Team Twin Six Metal Kit

My Team Twin Six kit arrived yesterday.  Check out the rest of the gear at http://twinsix.com.  All of the stuff is pretty cool but I am partial to the socks.

Seven Days And No Voodoo

I haven't sat on a bike since last Saturday and even then it was only for an hour. Training has taken a back seat (more like the back of the truck) to stuff like the photo above.  I thought I was going to have some time to slip away for a while each day this week but it was clear after Monday it wasn't going to happen.  A few more days and I should be back in the swing of things albeit set back a few weeks on the training.  Although I swear I can feel my fitness fading with each minute I am encouraged by how great the house is looking. 

I made up for the lack of training by drinking CarboRocket, and wearing cycling socks.

Twin Six!

Oh, and I also had to miss out on a the Voodoo Fire in Pueblo, CO today.  This one will have to wait for me until next year. 

Mancave

Man Cave

Every man needs a man cave.  Ladies, it is a primal instinct for a man to create one of these. Please don't resist or otherwise try to persuade in another direction when your man retires to the garage to spend hours upon hours building shelving, organizing tools, carpeting, reorganizing tools, leveling the organized tools, adding hooks for hanging, moving hooks for hanging previously installed, nostalgically rearranging race numbers from years past, or just standing back and taking in the awesomeness of his creation.  Like I said, there is little you can do to thwart this activity, it is built into our DNA.

Weekend Update

They closed my favorite section of the East West trail apparently for some Eagle or Hawk breeding.

I spent all day Saturday cleaning out the garage.  I found an old map of Utah with one of my favorite backpacking spots.  It was a secret place when I was a kid but now pretty much well known.

Fell victim to more of Ben's trash talk on Twitter and was forced to produce race numbers from the only 4 running races I have done to prove a point.   He still kept it up though and I was forced to retreat into silence.

I finally took the time to install hooks to hang my bikes up in the garage. This will probably be short lived.

I found this Stan's monster in one of my tires

April Snow In Colorado

The view out my back window yesterday morning.

Colorado weather is unpredictable. This time of year one has to pack a a rain coat, flip flops, and a down jacket if they plan to be out for more than 3 hours.  Yesterday some reported 18" of show.  Today it is sunny with a high in the upper 50s. This weekend people will be riding mountain bikes again in most places.

Today is also the deadline to get your taxes in...

Recovery, Gut Check, And Rocky

I just finished the first 3 weeks of (mostly) following a 100-miler LWCoaching plan.

Over this time I've been subject to hill intervals, one-leg-at-a-time pedaling, core workouts, 110 rpm spinups, long endurance rides, short-track racing practice, and mellow recovery rides.  The structured training has been interesting, fun,  and a welcome change from the usual non-stop pedal hammering rides that always seem to develop shortly after a group of 2 or more push rubber past the trailhead.  Rather than just riding to ride, the last 3 weeks have resembled scenes pulled from the 5 (or are there 6?) Rocky movies.

Now that you have that song in your head...

If you remember, Rock didn't just get in the ring every day and trade shots in a testosterone-induced 4-hour sparring match to prepare for the big title fight. The Italian Stallion spent the majority of his time hammering out rep after rep of push-ups, sit-ups, snow sprints, wood chopping, log tossing, frozen beef punching,  short-short belly shirt wearing beach sprint (followed by awkward oceanic hugging) running, workouts.  And when that was done, he took some time to do a cool down lap through the streets with neighborhood kids just in time to kick it in over drive and throw that last rep in up to the top of the stairs and explode into an impromptu jumping and screaming session.  Yea, Rock had a real passion for training and for competing.  In the end he was ripped and ready to take on Apollo, Apollo again, Mr T, that 8-foot-tall Russian,  That  young guy with a sweet mullet, and post-retirement, as his own computer-simulated avatar, some other champion with nobody left to fight.  Anyway, you get the idea... Just like Mr. Balboa, it's best to mix it up when it comes to training, no matter what the sport,  and that is exactly what LW's training plan has been doing for me.

This week is a recovery week so there is not a whole lot of intensity in the workouts.  It's a hard thing to dial it back when I've been used to hard efforts but it's the right thing to do.  After reading the training books/bibles it all makes a lot more sense to me.  Even if it didn't, I decided at the onset to follow my training plan explicitly, take notes,  and watch the magic happen.

I also found a scale again this week.  The last time I weighed myself was in December and as of yesterday I'm about 10lbs lighter.  That's almost 1/2 a mountain bike!

12/02/2010

03/11/2011

For what it's worth, I actually liked that last Rocky movie better than the other 5.

Favorite Ride

Mount Falcon -> Lair O' The Bear -> Mount Falcon

What's your favorite ride?  If you are like me the answer to that question changes weekly.  There are so many good trails within 60 min of my house that it is hard to choose favorites.  This week, my favorite ride is shown above.  I have ridden Falcon to LOTB out and back so many times that I should be sick of it but I keep coming back again and agan to bask in the awesomeness.  In the weeks leading up to the 2010 Point 2 Point, I rode the complete out-and-back twice a week as part of my training and it proved to be a good prep for that awesome madness.  The trails offer the whole gamut of riding conditions: rocky-sustained climbs, 22%-grades, swooping fast singletrack, punchy hills, technical rock gardens, and some amazing views of city and mountains.

Why not 23% grades you ask?  There might be, but speculation based on last weeks discussion with some EECT teammates, we are pretty sure Garmin devices don't go above 22% so that is all I can report.  Who would ride something steeper than 22% anyway?

Moving on. One of the best things about the ride is that you can easily climb over 5,000ft in less than 30 miles without realizing you just climbed over 5,000ft in less than 30 miles. I attribute this to the constant changing trail that always keep you guessing, whooping, and grunting not to mention the 1,500ft gained within the first 3 miles of the lower Mt Falcon parking lot.  If you have time to ride the whole Falcon trail system in reverse on the way back you'll go over 6k.

Now that I have spilled the beans on some sweet but really not so secret riding, I will warn you that this trail is really popular on the weekends.  Some days I've ran into herds of trail runners, hikers, horses, and people just not really paying attention.  So if you want the trail all to yourself it would be best to do what I do and start at 5:30am on a weekday.  You can then relax in your cubicle the rest of the day knowing you hammered out some seriously sweet riding before most of your co-workers were even out of bed.

Ergon GS2 Grips

Ergon GS2 Grips

Just got my Ergon GS2 grips in today and they look pretty sick on my bike if you don't mind me saying so.  This is the first time I've had barends since 1999 and I have secretly been missing them for the past 12 years.