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.

Down With Disease

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

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

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

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.