Updates

Amazing cyclocross shot

Easily one of my favorite images of cyclocross ever, this fantastic shot looks like it could have been taken on another planet. It also reminds me that I'm basically working all year to get better at races like this, so while it may look like hell to some people, it's actually the highlight of the year for my riding.

Posted on January 6, 2009

A cyclists' best friend in Winter

After the past couple weeks brought heavy snows in the otherwise rainy Pacific Northwest, all the local towns started throwing gravel down to improve traction on main roads and at intersections. The downside is it leaves gravel everywhere that gets kicked up and deposited on the roadsides, making the bike lanes unusable while covered in sharp rocks.

Thankfully, a week after the thaw I noticed this street sweeper was making quick work of most of the town's bike lanes. I shot this over my shoulder while driving around doing some errands this morning.

I haven't had any flats in recent riding, but I have had to take the main lane on most roads to stay out of the gravel. Looks like in a day or two things should return to normal on the shoulders of major roads again.

Posted on January 6, 2009

My first round of testing

Monday I had my first meeting with Seth at HPchiro to kick off our coaching for 2009 and I decided to do some lactic acid testing to show what kinds of baseline fitness I had going into it. I'm hoping for a retest in 4-6 months and another 4-6 months after that to see how I improve through training.

Overall, the testing wasn't too bad. You ride on a trainer for 10min to warm up, then start riding in 4min stages that get increasingly hard until the last stage feels like an 80% effort. We did some quick pin-prick blood tests after the first ramp up, then went back down to easy pedaling and repeated the sequence back up to where I stopped before, doing more pin-prick blood samples through the sequence.

Here's what I looked like doing the test, and what it looked like from my perspective on the bike:

My results are shown below and are pretty low which is what I was expecting for my untrained body at this time of year. My muscles can flush lactic acid up to about 205 watts of output with a heart rate of around 148bpm. Seth went ahead and created a set of training zones I'll be doing the next couple months of base mileage with, and I picked up an old powertap hub to stick with watts going forward when I'm riding.

Overall, it was a pretty painless experience and I'll have some good numbers to check against several months from now after I start getting into much better shape (hopefully I can start moving from a 2 watt/kg output to something more in the 3-4 watt/kg range by year's end).

Posted on January 6, 2009

Good initial progress

I've been tracking my weight every morning for the past couple weeks and so far things are shaping up nicely. Around Thanksgiving I was pushing 230lbs, but I'm back down into the 225lb range. My next goal will be getting to 220, which I hope to do by the start of February.

It's good steady progress of about a pound a week and I'm starting to get used to thinking about how full I feel when eating, I'm cutting out desserts, and I've stopped eating after 7pm.

Posted on January 3, 2009

Some Goals for 2009

Like JD, I'm not a fan of resolutions, I'm a fan of goals. Some goals require more than one year to accomplish and resolutions are just ways of setting yourself up for disappointment. Last year my goals were to ride at least a thousand miles and two thousand if possible, ride Cycle Oregon, and both race more often and do better in races. I pretty much hit all of those except the "do better in races" which is why I'm here now.

Everyone I talked to about getting faster said the next step was to get a cycling coach. After reviewing and interacting with about a dozen different coaches in the area (and talking to a few longtime coaches about what to look for in a local coach), I settled on one and our first planning session is this coming Monday. There are lots of places you can read about cycling coaches, but I found very little about what it's like being coached. My hope is to cover how hard the training regimen is on my body and through testing and racing see if it had a major positive effect on me. Since it's New Year's Day, I might as well put down my goals for the year:

My goals for 2009:

• Ride a lot more, try to hit 5,000 miles ridden in 2009
• Ride Cycle Oregon again, including all the optional extra riding
• Move up in classes for cyclocross, from beginner to Masters C
• Finish at least in the top half of my class in races on days where I felt good
• Win a cyclocross race at some point
• Race the short-track series in Portland and the one in Salem
• Try a road race of some sort (either Eugene Roubaix, the Banana Belt series, and/or a PIR crit)
• I'd like to see a noticeable improvement from coaching so I know the time and energy were worth it
• Continue with regular trips to the gym, get stronger
• Do 50 pushups non-stop
• Maybe try a different form of riding/racing (either Alpenrose Velodrome practice night or a XC mt bike race or something)
• Get a power meter and learn how to use it
• Sponsor a team and help build it
• Get my weight down in the 190-200lb range

I'm mostly worried about my two most difficult goals, which are to lose ~30lbs and find the time to ride 100 miles a week, every week, for a year. I have the strong feeling doing better at races is going to require that I trim some major weight off and ride enough so I'm conditioned for full race output. At 36 years of age, those things are often easier said than done. It's going to require a lot of discipline year-round to not eat too much junk and to always be taking 1 and 2 hour rides whenever I can.

It's a full plate of things to do for the year and I don't know if I'll hit them all, but I'll revisit this post later in the year to see how well I'm shaping up on it.

Posted on January 1, 2009

Ultimate Winter Training Shoe: Sidi Diablo GTX

Last winter, when I took a rainy ride I opted to keep my summer road shoes on and simply try some neoprene boot covers over the tops of them. That approach added warmth and some water resistance, but eventually on a rainy day I would end up with wet booties surrounding soaking wet socks and shoes. It certainly stalled the progress of water, but it never prevented it and any ride in the rain over 20 minutes would end with wet feet.

For a long time I eyeballed a set of Sidi's winter training specific shoe, the Hydro (road) and Diablo (mtb), mostly so I didn't have to wrestle with tight boot covers from last winter that would take a good 5 minutes of stretching and straining per shoe to get them on. This winter I finally broke down and got a set, opting for the mountain bike versions (SPD cleated) for a couple reasons: one, it's easier to walk in them compared with road shoes, and two, I could use them during the tail end of a cyclocross season. My rain bike has SPD pedals on it so they work great and if it gets dry enough to ride my road bike this winter, I can always swap the Look pedals for some SPDs.

After two months and about 300 miles through snow, slush, hail, rain, standing water, mud, and dry cold days, I have to say the hefty price tag (a new pair is about $300-400) is worth every penny. Over the last few weeks I've dunked my shoes into knee-deep snow during descents gone wrong, I've ridden in wind-driven rain that soaked me to the bone, and I've taken these into mud so deep I had to hose them off afterwards.

The thing that amazes me after any ride with them is that they feel great through the end, but I always assume I'll have wet socks when I pull them off but so far my wool socks have been dry every single time I've worn these. It's really something amazing, especially after racing in Sidi's top of the line Dragon 2 mtb shoes in muddy cyclocross races. The Dragons have a few mesh panels to keep your feet cool during races but they let water in like a sieve. The Diablo winter boots swap the mesh for gore-tex sealed panels and so far even going into snow deeper than the tops of the shoes, I haven't gotten a hint of moisture or mud inside these things. Plus, you can just throw them on with three quick velcro straps, and no muss or fuss with toe covers or shoe covers.

I can't recommend these highly enough when the weather turns bad, these things are fantastic.

Posted on December 29, 2008

Hey Didn't You Already Do This Before?

Back in early 2005, I tried to motivate myself to exercise by putting everything in public at what I called a "fitlog". I have no record of it beyond this CSS-free copy of it at the Internet Archive. I tried to do a blog post whenever I weighed myself, took a bike ride, or went on a run. It was the first time I tried out Wordpress and I used a new custom fields feature that let me set my weight and miles ridden/run in the blog's own database engine. Then a friend tweaked out some PHP/SWF graphs so I could see my weight and miles over time in handy graphs on the sidebar.

Like all my late night ideas for internet projects, it starts with the idea, and the motivation to implement carries me through building it and launching it, but soon after my enthusiasm began to wane. Every entry required putting in additional data (and input was a pain requiring a multi-step process), and I'd have to remember my early morning weight when I posted late at night (the worst part was I couldn't record a weight or ride without writing some sort of blog post). Then our baby was born and my exercise schedule went to zero for several months and didn't recover for almost two years.

The obvious question is how will this site be any different and what will keep me coming back to update it?

This time around my exercise schedule is pretty far open and pretty well set. I've got both a trainer in the gym and now a coach on my bike that I both pay to keep me motivated and progressing. I've got the whole 2009 bike racing season to gear up for and enjoy. I'm streamlining as much as I can so that entering my weight or rides is effortless. I've used We Endure for a couple years and it continues to provide the bare-bones features I need to track my cycling progress and has for the past couple years. After a long search, I ended up using Skinnyr to track my weight, though I've tweaked their embeddable graph to fit and it doesn't quite look right (they say custom sizes are coming soon).

I plan to keep track of my rides and weight automatically over on the sidebar, and I'll do at least weekly posts on how training is going. While I've been with my gym trainer since October, I haven't started with the bike coach yet and I'll be walking through devising a training plan for the year and we'll be touching base every month, so I suspect I'll have posts every few days about the process until it gets going. I'm also planning on getting my first custom frame made for racing and I'll be reviewing gear as I pick it up and start using it. I'm also helping a friend launch a new bike racing team that I'll be a member of and we're at square one right now (we have a concept, name, initial sponsors) but we have loads of work ahead planning and putting all the pieces together.

I'm really looking forward to posting on this site for the 2009 racing season and I'm looking forward to tracking my progress in public. I have high hopes for next year -- while 2007 was spent riding a bit and goofing around with a couple races, I was a bit more serious in 2008 but I was still finishing in the bottom third of the beginner racing classes. One of my goals for 2009 is to be competitive in the next bracket up, but it's going to take a lot of work and practice to get there. I hope you enjoy the ride along with me.

Posted on December 24, 2008

Some Backstory

I like to think of myself as a lifelong cyclist. I can remember the day the training wheels came off and I can remember the day I got my first decent schwinn. I can also recall the time when I was 13 and I got my first "real" bike (made by GT and not Huffy or Murray) from a real bike shop. I spent thousands of hours on my first real bike, learning bmx tricks galore. By high school, I was riding my freestyle bike from after dinner until a late bedtime, thanks to well lit underground parking garages with lax security being within two miles of my house. The high point of this was competing in contests and winning a few. My biggest accomplishment was winning the overall intermediate flatland title for the 15-16 age class (1988).

In college, I still put in 5-10 hours a week practicing tricks and it wasn't until the last couple years of my undergraduate education that I rode less and less. In graduate school I became a runner again (I had a couple years doing middle school cross country). I also liked to cross train and I used to ride the steepest hills I could find on an old mountain bike. Since finishing grad school, my bike riding went way down, especially when I lived in Los Angeles on streets devoid of bike lanes. I took up commuting to work by bike in 2000, but that went away when I no longer worked downtown.

Getting Back on the Road

Fast forward to 2004, where I've gained about thirty pounds since grad school and I'm telecommuting from home and needing to do something physical in my life. My first bike was a 50lb recumbent and it took me about a year to work up to 20 mile rides with 500 feet of climbing. In the spring of 2006, I was at my local bike shop waiting while some part was being fixed and I decided to try out a low-end road bike on the shop floor.

After riding a 50 pound tank for hundreds of miles, spinning down the street on tiny tires on a sub-20 pound bike was a revelation. It felt like a whole new level of efficiency and I wanted to swtich over to normal bikes as soon as I could (I eventually got it as a father's day present in June of 2006).

Riding a real road bike was nice and I eventually put about 600 miles on it over the summer. The next year I felt an upgrade was in order and I got an aluminum/carbon bike that was a slight step up. I rode this bike about 800 miles or so before I tried out my first all-carbon bike. Riding it was another revelation about efficiency. When I pushed my pedals down, the bike surged in a way my other bikes didn't and I fell in love with the high end hardware.

The Racing Bug

In late 2007 I decided to try my hand at racing. I accidentally stumbled upon the cyclocross championships in late 2004 when I barely knew what it was. I just read it in the paper and stopped by for an hour to shoot some photos. I eventually read more about the sport and became interested in trying it myself because it sounded like it could combine my love of BMX and riding dirt trails with the endurance aspects of riding a road bike like I'd been doing for a couple years.

My first race was pretty bad because I had no idea just how much endurance was required to ride several miles through thick, sticky mud. I came in three spots above dead last but I did have fun and I recognized there was immense room for improvement. I raced again a couple weeks later and came in about a dozen spots from dead last and had even more fun. I was hooked on racing cyclocross.

Another thing happened at that second race. There are often event photographers that sell you prints for a few bucks a pop and this was the first race I got to see lots of photos of me in action. My first reaction to seeing a photo of myself from the race was that I thought I was looking at a shot of my father trying to ride a bike. Honestly, the photos looked like how I remembered my dad when I was a little kid and he was an overweight middle-aged man. Right then and there I vowed to ride through the Oregon winter and ride much more and much harder in 2008.

2008 Shapes Up

Shortly after this revelation, I hit my maximum lifetime weight right around the holidays. I was tipping the scales at 235 pounds. When I ran a marathon in grad school I was around 172. After the new year I started to watch what I ate and I rode a lot more, and after a couple months my weight dropped to 225. By summer I was coming close to 220. As I write this, I'm currently around 225 but I'm hoping to get below 200 by next summer.

After riding about 600-800 miles per year, in 2008 I made it a goal to ride at least a thousand miles and hopefully two thousand by year's end. I also signed up in February for Cycle Oregon (my recap of the event), an annual long distance multi-day tour/ride through Oregon that typically covers 500 miles in seven days. Knowing I had that in September meant I hit my goals pretty quickly. I hit a thousand miles by May, two thousand by August, and three thousand in October. I'll probably finish the year at around 3300 miles ridden.

2008 meant more racing as well. I hoped to race a bunch of mountain bike short track races in June/July but only ended up doing one event (where I got about 25th out of 36 because I rode 35 miles earlier that day). I raced four cyclocross events and did better than 2007, but still not even in the top half of the beginner class. I was a tad disappointed that I didn't post better results given my fitness was much higher.

Fitness

In late October, I decided to hire a personal trainer and hit the gym for only the second time in my life. Back in 1998 or so, I had a co-worker at UCLA that showed me the ropes at the student/staff gym and we made a habit of going there for about 3-4 months. I knew I wasn't ever going to set foot again into a gym unless I had some instruction, direction, and social pressure to do so and a trainer is perfect for that. After two months of 3 weekly hour-long workouts, I have to say I feel much stronger and better overall and I'm looking forward to continuing into 2009.

Recap

That's about it for how I ended up here. I'll detail my goals for 2009 and more about why I started this site in future posts.

Posted on December 21, 2008

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Information

What

Discover Spring is a 5k/10k and Children's Fun Run event that is also a fundraiser for the non-profit McMinnville Montessori School.

Where

Discovery Meadows Park in McMinnville, Oregon (google maps). Parking is available at the Columbus Elementary School next door.

When

Date: April 21st, 2012

Times: 5k/10k start time is 9:00 AM
Kids Fun Run start time is 10:30 AM

Day-of onsite registration (5k/10k): 7:30-8:45 AM
Kids Fun Run registration runs until 10:00 AM

Cost

Kids run: $5, $10 (with cotton t-shirt).

5k/10k Adults (18+): $25. $30 (with technical t-shirt).
5k/10k youth (under 18): $10, $15 (with cotton t-shirt).

register now

Note: Day-of onsite registration will be $5 higher for 5k/10k participants without a shirt option, cash and check only please.

The Course

The 5k (3.1 mile) route

The 10k (6.2 mile) route