Blazin' Bunnies!

Saturday morning I was out doing my intervals on Harts Island Road. I had just started and had cranked up my speed to 26 mph with the aim to hold that for 2 miles (had to do this six times with 2-mile breaks inbetween) when I took a quick glance toward the one o'clock side of the road. In the sorta tall grass I saw an eye with two tall ears above it. By the time I had analyzed the data to determine it was a rabbit, that sucker came shooting out across the road, darting by my front wheel, missing it by 3-4 feet right in front of my eyeballs! Now, when you're zooming along at 37.84 feet per second, a rabbit that's 3-4 feet from your front wheel is awful darn close! If that rabbit had decided to run out on the road about a micro-second later, it'd have probably been killed and I'd have been tumbling along the road hoping not to break anything or jar any organs or lose too much skin. I kept cruising along since it happened so fast I didn't have time to reach my brakes. It DID wake me up for the rest of the morning!

The rest of the ride didn't go so well. My first, second, and fourth intervals were good, achieving what I wanted but the third, fifth, and sixth intervals were ugly...especially that sixth one. I couldn't get past 23 mph to save my life. The legs felt like they had no power although I was still turning the cranks at 96 rpm in a lighter gear. I'm hoping it's because I'm only into the second week of my TT training and that the legs are still getting used to the idea of being pushed hard. I still have two more weeks of this followed by a taper-down week leading up to the time trial on the 14th. The TT bike is getting serviced at this time, getting a new chain (to replace the gunky one that came with the bike when I bought it) and readjusting the gears. I'm also hoping to borrow a disc wheel for the race which would let Jonnene use my 100mm rear wheel. Maybe that will help.

There were only five of us at this morning's ride where we got the scoop from Mike and David about their experience at the Hotter'n'Hell bike tour over the weekend. Mike did pretty good, covering the 100 miles non-stop in 4:41. My personal best at that ride is a 4:18 in 1996 during the race portion...with one stop when I ran out of fluids.

You Don't Know Me

So, I'm out tonight doing my one-kilometer interval workout with Tim, my "coach". He's worked out my training schedule and was out to see if I needed any help. He would be training, too, but his left hamstring has been causing him all kinds of trouble so he's just riding easy for now. Tonight I did six "kilos" and I was pretty satisfied with them, averaging 29-30 mph with a slight tailwind. Tim had me roll up to my start line, pause for a second in a track stand, and then head out as fast as I could. The point being that the two worse spots in a time trial are (1) the start, and (2) getting back up to speed after the turnaround. These intervals are as much for learning to get up to speed as they are for being speedy. I should feel these in the morning.

Tim also told me, "Now, Alan, if you break an hour in that time trial, I want you to call me as soon as you can and tell me about it. Be sure to let everyone know that I coached you and that I take all the credit. However, if you don't break an hour or have a lousy ride that day, don't call me. Don't even tell anyone you know me or have ever heard of me. I will also deny that I know who you are."

I think Tim was kidding. I'm going to call him anyway. Maybe I'll wake him up.

I think my truck's alternator is going bad. I've ruled out any problems with the battery and I'm still not totally sold that the alternator is the cause of my anxiety but it's the next place to look. I tend to lean toward the possibility of a loose connection between the cable clamp and the battery post on the positive side. I hate it when the truck's not right. I'm just glad I'm not using it for a long trip this weekend...that's usually when things go wrong. And usually on a Friday. I'm taking the truck to the dealership and see what they have to say...hopefully, it'll be "That'll be five bucks and you're good to go, sir!" Uh-huh....

We go to Montana in a week! I'm about to get excited to go on a trip again to "someplace else" with my beautiful wife and hang out with her "someplace else". In three months we'll be on our way to Oz and I'll really be excited about that!

One sentence at a time

It's been raining the last two days and I've not been on the bike at all and that sucks.

In the Olympics tonight, the girl from Bahrain in the full-body running suit because of her religion doing the 200 meters has the talent to go fast but needs technique which I doubt she'll ever get.

Had to get the battery in my truck recharged so I didn't drive it anywhere for a couple of days and had to use Jonnene's car in the meantime but it's fixed now.

I am now the official club director of the cycling club at Centenary College so that's a few extra dollars a month...guess I need to get the club up and running now!

Made some significant progress on the local bike club jersey for 2009.

As much as I'd like to have Mike's job in "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel, I don't think my nose could handle it.

The women's marathon was AWESOME!

I might do more of these one sentence entries in the future.

Cool Weather

It's a great weekend! Weather-wise, that is. A front came through Friday night with some rain, it has stayed cloudy, and the temps are probably 10-15 degrees F below what it normally is. Nice preview of the coming Fall but it'll get hot again soon.

The weather made for some good riding. Jonnene got in 60 miles riding with a friend who's preparing for her first Ironman triathlon in two weeks up in Kentucky. We would have liked to go up there to watch but we'll be in Montana during the Labor Day weekend visiting friends J knew and worked with when she first came to the States back in '92. And I've always wanted to visit Montana. There's a connection we have to make in Denver both coming and going which will be my first visit to the Denver International Airport since 2001. Hard to believe that "new" airport is almost 8 years old now. I kinda miss the old Denver Stapleton airport...I was last there in 1999 before they closed it...it had some character and had its short-comings, but I liked it.

I did long intervals on my time trial bike Saturday but my legs were tired. Last week was my first "real" training sessions and six straight days on the bike really wore me out. I could barely stay in the 25 mph range in any of the six intervals I did although I did keep my cadence up to work on leg speed. Tim has adjusted my sessions for next week, replacing my kilo intervals on Wednesday with an easy ride and putting the kilos in place of the group training ride on Thursday. That should help keep my legs a little fresher.

I forgot to mention that Jonnene and I saw "The Dark Knight" last weekend and I was greatly impressed by the performance of the late Heath Ledger. He played the latest incarnation of The Joker in this Batman tale and it was dark, scary, and convincing. It is rumored that his performance will be a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination which would be unusual for a "super-hero-style" action movie (usually they get costume, special effects, music, and editing nominations). I think it's totally deserved. Heath was a native of Jonnene's hometown of Perth, Australia where this famous movie star was treated as a regular guy whenever he came home to visit family. The last time Ledger was in Perth, just two weeks before his death, he wrote a letter to his hometown thanking everyone for the good treatment he always got and for letting him be just a boy from Perth. I hope he gets the nomination and I hope he wins.

"Here's my card."

Interesting Point

"And for those paying attention, since President George W. Bush rescinded the Executive Order banning offshore drilling on July 14th, oil has dropped from $147 a barrel to $113. That’s not a coincidence."

– The Patriot Post, August 15, 2008

Into the Week

It's been a tiring week here at mi casa (my house). We're watching a lot of the Olympics, actually more than I thought we would. I was wowed by the opening ceremonies that the Chinese put on but my favorite is still the Sydney Olympics of 2000. It felt a little more genuine (if you take out the modern pop music they tossed in) and was of a more hearty style. The competition has been pretty good, wished they showed more of the cycling (of course!) and I saw nothing of the time trials. I doubt NBC will show much, if any, of the track cycling.

I've spent this week doing my workouts for the time trial in September following a workout plan that a friend here put together for me. The first week is always the worst and I can feel it in my legs. Last night was five single-kilometer efforts to get my top-end speed up. After Tuesday night's speed-fest with the team, I could never get my legs spinning fast enough to get past 27 mph on any of the efforts. With this workout I only get Sundays off with easy, high cadence rides on Mondays and Fridays. The rest of the week is speed and endurance work...oh, joy. Tuesdays and Thursdays are on my road bike on the team rides where I'm supposed to sit in and treat it like a motor-pace training effort, leaving Wednesdays and Saturdays as solo go-fast rides.

The Wife got the new triathlon/time trial bike she'd been wanting for quite a while. A nice Kuota K-Factor (you can see one here - click on #3 in the selection box and you'll see the color she got) and it's a sweet looking bike. She test-rode it for a week and decided to go with it, but got the aerobars changed out for something she liked better and a different saddle. She's now in the process of getting the kinks worked out on fit and other little things so that it rides perfectly. That usually takes a few rides to several months to get it right but it'll be ready to go by the time triathlon season comes around next year. It'll get it's first taste of action when we go to the TT championships in a few weeks.

Me in Texas

Here it is...PROOF positive that I did the time trial in Texas last weekend. Obviously this is a proof from a photographer's website that a friend sent to me.
Don't know who took it but, hey, I look good!

Sickly....yet not sickly

J finishes her bike and heads into transition for the run.

Jonnene and I are going thru our own ills right now. She's dealing with the remnants of an apparent gastric bug so she stayed home from work today. I seem to have contracted some allergic reaction to all the dust and stuff I blew around when I cleaned the patio and driveway this morning, using the blower and picking up debris around the house. Plus we're getting the effect of the edges of hurricane E'douard and it's probably blowing some crap around here to dig at my sinuses. Anyway, we're both going in slow motion right now but we should get over it soon.

Last weekend was full of activity to some degree. I went to Katy, Texas (about 36 miles west of Houston) on Friday to participate in the Texas State Time Trial Championships, which were actually being held in Pattison. I shared a ride with Tim, who picked me up on his way there from Monroe, and we got to our hotel in Katy after about 5 hours of driving. We went out to the course for a recon ride. It was nice...wide shoulders that were CLEAN so we didn't have to ride on the road itself (since the course would not be closed to traffic). Good surfaces. We covered about 3/4's of the route but I noted the wind...the course was among all that open land and that invites the wind. The 40-kilometer (24.8 miles) out-and-back course seemed to feel friendly to me and I began to think I could do pretty good out here if I can push my TT bike solidly for around an hour. My whole goal was to see what my fitness level was for the Louisiana/Mississippi time trial championships in LaPlace in five weeks. After a leisurely check-out of the course, we went back to the hotel, cleaned up, and met a couple of Tim's friends who had arrived from Monroe and went out to eat.

Saturday morning we got up, got our gear together, and headed back to the venue to check in and get our race numbers. There were over 380 registered riders in the various categories and age groups. I was in the 50-54 age group with Tim and he was a favorite to win it since he won the 45-49 group last year and had aged up for 2008. I was just hoping for a good showing! I was feeling pretty good and had a good warmup along with getting everything done with time to spare. My start time was 9:09:30 am, so I got there with seven minutes to go, got in line, and eventually rolled up to the start line. The starter counted me down and off I went. The wind was coming out of the west on this north-south course but it was going to be tougher coming back than heading out...that proved true for me. I was doing a conservative ride but I got to the 10-kilometer mark (6.2 miles) in 15:05 and I was very pleased with that. My breathing and heartrate had settled down by then and I felt pretty good. I was out of the rolling hills and now on flat roads, getting to the turnaround 20K mark in 30:11 (my second fastest 20K ever). But the wind was harsher after the turn and the next 10 kilometers saw me lose a lot of time...I think my 30K time was 46:17. I started getting some rhythm back in the last 10K and attacked the hills but I still was losing some time.

When I finally crossed the finish line, I knew I had set a new personal record for the distance. My fastest had been a 1:02:24 that I set back in 1995 in Baton Rouge. But the official time had me at 1:02:01, a 24.05 mph average. I was quite happy with that and it gave me hope that if I train well enough the next five weeks, that I might have a shot at breaking an hour in LaPlace! I'd love to break an hour in a 40K at least once in my life. Tim didn't have such a good ride and managed a 3rd place finish in our age group with a 57:26 (I wish I could get 57 minutes with a good day!). My time, as much as I liked it, was only good enough for 22nd place in a field of 36 riders. That's okay, I didn't seem to mind too much.

During all this, Jonnene was prepping for the River Cities Triathlon on Sunday. Saturday she volunteered to work a few hours to help hand out the race packets and swag bags to race participants. Other than that she stayed home and rested, getting her gear together. I finally got home around 5 pm Saturday and we got her ready for an early wakeup for Sunday.

Four o'clock Sunday morning came early but we popped out of bed, walked the dogs, ate breakfast, and got on our way to Cypress Lake in Bossier Parish. As is our custom, we got to the park 25 minutes before it opened...mainly to be one of the first 50-70 cars allowed to park in the smaller parking lot that's closest to the transition area. If you don't get into that lot you end up in a large field that's a fairly good hike. I don't really like that, so getting there early is definitely worth it.

Jonnene, by-and-large, had a great triathlon. She didn't beat her personal best from almost ten years ago but she was about 3 minutes faster than last year and finished 9th out of 72 women in her age group! The great thing was that it wasn't as hot as it could have been. Later in the day the temperatures reached 104 degrees but that morning there was a steady breeze blowing across the lake that really made the morning quite pleasant...still hot but not nearly as bad as it could have been. Her swim and bike legs were faster (20.9 mph average on the bike!) than I think she was expecting. I'm very proud of her!

Tonight's ride was tough. I thought I was going to just sit in the back and take it easy, but I couldn't do it. I chased a couple of breaks and then attacked the entire pack about a mile from Frierson. Joe called it a "hard move". JP caught me about a third of a mile later and I jumped on his wheel. About a minute after that the rest of the field caught us and we charged into Frierson rather quickly. All that took a lot out of me but it was fun.