Matthew

Priorities

    It's been a while since my last post, and for good reason. My wife and I moved from Tennessee to Lakewood, Colorado. The military pays for your last move home, and had some professional movers come and pack up the house two weeks ago. Of course, what I remember most about two weeks ago was taking my very last ride in Tennessee, down at the Natchez Trace, which I've written about before. This time, since I was moving across the country and wasn't going to have a whole lot of time to get my workouts in, the wind decided to grab my bike as I was taking it down off the roof rack and blow the bike across the car and away from me where I couldn't catch it. After a series of loud expletives and a frantic run around the car to check the bike, I thought everything on the bike was in good working order. I was amazed. I thought to myself rather smugly that "it was a really good thing I have the aluminum Cervelo P2, this thing can sure take a beating!" So I went for my ride. I had a great three hour ride, averaging about 200 watts. When I put my bike back on the rack, I noticed a crack clean through the right front fork about three inches above the dropout. When I saw the crack, I was mostly thankful that I wasn't lying on the side of the road, with both my bike and myself in pieces. That would have made a long day, and coming weeks, absolutely impossible. So I was thankful for that. And everything else on the bike still worked, except for the broken fork. A broken fork with a 1 inch head tube. Which are both expensive and hard to find. After the elation of having myself and most of my bike in one piece, I now had to deal with the movers coming in less than 24 hours to pack the whole house, workouts I still had to squeeze in, and a bike that I couldn't ride and part I couldn't find for less than 400$.

So I started making phone calls to my buddies in Colorado. Eventually, one said he had a fork he thought would work that I could just have. Awesome! So, problem solved for the time being, I spent the next day with the movers packing up the house. It was about a 12 hour day. You never really realize how much stuff you own till you have to move. The next day I finalized all my paperwork with Uncle Sam so all I had to do was show up for an hour on Thursday and sign my last sheet of paper and actually get officially released from the Army. Wednesday the movers came and loaded the truck with all the boxes we had packed on Monday, in addition to all of the furniture and larger items. Wednesday night some of my friends from Colorado called and asked if I had looked at the weather. Turns out the front range of Colorado was expecting 20 to 24 inches of snow starting Thursday night, right in the middle of my drive. Sweet! The sooner I got on the road, the better. Thursday morning I signed out of the US Army at Ft. Campbell for the last time and left directly from there to get on the road. I made great time across Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri, stopping only for gas. The two bikes on top the car were holding on just fine, despite the broken fork on my Cervelo. Up ahead was Kansas, the bane of any cross country trip. 450+ miles of boring nothingness and I70 stretches as far as the eye can see. I was cruising along just fine until I got a ticket outside of Salina, another in a string of towns where cows outnumber people at least 3 to 1. It was getting late, but if I wanted to beat the snow I had to keep on pushing. With no companion for the drive, nothing but coffee and talk radio to keep me awake and marginally sane, I kept going. Got more gas in a place called Hays, and some food. There was a little problem at the fuel pump, where someone left the gas on and it overflowed and started to spill over. I ran over and turned off the pump, and in keeping with the spirit of the past week, the spill container was locked. As if someone was going to steal the kitty litter and shovel at a no-name gas station in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. I managed to get to the spill kit over on the truck side of gas station and help the somewhat confused older gentleman clean up the gas that was all over the place at this point. Quite honestly, it was a welcome diversion from the endless miles of road. Without further adventure, I made it to eastern Colorado and then it started to rain. And rain. And rain. After that, as I continued into Denver at around 1 in the morning, it rained some more, just for funsies. Absolutely exhausted, I pulled into my in-laws, unloaded the bikes, and brought them into the house. My sister in law met me on the stairs, a dazed look on her face, said "OH!" turned around, and went back to bed. The next morning she said she thought I was robbing the place. I found that fairly amusing as I was bringing a car-full of stuff into the house, but everything seems a little surreal at 1 am. I finally hit the sack around 2.

The next day I woke up and drove to my buddies, picked up the fork and drove to my other friends place in Boulder to work on my bike. Hey, you gotta have your priorities straight, right? No dice. The fork wouldn't fit. And there wasn't another to be found for anything approaching a reasonable price. Pro Bike Kit and my very understanding wife to the rescue. A new Cervelo P2C was in the mail in less than 24 hours. After waiting and a semi-interesting build involving lots of driving and scrounging for tools, the new bike is finally built and sitting in my new place in Lakewood. I squeezed and hour in last night on the trainer at 9 o'clock. Oh yeah, and the rest of my wife and my belongings are in the house as well. Still in cardboard boxes for the most part. But you gotta have your priorities straight, right?

Spring Rides in Tennessee

    I've gotten two great outside rides in the past two weeks. Sundays are typically my long outside rides, and the past two have been beautiful Tennessee spring days, about 65-70 degrees, just a little bit of wind, and a great road. I started riding at the Natchez Trace several weeks ago after my mother mentioned how nice it was. The Trace runs from Tupelo, MS, to Nashville, TN. It's a little two lane road that runs smack through the "Trace" which is a loosely defined trail. Settlers, cattle drivers, and others used the valley the trace sits in to move north and south in the middle south. The road itself is in very good condition, and no tractor trailers are allowed, so the road is really very bike-friendly. The rolling hills and wonderful scenery make for a long, awesome, uninterrupted ride.

This weekend, I rode for about three hours. Two hours and twenty-five minutes at 200 watts (2.3Watts/KG), then twenty minutes at 55 RPM and 230 watts (2.71Watts/KG) followed up by four 20 second sprints (700-800 watts 8.75Watts/KG). All told it was 2200KJ of work, and a really good day.

Power and Trainers

    So, I finally got my powertap back to the house, in the wheel, and dialed in. Of course I wanted to do a threshold power test right away, but it was about a week until my coach worked a quasi-threshold test into the mix. And I learned a lot. Which is another way of saying that things did not go anywhere near the way they were supposed to.

    The deal was that I do my standard warm-up on the trainer: 10 minutes building to a cadence of 90 and HR in Zone 2, followed by 10 minutes of pedal stroke work, five minutes of one-legged drills, and then an RPM pyramid. The RPM pyramids start a 95 RPM and works up in one minute increments to 120 RPM, then back down. This warm-up is exclusively skill work, max wattage is not important, but keeping your stroke smooth and watts the same is. I.E., if you are at 120 rpm, it doesn't matter if you are at 120 watts or 200 watts, just that you are staying as close to whatever number as possible. It's a good way to work on efficiency. So, officially warmed up and ready to go, I began a series of three intervals. As this was the first sort of any test involving wattage that I had done, my targets were HR zones, not watts. First two intervals were supposed to be in low zone four (A "moderately hard effort") for five minutes each, with two minutes rest in between. My average wattage for the first interval was 271, for the second 288. My HR was right on target, and everything seemed fine. The third interval was supposed to be in high zone 4 (A "hard effort") for five minutes then two minutes rest. Once again, my HR was right on target, and my average wattage for the five minute interval was 297. Then, at 90RPM, I was supposed to do one minute in the gear I did the last interval in, then shift one gear down for one minute, and so on until exhaustion. I figured I could do a least four minutes before I exploded. Boy was I wrong. The first minute went great, HR came right up, averaged 314 watts and was cruising. Then I shifted down, my watts jumped to about 400, and I hammered it. Then, I exploded right at two minutes. The last minute averaged about 408 watts, but the real interesting part was that the powertap was only registering me going between 22 and 23 mph. This is a problem. I know I've gone faster on the flats. Last time I checked I could hold 26-27mph on the flats for ten to fifteen minutes and not explode. I was a little irritated. So, generally feeling like throwing something at the wall, questioning my ability to ride hard, wondering if I really knew how to suffer, and muttering four letter words like it was going out of style, I logged my workout on training peaks for my coach to look it. Turns out I'm not too bright…. When you cram the roller on the trainer into the wheel real tight, it kind of makes it hard to go fast. Imagine that. ;)