The 2013 NWA Spring Classic Road Race

 It's amazing how powerful having a positive mental attitude can be, and the racing that went down on the weekend of March 23rd and 24th was a good example of that. It was a good weekend for us. The weather was pretty brutal, but we made the best of it.
There are several different directions or topics I could write about in this post. One thing could be about the tips and tricks we've come up with over the years that are either free or cheep, but will keep you warm and dry(well somewhat), and several other little things you can do to deal with these types of conditions.
Another topic could be about the Guru DFU fit cycle at the shop. The wins just keep piling up from the guys who have been fit on that thing.
A third subject could be about the awesome equipment we've been using so far this year, and another could be about mental toughness and how to develop it and be prepared for racing in the worst possible conditions.

I think trying to cover all of these things at once would be a bit much, so I'm going to focus on the racing itself. I'll be writing separate posts for the other things very soon.

The days before the weekend were calling for pretty grim weather for the weekend. Saturday and Sunday were looking cold, windy and a high possibility of rain and or snow. This may sound stupid, but I've been dreaming about doing a race in the snow for a really long time, and the possibility to actually finally get to do one had me very interested. The first of three OKC Velo time trials was Saturday morning at Lake Overholser. The weather turned out to be not too bad, mostly just cold.

Anyhow, the race went well for me. I had the fastest time of the day.Rob got second just a couple of seconds behind me. Usually Rob and me are pretty close time wise on the flatter courses, but he kills it on the hillier courses. Rob's wife Sarah also won the womens category.

Sunday morning, Rob, Sarah and I carpooled to the NWA road race. At first it looked like we might miss the rain/snow, but as we were getting close to Arkansas, I started to see some flurries. Once we got to the race course, it was light, but it was definitely snowing. The thing was nobody in the car was bummed out. Everybody seemed pretty excited to race in it, which I think made a huge difference in the overall experience.

Rob and me geared up for getting down

19 guys rolling out - only 10 finished

The last race we did was the Tall Chief road race. I didn't write a story about it, but for us, the race was literally over in less than 5 minutes after it started, so we were determined not to make that mistake again.
Our plan was to be very ready at the start and really just go hard all day and get it done quickly. I know that Rob really wanted to get a good win this year, and the NWA race was one that he felt he had a good chance at.
Right from the gun, Rob attacked pretty hard. Within a mile or so, guys were already getting popped off the back of the group. About 10 minutes in the group was mostly back together. Bob Cummings from Kansas attacked and Rob was in a good position to go with him, and that was pretty much it. Once they were given a little gap, I knew they were gone. It's way more fun being one of the guys that gets to sit in the group and police would be chasers, than be one of the guys who doesn't have a rider in the break.

I got out of position and let Jake Lasley of Soundpony get away towards the end of the first lap, but by then it was too late. Rob was already almost 3 minutes up the road and he an Bob are both guys that together would be tough to catch even for a fast group working together.
Things seemed like they might start getting hairy as ice was pretty much forming on everything. It was getting hard to shift gears as ice was coating the cables, derailleurs and cassettes. It seemed like every time I looked around the group kept getting smaller.

Rob's bike coated with ice

Rob ended up out sprinting Bob and got his first win of the year in epic fashion!  What was left of the main field pretty much blew up on the climb a few miles before the finish and I ended up 7th.

After race photo...Smiling even bigger!

My iced up helmet

Sarah's bike

Rob's bike - notice the ice on the shift cables

And on the spokes!

Another fun weekend. Our confidence is going good right now, but believe it or not, I think we can get a lot better as a team. Lots more racing coming up.

How to quickly and easily route Di2 wires

First off a quick tutorial:

I've been pretty fortunate to being exposed to doing a lot of Shimano Di2 installations at the bicycle shop I work at. The popularity of electronic shifting has grown like crazy in the past couple of years, and I predict that within the next few years, it will be on the majority of nice road bikes. There is quite a bit of info out there regarding the installation processes of Di2, but not as much as you would think. I've done at least 100 or so Di2 installs at this point so far, some stock builds and some totally custom, and I thought I would share a few things I've picked up along the way.

Di2 in general is pretty easy to install and set up compared to a standard mechanical derailleur/shift system. The most difficult part of the process is routing the wires through the frame and making everything look really clean. Some bike frames it's a really easy process and others can be a nightmare. I've used several different methods for getting the wires through by taping them to shift cables, using dental floss to pull the wires through ETC.

Earlier this year I came up with an easy to make tool that works really well. It's primarily for the new style 11 speed Dura Ace and the Ultegra Di2 which both use the same smaller type wires.

These are the pieces you need: A standard shift cable, a 5mm brake ferrule, and a  crimp on cable tip.

Cut the closed end off so the cable will slide though it....

Like this.

Slide the ferrule and cable tip over in this order.

Push everything to the end and crimp the tip. 

The plug on the end of the wire fits perfectly into the ferrule....

Like this

At this point it's easy to feed the tool through the frame. In the case of this Cervelo P5, the tool is fed through the opening behind the head tube....

through the down tube and out the bottom bracket.

With the wire plugged into the ferrule, I pull the tool back through the frame.

Super quick and easy. The wire is routed and ready for hook up.

 I've got a complete Di2 conversion scheduled next week on a non Di2 specific bike, so I'll document that process as I do it.

Salt Creek Criterium 2013

The race today went pretty good I guess. Overall on the day, the team did very well, a couple of wins and lots of podiums.

This is just a quick report on the P 1/2 race because that's the one I was involved in. The weather forecast was something like an 80% chance of thunderstorms at noon, which is when our race started. I guess we dodged a bullet because it may have sprinkled a little towards the end of the race, but that's about it.

This race is kind of like a broken record in that it always runs pretty similar. The strongest team (Tulsa Tough) also had the biggest numbers, so we knew the race would be hard. I got into an early break with Levi Baker (Park Place) Jacob White (Tulsa Tough) and Ryan Gabriel (Tulsa Tough). We stayed away for somewhere between 35 and 45 minutes, but it was all for nothing. Well maybe not all for nothing, but the Tulsa Tough guys were not really willing to work effectively in the break. I don't blame them, they raced smart and in the end it worked out well for them, but I used up a lot of energy.

Anyway, Ryan Gabriel got away from us, and we got caught a little while later. Rob ended up getting in a good move and stuck it to the end. Rob ended up 3rd and I worked my way through the field at the end to get 7th. I'm kind of disappointed, but in a way I'm not. The team worked pretty well together today, and I think considering the strength of the field, we did pretty good.

The race tomorrow is going to be and early one + with daylight savings, it may be a little rough. I'm trying to calculate the actual time I have to get up and the time that it's going to really feel like, and it's not looking good.

Salt Creek criterium results 2013

Double click image to enlarge.

Iris Stagner Memorial Stage Race

It was a cold morning. The kind of morning where we had to use the old vest under the jersey trick that we learned a year ago to the day. Before I get ahead of myself again, let me back pedal to the start of it all. I'm not sure what it is, but historically, every time we've done this race, really weird things tend to happen. Maybe it's the Crazy Water or maybe it's the fact that it's an early season race and everybody seems to be all jacked up with enthusiasm and ready to race vigor.

The craziness started for me before we even left town. Around 6 months ago, I went to the dentist for a toothache that would come and go. The dentist said I needed to get another root canal, but I've been putting it off because it hasn't been an issue. Well, a couple of weeks before the race, it started to become an issue. I made an appointment to get it done, but it would be after the race, so I was just going to have to grin and bare it for the weekend. I'm not trying to make it an excuse as it didn't affect my racing, it just made me kind of grumpy the rest of the time. Anyway, Rob, Brian and me left the shop after I got off work. Long story short, we had car problems, had to swap cars mid trip and didn't get to the hotel til around midnight.

We had to get up pretty early on Saturday for the first stage criterium. It was a cold morning as I stated in the beginning. I told the guys I might go a little hard early on, but just to warm up. So we started and by the time we got to the top of the big hill, I was on the front. I looked back and 3 other guys and myself had already established a gap. A couple of laps in, we had a decent break established. Garrett Grow from Tulsa bridged up somewhere around this time, and then we gradually started to put time on the field. A couple of guys were not working much, and a rider from Austin managed to slip away from our group. He had a few seconds on us, and I'm guessing somewhere around lap 6 or 7 we came up on a guy going a lap down.

I'm not sure what the guy was thinking, but we came up on him on the last two corners and I was on the front of our group. I yelled at the guy that we were passing. He basically tried to keep his speed and sort of get out of the way, but in the last corner, he took a bad line and lost it and went down right into my line. I had nowhere to go and slid into the barrier. The barriers look like those cement highway lane divider things, but they're plastic and very heavy. What I thought was going to happen was I would just kind of slide to a stop into it. I remember seeing my bike flying in the air and thinking my bike is going over the barrier. Then I realized I was flying over it also.

I pretty much landed flat on my back and it knocked the wind out of me. I was sort of trying to walk it off, but I was making that groaning exhale noise that you make when you get the wind knocked out of you. The corner marshals were trying to get me to sit down and asking if I needed an ambulance. All I could do was nod no. I put my chain back on my bike and started to head over to the pits. My seat popped loose somehow. I've never seen that happen before. I guess the rail popped out of the clamp? We got everything good to go, and I got to go back out in the same position in the break. The only downfall was the guy off the front benefited from the mishap and now had about 15 seconds on our group.

There was a preem lap for bonus points midway through the race for 3 places. I got 2nd giving me 3 bonus points. I thought we might catch the guy off the front, but it stayed pretty steady the whole race. A couple of guys tried to bridge around 3 laps to go, but we held them off. Garrett attacked in the right place on the course on the last lap, so he got 2nd and I got 3rd in the crit. All the guys on the team finished in the top 25 giving us some good team points.

Historically I've never done well in the stage 2 time trial. This year I was determined to improve. I improved my time by a couple of minutes and ended up 13th which I was ok with. The best news was that Rob won the TT!  So going into the final stage, I was sitting 3rd in the overall GC and Rob was 1 point behind in 4th. There is also a team competition that pays 3 deep and we were sitting solidly in 3rd. In reality, I think this is where things took a weird turn for the worst.

I think we were all pretty sleep deprived as we had to get up even earlier for Sundays road race. The weather ended up a lot warmer so that was nice.

As a team, I don't remember a time when we've been in this good of a position before and in hindsight, we didn't know how to deal with it effectively. Basically there was a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda type things that happened and in the end we missed out on the team competition by 1 point which was pretty frustrating. Rob and I also dropped from 3 and 4 to 7th and 8th, still in the money, but not where we should have been.

There are still a lot of positives to the weekend. It was still our best result at this race and we learned a lot and took a major step forward in actually winning this thing at some point.

Very early on

The new kits look good!

Maybe starting our 2nd lap?

 Thanks to Biff Stephens, Lee McDaniel, and A. Stephens for taking the cool photos.

A cool video breakdown of the weekend from DNA

The cat 3 guys on the team did really well by sealing the deal and winning their team competition. Next race for me is March 9th and 10th near Tulsa.

Action Jackson

I finally got to ride my new bike for the first time today. I had a meeting at the shop, so I left a hour and a half earlier than normal. The traffic between 7:45 and 8:30 is a lot busier than my normal 9:00 - 9:45 commute. The bike rides awesome! Basically, it does everything extremely well. This was also the first time I've used a power meter other than the powertap. The Quarq is a crank based system, so now I can use any wheels I want and start getting power data from races and stuff. It was super easy to set up and sync up to the Garmin, so I'm pretty stoked about that.

One thing that's fun about using new equipment or a different bike is getting used to the slight differences. Every bike I've ever ridden has I guess what you could call a different personality. A lot of people like to give their bikes nick names. I personally can say that I've never done this, but after this morning, I think I finally own a bike worthy of a name.

Like I said, the traffic was pretty busy this morning. Long story short, I had to make a few evasive maneuvers this morning dodging cars not paying attention, not signalling ETC. It seemed like some kind of crazy action was surrounding me on my initial ride. The ride home was pretty low key, but it's that first impression that counts. So I'm calling my bike Action Jackson.

I think it fits pretty well   hehe

So long old friend....

Cannondale CAAD 10 - A great bike!!!!


So I should have all the parts in a couple of days to make my new EVO complete, which means by this weekend  I'll be riding  my new bike. Normally I don't get very attached to a bike, but I really liked my CAAD 10. In addition to how great it rides, I've had tons of epic rides and races on this bike. I kinda wish I didn't need to sell it, but when you're a bike racer on a tight budget, you gotta sell the old stuff to finance the new stuff. At least the bike is going to a good home.

Cold start to 2013

I'm not going to lie, I'm starting to get a little tired of this cold weather block that's been going on for the last week or so. There was a Strava 500 kilometer challenge that went from Christmas eve to new years eve. Originally I wasn't going to try and do it as it fell on a week that I had planned as a recovery week, but I got sick a couple weeks before, so I adjusted my schedule and decided to go for it. It was definitely a challenge with all the snowy and icy weather, but I did it barely.

My training plan for this season seems like it's already in some kind of freestyle mode, but I seem to be getting all the training stress and volume in that I had planned so I guess I'll just keep going like this until the weather gets warmer and I can get back to some kind of structure. I'm still riding my Caad 10 primarily. I rode the CX bike a few times in the snow last week. Hopefully I'll be riding the new bike pretty soon. I'm basically just waiting on a crankset to swap out for the OEM crank that's on the bike. I'm not sure how much longer my current drive train and rear shifter are going to hold up. Both are pretty worn out.

A quick ice/snow ride at Bluff Creek on Christmas day

Lake Hefner mid last week

Last Friday I think. Whatever day it snowed. I had to switch out to the CX bike because it got too slick with road tires.