Thursday, May 31, 2012

Tour de Gironde



So it has been a few days since the last race ended, but it has been really hit or miss with the internet where I have been (mostly miss). The race was called the Tour of Gironde, and it was mostly around Bordeaux, France. Like you would expect from the location, we pretty much ended up riding around many of the surrounding wineries, and the occasional castle. But it was actually a cool race (even though the place where we stayed was terrible), and I liked it a lot more then the previous weeks race. 

We started out with a 170 km road race on saturday, with a lot of wind, and some pretty hard, but short, climbs. I felt really good at the beginning, so I was being really aggressive. I ended up in a break that looked awesome: 9 guys, with most of the bigger teams represented, and I really thought that it would be the break of the day.  Since the team also thought that this move would be the break of the day, everyone else on our team had assumed positions towards the back of the 120 person field. Unfortunately, about 10 km later, we got caught, and, as luck would have it, the next break was the break of the day. Since I needed a second to recover after just being off the front, and everyone else was at the back, we missed the move, which was a big mistake. It turns out that there were 17 guys in the move, which is a lot, especially if you want to bring it back. And since pretty much every other team in the race was in this break, the responsibility fell on us to do just that. So, for the next 70 km, 3 of us from the US rode the front trying to bring it back. However, when it you have 3 guys versus 17 guys, it is pretty clear what the outcome will be, and we just watched while the time gap slowly increased. So while we got some great exercise (and pictures) while we were on the front, it ultimately did nothing for us in the end. Seven guys finished a minute ahead of the main group, which essentially ended all chances that we had for any of us to have a good ride in the general classification. I ended up finishing 97th, after blowing up on the last finishing circuit. 

The next day, though, turned out to be a lot easier. It was a 180 km road race, and, although in the first 60 km of the race it was really hard while a break tried to get away, the team with the leaders jersey, called the Rabbobank continental team, controlled it very well, never letting the gap get over one minute, and almost guaranteeing a sprint finish. I though that it would be a good chance to go for my best result yet, seeing as we didn't have anyone to work for in the overall. So when we hit the three finishing circuits, I worked on positioning myself for the sprint. I actually was doing a pretty good job, and going into the final corner, I was maybe 10th or 15th wheel, which was pretty ideal, given that the final straight away was maybe 700 or 800 meters. However, everybody in the race was just so strong, that everyone could contest the sprint. There were so many guys that were sprinting for the line, that I couldn't even full out sprint! I ended up crossing the line in 21st place, my best finish yet in Europe, but I realized that I just needed to be more aggressive, and I decided that if I were in the same position the next day, I would not make that mistake again. 

The last day was essentially identical to the second day. Rabbobank controlled it, leading to a sprint finish. However, this time, I was a lot better prepared, and although I was not in as good a position going into the final corner, I had a clear line up the left hand side of the road in the sprint, and I was able to pass probably 10 or so guys, which is a ton. I ended up finishing 13th, which was bittersweet; on one hand, I was happy to be up there and get my best finish yet, but I knew that I could have done better if I had not messed up the final corner. But it was good to get a boost of confidence going into my last race in Europe, which starts on the 9th of june. It is a 7 day race in Germany called Thurigen Rundfarth, and I am actually really excited about it.

Here are some pictures from the race this weekend:
This was where I stayed. Most of the teams stayed at this place as well.
 It was pretty dirty and fairly small, but we made do!

One of the pictures from the first day, when we were on the front. 


Another one of us riding the front



This is what 21st place looks like, from the second day. It is a bit hard to see me, but I am to the left of the guy in the green jersey, who is to the left of the guy who is winning. Just to give that a bit of perspective.




This is my favorite picture of the race. This was from the first day as well. On the second day, at the start of the race, they had three pictures up from the previous days race, and this was one of them. It was pretty sweet, but then on the last day, they actually presented me with a copy when our team signed in, which was pretty cool as well.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

France (2)

So, I didn't let people know how last weekends race ended. But ultimately, it did not end up that well. The last stage was 120 miles with over 40 kilometers of hard climbing, and it was snowing/raining the whole day. I ended up not finishing, but so did a majority of the other guys. From the 80 or 90 starters, only 28 finished. The good news was my teammates finished 6th and 8th on the stage, and were both in the top ten overall, so they both had really good races.
After the race, we went to Limoux, France, for a few days of training (and recovering). It is really awesome here. We are staying in the middle of old town, walking distance from the main square, and just about everything else you could need. The weather was not that nice for the first few days, but it cleared up, and now we have been having some really nice weather. Anyhow, we leave Limoux tomorrow for a 3 day race called the Tour of Gironde.

 Here are some pictures from around town:
The road to where we are staying

Walking to the Main Square

Another unique street near our house

This door on the right is where we were staying

An old church near town

A river near that goes through town

The church again, and more of the town.





Thursday, May 17, 2012

Q: How long can these guys go this hard?

A: About 155 kilometers, or... 3 hours, 45 minutes. 

Today was my first race in Europe. I have been feeling a bit better, but my lungs felt pretty bad once we really got going (which, like I have already mentioned, was at approximately kilometer zero). Here is a quick run down of the race:

Start. 
I am supposed to get in an early break, so I am going as hard as I can to try to make that happen. Despite a few decent looking moves that I was in, nothing is going, yet. This takes us to kilometer 50 or so, which took about an hour (thats about 31 miles per hour). 
Around this time, we hit the second rated climb. It got the lowest rating, a category 3, but we went soo hard. I was sitting last wheel over the entire thing, thinking "I cant get dropped, or I wont make time cut" 
Then, the hardest part of the race. We had these really strong cross winds, so the field was completely guttered. I don't have time to explain that tonight but here is a good picture example (different race, but you get the point):
This was essentially the view that I had for an hour plus during the race. 
Then, a big break got up the road, that got a minute and a half on the group really quick. So our director says: You all need to ride the front. So I ride the front for the next 30k with my teammates, decrease the  gap by 45 seconds, and then we hit that climb again. 
And I get dropped maybe 400 meters in. I ride the next 20 km with two other guys who were riding the front with me, and then get caught by 8 or so riders just holding onto a car. I draft the car, just so that I can make time cut, but we are going so fast, it was one of the hardest times in the race. 

All in all, I was the 3rd to last finisher in the race (but maybe 5 or 10 DNF'd, and a few got time cut), and I ended the stage almost 15 minutes down. 
BUT, our director was happy with my performance, and since I am still sick (I have a wicked cough), I think that this bodes well for what is to come. 

More Later. 

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

France

Today I spent mostly traveling. It was a unique day though, here is how it went:

Izegem, Belgium--> Lille, France (driving)
Lille, France--> Paris, France (TGV, the high speed train)
Paris, France--> Toulouse, France (Plane)
Toulouse, France--> La Bastide de Sérou, France, Driving

It is incredible here, we are essentially in the pyrenees mountains, so it is very scenic.

This is what I got to see of Paris...

The Rolling hillsides of France, from a car.

The mountains where near where we are staying

The view from my room


The hotel we are staying in.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Impressions of Belgium

As of today, I have now been in Izegem, Belgium, for 4 days. My first impression was something along the lines of "this town seems quaint." Belgium is definitely unique, with lots of unique and interesting sights.






































This is a picture that I took just a block away from where I am staying, that captures the feeling of the town pretty well. It is a bigger city, with a population of around 26,000, but it doesn't feel very busy. Most people seem to get around on bikes, but there is car traffic on the street that the house is on as well. Speaking of the house, this is where I am staying for the next few days:
Pretty much everything that you see in the picture is our house. Towards the back is what is called a "service course,"the place where the team keeps all the bikes, spare parts, and things of the sort. Most of the beds are upstairs, but I am staying on the lower level with a few other guys. I think in total, the house could accommodate 20 to 30 guys, so it has a lot of space. Also, generally there aren't so many cars, but today this happened to be going on directly to the left of the photo: This was actually pretty cool to see, because we didn't know that it was going to happen, but it reinforced the fact that they actually care about bike racing here. You might not be able to tell, but this is a field of probably 70 to 80 juniors, probably age 10 to 12. It is crazy, because you would never see a field that big in the US. Also, it is funny because as much as they seem to care about racing here, the riding SUCKS! This is a good example why. 
There are two things that make this terrible for riding. First, every time I go for a ride, there is a possibility that I will get hopelessly lost and find myself in Poland, without a working cellphone and with two flats and no way to get back to Izegem. Second, assuming that I have some idea of where I am going, there is now way to keep a steady ride, since you have to stop peddling every 20 seconds to slam on the breaks.  There is one solution to this, which is called the canal, which runs through Izegem. This is just a dirty stretch of water that runs for what seems like fifteen thousand miles, smells like rotting meat, and has no notable features what so ever, it just looks like this for hours on end. 
Now, I don't mean to paint such a negative picture, but I have actually been a bit sick since I got here, and today had to miss a local race because of that. I think that I should be fine, but I am just trying to get as much rest as possible to recover. 
I am really, really excited for my first race, which starts on Thursday and is in France. It is called Ronde de L'Isard, and is a 4 day U23 (under 23 years old only) climbing stage race in the pyrenees, the mountain range in the south of France. It is a UCI 2.2, and the website is here. I'm leave on Tuesday, so hopefully I can get enough sleep between now and then to get over this cold that I am having. 
And with that, I am off to bed! Talk soon.

Friday, May 11, 2012

First Post

I am writing this first blog as I am on a flight to Brussels, Belgium. Now, I was thinking about just writing this blog about how I was doing in Europe as I went along, but I figured that it might make more sense if I gave a bit of background on what has been happening this season. So with that said, I will just jump in at the beginning of the year.

I started my 2012 season in the middle of December, 2011, in Tennessee. By that, I mean that in December, I really started training specifically for the 2012 road season. And I was motivated. There is something about the roads in Tennessee that is just special, and that we just don't have in Colorado. I cant say what exactly it is, but I can say that the past two years after starting the season there, I just feel incredible. I came home ready to ride and race. I felt excited to race with my team, juwi Solar, but I was also excited about another opportunity that I had received. A few weeks after I got back to Boulder from Tennessee, I participated in a camp run by USA cycling at the US olympic training center in Colorado Springs. It was a good opportunity to meet the coaches who run the US national team, but I left a bit unsure of whether or not I was going to get invited to race with them at any point in the year. I did know one thing though: I wanted to prove to them that I deserved an opportunity. With all that motivation and determination, I made a big decision. I decided, after the semester had started, to not attend school full time in the spring. So I dropped all of my classes except for some online work to just keep me occupied, and started to give training everything that I had.
So at the beginning of February, I drove to Tucson, Az, for a few weeks to train race. I drove down just as the first big snow storm of the year hit Colorado, so I was really excited. I spent a few great days riding on roads that looked like this:


I felt awesome on the bike, and I am still convinced that during that week, I was the strongest I have ever been  on a bike. But with all ups come downs, and after about a week, I developed a sharp pain in my left knee. I tried to ignore it at first, but after having to drop out of my first race of the year due to the pain, I realized that I needed to get back to Boulder and see a doctor. The day after the race, I was driving back to Boulder and had an appointment with Dr. Andy Pruitt from Boulder Center for sports medicine, or BCSM. Now, Andy Pruitt knows his stuff, and I trust him completely with any injury even remotely related to sports. Him and the rest of the team at BCSM have helped me get over some pretty bad injuries over the past few years. That is why, when the first thing that he said in the appointment was "you are probably going to need to get surgery," I was really disappointed, but also knew that he was right. He said that my medial patellofemoral ligament was too tight, causing it to pull on the bone every pedal stroke, causing the sharp, unbearable pain that I was experiencing. I scheduled the surgery for the next available opening, and started the waiting game. All athletes know what it is like to be waiting to recover from an injury, but those few days when I was just waiting to get the surgery were just agony. It is easy to get negative and expect the worst in those situations though, so I tried to keep everything in perspective. For example, the surgeon told me that I would be back training on the bike within 2 weeks, and racing again within 4; Although that seemed like a lot at the time, in the bigger picture, it really wasn't that much. Anyhow, I managed to make it through the waiting game and got the surgery on February 24th. After the surgery, it was... more waiting. I was never in any pain, my knee just felt really funny, like if it had been replaced by a water balloon. After two weeks though, I was back on the bike.

For those of you wondering, my total time off the bike was three days short of a month, or 27 days. That is a lot of time for anyone to lose when you are going into the season, but my biggest issue in getting back to normal training was that as a result of the surgery, I had lost a lot of muscle strength in my left vastus medialis, the inside muscle of the quad. This caused a lot of issues for me. Since the outside hadn't lost nearly as much strength, when I began riding again, my kneecap started tracking differently then it had before, causing me a lot more pain. This meant that the first race of the season, the Redlands Bicycle Classic, just wasn't a possibility for me. After pulling the plug on that, I just tried to put my head down and get my knee better as quickly as possible. Once again, I owe thanks to BCSM, and I went in to see them almost every day for a week straight. Once they worked their magic, I started to be able to ride again. The weekend before my next big race, I was finally able to start my first race back, a local road race that was just shy of 80 miles long. I felt good, didn't have knee pain for the first time in a while, and things were looking up.

The next weekend I headed to upstate New York for the NRC Tour of the Battenkill, a UCI 1.2 that included lots of dirt and totaled 125 miles long.
Let me break down what those abbreviations mean, because I will probably be using them again later on.

NRC: The NRC, or national racing calendar, is a series of road races and stage races around the USA that most american professional teams participate in. Also, some amateur teams race these events, but they are mostly by invite only this year, so it is actually a good thing to even be invited to these races.
UCI 1.2: The UCI is the international governing body of cycling. For example, it is the organization that puts on the cycling world championships. Here is a good explanation that I found on wikipedia of the ranking system that they have.


"Throughout the season, points are awarded to the top finishers of stages within stage races and the final general classification standings of each of the stages races and one-day events. The quality and complexity of a race also determines how many points are awarded to the top finishers, the higher the UCI rating of a race, the more points are awarded.
The UCI ratings from highest to lowest are as follows:

  • Multi-day events: 2.HC, 2.1 and 2.2
  • One-day events: 1.HC, 1.1 and 1.2."



So all of that was just a long way to say Battenkill is a hard race. Now, looking back on it, it seems crazy that I even started the race, and I really wanted to finish. However, after having knee pain the day before on our pre race ride, it was seeming like my chances were slim of even completing that goal. The day of the race, I started out strong, but faded pretty quickly, and ended up dropping out at the half way point. I was disappointed, but knew that I had another big race coming up in a few more weeks-- the Tour of the Gila.
Even though it was a hard race, the scenery at Battenkill was increadible
Before Gila though, I still had two valuable weeks of training. That is when things really started turning around for me. The first week back from Battenkill, I was finally able to ramp up my training again, and start doing what I needed to do to get back into racing shape. While I was back in colorado, I did a few races. But the real turn around came the friday before I left for Gila. In the middle of the day, I got an email from the director of the national team asking if I could come do a big block of racing in Europe. I was nervous, a bit surprised, but most of all, really, really excited. I had been training for this opportunity for a few years.
With that excitement, I went into the last local Colorado race that I would do in a while with a strong desire to win. I knew that if I played it right, I would have a good chance. I wont go into the race details, but I will say that the race played to my advantage, and I ended up crossing the line by myself with my hands in the air. This video sum it up pretty well. The whole thing is interesting, but if you want to just see the real action, it starts around 14:20. I am the guy in the pink kit, by the way, I stand out pretty well.
Also, when I attack that guy when it is just the two of us, I am actually going really hard, it just doesn't look like it. I figured I should add that in.

A win is always a good way to go into a big race, so I was excited when I left the following monday for Gila. Gila is a five day, UCI 2.2 and NRC race, with a lot of climbing. I wasn't sure how I was going to fare with only a few weeks of training in my legs, but I was there, so I figured I would go for it. The first day I didn't really go for it because my coach wanted me to try to save my legs for the next day, so I finished around 100th, out of 150 guys. The next day though suited me really well. It was a 80 mile stage, with a bit of climbing, but it had a flat finish for the last 10 or 15 miles. I felt really good, and ended up 7th on the stage-- not incredible, but I was really happy with that finish. Seventh out of a field of 150 of the best racers in the US seemed pretty good to me. This is a picture of the finish:
That is me on the left hand side, in the pink, really fuzzy, just for an idea of what the finish looked like.

The rest of the race was pretty easy for me, as I mostly just sat in the field and got water bottles for guys, but I think that mostly, this race gave me the confidence that I might be able to do well in Europe. Also, my knee didn't hurt a single day!

Anyhow, I am determined to make the most out of the opportunity that I have been given by the national team, and will update everyone to how all of my travels are going!