The Spin Cycle

Amateur Hour?

The local rag has a TdG section again this year, and I'm sorry to say that once again, it's gotten off to a not-so-great start. For instance, did you know that the CSC rider to watch is Jens Voigt? I'm sure he'll be surprised, since he's not even in the race. Let's not forget Credit Agricole's Cristophe Moreau - I mean, we really don't need to remember Saul Raisin, Georgia native and the 2003 winner of the Young Rider's category. And John Murphy may or may not be "the" rider to watch on the USAC U-23 team, but he's also a Georgia native, and a well known motor in Georgia racing circles. Research, people, research!

On the other hand, this article by Karen Rosen was a really nice look at the local Pro team in the race - Jittery Joe's / Kalahari. Go Bean Team!

The AJC really needs to retain the services of someone in the cycling world for their coverage. I'm not saying they need any credit, or write the stories, but someone who can fact check their assets, and help them avoid mistakes like these...

April Fools, Fools, and Reporters

Much to do has been made lately over bloggers, their ethics (or lack thereof), and the fact that they (we) are essentially unedited.

I guess it's a good thing that Boston Globe reporter John Powers checks his sources, and has editors and stuff, because otherwise he'd run something like this in his Olympic Notes column:

The dope on UCI

Yes, the Dick Pound who may take over as president of the international cycling federation is the same Dick Pound who heads the World Anti-Doping Agency. Seems that Pound and UCI chief Hein Verbruggen had a heated encounter inside the Los Angeles airport after the world championships over Pound's longstanding criticism of the federation's foot-dragging on doping. Verbruggen reportedly called Pound a windbag and challenged him to do better. Pound, who says that the number of doping cases in cycling last year was "pathetic," agreed and is likely to be named president as of the end of June.

Oh, wait a minute...

Behold the April-Fool's-Joke-Turned-News meme of 2005.

UPDATE: Here's a screen capture, lest history be re-written:

TdG Speculation, Part II

As we get closer to the The Dodge TdG, more team names have been released by the TdG staff, and some others have been confirmed in the media. Here's a revised list of definite, highly probable, and borderline teams for the TdG:

1. Discovery
2. Phonak
3. CSC
4. Saunier-Duval/Prodir
5. Credit Agricole
6. USAC U-23 National Team
7. HealthNet
8. Navigators
9. TIAA-CREF

Gunn's Blazing

Long time cyclists from the Atlanta area will remember Georgia native Curtis Gunn. Curtis started riding in the late 80's, and I remember him  racing at the Dick Lane Velodrome as a junior. In fact, one of my last races at the DLV was against Curtis, when he was an aspiring match sprinter, and I was the (then) state and collegiate national champion. I still have some wicked scars from that ride and it's resulting high-speed slide into turn 3. That's all in the past, and now I'm quite happy to have him as a good friend.

As you can see from this recent photo, Curtis long ago gave up his match sprinting aspirations (my skin rejoices!), and turned to pursuiting. After quitting the sport for a while in the late 90's, he returned in 2002 to become one of the top pursuit riders in the country today. USA Cycling, however, hasn't favored Curtis with a ride at the track World Cup races, and so Curtis decided to take a shot at another dream of his - being a Pro. Curtis got his first Pro contract this year, at the age of 33. Riding for Team SeaSilver, he promptly went out an won his first race of his pro career, taking out the opening time trial and winning the overall at the Tour of Murietta in California last weekend.

He won the TT the hard way, too - note the bike he's riding. He spotted the rest of the field 19 gears, and still won by 25 seconds. Now he and the SeaSilver team are hoping for a berth in the TdG, and I'm hoping right along with them. Keep your fingers crossed for them, and for Curtis. I like to see my friends have their dreams come true.

Photo is Copyrighted and use is courtesy of Mitch Clinton Photography. Thanks, Mitch!

TdG Teams - Some Predictions

UPDATE: Welcome to everyone visiting from this week's installment of the Carnival, courtesy of PunditGuy. If the sport of cycling interests you, I hope you'll take the time to poke around a bit while you are here!

Recent rumors, and discussions with various friends in the racing world have led me to want to speculate, as a topic for dissection, what teams we may see in the TdG this year. Once again, the TdG staff has decided upon a total of 15 teams, with 8 riders each. As noted in my previous post, one hot rumor (with a little bit of confirmation behind it) is that Liberty Seguros will come, and with them will come Roberto Heras. I think this would be a huge step for the TdG, but that’s not what we’re here to look at. First, let’s have a look at the 2004 teams, as this provides a starting point - who will be invited back?

Book Report

Robert Messenger has a review of a new book about the history of Le Tour de France over at The New Criterion. I've not read it, but it sounds like a great book.

Thanks to The Agitator for the find, though Radley shows his true colors (or more properly, his origins) with his choice of "greatest cycling movie ever made." I find the choice of the Lance Armstrong/David Millar anecdote quite ironic, considering he'll not be riding le Tour this year due to doping allegations.

Track Time

The new ADT Center track is finished. Shown riding are Connie Young (World Champion Sprinter), her husband Roger Young (long-time cyclist and coach), and Paul Swift (Many-time national champion). The facility looks beautiful, and according to Eddie Monnier, Paul reports the track is one of the best he's ever ridden. I can hardly wait to try it myself - which leads to the quesiton of access. Will the regular Joe's get a chance to ride the new track? According to one of my inside sources, the answer is yes, and plans are being made as to how best to accomplish that. With Roger in charge of the track, I'm fairly confident a fair and equitable plan will be worked out.

One thing is certain: if this facility becomes an "Ivory Tower," where only the "best" track racers can race and train, then the opening of the track will be the sounding of the death knell for track racing in this country.

This track MUST be available to all track riders who can get to LA.

Grin and Bear It

In an exchange of e-mails yesterday, one of my teammates asked me “So what do trackies do when they can’t get on the velodrome to train?” The more I thought about the question, the more interesting it became to me.

As a match sprinter, it makes life hard to not have a velodrome. It’s very difficult to replicate the types of training that sprinters do without being able to get on some type of long, level surface. Even if you can find 1-2 kilometers of level road, you can’t recreate the effects of the banking and turns on acceleration, and these were some of the things that I considered when I changed my focus to the 1 kilometer time trial, also known as the “Kilo.”

Training for the kilo without a track is still difficult – the main problem being the difficulty in gauging progress. Want to know how much you’ve improved? There are several ways you can gauge your progress on the velodrome, and the most complicated thing needed is a stopwatch. Doing this on the road is a different story, which is why I’ve been travelling to events that have a Kilo as one of the races – not necessarily to be competitive, but to gauge my progress.

In addition to the roadwork (both on a fixed gear bike as well as my road bike), there’s about 3-6 hours of trainer work each week. Why the trainer (or rollers – I use those too)? Primarily it lets you focus on the effort without having to worry about extraneous factors like the wind, traffic, that dog that likes to eat you shoe. It is also repetitive – riding the trainer or the rollers at a set speed at a set resistance will reproduce the same power requirements each time. The faster you go, the more you’ve progressed. The rollers are also, when a wind resistance unit is added, highly comparable to actually getting out and riding. Including the falling! Though when you fall off your rollers, there’s usually more embarrassment than road rash.

Workouts, both on the road or on the trainer, focus on interval efforts. Most people hate doing intervals, but if you’re a serious track rider, there’s no substitute. Intervals help you work on leg speed and suppleness, your recovery from a hard effort, as well as increased power output both for a short time frame and a longer effort. Most of my interval workouts on the trainer last about 1.5 hours, and involve a lot of sweat, especially now that summer is on it’s way to Georgia, where I live. Here’s a picture my wife snapped of me at the end of tonight’s workout. I feel like I went swimming – only in hot water!

So does that answer your question, Ray?

TdG: Kings, Queens, and a Dark Horse for the ladies

UPDATE: Greetings to everyone coming over from the Daily Peloton message board. Please feel free to check out the rest of my weblog!

Interesting to me that some have called today the "Queen Stage," given what lies in wait on tomorrow. If today were a tour stage, it would be more like last year's Stage 7 in the le Tour, with several hard climbs followed by a descent into the finish. Although the finish here is after a slight climb into town, it’s not that big a climb. The stage profiles provided by the TdG organization are somewhat vertically exaggerated.

Tomorrow’s stage, however, is definitely the deal-maker (or deal-breaker, depending on who you are). Everything will be done by CSC (with several riders in the top-10) to break up the race to their advantage, to isolate Armstrong (which is going to be a tough order with Hincapie riding well), and shell off the other teams for the final climb. Horner is the wildcard in all of this. Make no mistake about one thing though: This climb is just about the hardest that the East Coast has to offer. It is steep, and painfully slow. Think Angrilu, without the cold and the rain. It is so steep it hurts worse to walk down it that up. After this stage, the riders will know what it will mean to have been “Brasstown Bal(le)d.”

In other news, I like this photo from the CyclingNews coverage. I think you ladies secretly know that this man is the second best looking man in the TdG. Reliable sources have told me so – I simply report. Now ‘fess up, as we say in the South. On scene whisperers have told me that medics have been summoned after he passes to revive the hormonally overwrought females along the parcours, so be careful, girls, before you click that link. Cipollini is the King in the race of your dreams, ladies, but Erik Saunders is the, shall we say, dark horse of those nocturnal sojourns. You can send me your thanks for helping you admit this to yourselves later.

Damn, but that was a bad pun. I hope Saunders is drinking something when he reads it, and spits it out through his nose.

The leaders will put time into the mob today, folks, but the race will be decided tomorrow on the slopes of Brasstown Bald.

Some southern slang for Saunders:

Hey Erik, y'all take care of Nieko now, y'heah?

Oh, and here's that pic if you didn't go over to CyclingNews:

Again and Again and AGAIN!

By now, almost everyone knows that interval workouts are important for any type of bike racing. From the ultra-short distance match sprinters like Gideon Massie to Tour winners like Lance Armstrong, all elite cyclists use interval based workouts as one of their tools for improvement – and if you don’t, you should as well. But what type of intervals should you do? How many? How long? In the hills or on the flats? These are all common questions that have no simple answers. You have two route to take here: you can either hire an experienced coach to develop an interval based workout for you, or you can try to figure it out for yourself. I’m going to point to some articles that will help you if you decide to go with the second option, but I’d like to make a case for the coaching option first.

Option 1
I use a coach. In fact, I use two. One is responsible for keeping me fit and building my general conditioning, especially during the winter months, and for monitoring my progress, making sure I’m resting enough, and generally keeping me pointed in the right direction mentally. The other is a specialized coach who works with me on very specific issues related to my track racing – specifically my weight workouts in the gym (a form of interval!), and my event-specific interval workouts on the bike. Both have the goal of making me as fast as possible at one specific event – the kilometer time trial. All I have to do is to do the workouts as hard as possible within the parameters they give me. I don’t have to sit down and plan what I’m doing, worry about what’s working and what’s not, or direct any energy to anything other than training. I also get experienced people to talk to about any questions that I may have about anything related to cycling – and there are many. The first coach lives in the same area as I do, so we can get together every now and then, do measurement tests to gauge progress, and talk about how things are going. The other is out of town, and we communicate mostly by e-mail, and a weekly phone call. This whole process has resulted in my having the same level of fitness as I had at the end of the year last year (August / September), only I have it in February – and I haven’t even started my event-specific training yet. It costs money, though, which is a drawback for many.

Option 2
You can always go the inexpensive way, and figure it out for yourself. It's not hard, though mistakes have a direct effect on your results (as do a coach’s – they just have more experience than you, so they're less frequent!). What it does require is a commitment to do several things that you may not be doing right now. The first is the determination of a goal, or goals, for the year. What do you want to do in cycling? It needs to be more specific than “I’d like to do well in criteriums this summer.” A goal is a specific result or event: “I’d like to finish the state road race with the main group this year.” The second step is an analysis of what quantifiable characteristics you will have to exhibit to be able to expect to meet the goal. A good question to go with the previous goal is “How much energy will I have to expend in order to finish the race with the group?” Other’s might be “What kind of peak and average power output will I have to put out?” These are all answered fairly easily –for instance, you could find someone who road the previous year’s race with a power monitor. Or there are several ( link , link ) on-line tools that will help you estimate answers to questions like these. The third step is an honest self-assessment of exactly where your fitness is right now. Once you have those three things, you can then sit down and design a logical plan for how to reach your goal, and what types, frequency , and duration your intervals need to be. PezCycling News has been recently running a very good series of articles on interval based workouts that would be helpful. The first (actually the second, but the first I’d like you to read) deals with the terms and general structure of how interval training works. The second has some information on selected duration, intensity and frequency of the intervals. Finally (though not the final article in the series), the third deals with how to design intervals to address specific areas you’d like to work on.

Later I'll talk about a third option, but for now, whatever you decide, I wish you good luck, good health, and good racing for the coming year!