season since he's also training for a trail marathon. He still managed to pull of his best OVCX result with a 14th. Makin it into the money.

It was a nice little Sunday and a fun change of pace to be the one running along side Lauren yelling at her for once. She also seems to have the "Stop telling me to go harder, this is all I've got", glare down pretty well.

This weekend is probably my favorite Cross weekend of the year with the 3 UCI's around Cincinnati. We'll all be piling into the Chartier's crib for the long weekend. Can't wait.

Check out Tom Moran's website for more pictures from OVCX #2

Media

2009-09-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

Day 1 Results

Day 2 Results

Race video from Day 1

Cycling Videos on CyclingDirt

and that's about it.

Planet Bike Cup USGP #1 and #2

2009-09-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

Here comes another blog entry from my phone so bear with me. We are driving back from Madison, WI after the first round of the USGP's. Zach, Andy and I drove up on friday afternoon to check out the courses as usual and get settle into the hotel for the weekend. My personal soigneur Lauren had to stay home this weekend because of sorority obligations... Anyway. We were staying at the oh so luxurios Super 8, along with half the other bike racers in town for the weekend.

Saturday I didn't race until 3 so I had time to sleep in and still get plenty of time on the course to dial in tires and tire pressures. I went with my semi slicks and they were money all day. My lingering 1 UCI point from last season (my most recent points kick in next week) got me a 3rd row starting spot and I got a good start from there.
I wasn't really sure where I was riding, but there were lots of big name guys around and I was setteling in nicely. Before I knew it my group was scooping up guys like Troy Wells and Barry Wicks. Believe it or not, we dropped Barry and we came to the last technical section with Marko Lalonde, Brian Matter, Tristan Schouten, Troy Wells and Myself. We were sprinting for 11th place in a freaking C1 race. I jumped to try to be first to the tough section. Marko beat me to it so I was second We pretty much went bleed through your eyes hard for the last 60 seconds of the race and we came to the line exactly how we went into the woods. That gave me 12th on the day and another 6 UCI points. That was a whole lot better than I thought I could do at a C1 race with a small handfull of euro pros to boot.

Today was day number 2 and it was just a C2 race, so points only went 10 deep. Once again I had plenty of time to preride and mess with tires beforehand, but it didn't matter much because it started raining right before our race started.

I got to staging and saw that I was the only one riding an all around challenge griffo. Everyone had their super muddy race tire, the Dugast Rhino. I had some rhinos handy, so I went and swapped wheels. The only problem was I hadn't ridden them at all since the sun had been shining all day. So I guessed on a tire pressure, banking on the rain to continue and it to get soft. Well I guessed low, waaay too low... And it stopped raining once we were on the grid.

I knew I was going to be hurting for grip, but this was pathetic. If you've ever tried to corner on a flat tire then you know the feeling I was dealing with every tiem I tried to corner with any speed. Since I was getting gapped out of every corner it was a lost cause trying to stay with decent groups. I just kept going backwards. It all boils down to making a stupid decision on my part, but I just didn't know what was better; the right tired at the wrong pressure or the wronf tires at the right pressure. Not totally sure, but I think I ended up 22nd.

I'm still really pleased with the weekend because I finally made the group that I've been wanting to make. It's really motivating to ride at the front of a big race like this and I think it has helped me set some new goals for myself, something I struggel with doing. I really appreciate all the nice texts, emails and calls from everyone the last few weekends. It was cool to hear that I was far enough up yesterday that they were following me on cxmagazine.com's live updates.
This weekend there aren't any UCI's within a reasonable distance, so I'll be heading to Louisville to do the OVCX. Then its the Triple UCI weekend in Cincinatti after that. It will be nice to have some light travel days the next few weekends.

I have a few pictures from the weekend and hopefully I find some more and I'll get them up on here sometime this weekend. Until then, thanks for reading.

Charm City Cross UCI C2

2009-09-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

After Saturdays race we drove down to Baltimore and got our hotel in the ghetto. Strangely enough Hotels.com didn't say anything about about the fact that our arrangements were located in the hood. Oh well, I was going to sleep like a rock anywhere. I spent the evening eating pizza and trying to see if I could get my sliced Challenge Griffo to hold air... GREAT SUCCESS!

In the AM, Lauren and I headed down to a not so ghetto area of Baltimore, called Inner Harbor. Lots of cool boats, restaurants, light houses and all sorts of things like that. It just so happened the Red Sox were playing the Orioles that afternoon, which would have been cool to check out, but I had some racing to do. After some breakfast out on the awesome little dock, we headed up the Druid Hill Park for the Charm City Cross. I wanted to get plenty of laps in on that tire to see if it would still hold up underneath me. It was holding like a champ, so I decided I was going to run that tire/wheel combo since it was a bit dry, dusty and slippery at times.

It's amazing how your expectations can change in a few hours. My whole goal for the weekend was to get at least 1 UCI point to secure a decent starting spot for this whole year. Well now after some minor success and a whole lot of what coulda been talk I was nervous again, but because I wanted to race at the front and try to get on the podium. No more of that 10th place and 1 UCI point nonsense. These guys are actually human and now I was actually believing that I CAN race with them.

Same second row starting spot in pretty much the same exact field. I got a little better start and didn't have to work as hard to find the guys I wanted to be racing with. This course was quite a bit harder and with a lot more getting off the bike and running. Anyone who knows me, knows I don't run unless I'm being chased, I'm practically allergic to it. The running sections made it pretty tough on me, but everyone was suffering it seemed. The front group had basically the same make up as the day before, but Frattini crashed early and it took him a bit to get back up there. I went a whole lot deeper to stay in the front group on day 2, but it the group kept steadily shrinking.

Coming through the start/finish I head the bell and looked up and couldn't believe that it was actually THE bell. I didn't even realize that the race was almost over. Frattini was off the front and gone at this point, but Myerson and former Canadian National CX champ Mike Garrigan were only a few seconds up the road. I didn't want to make the effort to drag myself, Ryan Dewald and Wes Schempf across to them and then get last out of the 5 of us, but we also didn't have time to play games with Tyler Wren chasing hard by himself. Plus, he had been so fast all day on the uphill road section leading to the finish, that I didn't want to let him into the sprint. Decisions decisions... Well we didn't quite make it across to Myerson and Garrigan, but Wren didn't catch us either. I opened up my sprint as soon as we hit the pavement and got a nice gap and was able to ride across for 4th place and 12 fatty UCI Points. No I didn't get to stand on the podium, but this was the ride that I had wanted to put together and I was pretty jazzed up about it. Hopefully finally turning the corner and racing at that next level with some of the guys I was able to race with this weekend will lead to some more good finishes in the big races this
year.

I don't know what that face says, but it's the one I was making as soon as I climbed off my bike. Pain? Surprise? Fear? Who knows, but I can tell you that I was pretty pumped.

Off to Madison, WI this weekend for the first 2 USGP's of the year. Thanks for readin'!

Nittany Lion Cross UCI C2

2009-09-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

With the Tailwind UCI cross races falling off the schedule for this season I had to try to find some other UCI races to do so that I could scoop up some early season points.

Lauren and I headed out to Eastern PA for Nittainy Loin Cross, a C2 near Philly. We made sure to get out there early enough to get some laps in at the course before the sun went down. It was mostly grass with a few sections back in the woods. I was feeling pretty comfortable about things when I went to bed that night.

I was pretty nervous before the race on Saturday because this weekend could potentially have been one of my few chances in the first half of the season, to score some points with some bigger USGPs and other decent sized UCI's on the horizon. I ended up with a second row call up since there were about 15 or so guys there with UCI points. My plan was to play it conservative and keep it upright and hopefully make a good group.

I got an average start and went pretty hard for the first lap to get on the back of a group with some good guys driving it. Soon I found myself in a group with the favorites, hanging out on the back just letting them do the work. We all stayed together for the most part until Davide Frattini attacked us and was gone. This split the group for a few laps while we all tried to chase, but it eventually came back together with 6 of us racing for 2nd-7th places. With just over 2 to go I came down a little drop off and almost lost the front wheel and nearly ended up on my face. I checked to see what the deal was, and the front tire had gone flat. I went from a pretty comfortable spot, to trying not to freak out because all those points were riding away from me. I rode it to the pits where my bike was unmanned and ghost rode my damaged whip off into the distance and executed a nice spin move with my back-up bike and headed back out to try to catch the group. 2 laps wasn't enough to catch them with Tyler Wren driving the group. I was able to stay away from Wes Schempf who got uncomfortably close in 8th. So 7th on the day was good for 6 UCI points and my best result in a UCI race, but I could help but think of what could have been if I got the chance to sprint for 2nd with those guys.

A Little Somethin'...

2009-09-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

...about where my 'cross frames are coming from. Courtesy of Justin Spinelli of Svelte Cycles.

Spooky Bikes Tour

With some encouragement from Steve at BikeReg, Mickey was kind enough to hook me up with 2 Green Anodized Spooky Supertouch frames for this season. They're in the mail now, so look for a write up soon.

I'm ALIVE...

2009-08-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

...and I have the INTERNET!

Coming back down Mt. Elbert

My Colorado trip has come and gone and I didn't perish. I'm back in Bloomington, trying to settle back into the real world and catch up on the things I neglected for the last week.

The trip was awesome. The hiking and climbing was harder than expected and the views were crazy, the pictures just can't relay the size and vastness of the mountains and valleys out there. Distances that look like they are a few hundred meters turn out to be closer to a few miles than meters. We didn't get to bag as many summits as we had hoped because of bad weather on some of the days, but it was still an awesome experience, we even went whitewater rafting one day to give our legs a recovery day.

Me coming down the side of Mt. Belford

Mt. Belford summit in the middle, from just above the treeline, still a few hours away.

My Dad and I on the summit of Belford

My Shower/Laundry Room

That's a small sample of the pictures from the week. I'm waiting on my brother to put the rest up on Flickr.

It was an awesome experience with lots of amazing views, but I also missed my bike by the end of the week. Now I'm back at it, trying to get my body in cyclocross mode. I'm still waiting on my frames to get here, so I can't really do much yet. All my friends are out doing cx worlds and all that bull, while I'm stuck on the skinny tires. Soon.

Since I headed straight from the Marion NRC race last Saturday, out to Colorado, I didn't get a chance to do my race write up. So here goes... It was a new, way more technical course this year with something like 10 corners. It was quite possibly the most critty crit of the year. I had pretty good legs and was able to hang out at the front most of the race. The whiplash effect was in full-on if you drifted too far back. A Colavita guy was solo from a long way out and he stuck it and soloed to the win. Once we hit 10 laps to go, the field got pretty antsy. With only 4 or 5 guys from the pro squads, the finale wasn't very organized. Lots of fighting and chopping in the corners. The was a crash almost every other corner for each of the last 5 laps. I was just wincing and trying to thread the needle through the carnage. With 3 to go a crash at the front made a nice gap for 5 more guys to get off the front. They also stayed away and so now we were stuck sprinting for 6th. I took some risks and fought for decent position going into the last lap. I dodged a crash with 2 corners to go and kept it upright through the last corner, which is apparently an achievement. I ended up 6th in the sprint which put me in 11th on the day. A decent result, but it would have been a lot better if all those guys hadn't been up the road.

I'm off to a friends wedding this weekend and hopefully I can find a bike race to do or something. I've still got the itch.

Hopefully my next post will be showing you guys my fully built cross bikes.

Thanks for reading

2009-08-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Yo, yo! I'm still alive and kickin, I've just had some other bull going on that has been keeping me away from the internets. I have done a few races, moved to a new home (just across Bloomington) and discovery the best way to clean a kit.

Races... hmm. Well I didn't update after this race, but it was in Glencoe, IL a few weeks ago and it didn't actually rain on us, but it rained right before our race, so the end result was the same. I felt like trash. I hid. I sprinted. I got 8th. Whooopeee...

Next up we had the Mass Ave Crit in Indy. A cool location on a less cool course. Panther showed up, but we we forgot our balls, legs and brains and rode around making fools out of ourselves for an hour and got nothing in the way of results. We all made just enough money to cover trip to Subway (with 3 cookies). Afterwards we headed up to Lafayette to stay at Derek, Greg and Chris' house at Purdue. We prepped for Crit Nats by taking a 100 mile trek around Purdue's campus at the demand of Derek. I spent the whole time thinking how superior IU is to Purdue.

We woke early, pounded a few chocolate doughnuts and hit the road for Downers. Most of us decided on our white shorts since it was crit nats and all. I had a pretty good pre-race race and ended up in the 2nd row at the start line. No wasted effort to get to the front and it was a good thing I was there. About 10 minutes into the proceedings it started monsooning on us. I was at the front when it started and it was great. All the crazies were pinned in the back and too scared to take the risks to move up and I was able to ride pretty easily without much jumping or sprinting out of the corners or fighting to hold my position. After sufficiently soiling my pearly white trousers, it started clearing up and I knew we were going to have a sketchy finale. With less water on the roads people were more daring with their maneuvers and it got tough to stay in good position. A break slipped off with less than 10 to go and Paul bridged to it with Kirk Ablers. I don't know if Paul has gone off the front in one race this year without Kirk following him. Anyway, the break stuck and we were fighting for 5th in the field sprint. I risked my life and avoided the carnage to end up in 16th place, my best result at Downers, but certainly nothing to write home about. The real story was up the road where Justin England attacked and Paul went after him, but came up just a little short. With Paul on the podium, it was a nice result for our team. You always want to win, but that ain't bad.

This weekend I'm heading to the Marion Classic NRC race on Saturday and then leaving for my hiking trip in Colorado on Sunday. Marion could be my final road race of the year, kinda depressing. Hopefully I can go out with a bang and pop off a nice result. If I become bear food and never update this thing again... You stay classy San Diego.

Grand Rapids Crit

2009-08-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm sitting in the back of Greg's car on the way to Chicago from Grand Rapids. This is the 3rd weekend in a row where we have been forced to navigate the permanantly congested highways of Chicago and surrounding 'burbs in search of prize money and results.

Last night was the Meijer Grand Cycling Classic in Grand Rapids, MI. It's put on by Bissel, so there was a nice chunk of their pro and elite teams in attendance, as well as a handful of Kelly Benifit guys, Kenda guys and Subway guys. We brought 8 guys, so we had enough man power to be as agressive as any team. We tried to put someone in every move, but missed out on one with Tom Zirbel and Jake Rytlewski. Those two got a nice gap and were holding it steady. We got 2 guys in a chase of 5 that looked like it was going to get away and catch those two, but it wasn't to be. The chase came back and Jake and Zirble stuck it. With the us in the field sprinting for 3rd.

Now you may recall, we've had some problems getting the team organized at the front to get a full on leadout going. Well with 5 to go, it was Panther on the front all lined up just like we've been trying to do the last few times we've had the full squad together. We had 4 guys on the front, with Chris on them and me sweeping his wheel. I kept looking out of the corner of my eye expecting to see a Ben Jaques-Mayne led Bissel train coming over the top of us, but it never came. All was well with Panther as we did our best team Columbia impression, until just over a lap to go when Vince broke his rear derallieur cable and that caused some chaos at the front, but we still had it together somewhat. Hayden Godfrey hit it with 1 to go and jumped around us, but Derek got back in front and lead it to the back side of the course. With 3 corners to go, Chris ripped his rear derailleur off with me still on his wheel. More mayhem and lost positions. I tried to jump back up to the front for the last corner, but just couldn't get there. I ended up 11th, with Paul in 12th, Derek in 14th and Moskal in 19th. Not really what we were looking for, but it was just tough to keep a handle on the end of the race, especially with the mechanicals thrown in. It's a step in the right direction, hopefully we can make another big step next week at Downers Grove.

If I feel like it I may check back in with a Glencoe repot on the ride home.

Until then, I'll be looking up facts about bear attacks in Colorado and suggestions on how to best beat up a Grizzley bear.

Chartier's and Chicago's

2009-08-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Alright, I know I'm a few weeks behind on my race reports now, but I've been busy (for me). Since I last wrote, I raced the Chicago Crit and Elk Grove, as well as cut a rug or two at the Chartier wedding in Bloomington the Saturday before the Chicago Crit. If I asked you which of those 3 events was most likely to result in injury, you might guess right, but I bet not.

So we all know I touched down at the Bloomington Crit and had a bit of road rash and some back soreness. I went about my daily activity for the next week and felt fine, like I said, just a bit sore. Last Saturday rolled around and after Kim and Chris tied the knot the dancing began and didn't stop for a half a day or so. I took a cab home and woke up the next morning early to drive to Chicago. I got out of bed and could barely walk. I guess all that dancing had seriously upset my already unhappy lower back. I guess that's what happens when you use such extreme and innovative moves.

Oddly enough, my back was feeling better on the bike where the saddle was taking some of the load off. Standing and sprinting was hard on it, but I decided to try to work through it. I actually felt pretty good in the race and was in good position on the last lap when I got taken out by yet another crash. Annoying to say the least. My back was definitely in worse shape after the race than before, so I went home and iced it and took a few days off to see if it made any improvements. Wednesday rolled around and it wasn't getting better so I took a trip to the Chiro for my first ever "adjustment". They took some X-Rays and could see that my pelvis was shifted thanks to my wreck in Bloomington and my SI joint in my lower back was also out of alignment. Now, I'm not much for bone popping, but it really wasn't that bad. He worked on me every day and even twice on Friday to try to get me ready to race at Elk Grove.

With a whole week off between Chi-town and Elk Grove I didn't have much in the way of expectations. I used some topical numbing gel and about 47 "Pain Skittles" to get me through the races in an extremely mediocre and lackluster manner. Made a few bucks for the team on Saturday and Sunday was pretty average as well. Surprisingly enough, I felt miraculously better on Monday after another "adjustment" and also a bit better today. I've got another appointment tomorrow and a nice routine of stretches and strengthening exercises that will hopefully have me functioning fully by Downers Grove in a week and a half. What I'm really worried about is my big hiking/backpacking trip to Colorado at the end of August with my bro and dad.

I'm kind of bummed about the way this road season has gone health wise, but I've still got a few more weeks left to pull off a nice season saving result.

Indiana and Ohio State Crit Championships

2009-07-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

Last weekend were both states crit champs and with Indiana's being the Bloomington Crit, I obviously decided to stick around and race in front of the friends and fam. Since there was good money on Saturday in Ohio, I was the only one from my team in attendance. It's been a while since I raced solo, but with they type of number Nuvo brought to the race, I quickly remembered that you've got to go with everything, because when you miss one, it's sure to be the one that sticks. No more than 10 laps into the race I found myself standing in the pits after my first real crash of the year. I was pulling through at the front and the guy on the front didn't see me coming through and swung over and put the rear half of his bike in my front wheel. The end result was a Zipp rim that was completely separated from the Zipp hub that was still in the dropouts, not to mention I went sliding down the road for a bit. I marched to the pits pretty pissed off, got my wheel changed and realized my front derailleur was all messed up so it wouldnt go into the big ring. I was running out of time, so we half fixed it and I got back in. After some attacking and some chasing it became apparent that nothing was getting away and I went to sit and wait for the sprint. In the mean time my bike started dropping the chain regularly and got to practice shifting my bike back into the big ring via yanking the cable at the downtube. The sprint came, I didn't get in the right spot and ended up 4th. Nuvo rode well for Hubbell and he took the win and all the local street cred that comes with it.

Post race I went home and took the dreaded post crash shower. It sucked, but I got all Tube-Gauzed up and headed out to catch up with all the people that were in town for the occasion. Minus the wreck, it was a pretty good time.

Sunday was The Ohio State Crit Champs in Miamisburg Ohio. We had a all our guys in attendance, plus a few of the local team members and even the title sponsor. It turns out that the team really didn't need me much the day before and went 1,2,4 and 10 on the day. Kenda and Roadhouse didn't want to see that happen again, so we figured we would have a good fight on our hands. We raced aggressively to try to get a break up the road with the numbers in our favor, but it wasnt to be. The race was only 70 minutes and we couldn't seem to tire out the guys who were gluing it all together. So it was gonna be a field sprint whether we liked it or not. Kenda got their leadout together and was doing there thing for the last few laps and we didn't really get organized as a team, as a result they were on the front with 2 corners to go and their man on the front laid it down, taking some of their guys down and causing a bunch of us to have to stop in the corner. I was sitting 5th wheel and wasn't one of the lucky ones. John Puffer and Kirk Albers from Roadhouse got through cleanly or at least clean enough to go 1-2 and Chris and Jeremy from our team managed to find their was through it from farther back and take 4th and 5th. Not really what we were looking for, but I think it is an issue we could hav avoided if we had gotten organized and gotten to the front. It's a learning experience for us as a team, but it's just never fun when you don't execute. I think our leadout/communication skills will improve once we get more races together as a team.

Photo By Jeffrey Jakucyk

This weekend is my homie Chris' wedding on Saturday and then we're heading up to the Chicago Crit on Sunday. I would love to get a nice chunk of that 25k they're giving away up there. Wish me luck!

Tour De Champaign-Day 2

2009-07-14T19:11:00.001-07:00

After a nice morning lounging around the Swartzendruber residence, watching the tour, eating our nice spread prepared by Mark's wife/podium girl, we headed to the course early in the afternoon to put out the vibe and start with the pre-race rituals. The field was roughly the same size as the day before, but with some Nuvo guys added to the mix, as well as Brad Huff and Bryce Mead from Jelly Belly. They were on their way to Stupidweek and decided to drop in.

The course was a pretty wide open, four-corner layout with little need for braking. Just as the day before, everyone wanted to be in the break and so it took a good while to get the move established. Lots of appropriately equipped groups got off the front and had reasonable gaps, but they kept coming back. Finally we got a group of three off with Vince in it, so the rest of us were on patrol at the front. Not long after, Chris slipped into an intermediate break. Things were looking good for us and the field was starting to realize the groups were gone, so we all settled into a rhythm of eating up the remaining laps. With 3 to go they threw a $200 preme at us and Randall Coxworth grabbed me and said, "follow me". Randall is a good sprinter, masters national RR champ and former midwest stud that was staying at Drubers with us. He lead it out for me, but he was a little tired from winning the masters race earlier and pulled off a bit sooner than I had hoped. I hit the wind too early and couldn't hold on for the big bucks. I tried to take my gap from the preme sprint and keep going, but the field wasn't having it. So I was reabsorbed with 2 to go and was feeling the effort and couldn't really participate in the bunch gallop. The boys up the road ended up in 3rd and 4th. Those are pretty respectable results, but we continue to get close but not quite on the top step.

This weekend is the Bloomington Crit, not exactly an opportunity to pad my pockets with money, but local street cred' is up for grabs. It'll be great to do my local race for the first time in a couple years and catch up with some good people.

See ya out there.

Tour De Champaign

2009-07-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry I never finished my updating from Fitchburg, it really wasn't all that eventful. The road race was hard and the crit was kinda hard and I finished in the overall, 70th or something like that. Not necessarily something to put on the top of the resume, but I think it's going to be really good for my fitness. After a 6AM flight and a 175 dollar charge to fly my bike, I made it back to my own bed for the first time in 3 weeks. I put another medium-hard week of training in this week so that I could get a nice big block including F-burg. The legs aren't so snappy, but with a little recovery I should be in good shape.

Now I'm hanging out at Mark Swartzendruber's house in Champaign, IL for the weekend for two new races on the calendar, with some pretty healthy purses too. Yesterday was the first of two crits and our team brought four guys out to try to get some results. The pre-reg wasn't very big, so we thought there field might not be too tough and we could put 4 in the top 5 (just kidding). Turns out Texas Roadhouse had the same idea. On top of 6 or 7 Roadhouse, there were a few ABD guys and that Webcor guy from Dairyland. I think his name is Ryan Parnes, butt hhe's really strong and I believe may have won a race or two up there. Aaaanyway, the racing was pretty aggressive because everyone was looking for the break to go early, but everyone wanted to be in it. Lots of promising moves went and came back until a big group of 10 or so got away, and a few others even bridged up later. The break was huge and the field pretty much shut down. We had me and Vince in the move, TRH had 3 guys including Puffer, Parnes made it, Jeff Schroetlin from ABD was there, so it had some pretty good horse power. There were a few late race attacks that were aimed at splitting the break up, but nothing worked until we got the bell. A guy from IS Corp attacked through the start/finish and it was basically full gas from there. That caused a split of 6 of us and Vince was there too. Coming through the last corner, Puffer tried to take a line that wasn't really there and pretty much t-boned Ryan Parnes and took out Vince in the process. I had my back wheel locked up and was in full Tokyo Drift to avoid the bike and bodies that were flying. Schroetlin and I had to pretty much start our sprint from a stop and I ended up second and Jeff was third. The IS Corp guy got through the corner without any real obstruction and took the win. Chris and Derek took 2nd and 3rd in the field sprint, but it sure would have been nice to keep Vince upright and have another guy in the top 5, but as they say, that's bike racing. I think everyone is feeling pretty good for today, so hopefully we can get off this damn 2nd place streak the team is on.

Check ya later.

A Must Read for Naive Americans

2009-07-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

Aaron Hubbell already posted THIS, but I felt like you guys should read it too. Enjoy.

Fitchburg TT and Circuit Race

2009-07-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in updates from Fitchburg, it's been raining everyday out here, so most of our would be down time has turned into bike cleaning and clothes cleaning and shoe drying time.

So let's back up a few days. Greg and I got out here on Tuesday night, to our host Steve Roszko's house. Wednesday we rode the TT course 3 times in the rain to try to get a feel for it. Thursday was the TT, a 9 mile out and back with some pretty good rollers. For those of you Bloomington peeps, very similar to the Forrest TT, only bigger rollers. Anyway, I rode hard, but just couldn't really ever get my effort level down. I was always going too hard or too easy trying to recover from my going too hard. My time wasn't very good, but I didn't have too high of expectations either. I'm just happy to be out here racing in the big races again.

Yesterday was a 75 mile circuit race on a 3 mile loop. The loop had a pretty steep climb that took about 1 min or so to get over. So we did the climb 25 times and it definitely took its toll on the field. The race was all about positioning, because after the climb the course continued on a false flat for another mile or so. That's where all the carnage happened. People would open gaps and if you were too far back, that was it.

170 people started the race, and I think something like 70-80 finished in the lead group. People started getting dropped pretty early and I was still hanging around in the front group late in the race. Colavita came to the front with 4 to go to help Bissel chase the break and that's when I really started to feel the burn. I got dumped off the back with a lap and a half to go and rode in with some of the other groups that were scattered all over the road. I finished a half lap down, but wasn't sure where that put me because there were people everywhere, some 2 and 3 laps down. I'm sure getting results sorted out was a nightmare. It really sucks to come unglued from the field so late in the race, but I really had nothing left in my legs. Oh, I almost forgot. I crashed again! Some fools stacked it up right in front of me at the base of the climb on the second lap. So I'm watching the field ride away from me on the climb as I'm sitting there kicking at my pedal thinking this might be the end of my race. Luckily I got back on after a few minutes of sprinting. I was definitely breathing through my eyes after that one though.

So that's about all that's been going on our here bike racing wise. Steve has been an awesome host and his kids have been pretty hilarious. His 2.5 year old son Broadie told me he was going to pee on me and his almost 6 year old son Oscar stuffed a giant meat ball in his mouth and insisted on showing me his progress after every chew. His kids are great, but like Steve said it would be, staying with them is definitely good birth control.

110 mile RR starts in about 1.5 hours. This update brought to you from my mobile telephone... This time I wasn't driving though.

Hyde Park/ Tour de Grandview

2009-06-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

After a couple short recovery days in St. Louis with Lauren I drove to Ohio for a couple crits with some good money and pretty decent sized fields. The usual guys were there with pretty big squads. Kenda, Roadhouse, Aerocat and our team made up the majority of the numbers. Saturday's race in Hyde Park, Ohio was a twilight crit on a pretty cool course with a 180 degree turn in it. We didn't race terribly, but weren't agressive enough either. The 90 rider fields on this tight course lead to a lot of people getting popped off the back. The whiplash effect was so severe at the back that some pretty quality guys were falling off the pace. Coming down to the finish with one lap to go I was sitting in the top ten wheels through the round-about on Chad B. of Kenda and he was on Paul's wheel and Paul was following a pretty well known rider from a pretty well known local team. This rider is also pretty well known for his yelling at other riders in races and generally being an ass to people who are riding in an manor that he deems unsatisfactory. So when said rider thought it was a good idea to try to pedal his bike through this 180 degree corner and crash out a handful of the top 10 including himself, me, Paul and Chad... I found it quite ironic. But as they say, that's bike racing. Maybe said rider will worry less about others' riding and more about himself from here on out. So the team got some guys in the top 10 and just outside of it, but that little spill definitely hurt our end of the race situation.

Sunday was the traditional Sunday of Grandview crit with the nice little big-ring climb in it. We did 40 laps, for a total of 45 miles. It was pretty hot and most of the major players from the previous night were still around. Traditionally this race has broken up quite a bit and ended up with a big group of 10 or so off the front. I tried to be in all the promising moves and make sure I didn't miss the inevitable move that was going to go. The team did a much better job of being aggressive and instigating some of the moves and riding a much more offensive race. It took a while, but the break did go. It had lots of the big guys in it and I missed it initially but got across in a group of 3 shortly after. Andy and Dan from our team also came across after, the group ended up being 13 strong. We had 4 guys including Paul, so once I was recovered Dan and I went to the front and pulled the break around for the last 5 laps so that Paul and Andy could rest for the sprint. What we didn't know was Paul was cramping and it may have been a better option for us to work for someone else, but how often are you not going to work for Paul Martin? Anyway, Dan and I were toast and couldn't really sprint at the end. We ended up taking 7,9,10,11, and 17 on the day. It was nice to get 4 guys in the move, but we would have played it a little bit differently if we could do it again.

Now Greg and I are staying at Chartier's place until we leave for Fitchburg tomorrow morning. We're about to head out for a little tune up on our TT bikes and then do a whole lot of nothing for the rest of the day.

The next update should be from Massachusets, or somewhere on the highway along the way there. Wish me luck.

Photo's courtesy of Jeffrey Jakucyk

Tour of America's Dairyland Wrap-up

2009-06-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm typing this from my phone as I speed through Illinois, away from Dairyland and towards St. Louis for a few days.

So you probably guessed that by my lack of an update yesterday, the road race didn't go so hot. Well, you were right. Well it was really hot, just not from a performance standpoint. It was literally 100 degrees and we were supposed to race 80 miles on a 10 mile course.

A break went pretty much from the gun and we hand Greg in it and so we were pretty much chillin in the field as a team. It was actually cooler to get out in the wind a bit, so I would occaisonally go to the front toride in the wind, rather than sit in the stagnant air in the middle of the group. The racing gradually got more intense as the laps wore on. I was getting at least one if not two bottles every time through the feed zone, and I'm not even much of a drinker in races.

Eventually I saw a group going up the road with Andy Crater, Frank Travesio, Ben Raby, and Pat Lemiux. It looked promising, so I dragged my weak legs across to it. I don't know what I expected, but it was really hard. Travesio and Crater were literally pulling at 35mph all the time. I was sitting on chewing on my stem, praying for mercy. I felt a bit better when I saw Raby was hurting as bad as me though. Eventually all the groups on the road had exploaded. The break was shelling guys and we soon cam upon Greg's corpse rolling along. He was totally shot. I got popped out of my group. The field caught me and it was tiny, but I went right out the back of it too. When my lights went out, they went out real hard. I pedaled squares back to the feed zone and called it a day. Dan and Vince were the only Panther guys to survive the day. Dissapointment was abundant as we went and sat by lake Winnebago until we felt like getting back in the cars.

Today we were all a little salty from the road race, so were we determined to get some.The course seemed like it was gonna be an easy one, but I don't know about the other guys, but it was harder than I thought it would be. Lots of attacks went and came back for about 45 minutes of racing, but one actually got a nice gap and we had Dan in it. A 2 man move with Frank "the tank" Travesio. They worked well together and got a nice gap. I ended up in a 7 man chase group with a bunch of former PRO's aiming to beat me down. Ben Raby (Kodak Sierra Nevada), Chad Hartley (BMC, Jittery Joe's) and Adam Bergman (Colavita). Since I had a guy up the road, I wasn't pulling through. They didn't like that. They were trying to ride me out of it every time one of them pulled off. So these gaps would open up and we would all be forced to close them or get dropped from the chase. This wore on me pretty good. With 4 to go, a group of 4 more guys came up and so now our group of 11 was sprinting for 3rd. Andy Moskal of our team was in the group of 4 to join late. The attacks atarted immediately. It was all I could do to cover them and when the sprint came I was totally smashed. I ended up in freaking 13th. Andy was 6th and Dan got beat by Travesio, but still it was a good day for the team.

As I was driving, I was getting pissed at myself for botching that situation so hard, but I also realized I'm at the emd of a 9 race in 18 day period. I'm seriously due for some rest before Fitchburg. But I guess if you told me I'd be able to race this much this month and not be feeling sick, I would have been pleased just to participate as much as I have.

My GPS is telling me that I'll be in St. Louis in 153 more miles, so it looks like I'll have time for a bit more reflection before I hit the hay.

I hope this mega long post from my phone actually works. Thanks for reading!

Tour of America's Dairyland- Manitowoc Crit

2009-06-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

Last nights crit was another 90 minute race on a four corner circuit. It was pretty wide open through the corners so the speeds were pretty high and it was tough to get much of a gap. After our poor showing in Grafton, we decide to get to the front and ride like we actually belonged in the race. The team was able to get someone in every move that went off the front, even though they we're all pretty short lived, we just wanted to play it safe and be represented anyway. We mixed it up in a few of the prime sprint and took home a little extra cash that way.

The crit was going along in pretty standard fashion, without much of a lull in the racing. Greg flatted and was coming back into the field after getting a neutral wheel when he got about 3 pedal strokes into his attempt to get back up to speed and he literally ripped his handlebar in half at the stem. the whole left side of his ALUMINUM bar came off in his hand and he went over the bars and his bike came flying into the field. Luckily everyone dodged it successfully and Greg was ok. After that he got a complete neutral bike and was back in the game a lap later.

The team did a much better job of communicating in the closing laps of this race than we did the night before. we helped take each other to the front and made sure that we weren't moving around in the pack without the purpose of helping one of us get to a good spot for the sprint. When we got the sign for 7 laps to go, the field collectively flared their elbows and starting duking it out in the battle for optimum position. With wide open straights, it was hard for any one person or team to keep the pace high enough to prevent swarming at the front. I ended up on Tilly's wheel with 2 corners to go and was pretty pleased with my spot. I got bumped off when I had to hit the breaks to avoid swinging into the curb coming out of the 2nd to last corner. It wasn't terrible, but at that stage in the race it hurt my chances to really get up there. I ended up coming across the line in 8th and Derek was 9th. Tilford took 3rd, but he's always been a pretty slippery wheel to follow in the closing laps of a bike race. All and all it was a much better day for the team, but we're gonna keep at it with hopes a getting a stage win. Tomorrow's Road Race is a pretty good chance given the two oxen we have in Greg and Dan.

Today was a pretty successful rest day, with maybe not as much rest as we should of had, but pretty fun none the less. If you're ever in Milwaukee, I highly recommend a tour of the Lakefront Brewery. For $6 you get 4 glasses of beer and a nice pint glass along with the tour of the micro-brewery.

Alright, enough for tonight. Hopefully I'll have some good news to report from tomorrow.

Giro D' Grafton

2009-06-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

Well the team is up in Wisconsin for some of the Tour of America's Dairyland. Last night was a 90min crit in Grafton with some solid riders and some good fan support. There were lots of parties around the course and the fans got pretty into it as the laps wound down.

The team had a pretty sub par performance across the board, with no one really riding very well. We were definitely all kicking ourselves on the ride home, but we just didn't get our asses into the right spots at the right times. We all got near the front with a few laps to go and then just didn't stay positioned well for the finale. This is the first race of the year where we've raced poorly from top to bottom. Personally I was as guilty as anyone of a trash performance and am hoping for some better legs and a little more bike racing sense tonight.

We just went for a spin with the 3 guys from the other host house. We've got a pretty nice situation here in Wawautosa, especially when you consider the price... free. Sorry for the short update, maybe I'll have some more after tonight's race. Time for a shower and some foam rollering. Happy Fathers Day.

Annnnddd, this just in: Lauren got 7th in Womens Open (1,2,3,4's) race at Winghaven today. She probably got a nice chunk of that $2K for the ladies. Tiiiight!

Le Tour de Mont Pleasant

2009-06-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Sounds pretty official huh? Le Tour de Mont Pleasant was an awesome race in a pretty cool area of Michigan. It was also an opportunity for my to race with my full squad for the first time.

Graham Howard, Me and Dave Williams give it a go.

Saturdays crit was a nice little 75 minute affair, with a few technical corners and a long Start/Finish straight. We had 8 of our 9 guys (sans Jeremy Grimm, probably one of our best crit-ers) there for the crit and face some good numbers from Bissel and Priority Health. Kenda Pro had 3 strong guys too. We decided that we wanted to be aggressive from the start and so that's how it went down. The team rode really well, constantly shooting guys off the front looking for the right combination to form the days move. It was never to be. Greg had a nice solo attempt from 9 to go all the way to 1 to go. It took about 6 guys from assorted teams to drag him back just before the bell lap. As he came back, Graham Howard from the Bissel Pro squad attacked from right in front of me, so I wasn't about to let one of the strongest guys in the field ride away alone, so I jumped on his wheel and he dragged out a nice little gap real quick like. Unfortunately for us, Kenda kicked it into gear and started chasing us down. We were gobbled up with 2 corners to go and I jumped on the back of the Kenda mini-train but was pretty toast and had to pull off and hand it over to Paul out of the last corner. Chris and Paul chased after Renkema, but he had gotten a good jump and a great leadout and they came up just a bit short. Another 2nd place for the Panther squad. That's something like 6 in a row for us. We gotta get over that hump.

Getting the bell

Saturday night we stayed with a professor at Central Michigan University and it was plush, let me tell you. There baked up cookies, brownies, and let us have our pick of his 60 some different home brewed beers he had made. His wife made us a huge spread for breakfast and we hit the road for the start line.

105 miles were on tap, with some KOM's and some Sprint Points too. A break with lots of horse power went about 10 miles in and we only had Greg in it. Graham Howard, Rytlewski, Renkema and some other studs were up the road, so I worked for a while to try to bring the gap down enough to bridge another of our guys across. Dan Campbell made the bridge look like cake and then we were sitting a little bit better.

After an hour of riding 15mph in the field, the break had a sizeable gap, so Paul Martin got the racing started for the second time, with some solo moves. We all took turns getting guys up the road by the handful. The field was too fresh and there were too many Priority and Bissel guys who weren't letting it happen. The racing stayed alive for pretty much the rest of the day. Coming into the final corner we got our guys to the front and set Chris up for the bunch kick. We had a few minor communication issues, but those will be corrected with more time together as a team. everyone did their part and Chris took the sprint for 8th, I was 14th and Paul Martin was 17th. Once we caught up with Dan and Greg, we heard the Greg had been 2nd and Dan 4th. Graham Howard had beaten Greg after sitting on the break for 80 miles or so. Panther had 5 riders in the top 20, but once again we were just off the top step of the podium. Soon we're gonna get these runner-ups turned into victory's.

There weren't all just 2nd places on the weekend, Lauren picked up her first win in the crit on Saturday and got 4th on Sunday. Hopefully I can get some of those "WIN" things.

I'm off to Tour of America's Dairyland this weekend and early next week for a handful of races, then Hyde Park/Grandview and our to Fitchburg for finally my first stage race of the year. If you need me, you can find me practicing up on my TT bike.

Getting My Numbers Up

2009-06-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

That was my goal for this weekend. In every sense, get my numbers up. My number of races on the year, my number of watts, my number of miles ridden, my number of dollars in my pocket. To accomplish this, I decided to try to do the Indiana State Road Race Championships on Saturday morning, the Winfield Twilight Crit Saturday night and the ABR Crit Champs on Sunday. A fairly tall order considering I had 5 races in my legs for the whole year leading into this weekend.

The state road race was held on a relatively flat lap that the group would do 12 times for a total of 88-ish miles. It was only Greg Christian and I from Panther/RGF in the race, with about 10 Texas Roadhouse guys, so we knew we would have our hands full. Greg did a great job of covering tons of moves and I tried to do my part as well. I ended up in a break with 4 laps to go, with all the important teams represented. The break wasn't working very well together so it ended up coming back to the field with 1 lap to go. Just as the break came back Greg broke his chain and his day was over. I tried to salvage a result for the team by trying my hand in the sprint. It was a long, wide open drag race style sprint, hardly my forte. I ended up in second place, but just couldn't quite come around Kirk Albers from Roadhouse at the line. I would have loved to pick up the win, but was pleased to salvage a result with such little form.

After the race I pounded some Recoverite, slapped on the compression socks and took off to Chicago. With 80-some miles in my legs already that day, I wasn't really sure how my legs would hold up, but I thought I might be have some value to the team. I actually ended up feeling better in this race than I did in any race of the weekend. The team rode well and everyone took turns throwing attacks and trying to get a break to go. Chris Uberti was smashing the field at every prime opportunity, netting the team a cool $300 in primes on the night. The race was all together with one lap to go. Greg went to the front and lead it up the final climb with Chris on his wheel and me a little further back. I knew I needed to get closer to the front by the top of the hill, but in my legs 110th mile of racing on the day, they were feeling a little crunchy. I ended up 6th and Chris 2nd. Greg rode like 4 people, as he always does and Derek was always right there at the front too. A solid day for the team. After the race we went to our host's house and then out for some Mexican food. I think I used my last bits of energy chewing my food, because once we were done I could hardy hold my head up. We finally got the check split 14 ways and got out of there and into bed around midnight. I suffer from extreme car-lag anytime I leave the eastern time zone, even by 1 hour, so with it being 1 AM Bloomington time, I was out in no time.

The sprint in the Twilight Crit. Josh smacked us all around pretty good.

The moment I stepped out of bed on Sunday I knew it was going to be a tough one. The legs felt like cement blocks at best. Luckily the team was awesome and were always there to cover any attacks that I wasn't feeling up to. As the race developed, Chris ended up in a break with Josh Carter and Mike Sherer. With those 3 guys in the move, the three biggest teams best sprinters, we were all content to let them go and fight it out for the win. The rest of our day was spent covering moves and trying to control the race. At then end of the race my legs were screaming every time up the hill and surely every time I had to cover an attack. I wasn't sure if I could do much in the sprint but tried to get my self to the front regardless. In the sprint for fourth I positioned myself pretty well and tried to hold off my move as long as possible because the sprint was another long one. At the line, Ben Renkema had taken the bunch gallop for 4th and I was second to take 5th. Chris ended up 2nd on the day, with Derek in 8th. Greg did the work of an 8 man team by himself again and rolled in in the field after burying himself to keep the field together. I've still got a long, long way to go to get back to the fitness I had before mono, but I finally feel like Im going the right direction.

As always, it was great to catch up with Ben and his girlfriend, whatever her name is. Christy maybe? seriously though, congrats to Christy for winning "the jersey" on Sunday.

This weekend we're getting the whole squad together in Mt. Pleasant, MI for a little omnium with some good cash. Can't to race with an almost full squad.

There are a few pictures from the weekend floating around so I'll try to add those a little later today.

Sweet PRO-ness

2009-05-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

I know this has been on a blog or two before, but some of you may enjoy this look into the prep for a season for a (doping)ProTour team. It's in Deutsch, dubbed over in French. So unless you're fluent in either of those, or a total dork like myself, these may not be for you. Each one is about 15 minutes long, so if anyone makes it through all of them, I'll be surprised.

PART 1

Fabian Wegmann La Marge Ultime 1/4 Reportage Arte
Uploaded by maple16. - Check out more sports and extreme sports videos.

PART 2

Fabian Wegmann La Marge Ultime 2/4 Reportage Arte
Uploaded by maple16. - Basketball, baseball, pro wrestling and more sports videos.

PART 3

Fabian Wegmann La Marge Ultime 3/4 Reportage Arte
Uploaded by maple16. - Discover the latest sports and extreme videos.

PART 4

Fabian Wegmann La Marge Ultime 4/4 Reportage Arte
Uploaded by maple16. - Discover the latest sports and extreme videos.

Alright, that's all of the videos for today. I know, Gerolsteiner was a bunch of dopers, but all that aside, I think these videos are cool.

Boom Goes the Dynamite!

2009-05-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

I stumbled onto a few pictures of Lars' Euro Mullet. Here he is at the Tour of Belgium (which he is now leading. Behold the power of the Mullet).

Forget the weird look on his face, that mullet is glorious.

Chicks dig the Euro Mullet.

Today I did the first ride, that actually resembled a training ride, in a pretty long time. Chris Chartier and Party Mike and I headed out for some decent hours and ended up doing the route from Day 2 of the Hilly Hundred. I ended up with a shade under 4 hrs on the bike and actually got a couple of efforts in and my heart rate was behaving nicely. I'm looking forward to racing both days of the weekend next month, and maybe even doing a few days of Tour of Americas Dairyland with the team too.

Recently two of my friends have had pretty bad training wrecks, as mentioned in Aaron Hubbel's blog, and both are now due or were due for some time off the bike because of it. It sucks badly, but when something like this happens it really makes you appreciate just going out for a ride of any sort. After being down with mono, a training ride like today really reminds me why I ride and race my bike. It was just great to be out, bro-ing out, taking in the great roads of Bloomington and just enjoying riding my bike.

Keep the rubber side down.

RIDE ZIPP STUFF

2009-05-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

TestRider.com was working on this feature at Zipp when I was there taking the tour and I guess this is the finished product.

TestRider.com Video

Ride it. It's just better than the other stuff.

Alternate Memorial Day Plans

2009-05-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

For the last few years my Memorial Day plans have involved heading out to Iowa for the usual big money crits and what-not. Well this year, given my situation, I opted to head to St. Louis to visit Lauren for the long weekend as well jump in a circuit race on Sunday.

I got into town on Friday night and just kind of kicked it with Lauren and her fam for a while and ate and then ate some more. Saturday We went to her brothers High School Lacrosse game, which happened to be the state championship. It was my first lacrosse experience and it was rad. Her bro (RJ)'s team came back from 3 goals down with 5 minutes left to play and forced overtime. Then they scored early in OT to take the win. I was pretty into it and it was awesome to see RJ win a state title in his last game as a high school lacrosse player. Went for an easy hour spin Sat. night and watched the season finale of Lost that we had been holding off on watching. That show is outrageous. I wish I could quit watching, but I just can't.

Sunday we rolled out to the Wildwood circuit race for L's race at 9am and I helped her get ready to massacre some cat 4 women. She had a decent field for her race and managed to get 3rd by about half a bike length to the winner. She lead out the sprint and I think she had it in the bag if she hadn't "forgotten" to reach for a harder gear. Damn Little 5-ers. We ran in to St. Louis celeb Kevin Moore at the race and chatted with him for a few as well.

In my race I was determined to make it into the break, but didn't really think about the consequences of making the break... you have to work it to make it go. Well I got away with two of the local TT guys on the hilly circuit and they were punishing me. We were away for all but the first 2 or 3 laps of the race. For a bit we had Nathan Rice, a good cross racer from that area with us in the move, but he fell off the pace after some of the strong turns from the other two, not me. I tried to do what I could to help them out, but these dudes were seriously rolling it. I told them I wasn't going to sprint them and moved to the back of the break with a few laps to go so I didn't get in the way. They attacked each other with a half lap to go and I just cruised in by myself for 3rd. It was nice to make to move, but it definitely showed me that I've still got a long way to go before I'm back in real race shape.

I averaged 195 bpm for an hour... How's that for hurt box?

After a trip to Panera with K-Moore, Lauren and I headed to her family's lake house to do a whole lot of nothing... and we were successful. Took the boat out a bit, slept, ate. It was a nice way to spend the holiday. The weather was too rainy for me to work on my fabulous tan, but a solid weekend none the less.

A huge shout out to my teammates who had a solid weeknd in Iowa and the others who went to Pennsylvania for the weekend. Andy Moskal picked up a "W" in PA. Greg "Calves" Christian got second to Bergman at Quad Cities on Monday. Paul Martin took 2nd and Dan Campbell 7th at Snake Alley. Friday, Chris Uberti snuck in with the sprinters in the Burlington RR to take 8th. Good work guys. Looking forward to being back out there with you full time.

New Developments

2009-05-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

After last week’s successful reintroduction to training, I was sufficiently feeling the itch to race. Everyone was off in Arkansas and there was a little race in Indy that I thought I might go check out. I went and pinned a number for only the 4th time this season. I got to test the legs and was by no means sharp, but I didn’t feel stricken with the devil virus either. I drove home Saturday night and sat around for a bit, then I got a phone call from some of my friends who were down in the Brasstown Bald area of N Georgia, doing a little cycling slash bro-ing out. They invited me down, so I hopped in the car almost immediately and drove down. I got in to the cabin around 4am and got a small handful of hours of shut-eye. We went for a nice 3+ hour ride with some good climbing at everyone’s own personal pace. I tried to open the throttle up a bit, in hopes of relocating my fitness. I felt ok again and not like I had gone amazingly deep, but just gotten a good sting in the legs.

Monday I set out to do Brasstown Bald and some other good climbs. I had plans for a big day and some serious time in the hurt box. Well I didn’t even get to the entrance to the park where The Bald resides before I knew it wasn’t to be. I was only pushing 240 watts up the moderate climb leading up to the park, about the minimum you could put out to keep going forward. 240 watts woulda been fine warm up effort if my heart rate had been where it was supposed to be. Instead my heart rate was above LT while my watts were so puny. I knew the truth of what was going on, but I couldn’t stomach the reality. I climbed the steeper grades of The Bald for about 10 minutes with my heart rate hovering at around 190 bpm. I felt like Joe Catfive just trying to make it to the top so I could take a picture and say I had done it. Soon, common sense kicked in and I pulled over and rested my head on my handlebars. I turned my bike perpendicular to the road so it wasn’t facing down or up. I had a nice 5 minute battle with myself. Up meant more climbing, but not giving up on the chance that my legs just needed more time to warm up and they would “come around”. Down meant I was giving into the reality that I wasn’t over F!@#$!ng MONO. I knew what I needed to do, but could hardly bring myself to do it. I finally made the smart decision and started the cold coast down the mountainside, where the chill of my sweat was nothing compared to the mental anguish over the thought of more missed racing. And to top it all off, I had a nice little 5 mile climb back up to the cabin before I could ghost ride my bike off the side of the mountain. I honestly just wanted to cry. I know things could always be worse, but I was having a hard time believing that.
Chapter Eleven… Sorry this is turning into such a novel, I’ve just got a lot to say (for once). Anyway, once I got back to the cabin, the guys were still down at the winery enjoying their day off. I took a quick shower, packed my crap, wrote them a quick note telling them why I was leaving and hit the road. It was a seriously miserable drive home with everything I had running through my mind.
Fast Forward to today. I met with a sports physician at the Methodist Sports Medicine Clinic to figure out what the deal was and to help me formulate a plan for my comeback (kinda like Lance…).This doctor actually understood the level at which I am trying to train and compete. He answered all my questions and got me started down the right road to a full recovery.

He basically explained that now that I have had mono, I’m going to be a bit like a battery; only for the next few months my battery is going to be really easy to run down, like I did in Georgia. So I have to be careful not to give it too big of a workload while I’m trying to fully recover. He said it will be maybe 2 or even 3 months before I’m back to full strength. So in the mean time I can race, but maybe only once a weekend for now. Then in a few more weeks try 2 times in a weekend and so on. I just have to be in full on recovery mode after I stress my body on the weekends. So yeah it sucks, but there isn’t a whole lot I can do. I’m going to try to be positive. I’m going to try to be positive. I’m going to try to be positive.
I also got an awesome tour of Zipp today, but since this is already my longest post ever, I think I’ll wait for a bit to tell you guys about that. And I signed a confidentiality agreement… so don’t expect too many juicy secrets.

Interesting

2009-05-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

edit: For some reason only 3/4 of the picture is showing up, so if you'd like to see the other 1/4th... here's the link- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5moRGZMep4

Oops... I did It Again

2009-05-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

I forgot to update my blog for 3 weeks. And yes I just referenced a Brittney Spears song for the title of my blog entry. Off me. Plus, I'll probably get 30 times more visitors with the words "Oops...I did it again" and "Brittney Spears" in my entry.

Since we last spoke, I have slept lots and done a few other thing along the way, most of them do not involve riding my bike.

- I coached Little 500. We didn't win again like last year, but I was starting to think about Phil Jackson with about 15 laps to go, but my sprinter (who had great legs that day) crashed with 4 laps to go. Day over. We finished 6th.

- Little 500 weekend I did the Alumni ride with some of the bros and some of the older alum's. One of which was Wayne Stetina, Multi-time Olympian and 1979 Pam Am games winner. General all-around HC and he's 56 now. Aaand he is a big-wig at Shimano North America now. So I get stuck on the front with him talking about the Electric Dura-Ace he was riding and getting lots of industry gossip, but the problem was that he's a serious hammer. Mind you, I'm sneaking out for an "easy ride" just as my time off for mono is up. Well we were hammering out the pace at about 300w with no signs of letting anyone else pull through. It was fun and it was stupid, but I felt ok so I went with it.

- I vacuumed the carpet in my apartment 127465 times. Cuz my new vacuum is tight and I like the way freshly vacuumed carpet looks.

- I slept.

- I didn't ride.

- I didn't race.

- I learned some stuff about photography and shutter speed and exposure and stuff, thanks to Lauren and her rad camera.

- I started riding again this week. And saw a huge effing snake on the road the other day. Probably an Anaconda.

- Mike Cody introduced me to Failblog.org to help battle to boredom of mono. I looked through 34 pages of the archives the first night I visited the site.

Alright, I think you're roughly up to speed on what's been going on since I last updated my blog.

Lastly, all you idiot dopers out there; Manny Ramirez, David Rebellin, Stefan Schumacher, Christian Pfannberger, Stefan Schumacher (again), thanks for the entertainment. I do get a good laugh out of reading your excuses.

The next time I update, I might just have a race of my own to report on.

Down With Disease

2009-04-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

So I'll give you a break from my lame race reports to bring you news of my sub par health. The week after Hillsboro (last week), I set out on a training block to try to prepare for Joe Martin at the start of May. I did some intervals with some bad power numbers, but didn't think too much of it. I took a couple more recovery days and the numbers for my workouts kept getting worse. It would be one thing if I had been training hard, but I'd just come off a nice block of rest and my body shouldn't have been acting tired. Anyway, fast forward to Saturday where I was supposed to do the Nashiville 90 with John Meyers on TT bikes. Yes, I understood this was going to be a serious suffer fest, but I wasn't quite prepared to suffer like this. Long story short, TT'd with John for a bit, sat on after I couldn't do that, died just trying to sit on, then called Lauren to pick me up in Nashville after 60 miles. I could barely ride at 200 watts to try to make it to Nashville in a timely manner.

I went home and slept, didn't ride Sunday and decided to go to the doctor on Monday. The Dr. ordered some tests (7 Vials of blood worth!) and I got the results on Wednesday that I have Mono. I had been trying to convince myself that it couldn't possibly be mono. Welp, wrong. Dr. says 2 weeks of stright up resting and no cycling.

Well, 2 weeks off puts me right around the end of April, and wicked close to Joe Martin on the 7th of May. So I've already written off Tour of Hermann this weekend, Brown County next weekend, Warsaw after that and finally my first real goal for the season, the Joe Martin Stage Race. Shit. I really would have liked to do those races so I can have some race fitness for later, but I guess I'll just be fresh to def for Fitchburg, Toona and the end of the season crits. And on this news, we just got our new, fresh, white, kits and other clothing. So I don't get to try out the new threads forever either. But I'm gonna try to look at the positive... or something like that.

See you on the road around April 29th or so. I'll be the guy riding 11 mph.

Hillsboro Report

2009-04-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

So it's over and I don't really know what to think about it. The field was 120 strong and even let in a few more than the field limit because some big names rolled up, un-prereg'd, so they kinda had to. Anyway, my goal was to try not to pull the normal Ryan move and freak out about everything that got 5 feet off the front... at least until half way through the 90 miles. It was a nice day with a little bit of wind, that turned into a decent amount of wind after a few laps. I rode up front so I could keep my eye on the experienced guys and make sure they didn't get too far without me. I ended up spending about 4 hours within a few feet of Steve Tilford (last year's Hillsboro winner, bad ass, and winner of the 1921 Inter-Galactic MTB Championships). Since I had no idea how this race was going to shake out, I figured he was probably one of smarter bike racers out there to shadow.

After a 2 pretty easy laps, the wind started to pick up and so did the racing. Attack were going and a few small groups were coming and going from the front. Towards the end of lap 3 a small group was just up the road and we were letting them kinda dangle before the catch. We'll Chad B. towed another guy across the relatively small gap and no one at the front really batted an eye. Turns out we should have, because the group of six stuck it. It got quite a bit faster on the last lap and the field that was 125, was down to about 50 and scattered all over road. The rubber band was thoroughly stretched in the front, but we couldn't seem to get another group to break off and catch the 6 just up the road. I did accomplish something I've never done before though, I rode in a break with Tilford and didn't get yelled at. Baby steps.

I need some media to spice up this race report, so here is the cut from the last lap. Nothing impressive, but you can see from the spikes that we tried to get something goin'

With about 5 miles to go, the field gave up and we started cruising in to fight for the scraps. Just about then, Greg was finally rested from his long chase back from a flat and took a flyer. Some posers tried to get across to him, but they undoubtedly had no idea how strong Greg is on his own and soon returned to the field. So he ended up being between the break and field in 7th, which was a tiny bit of consolation for the squad. As we came into town, I got up front and mixed it up in the sprint, but the legs were too tired to pop off a good one. I followed some wheels to end up 14th on the day. I feel stronger than I've ever been, but I just need to have the confidence to race like it. Looking forward to this race again next year. Also props to the promoter/organizers for running a tight ship for the most part and being speedy with the results

On the Eve of (Hillsboro-) Roubaix

2009-04-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

Yes, tomorrow is the midwest's own version of a spring classic. A little town in Illinois will be hosting the annual throwdown featuring (hopefully) some crosswinds, bad roads and a few "hellingen." No, it isn't really that similar to the real thing, but we'll play the hand we were dealt here in our region. The combination of this race as well as The Ronde this weekend, I'm all jacked up (off Mountin Dew). Tonight I'll be meeting up with Gregg Van Christiaan and Danny De Caampbell to head to Hillsboro, we'll be getting a bit of a late start, but it will be nice to get an hour back once we cross the IN/IL border. The legs are good and my mind is clear. Hopefully I can play the race properly and come back with a nice result in hand.

Also, I feel like I should update you on my DG's. My Delta Gamma women did their coach proud this week in ITT's. We put three girls in the top 15, with one of them being a rookie in 10th place. They've all been sticking to the plan and working hard, so it's nice to see them starting to come around a get their speed up. The race is April 24th, so it's almost time to be sharpening them up for an attempt to repeat our success from last year.

This is just gonna be a short update, but I want to leave you with a couple links to some good Flanders previews:

Pez Does Flanders: Day Zero

Pez Previews: De Ronde Van Vlaanderen

Obviously if you're a Pez reader, you've probably already seen those, but if not I think you'll enjoy 'em.

Little 500 Quals and a Recovery Week

2009-03-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

This morning I got up way earlier than a normal non-racing Saturday. In Bloomington, today is Little 500 quals day. My girls team drew the time of 8:45am for their crack at quals. We got up early and to the track in time to get them a good warm us and an ear full of my sorry excuse for a pep talk. They performed well, but not great. Quals are still going on and we're sliding down the list a little bit, but it's really not too much of a concern. The real test comes on the 24th of April.

After quals I met up with John Meyers and Mike, just in time to ride in the rain that was rolling into town. I'm wrapping up a rest week, a real one this time. I tried to have a rest week last week but I failed. I don't know how, but I got sucked into doing wednesday worlds and 2 races and before I knew it, my "rest week" wasn't so restful. So I'm about to start kicking it back up again for a few up coming races and then ultimately for Joe Martin at the start of May. In the mean time, I'd like to have a good showing for Hillsboro-Roubaix this year. I've never done it, but it seems to be a race that might not be too bad for a guy like me.

Speaking of guys not like me, Phil the Pro got himself a nice little P-R-O result last week in San Dimas. Congrats to him on that man-sized W.

This week I've been keeping tabs on Redlands as well. Pictures from that damn prologue don't do it justice, that thing is vicious. It's tough to watch this year and wonder how I would have done if I could have gotten back out there this year. I've played sports my entire life and that is by far the greatest sporting dissapointment of my life. Similar to "Into the Wild" when Chris McCandless kills the moose and the maggots get to the meat before he can skin it. Yep, thats about how it was.

On that note, off to watch some E3 Prijs on cycling.tv. See you at Hillsboro.

Racing for Training

2009-03-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

So this weekend I traveled to my first two races of the season. I races in Louisville KY on Saturday and Cincinnati, OH on Sunday. I've been putting in some good hours on the bike this spring, but haven't done much to get myself in race shape yet. It jump is slow and the numbers for my short intervals are pretty low. So this weekend I just wanted to go out and get in some hard efforts and test out the legs a bit. I have trouble racing for training and not caring about the result, but I know I can push myself harder when there's something riding on it, so I gotta wrap my head around it.

Saturday I got near Louisville and was greeted with a pretty steady rain shower and temps in the mid 40's. The course was a nice rolling circuit of just under 2 miles with nice smooth pavement. I was the only Panther/RGF guy in attendance (they were off winning in Ohio), and there happened to be 10 Texas Roadhouse guys that showed up. I knew how the race was going to go once I saw the turnout, but I couldn't get myself into that damn break. I raced as hard as I could trying to follow everything and cover the barrage of attacks from Roadhouse, but it wasn't to be. A group of 3 got away about midway through the race and the field pretty much shut down until the last 3 laps or so. The Roadhouse was getting greedy and rying to get more guys up the road. So I burnt my last few matches trying to keep them from getting the whole squad off the front and when the sprint came, I rolled in mid-pack. No result what so ever, but I got a good hour of self abuse and also set a new PR for 10 minute power at the start of the race, trying to make that inevitable break. I did feel better about the "pack finish" once I saw I had done some decent numbers and my fitness was ok considering the time of year.

Pre-race with Chartier, Renkema, and the Nuvo crew

Awesome picture of Chartier's late race whack

Sunday was a similar sized field of 30-35 guys, but the course was a flat, 10 mile loop with 4 corners and long straights. It wasn't really windy, but you could definitely feel it on some of those exposed roads. We did 6 laps of the circuit and I determined to make this a bike race and not a group ride. With no selective sections to be found, the stronger guys had to just keep attacking until the wheat and chaff were separated. It took a couple laps, but we finally got a nice split with pretty much all the guys that I would have hand picked for the break even before the start of the race, plus a few others I didn't know. They were all pulling through, so they're welcome to come along too. After we got the break established, like really, established. Like we-took-a-pee-break, established. It was time to figure out who was going to win this thing. I didn't like my odds in the 9 man group, with Aaron Hubbel of Nuvo(plus 2 teammates) and Ben Renkema of Kenda Pro Cycling. I knew both of those guys can pop off some pretty good sprints, so I would have rather gotten a split without them, but they did a good job keeping it together. I threw the kitchen sink at them for a while, hoping something would materialize, but no dice. Former teammate and host for the weekend Chris Chartier took off on a nice solo move with 1 to go, that he almost stuck thanks to some disorganized riding from all of us in the group. He came back with about a a mile and a half left to go and the cat and mouse started. I though we might completely stop and start the sprint with one foot down. Luckily someone jumped and it was on. I was trying to watch the guys I knew could sprint and was able to stay out of the wind and take the sprint for my first (although small) win of 2009. I'm not going to post a picture of the victory salute because it was so windy that I almost got blown over when I put my hands up. I look more like I'm about do the Y-M-C-A than I just won a bike race.

Me about to unleash my goofy looking victory salute

So this weekend was fun and a nice test, but I've still got a long way to go until I'm ready for the real stuff to start. I've got a pretty solid week of training in front of me, and my first ever bachelor "party" this weekend. Also, congrats to my teammate Jeremy Grimm for taking home his second win of this season this weekend. Thanks for reading.

Photos courtesy of Jeffery Jakucyk