Sweet PRO-ness

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.