Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Receiving a Whipping

Wow, what a race at Hawkes' Creek! I got my behind kicked by the course and the competition on Sunday but what an epic ride. During the course of the day four riders got "free" ambulance rides and I expect over 40% of those who started DNF'ed. It was hot, dusty, technical, rooty and just plain evil.

I knew it was going to be a rough day when I rolled up to the start line and I was waiting with 70 of my new closest friends. It's insane to have 70 guys all going for the start down a gravel road with a couple of left hand turns and barbed wire. Standing there I knew my heart wasn't in it and that I was in real trouble. What I didn't know was why but I decided to start easy and see if with a little help I could coax my body into it. As I rolled off I got to eat a lot of other guy's dust but I did get a start and going into the field I shifted up to the big ring to stay with the group. When we hit the singletrack everything got really hard. I was struggling to hold my group up the climbs but gaining back the time on the flats. I was having to brake hard into the corners and I had a hard time acclerating out of them. About three quarters of the ay inot the course we hit a hill and had to shift down. I felt like a slacker going into my granny gear but I told myself you gotta do what ya gotta to do to finish. When I finished the climb I shifted back up and realized it didn't feel right. I looked down and saw that I was in my big ring! No wonder the course seemed so hard and felt like I sucked, I had ridden most of first lap in the big ring. That's great for the pros but I had blown my legs completely.

By lap 3 they were cooked drier than a 7-11 hotdog in the "tanning bed" on a slow day. The roots had hammered my back (it's still sore two days later) and I had worked on my "falling down" skills a couple of times. Due to spending the first lap at a heart rate over 180 I was dizzy, dehydrated and exhausted and I still had riding to due. It was the first time I had decided to stop racing and just try to finish. The course was as hard and unforgiving as a spurned mistress and seemed to enjoy kicking me around like a soccer ball in one Mia Hamm's Nike commercials. Still I decided I had to race a couple of guys for the finish over the last mile and nearly passed out as I crossed the finish line. The race felt exactly like the Conyers Twilight race last year except that I finished 25th this time instead of fifth.

What I determined is that I'm overtrained, badly. This sort of thing can happen in endurance sports so I need to back off a bunch. This week is all really easy stuff with the weekend off for a road trip. After that I'll start building up for the next GAP race in Helen. I'm told the course is technically a good bit easier and there are lots and lots of climbs. Perfect for me and the Man o' War. Lightweight bike, good power-to-weight ratio and plenty of time to rest and prepare.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Perry-Roubaix

Last weekend was the second round of the Georgia Cup series down in Perry, Ga. The Macon race was the first round and while I didn't get to contest the crit in Macon, I was in 10th place overall in the series after the Lake Tobesofskee race. The thing that makes this interesting to me is that I'm racing, for a variety of reasons, in Masters 35+. Since M35+ is an unrestricted catagory (except no Cat 5) I'm racing against guys who could be Cat 4 like me all the way up to Cat 2 or 1. It's been a schooling but a very, very good one.

The races went pretty well though I knew I was in for a thrashing when I went out on the first stage of the weekend's omnium and got beat. The stage was a good, solid time trial; normally my best event. I expected a high finish and a good start in the omnium standings to balance out what I expected to be a poor criterium performance later that evening. I put in a great time trial, finishing the 9.5 mile circuit in 20:40 with an average of just over 27 mph but I finished a somewhat disappointing fifth. Had I raced Cat 4 I would have won pretty handily but I wasn't racing against Cat 4 guys, I was racing against the competition for the state time trial championships. Looking at it that way, I felt a lot better about my performance. I was really only blown out by one guy and I finished within 30 seconds of the other four. I missed the podium by 14 seconds. Given that they were all riding disk wheels I was doing the spoked thing, I can't feel too badly as I feel that a disk had improved my time by just 5% I would have shaved off a minute and been solidly in second place.

That afternoon I raced in the crit. I hate crits. I'm a slow-twitch muscle fiber kind of guy so I don't do too well at events that require repeated sprint efforts. The race was on from the get go and I found myself struggling to hang onto the back. I lost time in every corner and had to chase on on the straights. Still, about halfway into the race I was still with the group when a break went off the front. Several of the teams had riders in the break and so their guys who were left behind didn't have to work and we rapidly lost time. At this point I decided that I wasn't going to get lapped and pulled from the race so I charged to the front of the second group and started working hard. I was feeling surprisingly good and started to pull the break back by working with Kevin from the Carolina Volkswagon team. Neither of us had teammates in the race and so we formed a sort of unspoken alliance to see what we could do. As we pulled the break back we realized that three of them had broken off the front. I also realized that I had just torched my legs and off the back I went. Still though, I stayed in the race and finished 14th for a few omnium points. Better was the experience of getting to practice my cornering skills.

The next day was the crazy, long road race. Eighty miles in the central Georgia sun. I sort of had a plan. If I could get off the front in an early break, maybe I would be able to get caught by the fast Cat1/2 guys and intergrate in and hang on until the end. What I didn't know was that Kevin from the day before had the same idea and he took off from the start whistle. I decided to go for it and joined him and pretty quickly we had a minute on the field. Kevin said he thought a couple more guys were going to come across so we should stay off the front and see what happened. Five minutes later no had joined us and the field was strung out in a long thin line 90 seconds behind. That meant they were charging but it also meant they weren't making much progress. Kevin said to wait five more minutes and if no one joined us we'd sit up. I responded by telling him that the King of the Mountians climb was just up the way and let's try to stay away for that long. He agreed and when we rolled over the top and looked back, the pack had sat up and were just spinning their way up the hill. We had three or four minutes so we took off. We spend the next 25 miles on a suicide, solo break that ended 5 miles from the start/finish line for the first of two laps. As the pack came up though, a group jumped off the front and got a gap. Kevin and I got in the break as it rode away and we were still off the front. My tactic had worked I was with the group I knew would win the race. Now all I had to do was hang on and hope my solo efforts hadn't taken too much out of me. I made it to the 60 mile mark before crosswinds and my tired legs conspired to pop me off the now reduced group of riders. I managed to hold onto an 8th place finish and 7th overall in the omnium. More importantly, I learned some good tactical lessons to store up for later.

The coolest thing though was getting the respect from a lot of other riders for being a tough guy in the racing. For hanging in there and not giving up in the crit even though I had inferior skills and for having the courage to go on a long break and the strength to keep fighting in the road race with the best Master's riders in the state. I've got a lot to learn and school's definitely in session but I feel like I passed the first two exams. I like racing Masters a lot more than Cat 4 because the riders are better and people aren't afraid of taking risks. In Cat 4, almost everyone seems to be afraid to really go on a break or to seriously attack the group because they're afraid they won't have anything left for the end sprint if they fail. The thing is that for most of them, the sprint is moot point because they're not going to beat the two or three really good sprinters in the race. That having been said, Scott Beam, the team captain for the L5Flyers, who I race with, is a Cat 4 rider like me. At the Raccoon Mt. Road Race in Tennessee, he and another teammate went on a solo break after 8 miles and stayed away to win the race. Props to him for having the gumption to go away ont he first really big climb of the race and the strength, with the help of teammate Eric Koep, to make it stick.

So maybe I'll have a chance at my next Cat 4 race, assuming it's not too flat.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Curmudgeonly

That's how I'm feeling. Likely the reason lies in my training schedule (this week is the recovery week for build phase II, so I'm a bit wornout from the last three weeks of intense raining) but that knowledge doesn't help my frame of mind. Little things are bothering me more than I'd like and I really want to go out and pick a fight with some poor unsuspecting soul who has done nothing more than not live up to my arbitrary expectations in some way.

Everything I read in the media makes me grumpy. The conflict in Iraq being compared to the conflict in Veitam, Barry Bonds hitting the home run that ties him with Willie Mays, the complete suspension of racing by the Cofidis cycling team due to doping allegations, people still poo-pooing "The Passion of the Christ", delayed PowerMac G5 upgrades, all of it. I feel like the "media establishment" is going out of its way to find every bit of negative, depressing news it can publish and taking long looks at every negative angle to even the positive stories. I read a story the other day in an national newsweekly were the writer talked abou some really great piece of charitable work a person was doing and then finished off the half-column story with a single line better suited to an opinion column that served only to call the individual's motives into question and thus the "goodness" of his work. Sigh...I won't go off on yet another media rant here but only because you've heard it before and it's just too easy to do.

My students make me grumpy. Yes, I made bad choices in my first two years of college but, by golly, I didn't have some semi-wise mentor trying to help me see that making the choices would lead to bad consequences (at least not one I listened to-probably I had really wise mentors that understood that nothing teaches quite like the school of hard knocks). The hardest part is having to watch the train wreck slowly building momentum knowing that you've told the conductor that the train will jump the tracks at that speed and having the train conductor say, "Yeah, I know but...at least I'm having fun. That counts for something doesn't it?" I always want to respond, "Hitler probably had some sort of pleasure center response to ordering the death of millions of Jews, but nobody seems to think that counts for something..." but I don't. Why antagonize things when it won't do much good? I just wish I would stop hearing about all the stress that comes from the choices. To use the example above, it's like the train conductor saying, "Boy, I hate it when the wheels skip around like that, I sure wish it would stop. Did you say that if I push this lever forward I'll go faster?" I'm sure if we used my "salt-mine/hog-farm" method of behavior modification things would change. Of course, I'd likely have individuals from the Hague wanting to talk to me about various human-rights abuses if I was allowed to put my plan into place. Oh well.

Thanks for reading, I'll try to see if I can find were I put my better mood next time.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, April 05, 2004

Elvis and TV

According to an article published in the April issue of Pediatrics, watching TV can be bad for kids. In a study of pre-school youngsters, the study's researchers found that for every hour of TV per day a child watched there was a 10% increase in the likelyhood that the child would suffer from attention deficit disorder or ADD. While the exact mechanisms for this increase are unknown it is surmised that the rapid stimulation the child is subjected to through TV viewing causes the brain to wire itself in ways that are not beneficial to functioning in a normal (i.e.-not TV) world. If this is true, the deliterious effects of the viewing are permanent.

This is, to me, an amazing finding. As a educator I am exposed to the wreckage that ADD created in the lives of my students. They can't follow lecture. They can't focus in group work. They can't apply themselves to homework. Oftentimes they are being treated with drugs that don't always seem to make things better but instead induce something of a zombie-like state wherein the student interacts in a very superfical way with the world around them. This leads to a much higher incidence of failure among these students. Since education is the foundation of a person's success in a meritocracy based society these folks all start with a huge disadvantage. All because of TV.

Think about it. If we found out that for every jar of brand X baby food a toddler ate there was a 10% of developing a condition that would disadvantage the little tikes for life, you can gaurantee that there would be exactly zero bottles of brand X baby food on the shelves within about 30 minutes of the announcement. Yet, will there be regulations on "entertainment"? I doubt it. We tell parents that they HAVE to put kids in child seats in cars and wear helmets on bikes and all for very good reasons. But furthest we've gone on the whole kids and TV issue is to have the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that children under two not be allowed to watch TV. If a cop sees Patti Parent driving down the road with Junior standing up in the front seat he has the right to take Junior away and place him in protective custody. If Patti Parent decides to use TV as a long-term baby-sitting solution however, more power to her even though it may gaurantee her child less opportunity in life. You think this is far-fetched? According the the households surveyed for the study, 11% of the 3 yr olds watched 5-6 hours of TV daily and another 10% watched over 7 hours. If the study is representative of the larger culture (and with over 1300 households surveyed the statistics are likely to be pretty good) then about 20% of our kids have a better than 50% chance of developing ADD.

Elvis was right...shoot your TV. Especially if you have kids.

The Physicist   Link Me    |