Post Category → Cycling

Time Trialing & Going Nowhere

JacqueTT

I’m not a fan of the time trial (individual or team) unless it’s vintage pre-time trial bike, pre-aero helmet stuff (like the pic above featuring Jacques Anquetil circa 1953) or on dirt (like the Yankee Springs Time Trial here in Michigan each spring). While I have NO plans to ever do a road time trial, I do plan on returning to Yankee this spring. This winter I also plan on continuing my version of the time trial on the trainer; pedaling my ass off, going nowhere for 15 miles trying to best the time before. It’s basically doing lactate threshold training but that sounds all fancy and like I actually know what I’m doing. Since I don’t, and tend to wing things by the seat of my soiled chamois, I just call it doing a time trial.

Continue reading →

Fear & Loathing Lance While On The Trainer

hunterSlanceb

I wouldn’t say that I have anything against Lance Armstrong (except the lying, cheating, megalomania, sociopathy and making me feel like a Goddamn fool for all those years I supported him and his teams as they doped themselves to the gills to win bike races). And I wouldn’t dare to say that Lance does–or ever has–smoked grass, done mescaline, high powered blotter acid, cocaine, or a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, raw ether or amyls.

But I do think that he obviously got locked into a serious drug collection and had the tendency is to push it as far as he could. Only his drug collection had more to do with EPO and the like rather than Hunter S. Thompson’s laundry list of illegal, mild to hardcore and dangerous, recreational drugs.

Continue reading →

A Look At City Cross

citycrossb

I am not much of a cross racer, OK, I am not one at all. It seems I often miss “the point” of cross, along with wanting to avoid all the machismo and fisticuffs that seem so prevalent in the sport of late (at least on ‘merican soil), but I know something that looks painfully fun when I see it… like the Morvélo City Cross in Halifax, England. Check out the video from this year’s race–

Continue reading →

Ignoring The Facts

I find it amusing sad how long I can ignore the fact that spring and summer are gone and now fall is on the cusp of doing the same. Looking down the trail and seeing nothing but brown, bare trees is sort of a repeated slap in my fat face to wake up and smell the decaying bung of autumnal death and keep riding as long as I can. For soon winter will be bending me over a barrel of dark cold ass depression and thrusting its unprotected frozen phallus of hate in my general direction.

IMG_0683

This fact was made all the more real today when at the ride’s end I stood in the parking lot talking to some friends and was getting hit in the face with a smorgasbord of gusting wind, leaves, rain, sleet and snow. Then the sun came out. Michigan weather is as psycho as mountain weather…. we just don’t have mountains.

Thinking About The White Bike

A few days ago I mentioned that during my ride I went by a newly erected Ghost Bike memorial. While I didn’t know the teenager who lost his life at that intersection last month, as a life long “bike rider” and a cyclist of over 20 years, it was hard to ride by and not feel some sort of sadness and emotion. I felt that however sad it was to see, the bike both honored the deceased and served a reminder to motorists that we cyclists are out there. And I am pretty sure that is what I was supposed to think.

Then Monday morning (just before my 24 hour plague hit), I was chatting with a friend of mine who is a good bit older than my wife and I and has lived around our community most of, if not all of her life. In fact, she lives on one of the dirt roads that I often ride down, just a couple of miles from where the Ghost Bike now sits.

Continue reading →

You Probably Race

IMG_0638

If you open up a drawer–any drawer–and find a gel flask, you’ve probably raced some mountain bikes*.

Or you are just an unorganized doofuss like me that throws your shit wherever and then spend hours looking for it in the time leading up to a long ride or a race. Note that there is no cap for the flask. I am pretty sure I saw it on top of the dryer in the basement.

*OK, you might not race mountain bikes but you do SOMETHING equally as cool yet unpopular and misunderstood by the general U.S. public: ultra runs, adventure racing, cross-country skiing, etc.,