Woohoo! I'm Cat 4!

I hope this means I just said goodbye to the majority of sandbaggers.

Main Entry: sandbag
Function: verb
Date: 1860
transitive verb
1: to bank, stop up, or weight with sandbags
2 a: to hit or stun with or as if with a sandbag b: to treat unfairly or harshly c: to coerce by crude means d: to conceal or misrepresent one's true position, potential, or intent especially in order to take advantage of

What's next?

The season is not over. See all the options in the next few weeks:

2008-09-20 - Randy's Fall Color Classic superseries.
2008-09-27 - Heber valley century - http://web.bike2bike.biz/Rides/HeberValleyCenturySept272008/tabid/111/Default.aspx
2008-09-27 - Bingham's Cyclery Mountain-2-Metro Criterium http://www.mountain2metro.com/
2008-09-27 - Mini-Me #14 Heber Valley Color Ride.
2008-10-03 - BCC Racing Retreat. Rides on Friday and Saturday
2008-10-11 - Josie Johnson memorial ride. http://josiejohnsonride.com/
2008-10-11 - City creek bike sprint - http://www.sports-am.com/events/index578.htm
2008-10-16 - 2008-10-19 - Moab!!! Come to Moab! We'll be doing some mountain biking.

Next season may be a heavy mountain biking season. Maybe I'll race a few mountain bike races. I definitely want a rematch with the East Canyon road race and Garden creek gap.

I requested to move to Category 4. I hope I'm done with sandbaggers! I also hope my team will follow my lead as I aspire to feel what it's like to race in a team instead of a bunch of individuals wearing the same jerseys.

Post mortem - LOTOJA

In my professional life we conduct post mortems, or retrospectives, on a project where we capture the good, the bad, and suggestions for improvement. Here's my post mortem of LOTOJA.

Good

• Recon. Pre-riding the course proved to be as important as I wrote about in a previous blog. I was mentally prepared for the whole course. No surprises.
• Pre race nutrition. I consumed A LOT of decent power food all week leading to the race, including plenty of pasta, pizza, and a huge hashbrown, french toast, and bacon breakfast Friday morning. I had "my usual" breakfast of oatmeal with brown sugar, Naked Juice, and banana 2 1/2 hours before the race start.
• Race nutrition. I only consumed approximately 1800 calories even though I planned for 5300 but it worked out fine. I gave priority to my Cytomax drink before water, causing me to drink most of the electrolyte drinks I planned which is a huge improvement over previous races. I also ate a few Payday bars, and a shitload of shot blocks.
• Cola shot blocks good. Orange shot blocks good.
• Training. I put in 3300 road miles or so including a dozen race events. Good thing. I felt strong all day. Long rides, short rides, climbing, Death Ride, Tour de Park City, bring it on.
• Finish. All this translated to a strong finish. I did quite a bit of the work in the pack for the last 47 miles and was fine doing it.
• Musettes. Use them in combination with a killer support crew that understands racing. Proved to be a great advantage as it allowed to reduce the time during the chase, allowed to get ahead of the pack enough to pull over and take a leak, and allows for customization of nutrition.

Bad

• Last minute shopping. As much as I would prefer buying from local shops it just doesn't make sense to pay $3 for a bag of shot blocks where they can be purchased for $1.40 ish online.
• Chasing the lead pack. This took more effort than I had. Looking at the splits we got within 2 minutes of the lead pack at Ovid, but we never caught them.
• Urinating. Stopping takes too much time. On the bike is ridiculous.

Suggestions for improvement

• Use new tires. Turns out "everybody knows" to get brand new tires just for LOTOJA. I didn't know. My tires had a few hundred miles on them and were starting to look square. I wasn't worried until I got help in the worrying department. It really turned out ok; I changed my tires Friday before the race.
• Race as a team. If one of the team leaders has a mechanical problem maybe the majority of the team should help pace the leader back to the lead group. I know, this involves selflessness, team spirit, and team ability.
• Be selfish. I had to do my own training at my own pace, which meant not riding at most people's pace.
• Get whooped. Find ridiculously fast people to try to stick to. Riding above my pace and getting dropped increased my pace.
• Plan your nutrition. Just the effort of calculating food intake and output is quite the eye opener. Makes you believe in carbo loading. Makes you pay attention to your nutrition on the bike. I planned to intake 5,300 calories. I estimated an output of 10,000 calories. I estimate an actual intake of 1,800, and my GPS shows 11,472 calories burned.

Summary

Overall I am quite pleased with this race. I made a decision to stop early in the race at approximately 20 miles to help pace a buddy back to the group which turned out not to happen. I had to take a leak anyways. It was hard work for a long time, and being in race mode - trying to catch the leaders - likely helped my time.

Less than one week has passed and I truly can't remember this race being tougher than a hard century. I raced ULCER and fell over afterwards. I raced the Tour de Park City and fell over afterwards. How many times in the last two years did I finish something and say 'this was the toughest thing I've enver done on a bike'? I didn't say that for LOTOJA. I didn't fall over at the end of LOTOJA. I sprinted to the finish to pass the punk that tried to beat me after I pulled him home for 47 miles. I am sure it is tougher than a century. It is a hell of a long time on a bike. It is a hell of an accomplishment. I believe I peaked perfectly for this race. Sorry if it sounds like ego or bullshit.

I have extremely high expectations of myself.

I really thought I could do LOTOJA in 9 1/2. I wanted to, and wanted to do it with Brent, especially cause it would have been his best time and I would have helped. How selfish is that? First LOTOJA ever, and I want to beat most everyone. The dream was 9 1/2, the expectation was 10.

My time was officially 9:59:46.185, 11th place in my group, 22nd in all of Category 5 racers, 149th overall. Pulling off 9:30 this year would have meant a first place finish in my category with 7 minutes to spare. I could list the excuses and comments here to embellish this...

This was a nearly perfect day. Thanx to all that helped, especially my killer support crew and BCC Racing for the thousands of miles of training and companionship.

Now I resume my quality time in Jackson, wy.

LOTOJA is just about over

The only little thing left is the actual race. I'm done worrying, I'm done training, I'm done planning, I'm done with everything except sleep, eat, ride.

I feel I did well preparing physically. I ate quite well and I have a great breakfast planned. I learned quite a bit about nutrition this season including getting some late nutrition data to chew on and applying what I can to the plan.

I did everything possible to my bike short of replacing it. I mean everything: new 205g tires, new 49g tubes, cleaned and lubed the drive train, lubed cables, and even got killer new wheels earlier this season (see Williams Cycling). As I told a buddy: This wheels are so fast I just need to keep the rubber side down to win every race. That's right I said it. Would be awesome.
Here's a hint of my mental preparation...

To all competitors out there: I am going to destroy myself tomorrow trying to stick with you. I am going to find new levels of physical ability. I will NOT finish this race wondering if I could have done more. Note: This is not ego this is challenging myself through competition.

Oh, and I have some really cool new racing team arm and leg warmers! Even though the weather is cooperating it will be cold.

Hopefully I am still alive after this ride to comment on the results

LOTOJA is imminent

It has been quite a ride this year, as in adventure.

I have 3400 miles on my bike computer; over 3300 on the road. According to one of the LOTOJA veterans on lotojaclassic.com I am less than half way to where I need to be if I want to be competitive. Unfortunately I have a life, sort of. It already feels like my life was dedicated to riding this year; I donno how people can put in twice this much mileage and have a full time job.

I made great friends during this training year. If they knew about this blog thingy they would get all teary eyed right here...

I learned a bunch about myself during this training year. Interesting how a hobby can do that.

I learned about racing, criteriums, nutrition, endurance, energy management, and a slew of other freaky things to get that little tiny edge.

Yep, similar to everyone else it sure sounds as if this is the end of my season. I hope not but we'll see.

I need to learn a bunch more about how to be generous. I cannot comprehend the level of generosity it has to take for my woman to watch, support, and suffer through this kind of thing. Truly amazing. She can teach me a lot.

I need to learn a bunch more. Period.

Huh, not much of this is about LOTOJA. I am excited, ready, nervous, and I wish I coud write "optimistically cautious" but I need to keep telling myself I am going to kick its ass. I AM going to kick its ass.

It has been quite a ride getting here, let's see what happens next.

2 weeks to LOTOJA

Excited. Nervous. Beat.

I am quite glad Stan and I spent the last Friday and Saturday on our bikes previewing portions the LOTOJA course. I would say it was invaluable even before actually going through the event itself. Seeing and experiencing the climbs, the rollers, the long stretches of "flat" lands were useful and fun. Oh, and painful. My GPS logged over 8600 feet of climbing. My body felt many miles of headwind. My legs felt pain. We're doing all of this in one day? Holy shit.

But I am still glad I saw it before the event.

There's a chance I can do well at this race. I have two more weeks to prepare, and I believe the preparation will be mental and logistical. The physical preparation is done; if I don't have it by now it's truly too late. It could happen.

Token picture: This is what the finish looks like: