cycling rocks

… 45 minutes on the mountain bike. I hadn’t ridden in toe clips before, so naturally I took a spill along the trail that was no wider than my shoulders. I’d really like a mtn bike to tool around on when I’m not riding road. It will surely help with bike handling.

Cyclocross?

Hmmmm. I was thinking the same thing. I could get by on one of those. Woot! But will it get me thru a 10 foot drop off the jump? Off the roof?

Yeah.

Again. No relevent pics to share, so here’s me eating a very, very hot wing at Michael’s house.

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Tanked on this one. Ran outta gas at the 45 mile mark. Felt like the last half was a climb up Larch Mtn. Geez. Hillsboro was fine. Fast. But it was pretty windy in King City by the time I got there. Slow. This was supposed to be a seventy miler. Nearly got 60 miles in. I gotta eat better a couple days prior. And get a good night’s rest. Here’s to better days. Live. Learn.

58.47 miles; 15.5 mph ave; 4,098 ft elevation gain; 143 bpm ave.

Signed up for the Spring Century on June 3rd. The group from bike forums will join me for this and it will serve as “practice” for STP. This means a hard, fast paceline to finish in five hours. Careful preparation will make this so. I don’t want to feel like I did today. No way. As Tom would say. “We’ll be crushing souls and leaving them behind in our wake.”

As an aside, here’s a wildly different kind of roller. E-motion Rollers. Watch the vids. You can’t do this on regular rollers. Of course, now I want one. I call it the Burrito Ultimo Enchilado Style of indoor trainers.

Have a great holiday weekend. I’m off to the river for four days of beer. And fishing I guess. Naw, beer. Wait. Fishing. Well. Both!!!

I don’t have any of my pictures to share. So here’s some grapefruit art I stole from a guy named Garrett.

Perfect day for a ride everyone. It had threatened to rain, alas not a drop was spilled from the Oregon skies. Having an easy pace helped to have plenty of gas in the tank all the way to end 102 miles away in Pacific City. Heck, I could have ridden for a couple more hours. It felt great. Awesome.

I love that it took less effort to power up the hills than how I felt seven months ago at Livestrong (my first century). What a difference these last five months of training have made. The racing had been a great learning experience too since it has taught me so much about what it’s like to be fast and keep tempo. It all made this moderate pace today highly rewarding (and a welcomed break from HAVING to go fast).

I had premixed my two bottles of Hammergel and powders last night and even went as far as weighing the contents on the scale to perfect the caloric requirements for the day. For those who care, a guy my size at 154 pound can assimilate 225-280 calories an hour, meaning it doesn’t pay to take in any more than that. You’re body ends up spending to much work digesting, instead of sending that much needed blood to your legs where all the work is being done. I calculated that I needed to mix in 1,500 calories worth.

One thing’s for sure. If you commit to a liquid diet for an event, stick to the plan, Stan. In Grand Ronde 75 miles into the ride, lunch smelled so good that I innocently ate a boiled egg and a small bowl of chicken noodle soup. Well, that put solid food calories in my tummy AND exceeded my recommended caloric requirements for that hour. As a result, I had some gastric distress for miles after leaving Grand Ronde. Man Alive!

I thought I blew it. I felt horrible and couldn’t spin my legs no matter how hard I tried. There was a major loss of power. No wonder the guys at Hammer don’t want you mixing different foods while taking supplements. Luckily, after about forty minutes my stomach finished processing that food and I was back in business. I took another swig of water and a little gel and rode tempo into the wind. I need that rush of speed to end the day.

Props to my buddy Mike who had a successful first century. He worked really hard to make it to the end and he did it. Congrats my man! Tom and his group rode a phenom 18.6 ave mph. Good grief? Yup.

What else? Oh. Stats! See the GPS download here. If you don’t feel like wading thru the data, here’s the pertinent info. 102.02 miles; 15.5 ave mph; 6,780 ft of elevation gain; HR max 167, 132 ave.

p.s. I woke up extra early to ride the 9 miles to the start line. Perfect warmup to start the day.

It had been almost two weeks since being on the bike. Wednesday’s workout was one of ease. Ease into it. It was hard to take it easy. I wanted to go fast. By Thursday’s workout, I really wanted to go faster. I did some hill climbing at LT and for 23.5 miles. Net elevation gain was 2,422f ft at a 16.5 average. I managed to hit 45 mph on the descent down Terwilliger.

It felt good.

I’ll have plenty of legs for Saturday’s Reach the Beach. We’ll be taking it at a decent pace of 16 mph total. Totally doable. I’m interested to see how much legs I’ll have at around mile 85. My last century was brutal for me at that time. I want to see if I can pick it up the last fifteen miles. We’ll see. It’ll be interesting with the overcast weather. I bet it’s going to be wet, but that’s okay. Bring it.