Goals

As a coach and an athlete I know the importance of goals. They require you to be responsible for your actions in training and other parts of life. If my goal was to win RAAM (Race across America) but I never road more that 50 miles a day, that would be irresponsible of my and I would be unable to attain that goal let alone finish the race. Goals can be as broad or as specific as you need. They can be long range or set for the next day's workout or race. I personally believe that the more specific the goal the better. When a goal is very vague it leaves open the possibility to worm your way out of attaining said goals. For example I want to do well at "race A". What does "well" mean exactly? Does that mean first place, in the front group, not being lapped, or even just finishing?
This is a goal that I have set for myself this year. I know that I do this when I feel that I might be in over my head. My mentality as an athlete can be very fragile and not attaining goals can be very tough on me. Don't get me wrong I have missed out on a lot of goals that I have set for myself. As a gymnast I trained for 3 years for one moment and lost it by half a tenth. But I have also set unattainable goals that sometimes I actually thought I could do, other times I now I can't, but these goals not met can play havoc on my mind. And athletics is all about the mind, being able to push yourself farther, faster, harder, than the next guy. When everything else is equal the mind is the determining factor.
So what do I do? I already THINK that I am the weakest member of my team. That right there puts me at a disadvantage to everyone else. "Whether you think you can or you can't, you are right". This is not the way for someone who considers themselves to be a "winner" to think. I find that I am second guessing what I am doing every day. Am I working hard enough, or am I working too hard too soon? Should I lift weights, ride the bike, or do both? When I am on the bike am I putting out the right amount of power? Maybe I am just thinking too much? I often times tell my own athletes to get out of their own way in terms of thinking too much. They talk themselves out of skills, or put themselves down. Why is it that even though I know that thinking this way is wrong and bad, I am unable to stop. Part of it is human nature I believe, we as humans focus on the negative. We tell ourselves "not to screw up" rather that "do a good job". I know that putting negative thinking into my thought pattern is counter productive because you alway think the opposite when using the negative. But sometimes when I try very hard to use the positive I almost find myself feeling that I am lying to myself. That is the strangest feeling of all. How does one lie to themselves. There is no wall that separates my brain, I don't have two voices (that I know of) that site on either one of my shoulders and whisper sweet nothings into my ears. So why?\
Maybe I am thinking this way because I have not made solid goals for the year! Perhaps I just need to bite the bullet and say I want to WIN! Winners do not shy away and hide in the corner. Just because you lose does not mean that you are a loser. Winners in cycling, lose far more often then they win. But when the time comes and everything is on the line they say "sorry boys but today this one is mine" and they go out and do it. It is like the storied tale of Babe Ruth pointing to the bleachers and then hitting a home run. But these winners do it all the time. Everyone knows that this person is the one to watch and everyone knows who to battle. But on their day, when it is their time, they go out and win in-spite of everyone else. I don't have to be the guy to tell everyone else that I am going to win. But maybe I just need to tell my team that "I am going to win this one guys, leave it up to me".
So here it is right now!
I am going to target the Belleville crit to win, and if the Labor Day races are the same I want to win day 4. I also want to finish in the top 10 at the MO state road race. The rest of the year I will do my job to make sure that my guys are getting the best chances we have to win. I will bury myself with pride knowing that a 708 Racing man will cross the line first. Especially if that guy is Mike.

Gym season is close, so close.

My gym's home meet is next weekend! I love our home meet, it is a big deal to our kids and parents. The gym works so hard to put this thing on, and everyone works so hard to make sure the kids have a good time. We have close to 1500 kids come thought the competition doors. It is a dance that we do to make sure that every event goes off on time, and that all the kids are on their next event on time.
The nights are the best though. The first night after we set up everyone involved heads upst.airs to the hotel bar and we hang out and get pumped up for the rest of the weekend. The next night we host a big party with card games, music, and lots of good drinks. Most of the coaches, judges, and parents helping with the meet come to the party and everyone has a little too much. We all pay for it in the morning but everyone always has a good story about how their night ended.
The worst part of the weekend is the tear down when we pack up all of the gymnastics equipment into 4, 52' semi-trucks. Everyone is really tired and it is a logistical nightmare to try to keep everyone working and not standing around waiting to do something. It is easy to get people very mad and there is always someone saying that they "could do better". Our goal this year, and it was our goal last year, is to get set up and tear down done in 4 hours or less each. That sounds like a lot of time but it is not. We have 6 sets of bars, beams, vaults, 3 40'x40' floors, 3 8'x60' tumble strips, high bar, pommel horse, parallel bars, rings, and hundreds of mats. And we do it with hard working parents who are not professional laborers or movers.
I have been fighting some kind of bug for the last few days. Really it feels like I have been fighting the same thing for a few months and it just keeps coming back. Maybe I am not getting enough rest and not taking care of myself well enough. It is tough for me that my body isn't working the same way that it did when I was a kid. I have to work very hard to watch my weight now a-days. When I was younger weight was never a problem it was easy to loose, seamed like all I needed to do was think about it and the weight would fall off. Now it seams like if I think about food I gain weight. So I have been messing with what I eat, how much I eat, when I eat, as well as not being able to sleep very well (chronic insomnia) without some prescription medicinal help. I hate taking something to sleep but if I don't my mind actually seems to work harder at night than it does during the day. It is like I think about one thing and in a few minutes it has wound up to thinking about 100 things at once. This adds to my anxiety and that can lead down bad roads that I hate going. This is all family inherited shit for me. I am not as bad as my two brothers or my father and didn't really have any problems until I was in college. My brothers have had these problems since they were little kids and my Dad didn't have a REM sleep for over 20 years at one point, which killed a portion of his brain!!! Soooooo I guess what I am saying is that I need to work harder at taking care of myself..................gnight.

After Christmas Glow

Christmas has come and gone, we spent the day at home because Katie had to work at the hospital at 11. We are up in Monticello for the day to see Katie's family. The drive was uneventful, no cops, and really no traffic to speak of.
I had asked for a bike rack for Christmas but I never thought that I would actually get it as it was a gift that was approaching $300 and would never expect someone to do that. Not even my own folks. Well my Mother and Father-in laws are uber generous and purchased the rack that I wanted. It is a Softride, Dura 4 bike, bicycle rack with a hydraulic assist. This rack makes it possible to get into the rear hatch by bending away from the car while also keeping the bikes in a vertical position. That makes it nice that you don't have to worry about your bike hitting the ground when you tilt them from the car. I only hope is that the rack is as secure as it advertises and as people have said it is

We are not going to see my folks until next weekend. They are going to come down to St Louis and bring my younger brother Zac, his fiancée Jamie, and my baby nephew Will. This will be the first time that my brother Zac and Jamie have been to St Louis. Zac really is kind of a home body and doesn't like to go outside of Chicago. I am really excited for them to come though. I didn't really have that great of a relationship with my brothers as a kid and I have been trying to rectify that for the last 10 years. So the more I get to talk to my two brothers and see them, the better.
We are only a few days away from the new year. That has always signaled that time to really start laying down some serious miles on the bike. My ass is going to be hurting bad for the next few weeks since I am still waiting for my road bike. My TT bike has been fit to me really well but it still is not a great bike to be on for very long. I am going to try to work on more intense workouts while on it rather than the longer rides that I will do on the road bike. I hope that the work that I have been doing is going to pay off. I really have felt pretty sore and tired. I use the WKO+ software and it does a great job of keeping track of my riding but I don't think that it does as well with weight training. If I input those workouts the training stress doesn't seem as high as it should. So my TSS CTL and ATL are a little out of whack I think, but those numbers are all better for this new season than it was when I first started using the program.
The Cat 3 team has now gotten to 6 guys, we picked up a couple more last week. We are going to wait to let that info out till some stuff is taken care of with their current team. I think this is really going to be an exciting season. I also think that I will be the weakest rider on the team, but as long as I am able to add to the team in some way I will feel happy.
I have my home gymnastics meet in a couple weeks. It is called the Meet Me In St Louis Invite. It brings in over 1400 athletes over 2 days of competition in 3 gyms which have 2 set of equipment each, and one boys gym. It is really a big money maker for our parents organization, it offsets the cost of coaches traveling, eating, and working at competitions. Competitions are really pretty fun, and tiring. You work all day and then go out all night. Not really the best thing to do when I am trying to train for racing so I will have to watch myself a little more this year. This meet is the real start of our season and once we have that we have a meet every other week. I have also scheduled races once March comes around, so it will be a VERY busy spring. I can't wait for it all to get started.

 Check out these t-shirts that I made for the meet. I tried to do something that I have never seen at a meet before.

This is the image, and I guess you can put it on just about any color shirt. The original color I made the shirt with was red!

I see dead people

I had this friend of mine die about 6 or 7 years ago of a drug over dose. At one point in my life he was my best friend and influenced many of the decisions that I made in my life. He was a guy that I looked up to and looked to for answers and advice. He was the reason that I went to the U of I. Once I got there though I noticed a large change in him. He was more distant, paranoid, would drink unbelievable amounts of alcohol, and had huge mood swings. He began selling drugs for very scary people, talked about driving to Texas to buy ex, bragged about the prescription drugs he could get. He was the smartest person that I ever knew, and I think that was his biggest flaw or weakness should I say. This made his life very lonely. No one could quite relate to him, all the people he understood were in books and dead. He began to live inside his addiction to drugs and alcohol and would only rarely come out. A couple times he wrote pages long good byes to all his friends and people would rush to his place and prayed they weren't too late. He was kicked off the gymnastics team I was on and was even arrested for making fake prescriptions on his computer. His paranoia made him blame everyone for his problems, and his drug induced stupor made him think he was still smarter than anyone and everything, and he was invincible.
The last time I saw him was right before my junior year in college. He was telling everyone that he was getting clean, and I wanted to believe it so badly. Our meeting was great and I was excited to have my friend back. He was going to help me put in my AC and let me use some of his tools. The one thing that I thought was strange was that he was sweating while it was a nice breezy day and no one else was. That was because he had gotten a hold of medical morphine patches. He died a couple day later overdosing on morphine and beer. My friend Ben found his dead body in the basement of the house they were living in. He had been dead for a while and Ben did everything he could to save him but he was gone. This really fucked Ben up for years. He wouldn't go back to that house for at least 2 and I think Ben saw a lot of himself in my other friend. Ben was also crazy smart and I think he thought the same thing could happen to him if he wasn't careful.
The thing about my friend dying is that I see him all the time. Not that I see HIM in ghost form, but I see people that look like him and I do a double take. Just earlier tonight I thought I saw a picture of him on a web page. I have had other people in my life pass away, I had another friend that ran in my same group in high school that died in a car accident. I have never seen his face in the crowd. I have had grandparents pass away and I never think I see them. I have even had dreams about this guy and have never had a dream about any other dead person I know. So what the F is up with that?

Going for a ride in the AM with Michael again. It is going to be cold but I got plenty of clothes I will live. The only thing that sucks is that I gotta get up at 7am bluhhh..........

Today's Ride

When on a ride with Michael today, really nice guy. He has been riding for about 10 years now off and on and might get into racing this year. He also said that he had an older brother that may want to race with my team as well. I talked to a friend of mine from back in Champaign about joining our Cat 4 team as well this year. He is interested but has been out for a few weeks with a non athletic injury to his leg. That's all he told me.
Michael likes to keep his speed high all the time it seams. I think he would be a very good racer if he had a little coaching from Mike and Kurt. I wanted to go a little slower than we went today because I was feeling the effects of my weight lifting session yesterday and on Saturday. I kept watching as my power meter kept creeping up and Michael was just riding away. After a while he slowed down a bit and the ride went really well.
I can sometimes be a pretty quite person when I meet new people and I think I was a little this time. But Michael kept the conversations going which was nice to have. I really hope that he is able to join the team as well as his brother (I didn't get big bro's name), I think that he would have a very welcomed member into the group.

I got an email from my old team director Karl apologizing for kicking me off the Wild Card Cycling website. He said that it was just an over reaction to my changing the name of the team. I guess I could have told him before he heard from one of the other guys on the team, but we were really doing a lot of our own thing down here so I didn't think that he would mind, shows what happens when you assume. He was also very mad at my 708 teammate Mark for jumping ship. Really that was Mark's only move. He is an amazing racer, super fast sprinter, good on the climbs, a hammer in the TT, and an all around monster. Mark had no one else on the team to race with up in Champaign. There is one other guy that is at his level but Mark could take him at any time and he really just races for himself. Mark wants to race for a team, not race on his own. I think Mark has to do what he has to do. If someday Mark has to move on from 708 as well, yeah I will be sad to see him go, but it does not mean we wont be friends. It just means there was something better out there, and aren't we all looking for something better?

So what are you saying?

Just read an article in The New Yorker about how these scientists are dumbfounded by these medications that back in the nineties had double the effectiveness than they do now. It goes on to say that this phenomenon isn't just happening in medicine but in psychology to ecology. It appears that all the research these great doctors and scientists did was somehow skewed to the favor of the researcher.It talks about how often subjects are proven but then the researcher is unable to attain the same result. To me that should mean that the one outcome was just a fluke and should not be taken as fact. At least that was what I was taught as a child in elementary school. Until something can be proven more often than not isn't it just a hypothesis?

I think that this is not human nature though. For instance take the long standing feud between the Lance lovers (Me) and the Lance haters. No matter how many times the man is shown to be clean people still believe that he is guilty. It has been shown time and time again with test after test that Mr. Armstrong is clean but as it appears people will subconsciously as well as consciously change facts and results to support their hypothesis.
Here is the article, they are pros at writing and research so they can explain it better than I can.
The New Yorker

I just finished reading Joe Parkin's latest book Come & Gone and I would have to say it is much better than his first book Dog in a Hat. This book is a continuation of his career after he comes back from Europe to live in the states again. In the first book it showed how tough his life was as a domestique bike racer living in Belgium. His first book was really just the same story over and over again about how he was never quite fast enough. Was smart enough to stay out of the doping stuff except for one or two instances, and lost all the time. This time around Joe gets involved in the young mountain biking scene in the USA. I would think that as an old European pro Joe would have been able to clean up more in the States than he did. A few times he made mistakes that Cat 5 racers make, like forgetting to eat or drink during a race. It was still a tough life for Joe back in the States though. He never really was able to put together a string of wins that would have attracted a larger team or sponsor. He always seamed to have a big win followed by a few terrible races.

It is interesting reading this book as well as other older pro's blogs like Steve Tilford's blog, and talking to some older (than me) guys who raced as young guys back at that point in time. They all seam to have the same point of view and speak the same way. They are true wanderers of the world; as long as they have their bike they feel at home. It is really quite cool to be that free, to be able to go where the road takes you so to say. I will never be that way, and I am sure that there are those who live that life that may look at how I live with envy as well.

I am riding with a new team member in the morning, his name is Micheal Kittler. He is a Cat 4 racer and knows Kurt. We are going to do an easy 30 or so miles and just get to know each other. I will have to do the ride on my TT bike because my ride is still at Mesa. Probably another 2 weeks before I get that thing back. Can't believe that Sram doesn't have more shifters laying around. I miss my pino.

Lazy Sunday

Didn't do much today. Had a company party last night and I drank A LOT :-). So I was a bit hung over. I have decided that last night was going to be the last time I drink alcohol for a while so that I can work on keeping my weight down. That is going to be really hard because I love beer.
My buddy Mike Rickey got me an awesome cycling jersey for Christmas. He said it was hard to buy because it is a Cubs jersey design and Mike is a big Cardinals fan. Gonna wear the crap out of that thing.