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No Donut Race Report

Some of you might remember that I enjoy an occasional donut. Of course, if you're any kind of an athlete, making a career out of donut consumption is probably not the best idea. They make great pre-race food though, and are equally well suited to fueling long days in the saddle. Digesting food on the bike is easy enough, and the combination of fat and sugar in a nice donut, particularly a non-chain (if you can find such a thing these days) old fashioned plain stays with you longer than many "engineered" workout bars.

Someone inquired whether or not I was going to do any running races this fall. The answer is yes. Just like last fall, I'll mix duathlons, running, and cx for the next few months. Of course I did not run at all for two months this summer. Furthermore, when we left off in June, it seemed my running just kept getting slower and slower, with my 5 mile race pace slipping into the mid 6 min/mile range, signifying time to hang up the sneakers for a bit. Late in August I started up again with some short runs. Through this weekend, I've accumulated a whopping 45 miles spread out over about a dozen efforts. And I've felt slow. However, being notorious for slow training paces, I started to wonder where I was compared to the spring, so I thought maybe entering a 5k this weekend would be a good idea, even though I haven't built enough base to race on. It would be like a training run. A quick scan of the local calendars unveiled a suitable event just a few towns over in Norfolk, sponsored by Dunkin' Donuts no less. The course was recently certified, and with the huge CVS 5k in Providence drawing all the local (and national, and international) talent, a tiny field was ensured.

I felt great race morning. Getting there early, I stretched, warmed up, and put on my race shoes. There were only about 100 runners, and nobody looked serious. On the gun, a high school kid wearing a green Papelbon shirt took off, and he ending up winning with a high 17 minute time. I hit the first mile in 5:48. That seemed pretty good. This year I've made it a goal to learn to negative split, and in training that's been my focus. 5:48 is too fast for me though, but there were some other little kids that I wanted to get around so shit happens. Second mile had a lot of downhill before heading back up, and I ran 5:55. By now I was in 3rd, but the fun was over. I passed the next guy, but being almost over the edge with five minutes still left to run, the final stretch was not going to be a negative split, that's for sure. The lead kid pulled away a bit and I suffered enormously, averaging 170 bpm while running the final 1.1 miles at a six flat pace to finish 2nd in 18:23, just 13 seconds off my PR.

Feeling pretty satisfied with the effort, and relieved to not be super-slow with just a month until my focus race, I headed out for a few miles of cooldown before returning to the festivities. Now I don't know about you, but I sort of expect a race sponsored by Dunkin' Donuts to maybe have donuts available as a post-race refreshment. Not that theirs are what I'd call great donuts, but I was looking forward to one. Nothing. No DD products at all. Instead, greasy hamburgers! Well, it was only 5k, so maybe no donut wasn't such a bad thing after all. But it was definitely a negative, so I split. Thanks for reading.

Cyclocross How-To Video

Licensed to [a-z]ill

Gewilli pointed me to the new NORBA license designations this morning. Not that I should care. I haven't re-upped my NORBA card in quite a while. But it got me digging, and here's what I unearthed (of course you can click and zoom):



Here is the back. This is how we used to upgrade.



There was none of this $150 UCI license stuff either. If you wanted an international license, it was a few bucks more and you sent them a passport photo. Pretty young and handsome looking for a 30 year old!



Here is the complete 1989 NEBRA schedule. Notice we used to start in late April and race road all the way through September.




Of course this is about NORBA. I had an expert designation back in 1992. How old was Colin then?



Of course this is all about me. Here are the results of my body fat testing at the 1988 Boston Marathon expo, where I manned a booth for the Boston Road Club. 166 pounds and 10%, in April. Just like this year.



Last but not least, I have a flyer for the 1986 Dover Road Race. Not sure why I have this, as I wasn't even licensed then. I think I picked it up at International when I was buying a bike. $11 was actually quite high for an entry fee then. If you ever did this race, please comment.



Thanks for reading and wasting your bandwidth, nostalgia buffs.

Day 7

Of not touching a bicycle. More accurately, not riding a bicycle. I did a little bit of what could be stretched to call bike maintenance, finally fitting new tires on the Yo Eddy, and dragging the cx bike out of the basement and onto the repair stand. That's as far as I've got though. The MTB is sort of rideable, though the brake pads have about three stops worth of life left in them, and the entire drivetrain, including the crank, should probably be replaced due to old age. The cables are all pretty toasted too, and the low-end Tange fork that replaced the broken Big One Inch original just looks like a poor substitute. Other than all that she's ready to rock. There are just over three weeks until the Pinnacle Challenge and one of my vows this year is to not be getting on the MTB for the first time of the season when leaving the transition area...

Astute readers may note that's also the same weekend as Gloucester, which is why I only threw my name in the hat for Saturday. Even then, your hero clearly did not consider the travel and other logistical challenges involved in racing three different bikes over two days, each far from home on an inflated lodging price holiday/foliage weekend. Gloucester looks close on the map but in reality it's a pain in the ass place to get to. We'll figure something out. More importantly, I'd like to get up to Newport to ride the Pinnacle course a bit before race day, but that's not going to be too easy to work out either. The calendar is full of all kinds of events between now and then, and I've not sorted out which ones will make the cut. And I suppose the cx bike will need to be assembled and ridden once or twice between now and then too. This is like a friggin' job sometimes.

So back to taking a break from the bike. Besides procrastinating about preparing my prehistoric equipment, what else have I been doing? Very little. There was and is some golf to be played. I started running for the season. The Sox are playoff bound, so I have to prepare for that. Then there's wasting time on the internet. Brucie turned me on to Fitzy and townienews.com, which officially renders all nodcasts second-rate wannabee efforts, if they weren't already. I've also been looking around on the Rivendell site. Lots of very cool unique products. And they don't list the weights, so all you gram weenies can save yourselves a few clicks and not even bother. Since we have a bunch of tall guys who read this, here's one for you:



And I'm not blogging about politics and/or the return of Lance Armstrong. Not because I don't care, really. This blog is about not riding my bike. The first few days wasn't so bad. I did not miss it. About the fourth day I started to get this strange, unfamiliar feeling. I think it's called "energy." For the first time in months, I was moving around with ease. The euphoria lasted another day or two. Now I'm getting antsy. I might cave and head out today, but don't worry, no "epic-ing" anytime too soon, just ramping out of the rest week. Bike pics coming, maybe. Thanks for reading a totally pointless post.

No place for hate

There's even a sign at the top of my street that says so, right next to the one declaring my town "Tree City USA" and the other one warning of no on street parking between December 1 and March 30. So it must be true, though you'd never know it from talking to my 80 year old next door neighbor who has lived here all his life. Sort of the Rifleman Flemmi of local agriculture, the guy traps small, furry, vegetable stealing "varmints" in Hav-a-hart traps by night, only to shoot them execution style at sunrise. Two in the head tomato face! I'm neutral with him though, as it's pointless to try to change an old swamp yankee dude, so in return for the free garden tomatoes and driveway snowblowing he bestows upon me, I'm willing to not only ignore his Rambo farming methods, but also humor him by listening to his amusing, yet hate-filled election year rants. And the local skunk and squirrel population seems to be holding its own against great American infidel regardless.

However, this post isn't about politics. It's also not really about my growing fatigue from the wonderful internet turning every debate imaginable into an epic struggle of good versus evil. Which of course includes politics. Cough. So fucking calm down. At least here in cycling land, some of the pundits aren't afraid to note that improvements require getting off your ass, working hard, taking responsibility, and making sacrifices. You didn't hear much of that from either sugar-coated party convention, did you? But hey, it's an election. You can't do anything if you don't end up winning, so whatever it takes to appease the fickle masses. I'm ok with that too. Are you following this? I know it's not quite as confusingly cryptic as Feltslave, or as disjointed as a Gewilli post, but I'm trying. No, this is about cyclocross and running. You see, I'm guilty of planting some of the running seeds in Willi's noggin, so I should squirrel-up and take some of the bullets that are flying about it too.

Let's ignore my lack of coaching credentials for a moment. No, wait, let's not. I don't have any letters or acronyms after my name. I am not pursuing the addition of any letters after my name. I possess a rather inglorious record as a cyclocross racer that spans the last four presidencies. I've never paid a dime for coaching, never raced full-time, and don't even particularly like cyclocross. This year I went sub 30 minutes in a five mile running race, and completed the Boston Prep 16 miler, and I once went home from a cyclocross race on crutches (that was not this year); not only am I unqualified as a coach, I'm biased too! So if you were planning on taking any of this as serious advice on how to become a better, faster, more successful cyclocross racer, then you should probably just stop now. Thinking about it more, and refocusing, this isn't about cyclocross and running, it's about hate. That's where I started, right?

"I hate running."
"I hate weight training."
"I hate _ _ _ _." (take your pick)

Heard or read anything like that lately? As much as I hate (ha!) the seemingly pervasive quest for efficiency in anything and everything we do, emotions in general can be pretty wasteful, but none more so than hate. Don't be a hater. It's inefficient? Instead of worrying about what you hate, or worrying too much about being efficient in training and everything else you do (I'm mean, c'mon, you're reading this shit, you must have some time on your hands), be constructive. At the extreme risk of being "terribly unfair" and unfairly misrepresenting someone else's position, I remember an Adam Myerson quote I read somewhere that has always stuck with me: "Your diet is what you do eat, not what you don't eat." Great advice, and of course the same thing goes for training -- it's what you do do, not what you don't do.

So of course, as even an unqualified coach with a still wildly popular web page parodying the online coaching industry knows, the answer to the "how much running should you do to train for cyclocross" question is the same as virtually every other coaching-related question: It depends. Your training is what you do do, right?

The real question to me is: why wouldn't you run? There are some good reasons. Maybe you have some sort of injury history that makes running an unacceptable risk. Fair enough, but in that case cyclocross might not be such a good idea in the first place. Of course, nobody yet has actually come out and said that cyclocrossers should not run train at all. There is agreement that cyclocross running isn't much like endurance running; it's more like running from the cops, baseball running, or some other sport's running. Track sprinting has been mentioned. Here's the issue for me -- while if you're a former pro cyclist who never had much of a jelly belly, no matter what your jersey says, maybe you can get away with those things even in the absence of base training. Most of the masters' fields though, at least once you go back a few minutes behind the leaders, don't have that kind of athletic pedigree. Furthermore, you don't see many forty year old track sprinters. Even the younger ones suffer acute injuries and get carted off the track in wheelchairs fairly often.



Winning races is great and all, but for me, the biggest goal is to stay in the game. I want to be able to still be doing this stuff in one form or another for at least another few decades. Therefore, the prime directive is DON'T GET INJURED. Running 20-30 miles/week in the winter may not seem consistent with that goal, but it's a lot easier to monitor myself for overuse injury than it is to predict an acute injury that might come up from jumping off my bike at 15 kph wearing plastic cycling shoes, only to subsequently sprint up some frozen, rooted, rutted 20% hill. But we're getting off the course a bit here... Not really though. Cyclocross, regardless of whether the running sections are ten seconds (typical) or two minutes (think UNH in 2006), requires a more well-rounded athlete than bicycle road racing does. Of course it's primarily a BIKE RACE, and I'm the first one to hope it stays that way. I hate don't especially like barriers, dismounts, and remounts. But you have to be a good athlete just to survive, let alone do well. Running is such a basic human function, I'm not sure how you can consider yourself a good athlete if you can't endure a little bit of running.

I feel the same way about gym training. You don't stop in a cyclocross race and do yoga or lift weights either, but many coaches still advise racers to do these things. So just because you never need to run 45 minutes in a cross race doesn't make it a dumb idea in my opinion. If you're sacrificing your bike workouts to run, sure, that's not ideal, especially if you're so serious about this cross shit that you're flying around the country to do it. Perhaps the level of athlete commitment professional coaches see is much different from the pack I run (pun intended) with. I see what they do do, and in most cases the addition of more running should be helping them, not hurting them.

I do cross to train, not train to do cross. So I'm weird. And this is just a blog. Don't hate. One click and and it can be gone forever. Thanks for reading.

So you don't go away empty handed

Guess why we're smiling.


The indomitable Duano.


Your hero suffering like a dog in the heat at one of the first cross races of the 2005 season. Actually I hope dogs never have to suffer like this. It was fun though, sort of. Thanks for reading.

Eurobike Porn

I know your powermeter data files are like Viagra to you, but you can put them away now and start rubbing to these pics fresh from eurobike. I'm going to go put new tires on my early 90's MTB. Thanks for uhh, reading, huh-huh.

Just thinking that...

Paying 63 cents/day for The Daily Show on Itunes is worth it.
My 35 mm Panaracer Paselas roll way better then the 700x28 Conti Contact City tires, which kind of suck.
Despite this allegedly rainy year, the weather has been awesome for me nearly every time I've wanted it to be.
I don't have as many MTB wheels as I used to, and rim brake wheels are getting harder to find.
Scheduling training at this time of year is easy. All my weekday workouts, be they road, run, gym, cx, MTB, or whatever, are fairly short due to daylight constraints. This means I can always do two a day if I wish, so fitting them in does not present problems. On the weekends, there are always multiple events to choose from. If there are no events that I want to attend, I just do a long road ride, run, or MTB adventure. Easy. Automatic. So long as all the bikes are up and running.
I have a shitload of bike projects that need to be taken care of.
I can still get leaner if I work on it.
If I trick out the XB with a spring kit and 20's, I can be So-Low Break.
The foam roll has become an indispensable part of my structural fitness maintenance.
I found some good blogs while searching for D2R2 photos.
Riding to work does not save me any money. The extra food costs me more than the gas.
I should take more pictures. Then maybe I wouldn't have to write entries like this. Thanks for reading.

On Empty

With the road season just about over, and cyclocross mania just beginning, this would be a good time for me to sit back and be a lurker for a while. I've taken more than my share of blogging pulls this summer as you clowns have just sucked my creative wheels with your once a week posts. But we're not competing. That's just a warning. I may sit in for a while this month and let all the cyclomaniacs produce the content. Before that though, I'll share the details of a rare solobreak mistake this weekend, in the hopes of helping you, of course, because I'm a kind, nurturing, benevolent mofo.

You all get the advice to eat enough on rides, blah, blah, blah. Bonking sucks. Even running low on food stores on a ride will make you wish you stayed home. Doing it on a big group ride is even worse. This is why I rarely make this mistake. But it happens to the best of us sometimes. Saturday it was a reminder for me of why to always, always, always have enough fuel. We had a big group ride and cookout planned for Sunday up in southern NH. I spoke with the Cronoman on Saturday, and he gave me the details of the hard solo ride he'd done that morning, because "Sunday's ride was going to be a rolling trackstand" or something like that. I voiced my disagreement. Duane does not drag me all the way up there for an easy ride. This was going to be Tuesday night worlds on a Sunday morning, just longer. I headed out and did two hours with about fifteen short sprints sprinkled in just in case it turned out we were in some once-a-century planetary alignment and the Cronoman was right. Of course he wasn't.

Sunday I got up early and packed a bag with the food I'd need for the drive up, and on the ride. I have two Trader Joe's reusable shopping bags with the Hawaiian print motif on them, and in one I put all my stuff. I took off early so I wouldn't need to rush, but for some reason I wasn't all that hungry. About an hour from home, I reached into the bag to retrieve a peanut butter and jelly Mojo bar, and to my surprise there was nothing in the bag except an old newspaper and a few plastic shopping bags. I'd taken the wrong bag on my way out the door... Fuck. Thinking quickly, I stopped and bought a dozen donuts to share in Duane's driveway while the team assembled for the ride. I ate two. Duane said three hours, but I had my doubts, so that should be enough, right? Plain water in the bottles. Declined gels when offered. Out we went, sixteen riders total.

I rode up in the front of the double paceline with Duano 90% of the time. I wanted to get my moneys worth out of this effort. Duane was going well, so for amusement I half-wheeled him on most of the rises to push the pace and listen to him start to breath hard, but he never, ever quits. He pointed out a few properties he'd scooped up at bargain prices in the recently depressed market, and we wound our way north along fairly rural roads. After two hours he warned of a tough grade and I threw down a little and jammed it with the Cronoman and Zencycle. After the regrouping some others joined in. And now I was starting to get hungry... I bummed a few Clif Blocks off Duane, but it was a temporary solution. And it now looked like the ride would indeed be over three hours, as we weren't heading back yet. And the natives were getting restless. I started following wheels. Fast forward a bit.

A short time later, the race simulation began, the group shattered, and about seven of us were duking it out on the roads that led back to Duane's. I was now officially starving. Spending the first two hours of the ride pushing the pace on the front no longer seemed like such a great idea. I sort of knew the route back, but getting dropped was not an option here, as there are three short hills near the very end, then the ride traditionally ends in a sprint on the old WMSR road course. I could not crack, but it's been a long, long time since I tried to ride hard with no fuel in my system. Oddly enough, the hills were my friends. This group was not exactly Pantani, Rooks, and Theunnise. On the flats I was suffering though. Going through South Hampton I hit up the Cronoman to see if he had any food left. Doing so required a complete meal of pride to be swallowed and digested first, as when it comes to bonking, he's a rainbow jersey wearer, and I bust his balls about it all the time. He says yeah, I have some gu, and pulls out a flask. Yuk. Like his water bottles, it's been gnawed on like a Labrador puppy's chew toy...GROSS. But I'm desperate, and I squeeze about a hundred calories worth out of it and give it back. That should do it.

Over the hills I'm cramping and Big John is pushing the pace. At one point I was nearly dropped on a flat crosswind section, but I hung on. Onto the finish road, Duane told me to watch Zencycle. I wasn't sure of exactly where the sprint was. We had been going 35-40 kph for the last hour, and now it was cat and mouse time. Normally I'd have attacked, but I knew I had barely anything left and thirty seconds would seem like ten minutes right now. Duane jumped to lead me out but I thought that meant the finish was right there so I went around and buried it, but zencycle was on me like a laser and easily took the sprint to the rusty mailbox ahead of me and Big John. I survived. And there were still donuts left... Don't go hungry, it sucks. Thanks for reading. Now it's your turn to pull.