Tickling the VO2

The Tour of California finished about forty miles from my house today, so Wes and I rode there to check it out. I'm finally starting to do some LT (hard) workouts. So on the way, I hammered up the Mulholland Hwy, one of the many canyons that splits off of the Pacific Coast Hwy. The finish of the race was in the town of Thousand Oaks at the Amgen headquarters. I was completely blown away by the number of spectators that showed up for the finish. There were hundreds. It kinda sucked, because I wasn't even able to see the race there were so many people in my way.

I didn't hang out at the race for very long and made my way back to the PCH so that I could hit up one more climb. While I've been living in California, I've been putting this climb off (Deer Creek Road) until I started LT... Today my time finally came. The climb was awesome, incredibly steep for about 12-15 minutes. I pinned it for about 10 minutes, tickling the VO2 a little, but that's all I had since I was around five hours into my ride... and I'm not too used to the lactic acid yet.

When I got to the top I took a picture of myself with the ocean in the background... I figure there's rarely a picture of me up here, so you can print it out and stick it to the ceiling above your bed... or put it in your garage and throw darts at it... it's up to you.

Tomorrow I'll be doing another local crit in Ontario (east LA). There's $1000 purse for pro 1/2, so hopefully I can get my hands on some of that.

It's supposed to rain on Monday and Tuesday... Bummer. I haven't seen rain in probably like 4 or 5 months... I'm actually a little excited, I hope it storms hard!

In my last post I was talking about old friends contacting me... well another friend of mine from Jr. High e-mailed me yesterday... Dan Wold!! Wow, that was a major surprise. I haven't spoken to him in like six or more years. He's actually the one who got me into mountain biking. He and I used to bomb our Trek 820s down some sick, crazy shit!! We beat the shit out of those things.

Daily Routine

Well, since I’ve begun my pseudo road trip/adventure, my lifestyle has changed quite a bit. Yes, I love it, but it is so incredibly different than what I’m used to. My life before was a constantly busy… and I had multiple things (school, girlfriend, social life) in my life other than cycling that were close to equally as important. Now, I eat, sleep, breathe and live cycling… and there’s not a whole lot else but that. Typical day: wake up, drink water, coffee, shit, eat, chamois, ride, shower, eat, stretch/therapy, relax, bed. I’m still trying to adapt to this new lifestyle, but I gotta say, I think I kinda miss being stressed out all the time from school… it took my mind off all the other little stressors associated with racing.

I spoke to a friend of mine from high school the other day that I haven't heard from in a few years. Outa the blue she called me while I was at Valley of the Sun. I love it when old friends make contact after so many years… nostalgia’s a great feeling. We’ve been talking a bit still since then too on this new website I signed up for called myspace.com.

I haven’t spoken to my Boulder hommies in a while… hope all is well and it’s not snowing too much up there.

Everyone should be watching the Tour of California tonight and the next few nights on ESPN2. This is the biggest cycling event in the US that I remember ever occurring… so check it out!!!

Bike racing on TV!!

The final stage of Valley of the Sun went great for my team. We took the majority of the primes and Wes took third. I actually won a $100 prime due to some amazing teamwork. On the final prime lap, three of us were on the front just pinning it and the third guy back (Eneas) let a gap open between Dustin and I so we rode away from the field and took it.

Blickem still held onto his third place in GC... so all in all it was a very succesful first race for the team.

Since the race, I've started my recovery week, so I haven't been doing a whole lot of riding. We met our team mechanic (Eric Jellum) out at the race and were greeted with all of our new GT bikes, including the TT bikes. The bikes are awesome, I can't wait to race on them. Every day since we've gotten back to Oxnard, Jellum's been working from sunrise to sunset getting all the bikes and everything else dialed and ready to race. It's a new concept having someone else work on my bike after being my own mechanic for so many years... it's gonna be nice.

Stage two of the Tour of California is on ESPN tonight... I'm psyched! I tried to go the whole day without hearing the outcome, but that's pretty much impossible when your in a house of seven cyclists. It's a little tough to watch and read the coverage of the race, knowing how close my team was to being in it... suposedly we were on the bubble with another team... but they got it. I heard that the entire Mexican national team dropped out today... hmmmm, now that was a good choice by whoever was selecting teams for that race.

Alright, back to Olympic figure skating.

Racin'!!

I'm back in the hotel room again watching the Olympics... this time with a couple of races in my legs, and a fat burrito in my belly.

The TT yesterday didn't go too well, but I didn't really expect a result without any real TT equipment. My teammate Ryan Blickem got third, 40 seconds down from the winner. Today was the road race, it was a pretty flat course with a small 3% grade climb near the finish. A couple guys got off the front early in the race and opened up a five minute gap with no teams really making an effort to chase it down. By the last lap, their lead was down to only a few minutes, so my team and I got on the front and crushed the pace until we pretty much popped ourselves. We finally caught the break by the finish line, but we were late by a few seconds and one of the two guys in the break ended up taking the win. There were no changes in GC, and Blickem kept his third place position.

Tomorrow's the crit, which looks to be a bit technical, so that should be pretty fun. After that, we'll be driving into the night back to Oxnard.

Waiting patiently

I'm back in Arizona, anticipating the start of the time trial of Valley of the Sun. I start around 3:30, so I'm just sitting around in the hotel room watching tv and surfing the net right now. Not my favorite way to spend the day, it's too bad that we can't just race early and get it over with.

I threw on the aerobars this morning, that's the extent of my TT equipment right now. Hopefully I'll be able to use a TT bike at some point this season. I'm looking forward to racing though, especially the Road Race tomorrow.

It looks like there's a fairly strong field. I think our team has a good chance to do well. We have the defending champion, Ryan Blickem, who will likely be our GC guy. And, Alejandro Acton, our top sprinter, will likely do well in the Road Race and crit.

California Climbing

After a couple days of bad legs, they finally came around today. I did another big ride, up into the mountains of Cali. I think the route I did was actually part of one of the stages of the Tour of California... Only the other direction. There were some spectacular views today, but I didn't carry my camera for lack of jersey pocket space. I climbed for probably about two and a half hours on this road and climbed about 5100 feet. The weather was beautiful, as ussual, mid-70s and sunny. I got incredibly dehydrated because there was nowhere to fill up water the entire time. Luckily I ran into this weekend warrior with his aerobar equipped bike who was carrying a gallon of water in his backpack. He gave me about 16 ounces, which was enough to get me about 40 miles back to the nearest gas station.

My current home is slowly filling up with more and more teammates. Alejandro Acton, the Argentinean sprinter just showed up a couple days ago. He doesn't speak very much English, so I've been trying to brush up on my Spanish. I took 3 semesters of Spanish at CU, but I've never had a real opportunity to actually use it outside the classroom.

In the last week my team has decided to send a crew out to the Valley of the Sun stage race in phoenix, AZ. The race starts on Friday with a time trial. I think Saturday is a road race and Sunday is a crit. This will be a good tune-up for Vuelta Sonora, which will start a week later. Wow, I can't believe that the race season is already starting... Crazy!

Stuff that breaks sucks.

The posts have been scarce lately.... and I have many excuses for that, the main excuse being that my laptop is broken. I woke up a few days ago and it wouldn't start... damn that sucks! Well, I spent an entire day trying to figure out how to fix the darn thing, and I eventually found a somewhat invasive fix that entails pulling the hard-drive out and hooking it up to another computer to get my personal files off. After that, I'll format and reinstall windows. What a bitch! Oh well, I actually kinda enjoy doing that kind of stuff, so alright!

Today I went out with the Hulk (teammate Dan Greenfield) and busted out about four hours of tempo. The ride totaled 6:45 and 126 miles. I'm in the transition phase of training right now, so every other day I'm essentially going long and hard.

Dan and I both ran into some mechanical problems along the way today. He had a couple flats, and my derailleur cable broke when we were in Santa Monica... which was pretty far from Oxnard (where we're staying). We searched around for awhile and decided that a coffee shop would be a good place to ask for directions to the nearest shop. The first person I saw as we approached the coffee shop looked kinda like a cyclist... you know, skinny, strange tan lines, bike t-shirt. We got to talking and I knew I recognized him from somewhere, and then it stuck me that he was David Zabriske from CSC, and it was. I thought that was pretty bizarre that of all the normal people we could have asked for directions in that town we bumped into one of the best American bike racers in the world. After that we found the shop and the guy working was super cool and hooked us up with a free cable and some energy food. After that whole fiasco, we got back on our way and pinned it for the rest of the ride. The roads are amazing here... the climbs are spectacular.

The owner of our team has been out here for the past few days and decided that it was time to purchase the new team vehicle. We got an Audi A6... Damn that car moves!! I've never driven a fast car in my life until this one... even compared to Old Reliable.

Well I hope I fix my computer by tomorrow, I'll try to get some more pics up when I do that.

Happy rides!

California Love

I'm in California now, and I love it! I can't believe that I've spent so much of my life without the ocean.... it's so incredibly beautiful. And what's even better, is that right up next to the ocean there are some pretty large mountains. The house that my team is staying is great... it's about a block from the beach and about five miles from the PCH and the mountains.

The scenery is spectacular here. Today I rode down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway or Hwy 1). The road follows right alongside the coast, it's very pretty, a nice shoulder, and not too much traffic. I turned off the PCH pretty early to head up into the hills... amazing roads!


The first thing I did when I arrived last night was go to the beach and take off my shoes to walk barefoot in the sand and the ocean water.

We tried to get a picture of the sunset, but I think we were about 20 minutes late.
My Beach and my neighborhood.

The ocean and mountains.... What else could you ask for?

Strawberry fields