A Chill's In The Air

Today I found myself part of a really great group ride. A usual time that everyone starts around here is 8am. But with the cold I've been holding off until 9 to get a little more warmth for the first hour. Even though this is California, it still gets cold at nigh here, like 28 degrees, but luckily this group of people decided to wait till it warmed up.

We took off from the shop and headed north on the 1 up to 41 and then over the hill to A Town, Atascadero for you non SLOians, and then back over the grade. A solid 3.5 hrs on the bike with a bit of tempo in there. Starting to feel better out there, getting a solid week in at the gym this week, with some running. Got to be in somewhat decent shape for the annual crazy birthday ride next weekend of a buddy, 50 miles or so and tons of climbing, I'll have my Garmin 500 on the bike and will post the details.

So I'm pretty sure that Thanksgiving isn't this warm in Minnesota. On the invite of Chris Stehula, current Collegiate National Tri champ to go south to Los Olivos/Santa Barbara area to ride Little Pine. It's a really awesome climb up a fire road for 10 miles or so, but the view is great. The decent afterwards was epic, one screw up and poof, you're gone.

After four hours, it was a drive back and then put the little bird on the grill and relax the rest of the day. Happy Thanksgiving!

Base

So lucky for me the rain broke this morning so today I started up my base miles for the year. I'm taking a slow approach to this, only 1.5 hours today, keeping the heart rate around 70%. I haven't really had myself on a structured plan in some time and I noticed some of the bad habits I got from riding with people that just want to try to drop you all the time. I find myself tuning out and just start mashing the pedals and then catch myself and chill out a bit.

Some new things I'm trying out are the Garmin 500 and a set of Quarq cranks. The power meter on the crank makes perfect sense, you don't have to worry about swapping wheels for racing or training. It's always there ready to go. So training with power is new for me. I used to train with heart rate only, but having all this tech is cool and hopefully I won't get fixated on numbers and lose sight of the goal here.

It's funny starting up base miles when everyone else that I know is winding their seasons down and starting to nestle in for the winter. I guess that's the Left Coast for ya, everything is completely different out here. But reading others blogs of the racing this year has me pumped up to get out there and give a real go this time around. Still getting my head straightened out, but everything is coming along. Until next time.

Runnin' Barriers

Had fun at the local cross race this last weekend. The SLO Nexus group did a great job with it and made a fun course too.

Starting Over

It's been a long while since I've written on this thing. Partially because I don't know if people really use the blogisphere anymore to tell their stories, but I figured why not give it a go again.

So over the last 8 months not a lot has happened. I had mediocre success in any race I did, either mountain or road, road a lot of junk miles, ate like crap and fell into a depression. It's been a real journey for me to get to where I am right now. Racing a mountain bike again was fun, and I did meet some nice people, and it was fun watching the national/international pros race and be able to shoot photos of them doing it. The thing about the racing out here is that the series is too short, the venues leave a lot to be desired and most of the people are sandbaggers. Even the guy who sponsors the series was a sandbagger. He was getting top 15 times of the pro and still racing the Cat 1 's. Something's wrong with that.

But, with that said, I realized that I forgot how I needed to train for racing again after being on the road for two years for Trek. All the racing I did hurt way more than it should've and left me very disappointed with myself. This put me further into my depression.

So onto the present. I have been on medication for the past 6 months and it's been working great. I have work to do still, but it's helped me get my head cleared and start setting goals. I raced Cross last weekend and finished 8th out of 16, so mid pack. That was a victory for me though, I suffered hard in that one. I got as high as 6th but started to fade at the end. So that gave me a boost in the morale and I have a plan going now for when racing starts up again in February. I plan on racing the mtn. bike in the beginning of the year, with a few road in there, and then switching over to road by June. The off road season is really short out here. Ok, that's the story so far.