Sufferfest: April Series Race #4 The Zoo Crit

After the Firehill crit on Saturday, I had decided a few weeks earlier that I was going to apply for my cat 2 upgrade regardless of the race outcome. As luck would have it, I was sick all weekend with some kind of upper respiratory infection, so the outcome was not good, however, as of Tuesday I'm now officially a cat 2!

By Wednesday, my legs and mental state of wanting to go fast were 110%, but my lungs were only about 80% and still clogged up with a lot of junk.

My daughter Chloe giving the look of pain that's about to be experienced.

So the points for the April series going into this race were: 1st place with 25 points was Phillip on Metro VW, Evan who is also on the Metro VW team was in second with 19 points. I was tied for third with Phillip from OKC Velo with 15 points each, and my Foss1l teammate Jeremy was in 5th with 13 points.

Phillip from OKC Velo didn't show for the last race, so I ended up getting 3rd overall in the series with my 1 point for 6th place.


This was probably the hottest day so far this year with the temperature close to 90 degrees.

I think because of this, the start was not quite as fast as it has been lately.

I got in another short lived break with Rob from Team Undiscovered and Paul from OKC Velo.

We were soon joined by Phillip and Jeremy, Then Gil and Evan. It looked like we were pretty isolated from the main field, but eventually, everything came back together.

I felt ok for the first half of the race, but I was once again in survival mode for the second half.

The OKC Velo guys did an excellent job with posting results and series points on their website. They also had a lap counter at the start/finish line that defiantly helped in keeping me motivated to keep going. 6 laps to go just 5 more.......

Warr Acres Loco Evan Bybee attacks the field as his brother "little" Tony looks on.

Fellow co-worker and Warr Acres loco Brandon, AKA B$ pretty much dominated the B series taking 2 firsts and an easy series win.

There are a couple of TTs coming up plus a couple of other races that I may or may not do. I've decided to skip the Joe Martin stage race this year. I'm pretty excited to do the Tulsa Tough in late May, plus there are a TON of races in June, so I guess I'm somewhat on a spring break from racing until the Tulsa Tough.

The Good,The Bad,and The Ugly: Firehill Crit

The good: In riding around warming up before the race, we made it a team goal to get 2 riders in the top 5. The Team Undiscovered boys put on a nice race with a sweet payout for the top 5 riders, plus some great cash primes. Not only did we get 2 riders in the top 3, we won all the primes as well.

Racing up the hill early in the cat 3/4 race

Erin getting ready to unleash some power for 3rd place before mixing it up with the 1/2's

The BAD: Brady is officially a bad ass. Here he is soloing in for the win by almost a minute!

Jeremy, Erin, Brady, Clendon, and myself.

The Ugly: My performance at the Firehill Crit. This makes the second year in a row that I've been under the weather. I hate not being able to finish a race and making excuses. I probably shouldn't have raced at all, but I thought somehow if I just started racing, everything would clear itself out of my lungs and sinuses. It felt like breathing through a straw and I only was able to hang on for a few laps and then DNF. I really, really wanted to do the 123 race as most of the top riders from this region were there and I wanted to see if I could hang. Pretty disappointing, but there will be more opportunities coming soon.

Hopefully I can get back on track for the zoo crit on Wednesday.

April Race Series #3

The third race of this series was a TT. Going into the race, I was tied for 2nd place in the series 4 points behind 1st. With the equipment I was fortunate to borrow, I felt like I had a good chance of possibly moving up in points or distancing myself from 4th on back.
It was not to be due to a bonehead move on my part.

I got to the race and registered in plenty of time. I decided to ride out to the dam to warm up and see how sketchy the crosswind was. As I was coming back to the marina, I didn't see a lot of people riding around. I saw Evan and he told me they were starting up the road almost to the 240. I thought I had time to get one last drink at my truck, and doing so, I ran into B$ who told me I better hurry cause our group started 1st.

At first I thought Iwas ok. Then I started seeing guys coming up the road and I knew I would have been 8th or so in line giving me about 4 minutes. The start line was almost 2 miles away from the marina and by the time I got there, I was anaerobic and over a minute past my start time. Not a good way to start a TT.

I didn't stick around to see any times posted. After I downloaded my ride info, it looked like I did the TT in 24:49 + whatever time I started late = not a top 5. The points going into the last race should be interesting. One positive of all this, I did set a new 2 minute personal power record TTing to the start of the TT and a new 30 minute personal record for both combined!

Last year at the Firehill crit, I got sick the night before. Tuesday night I woke up with a sore throat and felt pretty crappy all day. Last night it seemed to get worse, but I took some ibuprofen and I feel ok for now. Hopefully if I take it real easy the next 2 days I'll be good on Saturday.

My Commute

So since I'm taking it easy this week, I thought I'd take a few pictures along the route I take most of the time. Lately, every time I'm out, everything is a little greener than before.....

A couple of blocks from my house, a new hotel is being built.

It's about 7/10 mile from my house to the Lake Hefner bike trail.

Off the bike trail and onto Grand Blvd.

Grand Blvd. through Nichols Hills. Watch out for spitting cyclists...........

Heading south on Shartel............

The Paseo district heading towards Walker..........

Some graffiti on 23rd and Walker.......

Up Walker to downtown

East though midtown then Automotive Alley where the shop is.

Riding home back on Grand Blvd. over the Hefner Parkway looking NW at the lake.




North side of the lake on the dam. There was the full crowd scene at the lake this afternoon with the super nice weather.

OKC Velo Time Trial race #1

So I borrowed Steve's P3 for the 1st TT. I brought it home, put my pedals and powertap wheel on, then took it for a quick shakedown run (basically up and down my driveway). Steve and I are right at about the same height, so I didn't make any changes whatsoever to the bike as it felt pretty good when I test rode it. I also borrowed Charles' old LG helmet to make the "aero package" complete.


Saturday morning, after getting registered, I took the beast out to get warmed up, as well as try to get used to the SAPP (super aero package position). It was pretty cold at first, but once I got warmed up, my impression of the bike was: "this bad boy is bad, boy". The bike felt very fast and the SAPP was pretty easy to get used to.


I had signed up for the cat 123 class, and I must admit, I didn't think I had much of a chance in making it into the top 5 because there were some pretty salty characters that I would be up against. I guess my main goal was to: 1- Beat my all time time on this course and 2- Try to set a new 20 minute personal power record.


The riders were going off in 30 second intervals. The hardest part for me in time trials is the pacing for the first 2-5 minutes. On my best TT at this course, I averaged 317 watts, so, I wanted to stay around 320 watts or slightly over. As I started, it seemed very easy to keep the power between 350-400. Sure enough, at 5 minutes I'm on the edge of blowing up. I backed off and managed to recover and get back to 320ish.


My personal best time on the course was 18:35 from last year. As I was going around the big curve on the south side of the lake, I thought I may be able to break into the 17's. I got close with an 18:20 with an average power of 333 watts. I was pleasantly surprised to find out my time was 3rd best in the 123's! Later on when I downloaded my powertap info, I had set new 10 and 20 minute personal power records.


I'm going to use the bike again this Wed in the TT out at Draper. I'm also gonna make a few changes to my SAPP. The seat nose is angled down too far, which made me keep sliding forward and hitting my knees on my elbows. The coming week is going to be a recovery-mini taper period. My only real intensity will be the TT on Wed.


The Firehill crit is this Sat. It should be my last race as a cat3. It will also be my first race of the year with a positive TSB number. Hopefully I will do better than the poor performance I had on this course last year.

We got our new kits in. We switched the color scheme around, which I think looks pretty tough!

Redbud and April race series #2

Once upon a time, the Redbud Classic was quite the deal. Well, at least to me. A few years ago when I was first getting into road racing, it was a big deal. You would get a timing chip and find out how you stacked up against the real racers and local badasses. In 2006 it was actually a USCF sanctioned road race. Since then, the Redbud has been shortened with toughest section removed and basically turned into an untimed T-shirt ride. You will still have a high percentage of guys who are going to go out and punch it, but it's still not quite the same.

Some of my teammates and I did the ride last year, which ended up getting pretty silly. We had so much fun last year that we decided to do it again this year.
Brady took off a few miles into the ride once again. Fast forward to midway through, A Bike Alley guy took off and Jeremy went with him. So basically by the time we're heading back on Hefner Rd., we have Brady about 3 minutes up the road and Jeremy and the BAR guy about 1 minute up.

This hammerhead guy decides he is gonna pull the whole group up and catch the leaders solo. He actually did a pretty good job as the gap was about 20-30 seconds as we got to the Oakdale school. The hammerhead guy started to peter out, so this guy on a Cervelo wearing a Schlegel Bikes jersey (the shop I work at) takes off and I went with him. We broke free from what was left of the main field and I could see a shadow of a third rider that had come with us. I thought it was the other BAR rider, but it turned out to be my teammate Erin.

We bridged up to Jeremy and then finally Brady blew up on MLK a couple of miles before 63rd st. and we caught him. At this point, we have 4 Foss1l riders 1 BAR guy and the Cervelo guy. Around 63rd and Walker I attacked and the Cervelo guy came with me. He asked me where we finished and I told him it was just past this next hill. He said he wasn't going to sprint me and that he thought it was funny that neither of us had numbers on. We just rode in together and I felt like a schmuck for not signing up and just ghost riding the event.

Jeremy and Erin finished next. I later found out the Cervelo guy was Greg Oravetz. He was a top notch pro at one time who raced on the Coors light racing team in the late 80's-early 90's. He was also the USPRO national road race champion in 1989. Pretty cool.

On to the Lake Draper circuit race. Once again, huge fields in the 2nd race of the April series. Plenty of cat 1's and 2's in the race, plus the weather conditions were perfect. About 2 miles into the race, Jeremy got away. From that point on, the rest of the race was a series of attacks. It seemed like the Metro VW team of 2 riders was the strongest, but they weren't willing to go hard for more than a minute at a time.

Guys were getting frustrated because they couldn't break away from the main field. Some guys were grumbling and complaining that the Foss1l guys weren't working, but that's what you do when you have a guy off the front.

We had numbers and I think we did a pretty good job of controlling the race. A pretty stacked race at that. Jeremy ended up soloing in by 15-20 seconds or so. I got caught up in traffic in the field sprint and almost went down, but it worked out well keeping me from starting my sprint too early. I ended up getting 2nd in the field sprint giving me another 3rd overall.

So this weekend is the OKC Velo TT series 1st of 3 races. Steve is going to be out of town and he said I could borrow his Cervelo P3.....SWEET!!!! The April series next Wednesday is also a TT. I think I'm sitting second points wise, so hopefully I can pull out a good time and stay in the top 3 or 4.

OKC Velo April race series #1

It's official: Spring has officially sprung. Yesterday was the first of 4 races in the April race series. As usual in early spring races, there was a huge turnout. We had 23 riders in the cat 123 "A"race. Brady took off from the gun as the field gets ready for some pain.

Rob and me in a short lived break. This was around lap 3, also when we started to catch some of the "B" riders, which caused a lot of havoc in the race.

Evan and Phillip used some B riders as a pick, not necessarily on purpose, and got away from the field. Peter and I chased for a few laps and got very close, but not close enough.

This was around 2-3 laps to go. With all the random riders on the course, it got confusing as to which race was which. Because of that and people dropping chains on the rough course, the chase group was down to 7 riders. 3 were on OKC Velo, so the attacks from them were non-stop.

I won the field sprint giving me a 3rd for the day. All in all, another fun and action packed race. I'm going to try to hit all the races in this series as it's nice to not have to travel 4 hours to go to a bike race, plus the entry fee is only $5!!!!

The infamous Redbud classic is this Saturday, generally a big adventure and a good training ride. There are a couple of races happening on Sunday, but, it's my birthday so I'm gonna stay home and celebrate with my family.

Next race: Wed evening Draper circuit race