Thursday, February 25, 2016

Race Report Blogging Style Guide - part 1?

Seriously? From a guy who has no style, and almost no blog? Probably just a bunch more hate-filled satire. No really. And if you already know what a race report blog entry is, why even keep reading? I wonder myself sometimes. But if you have, then let us begin with classification, because if we can't classify people, then we can't divide them, and if we can't divide them, we might end up bringing them together, and nobody, least of all me, wants that. So classify we shall. Let us begin with triathletes.

Doing a triathlete race report blog entry is fairly simple. Start by writing about your "nutrition" from the night before the race. This will ALWAYS come from either a restaurant, the Whole Foods prepared goods section, a 2lb sized cardboard powder canister, or a foil pouch. Preferably all of the above. Because who the fuck has time to cook when they're swimming, riding, running, and blogging all the time? Then write about your alarm going off at like, 1:45 am or something, segueing nicely into and even more detailed description of your synthetic breakfast. After that, cover the race plan, like your coach laid it all out to you. Cuz if you're a triathlete, and you've got a blog, then you've got a coach. And if you've got a triathlon coach, you've got a plan.

The rest of it is pretty easy too. Short paragraph about going in the water to pee, maybe 150 words on getting bonked on the head in the swim, and having "sighting" troubles. The rest of it can be pretty free form, just remember to say a lot of stuff about your crotch, and use catch phrases like "slammed a Gu" and "dropped my chain." Wrap it up with a finish photo that looks like a drunken stage dive in front of a digital clock (if you did well), or go to the cutesy kids cheering you on images if you sucked.

Running races are a little different. If you're a pure runner (i.e. don't ever ride a bike), then you probably wouldn't ever write a race report at all, or even have a blog. Because let's face it, your daily run isn't much more exciting than a trip to the bathroom, and for reporting on that we only need twitter. But let's go out on a limb and assume you want to blog about it. Start with the basics, you know, how you put in three consecutive 90 miles weeks, feel a little flat from those 400m repeats with the club, are a physical train wreck, and are using the race for "just training." Cause you need more mileage. Then go on to how you lined up, and how the 15 degree temperature just felt too warm after your winter of training in sub-zero at 4 am. The gun goes off. Here's where it gets difficult. If you're a dude, you'll want to detail how you made pace for the world class hot chick winner of the race that is... (don't remember where I was going with this)

Next up we have the road rider's race report. These are pretty easy too. Road rider blogging has one simple objective: make every race, every training ride, heck even every trip to the store sound worse than a Sunday in Hell. Now that I think of it, this could extend to CX riders too, and especially to CX riders who have nothing to do but ride the road in the summer. Point is, even if you don't allow yourself to use the four letter "E" word, you've got to let your readers know that all your rides, your entire life actually, are "E" Period. It's easier than it looks. Just rearrange "pain cave," "dig deep," "red zone," and "Belgian hard man" into a tale of a ride so difficult no reader could ever possibly duplicate it, because you and you alone are able to overcome the challenge of staying with equally unfit athletes following one another around an office park.

To be continued... Maybe

Friday, February 1, 2013

Bits of ... nothing

Most of the photos here will probably appear as broken links tomorrow. RIP bitsofstuff.com Just tired of paying for it, and even if it's a cool name, well, the money that was used maintaining it will be better spent on charity. I doubt that I'll ever get around to fixing the links, no easy way to do that with blogger. On a real site, yeah, 2 minutes with sed. Oh well, those were the good old days. Look for something (anything?) to surface on davefoley.com. Ciao. That's Latin for goodbye. Thanks so much for reading.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Uri Wins!

Well we had to declare a winner, despite a disappointing voter turnout. It came down to a two racer contest, as the Big Al political machine failed to mobilize the electorate. Robin lobbied for an 11th-hour addition of Sick What!!! Anthony to the ballot, but the request was denied. We had two J.A.M. fundafarians already.

With his string of recent bad luck (or is it just bad racing?), Mr. Uri pulled in the sympathy vote when I put on my Vice President's hat, cast the tie-breaking vote, and banged me gavel. Congratulations to our victor. We'll try to pull together a prize for presentation very late in the proceedings at the Grand Fundo, right around when the kegs are empty and we're transitioning to Nixon's home brews. To really make it special, I'm calling in favors and paying people off to try to get our winner some face time with cycling media celebrity Big Bikes Thom. All hail Uhalevi, and thanks for reading.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Last Chance to Vote!

Cast some ballots or I might be forced to break the tie myself. And where's the love for Al?

In other news, the new blogger still sucks. Thanks for your continued support.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Valley of the Dolls

Now that I've been forced into the new Blogger along with everything else new Google, I see that solobreak has had just over 50,000 pageviews in its 6 year existence. Worth trying to bring it out of the coma? Not sure, but if it is, what better way than with a poll? After all, who doesn't like to take a pole? Huh-huh. Pole jokes. And what better kind of poll than a popularity contest among bike racers my faithful blog readers might know? Knew you'd agree. So without any more bullshit, I present the First Annual Solobreak Favorite Rider from the Valley Poll.

Why the valley? Well, first of all, it's in Massachusetts, and you know I love Massachusetts. Other than that, I'm not really sure. But there's lots of riders out there. And lots of great riding. In fact, since I'm not racing much this year, I'm hoping to do more just plain riding in western Mass. Background, this started on, where else, twitter. I noted that Uri Halevi had displaced Al Donahue as my favorite rider from the valley. @uhalevi as he's known, had won me over primarily by being less of a dick than @resultsboy, racing the road, dropping all kinds of knowledge about cars, and having unusually good taste in music for a dude probably born when Ray-Gun was president and vetoing implementation of the metric system. Of course, I'm not sure if either of these two "clowns" (more on that in a second) are actually from the valley. In fact, we know Big Al is from the South Shore someplace. Let's just hope it's Hull and not Hingham. Because if you're going to be from the South Shore, it had better be Hull. Weymouth maybe. But not Hingham. Likewise, Uri has some online bio listing his home as Chestnut Hill. This I did not know when I nominated him, but it's too late to revoke now. Hopefully he was going to school or something and he's not really from there. But anyways (not a real word), they both live in the valley now, meeting the residency requirement. I "met" both of them at last year's Grand Fundo. Uri had a really non-bike racer beard thing hanging from his face, not becoming at all, and I talked with him for about three beers before realizing I "knew" him from twitter. Al's name I recognized as the Garneau guy who won every friggin' race in New England a few years back. I'd heard good things about him. Then he tells me that he started racing at Wompatuck on Wednesday nights when I was with the Bicycle Link and we helped newbies learn how to be mediocre. I guess he moved on...

This would have been a two person race, but of course, the ever-opinionated @shopengarten opined that "those two clowns got nothing on @Francestastic." Dedicated readers might remember @shopengarten as the guy about which Jonny Bold once quipped "too bad, your name sounds like a delicious Belgian beer, what a waste!". At least that's what I remember him for. From what the other Davis Square dicks tell me, nobody will remember him for his race results. But we won't let that stop us from yielding him the floor to put forth a third and final nominee. To be honest, I don't know all that much about @Francestastic. I don't even follow her on twitter. She rides for the same team as Al. He may even be her coach. &^%$#? Another masters racer I know (who does not want his good name associated with this trashy blog) cheers for her at the races. Probably because she looks about 15 18 and wears a clean white skinsuit. She races elite. So there you have it, a three-party party.

Voting will be in the comments. Do your civic duty! Duty. Huh-huh. This is no simple ballot either. You're not even limited to 140 characters. Write a comment. If you tweet about it instead of commenting, you're not only a jackass, but you're a dumbass (a little @gewilli-esque name-calling there). We will come up with some kind of prize. Thanks for voting.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Raising the Bar

The solobreak customer/commenter base took a beating it would seem, but a few wise-asses remain. We're getting fit tips from the youngest case of old man back in the Northeast. Maybe I should point my hoods at the sky while I'm at it. Regardless, something had to change, but we had a process. For starters, Greg took a lot of measurements of my feet. Anyone who has ever ridden with me knows that my feet are not "quiet" when I'm pedaling. We measured both unloaded and loaded, checking length, width, arch height, and arch drop when loaded. I've tried a lot of shoes, including Rocket7s custom-made from squish box molds. Well, my feet are narrow, with medium-high arches. To get snug fit I'm probably buying shoes that are a bit too short. My current Bontrager RXLs are 43's, and they have a big toe box. I guess I could wear 44's if I found something narrow enough. We discussed my e-sole supports, and the use of in-shoe varus wedges.

We moved on to testing flexibility. Never a strong point for me. I stretch more than most riders, because I have to. After about twenty minutes of warming up and stretching, I'm reasonably flexible, but it's always a struggle. We tested my hamstrings. Greg's method is to have you flat on your back, both heels down. He bends one straight leg up, waiting not for the "stretch point," but more for where your pelvis starts to rotate. Which is not very far up. My left was less then my right. We measured a bunch of other stuff, including my leg length. Once all the measurements are done, we moved to the Serotta fit machine. This was the newest version, which makes moving any of the contact points very easy. We had it setup with one of my preferred saddles, Speedplay Zero pedals, and Shimano shifters with hoods just like I use.

Based on leg length a few other things, we came up with a starting point for saddle height that is way higher than what I use to setup my bikes. Like 19 mm higher than my traditional reference height. I tried it. Greg also felt that my 9-10 cm of saddle to the bar tops drop was too much for my limited flexibility to accommodate. The reasoning being that excess stretch of the hamstrings prevents the quads from firing properly. So what I had been doing was lowering my saddle, as it made my hamstrings feel less tight on the bike. Except it made my knees hurt. I could spin nice and smooth, but couldn't make big torque while seated. Always wanted to stand up. Which is what led me to believe my saddle was too low in the first place.

I mentioned my "reference saddle height," a measurement 765 mm going straight from the BB to where I sit. I kept my setback around 68-75 mm from the BB to the front tip of the saddle. I've always been afraid to mess with this. But then I got the Rocket7s and switched to Speedplays. This necessitated lowering the saddle quite a bit, as the shoe stack was so much less than with Looks and thick-soled shoes. Then there was cyclocross, MTB pedals, and messing around to see what worked off road. Well, story goes, somehow I lost my way because upon measurement, my bikes were all around 750-755, even lower than I thought. And a whopping 30 mm lower than what the guidelines suggested for my leg length of 89 cm.

We spent a lot of time on the fit cycle, watching my pedaling, talking things out, making cleat adjustments. A lot of experimenting with reach, bar drop, and setback too. The fit bike has spin scan too, and my left/right pedaling was nice and balanced, but I can't go up that high on the saddle without losing a lot of cadence. No matter how high the bars were. But we made a lot of progress. The work on my cleats, some wedges, one shim on the right and my feet weren't nearly as fidgety and twisty as they've always been. For now we settled on a saddle height of 768. Which is about 15mm higher than what I've been riding. Setback we left about the same.

Which leads us to the bars. I had "aggressive" drop to begin with, pretty much the way I've always ridden. High bars really bother me when I'm standing, and I like to stand on climbs. But drop that was aggressive before is like, really aggressive when you raise your saddle a cm or two. So they had to come up. But Greg also wanted me to try shorter reach. I'm always telling beginners to bend their arms more. Well, I wasn't bending mine so much lately. Part of the other problem I had in CX was not getting enough weight on the front wheel. So I'd go with longer stems. Except that doesn't work if you're reaching for the bars. Remember those tight illiopsoas? A pelvis in distress doesn't allow for proper posture, and posture is a far more important aspect of fit than contact points.

Of course, I'm not thrilled about being old and feeble. The best medicine is never going to be an accommodative fit, but instead to fix the body. But there's only so much we can do. I have a pretty short torso in relation to my leg length. That doesn't help much. So now I'm in the market for some forks with longer steerers, if not some new bikes with short top tubes and big head tubes (which luckily is what all the fat-old-guy production bikes are like these days. In the short run, scary stems are part of my life.

So how does it ride? You're supposed to ease into a new position right? Well the first day I applied all my wisdom and "raced" an indoor time trial. Though the Vegas judges had my computrainer at 280 watts, my PM had 304, an encouraging 14 more than I rode on the same course in January. Can't give all the credit to the position change though, as let's face it, March fitness is better than January fitness, even if you don't have any fitness. The next day I went out for a long, flat ride with the Cronoman. I was kind of afraid, as he's somewhat of a winter champion and had been putting in big training mileage with the Blue Steel/Team Type 1 southern NH mafia. I felt fantastic. Was a better 3 hour wattage than I've ridden in a year. All in all, so far so good. But the best part is my knees seem to like it.

Now a few weeks later, I think we can continue to improve. I'm beginning to understand the foot thing and how my hips want to rotate, and how it affects my knees. There is work to be done though. It reinforces my recognition that structural fitness is important to begin with, and it only gets more so as you inch toward death by old age. I hope the younger generation is listening. Believe it or not, I was 26 and strong once. Classic case of if I'd only known then what I know now. Thanks for reading.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Having a fit

Greetings, Earthlings! What it is? Feeling somehow like a pretty picture or two should accompany my prose, but that's the kind of petty nonsense that's been keeping me silent, so perish the thought, let's do this. Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. What else?

When we left off last, I think I'd had my right knee scoped for the second time, I was fat, happy, and slow as a mofo. Was a rough mild winter too. Saw the dark side of 180 pounds (that's like 82 kilos for you civilized folk). Woooooah Shamu! Who knew that pizza at Little Stevie's and barfing up tequila in the middle of Boylston at 3 am weren't the way to prepare for race season? Race season, hah. Not even so sure about that. But with friends like mine, you have to train just to train. Fuckers won't relax and slow down, ever.

Anyway, last winter I met Mr. Greg Robidoux at Mo Bruno's end of year reception at the Ride Studio Cafe. So when it came time for a little post-op rehabilitation of the physical therapeutical kind, naturally I called on him. And he showed me what a train wreck my aged body had become. But we worked through it. Sort of. My hip stabilizing muscles are practically non-existent. This does not help my knee tracking. And some of my joints aren't joined so well, things don't move all that freely. It all seems so obvious now. So we worked on some stuff, and I returned to riding and running. My left (not scoped since 1996) knee gave me more trouble than the one we cleaned up this time.

I also have been getting treatment from a rolfer/muscular therapist, Carol Joy Ortiz down here in nearby Norton. She does amazing work, and has been incredibly helpful. One thing that resonated the most from both her and mostly Greg was that SITTING IS THE ENEMY! We should not sit in "comfortable" chairs so much. Or at all, at least that is what I'm beginning to wonder about. I sit a lot. Way too much. In the morning, I sit and drink coffee and surf the net. Then I get in my car and sit for the short drive to work. Where I sit some more. A lot more. Then after work I sit on my bike. When that is over I come home and sit while I eat dinner and surf the net some more. Then I sit while I have some scotch before bedtime. Hell, I'm sitting right now. Fuck.

Why is sitting so bad? Ten years ago, when I quit my old job and came to work in I.T., I thought "this is so awesome, I can recover from my workouts at work!" We all know the cyclist's creed, never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down. Well, maybe if all you want to do is ride fast until you're 35, then just die. I never appreciated my old job very much. Working hard, and breathing organic solvent vapors for median-ish income didn't seem like such a great deal at the time. But it wasn't repetitive, and it wasn't totally sedentary. It did not take me long to miss the variety. But it's taken until now for me to miss the physical side of it. Sitting on ones ass all day is not the way. I'm not sure what I can do at this point in life, but at the very least, a greater effort to counter the ill effects of sitting will be required.

Kind of embarrassing that I never noticed how much sitting hurts me until someone pointed it out. I can go into work at 10 am feeling like a million dollars, and by 11:30 when I get up to go to lunch I'm a mess. Getting up once an hour and walking a lap of the building is not enough. At least not for me. As a cyclist, the psoas group and some of the other hip flexors get all short and tight. Eventually this affects alignment of your pelvis and messing with your already oversat posture. In my case, a couple of abdominal surgeries on my right side early in life probably didn't help much either, leaving lots of scar tissue (open incision appendectomy on Christmas eve in the barbaric 70's, can you say half-drunk surgeon, hello!), fostering asymmetry.

Enough excuses, bottom line is for a while, when I was running a lot, I worked harder on staying flexible and structurally strong, helping to neutralize the effects of sitting and twisted biomechanics. Worked well for several seasons, but in 2011 when my knee started showing signs of wear again, I stopped running, and when I'm not running, I stop stretching, and bad just gets worse. It's amazing how quickly things snowball during the winter, leading me to a nearly unraveled state by January. Trying to ramp up the bike hours though, my knees remained problematic, all twitchy and achy during harder efforts. It felt like my saddle was too low...

Considering my position on the bike somewhat a sacred cow, I've rarely messed much with it since being fitted with Belgian methods when I first started riding. Over time pedal and shoe changes led me to play with saddle height a bit. But not much. Mostly I only tried to compensate for changes in the pedal stack height, and switching models of saddles. Bar drop, reach, and saddle setback are variables that I didn't always track and/or measure closely enough, and of course we all how the evolution of the size and shape of brake hoods dramatically shifted (pun intended) the way riders set up their bars. The demise of the quill stem didn't make proper fit any easier, nor did the bike industry going to S-M-L sizing of frames. And, since I've lost a centimeter or two of height over the past decades, lowering the saddle a bit made sense.

For a know-it-all like me, seeking professional help can be quite traumatic. Luckily, I like Greg, and more importantly I trust him. Not only does he have a similar racing style to mine, he's about the same size, and most importantly, he has read me and my ailments like a book since day one. And while Greg is a mild-mannered physical therapist by day, he's also a lead instructor at the Serotta Institute, training cycling industry professionals in bike fitting. Now, I know how a lot of bike racers feel about fitting systems, because I'm one of them. We know best, slam the stem, hammer the saddle back, suck it up, and suffer. All my bikes have -17 degree stems, because low bars are better, allowing you to make more power, and I hate the look of a rise stem, even a -8, especially with a level top tube. Yet in pictures of me riding, the look wasn't right. But I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

OK, here's an idea. Since it's taken me two days just to pen a back story chock full of weak verbs and repetition (this is why I don't blog anymore), let's open up the floor for comments and predictions. I've ridden with many of you assholes, and nobody has ever said much about how I sat on the bike. And we all know I'm extremely approachable and open to criticism. This is one way to see if anyone still visits, so let's hear it. Thanks for reading.