Kenosha #3 Race Report

While it was a cold more (high of around 30) with a few snow flurries swirling around off and on throughout the morning, it was an absolutely beautiful day for a bike race. If only it had been about 30 degrees warmer, then it would have been a most excellent day for a bike race!



Because Kari was racing her first crit ever this morning, we had to get down there really early with the women's race being the third race of the day and my race occurring several hours later. Kari has raced a road race before and she has some "track" experience racing Little 5 down at IU, but she has never raced a crit. Personally, I think a crit is about the most fun you can have on a bike. Due to the cold temperatures, Kari had to borrow some of my thermal clothing, including my Purdue thermal jacket. She looked great at the starting line waiting for people to line up in black and gold.



While Kari missed out on jumping in with the girls who got in the breakaway, tactically, Kari raced a very smart race. She stayed right with her rivals and worked with them to maintain a solid pace. Once the official announced 3 laps to go, Kari decided that it was time to work and drop her competitors. It worked because she rolled across the line with about a quarter lap lead on the second place rider in her category and took 4th overall in the field. Nothing more exciting that winner your first crit by a large margin knowing that you left a lot of gas in the tank. She will definitely be rocking it out this summer in the bigger races!



Kathleen also raced with Kari in the Women's Category 4 and took 3rd in her first ever race! Unfortunately, she left before I could get a picture of her with her medal!

My race was definitely the most exciting of the series. As a quick recap, in the first week, the field stayed together throughout the whole race, minus a few stragglers who fell off the pace, and concluded with a field sprint. In the second week, the pouring rain scared most riders off and Chris and I drilled those that did show up until only he and I remained. This week was vastly different, but similar at the same time. One big difference was that the official announced that there would be primes, or intermediate sprints for prizes/cash! One prime was for an ABR sanctioned prize and the other was for $20. After the first lap, the official rang the bell for prime on the next lap. I had been very aggressive right out of the gate, my legs were not feeling all that good, and I got myself into bad position for the sprint, so I did not contest the first prime. Oh well. This prime actually shattered the field. The result had one rider off the front, a group of four (including me) then the rest of the pack split up into 1s and 2s. An unfortunate thing about racing with Cat 5s is that many do not understand strategy or how to ride in a pack. I had to teach my fellow companions how to pace line in a manner that would allow us to catch the breakaway rider. It took time, but it seemed like some of my yelling and instructing was sinking in. At least they were willing to work to bring him back to set up a "field" sprint.

At some point later in the race, the official announced another prime for our posse of 4. I got myself into 3rd wheel going into turn four, my favorite position to be in in that corner when the race matters. I hammered it coming out of the corner and raced passed the guys in my group to easily win the prime. It just so happened that this prime was worth $20 and the first was only worth $2. I definitely won the better one!

Once we regrouped, the chase for the breakaway commenced again. Now we were running out of time. Myself and big pony (a Team Pegasus rider named Chris) were doing a lot of the work, but as I shouted to my group, I really did not want to lose to a breakaway rider. With one lap to go, we still had not caught him, but we were making significant gains because our organization was finally there. Then it happened. I made the final pull that bridged us to the lapped rider drafting off his wheel right before turn 3. I relaxed, content to just sit in this position through turn 4, assuming none of my companions from my chase group tried to move up. As we rounded turn 4, I hammered it to the finish line and easily won the field sprint.

Following the race, I found the guy who was in the breakaway to congratulate him for a strong effort and thanked the guys in my chase group for their work. Big pony ended up taking 2nd and the breakaway rider took 3rd. One of the officials commented that he would have liked to see a true head to head sprint between myself and the breakaway rider, since we both were strong sprinters. I agreed. I would definitely like to test my sprint skills against other good sprinters. I have a feeling that I will get my chance soon with the WCA Road Cup starting soon.



My results in this series were 1st in Weeks 1 and 3 and 2nd in Week 2. One of the officials told me that I was not allowed to race Cat 5 anymore. I agreed and took my upgrade. I knew that I probably should not have raced Cat 5; however, all of my teammates, of which only Hank and Chris showed up once thanks to other commitments, are Cat 5s and they split 5s and 4s in this series. Now I am a Cat 4 in both ABR and USAC, inching closer and closer to my goal of the season to upgrade to Cat 3.

Finally, I would like to thank Kenosha Velosport and ABR for putting on a great training series. The volunteers and officials were great! This is definitely a fun series to tune up the skills from winter training indoors to prep for spring/summer racing!

Happy Training!

How Do You Measure Up

Ah, the performance metrics.  Which ones matter?  Which ones are easily obtained?  Which ones can be ignored?

 

Now before you start reading expecting all kinds of equations for the calculation of normalized power and pretty graphs showing speed, torque, heart rate, power, number of gerbils necessary to power a 60w light bulb, etc. let us just step back from ourselves for a minute.  Well, maybe more than a minute or less depending on your reading speed.  Just know that typing this did take me more than a minute.

 

In previous posts I mentioned that my outside of sports life has a few changes on the horizon.  My lovely (and she is truly lovely) bride will be doing a bit more higher learning and my offspring now have their own activities for me to support and truck them off to. Those two things will have a definite impact of how much I can train and how much I can race.  So, on to measuring my performance.

 

Without a ruler you cannot measure.  I think Yoda may have said that to Luke.  At least I would ask you to reread that sentence in Yoda's voice to get my point across that it is a great philosophical statement.  I'm not sure if anyone said it officially, but I'm writing it now.  Regardless of who, or what, might have said it; it is a true statement.  It is hard to measure something without a reference to something else.  You have to set a goal or an end you are trying to reach.  I'm not talking about one of those New Year's resolution type goals that are made at 11:55pm and after six too many adult beverages.  I'm talking about one of those conversation with yourself that might go like this:

 

"Self, How you doing?  You're looking good."

 

"Well just fine thanks.  And you, too, are looking good.  How can I help you?"

 

"Well maybe you can answer this question for me.  What are you trying to get out of this whole triathlon/bike racing thing you've been up to?"

 

"My that is a question in deed.  I guess I am trying to X."

 

Now X can be any or all of the following:

 

Loose 40 pounds

Live a health lifestyle

Lower my blood pressure

Be active and enjoy what my body can do

Ride a sub one hour 40K time trial

Place in my age group at such and such race

Win such and such race overall

Beat so and so at such and such race

Qualify for Kona

Be happy

Enjoy life

 

That list can go on and on.  Some of those above are more short term.  Some are long term.  Some are easily defined.  Some not so much.  I would actually argue that only some of those may actually be worth pursuing and some may be steps in the pursuit of others.  The part that is interesting about the determination of X is the brutal honesty that one must have with himself or herself during the above conversation.

 

Now here is the $60,000.00 question.  What the heck is my X?  If I could answer that for you I would first make you pay me way more than you currently are.  So, off you go to figure it out for yourself.

 

Power meters, cadence sensors, speedometers, maybe race results, numbers in a training log are all tools to get you closer to X.  They are not X.  At least they are not for me and I truly hope are not for you, my gentle reader.

 

End of philosophy lesson for now.  I promise i will post more mundane things in the future.  Probably.

Kenosha #2 Race Report

Today, Chris, Hank and myself made one of our less wise decisions: racing in the mid-30s with a solid downpour and wind out of the southeast. Instead of a warm-up, we decided to sit in our cars and watch the rain pour down.


With about five minutes before the start, Chris and I emerged from his truck to finish getting ready and ride a warm-up lap. Within a few minutes, we were absolutely soaked. Since we did not have much of a warm-up, I led the first few laps at a casual 16 mph to build more of a warm-up in. Surprisingly, no one came around me for a few laps. When they finally did, Chris responded and we started shredding people from the group. Mind you, we only started with 6 people. At about the half-way point, Chris and I had driven everyone off of our wheels except for John (the 3rd place finisher from the previous week), but we had started to notice that he was weaker than us and struggling more in the wind. As I came around to the front with about 10-13 minutes left to go, I mentioned to Chris that I was going to shred this guy. I drilled it through the wind section and then as we exited the wind section Chris took over at the front and kept the pace high. Within the lap, John was gone and Chris and I settled into a rhythm for the remainder. As we approached the finish line, I let Chris take the line while I sat up to cheer the effort. Hank, racing his first bike race ever, rode a solid race and took 4th!


Earlier in the day, Jeff McKillip represented the Emerys team well and took 2nd in the Masters 55+!

Now we are all home, warming up and getting food in our bellies!

Happy riding!

First Win of the Season!

It is time for one of my favorite kind of blog posts: a race recap. Today was the first of three Kenosha Velosport Spring Training Crits held down in Kenosha/Pleasant Prairie, WI. More than any year before, I feel that Brent's winter training has really gotten me prepared for the season. With the big goal race being ToAD, the plan is to keep adding intensity in both training and racing over the next several months. Today was the first real test of how winter training actual went. As Chris put it the other day, time to put up or shut up.

Knowing that Daylight Savings Time was scheduled to happen during sleep time prior to the race, I made sure I got to bed a little earlier and left myself plenty of time to wake up and get things organized in the morning. I believe that I may have left a little too long, because I had way more time to think about what I was about to do than I normally have. Mind you, I am very into ways to mentally prepare. For instance, throughout this crit series, my Desktop Image on both computers lists my goals for the series. The goals are: Finish, Win Cat 5s, Help Chris and Steve place well. I have been staring at these goals for well over a week and will continue to stare at them when I'm on my computer, both at home and work. However, on the morning of, I try not to over think things because that just leads to increased nerves. Anywho, while I was getting my bag ready and car loaded to head down, I received texts from both Chris and Hank that they are out due to illness (to kid and self) and I was unable to contact Steve, so it looked like I was going solo. This is no big deal, I've raced solo plenty of times; however, all of our strategies were team-centric, so I ended up thinking more about how I wanted to attack the race.

The drive down to Kenosha was fairly normal. Right as I was turning on to 80th Avenue, I could feel my stomach doing summersaults. I was thinking: it is cold and cloudy, I have no teammates and I have not been on a bike outdoors since November. Awesome! As I pulled into the parking lot, I found Jeff McKillip's car and parked next to him. At least I'd have a familiar face at some point.

After registration, using the facilities and watching some of Jeff's race, I went back to my car to start getting warmed up and ready to race. As I was putting my trainer together, I remembered why I could not use my trainer and my bike with the skewers that I own. Good thing to note for future, not something that I wanted to discover on race morning at the site. I started thinking, what else could go not according to plan? I tried to push that thought from my head and just focused on the task at hand.

Instead of riding my trainer, I decided that I would try to do the warm-up that I would have done on the trainer out on the open road. This turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise. I was able to replicate what I wanted to do on my trainer fairly well while getting the jitters out of feeling my bike on the asphalt for the first time in months. I kept monitoring when the race before mine was due to finish and adjusted my warm-up on the fly to allow myself to finish warming up within 10-15 minutes of the finish of the race before mine. That way, I could dump the extra stuff at my car, switch gloves and ride to the start/finish line warm and loose.

I lined up in the second row of the bunch at the start while they were checking to make sure we were all there. Astonishingly, there was a guy (first timer) who was only wearing shorts, a Yankee's jersey and toe-clip pedals. He was actually fairly strong despite not knowing how to handle his bike all that well. I had decided to just sit in the pack and see what happened for the first few laps. As expected, no one went on a break so at the start of lap three, I jumped and had a huge gap on the field rather quickly. Unfortunately, no one came with me. I rode solo for a lap without gaining or losing ground on the field, so I decided to shut it down and let myself get caught. I sat in the field for a few more laps then did it again with the same results. One of my favorite parts of my breakaway attempts involved hearing the coaches yell at their cyclists to sprint so I would not get away! It made me smile each time!

With only a little more than three laps to go, the guy leading the field swung wide in the back stretch to try to get people off his wheel. As expected, the pack followed like a herd of cattle being led to slaughter. I took this opportunity to race up the inside of road and got a huge gap on the field while they tried to figure out what was going on. I shut it down again as we crossed the start/finish line with three laps to go. As we made it through turn three, I mentioned to the guy next to me (Shawn) that this was the most gentle three laps to go that I've ever experienced. He mentioned that he is a Track guy and the whole race is boring. We got a good chuckle out of it.

On the last lap, no one had picked up the pace at all, so I decide that I would once we hit the back stretch. Coming out of turn two, I punched it and got another huge gap on the field. Surprisingly, the field did not chase me down, so I kept the hammer on. At this time, the newbie I mentioned previously crashed behind me (I only heard the crunch of metal in the distance) and took two other guys with him. It was a bloody mess. Hopefully he is ok. Definitely not the way you want your first bike race to go. Knowing that my legs were not going to be able to keep pushing hard and muster a strong sprint in case I got caught, I decided to ease off the gas a little between turns three and four. Despite easing off the gas slightly, I still had a bike length or so lead going into turn four. Coming out of turn four, I punched it and really poured on the gas. As I approached the finish line, I glanced to my side to see where other people were. I had several bike lengths between myself and the next guy so I sat upright and glided across the finish line with my arms held high (Donna said it was Tour de France style). I am really hoping someone got a picture of that!

This was my first cycling win ever! Needless to say, I was stoked! I met the guys who took first and second on the cool down lap. They were cool guys and I look forward to racing with them again. The second place guy was really strong, a mountain bike racer trying out the road for the first time. He led the race for the most part, since he is more used to just a consistent level of suffering and not the accelerations common to road racing. I know that if Chris or any of my other teammates were there, we could have put an immense amount of suffering on the field and definitely road away from them. I am very excited for next week when we can make that happen!

Here is a photo afterwards with my medal!

Shaved My Legs, But No Where to Go

So here I sit with perfectly shaved legs, actual road (like outside riding) tires on the bike, a (for me) clean bicycle, and I have no where to go.  As cyclists we all know that shaving one's legs is the equivalent to putting on a pretty prom dress.  Not that I have ever worn a pretty prom dress.  But, I digress.

 

Today sees the first of the Kenosha Velosport Training Races and my life has gotten in the way of my bike racing. What to do?  Guess I'll put the trainer tire back on the Powertap Wheel and shoot to do all three races I can next week.

 

Good luck the Emery's Third Coasters today.  I'll be pulling for you in spirit.

 

Coming soon...  How do you measure your performance?

 

Since I've posted about getting a power meter, I've gotten a few e-mails about how I track my training, etc., etc.  I have more than a few thoughts on the subject.  Rather than respond via e-mail, as soon as I get them straight in my own head, I'll post them here.

Sobelman's

Last night, a few of us crazy Team Emerys guys and gals went down to Sobelman's Pub & Grill. The food was fantastic and the company was equally great. Part of the discussion revolved around the racing calendar to prep for the Tour of America's Dairyland, the race I (and Chris and a few other guys) am targeting as my "A" race. Not only do I want to do well in each of the stages, but I want to challenge for the overall. It was helpful to get on paper what I need to do in the months of April and May to really prep for ToAD in June. Anywho, here's what I'm sure you're mostly interested in: a photo of my burger!

T Minus One Week

Today saw me actually make a group workout at the shop. Man, that is a much better workout place than my basement. When I rule the world, I will be able to make more of the group workouts. Anyway, as always, Coach Brent had a great set-up with Computrainers and all the fixings.

With less than a week until the Spring Training Races in Kenosha, it is just about time to put-up or shut-up. I have reason to believe that the team should be closer to the first rather than the second (nevermind we are seldom a quiet lot). We shall see. Stay tuned.

It's almost racing time!

As the season approaches (only 11 days until the first race of the season in Kenosha), I will also be posting more. While I have spent an average of 3 days a week at Emery's training with Brent, I do not have many interesting things to write about. One positive thing of note is that we seem to have around 8-10 people showing up on Tuesday nights. Who knows if that will continue once we hit the streets in about 7 weeks, but it is pretty cool for now. I am sure that there will be more interesting things to write about and discuss while the outdoor miles start to rack up.

For now, I have a few things that I would like to share. This past Saturday (Thursday for Kari), we completed our second power test. This power test was 15 minutes long in contrast to the 10 minutes we completed for the baseline session. First off, Kari did awesome! She went for 4.90 miles in the 15 minutes for an average of 19.6 mph on the CompuTrainer! What's even more awesome is that she went for 1.81 miles in the final 5 minutes for an average of 21.72 mph! She definitely did not try hard enough for the first 10 minutes! I truly believe that she will shock people come race season as long as she picks up on the mental aspect of the sport. As for my power test results, my goal was at least 6 miles in the 15 minutes; however, I was only able to get 5.75 miles for an average right around 23 mph. I was also watching my average power and it looked like I was averaging around 290 watts for the duration. While I do not have a fancy power meter like Chris to gauge all of my data, it is nice to see my data during my power tests. I am definitely looking forward to growing up and owning a fancy power meter some day!

Finally, for those interested, a preliminary race calendar and results from 2011 are posted. Keep checking back to see more races added and results posted! Also, if any of our readers are part of the team, please send me your race schedule so I can add them to the calendar and capture your results.

Happy Training!