Earlier Posts from Nelson's Stage Race
Here are some entires we jotted down the first two days of our most recent stage race conquest! :
January 27, 2006 Chris
Holy crap, it took me forever to pack last night. Gotta get the racing weekend drill down so that I can hammer out more homework before we leave.
The three of us got into the Beamer with four bikes on top and extra wheels crammed into the fourth seat. Sam made a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the drive out, and we had grabbed a few giant green apples and about a dozen bananas from the dining hall. Lesson 1 from this weekend: You can never bring too much food from the dining hall. No matter how stuffed your pockets are, bring more.
Over the mountains and across the desert, I 15 took us to Las Vegas and just beyond, to our FLAT, STRAIGHT TT. We got suited up, tried to eat and drink the last bits of fuel we could, warmed up, and hammered. Boy,you really forget just how hard “all-out” is. I feel like I did a good effort, with room for improvement, but nothing to be ashamed about.
One of the main problems of this event is how many excuses you can use to explain your low or fast time. First, it is general knowledge that little guys just aren’t able to put out the same kind of power as a 180 lb 6’5” guy, and therefore can’t do timetrials as fast. This is annoying coming from a sport like running where the playing field is level. The second often-used excuse is equipment. You can hear guys saying, “Well I had a disc wheel” or “Well I didn’t have a disc.” A disc wheel is a known advantage with rumored potential to drop your time anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes. Other equipment that increases the differential between people include other carbon wheels (deep rims or tri spokes), aero bars (which get you into that tucked position), TT bikes (bikes made and used specifically for time-trials), shoe covers and skin suits (to cut down on drag !?)… all of these things add up and the more of them you have the faster you go.
While it does kinda suck how much equipment you need to get the most out of your power output, holy crap do you go fast!!! We averaged around 28.5 mph for 25 minutes. You feel like you’re flying.
Afterwards, no matter what you used, you eventually think “Could I have gone faster?” This especially happens when you hear how fast everyone else went. Will started 30 seconds behind me, passed me 75% way through, I passed back at 85%, then he passed again as I blew up (after getting hopeful that one group of onlookers had been the finish) and ended up a total of 36 seconds faster than my time. It was great having him pass me, because it woke me up a bit and reminded me to pedal smoother and faster.
All three of us raced great, but we’re a bit down on the leaders of our category, so we’ll see how the next couple days pan out. Hopefully we can move up.
January 27, 2006 Sam
I came into the weekend off of a very dissapointing two weeks of training back in school following Christmas break. Training for five days in Albuquerque was fantastic but I think the other three weeks of weather-induced relative stagnation really hurt me. Chris and I started doing very hard workouts three times a week since we’re into what is called our base period, meaning this is the point in our season when we want to ride over our lactic threshold for long periods of time to elevate our over-all ability to produce power with less effort for long periods of time…basically the most important thing for time trialing and climbing- two things that this weekend surely will serve to test! But during those workouts I felt worse than I had in a long time, and the stats were there to prove it! Since Chirs has a power meter on his bike, I have been able to gauge just exactly how strong I am at different points, and despite the fact that I have put in a ton of good base miles, last week I just was horribly slow.
ANYWAY, I thought of today as my opportunity to ask Mr. Body, “Hey, Mr. Body, what the hell over?”- to see if I can consider the last two weeks of feeling wimpy over or if I still have more wimpiness ahead of me. Once we got there, I got quite a scare. Chris and Will (the guy from CAL Tech who came with us) had already registered online, so they went to go pick up their numbers and race timing chips. I waited till the line died down and then went to register about 2 hours before the time trial was going to start. I got a blank look from the lady at the race tent as she told me that on-site registration was not possible. My stomach dropped. I had prepared all yesterday and planned out all of my training and suffered the drive over, and I was going to be really mad at the world if after all of that I was going to spend my time here in Vegas watching “Bikini Bull-Riding” (flash!flash!) down at the Frontier, a sure-to-be classy spectacle that SOMEONE else I happen to know wanted to experience last night, while everyone else got to race for three glorious, epic days. Luckily the dorkis who failed to post such information (I mean about the race, not the Bikini business), finally aquiesced, permitting me and the other riders who made the same mistake to race. He kept us waiting on the edge of our seats for about an hour as he went to go ‘deliberate’ (can you say ‘power complex’? God, I thought cops were bad…) but came back with his god-like proclimation, “Alright guys, what I’m going to do is let you race, but you’ll have to go after everyone else goes for the tt, (cough cough) and pay an extra (ahem) 30 bucks.” “Oh thankyou, merciful one! I will happily contribute $30 to your beer fund.” Needless to say, I got my damn revenge when I discovered he was racing as well and I had gone faster than his worthless Pro/1/2 ass in the tt. Ummmm. Yummy.
I was excited about the time trial because one of my projects over the break had been to put together a swanky new time trial bike with aero bars and a tri-spoke wheel. Also I got a aero helmet and little aero booties- in short I was at least LOOKING pretty fast, and that’s being halfway to BEING fast the way I see it.
“Mark 15 seconds. Ok on Go. 3, 2, 1, GO!”
The race official let go of my sides and I felt the juicy goodness of my first stroke down the start ramp. ! 10 strokes and I sat down into position to shift to the big ring and then stood for another 10 strokes to accelerate. The adrenaline at this point keeps you from feeling anything, so it’s important to put out a good rhythm but not out-do yourself, because when the pain invades the legs, wow do you remember how much it hurts. Funny how that works. I think no matter how much I ride, I’ll always think back to the points where I’ve really gone hard and not fully be able to ever recall just how much it hurts. I always think it will be fun, but then when you reach that state, you kind of think to yourself, “Why am I doing this again?”
The 25 to 26 minutes it takes to do the 20km actually pass by very quickly and even more than the physical exertion you notice how hard the mental exertion must be for a good time trial. Concentrating on being smooth and applying continuous power to the pedals is quite difficult. Its so easy to let your mind wander, causing your power output to fall and, more imortantly, making you slwo down. The course was very slightly down-hill on the way out with a slight headwind and on the way back, the reverse. I worked on going at my near max on the way out and then my max max on the way back, since I figure going uphill is what I can do marginally better than the really fast big guys. I was pretty happy with my time. As I came across the line, with nasty spittle trails all over my face, the clock showed I had done the 20km course in under 26 minutes, meaning I averaged around 29 miles per hour! That’s pretty fast for 25 mintues. As Chris alluded to, had I really been in good form, or at least more equal to his level of fitness, I just have been more than 30 seconds faster just because I’m bigger, but 30 seconds was OK for me after two weeks of feeling badly. My time was good enough for about 8th place out of around 40 cat 3 guys, which I was happy with.
Then back to the hotel for hotel room vistas of the infamous “Las Vegas Strip” since we’re staying in the mighty Stratosphere Casino and Hotel. God this place is surreal. I was telling Chris I feel like this town was built for a Kubrick film. Goodnight.
January 28, 2006 Chris
Got up this morning at 7:57am just before the alarm. I took a quick shower and poop, weighed myself, and woke up Will from Caltech so that we could head downstairs to hit the morning buffet. Sam requested to sleep the extra 30 minutes or so.
The buffet was bomb. Omlettes made-to-order, fruit, hashbrowns like at home, toast, and donut holes: all you can eat for only $10. That’s a pretty nice deal here in Lost Wages – cough, cough – I mean Las Vegas. This place really ranks up there with ways to burn a lot of money, right below digging a hole in the sand, pouring lighter fluid in there, and tossing in a match.
So, it was a good start to the day despite getting to sleep around1am after dragging Sam all around the strip last night in search of god-knows-what. I, of course, figured we had to go out and see the sights just like an Oregonian might in sunny weather: we’re here and we SHOULD go walk around and see the ridiculousness that is Las Vegas.
I think from the outside, I would rank the Wynn, the Belagio, Caesar’s Palace, and the Venetian all up there in terms of straight grandeur. The taxi cab driver was telling us about “the good old days” when it all was mob-owned and mob-controlled, “before they were pushed out of the casinos.” “They ran it better,” he said, “They took your money at the tables, not every time you tried to breathe.”
It took a while to get going, but we got there with about an hour to get all set up and warmed up, only to find out our race had been delayed for an hour. A bit of a relief. Nate DeFelice came to check out the scene, which was way cool, and a bit inspiring.
The race started with some hesitation: nobody was exactly rip-roaring from the gun. Sometimes you’re suddenly in last place if you don’t clip in immediately and start near the front. The three of us stayed in the top 15 for the first 10 minutes, monitoring breaks and breaking away ourselves for a few, only to be brought back into the fold. You don’t really notice too many others, but a few stick out by a few qualities: maybe they are just huge, either 6’5” or a butt that must weight 200 lbs, or they have a menacing tattoo on their calf, or they’re small, or they look really nervous and have a hard time holding their line. These are the little things you notice. The big things you notice are accelerations, jumps, certain corners, gaps between you and the guy in front of you. These things you suddenly remember how to deal instinctively, even after such a long time away from racing.
The race was exciting pretty much the whole time, with one technical corner just before the finish of the 1mile loop always a bit of an issue. It was tight enough so you couldn’t pedal through it, and shaped in a way so guys would try to take it along the inside edge, but have to straighten out their line at some point so they wouldn’t crash. I watched the few races before us and noticed that getting to that corner first would be the key move. So Sam and I were top 5 into that corner on the last lap, after a pretty speedy last two laps, and I couldn’t hold the tight line around the corner and swung way wide (just bad handling skills), and that turned out to be the lucky move because the guy I would have been right next to hit the deck in the middle of the turn. Sam and I were able to sprint to 3rd and 4th I think. Awesome results for us considering we’re really aiming for tomorrow.
The leader of our race acted like it today; he defended several moves, and spent 80% of the day in the top 3 places. From his TT time yesterday, he’s clearly very strong. It’ll be fun if we can see exactly how strong tomorrow.
We rode for 30-45 minutes afterward, got in the car, back to the hotel, showered, and got advice about good hole-in-the-wall mexican restaurants near by. We looked for one, but resorted to one on the way, which had a carne asada burrito and Pacifico that turned out to be pretty good eats.
We just got done with a great 2-hour nap. After some homework and another meal, I’d like to hope we’ll be in top form for tomorrow. We really think we can hit the GC podium after a good day tomorrow.
January 29th 2006 Sam
Today was another good day of racing for all of us. We did a bang-up job of controlling the race for all 45 minutes. Each attack that went off the front one of the three of us would get on the wheel right away and just sit to nullify it. A handful of times Will, Chris, or I went off the front, most notably Will who spent about 3 1-miles laps off the front. We kept an eye on all the riders in the top ten from yesterdays time trial to make sure they couldn’t make it in any breaks, so in the end the pack finished all together. I think I snagged third and Chris got probably fifth. Will was also inside the top ten.
Tomorrow is going to be increadibly hard with three long, hard climbs. Its only a fifty miles race but we’ll climb 7000 feet in that shrot distance! That basically means it will look like an uphill time trial for everyone after the first climb. I think Chris has a real chance at cracking into the top three, possibly even winning the overall, just because some of the time trial guys who were fast are pretty big and will probably suffer quite a bit tomorrow. He’ll have to make up about 2 ½ minutes on the first place man to win the whole thing. I can’t wait!
We’re glad we got through todays stage safe and in good form for tomorrow. I’m nervious for how much this is going to hurt…Oh and P.S. I forgot a funny coincidence that happened today. While Chris and Will rode back from the crit in the car, I rode back on my bike (picture me walking through the Stratosphere Casino in my spandex by the way). Just before I got there, this latino guy honked at me and wanted me to pull over, he was all excited. At first I was bit leary and stayed on my bike rolling along as he approached me because I was sure if he was about to knife me for my precious baby or something. But, of course that didn’t happen and I didn’t have to administer any karate kicks, luckily. It turns out he’s from Cuba and he’s been living here for about a year, but the funny thing is that he was one of the coaches for the Cuban National Team, and he knew BOTH of the guys I lived with over in Alcoy! Small world….he may come see the race tomorrow morning if I can find his number.
January 27, 2006 Chris
Holy crap, it took me forever to pack last night. Gotta get the racing weekend drill down so that I can hammer out more homework before we leave.
The three of us got into the Beamer with four bikes on top and extra wheels crammed into the fourth seat. Sam made a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the drive out, and we had grabbed a few giant green apples and about a dozen bananas from the dining hall. Lesson 1 from this weekend: You can never bring too much food from the dining hall. No matter how stuffed your pockets are, bring more.
Over the mountains and across the desert, I 15 took us to Las Vegas and just beyond, to our FLAT, STRAIGHT TT. We got suited up, tried to eat and drink the last bits of fuel we could, warmed up, and hammered. Boy,you really forget just how hard “all-out” is. I feel like I did a good effort, with room for improvement, but nothing to be ashamed about.
One of the main problems of this event is how many excuses you can use to explain your low or fast time. First, it is general knowledge that little guys just aren’t able to put out the same kind of power as a 180 lb 6’5” guy, and therefore can’t do timetrials as fast. This is annoying coming from a sport like running where the playing field is level. The second often-used excuse is equipment. You can hear guys saying, “Well I had a disc wheel” or “Well I didn’t have a disc.” A disc wheel is a known advantage with rumored potential to drop your time anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 minutes. Other equipment that increases the differential between people include other carbon wheels (deep rims or tri spokes), aero bars (which get you into that tucked position), TT bikes (bikes made and used specifically for time-trials), shoe covers and skin suits (to cut down on drag !?)… all of these things add up and the more of them you have the faster you go.
While it does kinda suck how much equipment you need to get the most out of your power output, holy crap do you go fast!!! We averaged around 28.5 mph for 25 minutes. You feel like you’re flying.
Afterwards, no matter what you used, you eventually think “Could I have gone faster?” This especially happens when you hear how fast everyone else went. Will started 30 seconds behind me, passed me 75% way through, I passed back at 85%, then he passed again as I blew up (after getting hopeful that one group of onlookers had been the finish) and ended up a total of 36 seconds faster than my time. It was great having him pass me, because it woke me up a bit and reminded me to pedal smoother and faster.
All three of us raced great, but we’re a bit down on the leaders of our category, so we’ll see how the next couple days pan out. Hopefully we can move up.
January 27, 2006 Sam
I came into the weekend off of a very dissapointing two weeks of training back in school following Christmas break. Training for five days in Albuquerque was fantastic but I think the other three weeks of weather-induced relative stagnation really hurt me. Chris and I started doing very hard workouts three times a week since we’re into what is called our base period, meaning this is the point in our season when we want to ride over our lactic threshold for long periods of time to elevate our over-all ability to produce power with less effort for long periods of time…basically the most important thing for time trialing and climbing- two things that this weekend surely will serve to test! But during those workouts I felt worse than I had in a long time, and the stats were there to prove it! Since Chirs has a power meter on his bike, I have been able to gauge just exactly how strong I am at different points, and despite the fact that I have put in a ton of good base miles, last week I just was horribly slow.
ANYWAY, I thought of today as my opportunity to ask Mr. Body, “Hey, Mr. Body, what the hell over?”- to see if I can consider the last two weeks of feeling wimpy over or if I still have more wimpiness ahead of me. Once we got there, I got quite a scare. Chris and Will (the guy from CAL Tech who came with us) had already registered online, so they went to go pick up their numbers and race timing chips. I waited till the line died down and then went to register about 2 hours before the time trial was going to start. I got a blank look from the lady at the race tent as she told me that on-site registration was not possible. My stomach dropped. I had prepared all yesterday and planned out all of my training and suffered the drive over, and I was going to be really mad at the world if after all of that I was going to spend my time here in Vegas watching “Bikini Bull-Riding” (flash!flash!) down at the Frontier, a sure-to-be classy spectacle that SOMEONE else I happen to know wanted to experience last night, while everyone else got to race for three glorious, epic days. Luckily the dorkis who failed to post such information (I mean about the race, not the Bikini business), finally aquiesced, permitting me and the other riders who made the same mistake to race. He kept us waiting on the edge of our seats for about an hour as he went to go ‘deliberate’ (can you say ‘power complex’? God, I thought cops were bad…) but came back with his god-like proclimation, “Alright guys, what I’m going to do is let you race, but you’ll have to go after everyone else goes for the tt, (cough cough) and pay an extra (ahem) 30 bucks.” “Oh thankyou, merciful one! I will happily contribute $30 to your beer fund.” Needless to say, I got my damn revenge when I discovered he was racing as well and I had gone faster than his worthless Pro/1/2 ass in the tt. Ummmm. Yummy.
I was excited about the time trial because one of my projects over the break had been to put together a swanky new time trial bike with aero bars and a tri-spoke wheel. Also I got a aero helmet and little aero booties- in short I was at least LOOKING pretty fast, and that’s being halfway to BEING fast the way I see it.
“Mark 15 seconds. Ok on Go. 3, 2, 1, GO!”
The race official let go of my sides and I felt the juicy goodness of my first stroke down the start ramp. ! 10 strokes and I sat down into position to shift to the big ring and then stood for another 10 strokes to accelerate. The adrenaline at this point keeps you from feeling anything, so it’s important to put out a good rhythm but not out-do yourself, because when the pain invades the legs, wow do you remember how much it hurts. Funny how that works. I think no matter how much I ride, I’ll always think back to the points where I’ve really gone hard and not fully be able to ever recall just how much it hurts. I always think it will be fun, but then when you reach that state, you kind of think to yourself, “Why am I doing this again?”
The 25 to 26 minutes it takes to do the 20km actually pass by very quickly and even more than the physical exertion you notice how hard the mental exertion must be for a good time trial. Concentrating on being smooth and applying continuous power to the pedals is quite difficult. Its so easy to let your mind wander, causing your power output to fall and, more imortantly, making you slwo down. The course was very slightly down-hill on the way out with a slight headwind and on the way back, the reverse. I worked on going at my near max on the way out and then my max max on the way back, since I figure going uphill is what I can do marginally better than the really fast big guys. I was pretty happy with my time. As I came across the line, with nasty spittle trails all over my face, the clock showed I had done the 20km course in under 26 minutes, meaning I averaged around 29 miles per hour! That’s pretty fast for 25 mintues. As Chris alluded to, had I really been in good form, or at least more equal to his level of fitness, I just have been more than 30 seconds faster just because I’m bigger, but 30 seconds was OK for me after two weeks of feeling badly. My time was good enough for about 8th place out of around 40 cat 3 guys, which I was happy with.
Then back to the hotel for hotel room vistas of the infamous “Las Vegas Strip” since we’re staying in the mighty Stratosphere Casino and Hotel. God this place is surreal. I was telling Chris I feel like this town was built for a Kubrick film. Goodnight.
January 28, 2006 Chris
Got up this morning at 7:57am just before the alarm. I took a quick shower and poop, weighed myself, and woke up Will from Caltech so that we could head downstairs to hit the morning buffet. Sam requested to sleep the extra 30 minutes or so.
The buffet was bomb. Omlettes made-to-order, fruit, hashbrowns like at home, toast, and donut holes: all you can eat for only $10. That’s a pretty nice deal here in Lost Wages – cough, cough – I mean Las Vegas. This place really ranks up there with ways to burn a lot of money, right below digging a hole in the sand, pouring lighter fluid in there, and tossing in a match.
So, it was a good start to the day despite getting to sleep around1am after dragging Sam all around the strip last night in search of god-knows-what. I, of course, figured we had to go out and see the sights just like an Oregonian might in sunny weather: we’re here and we SHOULD go walk around and see the ridiculousness that is Las Vegas.
I think from the outside, I would rank the Wynn, the Belagio, Caesar’s Palace, and the Venetian all up there in terms of straight grandeur. The taxi cab driver was telling us about “the good old days” when it all was mob-owned and mob-controlled, “before they were pushed out of the casinos.” “They ran it better,” he said, “They took your money at the tables, not every time you tried to breathe.”
It took a while to get going, but we got there with about an hour to get all set up and warmed up, only to find out our race had been delayed for an hour. A bit of a relief. Nate DeFelice came to check out the scene, which was way cool, and a bit inspiring.
The race started with some hesitation: nobody was exactly rip-roaring from the gun. Sometimes you’re suddenly in last place if you don’t clip in immediately and start near the front. The three of us stayed in the top 15 for the first 10 minutes, monitoring breaks and breaking away ourselves for a few, only to be brought back into the fold. You don’t really notice too many others, but a few stick out by a few qualities: maybe they are just huge, either 6’5” or a butt that must weight 200 lbs, or they have a menacing tattoo on their calf, or they’re small, or they look really nervous and have a hard time holding their line. These are the little things you notice. The big things you notice are accelerations, jumps, certain corners, gaps between you and the guy in front of you. These things you suddenly remember how to deal instinctively, even after such a long time away from racing.
The race was exciting pretty much the whole time, with one technical corner just before the finish of the 1mile loop always a bit of an issue. It was tight enough so you couldn’t pedal through it, and shaped in a way so guys would try to take it along the inside edge, but have to straighten out their line at some point so they wouldn’t crash. I watched the few races before us and noticed that getting to that corner first would be the key move. So Sam and I were top 5 into that corner on the last lap, after a pretty speedy last two laps, and I couldn’t hold the tight line around the corner and swung way wide (just bad handling skills), and that turned out to be the lucky move because the guy I would have been right next to hit the deck in the middle of the turn. Sam and I were able to sprint to 3rd and 4th I think. Awesome results for us considering we’re really aiming for tomorrow.
The leader of our race acted like it today; he defended several moves, and spent 80% of the day in the top 3 places. From his TT time yesterday, he’s clearly very strong. It’ll be fun if we can see exactly how strong tomorrow.
We rode for 30-45 minutes afterward, got in the car, back to the hotel, showered, and got advice about good hole-in-the-wall mexican restaurants near by. We looked for one, but resorted to one on the way, which had a carne asada burrito and Pacifico that turned out to be pretty good eats.
We just got done with a great 2-hour nap. After some homework and another meal, I’d like to hope we’ll be in top form for tomorrow. We really think we can hit the GC podium after a good day tomorrow.
January 29th 2006 Sam
Today was another good day of racing for all of us. We did a bang-up job of controlling the race for all 45 minutes. Each attack that went off the front one of the three of us would get on the wheel right away and just sit to nullify it. A handful of times Will, Chris, or I went off the front, most notably Will who spent about 3 1-miles laps off the front. We kept an eye on all the riders in the top ten from yesterdays time trial to make sure they couldn’t make it in any breaks, so in the end the pack finished all together. I think I snagged third and Chris got probably fifth. Will was also inside the top ten.
Tomorrow is going to be increadibly hard with three long, hard climbs. Its only a fifty miles race but we’ll climb 7000 feet in that shrot distance! That basically means it will look like an uphill time trial for everyone after the first climb. I think Chris has a real chance at cracking into the top three, possibly even winning the overall, just because some of the time trial guys who were fast are pretty big and will probably suffer quite a bit tomorrow. He’ll have to make up about 2 ½ minutes on the first place man to win the whole thing. I can’t wait!
We’re glad we got through todays stage safe and in good form for tomorrow. I’m nervious for how much this is going to hurt…Oh and P.S. I forgot a funny coincidence that happened today. While Chris and Will rode back from the crit in the car, I rode back on my bike (picture me walking through the Stratosphere Casino in my spandex by the way). Just before I got there, this latino guy honked at me and wanted me to pull over, he was all excited. At first I was bit leary and stayed on my bike rolling along as he approached me because I was sure if he was about to knife me for my precious baby or something. But, of course that didn’t happen and I didn’t have to administer any karate kicks, luckily. It turns out he’s from Cuba and he’s been living here for about a year, but the funny thing is that he was one of the coaches for the Cuban National Team, and he knew BOTH of the guys I lived with over in Alcoy! Small world….he may come see the race tomorrow morning if I can find his number.
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