roadcx.net

While Andrea was off digging ditches, I tackled the garage.

I ended up replacing the cardboard surface on our bike workbench with sheet PVC (shower stall liner).  It isn’t very thick, so I doubled it up and duct taped it down.  I also bought a set of bin organizers on a track.  It allowed me to get some more stuff off the workbench.   I left it as a big pile of tools (we will sort them into tool boxes soon).  As much as I would like to hang up everything, we need to pack up many of them for race or riding weekends away from home.  (Which if you keep up is most weekends for us).

New work surface

All the random stuff I moved to resurface the bench.

More or less the finished product.  Need to do some more sorting/putting up yet.

I would like to say that I keep the work area 5-S squared away.  In reality, it is a hobby and Andrea and I often have to make a repair in a hurry.  We both have different ideas about where each tool should go or don’t always put it up to even that place.  Since that is a big fail, I at least like to keep the floor clean, I use a shop vac.  Very often a small part will leap out of your hands and it will hard to find if there are bunch of cable ends and dirt clods all over.  With mountain bikes and CX bikes involved, that can be harder than it sounds.  (Also space is tight since, at this point, we do keep both our cars in the garage and fit bikes, wheels, and the work area around them.)

After last weekend performance at Cuba/Meridian, it was time to close the book on the 2010 road season.  I had some okay results, helped the team in a big way at a few races, and had a good time along the way.  I was running about 5 to 8 pounds heavier year-over-year compared to my 2009.  Between that and the training interruptions, I think it was a fair season.

So, it is time to pull back to start the ramp up to cyclocross.  The week started out by not doing anything… I took a day off on Monday to recover from the weekend.  Tuesday evening, I planned an hour run while Andrea had an hour moderate/easy mtb ride.  So we hit the Farms and both did our own thing.  I ended up getting about 6.5 miles running most of the way.  I had a feeling that I would pay for that later…  I would (I haven’t run > 5 miles in more than a year, maybe 2?).

Wednesday, we took the dogs to Shelby Farms for a little running around time (there is an off-leash area at the park).  Thursday, I went out for a little run with our Belgian Malinois.  It was a short run indeed, about 1.5 miles out, my knee started to hurt, so I walked and ran back towards the house.  About a mile out, I took off my shoes and ran back barefoot the rest of the way (mostly smooth sidewalk and not-as-smooth asphalt is around our house).  That ended up working better.

Tonight, I joined a local health club to start the other prong of my off-season assault… weight training.  This is something else that I have foregone since the winter before last, so my first session this evening was high rep and low weight.  I plan to go in pretty often for short sessions at first to get back in the swing of  things.  The gym is only a 1/2 mile from the house, so I can run (or walk) to/from.  Unfortunately the route there is sort of busy road/ no-shoulder.  It’s Memphis, so what else do you expect?

At this point, I haven’t ridden a bike since the road race on Sunday.  I may join Andrea and ride out moderately at Trinity tomorrow AM.  I did that last Saturday (morning before my race), the group was pretty feisty.  The group ride riders have hit peak form at the end of the season.  It always happens as we are ripping down Lenow Rd at 25+ mph.

I plan to keep incorporating running and weight training as I start to do some CX play riding / slow speed barrier drills (technique focused).  My 2010 road season was underperform (compared to 2009), I plan to make 2010-11 CX better than my 2009-10 CX season.

Andrea rewrapped the handlebars on my Ridley CrossBow (my “B” bike).  Now I have blue tape on my blue bike and red tape on my red bike (Ridley X-Fire).

On other notes, I am playing around trying to get Google AdSense to work on the sidebar.  It may not last long, but I am curious about it.  I plan to keep it out of the way and may take it out completely if it is too intrusive.

I also re-upped with AT&T and got an iPhone 4.  It doesn’t work well in my house, but neither did my iPhone 3G.  I have to put it by certain windows to get a good signal (and we live in a pretty built up / dense population area).  At work (in NE Memphis), I have no problems whatsoever even in metal buildings, etc.

I wondered how things would go after not riding my road bike for a while before late in the week.  I found out pretty quickly.

The crit started out pretty fast and stayed reasonably fast the whole time (as usual).  My legs took a while to wake up and I paid for it.  Ended up struggling to move up and finished in the back of the pack.  In general, it wasn’t a good race for us expect that Travis Sherman (who was guest riding with us) was in the break and got a 4th.  For several guys on the team, it was their first 1/2/3 race, and in general it was good to see the future of M-B team out there mixing it up.

On Saturday night, a bunch of us stayed at a the course as a guest of one of the promoters of the race.  Very nice indeed.  The location is pretty rural and we finished the evening out shooting off some tracer rounds on the shooting range (interesting since I am not normally a gun guy).

The next morning, we woke up and ate breakfast with the race registration right outside the house we were staying in (very convenient).  The road race went better for us as a team.  The race was a 1/2/3 race but the 3′s were scored separately and we had our our purse.

From the start, we were pretty much always with 2-3 of us near the front of the race.  We had a total of 6+1 (5 cat 3′s, 1 cat2, and one cat 2? guest rider).  Johnny Mac rolled off with the first break of the day from mile 2 or 3 (it seemed) and they dangled off the front for a while as we tried to keep things in order up front.  Eventually they rolled further out and out of sight by the end of the first lap.  Okay, things were looking good.

Attacks continued for a while, but they were normally short lived.  Most of the way though the 2nd lap, Travis (guest riding) jumped on a move that included the eventual race winner (Toone).  They move out quickly and out of site.  Even better.   At this point, I was thinking that there was another break to be had and was preparing to join it (or start it) at some point in the 3rd (and final) lap.

About 1/2 way through the 3rd lap, JMac came back.  Crap.  Okay we still have Travis up the road…  5 miles later, there comes Travis.  Not good.  So when in doubt, I attack.  I didn’t have much, but I was able to move up the grade a little bit.  A minute later, a few came up including Robbie (my teammate).  We sort of worked together for a while before things started to fall apart.  I wanted to keep things going and quickly found myself out there by myself again.  After a minute or so, I was joined by Frank Moak (Herring).  I thought that could work since he can motor along, but it was short lived as we were joined by the field.  Groupo Compacto with 3-4 miles to go.

Going into the final mile or so, John King, Ben Knoernschild, and myself were at the front of the field, with Robby Holdich and Scott Newberry not too far back.  Scott launched with a mile – 1.5 mile to go and Ben joined him with John and I holding pat watching for a reaction.  The reaction came and I followed a rider as he wound it up dropping me off with 300m to go or so.  At this point, I couldn’t do much but sprint early, and lead out whatever was behind.  That didn’t last long, but at least Robby finished it out with a Cat 3 win and Ben held on for a 2nd.  Result.

So with that, my road season is done.  It was  good weekend and I had a lot of fun and was glad to see the nouveaux Cat3′s in action.  It is going to be a good year next year for M-B.

Time to step back and then wind up for cyclocross.  I haven’t typed up a calender, but it will really start to hot up for Louisville (Oct 23/24), Memphis (Oct 30/31), McEwen (Nov 6/7) and Outdoors (Nov 14).  Time to glue the tubulars!

The day after Ore to Shore, Andrea and I wanted to ride some of the South Marquette trails.  Our legs were still sore, but we rode part of the trails out my mom’s house starting with the north part of the blue trail and then hooked into the gorge-ous trail to the carp trail up the back of Mt. Marquette.   We descended one of the overgrown downhill runs back to the highway.  After that, we climbed up Benson’s grade and took the “free ride” Flow trail back down.  The Gorge-ous trail features some impressive bench trail along the Carp river..  one wrong move, and you will slide down a bit (until hitting a tree).  The “free ride” trail was just a nice technical descent, our full suspension cross-country bikes were fine (a hard tail would be fine also).  That ride didn’t take us long (as planned — Andrea is trying to cut volume back this week).

That afternoon, we packed up and headed down to my hometown of Midland, MI to see my dad for a few days.  I hadn’t ridden the trails in the area since I was in high school (with a period rigid MTB), so I didn’t remember much.  The internet shows two places to ride, City Forest (a short ride from my dad’s) and Pine Haven (beyond Sanford Lake).

City Forest was a surprisingly good ride (remember the wide sandy ski trails from my HS days).  There is about 12 miles of singletrack (albeit with little to no elevation) twisting and twisting through the pine trees.  The challenge is to try to lay off the breaks which is tough since it so easy to pick up speed and the turns are so sharp.  I tagged two trees trying to push it (mostly as I 2-wheel drifted I would fall over into the tree on the inside).  Both were sore shoulder and soft sand landings.

The next day we headed out to Pine Haven to ride the shorter trail.  It is similar to City Forest, but includes some (short) steep climbs and some tight switchbacks early on, but most of it looks the same.  We rode the MTB loop at Pine Haven and then rode out the skating loop (think 2-track wide) to the point were the Stubway connector trail under US10 expressway.  The trail goes under the east bound lanes and then rides through the middle for a while before crossing the west bound lanes.  At this point, we turned around because of time limitations, but there is a whole mess of trails north (also accessible from Burns road).  We didn’t ride them, but the connector trail was a nice change (up and down and rooty).

Under the W.B. US-10 bridge before deciding that a 3-4 hour epic was not something on the training plan for the day.

At this point, we are making the 800 mile drive back to Memphis.  We both are racing this weekend (Andrea – Fool’s Good in Ga. / me – Cuba-Meridian in Ms./Ala.).  Have two days at work in there somewhere as well.  Probably take both days to catch up after being off for a 1.5 weeks.

The trip took us some 2500 miles starting in Memphis to Fond du Lac to Copper Harbor to Marquette to Midland and back to Memphis.  Since I am bored in the passenger seat, here is a nice map…

After leaving Copper Harbor we hit the Michigan Tech trails (my engineering degrees are from there) on the way to my mom’s house in Marquette, Michigan.  Andrea already blogged our ride, so here it is.

On Friday, we rested and went on the Cleveland Cliffs Iron mine tour.  Sort of long, but they have some pretty cool equipment.  Sorry, no photos are allowed, so you will have to just imagine a pit a mile across and 900 feet deep.  The processing plant is all about large rotating equipment and iron ore dust everywhere.  After the tour, we did a bit of a tune up ride and along the way stopped by the Ore to Shore registration.

On the race morning, we got there early (around 8:20a or so) for a 9:45a start.  People already were putting bikes down in the start grid (except those with a preferred start at the front.  We setup in the 2:50 or under group (expected time) and then walked around to warm up (since we didn’t bring another bike).

The start was fairly fast, but not too bad.  I sort of laid up a little to make sure that Andrea was making good progress (first two miles are generally uphill and on pavement).  Once we hit the trail, we separated and I avoided a few crashes (most were guys lying in a puddle or hung up in the sand).  I continued on and then thought I should wait for Andrea.  Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did.  About 40 people passed as I slowed up and then stopped for a minute.  Once she passed, I caught up and then I lost her again.  At this point, I decided to hammer and improve my placing. I repassed everyone that I let go by the Misery Hill feature (loose rock powerline climb).

After this point, it was taking longer and longer to bridge up to the next group, but I continued to pass people until maybe 5 miles to go. I had my only “crash” of the day which wasn’t a real crash, just a near miss.  I dove into a steep sand pit (I took the wrong line) and had to suddenly stop to avoid the endo.

Along the way, I ended up working with one guy for a while (one of the photos below is us at the finish line).  He ended up missing a turn and finished a minute or so after me.  By the end of the race, I was spent, my arms were getting weak and I was ready to be done on the last mile or so of pavement to Lakeside Arena.  Towards the end we started to overtake some of the back markers on the Soft Rock (28 mile version that started 45 minutes before ours).  So I wasn’t getting bested by someone’s grandma…

In the end I finished 1 second over 2:55 for 86th place.  I probably wasted 5 minutes with waiting for Andrea (and about 40 places), but I certainly didn’t have anything left after my efforts the last 40 miles.  I don’t have power data, but almost 60% of my race was in the threshold heart rate zone.

My mom took some photos at the start and the finish.  She was out on course, bu didn’t get a chance to take any photos.

The second day in Fond du Lac, WI, we headed out on the road not knowing what the trails would be like after the overnight rain.  Since I knew it and it is a nice rolling course, we headed down to Greenbush to do the ToAD loop as a start.  Along the way, we stopped at the trailhead and found the trails to be in great shape.  The overnight rain turned the dusty trails tacky (meaning fast), but we had moist rocks to deal with so it was not a good plan to get up going too fast.  We rode most of the those trails and completed the Greenbush RR loop back to the car.

That after my brother came back from a morning fishing out on Lake Winnebago.  We decided to go out with him in the mid-day heat.  We ended up pulling in quite a bit of Perch, a few bass, and a healthy amount of Sheephead (not keepers).

The next morning, we drove north 5 hours or so to Copper Harbor (hitting the Lena cheese shop and Dobber’s in Iron Mtn for Pasties).  It was almost 6 before we got settled in after comparison shopping about every hotel in town (after rejecting camping at the overpriced state and private campgrounds).   We headed out on US41 to the end (or the beginning as the sign indicates).  Past the end of the pavement, gravel roads beckoned….  We headed out along the GPS track (past many forks) until we thought we need to turn off or turn around (the sun was getting lower and lower).  I thought it would be more interesting to make a loop, so we started to follow the loop around…   All was cool until the wide and open road in front of us went straight, but the GPS track went hard left into an overgrown double track.  Since the wide open road went away from town, we opted to go into the overgrown trail.  It was slower going, but in the end, we ended up popping out on a open gravel road (as shown, sort of) and back to the main gravel road back to US41.

After an overpriced dinner (Mariner North), we settled in for the night.  It has been relatively hot up in the copper country and most of the hotels (ours included) don’t bother with A/C.

The next morning, it was threatening rain.   We went down the street for breakfast and wondered what we should do… ride now or wait it out.  Andrea and I decided to head out and bail out on one of the many road crossings if it started to rain.  Our ride plan was to ride the IMBA epic ride from start to finish.  Andrea only wanted to ride about 2 hours, so she might have had to bail out if it was running long.

First of all, the trails at Copper Harbor are an excellent mix of flowy, rocky, and down right frightening.  Most of the trail is fairly moderate, but the red trail is particularly tricky at time and includes two notable bridges (well marked).  We opted out from riding them not wanting to get hurt coming into the race weekend (Ore to Shore this weekend).  We made one wrong turn and cut off some of it near the end, at ended up back in town under 2 hours.

Wanting a little more riding and with the rain seeming more imminent, I decided to climb Brockway Mountain.  I have been up there in the car many times, but I never noticed how steep it was in parts.  Most of the climb is 5-8% when going up, but there are a few sections at 15% with an early 21% pitch right out of the first switchback.  The climb is broken up by a few reprives where the road heads back down before heading back up again.  This meant that on the return trip, it wasn’t a freeride…it requires a bit of pedaling to get back over these reversals.

Since we were done riding for the day, we decided to play tourist some.  We toured the nearby Delaware Mine which is quite a bit more interesting as a self guided tour (and longer) than went I went the last time probably over 20 years ago.  We drove around, bought some jam at the Jam Pot (monks selling jam and bakery near Eagle River), and looked around the houses they fixed up in the ghost town of Central Mine.   After dinner of some lake whitefish and trout, we rode out to a trail head and walked out to the lake front.  The overcast sky made it pretty cold and not so scenic, so we headed in before the sun went down.

The plan for tomorrow is get up and head down to Houghton to ride the Tech trails some and then head to Marquette where my mom lives.  The Ore to Shore race is on Saturday.

Started the day off yesterday driving the 700+ miles from Memphis to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to visit my brother’s house.  This is the first leg of the trip that will take us around to the U.P. of Michigan and back through downstate (my hometown of Midland).

When we arrive, my brother and wife were having a barbecue / party with friends over.  Good start for the trip.  We woke up this morning a little late to a bit of rain..  It passed and we waited a while for the trails to dry before heading out.  Our ride took us to a confusing and short trail system called Kiekhaefer.  The trails loop back on to themselves and sudden go from MTB Ok to No MTB without warning.  Some of the trail was wide open mowed field, some tight singletrack, and some grassy trail.  After giving up on those trails, we hit the road for some windy riding out in the open rolling farmland.

Once we got back, we ate and then started fishing on the channel behind his house.  Mostly we caught small bluegills or bass, but we caught some other ones as well.  The biggest one I got was pretty much right away and it seemed to go downhill for me after that.  Andrea and Kris (my brother) did better later on.

After concluding my business in Huai’an, I came back to Shanghai.  I was left with a free day and a half in Shanghai.  The photos include the Jingan Temple (Buddhist), the Shanghai Expo (only got through Singapore, India, and Estonia.  It was very hot and very crowded when I went…so after 4 hours I left), and some scenes near People’s Park.   It was a good trip, but it is always good to be back home.

I have just spent my second night in Huai’an, Jiangsu, China.  The hotel I am staying is nice, but it seems over done for the amount of people that stay here.  My room is similar in size a 1 BR downtown apartment I had in Chattanooga.  Unfortunately, the hotel is out from everything surrounded by a few ministerial type buildings, some sort of slummy type houses, a few under construction high rises, and a large park.  Anyway, I have been pretty busy, but here are some photos I took from a walk in the park and out the wind of the car driving around town.  This town is rapidly changing and they replacing old style housing with high-rise apartments.  I can even notice a change in only 3-4 months (my last visit).