Here's a water bottle that I made for TT. Now, I can drink without breaking my aero position, which supposedly saves about 9 seconds in a 40k (I didn't do that science myself, but it sounds reasonable). Be patient with the sound quality. I don't know why the volume is so low in the beginning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XzTWJ1BTU

I'll be doing this with an aero bottle next.

A Successful Spring, So Far

Second Place at the Sea Otter Classic Criterium

I suppose it's time to catch up on some blogging. It's been a productive Spring racing season for me. Finally. I feel like it's taken 2 years to get to this point, but it's been well worth it. Last year (my first year in Cat4), I really didn't want to be aggressive. I wanted to race as many races as I could, and get a good feel for what was going on. Somewhere deep down, I knew I wasn't ready to be as fast as the guys that were winning races. So I would race, but never attack or sprint for the finish, but I still trained my ass off. This year has been the opposite. When I started training for this season (at the end of November), I knew from the get-go, that I wanted to do well this year. I was focused and disciplined all winter. During a few training races in February, I took the mindset that when it was time to pedal, I was going to pedal hard, and when I saw opportunities and openings, I was going to take them. Here's how my Spring season has unfolded so far:

Snowcone Crit #2- 16th
Snowcone Crit #3- DNF, mechanical
Carl Dolan Memorial Crit- 6th
Sea Otter Classic Crit- 2nd
Sea Otter Classic Circuit Race- 11th
Rock Lititz Tour Road Race- 27th (worked to successfully pull back the breakaway)
Rock Lititz Tour Mountain TT- DNF, took a wrong turn on the course (along with at least 3 other riders)
Rock Lititz Tour Crit- 2nd

There's still a lot more racing to come this year. I've already accomplished a few goals, so I'm setting new ones as I go. My initial goal for this season was to earn enough points to upgrade to Cat 3, but now I'm not sure if that's what I want. I may take another year to get more comfortable before going to the next level. One thing's for sure, my skills are continuing to develop each year. This year, I'm a much more patient rider...not panicking at every attack, sitting-in when I need to rest, but I'm also more confident. If I see that I need to back off for a second, in order to find a safe slot to be in, I know that I can leap-frog my way back up the chain when we come out of the turn (Rock Lititz Crit was the perfect example of this...avoiding the big crash at the end, and sprinting for 2nd).

Next on the lineup, I've got Smoketown, BikeJam, Ride Sally Ride, and Leonardtown. I'm bringing my training back down to aerobic for a couple weeks, then going in to another build period to try to stay strong for another couple months. I'm hoping for continued success in the coming weeks!

Taking a look at my PMC

With my racing season about to officially kick off, it is sufficient to say that I've been training my ass off (along with my teammates). This is the time when all the winter riding in cold and windy conditions will hopefully pay off. I've paid close attention to my Performance Manager Chart (using WKO+ software), and I've stuck closely to my initial plan for a training season, so I'm hoping for some decent results.
Recently, myself and a few teammates have been discussing the charts, so I figured I'd take some time to share what I know about them (they can definitely be difficult to understand at first). The pictures below are my personal chart from this training season so far (November 28 - April 8).

Some quick basics: The purple line is my "Acute Training Load", or basically, the recent stress load. You can also think of it as today's workout. When you upload a ride into the software, the purple line reacts rather abruptly.  The blue line is my "Chronic Training Load". It is a general representation of how fit you are. As you can see, it reacts much less drastically than the ATL. The goal is to keep the blue line trending upward throughout the season. The yellow line is my "Training Stress Balance". It shows how "fresh" I am. Notice how the ATL and the TSB pretty much oppose each other, which makes sense. The harder the workout, the greater the stress.

 If you look at the above chart, you can see that I trained for the first 3 months (which was generally aerobic base training), then had a period where my CTL (blue line) flattened out a bit. This was a rest week. Notice how all of my lines came back together as I got "fresher". Yes, I lost a tiny bit of fitness, but this is how recovery works. I should perform good here, since glycogen stores should be back up, muscles are recovered, etc. Then, you can see that I hit the training hard again, with a 4 week build period, and my CTL continued upward. Notice how the lines all separate again.

I'm currently in my second build period, and about to begin a rest/taper week to head into a big couple weeks of racing. Notice, however, that throughout the season, my CTL continues to trend upward. This is the important part. It shows that I'm gaining fitness throughout my season. If my chart would start to go downward, I would immediately know, and could adjust my training schedule accordingly. The only other thing that I want to point out (below), is that after a rest period, when my lines were intersecting, I felt amazing. In fact, I felt so invincible on my bike, that I had an incredible workout, as evidenced by the large spike in my ATL that day.

One important note, is that according to Hunter Allen (who co-wrote the book "Training and Racing with a Power Meter", raising your CTL greater than 8 points (the numbers on the right) in a week, will lead to illness or injury. I can say that I came close to that one week, and I did indeed end up sick. Thankfully, though, I already knew (from a Carmichael book, I think), that a common cold literally has no detriment to training performance, as long as you can suck it up and tolerate the symptoms while on the bike. Which is exactly what I did, and thus, did not lose any time training.
I hope this helps to make the PMC a little more clearer (to my teammates, at least). I know that Golden Cheetah has a similar chart, using different terminology, but I haven't used it enough to remember what their lines are called.

Snowcone Training Series #2: 2/11/2012

Snowcone Training Series #2

2/11/2012

This was the second installment of this year's Snowcone Training Series. It's a criterium held on clean asphalt roads that are closed to traffic, in an office building park area. I missed the first one, and there's not many races this early in the year, so I was pretty eager to go. Leading up to the race, I felt like crap. I was just finishing up a tough training week, I had been under a lot of stress at work, and woke up with a sore throat and headache.

I drove down with a friend/teammate, Matt,(which was awesome), and we arrived in plenty of time to get dressed, get the bikes ready, and warm up. It was cold (about 38 degrees) and spitting rain. Riding around the course to warm up, I felt horrible. My head was "foggy" and my legs felt weak, but soon enough we were at the starting line, ready to go...there were 61 people in the field.

Once the race started, everything felt great. My head was clear, my legs felt nice and strong, and for some reason, the song "Feel Good, inc." by The Gorillas, was stuck in my head. Overall, the racing was smooth and fun. There was the occasional guy not holding his line through a turn, but that's pretty typical, and didn't seem to cause too many problems. Towards the end of the race, somebody took a turn too wide and clipped the concrete curb, which sent 2 guys rolling into the grass, but to my knowledge, that was the only incident. 

With about 5 laps to go, Matt and I were sitting in about the top 25% of the field, and we were both feeling pretty strong. I was starting to think that I was actually going to contest the finishing sprint, which I typically haven't done in the past. However, with 3 laps to go, I pushed down to accelerate hard on my right leg, and immediately felt a sharp pain in my lower back. Matt was beside me and asked me how I felt, so when I told him that I was hurt, he went to move to the front. At this point, my plan was simple: keep my speed high enough to not need to accelerate hard, and hang on until the finish.

On the final turn, Matt got boxed in and had nowhere to go for the sprint (a lesson that I learned last year), and I held steady on the outside for about 16th place (after reviewing the video).

This was the first chance I've had to race with Matt. He looks solid, he's strong, and he seems to have the ability to stay firm in his lines, and in the pack. This was also the first time that I recorded a race using my GoPro HD. I put some working gauges on it (using a cool program called Dashware), and put it on YouTube. Here's the link: Snowcone Training Series race #2 video

Hains Point "Slayfest" 2/7/12

Hains Point "slay fest" aka "The Noontime Peloton" is a pretty neat phenomenon. Every day around lunch time, local racers meet on a 3.2 mile loop of road that sticks out into the Potomac river to ride some laps. The groups are random, with riders ranging from pro to Cat 5. There's some pretty strong riding, powerful attacks, strung-out fields, dudes in aerobars, and chicks that ride on the front. It's a pretty eclectic scene. One side of the loop can see speed upwards of 29 mph and beyond, and the other side is usually somewhat windy. The road is also occupied by runners, speed skaters, tour buses, casual riders, and the occasional homeless person. Add to that, the fact that the police randomly choose days to target cyclists for not stopping at the stop signs, and it sounds like the worst-nightmare-of-a-group-ride that you could imagine. However, somehow, it all works. It usually goes off without a hitch, and best of all, it's always a great workout.

Today I went to Hains Point with the intention of just doing a 2x20 threshold workout. Once I realized that I was right on time for the Slayfest, I decided to abandon my own workout and ride laps with the fast guys. This is the third week that I've begun to open up my legs a little bit and push above my calculated FTP. I've been working out aerobically at an FTP of 234. Today's numbers show me that I'm progressing well, and starting to make some gains in power.

Below is a link to the ride file loaded to Garmin Connect.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/147918962

Well, February is here, and usually by this time I'd be complaining about how much training I haven't been doing. This year, however, has been awesome.
I got a new bike...actually an entirely new setup (a custom spec'd 2012 Specialized Tarmac SL4, with Mavic Cosmic Carbones)(pictured with the old stem which has been replaced with a new S-works stem)

I spent a great deal of time staying aerobic throughout November and December, and even half of January. In fact, it wasn't until after attending Hunter Allen's power clinic that I decided to start ramping up the intensity in my workouts. For the past couple weeks, I have added a sprint day to my training week, and I even threw in a day of small climb repeats, using a little course that I put together to train for the Sea Otter Classic circuit race.
The team that we started last year is going well, and a few of the dedicated members have been meeting weekly for some winter training. Hopefully once the weather warms up a bit, we'll see the rest of the crew.
So, I've got my new bike, I've been training well, the only question is whether or not it will pay off. Well, we'll see soon enough. I've registered for an early season "training" race in 2 weeks. In the last one of these series, the fields had over 70 riders each, so it should be action packed. This will also be my first opportunity to use my new GoPro HD in a race. I've been playing around with it, and using a program called "Dashware" to add custom gauges to the video.
My big goal this year is to earn enough points to upgrade from Cat4 to Cat3. To do so, I'm going to try to finish at least in the top 10 at every race. I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Share the road, much?

My local state laws state that in order to ride my bike on the road, I must 1) wear a helmet, 2) have a warning light, and 3) stay as far to the right as is safely possible.

Here's bit of video that I captured on my new GoPro HD2 the other day. As you can see, I'm riding as far to the right side of the road as I can be. I am also wearing a helmet and using a flashing red light on my bike (which you can't see in the screen, of course). Watch how much of a hurry the white pickup truck is in. Then, watch as he forces another car off the road, because he passes on a solid line, on a blind rolling hill. The raw video shows his license plate CLEARLY. I contacted a friend of mine who is a sheriff's deputy, but unfortunately, it's impossible to prove who was driving the truck.

I should also say here, that about 30 minutes prior to this video, I was nearly hit...as I was SITTING STILL at a stop sign. A full size pickup blew the sign as he was turning right, and almost clobbered me. Luckily, I saw him at the last second, and refrained from moving forward. His window was down, so I yelled, "I guess you missed the stop sign?"...to which he replied with a middle finger. HA! Suddenly, I'M the asshole, because this guy couldn't take the time to stop at the sign. *...sigh...*

Some of the residents in this area are apparently opposing the "Share The Road" signs that have been placed throughout the 2 neighboring counties here. I can't imagine that it would bother somebody THAT much, as they drive past the yellow signs, that they would want them taken down. Surely, none of these people have read the state driving laws to see whether or not they have a leg to stand on in regards to opposing cyclists on the road.