Summer Racing

Howdy all,

Well, my days of organizing events are over for the time being, and now I'm focusing on racing. All the months of hard work - was it enough? Yes!

I'm relatively happy with how the first month of racing has gone. My typical week is:

Monday - Easy Ride

Tuesday - Blasted Tuesday Night World Championships Crit

Wednesday - Pursuit Training

Thursday - Thursday Night Coastal Crit

Friday - Sun - A couple of rides and races, depending on schedule.

Went over to Victoria to race two weekends ago, and then was down in Seattle this past weekend. It's fun racing at Marymoor, and it's somthing I've looked forward to this past couple of months.

Things are pretty good. I'm aiming at a late peak (July / August) this year, so I'm a little short of race intensity right now, but my base is there, my top end speed is there, and I just need to tee up the super high end work, so that I can compete at points races and madisons, rather than aim at surviving them.

Here are a couple more shots from Victoria:

And a few from Marymoor:

Hey Everyone,
Here's a shot of me at this past weekends Trackfest in Victoria. Record temps made for some pretty hot hours in the sun! Felt good this weekend. Lego and I won both the madisons, and I got third in both the points race and the miss & out. Ended up third overall on the omnium, and earned some good points in the Provincial Track Series.

Headed down to Marymoor tonight for Keirin and Madison night. Should be fun!

Slowly bringing the engine to speed...

Well, this last week has provided a bit of indication that my training is coming along just fine, thank you very much!

Raced on Thursday night and was very pleased with how I felt during the race. Threw in a few attacks, covered a couple of breaks, and gave one hell of a lead out. In fact, the leadout almost turned into the bunch sprint win, as the couple of riders on my wheel found it more than difficult to come around me, and one told me that he actually thought he'd waited too long...

Sunday is the infamous vet ride. Legs felt a bit stiff from climbing Cypress the day before, but they opened up during the ride. Gave a solid leadout to Lego at the intermediate sprint and a very good leadout at the Iona sprint. Lego took both sprints, of course. Set that guy up right, and he won't be beaten.

So as long as I don't have to take a trip any time soon, I feel that this summer is looking super!

Ciao.

Summer Challenge Photos

April Update

Howdy All!
Well, these past three months have been pretty busy. I've been to Chile a twice, Kamloops once, worked a lot, trained a lot, had gum surgery, and now have a cold.

It's kind of funny, when you try and summarize what you've been doing for a couple of months, and you can boil it down to a sentence. Hmmm.

Well, I have been putting a lot of time into getting the next race weekend organized: The Summer Challenge at the Burnaby Velodrome in May. We'll see how that turns out. And I've arranged for socks and jerseys to be made for the Burnaby Track Club, and we are getting custom helmets for the club, too. Also met with the Mayor of Burnaby, to give him an update on how things have been progressing under the 'bubble'.

Training has been coming along as expected. I'm doing a lot of threshold training, some of it behind the bike on the track, and it really seems to be helping with my high end recovery. I'll be switching into a killer phase, next, which will involve a lot of above threshold intervals, with short recovery periods, in order to improve my repeatability at high speed.

I'm pretty excited for summer racing to get here. I skipped on the spring series races, in favour of staying focused on my own training, and avoiding getting too burned out, too early. The May BVSC is a perfect start to a long race season, anyway. Why start too early?

More later!
G

Winter Training Rites

Well, the depth of winters ugliness is upon us, and with it comes the inevitable winter training rites.

On Sunday, a group of us got together for a nice easy ride. A bit rainy, maybe slushy snowy, but safe enough for a ride, or so we thought...

Pinky had the first mishap of the day, flatting her rear tyre. A pretty fast road side change made it look like we were going to get back under way quickly, but the valve stem was ripped off during enthusiastic pumping, so another tube change was in order...

After that, and only about 1o minutes later, I went down on some well camoflaged ice. Not totally ice, mind you, so all the farmers field slop that wasn't frozen slowed my skid... :(. Not too worse for wear, or so I thought, but the trickle of blood down my leg warmers later on showed that I'd down a bit more damage than I'd thought. More importantly, somehow my cleat ripped off the bottom of my shoe, and was now melded to my pedal.

Well, through damn luck, one of the guys had an old toe strap, and we jury-rigged that together so I didn't need to do a left leg drill all the way home...

And finally, on a busy section of road, a second flat. So while the trucks flew by, covering us in a fine layer of wet, slimry, road grime, we changed out that one, and worked our way back home.

Some days, its just better to not question whether you should have got out of bed...

G

Back to Reality

The Six Day was great! Ended up getting first place in the Madison on Day 2, which in hindsite appears to have been my best day...

I think the prep and the long days slowly burned my out. Legs, lung, heart and head were just not focused on racing by the end of the week. But I still had great fun, and everyone else appeared to, as well.

Breakfast TV was at the 'drome on Thursday morning, and I got my two minutes of fame in front of the camera, talking about the Six Day. Didn't actually see the clip, I hope I looked fabu!

The strange weather of this year put a crimp on things for Friday night. After a couple of rounds of Keirin, the decision was made to evac the facility, as the roof was seriously drooping and we all had visions of BC Place deflating in our minds.

Things got back on track for Saturday morning. The courier/fixie races on Saturday night were awesome! Brought a needed "devil may care, take that" kind of attitude to the track. They've got great bike handling skills, and energy to boot! The 'play of the day' went out during the Aussie pursuit, when one guy caught the guy in front of him, rode above him and taunted him, yelling "YOU'RE OUT!!". Sportsmanship of a different kind then occured, as the eliminated rider proceeded to ride around behind the guy, hands off his bars, and flipping him the bird for several laps. Great fun and lightened up the night.

So things are sinking back into normality now. The snow is putting a crimp into training, but I think I needed the rest after last week, anyway.

Base training continues next week, with a step up in some intensity and some climbing. Will be nice to start seeing improvements in my time after doing this for awhile.

Racing is only 2 months away, so it's time to focus and get fast...

Ciao.