It's that time of year. The racing season is over, or has been since Thanksgiving in my case, and it's been a good time to have some unstructured fun on the bike. I'm still hitting the trainer, road and trail, but the workouts have far less structure. The PowerTap is still on my trainer, but the winter bike and MTB offer a certain freedom from the constant attention to the watts. To be clear, the PowerTap has brought great results but it's also nice to just get out and ride with some buddies. The new SS MTB has also given me some new found motivation and a fun way to go ride for a couple of hours and work on technical skills. Hopefully the MTB thing will pay dividends on some of the more technical MTBesque CX courses in the area.
Saturday was a little too cold, and more importantly windy and snowy for me, so I hit the trainer. I'm still pretty motivated on the trainer since I got the life sized picture of Bob on his CX bike. I usually head down to my basement, hop on my bike, crank it up to zone 3 and just stare at the picture and cry tears of anger while listening to The Flight of the Valkyries. If I happen to lose focus and glance down at my handlebars, I'm instantly reminded of my mission when I see the words "Beat" and "Bob" written with a black Sharpie on my white handlebar tape. After I'm done riding, I throw a 60 pound heavy bag over my shoulder and head outside to run up and down my hill, shoeless, barefoot and only wearing bib shorts. The neighbors tend to stare, but who's going to say anything. Would you have interrupted Rocky Balboa when he was training in Soviet Russia to fight Ivan Drago? Would you interrupt an espresso addled, 138lb maniac in bib shorts running around his yard? Actually that's all made up, but I did watch an episode and a half of The Wire. It was pretty intense.
Luckily Sunday brought a reprieve from some of the cold and snow. The wind was still insane, but Bob, AJ and I got in 3:15. I got a chance to try out my new Planet Bike fenders, and I have to say they were pretty sweet. Cold, windy and dry beats cold, windy and wet any day. We saw another snow plow. I'm starting to think my future may actually include getting run off the road by a plow. AJ was on the front when the plow guy dropped the blade as he passed us. AJ mentioned it was a little close. I'd tend to agree, but if AJ gets taken out of commission I'll probably move up 1 position in most of the local races. I'm kidding of course, I like AJ and he's probably going to race with the Masters next year anyway . . .
Might get out to Albany next Sunday for an MTB race. They were hammered with an ice storm this weekend, so we'll see if they hold the race. It's also at 9:00am which would require a pretty early start from Syracastan.
Hope to see some of you at Syracuse Bicycle on Wednesday. Bring a toy and drink some of Ommegang's finest.
PS - Feel free to leave a comment. I hear from lots of people that are reading the blog, but so far we've had two comments. One from a teammate and another, oddly enough, from one of the nation's top CX/Crit pro's. I was pretty psyched to see that someone as cool as Adam has stumbled across the site. Hopefully we can get a CNY contingent out to his clinic next year. Keep an eye out for a post on his clinic in the near future. It was without a doubt the best return on investment I've ever had in racing. You can buy a light bike, trick wheels, tubulars, etc. without being appreciably faster. Adam's clinic will make anyone, at almost any level, measurably faster. More on that later.
No comments:
Post a Comment