Getting Dirty

Oh look, I have some blog catching up to do again...  I'll start with the clean stuff.  After Cascade I did some resting.  Before I knew it though I was off to the Tour of Elkgrove in Chicago for three days of UCI sanctioned stage racing.  That just means that there were some big time bike racing teams there.  The race was super cool with all three days taking place in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chi-City that seemed to be one large well groomed American-Dream of a neighborhood.  The road race was 10 laps of a circuit that had 26 corners per lap.  That is 260 corners in just a hair over 3 hours!  That turned out to be a lot of hard accelerations following those big time bike racers around.  Just what I needed to get ready for cyclocross season right?

After getting home from Elk Grove I was looking for a bit of an adventure.  So what better adventure than three days of mountain biking and camping out of the Vanagon with some bros?  Alright so this is shaping up to be a rather dirty adventure...  First I took a ferry boat with Ian Terry over to Winger's house.  I sure was glad that I was only taking this boat for recreational purposes.  A certain few HB team members ride on these boats to nearly every bike race that we attend and sometimes even for work!  That is insane.

Thankfully once we picked up Winger, some sort of cartoon character was able to keep us entertained with a Ukelele from the back seat.

We rode some awesome trails a bit south of Sequim.  The Gold Creek and Lower Dungeness trails if you are familiar with the area.  Green stuff and big trees are good for you.

wingerstudios.com

After an awesome day on the trails we set up camp, ate good food, made a fire, and had 'smores.  Just the usual camping things right.  But then...  There was the Jiffy Pop which we had purchased.  Jiffy Pop seems like such a great idea, but in reality it rarely ever actually works.  Most often it just gets really really burnt and popcorn is probably one of the worst things to eat when it has been burnt.  I read the instructions which specifically said not to cook this popcorn-in-a-pie-plate product over an open fire.  Since our camp stove had long been put away though, I said "whatever" Jiffy Pop lawyers!  I went for it and I cooked that Jiffy Pop so well!  Below we have both the cooking process and the celebratory eating captured by Ian Terry.

After many more camp fire songs it was time for bed.  Winger tried desperately to trick me into cuddling with him by saying that this was a 3-person tent.

I opted for the Vanagon instead and it proved to be quite comfortable. 

All in all it was an awesome weekend filled with three days of mountain biking and many other good times. Getting dirty on the way to transitioning into the cross season.  I'm super stoked to race bikes right now!

July: Delta, Boise, Cascade

I promise my blog isn't dead, it was just resting okay... For more than a month... I guess that is probably considered hibernation?  But perhaps it's better this way because I can spare you all of the boring details of the last month and just give you a months worth of highlights

So after last month's tail safari on the way home for Augusta I did a little bit of resting. (Is it good or bad that I just had to look at my google calendar to see what I've done in the last month?)  Then after resting was the Tour de Delta in Vancouver, BC.  Always a good race and it didn't dissapoint this year. Thanks to Winger's grandparents for hosting us and to these guys for entertaining me on a morning spin through scenic North Vancouver.

Next up was a little drive to Boise with Ian and my new found teammate, Cody Campbell.  Cody is Canadian, so it was natural that we found him after Delta.  Supposedly Cody has been on the team all year, but since I didn't race San Dimas or travel with the Canadian National team to Belgium (those are things that Cody did) I didn't know.  I'm really glad we have him around now though.  Here is a picture taken on the way to Boise.  It's like we are getting ready for a bike race, but really we were just going for a little spin to break up the drive.  Either that or we are 3 homeless dudes living out of a van.

Boise was a pretty cool place to hang out.  Unfortunately the crit didn't yield any great results for us.  But I'd heard that there was another crit less than one week away, so I kept my head up.  Though I soon learned that this crit was deep into some big stage race called Cascade and that getting there would be somewhat challenging.  I'll break down the Cascade from my perspective:

Prologue: 19 seconds down isn't going to matter at all for me by the end of the week.
Stage 1: 18 mile climb? Really?  I'll settle for finishing in the largest group on the road, 16min down.
Stage 2: Another TT? Really?  I wasn't last, but was really far from 1st.
Stage 3: Only the top 150 riders after this stage get to do the crit!  Why does this race start with a 10mile climb?  Woa this is hard, imma be chasing back through the cars for a while when we get to the top of this.  Ah ya this finish climb seems somewhat easier, imma totally win this gruppetto, top 100 on the stage.
Stage 4:  I made it to the next crit! Here is is!  I rode near the front all night, but not close enough to make the break.  I did manage to snag a $200 prime though and finished 33rd on the stage.  Little did I know there were all these skinny dudes "resting" up for some other race the next day.
Stage 5: Woa, hey, is this really hard for anyone else?  We've been going 29mph for more than an hour now guys and its really hot out. Can we slow down? No?  Okay well I'm going to have to slow down now, see ya later Cascade Classic.

So Cascade was tough, but a great experience for me.  Hanging out in Bend is always a pleasure too.  The wildlife really enjoy Hammer Nutrition products in Central Oregon, I'm glad HB Cycling could help out.  Now it's time for some local racing

Tails of Traveling

I'd like to share with you some tails of my travels through the Chicago Midway airport on the way home from Nationals.  Yes. I meant tails, not tales.  Behold these majestic man-tails that I so cleverly captured all within one hour of each other in the windy city:

This is the man-tail is free and loose.  Only restrained at one point to keep this man from looking completely like a woman.  Although with hair groomed as well as this a mistake could still be made from afar.

No, this man is not actually wearing an animal with a long bushy tail on his head.  He is sporting the incredibly rare man-dread-tail.  Notice how he not only achieves great length through the dread process, but also impressive girth and weight.  This tail could probably be used as a weapon to fight off chupacabras and/or terrorists if need be.

This fellow might be new to the ponytail game.  He isn't really sure if he is ready to rock the man-tail, yet somehow he ended up with long hair that was getting in the way.  Rather than let it be free and loose like in the first example he opts for a simple braid.  This keeps his locks in check, yet might also make us question his gender.  This man should make a decision about his mane ASAP.

I've got one question about these men though...  Is it necessary to accompany your man-tail with some sort of strange hat?  I'm not sure if there is any significance here.  But I've got one more tail to share, also from Chicago.  Behold:

 I'll just let you judge this one for yourself.  But imagine following him onto an airplane and watching him tuck his tail in from the aisle when he reaches his seat.  I settled on humming this tune.

U23 Nationals Road Race - The Battle at Fort Gordon

Today's U23 National Road Race championship was contested on the Fort Gordon Army base in Augusta, Georgia.  It wasn't like any other road race battle that I have ever fought.  This was a war 104 miles long in the heat of the day.

We started with 160-something men in our battalion, all between the ages of 19 and 22.  Fresh young men, impressionable and looking to make a name for themselves on the battlefield.  Did I mention that it was extremely hot out today?  In fact, there was a point during today's battle where I found myself wondering if Augusta, GA was somehow closer to the sun than the rest of the world?  Anyways the battle began and before I knew it our battalion had turned rouge.  IT WAS EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!!!  Perhaps the biggest skirmish within the battle was keeping one's self stocked up with ammunition (water).  Within the first 30min of the battle most soldiers had already fired off their first two bottles of ammo and the pace of the firefight would continue.  I went back to our roving HQ (Joe Holmes in the team car) multiple times within the first 25 miles of the battle to gather more ammo for myself and my good Army buddy, Ian Crane.  Before we knew it though a unit of approximately 30 soldiers had separated themselves from the front of the main group and the remaining soldiers in our until battalion seemed to be on the verge of surrender.

I pedaled my machine gun every so slightly harder after about 30miles of fighting and ended up off the front with one other rider.  I though we were beginning a 74 mile march to no man's land with the main battalion behind us taking a nap and the front unit several minutes ahead of us.  It wasn't long though before my 2-man unit began to pick up some stragglers who had abandoned the lead unit.  We became 5 men, then 16 men, and we kept growing our ranks.  We closed some of the ground to the front unit, but still had a long ways to go if we were going to reel in the front unit.  Eventually our chasing unit seemed to become too big for its own good and with only a few men willing to do much work.  With a bunch of good for nothing hanger-onners our momentum began to fade.

Somewhat suddenly, with about 10miles left in the battle the main battalion that I thought had maybe surrendered caught us from behind.  It could have been a full on ambush.  Thankfully it turned out that these men who had become foreigners only wanted to trade war stories and share a few laughs.  After spending 65 miles firing my machine gun through no man's land in between the front and rear battalions I was hungry for the some more fighting and to at least win some sort of war prize for my efforts.  So with less than 3 miles left I attacked this large group of soldiers with 3 others and we pushed onwards towards the finish of the battle.  We managed to stay clear and I secured a 25th place ranking in this great National Championship Battle.  That in itself may not seem so significant but I was the 3rd ranked soldier that didn't make the original early front unit.  I'm happy with how I fought and my only regret is not going with the lead group in the early stage of the battle.  I've lived to fight another fight though.

Most photo journalism from the battlefield has not yet reached the news wire.  So this single photo will have to suffice.

*I cannot vouch for the proper use of any military terms in the post.  To those men and women who are currently or have in the past served our country, Thank You.

A Frenchman

I'm like a Frenchman racing the Tour.  That pretty much sums up the 4 days of racing at ToAD for me.  Let me explain...  The chances of me winning a race at ToAD are pretty darn slim, yet that incredibly slight possibility still exists.  For the most part though my role as a teammate has been to animate the race, get us some time on the microphone and make sure everyone knows that we are here to RACE our bikes.  I think we have done a great job of that.  In fact Dan, Logan, Ian and myself are all like Frenchman racing the Tour if they don't mind me saying.

Dan and I have been the guys going in the nearly no hope breakaways.  Yet, just like the FDJ rider in the Tour who may be rewarded with some KOM points; we are hoping to be in a good position to snag a prime.  The two of us have done a great job of that over the past 4 days and we have gotten quite a bit of TV time as well.  Although instead of getting our sponsors jersey on TV for hours on end we settle for being announced over the PA system during the race.  I can assure you that there are some Wisconsinites now aware of the Hagens Berman Cycling Team because we have been taking risks and pedaling hard.  So that feels good and the prime $ certainly doesn't hurt.

Cantwell is a straight up thug.  Thankfully with the whole field watching him I was able to sneak away from the situation with a prime.

Now Logan and Ian...  They too can be compared to the French riders in the Tour.  Logan kept a stranglehold on the green spotted cow jersey for the best Cat 2 rider during our four days of racing.  So not only was he getting lots of love from the race announcers, but he was backing it up too with some aggressive racing and excellent finishes.  Ian has been finishing well too.  Now don't get me wrong here, Ian is a great sprinter.  But if Jonny Cantwell is Mark Cavendish, Ian is Jimmy Casper.  Sure the possibility of Ian winning the bunch sprint exists, as proven by Casper in the 2006 Tour de France.  There are a lot of good sprinters here though so that is a tough battle with small chance for reward.  Ian knows this, but he still gave it his best shot last night.  Ian put everything he had into bridging to a pair of KBS riders with 2 laps to go.  He gave himself a legitimate chance at winning the race.  Unfortunately it wasn't to be and they were pulled back going into the final lap.  Major props though for hanging it all out there.  Ian's take on it here sums things up well. THAT is how we race bikes!

Pool Sharks

With only 90 minutes of racing each day you might wonder how we fill the rest of our day?  Even though we spend copious amount of time drinking coffee, napping, doing nothing, riding easily in the mornings, playing with our host dog, and then there is still some time to be filled.  Thankfully our host house has a pool table.  So we are "learning" a new sport.  I'll provide some examples below.

 Ian lining up a long shot - note a long shot for us is about to cross slightly more than half of the table.

 This might look like the same shot from the previous picture.  But I think this is just another attempt of the same shot two turns later.

 Here is a full view of the table after about a dozen turns each.  I'm no billiards expert, but I think the table should normally be looking a little cleaner at this point.

I thought that my Castelli Aero Race Gloves might give me that extra bit of cue stick security that I was lacking.  I'm pleased to announce that as of this posting I've won 5 games to Ian's 4 games.  I have no shame in admitting the 4 of my 5 victories have come as a results of Ian's trouble keeping the 8-ball on the table until the appropriate time.

In other news...  The mailbox that was recently destroyed has been replaced.

Oh, and bike racing, right...  Well the first day of ToAD went well for us. We were all pretty active and took a few primes.  Then we also placed Logan into the top 15 and into the best Cat 2 rider's jersey.   I rolled it in after attacking for a prime in the closing laps.  Day 2 was a little less fruitful, but not all bad.  Logan kept a hold of his green spotted cow jersey.  There was a crash with 4 laps to that sent Ian riding well into front yard of a house lining the course and bent my derailleur hanger real far.  So I took the last few laps of the race to get that straightened out in the pit and got to watch the finish.  The cool thing about these races is that there is another one the next day.

Here is a highlight real from our antics on the billiards table.  Sorry about the soundtrack, we are working with limited resources.  Actually, our host house has speakers everywhere that are hooked up to said host's iPod with 21,000 songs! And yes, I know you were wondering.  The pool table here at the house is a very nice one; with the ability for the felt to change between red and green.

NEWSFLASH: I'm terrible at blogging, but let's catch up...

OK, so obviousely I'm terrible at blogging.  Mostly I'm going to blame school, which I'm also terrible at, for my blogging demise.  But now it is summertime and I'm traveling to bike races.  So no excuses right?  I'm not going to promise anything, but hopefully I will be updating a bit more regularly.  Anyways let's see if I can put the past 2 months and 4 days since my last post into one entry:

I did some collegiate racing and the Tour of Walla Walla in April.  All that was cool, Walla Walla went well.  Normally I'm feeling pretty slow still at this point in the year, but things have been going well this season.  I won the collegiate conference criterium the day after my teammate, Ian Crane, won the conference road race.

Next up was the WA State Championship road race.  Long story short I was in a breakaway with a Canadian who turned out to be really strong.  He won the race and I got 2nd.  But since he was Canadian I got the State Championship title.  Winning actual bike races is way cooler though.

Then I went to Collegiate Road Nationals with my WWU homies.  The road race was a hard one.  I was doing real good going in some breakaways and what not, then I got tired and finished 8th.  We pedaled to 2nd in the TTT which is one of the more awesome events that a team can do.  You know, just through-and-off with your bros. The crit was fun too.  First I was the breakaway by myself for a long time.  Then at the end there was a breakaway that I was not in, and Ian wasn't in it either.  Ian wanted to do some sprinting.  So I rode the front from 6 laps to go until 2 laps to go.  Then there was no more breakaway.  Ian got 2nd in the sprint and we were happy with another medal for the team.  This photo sums up the collegiate nationals experience for most participants.

So then I did some training and some resting.  Then I won the Ballard Crit while most of my teammates were racing the the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic.   I was super stoked to win one of Seattle's coolest races. Apparently I'm a "sprinter", but let's not get ahead of ourselves.  I'm glad to be back racing with Ian and helping to position him for some real sprinting. Good to know that I can get it done when it needs to get done though. Thanks to Wheelsinfocus for the photo.

Now I'm in Milwaukee, WI to race the first half of the Tour of America's Dairyland.  It is a series of mostly crits which should provide good racing and some good prep for next week's nationals in Georgia.  So now that all I have to is race a 60-90min crit each day there should be plenty of time for blogging right?

Upgrades

Life has been upgraded on numerous fronts!  I am now an automobile owner again after being a carless hobo since September.  I don't just own any automobile though, behold my 1986 VW Vanagon!

 I'm pretty stoked about this purchase.  This isn't just an upgrade from no car to car.  This is a lifestyle upgrade.  This machine can take you and your stuff places in style!  It didn't come with a middle seat, but that is probably a good thing, because otherwise there would be a middle seat sitting in my garage right now.  So within 24hrs of purchase I set about filling the void left by this middle seat with an easy to clean floor and some secure bicycle mounting devices.

 A quick trip to the hardware store and I was off and running.  I'm not usually much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to non-bicycle things.  But with a little help I created a pretty slick floor that should be easy to sweep out and can also be easily removed.

 After the floor came the bike mounts.  These can also be easily removed so that when not going bikin' there is lots of space for activities, as demonstrated here.

I'm still waiting on some more bike mounts to finish it off, but 4 bikes will easily be accommodated.  I'm quite excited about the possibilities of my Vanagon.

Wait... I haven't directly written about bike racing yet in this blog entry...  So ya, I went to the Cherry Blossom Classic a couple weeks ago.  It was relatively awesome.  Young buck Logan Owen won the first stage for our team.  Then we did a time trial and a criterium in the dark. Oh my!  Those were plenty of fun, but the last stage was a legend that I had only heard of beforehand.  Here are some of my traveling companions discussing it over morning coffee.

Oh wait, actually they claimed to be "warming up" for the stage 2 time trial at this point.  Either way the last stage lived up to its hype with a lot of climbing and some sweet gravel.  I got into the early breakaway which turned into the leader's group on the final lap.  I hung on until the end, but I was real tired and could only muster 4th on the stage.  I did leap up to 6th overall though.  These results were enough to finish off my category 1 road upgrade.  So there you have it, life upgrade number 2 for the week.  I'll leave you with some action from the Cherry Blossom gravel. Thanks to Oregon Cycling Action for the photo.

March Bike Racing - All in the Rain - No Matter the Latitude

Well first off, I raced bikes in March for the first time in a few years.  Then I won the first three that I did!  I went down to the OSU/UO collegiate ominium in Corvallis and Eugene, OR.  It was fun hanging out with my WWU homies and getting it done in the wet road race and TTT on Saturday, and then a nice windy crit on Sunday.  After the early bike racing it was back to school for a week of finals.  There was Greek Mythology to be conquered!  I did some mild conquering, but the Craneimal still bested me by a couple points.  I did manage to capture a pretty interesting scene from the collegiate weekend below:

It appeared to be some sort of vigourous mid-race cramp massage therapy...  But, now I'm in sunny California to do a lot of training myself and some the first big races of the year for my teammates.  Wait...  California has not been so sunny...  Yesterday we drove to do a local crit through a very legitimate rain storm.  Like the kind of rain/wind/flash flood combo that makes even the knuckles of some Northwesterners a bit white on the freeway.  Especially when the wipers on the team van stop working completely...  Despite all of that though the industrial park crit was a good time.  Despite any stereotypes we may have had about the Socal peleton's ability to ride in the rain, everyone kept it upright and had a good time.  Today I found the sunny part of California though, so I'll share it with you.

After today's mellow ride Ian, Kennett and I went on an epic hike through the jungle.  Kennett found a rather strange plant.

OK, actually this was just in the back yard of one of our host houses...  Anyways California is great and I'm looking forward to some long rides coming up this week.  Hopefully I'll update again a bit sooner than last time.

The Off Season and Beyond!

Well it's been awhile... So a good number of things have happened.  After getting home from Europe I settled back into Bellingham and tried to get back in the school gear.  So that is what I spent most of my month or so long off season doing.  It was only interrupted by a week long visit from my cyclocross season traveling buddy Adam.  Adam likes to ride mountain bikes so I rode my mountain bike more days of the week than not for a bit.  We had some good fun and it was a good way to get back into the bike riding.

After Adam returned to Oregon I started up the training again and somehow I lucked out with nearly 3 weeks of great weather.  I think moslty I just got really lucky and had sun for the long days and most the rain came on the shorter days.  Until this past week when the weather got real for Bellingham and we got a decent amount of snow.  Which of course led to my nearly only once per year snow adventure involving some skinny skis.  It turns out you don't get any better at something if you only do it once per year.  Nonetheless I still headed up with some buddies from the WWU Cycling Team and proceeded to flounder around in the snow.  I think I did do some gliding on the skis, but there was a lot of pushing and a lot of soreness afterwards. I may have crashed a few times too...  I did my best to pretend I knew what I was doing though.  We managed to ski 8k through the 6inches or so of powder that was on top of the groomed-awhile-ago track.  Then I came home and looked up some ski race stuff.  8k is about half the distance of the shortest xc ski race.  Respect for those that do that and longer.  Oh ya, they also do it way faster too...