Off season/Mexico

I recently had the opportunity to go to Mazatlan, Mexico to ride my bike. With what has seemed to be a fairly cold winter this year it was a relief to get out of the cold and experience some shorts and jersey weather as well as get some solid training in over two weeks.

The daily routine was fairly simple. We got up every morning at 5:30am and got out on the roads for around 4-6 hours of riding. The amount of time we spent on our bikes was really an eye opening experience for me. I've done blocks of high volume before, but not like this. The limit is much further away than I thought it was, as we did a solid 50 hours of riding over 14 days, with many of the rides including a fair bit of interval work. The lower altitude helped, with nearly a 1000m drop compared to Calgary - I felt significantly more powerful and I think I was recovering faster too.

Part of what made the trip so great was having some awesome company for riding. Lee Nelson, a friend from my cycling club always made the rides fun with some friendly competition. There was much cross-eyed panting as I tried to hold his wheel up some of the incredible climbs. Example Gratis:

The other great part was getting to know and ride with cycling legend Paul Wolfe. We had the incredibly good fortune of being hosted by Paul for the duration of the trip. I was really taken aback by his generosity and just generally the amount of life experience and wisdom he had to share. After riding with him for a few days I realized he likely the fittest 60 year old I have ever met. I'd also hazard a guess that he is one of the fittest 60 year olds around period. His racing pedigree is quite impressive, and includes winning the tour of Africa in 2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_d'Afrique).

The trip was also a great time to reflect on 2016. All round it was a pretty great year. I got into a sweet Masters program studying fluid dynamics at the U of C, started and ended a great relationship, and had some good times racing my bike with a fantastic road season. With 2017 getting into full swing, I'm looking forward to the new experiences it bring.

2016 Season Wrap Up

Season Wrap up

The 2016 road season finished off with a couple of "fun" time trials, first the 33km Crossfield ITT and second everyone's favorite provincial time trial, a 30km course at Miquelon Lake. This season felt like a long one to me with 25 race days and of course all of the travel and angst associated with them. It was satisfying to end the season with a solid couple of efforts. I was super happy to set a personal best power for the provincial ITT, despite reading the "wrong" start time and showing up about 15 minutes before my start...

Stepping out of the car I was informed that I had about 12 minutes to get to the start line, which meant getting my bike and license checked, putting on my skin suit, shoes, and helmet, and getting to the start which was not immediately nearby. A friend helped me by getting my bike and license checked while I threw on my skinsuit. After struggling with the zipper for a few minutes I realized it was completely jammed, so I used some safety pins to secure it and drove to the start line, showing up with about 3 minutes to spare. The weird part is that despite having absolutely no warm up and having sat in a car for the past 3 hours my legs felt awesome right from the go. As soon as I got going I felt a sense of calm and all the panic from the hectic start sort of faded away. I was actually enjoying myself despite riding pretty much all out. The cooler temperatures felt awesome and the wind direction was favorable for most of the course, which somehow made it easier to produce power maintain momentum over the rolling course. Rolling across the finish line was a satisfying feeling as it marked the end of the what has felt like a pretty long road campaign! I uploaded the TP plot for anyone who is interested here:

Racing more time trials this year than usual has definitely got me thinking about upgrading my time trial bike, which is currently an old 10 speed felt AR4 road bike with some fast forward 90mm racing wheels. Naturally, I've been watching lots of youtube videos which review various time trial setups, and the chinese frames have definitely been catching my eye. Deng Fu supposedly makes a solid time trial frameset which is comparable to brand name superbikes. Pricing is about $1000 USD for a frame and bars, and comes with a two year warranty! Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Anyways, lots of things to think about. In the meantime I've been enjoying various off season pursuits including getting back into the weight room and dealing with massive amounts of DOMS. It seems that cycling all day every day does not condition any weight lifting ability. Things like walking down stairs and opening doors have become incredibly interesting activities.  I've also started dreaming a bit about the 2017 season. After seeing a friend win the duathlon national championships I've even been thinking about giving multisport a go, perhaps getting back into running. Triathlon too is an exciting prospect, as the swimming and running would both some welcome variety to a typical training week. Despite what seemed like a long season this year, I am still feeling the desire to compete and push myself, to see what I'm capable of with another year of training in the legs and some new goals to push towards. In the long term I'm hoping that I'm just getting started on the journey of training and competing in endurance sport.

Road Provincials

This past weekend was a highlight for the 2016 road season with road provincials on Sunday at the Dogpound course north of Cochrane. The race is special because the winner gets a cool provincial jersey. This encourages everyone to race with a little more grit and determination when the shit hits the fan, and indeed it did!

Team dynamics played a large role in the race. Heading in, everyone knew that Leadout Project would be trying to put Warren Muir in the jersey. As the strongest team in the Alberta Peloton this year, Leadout Project has been formidable force. With many of the stronger riders in Alberta racing essentially independently, we made an agreement not to chase any of eachothers moves down to put pressure on the Leadout Project. Drama in the Alberta Peloton!! To be clear, we did not talk before hand about setting up Shawn Bunnin for the win, which I was later asked about.

Shawn Bunnin also voiced an interesting perspective on bike racing which I really identify with:

Shawn Bunnin (addressing myself and Stephan Becker): "Okay informal team meeting! My only goal here is that by the end of the race I've given it 100% and left it all on the road. Lets make sure this isn't just a group ride. I'm not racing just to sit in and sprint, lets race bikes!"

Myself and Stephan Becker: "Cool man! Lets do it."

As the rider lined up at the start line, one of the commissars, Robert Armstrong addressed us. "Okay guys, if it rains it's just gonna be a shitty day for a bike race... and the winner is epic! If there's a lightning storm the race is off." Minutes later the race was on, minus Andrew Davidson who broke a shifter cable minutes before the start line.... this happened to me at a TT once, it sucks. (Murphy's law?).

The opening laps were fairly chill (besides Eric Jenson's suicide mission pretty much right off the bat...) I start getting really antsy when the pace is too easy... The group was large and I wanted to make sure the numbers were reduced to better my chances. I started stressing about how I might actually have to attack at some point! Fortunately I needn't have worried. As we entered the rolling crosswind section things went bananas! I stayed with the lead five or so riders to prevent myself from getting gapped in the headwinds and tried to find my happy place as Shawn Bunnin and Dan Wood hit the rollers... We took turns at the front forming an echelon - things were pretty much full gas for about 20 minutes... My feelings were something like this:

As we rounded the corner the pace dropped off a bit, with the peloton much reduced. We hit a fairly intense bout of rain and as we rounded the corner for the rolling crosswind section again, things got ugly. This time the peloton was pretty much completely shattered with about 30ish guys reduced 7 in the first 5-10 minutes. I felt an interesting sensation of riding full vo2 max with what felt like a gardening hose held up to my face from the spray coming of everyone's rear tires. At one point Dan Wood just shouted "GO!" (While my heartrate was at like 185bpm) and he attacked. I managed to get onto his wheel. I think this was an important move as this was where we significantly reduced the group size.

The opening laps really put me in the hurt box, and I was faced with some interesting internal questions such as "wait we have to race another 70 km of this savageness??" and "Why am I doing this??" and "when am I gonna make my move??" I tried to relax and ate my banana which made me feel better. Luckily the pace dropped off a bit except for a few attacks which were brought back. The decisive move happened when Shawn Bunnin just sorta wandered off the front with 1.5 laps to go. We sat up and decided not to chase. We could see him fading into the distance and were expecting LOP riders Warren Muir or Marc Enter to chase it down, but they didn't!

As we entered the final lap there were a flurry of attack coming from various riders but Warren Muir and myself chased down pretty much everything. As we entered the final 10km it was clear that Shawn Bunnin was going to solo for the win. The finish was sort of a weary bunch sprint with only really 2-3 of the guys having enough left to properly wind it up. I finished 6th, barely able to push 250 watts in the final stretch. As I crossed the finish line a feeling of relief washed over me. Shawn Bunnin was lying on the ground, his bike in the ditch, totally spent and a big grin on his face. I couldn't help but feel happy for his victory. There were much fist bumping and high fives. Shawn gave me a big hug saying something about along the lines of "thanks you for racing today". I rolled back to the parking lot and had some excellent beef on the bun. Driving home and for the rest of the day I felt a feeling of content satisfaction and a feeling of being at peace (probably the endorphins!).

To sum up, this was one of the best races of the season for me. While I didn't podium, I felt like I affected the race outcome and I left it all out on the road, some would say this is poor tactics but this is a major reason for why I train and race - pushing the physical and mental limits and the satisfaction at the end of knowing you gave it your all. Exciting times are ahead as I will be attending the Cascade Classic from July 21 - 24th in Bend, Oregon this coming week. I'm excited to be driving down with two of the stronger junior riders in our club, Aidan Livesey and Christian Gomes. Then, the Tour of Bowness the next weekend will wrap up the 2016 road season. (If I decide to shut things down rather than holding on for another few weeks waiting for the provincial TT).

Race season update and personal growth

I thought it time for another blog post, as the race season is well underway and I'm headed into my fifth race weekend with Ghost of Gravel this Sunday. Should be interesting as forecast calls for rain and the race is 118km of gravel! I'm super excited, I'm hoping it will be alot like this: SeanKelly4Ever!!

As I've gotten some more racing into the legs I've found the feeling of nervousness heading into races has kind of faded away. I can feel the race form starting to come into swing and now I'm actually stoked to be racing versus feeling some trepidation. Most recently I raced the kicking horse cup in Golden BC, which was a confidence boost as I was able to get on the podium in the road race and performed reasonably well with a 4th place finish in the hill climb and time trials. It was great to be racing with a couple other guys with Synergy. For about 3 glorious minutes we were team time trialing off the front but were soon shut down by Warren Muir on the Leadout Project.

This year I have been amazed with the level of competition in the elite mens field. Leadout Project made the road race interesting with viscous attacks happening pretty much right from the gun. I suspect their strategy regarding attacking is around the same as mine (also known as keep attacking until something sticks). Anchorman sums it up pretty well:

 

In addition, Stephan Becker, an exceptional rider who recently entered the race scene has been shaking things up by upgrading from cat 5 to cat 2 in around 2 months. I have secret hopes to convert him to joining my cycling team, Synergy Racing.

It was interesting to compare the power files from last year to this year, with only a 5-10W difference in normalized and average power! Quite amazing just how similar the two efforts from one year apart are, and how difficult personal improvement can be to realize after training hard for a few years. I think the same goes for realizing personal improvement in areas other than physical endeavors too. So often I find myself slipping into autopilot and doing things the same way as I've always done them. Habits can become so ingrained and to change takes a conscious effort and stepping outside of your comfort zone, which is terrifying! Continuing on this train of thought, I wonder how many of the things we do are that are even conscious efforts at all? Once the motor pattern becomes muscle memory it seems all it takes is for us to initiate the process and it just carries itself out. I think this is both good and bad as it stresses how important it is to learn how to do something right the first time! Perhaps excellence in life and athletic endeavors is about building effective "ruts" in the brain and just letting the process execute. Heck, I bet even our moods are at least partially self reinforcing habits too. So this means we're basically pre-programmed robots a pretty good chunk of the time.

In other news, two great thing things have happened recently, I bought my first vehicle, a red mini-cooper s, which is crazy fun to drive (pics upcoming), and met an awesome girl! (I'm now realizing now the two events may not be mutually exclusive.) Holly is a cross country skier and all round great human. We are "totally dating" so that's a thing!

Thoughts on bike racing

I thought I would harness the supposed therapeutic properties of writing and try starting a blog! Can't promise consistent posting but I thought I'd give it a try.

The past couple of years I've been training pretty hard for a sport called bike racing, and the 2016 season is kicking off this weekend with the velocity stage race in Edmonton! Me and my coach Jack VanDyk have been working well together for a few years to try to achieve glory in the local race scene. I've have managed to claw my way up to Cat 2 and even win a race last season which was sweet.

To be honest I get pretty nervous about racing. Memories of bike racing over the past few years are filled with a whole spectrum of emotions. Exhausted satisfaction, the thrill of rolling a breakaway and not getting caught, the endorphin high which seems to mute everything around like being underwater and it feels real good to just chill. I can't remember too many of the lows but I'm pretty sure there is a fair bit of searing pain and even boredom in there too.

I read a book by Time Krabbe, The Rider, which I think sums up my thoughts on bike racing fairly well. Here is a badass quote:

Fourty-three nineteen. My gear lever feels like a scab on a wound. During our reconnaissance ride I was using forty-three twenty here. Now I’m sticking to the nineteen, a matter of willpower. My twenty was still as clean as a whistle. Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up. After all, if I wanted to kill my pain, why not choose the most effective method? Road racing is all about generating pain.

Honestly that sounds awful. Why would anyone do this? I think it's interesting how over the past however many thousand training sessions, only a few sessions in particular really stand out in my memory and yet I can recall every small detail of most races I have been in including who I was riding with, the weather on that day, and recount a fairly detailed play by play of how the race went down. Kinda like a series of of concentrated moments with a weeks worth of energy crammed into 3 hours. I also have found a passion for all of the training and preparation, the feeling of satisfaction of crushing a workout you didn't think you could do with already fatigued legs, the sensation of personal self improvement and finding strength I didn't know I had.

Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed with life stress (e.g. girl problems! exam stress! actually lets be honest really just girl problems) Lets see it in pie chart format:

Bike racing makes all that seem pretty darn inconsequential. Like who cares about girl problems when you can't feel your legs and Evan Bayer is just rode off the front of the peloton into a headwind? Cycling burns all the life stress away and makes these stresses seem minimal in comparison.

Anyways, those are my thoughts. Despite all of the positive aspects of bike racing sometimes I do think it would be great to live a more well rounded existence like working on myself spiritually as well as physically. As someone who has never really been raised with religion in my life I always find it fascinating meeting people for whom faith and spirituality is a big deal. There's a cool non-denominational church in my neighborhood that I've thought about attending, but that's a topic for another blog post!