Things are darkest before the light

My racing career in St Louis started with me racing still for a team out of Champaign IL called Wild Card Cycling. It is a great group of mostly older guys who just LOVE to ride. It is headed by a great guy named Karl Crapse, who loves to ride his very cool looking bikes. I believe his goal was to have a very good racing team as well as a place for anyone who wants to ride to go. This group taught me a TON about riding, they took me in and showed me the ropes. They kept my desire high when I was just coming back into being an athlete. It was less than a year after joining this group of guys that I decided to move to the STL. It was a move that I had to make as there was really no advancement for me in Champaign, and no way for me to make more money which I really needed.
When I got to St Louis I looked for a team like the one that I came from. A group of guys willing to let me into their group, teach me what they knew, and race with me. It was much harder than it sounded. Any group that I was going to join I was going to just be "another rider" in a large group of people. I would just be pack fodder. After going on a bunch of rides with guys and paying attention to how people acted I decided I would do my own thing. I called Karl and asked him if he minded if I started a WC chapter down in St Louis. He was very cool with it and so began Wild Card Cycling STL. I brought in a friend of mine from college who pointed me in the direction of a parent and the gym I coach at. He would become one of my best friends and a mentor to me and my cycling "career". Mike Rickey was a great Cat 2 racer back in the mid 90's who quit his racing to start a career in systems engineering and have an awesome family who's 4 kids are btw great gymnasts on my team. I was enamored with the fact that he had a few times been in races with LA. He was my hero :-) I talked Mike into coming back into racing, which wasn't hard, and we started training together.
Mike taught me everything he knew, which was A LOT. He is also very open to new techniques and equipment.We were only a 2 man team but we KICKED ASS, or Mike kicked ass and I did a lot of leading out. Mike would do everything he could to help me do well but I am still just not that good. I was super pumped to do anything I could to help Mike as he had done a ton to help me improve light years over what I had done the season before.
Mike has an old friend that he raced with back in the 90's that had never stopped racing and was a beast. He was also an owner of a cool clothing line and was looking to start his own team. I was pumped to join with another guy like Mike who could teach me even more about racing.
To make a long story that I don't really want to tell short, we had some differences that should have been gone over at the start and we came as close to you can to splitting up as you can come. But I feel that Mike saved the day, helped everyone see the middle ground and NOW I feel like things are getting better everyday. Someone once told me that every friendship has a few bumps before things smooth out and I think that guy was very right. I am very hopeful, excited, and happy about this coming season and my team is going to do some big time damage when it comes time to put the anger into the pedals.

UUUgh I drank diet coke

Ok I think I am finally getting serious about losing some weight. The last time I was this into it I was an elite gymnast at the U of I. Really what I need to do is get through the Holiday without gaining 10 pounds. Last year I had to loose more than 12 pounds just to get back to my competitive weight. If I can keep the weight low it will be much easier for me to get down to my goal of 155. I have not been that light since high school. I feel like if I can get really dedicated about my training and weight this off season that I could have a really good racing season as a Cat 3 this year and maybe keep working my way  up the ladder.
Now I need to cut out the beer and really stop drinking pop all together again. The beer is going  to be really tough. It's not that I drink it all the time or anything like that. I just love the taste and when you are out with people it is REALLY hard to not drink with them. This Saturday is my company holiday party so that is going to be my last drink for some time.I need to come up with an end point though....

Well I need to get some time on the bike trainer today, Got my bike fit the other day and I need to get some time in my new position.

Later.

Spinning classes are HARD

So I went to a spinning class for the first time tonight. I have not been able to ride for a few days because my shifter was broken on Saturday so I was excited to get some bike work in. The gym was in a industrial area in a small building. The room with all the spinning bikes a small and jam packed with spinning bikes. We got there while another class was going on. It was really cool to see all these people churning away on these bikes at the same tempo.

To get warmed up for the class we did a yoga core type workout first that was about 30 - 45 min long. Most of it was okay but there were moments where it got really hard and the woman leading the class talked normally throughout the whole thing like it was nothing to her. Then we got into the spinning room. The bikes are nice because you can set them to fit you unlike bikes that are at normal health gym that have HUGE seats and sit straight up. There was a lot of changing of pace and difficulty during the class. This was not what I thought spinning class was. I thought it was a lot of high paced spinning.I guess that's what happens when you assume something. I could not believe how sweaty I got doing this class. I only brought one bottle of water, and no towel, so I was slipping and sliding all over the handle bars. The woman leading the class was the same from the yoga class before and she was KILLING it! I have seen her racing before but never realized how bad ass she was. Again she was talking like it was no big thing while the rest of us were dying! It was all I could do to reach down and finish that class. I wanted to quit so bad, all I could think about was "this is base season lady, why are we working so hard?!" I think I will be hurting tomorrow.

I think I am going to start working more on my art work again. I really like doing the photoshop stuff I have been doing, and it could be a way for me to make a little extra money for the season.

Mike Rickey's "The Look"

I shift too hard I guess

Did a late night training session last night. I had gone to the gym after work but wanted to get in some light interval work.No one was home and I procrastinated long enough that it was after 9pm before I got the bike set up on my trainer. I put in pirate radio on my protible DVD player, it is a movie about English radio ships of the coast of Great Britain back in the 60's or 70's. These guys would broadcast rock and roll outside the control of any government and it pissed everyone off. It was a pretty good fun watch.

The intervals I was doing were some quick spin ups and single leg work.The interval sets would only take about 30 min and noting over 200 watts really. I was just about to start my single leg intervals on my last set and I went to shift up a few gears into my 19 or so and CRACK, the shifter lever just kept going and all of a sudden my chain dropped down to the 12.

The funny thing about it was I just read an article about how Force and Rival shifters were breaking and how SRAM's claim that their products are all the same was shown to not be true. The Force and Rival shifters had a different shifting mechanism and were made with a lot more plastic. Here is the article and it can explain better what is going on.

The big bummer for me is that, of course the bike shop will be closed and I have to take a day off from riding. I am hoping that Mesa will have some in stock for me when I go on Monday morning. What I am REALLY hoping for is that they will let me warranty the part and then pay an upgrade charge or something and get the RED level shifter. I will just keep my fingers crossed.

I hate the winter

I used to love the winter when I was a kid. The snow was so fun and I did not mind the cold at all. I just figured that I could throw more clothes on and I would be good to go. I guess it was because I was always too hot as a kid, my parents would put me in too many clothes or something. Now it's different though. I lived for a few years barely being able to pay for my heating bill. My wife was going threw school and my job didn't pay well enough for us both to live on. Never feeling warm for 5 months at a time for 3 to 4 years was just too much. Now things are a millions times better but I still hate the cold. What passionate cyclist wouldn't? I know that there are guys that excel at cold rainy races but no one enjoys training in the cold, or rain. All I want to do is ride my bike but going out when it is under 20F is just crazy. So I am banashed to the deep dark depths that I know as the dungeon. I own a little 5' x 8' storage locker in the basement of my building that I set up my bike and trainer and go to town. I have it rigged up as good as it can get though. I have my little protable DVD player, a radio, plenty of light, some cool cycling photos and art. It is my little tiny man cave. Being able to watch movies or race DVD's does make the time go by a little faster but really it is still mind numbingly boring. It is the only way to improve for next year though unless I could travel to the warm places of the earth and train while staying at some 5 star resort.....we can all dream.

Maybe if there was something to do around here when it snows it might be more fun, like sking or snowboarding. There isn't even a really good sledding hill around that I know of. I guess I shouldn't complain too much though as this Fall was the best Fall in a few years. Almost no rain and plenty of time to ride.

Just please let it be over soon.

After over 8 days off the bike and 7 days of no working out at all I am getting back in the swing. I did two work outs today, one in the gym and the other on the trainer in the basement. The gym workout was a change from my normal gym workout. I have decided to up the intensity and weight after a talk with Kurt and Mike about what I was doing in the gym. I am sure that they would both feel that I am still doing too much work for this time of the year but I am gambling a bit. Really I have made two gambles for next season, one is by moving up to Cat 3 without too much in the way of great results last year, and two is my high volume of work at, and up to this point. I will just have to see if my body can take all the abuse and recover enough to have a good to great year. I do have experience in this type of training you see. I was an elite gymnast for 5 years and got there in only 3 years. I was not a top elite or anything. One year I was 25th in the country on the rings and I would place in the top 3 every once in a while but never on the top. The way I got there was a TON of work and I am hoping that I can do that same type of work on the bike. The big difference other than sports is that I was a teenager not 29 years old. But I have never done what people thought I should or could do. So why start now.

I have been looking up a lot of new bike toy stuff for next year. I have found a great Chinese website that sells inexpensive carbon rims. It may even be the wholesaler for the place I purchased my last set of carbon wheels. I am thinking of buying a set of 30 mm rims to build up a climbing set of wheels. I am also looking to build a disk wheel for my TT bike. I looked at lots of really nice disk wheels but there is no way that I am going to pay $800 at the least for a wheel that I wont use but 4-5 times a year. I really like building my own stuff and building a set of wheels is the last frontier for me. I know how to true wheels, and I have replaced spokes and nipples on wheels before but never purchased everything separate and then put together on my own. It is said that the mark of a true mechanic is a person who can build wheels. Soooo I really need to get on that.

Just last weekend I put a new bottom bracket on my road and TT bikes. I wanted to make my TT bike able to use my Quarq power meter so I needed to change the BB from a Shimano to GXP BB. I also needed to order an Italian threaded BB for the Pinorello. I had put a lot of miles into the original one that came with the bike and it was starting to get a little slack. Like most of my bike work lately things did not go smoothly. The BB of my TT was a mountain bike BB, they are really the same I just don't use the extra spacers that come with it. The thing that I think made things a little tough was at Italian BB is 70mm wide while and English BB is 68mm. So there was some slack in the cranks. I would need a 2mm spacer, I don't really have those laying around and I hate not having what I need right away so I stared looking at my pile of crap I have in my shop. I did not have to look far just at the old BB I just removed from my road bike. There is a spacer that is on the non drive side that has a little rubbery plastic molded onto it. I first tried to install the cranks with this extra spacer as is but it was just a little to thick. I used my dremmel tool and a grinding bit to grind off the plastic. This was all that was needed to do the trick. Then I had to install the crank on my road bike. Thought this was going to be easy as pie as I had been riding with these cranks on my bike for months with no problem. Well there was a problem. After torquing the cranks to the prescribed 130 in pounds there was still play in the crank. I found another very slim spacer, maybe .5mm and tried to use that to help with the play but it didn't help. I then said F it and used a normal allen wrench to torque the crank all the way down. That didn't work either, it bound the bottom bracket and made it tough to turn. Feeling very dejected and confused I started to play with my torque wrench a little more. I turned out out that my wrench needed to be turned up to 145 in pounds and then it was snug and free moving. I didn't try it on the TT bike but I will when I have the itch to play with my bikes again.

A long break

I have not been on my bike since last Saturday in Atlanta. I was a little sick this week and I think I am using that to get a short break from the bike before I really start to hammer for next season. I have never been good about taking time off, when I was a gymnast I would train 8 days a week. I know that it is imposible to train like that on the bike. A person would just ride themselves into the ground and could end up seariously hurting themselves. It is funny but I think that racing my bike has made me a better gymnastics coach. Not many coaches, even good coaches, know a lot about periodazation or how to use it. To be good at riding I have had to use this technique to train for the last year. It has brought a lot of improvements for me and my athletes.

So I am going to wait till Monday to start riding and lifting weights again. It is going to throw off my training plan but I have to be flexable. I mean I am not a profesional rider, I have a job, I have a wife, I have other responsibilities that may pull me off my training plan. So I will have to go back and re-think what I am doing for the next few weeks. This really isn't a problem as I have a long time before my first race weekend of the season in March.

Last night I met with Kurt Fletcher and Mike Rickey to talk over team issues. We met over at Dressels Public House in the St Louis Central West End. Great food, amazing drinks! So we are going over what the team kit is going to look like. Right now we actually have a problem with too many sponsors. Our kit was designed and then we are trying to make the logos look good inside it. I think that pro kits are done the other way around, that the logos define how the kit is going to look. I think we have it down though and it is going to be very differnt compared to what else is out there. Very retro.

Kurt is also bringing more riders onto the team, very cool. He is trying to get more Cat 1s and 2s to join. I would love this to happen, it would mean more knowledge that I could possibly mine to make myself better as a racer. I do have to work to remain a top management member of this team though. With all of these older guys coming on it would be easy to push me out. But I started Wild Card Racing and I am going to stay on the top with everyone else.