Semi-Annual Blog Posting..

So I guess it's high time I updated this thing with all the latest going ons.

Typically this is the time of year everyone who races bikes (myself included) starts getting excited about the upcoming season, so I'll start there. My motivation for racing bikes pretty much got really low as the season progressed earlier this year. I had been thinking about it off and on for the last couple years, so after the Tulsa Tough in June, I decided I was going to leave the Evoke/Undiscovered team that I had been on the last 5 years or so. There's really no one big reason, more like a lot of little nagging issues that kept adding up and eventually, personally for me, made it not any fun anymore.

Anyway, next year I'm going to be racing on the DNA Racing Team.  More on this later, but needless to say, I'm back to being excited for next year. So I got my training plan all lined out and started into the preparation phase, got a week into it, and then last week I got the worst case of the flu that I think I've ever had. I haven't done any exercise or riden my bike in over a week, but I should be good to ease back into it in a couple of days.

Another big "going on" so to speak, I started building my first bike frame from scratch in May and finally got it completed in September. It was a pretty fun project and I hope to do another one at some point soon. It's basically my commuter bike that I ride to work now and due to the fact that I've had to sell most of my other bikes to pay for the Trek Emonda I rode last season, It's currently my only bike.

I've got a 12 video series of the process on my youtube channel, but here's a quick video I made that skims through the whole thing-

Well, that's it for now. I think I can try a little harder to do more than 6 posts a year..

Wheeler crit #3 video

2015 Tall Chief Road Race and NWA plus the local stuff.

I started this post 3 weeks ago so I guess I'll finish it. I've got 2 road races in so far this year. This year so far has been a little weird in that a few of the races that were planned early on have been cancelled. Results wise things aren't going quite as well as last year, but not too bad. We've been in a position to win or get podium spots at the end of most of the races. There's lots of racing coming up, but I'm not sure what I want ones I'll be doing. For sure the crits around the pro-am and Tulsa tough, but everything else is just a week to week decision.

The last 2 wheeler crits have been fun. I'll probably do most of them through June before my schedule changes up. Anyway, here's my Wheeler highlight videos from the last 2 weeks.

 

2015 race season week 1

I guess there's not a whole lot to update personally this week. I decided to skip the race in Arkansas because of the bad weather. I don't have a problem riding and racing in any conditions, but I wasn't interested in a 12 hour+ white knuckle drive. Bob, Micah, Dylan and Rob all went and did really well. All the guys finished in the top 10 out of a pretty big field. Anyhow, next week is the Oklahoma season opener. Day one was canceled because of construction at the park the salt creek race is at, so it's the tall chief road race only. I'm really looking forward to finally racing, so next weeks post should be much more interesting.
I got some snow riding in Saturday and Sunday. Mostly just for fun, but I did do a few short intervals. Riding in the snow/ice is mainly just good practice for bike handling skill. There's a new website called Zwift that lets you ride your indoor trainer device and ride/race with other people in a video game format. I've been seeing a few pro's using it on Strava. I thought about giving it a try this weekend, but I didn't get invitation approved yet. It seems like all the guys on the team are pretty divided on the Zwift thing. most of the cat 4's think it's pretty cool and the 3's and up think it's the gayest thing ever. I guess without trying it, I'm in the middle somewhere. I don't really like stationary riding indoors, but it could be fun for the occasional indoor ride. We'll see...
Here's a few snow pictures I took:

2015 season primer

So it's almost time to get the season going. I haven't kept this thing up very well, but I've kinda made it a goal to post something each Sunday or Monday to keep the racing stuff updated. Hopefully more on board race videos too. The winter base phase has gone about as well as I could have hoped for. In fact, I think this may be the first base period where my power meter data looks about as textbook as it gets. Click on graphs to enlarge.

Weekly training stress in green and intensity factor in yellow.

A few years ago I switched from going off time and/or miles to using TSS to determine  my weekly training load. It's pretty easy to see the classic 3 weeks on - 1 week off base period. Historically, I've usually always gotten sick or something comes up or a bad weather week etc. that causes the schedule to get thrown off, so I'm pretty pleased with the winter so far. The tallest green bar was from our training camp week. I started my build phase a couple of weeks ago and this week was the first one that the weather and life shortened things, but this is the time of year when we generally start racing, so the weeks normally get shorter but harder. This past week was short but looking at the intensity factor dot, it was my hardest week intensity wise this season so far.

My Performance Manager Chart from last June until now.

I let my fitness dwindle pretty low last October, but I wanted to be as rested as possible when my base period started.  If you're not familiar with the PMC graph, the blue line is chronic training load =current fitness. The pink line is acute training load = current fatigue and the yellow section is training stress balance = current form. The black dots are my top 10 - 20 minute efforts and the orange dots are my to 10 - 60 minute efforts from last June until now.
I usually start feeling pretty good race wise once my chronic training load gets over 90ish or so. Right now it's just under 100. Rob and Micah have already raced a couple of races each. Hopefully next weekend we'll all get to race together next weekend in Arkansas. The weather is looking iffy right now, but either way, I'll update next week.