Lucky Day... Almost

Made the first break yesterday which Toyota/United thought was too strong. They brought it back at the base of the climb where a Sierra Nevada guy attacked. The Toyota guys were spread across the whole road and when a hole opened up I shot through it to see if anyone would react. No one did and Dietrich waited for me. I caught him, completely redlined and we rode up the climb. I was finally able to get my legs and lungs back on the decent and we slowly built time. We knew were in luck when our gap was still over 4 minutes at the last feed zone. Toyota/United seemed content to let us take the stage and time bonuses. Things looked real good until TIAA-Cref decided they wanted to bring us back so their sprinter could try for the win. They succeeded in bringing us back, about 25 meters from the line, but it played into Moninger's benefit as he got another small time bonus on Baldwin. No Cref guys made the top ten. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Crit today, I like the course and have ridden well there before. Might be a bit cooked from yesterday though. CC is looking good and should be the man today.

In Reverse

Had a good TT yesterday, I knew I was off pace from my ride last year. I was to conservative on the way out and as a result was 20 seconds slower than last year.

Today was a different story. I was feeling REALLY good from the gun. Made it through the loops around Cliff with ease and then proceeded to get a flat on the way to the climb. Baker and I switched wheels and chased back on, I felt even better after that effort. I was set up perfectly going into the climb. We hit the climb and my legs were all of a sudden not good. I couldn't really go hard at all. Made it over the mesa in the 3rd group and then my body decided to shift into reverse. Guys were flying by me like I was standing still. The worst part was I had NOTHING, couldn't get my HR or Watts up. BAD day for me.

CC Rider made the break for like the 5 th year in a row and produced a 5000Kcal day. Hats off to Coyle for another great ride.

The Cat 2 guys are RIPPING and making up for our GC shortfalls.

More fun tomorrow.

Onto Gila

Had some good races last weekend and was happy with my form by the end of the day on Sunday. Baker and I drove to Las Vegas, NM on Monday night and continued down to Silver City yesterday. Nothing to eventful, except I got real Kick out of watching Baker chase this cat around our front yard with his phone, apparently to take it's photo to send his wife... Here kitty kitty kitty!

My TT start is in about 90 minutes so I'd better get rolling!

More later.

Birthday Boy

Yesterday was my birthday and it was anything but relaxing. Did some work in the AM, wrote up my speech notes and headed to VC "corporate" in Denver for a team presentation. I need to give a big thanks to Dirk, Chuck, Joey, Sharon, Renee, and Beth for taking a lot of time for the short and to the point presentation. It was the annual managers meeting and it was clear by the number of people there that VC is getting pretty big and not showing any signs of slowing down.

Booked it back to Boulder so I could head out and do a test on Flagstaff. It went as well as it could have and after two days off I didn't feel blocked at all. Don't know if that was good or bad.

Headed to La Mariposa for a great B-day dinner with friends and hit glacier afterwards.

I had every intention of getting out on my bike today and it just didn't work, looks like I'll have 3 days off this week. Looks like some of the work I've bee doing to take my business to the next level might pay off. More to come on that in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned!

Grumpy old man...

So this was pretty much me with 3 laps to go in Sunday's bike race:

Whatever happened to make me loose my cool isn't really the point. I lost my temper and that is just not cool, especially in a damn bike race. Racing is filled with karma and I was positive that something bad was going fall upon some of my fellow racers after that race. Given a couple of days of down time it's actually probably the other way around. I probably did something years ago when I was figuring out how to race that partially led to my breakdown on Sunday. We were all rookies at some point. Heck, I still get taken to school in races on a regular basis. Sunday would probably be one of those days.

I do hope the Einstein's guys end up at every local race I end up at. Those guys are still learning the ropes but have contributed greatly to raising the bar of the local scene this year. My guess is that they will do the same thing at the national level, especially later in the year. We could be seeing a lot more of this:







You still can't overlook the "Barney Boys" of VC, we'll be there to make sure they earn every result they get. It's gonna be a good year with some great competition.

Here is my Ergomo .wko file from Sunday's Boulder Beer Road Race

Whooops

One last thing about last Saturday's race...













This was me about 10 feet from the line diving to get my handlebars. I start to that victory thing and I got hit with a little gust of wind. As I was reaching to save myself I had some very vivid images run through my head of me crashing in a heap 5 feet from the line. At the same time I was thinking about this guys mistake from earlier this year.














I've put a link up on the side to my Training Peaks public view page of my training log. Occasionally I'll upload select files to my own server and link to them if for some reason you want look at them on your Cycling Peaks Software (best power meter software by far).

Here is the file from Boulder Larimer and also Here is Stazio

Have fun with it. Hope everyone has a good time in Nebraska, Grand Junction and at the Boulder Beer Road Race!

Ready to Rumble

I took the day off my bike today in order to reorganize my office, catch up on accounting and work on the site. Tomorrow is back to the grindstone with long hard day in the saddle.

Last weekend was obviously pretty good for me. The team was CRAZY good on Saturday. When CC, Dirk, Baker and I rolled it on the second lap I was pretty impressed. There's something about wind races I don't like and that's probably the difficulty. There is also something I love, probably that same difficulty when things go your way.

Big thanks to Timmy Duggan for feeding us. Our team wishes him a speedy and complete recovery from his recently broken collarbone.