Speed work

Here are a few pics from last weekend's Snelling Road Race. This was a fast, flat, windy 65mile course that proved to feel a lot different than slow steady endurance mountain bike riding! Berkeley Bike Club did well with Jens, one of the star cat 4 riders, getting into the winning breakaway and placing 7th.
I was happy to survive to the end in the main pack. The fast single file crosswind sections were pretty tough to hang with.

Two weeks till summer

This morning I had my first snow experience of 2007 -
Usually by the end of February I have been skiing several times! This year has been a bit different with all of the riding - I guess my priorities are just shifted with the trip to Africa looming. Anyway I rode up to the top of Mt. Tam this morning to see if I could find some of the snow from yesterday's crazy weather. I found it right at the tippy top! There was barely a dusting but it was fun regardless.

It's full on summer down in South Africa right now... can't wait to feel the heat!

Today marks the "two weeks to go" day! I fly out on Wed the 14th - it is amazing how fast it is coming...

Training camp weekend

Team Lucky U.S.

So, to catch up... Tom and I got together for our first official "team" training camp last weekend. All in all it was a success and showed us that we should be very compatible for the race!


Poor Tom though - all season he has been subjected to me rubbing in our beautiful California weather, and he shows up to the wettest weekend we have had all year!


It was so bad that his flight Thursday night was delayed by over two hours....


Friday morning we awoke to "showers" which gave us some optimism for a decent ride. We suited up with all the appropriate layers of GoreTex and started out for one of my epic long hilly routes. I took him up past the Golden Gate Bridge, over the fire roads of the Marin Headlands to Tennessee Valley... and all seemed to be going pretty well. We were even complaining of being "too warm" with so many layers on. I guess that is a good thing to learn - don't complain about being too warm when it is threatening to rain, because, on the ridge above Muir Beach it started to pour. Being early in the ride we were still optimistic - saying things like, "at least the rain is at our backs". I took him on up Mt Tam all the way to East Peak where if we were close to home we would have quit. By the top it was blowing a full gale and the rain was coming down in sheets - again our optimism spoke up trying to get us to believe it was only cause we were on the top of the mountain and it would get better as we went down the other side. At our little rest stop at East Peak we cussed the timing of the rain and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the shelter of the public restrooms...

Bah humbug...

To finish up that first ride we dropped over the North side of Tam down towards Alpine Lake. Contrary to our hopes, getting off the peak didn't help the weather. We basically got to a point where we could at least turn our bikes in a homeward direction which lifted our spirits a bit - that old horse heading for the barn syndrome. It was more or less a slog home in the pouring cold rain - no more complaining of being too warm. In the end we got in just over 4hrs of riding out of the 5 planned. In Tom's estimation it counted for more like 8 hrs in terms of suffering.

Food for two - we did some experimenting with what we can tolerate for 5hrs of riding... the PB&J's were great!

Tom gearing up for day two with the hair dryer...

Day two of the camp again started out with "showers". Our optimism had turn to skeptisim and it was a little harder to motivate. Heading out the door we had every intention of getting in the planned 5hrs of riding. Heading down the bike path towards Mill Valley all seemed ok until we felt a few sprinkles, then drops, and then by the time we actually hit the trails at the base of Mt. Tam, full blown rain. At least on Friday we had the first hour or so rain free.... this was going to be tough. We even tried to entice ourselves further away from home - to make sure we got in the time - with thoughts of hot coffee drinks in Fairfax. It didn't work. In the end we gave up - or you could say gave in to Tom's reasoning that 3hrs in the cold rain = at least 5hrs in the sun. So, day two was just over 3hrs.

Sunday was the last chance for a redeeming ride... luckily it all went well! Funny how overcast, cloudy, cool weather is so beautiful just because it isn't raining. Look at the smile on Tom's face in this next pic - it says it all.

A happy ending...

Sunday was a truly epic day! We did an amazing loop up and over Tam a couple of times, past Pine Mountain, through Fairfax - we had fire roads, single track, pavement, climbs, descents - it was awesome.... Amazing was how much our spirits were lifted with the rain gone. "If it had only been like this all weekend!" was spoken several times an hour.... 5hrs and over 50 miles seemed to fly by. We hope it feels this good in Africa!!!

Stones Bike Shop

Dennis Stone has just put his classic cycling shop on the WWW and I thought I would share:

www.stonescyclery.com

Dennis has been a great help to me in setting up my cross bikes, outfitting for the Cape Epic, and for plain old good advice...

If you are looking for a pretty, classic, trophy bike - Stone's your man!

New Bike

Few things in life elicit as much joy as a new bicycle. No matter what your age, the feeling is almost universal when seeing your new bicycle for the first time. Be it Christmas morning under the tree (no matter that there was two feet of snow on the ground, you were still going to ride it around the block while your beaming parents looked on--they were beaming because they, too, knew the joy of receiving a bicycle) or when the mechanic at your local shop wheels your new steed out from behind the shop counter (with a smirk that seems to say this is a lot of bike--you'd better know how to ride it buddy or I'm taking it back). So it should come as no surprise that when I first laid eyes on my new bicycle I couldn't help feeling a bit nostalgic for the other (forgotten? never!) bicycles I have owned in the past. My first bike, a yellow Swinger from Woolworth, did not have XTR, disc brakes or carbon anything. But it made me happy to ride it around the block and to the pool. I was happy because I knew nothing else. I was happy because I was free. As of Friday, those feelings are back in all their carbon-fiber glory. My new Giant Anthem Advanced makes me smile on the outside. And on the inside. Not wanting to sound like a promo for Giant bikes I will simply say that this bike climbs like a hardtail, shifts like a dream and handles quite well for being so light. I took it to the local mountain on Saturday (Tiger Mtn) to test its climbing prowess on the steep (and at times unforgiving) fireroad climbs. I don't ever remember feeling this good on the climbs. Now I will be the first to admit that perhaps the joy of the new bike overshadowed the pain that otherwise plagues me on the ascents or perhaps I am simply in a better state of fitness due to the impending trip to south Africa (47 days but who's counting. Actually I am.) No matter. At 23.7lbs (without pedals) this bike is a rocket ship. The acceleration is crazy fast. But you know what they say, bikes aren't fast, the rider is fast. So hopefully I won't disappoint the Anthem by letting my speed prevent her from realizing her maximum potential. Otherwise, I'm afraid she'll call the shop and ask to go back.

January training update

Race countdown: 47 Days, 8 Hrs

Another month of training is now behind us. My totals for January are a bit more than for December... but I have a feeling (from what I have already done) that February is going to be a LOT bigger...
Here is Jan:
Week of 1/1 - 15:37hrs, 182 miles
1/8 - 14:47, 169 miles
1/15 - 10:52, 120 miles (boat show week - too much work!)
1/22 - 20:54, 263 miles (this was a big week!!)
1/29-31st - 6:04, 81 miles

Total for January - 68:16 hours, 815 miles
Total (to date) since the start of the Cape Epic Training Plan (started 12/4/06) - 116:01 hours, 1461 miles.

Look for another interesting update at the end of February.
Scott, my coach from Wenzel Coaching, has me scheduled to be doing back to back 7hr rides towards the end of the month... An excerpt from my training plan, "To succeed at stage racing you need to not only be able to complete the distance of each stage riding strongly, you need to be able to do it with little enough fatigue that you can continue to ride strongly day after day, with only one night for recovery between races. Since you’ll also be doing all your moving and setting up housekeeping in a new venue each evening, recovery opportunities are really minimal. That means that rather than just getting to the point where you can do the daily distances, you would ideally get to a point that the daily distances feel pretty trivial. That is unlikely to occur, so the next best is simply doing as much endurance time as you can to build the biggest base possible."

I really like the part about the daily distances feeling "trivial"... Somehow I agree that this is not likely to happen!