2018 updates and such...

Wow, I guess it's been over 2 years since I've added anything on here. Sorry about that. I've been mainly focused on my YouTube stuff for the most part, but let's do an update.

I've been working on building another bike frame. I guess I started it last summer, and the goal was to have it finished by the fall of 2017, but obviously that didn't happen.

Super sweet frame tubing kit!

The plan was for a bike that would essentially be like an adult sized version of my first BMX bike. Something to ride around the local mountain bike trails - pump track, or just cruise around the neighborhood with my kids. I actually found my first bike when I was planning out this build, and made a video about it...

Fast forward to today, I've got a frame and a fork built. I'm going to take the new frameset, and the old webco to get painted next week. I didn't get to build the new frame exactly as I had had envisioned, mainly because I had to rush the completion somewhat, but I still think it's going to be a really fun bike to ride and stuff.

The main reason I had to rush it along was the other latest big news...

We're moving!!

Yes we're moving to Colorado. Coatney was accepted to graduate school in Denver, so we're relocating in June of 2018. The past several months have been pretty crazy. A combination of getting our house ready to sell, selling it, finding a place to live, finding room for all our "stuff", getting rid of a lot of it, and finding a new job. So far, everything seems to be falling in place day by day. 

I'll try real hard to update this as it's all going down. If you're interested in the build up of my frame project, I have a playlist series on YouTube...

650b frame build series

Otherwise, until next time...

Tis the season..

Well, spring and the race season is definitely here. So far I've gotten a road race and a couple of practice crits in. It hasn't gone great results wise, but not horrible either. It feels like things are headed in the right direction. My overall fitness seems ok, but the higher intensity power from say 30 seconds to 5 minutes needs improvement. It's pretty much the same thing every year. Everything seems great until you get into an actual race situation and the painful truth comes out.

I've been playing around with the onboard video a little.  These are the last couple videos from the Wheeler crits-

I was planning on doing the crit yesterday, but I cut my finger pretty good, so I had to miss it. Chad had a helmet cam and I put the camera I was going to use on Andys bars. The race was pretty entertaining to watch, so it should make for a pretty sweet video! Hopefully I'll have it finished tonight or tomorrow this weekend is the NWA road race in Arkansas. We've got 5 or 6 of us going, so it should be fun. 

Turning the corner..

 Every time I start into a new season, it seems like the progress, for me anyway, is super slow. It's been months of getting up early, riding in the cold and dark sometimes, wondering if it's worth it, not seeing much improvement. It seems like lots of things go that way sometimes. You're in a dark place ready to give up, but you gotta keep plugging away. Just take it day by day, then BAM! You go out one day and notice the change. I think it's happened twice so far this season.

I'm not sure when it happens, but for me, it seems to be a noticeable difference the Tuesday or Wednesday after a recovery week. What I'm talking about is more of less a rise in fitness.

It's not something that occurs after every training block and recovery week, but if its going to happen, that's usually when it comes around. It happened on one of my last rides on my commuter bike, and yesterday.

 It's not necessarily something that's accompanied by high power numbers, although usually so, it's more a feeling of well being or feeling like you can keep punching it indefinitely or you're impervious to fatigue or something like that. 

Maybe it's just because the weather is getting nicer? Well, I'm sure it helps at least.

It's been a while since I've updated any data in my WKO software. I've been working on it, but I have a couple months worth of rides to manually estimate the power numbers and add to the calendar.

Anyhow, I have about an hour each Wednesday while my daughter is at an after school activity to work on this blog thing, but enough rambling for this week. Until next week..

Gearing up for getting down

So my winter "training plan" so far has been a little half baked. I guess really, you could say it's been pretty unstructured, at least less so than anytime I can remember in the last 10 years. Since I sold most all my bikes, I haven't had a bike with a power meter, just my heavy steel home built rain bike.

It wasn't too bad just riding to work, but doing our weekend group rides was definitely a challenge.
I've tried doing some longer intervals just riding on my way to work, which by the way, the new west river trail is great for. I've mainly been just going off feel and similar volume to what I've done in the past for a rough metric on how hard and long to ride.  Anyhow, I put about 2000 miles on the rain bike and have been riding my new race bike since January, which has been nice.

My new race bike

 In general, I think riding the heavy rain bike has paid off as far as a good base to start the season and be competitive.

We had our team training camp last weekend. I feel like it went really well, and I really like the direction the team is going in. I feel like I fit in well, and I'm pretty excited to go out and compete with these guys.

It was nice having a lead car, a follow van and a moto for a nice rolling enclosure.

The DNA team, the team I'm on, is kind of a junior varsity team to our big brother Arapahoe Resourses elite team

I think I'll try to get a FTP test in soon, just to get a clearer idea where I'm at fitness wise.  I've been slacking pretty bad lately keeping track of all the "fitness stuff", but I got reinterested after hearing guys talking about their numbers and such at camp. So, I guess since the first races are only a couple weeks out, it's time to get my training a little more focused and structured, which I'm pretty excited about as well!

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.