Epic weekend rides

There are a couple of weekend group rides that I sometimes do if there are no races going on. Saturday is the Francis Tuttle Vo-Tech ride leaving from 122 and Rockwell and the Bricktown ride on Sunday, which starts at Stars and Stripes park at Lake Hefner. Both rides are cool in that it's only a quick 3 or 4 mile ride from my house to either one.

This past weekend was different in that we had a special guest join in both rides! Team Milram rider Dominik Roels from Germany was in town visiting his cycling friends in Oklahoma City.
Dominik was a foreign exchange student here in 2003-2004. I rode with him a few times back then, and even at 16-17 years old, he was super strong. He's 22 now and fresh off a pretty decent Protour season. Dominik competed in and finished the Vuelta a Espana, getting 3rd in stage 15 and finishing very well in all the time trial stages. He raced very aggressively getting a lot of TV time as he was in several break a ways.

I met up with a couple of my teamates Erin and Jeremy as well as Andy Chasteen and the Willis brothers, and the five of us rode out to the Vo-Tech ride. As expected, there were a ton of people there. Depending on who shows up, this ride is usually fast, but sometimes, it's brutally fast. National tandem time trial champions Gil and Helen showed up on their fast tandem so the ride was semi fast in the beginning and super fast at the end.
Part of the ride group at Java Daves in Edmond.

Dominik and me.

Notice the Stars and Stripes jersey looming back waiting to throw down some power........

This is on the return trip from the coffee shop.
After the dust had settled on Saturday, I was downloading my power data and discovered I had set a new 1 minute personal power record beating the old record by 47 watts!

Sunday I couldn't decide if I wanted to go to Tulsa for a CX race or do the Bricktown ride. I decided to do the Bricktown ride at the last second with the thought of I would be going to Tulsa again next weekend for the State Championships, and I would probably have to spend all week cleaning my cross bike because of the wet weather.

The Sunday ride was definitely easier due to the cold and rain. There were only 8 people there so I got to pick Dominik's brain about training and talk alot about racing and riding.

Our rainy day group at the coffee shop Downtown taken from Brian Parks phone.

An awesome weekend all around. I'm a little bummed to have missed the race in Tulsa as it sounded like it was a blast. Time for a recovery week and then my target CX race this weekend.

Kids Lake Park OKC cyclocross race #2

I decided not to do the race last weekend in Tulsa due to a lack of money to race with. The second Chandler Park race was on the 7th and the second OKC cross race was on the 8th. I chose to just do the OKC race at the Kids Lake Park and race in the masters class. The OKC course seems to be more of a road riders course as opposed to the last two races I've done which are more of a mountain bikers type course. The thing I like most about the local races is that I can ride my bike out to the course from my house and not have to load up a bunch of stuff in the car.

The day started out good with some super nice weather and got better when I was registering and found out I actually finished in the money at the race they had here a month ago.
The masters start 1 minute after the B race and as we were staging, I thought I had a pretty good chance to get a top 3 finish, but I wasn't real sure because there were a few guys in there that I'd never seen or raced with before.


The starts in the masters races are not quite as crazy and aggressive as the A races. I didn't necessarily want to get the holeshot, but it didn't seem like any one else wanted to either. I found myself leading after the first corner down the long sidewalk, so I just punched it to try to catch some guys off guard. By the time we got through the first technical section, the group was already broken apart and strung out. Eldon Harding and Jason Pratt passed me on the first set of barriers so I sat on and recovered.

By the time we finished our 1st lap, the 3 of us had a pretty good gap on the rest of the masters field and starting to pick off a few of the B riders. When we caught a group of 3 or 4 B riders midway through the second lap, I attacked and got away.

The B riders were pretty strung out so each time I would pass some, I would focus on the next ones ahead and try to catch them.

By the time there were 2 laps to go, I caught up to the 1st and 2nd place guys in the B race. We just rode together and finished like this. I felt pretty good the whole race and contemplated doing the A race, but decided to call it a day. The good news is the payout was better than I expected, so I should be able to do the race next weekend in Tulsa.