Pre-Race Prep

Another week another race looming on the horizon. This weekend is a split weekend for the Transparent Racing Squad. I will be racing the third edition of the Winter Park Series while Macky will be racing at the New Mexico Off Road Series in Albuquerque.

This weekend will be pretty sweet for me as the Winter Park Series is more about having fun while riding your bike fast on sweet trails in the Fraser Valley. Instead of the traditional 5 or 6 lap race around some track we will be competing on a 24 mile point to point course starting at the Winter Park Ski Resort and finishing up just outside of Fraser, CO.

Macky will be competing in a much more traditional style XC race, however, it will be an epic battle. Damien Calvert, a fast pro from New Mexico, has eluded Macky every single match-up they have had. Macky is really gunning for him this weekend and barring any mechanical problems I believe he will overtake him for the W.

Watch for updates as the weekend progresses and if you are in the area come out and cheer for us!

Happy riding and racing this weekend.

Yeti

We're proud to introduce our newest sponsor: Yeti Cycles!
We are planning to get our frames soon, so look for us to be riding the Yeti ARC in the very near future.

If you've never checked out Yeti's bikes, give then a good look. They have some really cool technologies (notice the rear triangle of the ARC above) and you can't help but ogle the Carbon ASR (check out the integrated seat post).
More updates soon!

Putting in the Miles

Last week was my final week of serious training before the 2009 US Mountain Bike National Championships. This meant a huge week of time on the bike and lots of painful intervals, but also some good fun.

Between my race last weekend and then along endurance ride I was ready for some rest time. Monday was a day to sit around and let my body except the punishment I gave it over the weekend while recovering for the week of training.

Tuesday - Hill attacks. This means find a short hill and sprint up it for 30 seconds recover for a minute. Rinse Repeat. I did 3 sets of 4 attacks with 5 minutes of recovery between each set of 4. Legs felt awesome, though my bike was feeling weird as I put my narrow flat bars back on in order to fix many fit issues I was having, the first and foremost was my cockpit length and the only shorter stem I had was not the same size as my riser bars (ugh!)

Wednesday - Climbing Repeats with Hill attacks every 2 minutes. These hurt. All you do is go long and hard with even harder efforts throughout. To make matters worse these workouts always come with a total time of 3 hours at a minimum, I did 4.

Thursday - Endurance Ride. In order to prepare for nationals at my best I took the 2.5 hour trek up to Sol Vista Ski Basin to ride a few easy laps on the Nationals Course. All I can say is: Sol Vista you guys need to get your act together. Though I haven't seen the DH course or Super D course the XC course is rather sad and not worthy of being the course that determines the American National Champions. The climb is all well and good but as soon as you reach the descent you essentially ride down a "trail" that is marked out and has been ridden but not actually built like a real trail ought to be. To make matters slightly worse half way down the descent there is a short power climb that is over a section of the mountain that has been clear cut and then the trees were sent through a chipper. You ride over these wood chips with no way of understanding where the course is. Finally, near the top of the course there is a section of trail that IMBA would cry at. It shoots straight down the side of the mountain without a sign of even thinking about sustainability. Nor is it actually built. Imagine grabbing your mountain bike and then just riding down the side of a hill straight, hmmmm.....

Friday - Recovery. I needed some good recovery after those past 3 days to get ready for a big weekend.

Saturday - More Climbing Repeats with hill attacks. Went back out for the same workout as wednesday and did not feel it. Did my first interval and after not being able to get my heart rate up to where it needed to be consistently I bailed on the workout. Sometimes it is better to just ride and recover than really over do it.

Sunday - Another Endurance ride. With the plan being to head to Winter Park again this coming weekend for another Winter Park Series race I thought let's go to Winter Park ride some epic trails and check out the course. After talking to the guys at the Trestle Bike Park Shop about the area a little bit I suited up and headed out. All I can say is the mountain biking in Winter Park is truly epic. Amazingly built trails that are so much fun to ride. I smiled for 4 hours and never got tired.

Now it is time to taper off and let my body really get the best out of that last week while keeping the engine finely tuned with some short hard efforts this week and a race this weekend.

Hope to see you out there in Winter Park enjoying the epicness that is the Fraser Valley in Grand County, CO.

Winter Park Series # 2 Race Report

This morning I woke up bright and early (5:30) to load up the car and drive to Winter Park, Colorado. If you have never been to Winter Park to ride your mountain bike I highly suggest it. There are hundreds of miles of beautiful singletrack ranging from crazy technical to fast and flowy.

The Winter Park Series is a low key fun series that has about 8 or 9 races over the course of the summer highlighting the trails and sweet riding in Winter Park. Today's event XC Super Loop. In many ways this course was a Super Loop in that it was a blast! During the race I had a hard time separating myself from the fact that I was racing and the fact that these trails were ripping fast. Fortunately because of how much fun the trails were it made me want to hammer it in the big ring for the 1 h and 37 minutes of race time I had.

Overall I am happy with the race and finally excited to be racing again. Though I felt average at first after about 15 minutes I found my mojo and just kept flying. Maybe that past week of goofing off and not being serious for 7 days really helped me. Even riding a 3 pound heavier bike than I have since March I still had my best finish of the season with a 35th place finish only 18 minutes down on the winning time posted by JHK. All the better that at least 2 big guns showed up (JHK and Colin Cares) as well as a couple of fast pro roadies that have some sick mountain bike skills (Scott Tietzel - DLP Pro Cycling).

All in all a good day. Now time to rest up and put in another solid ride tomorrow before I continue my final build phase leading up to Nationals.

Pictures to come as soon as I can locate them.

Building the Form Back Up

After my mental recovery week I thought it was high time to get back to actual bike practices and give the whole serious training thing a shot again with the hope of not being completely destroyed by the time Nationals rolls around in 3 weeks.

In my hopes of building form back I did what has been on of the most successful training rides of my career as a cyclist based on my results the past couple of years: long and hard. When I say "long and hard" I don't mean I go out and hammer for 5 hours at a harsh 165+ average heart rate. No, no, no.... That means I spend about 2 hours riding at a fun and consistent endurance pace and then light it up for a solid hour of intervals and then spend the next 2 hours back in the endurance zone.

By the time I got off work in the morning and made my way home I was on the bike by about 12:30 in the afternoon. The skies were looking good and I was pedaling a pretty good pace towards Boulder Canyon from Longmont (a solid 1.5-2 hour ride at Endurance pace depending on the direction of the wind). During this first part of the ride I was feeling pretty good but definitely noticed that it was really hot, I'm talking in the 90's and there are no groves of trees to protect you out on the plains, so I was baking pretty good.

I reached Boulder Canyon and almost immediately started out my first 15 minute interval with 30 second attacks every 2 minutes. "Man I am feeling good, heart rate is controllable, it is in the right place, and I can really ramp it up during those attacks, 200 here I come" were my thoughts. After finishing the first interval I dropped into a seriously easy gear for Boulder Canyon and recovered for a bit till I reached Magnolia road and then put my bike in the granny gear for the first time in God only knows how long so I could continue my recovery process.

Next interval showed up and after about five minutes of suffering up one of the steepest climbs in the world (I swear this hill is nuts!) I started to notice that I was not feeling so hot. My stomach wasn't happy, I wasn't able to control my bike, or even really keep my heart rate down in my climbing zones. Then I realized, uh-oh, my old nemesis has returned: heat exhaustion.

Last year I had two weekends in a row where I battled heat exhaustion in the middle of the summer and after those two events I very quickly learned that one does not continue on when feeling like this. Didn't finish my second interval and it was time to go home. Instead of doing my planned ride all the way to Nederland and then wandering on dirt roads and trails back towards Left Hand Canyon and finally home I just booked it down Magnolia road and went home the way I came at a comfortable and sustainable pace considering how I was feeling.

4 hours 45 minutes later I had covered 60 miles (almost a metric century!) and burned about 4,000 calories.

Now time to recover...

This weekend Transparent Racing will be up at the Winter Park Series Race #2 - The XC Super Loop, so if you are from Colorado and enjoy epic mountain biking at it's best come on up, say hi, and rip some of the best trails in Colorado.

Here are some photo's from last weeks exploits for your viewing pleasure:


See you out there.

Back to Basics

After a hard weekend both mentally and physically I decided I really needed a mental break from living life as a professional mountain bike racer.

Colorado Springs greeted me with a bruised up left side of the body and the possibility of cracked ribs (Shannon, my fiancee, keeps telling me this. I refuse to believe her) as well as a cracked carbon mountain bike. After spending my sunday rebuilding up my old aluminum hard tail from the winter I finally got back out for a ride again on Monday and did something I haven't done for awhile, I just rode. The heart rate monitor though present was not on the handlebars for the first time on a training ride in over 3 years and I didn't look at it at all except to hit start and stop at the beginning and end of my ride.

This view of training has been following me all week. Tuesday I went out for a bit longer than the 45 minutes the day before and did one of the best loops from my house out to Heil Ranch and home through Lyons, solid 3 hours at a comfortable pace. Wednesday I didn't have the mojo to ride, so I didn't! Then by Thursday I suited up a for a quick morning spin into Lyons and up to Hall Ranch. By the time I got to the Antelope trail I was feeling pretty antsy and pinned it all the way to the top, man that felt good to just hammer on some dirt.

Well after getting in a sweet 32 mile ride at Hall I had to take a super fast shower and then get ready for a weekend down at Sea Level. This past weekend while Macky was killing it at Crested Butte I was living the life down in Houston, TX.

As a mountain bike racer/rider one would think that my options for actual singletrack would be quite limited in Houston, wrong! At both Memorial Park and Terry-Hershey Park (both a 25-30 minute road spin from where I stay) there is some sweet true singletrack unlike any I have ever experienced. The trails are tight, twisty, rooty, and above all a blast to just put in the big ring and hammer. It felt so good to spend the weekend not worrying about what intervals I should be doing and just enjoying riding my bike again, something that I think will benefit the rest of my season exceptionally well.

Next up, Winter Park Series number 2 this weekend on the XC Super Loop, can't wait!

BigAir, Squirt lube, and a little rain

This past Saturday was Mt. Crested Butte's annual mountain bike race, the Wildflower Rush. In my seven years of racing, I have raced it 5 times (the only one I've raced more is the Angel Fire Chile Challenge, which I have raced EVERY single year, for a total of 7). Back in 2004, this was the race that my coaches guessed would get me hooked, or get me to quit mountain bike racing. As you may have noticed, it got me hooked.
I raced it as my second ever mountain bike race, and I had just moved from Junior Beginner to Junior Expert (there was no Junior Sport at the time). For those of you who have raced this race in years past, you probably remember the course: 10 miles with 1800 or so feet of climbing per lap. And I had to ride 3 laps (the same number of laps I later rode as a Pro). And I had barely ridden and had only raced one other race. I survived it. That's about all I can say. That, and that I finished 3rd, only because I was one of the few racers who didn't quit.

The race start

Now that you know my history with this race, let me tell you a bit about this year's race. First of all, they completely changed the course. And I wasn't quite sure what to think of it. Of the new 7.5 mile course, only 0.5 miles were the same as the old course, and quite a bit of it was brand-new singletrack. As much as I enjoy new singletrack, it is important to note that it is rarely smooth. It takes hundreds of riders riding it for it to get buffed out and I could very easily tell that hundreds of riders HAD NOT ridden it yet. Fortunately, the Cat 1s, 2s, and 3s all raced before the Pros, so they smoothed it out quite nicely for us.
The race started off fast. I was able to get myself a front row start (finally) so I was in the mix right from the gun. After about 10 minutes, I had moved into 2nd place behind Andy Schultz, and was jockeying for position with Cameron Brenneman. When we hit the descent, I was able to put some time on Cameron, but then I hit a rock and partially rolled my front tire. Luckily, it had not punctured, so I was able to pull it back onto the wheel and inflate it with a BigAir, but I lost 3 places in the process. I caught back up to the guys who had passed me, but had to stop at the tech zone to get a now CO2 (I thought that I had used most of the BigAir) and to close my valve (I had forgotten to in the frenzy of re-inflating my tire). At that point, I was starting my 2nd lap of 3 and was in 5th place.
I remember very little of the 2nd lap except that it started raining and I was able to catch up to a few of the guys ahead of me on the muddy descent. As we started our last lap, I had moved up 2 spots (into 3rd) and was in a group with Jay Henry, Travis (not sure of his last name), and Cameron Brenneman, working to catch Andy Schultz, the race leader.
Jay Henry passed me part way through the third lap and put a bit of a gap on me, but once we hit the descent, I was able to catch him, and together we caught Andy.
The rest of the descent reminded me more of a cyclocross race than a mountain bike race. The descent was so muddy that all three of us had to run with our bikes on certain sections and ended up completely coated in mud. Fortunately, my Squirt lube held up beautifully in the inclement weather and my shifting stayed for the whole race.

Post-race mud (and COLD)

As we neared the bottom, Andy was able to put a slight gap on Jay Henry and myself, and I realized that I would be fighting Jay for 2nd place. As we popped out of the singletrack onto the final dirt road climb to the finish, Jay went to clip back in (he'd been using his foot for stability on the muddy singletrack) and missed his pedal. I was able to take advantage of his minor slip up and attacked with 100 feet to the finish and beat him in the sprint! It was a great finish to a miserably fun race.

Poor bike!

Post-race shower