18.2 hours on the bike this week. I covered 580 kilometers of roads in those hours. Some of the hours were hard, some were easy. But every minute on the bike was between me, the bike and the roads.

It's been months since there have been serious cyclists in the area prepared to put in long distance time, let alone structured training time on the bike. The club I ride with has been conspicuously quiet on the group ride schedule for a couple months so when I wake up in the morning and prepare for riding, I prepare for a couple hours alone.

Lance Armstrong said something in an interview I saw one time. He was asked about the physical anomalies that he was lucky enough to be born with genetically that help make him a world class athlete. He reminded the interviewer that some of those things are "1 in a million" odds of being born with them, which means there were still hundreds and thousands of people who were born with the same "genetic" gifts as him - and most of them are sitting on the couch stuffing their faces.

So, I write this post to tip my hat to a bunch of people.

I tip my hat to all of those other cyclists who got on their bike this week.

I tip my hat to you for getting on your bike in the rain, cold, wind or all around crappy weather.

I tip my hat to you for riding intervals that you didn't want to do when you woke up and got on the bike.

I tip my hat to you for making your body needlessly sore, when the guy in the cubicle next to you is "pounding" the Quarter-Pounder with cheese.

I tip my hat to you for training for 6, 7, 10, 15 hours... for a race that will last 45 minutes.

I tip my hat to you for not being average - even though you, like me, were born without the genetic gifts of Lance Armstrong, and we know it.

Ride on guys and gals.

Semper Equito,
VW

Power file found HERE

So, call me crazy!

Yes, that's right. My son and I drove 5 hours to race for 30 minutes this morning, watch a bunch of other races and turn around to drive home. It was a good chance to get quality time with the boy and a good chance to experience a little bit of what to expect from racing when I get back to the states from short races.

I've done a bunch of circuit races but nothing shorter than about 3 kilometers. This course lies just over 2 kilometers and would be the typical "industrial park" criterium. The course looks like this (right click, open, etc..):



The course profile is definitely deceptive. F to G is definitely 6%ish, but the downhill stretch from I back to A (start finish) is much flatter than it appears. That's not to say we weren't cruising along at 60ish kph at the end, but it wasn't a "dive" for the finish.

Aside from that the course had basically full access to the road. The only weird spot was around point H. The corner at point H looked something like this with the barrier setup. You had a nice wide turn but the barriers quickly narrowed the road from two of the four lanes of the road down to one of them. I don't think most of us expected that so the first time through the corner one guy crashed and I almost got smushed.




I warmed up for 45 minutes total for this 30 minute excursion into criterium racing. I was signed up for the Cat 2 event, which is the hardest event I'm allowed to race here. The only higher category is (obviously) Cat 1, but that includes the development teams and some pretty keen players like Marco Polo Cycling.

I can't really "recount" the race like I normally could a longer road race. It honestly happened so fast that by the time I was finding a groove, the race was over (especially since I lost count of laps and didn't know we were "sprinting" for the finish!). Instead, I'll list a few things I learned in the brief experience.

1. Don't crash! There were 3 crashes in our event. One guy slid out of the second turn (point C) on loose gravel. There was another guy that got wiped out against the barrier at point H. And one guy on the straight run in to the finish flatted, followed by the familiar sound of loose tire treads followed more closely by the scraping of deep Carbone rims and flesh sliding along the pavement with the scurry of riders trying not to run over him.

2. Take turns in the gear you intend to leave the turn spinning. It always takes me a couple turns through a course to remind myself of this and today was no different. I just didn't have as many laps today!

3. Pack navigation. Most of the events I've participated in have been longer road races where you're pacelining or moving slowly around the pack. Today's field was at least 100 riders (112 riders signed up) and we were pretty much over 40kph the whole time except for the 6% climb. Again, it took a few laps to get used to filling gaps so quick. If you wait too long and someone else fills that gap, you just got another rider further from the front. This is bad ju-ju if you're still reminding yourself of lesson #2 about gearing.

4. Effective movement forward and taking advantage of routine pack flow. The segment from point E to F saw a slow down on every lap that I was able to move up the leeward side of the pack almost every lap that I wanted to - sometimes up to 3 to 4 riders off the front before the climb.

5. Huge pack means lots of people to watch. With 100 rider field, it is very tough to mark riders. Concentration has to be at its highest at all times. I was able to see/follow a few team movements throughout the race I could catch before hand. Simple things like a tap on the backside saw riders make moves. That guy sliding up the pack on the side is simple to mark. This comes back to one of the most difficult parts of racing somewhere you don't know people. You have no idea who the key competition is.

6. Course knowledge. Wow... every course I've raced so far this year I've known a little bit about. This course I had no idea how the flow of the pack would go so it took 5, 6 laps just to get an idea of where to go and when I wanted to plan an attack. Then I forgot what lap I was on and blew my chance, so no matter. But the courses I've known about have been much more positive results.

7. Lastly, I'm definitely comfortable with the fitness level I was at. I rode particularly hard yesterday (3 hours of tempo time) and am in a downward trending TSB and in some hard training. I was still able to stick the pack and felt like I had more in me at the end of the race. I wish the race had lasted another half hour, honestly. Under 32 minutes of racing is just too short.

Power file for those so inclined can be found at the link at the top. Nothing particularly exciting and I'm sure if you turn the speeds on you can see our climbing/descending on the file.

Two years of road cycling as of today. July 10, 2005 marked my first ride on the Specialized Roubaix Elite that I currently call my "ride." Before then, I road a Giant hardtail MTB everywhere I wanted to ride a bike. I put some good miles in on the Giant MTB between 2000 and 2005 when I retired it, but nothing approaching what the Roubaix has done for me.

I had a fantastic ride today to "top off" two years of training. After feeling pretty sick with sniffles, sore throat and some sinus pressure, I fully expected today's ride to be pretty abysmal. 3 hours of riding with 1 1/2 hrs of high tempo work was not looking pleasant. I got the bike out and mentally prepared for my legs to be drained. I hopped on the bike and committed myself to the first 15 minutes of the hard stuff to see what the legs would do.

After 20 minutes of tempo work my legs still felt good. No... my legs felt Grrrrrreat! I kept the hard stuff going and more often than not found myself looking down at the power meter seeing values in the 330+ range and had to pull back on the pace. When I got up on the twisty roads in the rain I had to come off the pedals quite a bit on the turns but was right back on them in threshold zone. My total workout stats for the MIET time looks like this:





For fun, I pulled up the program Cyclistats. I use it to track interesting things mostly since I have lots of previous information in it. But it also has some default graphs that I can use without having to import all that information into my Excel spreadsheets. Here are some personal stats about me for a "then" and "now":





And... here are the fun charts. Can you guess when I really started training?

Cumulative Distance:


Distance Per Month:
(2005: 469.95 km/month 2006: 1257.07 2007: 2039.01)


Time Per Month:
(2005: 16 hrs 2006: 43.3 hrs 2007: 67.25 hrs)


Avg Speed:
(2005: 29.253 km/h 2006: 29.392 km/h 2007: 30.318 km/h)

Waiting for the live feeds to start broadcasting Tour updates, but I may not be able to stay up that late. While I'm waiting, I'll toss in some info from the training week.

As the week finishes out, things appear to be moving along nicely. I'm starting to "feel" better on the bike and am anxious to get back into the hard stuff this coming week and on from there. This last week the rain got in the way for the first time since rainy season started and abbreviated one of my workouts, but not too badly.

Sunday was the Kyushu circuit race. I'll let the previous blog post speak for that one and won't rehash anything there. It was followed up by a nice rest day as we took the family to the aquarium while it rained for the day. It ended up clearing up, but the rest day was definitely needed (and, well deserved if I do say so myself!)

Tuesday I was back in the pain zone. The plan was to get two hours in of high tempo pace (holding steady right around 300 watts on the flats, 350-400 for climbing). I got out off the base warmed up and meandered up the Nishiki River / Rte 187 route. I hit the turn around at the Pure station turn around feeling pretty good but realizing I was going to run out of water (with only 2 water bottles with me). I got a late start Tuesday and this was my first head-to-head encounter with the higher heat/humidity. Sure enough, at 1 hr 30 min into the tempo work, I needed water and had to stop. The legs never came back, after re-starting the ride so I dropped it to endurance pace and got myself home.

Wednesday was to be my rain day. And do I mean rain. It poooured. So, for the first time in months I set the trainer up for something other than testing. VO2max intervals on the trainer.. no fun. I got through 3 of them and died on number 4, but am not too disappointed. These have always been harder for me on the trainer than on the road. Of course, by the time I got to the endurance portion of the workout, the rain stopped so I pulled the bike off the trainer in disgust and got out on the road for an hour in the fresh air.

Thursday was another tempo day, 3 hours and change @ 270-290 watts on the flats, 340+ on the climbing. I got myself up in the hills and found out once again that I am having to add more and more distance to my "standard" routes as I get faster on the bike. My old 3 hour route in the mountains only takes about 2 hrs 40 min now, so I end up biking laps around places just outside the city to keep the pace up before having to battle the stop lights / cooling down. I pushed Thursday's climbs a little bit harder knowing I had some VO2max time to make up for after the previous day. Main session normalized out to 291 watts for just under 3 hours with some really great climbing in there. (Peak 5 min avg 385 climbing one of the better hills)

Friday... downpour. It was slated as a recovery day with sprints, and that's what it ended up as. It was really raining hard when I left the house at 6 am. I spun easy for an hour and a half before trying to get some sprints in on the wet roads. Well... wet roads, wet shoes, wet everything. Wet sprints. Nothing exciting on Friday, so I spun easy back to the house and wrapped up the training day with a massage.

Finally, today's ride takes me for 4 1/2 hours of endurance time. I hopped on mid-afternoon and got going down and around Oshima Island. It used to take me 4 hours to do that route alone (120ish km). Not pushing too hard on the flats (240ish) with some good out of the saddle climbing and I got back on the main road to Iwakuni (45 minutes from home) in 2 hrs 50 minutes. Hrmmm... So.. time to add distance again. Into the hills! When the day was all said and done, I'd wrapped up just over 147 kilometers at 32.3 kph average including warm up/cool down and stopping. Fantastic day in the saddle today.

Stats for the week look something like this:


Weight is steady.. more or less. Numbers on the chart are from the bathroom scale which is +1.5 lbs. CTL climbed by 4 points to get me to 118. I'll be over 120 next week before I do a day or two taper for the Keihanna Criterium. I'll spend the next week in negative TSB numbers watching that CTL climb. I'm loving being back in the pain zone. I can't wait to bring it in the fall racing season.

Last but not least, for those who are dedicated enough to read the entire post..... I received my reply from USA Cycling's rep that I've been working with. He was impressed enough with my current race resume to give me my requested upgrade to Cat 4. SO, without having raced in the states once, I've gone up to Cat 4. But, on the downside.... no more upgrades till next spring.

Now time to look for next season's race schedule. That's the plan for July and August - start selecting 2008's racing calendar.

Safe riding!
VW

Power file: Found Here

After sleeping in the car last night, I woke up at about 5am to munch down some granola cereal and bananas. I opened my eyes and saw the windows had fogged up quite a bit. I leaned up to wipe the windows clean, but nope. It was outside. I opened the car door and I couldn't see more than about 30 feet away from my parking spot the fog was so bad. It had rained on and off overnight and looked to be a miserably wet day.

After hemming about whether or not I would race, I did a lap of the course with my new helmet cam to video the course. I'd show the video, but you'd get more entertainment out of watching static - as that's all you can see in the fog.

They opened up the check-in precisely at 7am, and I got my number and went back to the car to relax until 8:15 to start warming up. By 8:15 it had rained pretty hard a number of times, stopped just as many. This was going to be a miserable race. When I finally hopped on the bike to do a couple laps of warm up, the rain had trickled down to just a drizzling mist. I didn't do much of a warm up, just hit the course for 3-4 laps to get a feel for the climb that would destroy the pack lap after lap. It's not a really long climb. It's 700 meters or so @ 7% (according to the course profile on the Autopolis site). But it was surely going to create some pack selection today in horrendous winds and wet pavement.

I got in the last pee-break at 8:40 to get ready for the race @ 9am. Hopped on the bike and on the way over heard them announce 2 minutes to start, everyone to the start line. (or something like that... I heard two, start line, and please.. the rest was something said in Japanese that told me I need to learn more Japanese) I got to the FULL start line and squeezed my way up to the second row.

We started off pretty quick and in no time at all we began to thin out the pack. We climbed the first time around @ 21 mph. This was going to be a loooong day. 37 laps to go.

On the fourth lap, dumping into the downhill stretch two guys wiped out in the corner. Those ahead promptly pushed the pace. Those of us behind promptly pushed the pain. It took a lap and a half for those of us back to catch up to the 8 riders out front. This sucked big time only being 25 minutes in when we caught up. 33 laps to go... oye.

At 40 minutes in, two riders from the same team decided to make a go for it on the climb. So what do we do? Hammer time. No getting away from all of our fresh legs... Once again climbing at over 20 mph, 1 min 10 sec over 500 watts. Yeehaw, 29 laps to go.

Almost on cue at the 1 hour mark we hit the base of the climb. Again, two more riders thought to make a go of it. Fortunately for me, I'd just spent a good length on or near the front for the descent. Dialed it up to 400 (418 to be exact) and hung on for dear life. 25 laps to go!

By this point, I'd considered stopping. I was praying for some sort of physical breakdown. Maybe I'd get a puncture, or some other catastrophic failure. My legs hurt, my lungs hurt, and my heart was feeling like it could come out my mouth at any time. The next hour was spent thinking about quitting this event. This is perhaps the bad part about calling a race "just another training day."

Fortunately, that had been the last time a serious attempt was made to break away for some time. For me, the rest of the race was almost a non-event. Somewhere around 30 minutes from the end, the two riders that would eventually come in 1-2 took off on the climb. Too many of us hesitated and before we knew it they were over the top and gone. Everyone waited for someone else to make chase, and within a lap we all pretty much gave it up for a bid for 3rd. I pause here to say that the two riders that went away made it look very easy. The difference between the way they were climbing and the way the rest of us were climbing was no small margin.

We rolled across the start/finish line after lap 35 with 10 min 31 seconds remaining. I thought "Awesome, two more laps!" Lap 36 ended... 5 min 31 sec... uh oh.... Lap 37 ends... 31 sec on the clock. Awwwwww CRAP. Another lap. I came over this lap feeling pretty good actually. The slowed pace of the last 30 minutes had given me some legs back. We'd been climbing in the mid 300's instead of the 400+ and I'd been able to get over the top early on the last 4 laps and get a breather on the downhill straights. I came over the top first again and settled into a mid level 1 pace waiting for the pack to come around.

Haha... no chance. We hit the base of the climb and I was still on the front. I never picked up the pace and we'd actually gone really slow in the wind. Here they go. They all stand to mash, and I just gave it what I had left. It was comical to see them drop like flies 300 meters into a 700 meter climb. One by one they fell back behind me. The last guy to fall behind me fell behind as we crested the top and he didn't have anything left to push through to the finish. Only one guy between me and the finish line and there was no catching him. Final result... 4th place. No problem!

The final results as published actually ended up putting me in 5th place when I got home and checked. The guy they put in front of me between leaving the course and getting home was definitely behind me on the course, but it's not really worth calling them about it. (Mostly because they'd speak Japanese, and I can't)

They split out the semi-pro guys from the rest of us, and I ended up with a "second in my category" trophy and award. The prize? Two pair of socks (one small, one large - so my wife gets something too!). I also got a set of energy drinks which could only be marketed in Japan.

Here's the "marketing slogan" on the front of the package:





Sounds tasty!

Another top 5 finish to add to the list, and this one was rough. Came home and checked up on some of the names. Nice to know who you're getting smoked by.

First place over all would be a BR-1 JBCF rider. This gives him the ability to compete at the national level. This means he's racing at the Fumy Beppu level races in Japan. (this particular guy DNF'd last week at the Road Race national championships, but so did all but 13 competitors out of 100 riders).

Either way, nice to know I was even on the same lap this guy was on.

Safe riding! Stay Dry!