Record Miles July

I decided at the end of June that I'd pretty much used up my base miles bank and it was time to make a serious deposit if I wanted to salvage the rest of my season and have something to build upon for cyclocross season. My highest ever mileage month was in August of 2003 at 1238 miles, and it was time to make that the old record. Since there were 31 days in July, if I figured if I tried to average 40 miles per day that would give me 1240 miles. I could get 30-35 commuting during the week and get some long weekend rides in.

It got close at the end, but I set a new record with 1241!

I didn't really do any high intensity riding, just enduro pace and a lot of 10 minute tempo stuff.

I'm going to try to do the Hotter than Hell cat 1/2 crit on the 28th and the 100 mile 1/2 road race on the 29th. I did the Spin Your Wheels 100 mile ride last sat and felt pretty good all day. The next day I got a good 50 mile ride in. It was pretty rough at first, but Randy "crazy legs" Wyninnger was there causing havoc and baiting me to sprint to frequent points of interest. My high end power numbers were very close to my all time bests, so I'm very happy with that.

The latest deal is I'm getting a tandem bike and I'm gonna pick it up tomorrow! It's a super sweet Burley. Should be a lot of fun.

June summary

So I've had this blog in limbo for quite some time now and I guess it's time to post it. June was defiantly not my best month of racing or bike riding in general.

Things started off with the Foss1l Tornado alley crit. This was to be our teams first official event. We had been planning and working on the event since January or so. I had a bad feeling as the race got closer that something bad was going to happen or we were going to make a bunch of people mad due to something going wrong that we didn't plan for.



As it turned out, things went well overall with how we put the race on. There are a few things that we need to improve and the planning for next years event are already happening. Things are looking very good right now for a much bigger event for next year!

So I decided to do the masters race and the cat 123 race at our crit. It was a long hot day with setting up the course and doing 2 races. I was still sore from my crash 3 days prior to the race and a little gun shy going into the turns at full speed.

I had a lot of teamates in the masters race, but it quickly turned into a 4 man breakaway. 2 strong OKC velo riders and the soon to be 45-49 masters national champion riding for the Tulsa Tough team. I pretty much buried myself bridging up to these 3 guys and was in a bad position in the rotation in looking back . I ended up getting popped with 3 laps to go and got 4th.

By the time the 123 race started, it was hot. I had a set of demo Zipp tubular wheels on for this race. The good news is that they were fast! They accelerated VERY quickly. The only problem was after a few laps, my stock Shimano brake pads didn't work well with the carbon rims. They would kind of slow you down, but it felt like no brakes at all and messed up my rhythm going into the corners.

A couple of riders got off the front and ended up lapping the field. I think I ended up 17th overall.

The day overall was tough. I've got a lot of respect for anyone who puts on a bike race. It's a lot of work but if you go to bike races, you've got to pay your dues and put one on.

So on June 9th, the following Tuesday after our race, 3 riders from the Bicycles of Tulsa, Matt Edmonds, Christa Voss, and John Moore were hit by a drunk driver on a training ride killing Matt and Christa. Matt and John are in the photo above racing the 123 race. I used to see all 3 of them at most of the races we've done the last few years and had a good chit chat with Matt after the NWA race earlier this year. Just a bad deal overall and it really took the wind out of my sails for quite some time.

I skipped the speedwheel race because I just didn't feel like racing. The 89'er criterium was in Purcell on the 20th. Very hot weather. I think there was only 10 or 11 riders in the 123 race. Most of them were Tulsa Wheelmen riders, and they pretty much controlled the race from the first lap. I ended up with 7th. So Sunday the 21st was the state championship RR. Super hot again. The 1-2's were combined with the 3's which really changed the dynamics of the race. Due to the heat the attrition rate was very high. Long story short, a group of 3 eventually got off the front. I ended up 9th in the 1/2's.

The summer race series #4 race was on the 24th. A crit at the Edmond fire training center and probably my worst race of the year. I went a little too hard early and got dropped. I decided to just keep going and get a good workout in and got lapped twice in the process by the time it was all said and done. A couple of things I've learned: I don't do very well in hot weather and no matter how hard I train, if I don't get enough miles in, my fitness goes down. I pretty much decided at this point to re-group and go back to establishing my base endurance, and not race the rest of the season till my form gets better.

Things are tough all over: The Tulsa Tough Etc.

After having taken a month long break from racing crits, I was ready to get back in action. The Tulsa Tough is by far the coolest race I've ever done. This year was my first race as a cat 2 and first race as a cat 2 in general.

Jeremy and me warming up before the Blue Dome race on Friday night. Racing a crit as the sun is going down is awesome! The speed, intensity, and aggressiveness was insane.

Just getting started.....

With 120 riders going off and forming a train 2 blocks long, the jumbo trons made it easy to watch the race action. There were way more crashes on Friday then I thought there would be. At one point midway through the race, there were wrecks on every lap for something like 6 consecutive laps! I ended up getting 74th on Friday. I moved up to around 20-25th or so at what I thought was around 15 minutes to go, but it turned out laps to go. This was the fastest crit I've ever done. Average speed: 28.1 MPH

Saturday was hot! Every year the Tulsa Tough seems to get bigger. It seemed like there were way more spectators then I remember from the past years. The party atmosphere by Cains ballroom and Soundpony was crazy! It was like the crazy cycling fans you see at the Tour de France. I got 56th on Saturday.

Sunday was even hotter! I managed to stay in for half the race until I got pulled. Of the 100+ riders to start the race, only 26 finished. The officials were aggressively pulling riders. If you got dropped from the main field, you got pulled immediately!

All in all, a fun weekend. My teammate Erin tore it up it the cat 3 race with money finishes every day and a wild front flip photo sequence Sunday as seen on taos action photos.com

I was happy to make it through the weekend unscathed except for a big elbow bruise on my arm until.................

The first race of the velo June race series. The crit course was at the fire training center in Edmond. Things were going good until the 4th lap when I took off to try to bridge up to Evan. I was railing the fastest turn on the course, when my tire came unseated from my rim causing me to crash and take out about half of the field. If any of you guys are reading this--I'm sorry I caused you to wreck.

I got skinned up some, but I'm kind of bummed about tearing up my trusty Sidis.

The Foss1l Racing Tornado Alley crit is this weekend, so hopefully most of the soreness will be gone by then.

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.