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.