Endurance races, ski trips, musings, and adventures on the East Coast.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

I Wanna Go Fast

Lot's of transitions right now...but hanging in one of my favorite coffee shops in Black Mountain, NC is pretty darn nice. Work these days has me coaching a college mountain bike team at Warren Wilson - which is pretty much one of the coolest jobs ever.
We spent the weekend at the first college race of the season at East Tennessee State University, and the team killed it. Gotta admit is was a little bit tough to stand on the sidelines and watch the whole time, but coaching is a lot of fun too. I did get the feeling though that I want to learn how to go fast again. All these 100 milers and ultra-endurance races have had me trading fast twitch speed for slow twitch endurance. I was thinking about the last time I did a proper Short Track/XC weekend, and it was two years ago in Vermont.

I was fast enough then to get the who shot and hold it. Not sure I could do that right now. But watching fast guys just totally punch it all weekend got me to thinking....maybe it's time for a few less long rides and a few more intervals. Some shorter races could be fun. XC's and 40 milers. That could be cool.
In the meantime I have a tent set up next to some of my favorite backcountry trails in the world, and there's is endless riding within 30 minutes, so I don't have any excuses to be bored! Until next time....

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Fool's Gold

So I'm hangin' down south these days in the bike mecca that is Asheville, NC - and I even have a job that pays me to ride bikes. Rad. Not sure how that happened but I'm pretty stoked on it. And the best part is that after my slow start I'm starting to not suck so bad. How would my newfound quasi-fitness fare at the Fool's Gold 100?


Well, for a little while I thought it might be my day. I was never close to good enough to get on the podium with these guys, but for the first 30 miles or so I was actually racing, and opposed to surviving the brutal course. Big difference there in terms of fun factor for sure. In fact, the first 30 miles or racing was the most fun I've had in a NUE race.

Things kick off with a long gravel climb. Long. But I managed to stay with the lead group for a little while, at least until it was down to 8 guys or so. Then I dropped off and rode my pace just outside the top 10 for the rest of the first 10 miles of climbing. Then we hit some rolling stuff where you could lay down some power, followed by a screaming, loose descent and some really flowy singletrack to aid 2. I used all that to move up to about 10th 20 miles in.

Then things stopped going to well. I suffered up the climb out of aid 2, which was surprisingly long and hard. I tried to stuff some food in me, but that only did so much. Then I made a wrong turn and lost probably 5+ minutes. Then my chain broke. By that point I was pretty mentally exhausted and I still had 60 miles to race, so I spent some time hanging out trailside fixing my chain and eating a payday. Yum.

Lap two was more or less survival. I went I pace I knew I could hold and just tried not to think about how far I was from the finish. I raging thunderstorm rolled through - and the resulting chain suck meant I could only use my big ring (a 36t). Major bummer. Then my cassette worked loose. A quick stop at aid 8 fixed that, and I limped in at 9:50, pretty much destroyed. Funny, when I was racing it didn't feel like a long string of mishaps - just racing along. It was good enough for 20th though, which is my best ever NUE result, and someone claimed afterward that there was 16,000 feet of climbing, which makes me feel pretty darn good about finishing period.

Too bad I'm not doing PMSR in a few weeks. The form is finally coming on (I guess that was the plan all along)....but it'll be a fun fall of coaching and riding Pisgah instead. Maybe I can sneak the Swank in though......

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Mid-Season Report

Finally, finally, finally I've been doing some good racing. This past weekend was the Wilderness 101, and prior to that I raced as a team at the Ryan Hawks Memorial Eastern Cup 6 Hr. race. Sweet.


So, the 101. Those guys on the podium crushed it, and beat me by hours. More on that later though.
Last year I was pretty shattered coming into this race, so I was hoping for better things this year. Of course, I also hadn't trained as hard. I knew it was pretty unrealistic to hope for a stellar ride, but still, I was rested, maybe something would happen. Also, Nina and I threw down at the Eastern Cup, winning the team division of the 6 hr. race. Sure, it was a small field, but it's always fun to win a race and it gave me a little bit of confidence at least.
Turns out confidence doesn't get you very far in a 100 miler. I started way back on the line, gunned it up the first part of the initial climb to be on the tail end of the still large lead group. Then it hurt a lot to be there and so I fell back. After that I got a little smarter, got in some groups, recovered, and rode my race. I actually have gotten better at racing these things over the course of two years.
The first half of the 101 course is mostly gravel roads, so I did my best to ride with groups and let other people do most of the work at the front. That worked out pretty well actually. Though sometimes the groups were moving a little slow, I figured it was best not to force the issue. I don't have that kind of fitness right now, and I knew I was climbing okay, so I waited. Right after Aid #2 things start to go up in a real way. It's the kind of climb were you can let people ride away and then real them in 20 minutes later. So that's what I did. Then you finally get a good singletrack descent, which I regretted wishing for in about one minute of riding. PA singletrack is BUMPY and ROCKY. Ouch. All that carbon goodness that kept things efficient going up relies on you being smooth going down to keep things comfy. Well, I kind of did that sort of. But I'm not immune to the death grip. I was happy to go up again.
And that's sort of how the race went for me. Steady and efficient climbing followed by serviceable riding on the singletrack sections. I think I ended up 44th, which was a lot better than last year but well off where I'd like to be this time of year. The reason for which goes back a few months.


This winter I had a few things on my mind with regard to bike racing. One was that I wanted to be fast in August/September, when I'm usually burned out. And the other was that I didn't want to ride the trainer. So I experimented and spent a lot of time climbing mountains with skis on my back (or on my feet). It kept me in general shape, but the lack of specific bike fitness is something I haven't been able to overcome all season (being sick for a few weeks didn't help either). Okay, lesson learned. The trainer would have been helpful.

Okay, back to the 101. I should say that at 8:31:something this was the fastest I've ever done one of these things. That was more the course than me, but hey, I'll take it. I made a couple of equipment tweaks for this one, which worked out really well. The new 24x36 crankset set-up was sweet, and I had some new tires from Continental that worked super well. The rear was the well known Race King 2.2, which provided some nice cush run tubeless with Stan's rims. In the front I had an unmarked, super pro (haha), X King 2.2. I was a little nervous to be running them as this was my first ride (I got them set-up on Thursday and spent all day on Friday driving). But they held up really well and the X King was confidence inspiring even when bombing rock strewn descents and death grip speed. Cool.
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Three weeks to go until the season's last big race (for me), the Fool's Gold 100 miler. I guess it's time to rest, put the last touches on my decidedly mediocre form, and see what happens. Yippee.