My other blog has a new privacy setting. I gave plenty of warning, but if you want to have access to it, please send me your name and your WordPress user name (you have to sign up for a wordpress account–it’s not that hard).
Training is going great. I just finished a block of three weeks in the low 20 hour range and still feel pretty good. I’m taking a rest week starting today.
I’ve been looking over my power files from last year’s Shootouts and comparing them to the past two Shootouts I’ve done this winter. The data looks good. (By the way, the Shootout is a hard, race-pace ride that leaves from downtown Tucson every Saturday morning at 7:30. Depending on the time of year, there are a lot of pros that come on the ride, which can swell up to 150 riders some days. It’s a good ride to see where your fitness is and work on the upper end, although too much of this sort of thing can be detrimental this early in the season). Anyways, this year both times I’ve done the Shootout I’ve had more power than last year in all power ranges and more time spent in all of my upper power zones. I think one main reason for this is that I’m coming into Saturday (the Shootout day) more rested than last year–when I was doing a hard ride the day before the Shootout. Now I arrange a three-day block starting on Saturday going through Monday, which I think is working better since the high quality day comes first. But the even better news is that last year at this time I had been riding 20+ hours most weeks since the beginning of November (too early, Stupid!). This year, I kept it cool all the way through mid December, riding 10-16 hours a week. So I’m happy to see that I have more power already, even with less ”fitness” in me. Boo yeah. Now the hard part: gradually digging a hole that I can get out of every couple weeks. Lots of riding, lots of rest, lots of food. Seems simple enough…
I’m training down in Tucson with my teammate Chris Daifuku for the winter. We’ve been here a little over a week and have gotten a lot of miles in already. The weather’s great and we’re both very motivated. I’m looking forward to the 2010 season. Other than riding somewhere between 15 and 20 something hours a week, I’ve been doing yoga, stretching, and eating lots of organic fruits and vegetables. I also enjoy eating Nutella and espressos.
Sean and I drove up to Seattle on Friday to stay with a teammate, Chris Wingfield, over the weekend. We did some good rides with the team while we were there, but let’s not get distracted from what’s important: the food. In traditional US culture, it’s acceptable for a man to cry during four events in his life. These include the birth of a child (where his wife expects him to cry but he won’t), the death of a loved one, when he stubs his toe really extremely badly on a hard corner of the wall, and lastly: when he sees a kitchen with three kinds of pie, a full fridge, and a bowl of chocolate candy that’s always filled. The later happened this weekend. Sean was still recovering from his seven pound feast from Thanksgiving, so I had to do the heavy lifting on Friday night. But by Saturday, he was fully recovered and helped me devour pie, cookies, turkey, about 23 pounds of berries, pasta, steak, and much, much more. We rode our bikes a few times to make room for the food.
Tucson countdown is less than two weeks.
I met Jacob and Jim out in Beaverton yesterday morning in what I was pretty sure was just a small patch of rain that would most likely go away before we started riding. We drove out to Troutdale to do a 75 mile loop up at Bull Run/Sandy, and the rain hadn’t stopped yet. It never really did. For the majority of the ride, it was that really fine misting rain, which I think gets you wetter than big drop rain does. Mist rain comes straight at your face even if there’s no wind, where big drop rain sometimes just comes straight down. Didn’t matter though, we all kept pretty warm. As we got out of the car and to get our bikes ready, Austin pulled up right next to us so we all started out together for the first hour.
The three of us did about four hours before I got a flat tire one kilometer away from the car. Jacob and Jim rode the rest of the way and picked me up in the car 10 minutes later, bragging about the extra fitness they had from that one last kilometer. Little did they know I had been doing jumping jacks while waiting.
