This coming summer I’ll be racing BC Cups, Canada Cups and a few West Coast races proudly sporting a Steed Cycles jersey. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been on the bike, so I’m honored that Steed stepped up to offer their support. If you haven’t been by the shop yet, you should check it out:
Things are starting to get shredtastic out there on the shore. Dave Smith (@apeshape) & I banged out some great Seymoure runs with a friend from the coast on Saturday. The air was super cold and the dirt froze up solid making the runs fast and brittle. A few of the berms had been muddy before the frost and the ruts were frozen in place. If you were right on your line you were okay, but there wasn’t a lot of room for error.
Sunday we traded our coastal friend for an Aussie expat and moved the shuttle party over to the steeps on Cypress. I hadn’t ridden there in about a decade and was hoping for mellow conditions, but it was not to be. The trails had a nice little 2″ dusting of snow, just enough to obscure the patches of blue ice underneath. The first run down Wild Cherry/Roach Hit was pretty gnar if you were breaking trail.
After three shuttles or so we figured out where the ice was and got the corners dialed. Spring mud is going to be a piece of cake after these slick roots!
If you do an MBA you might experience being locked in a building and strapped to a chair for ~100 hours / week. Two things will likely result. #1 You’ll get smart, #2 You’ll get fat. I definitely gained weight and #1 is TBD.
So at the end of the year my girlfriend & I ran a half-marathon, and an XC running race in Victoria. Then Andre got me out riding mountain bikes again which is an all or nothing type of sport, so I dove back in. I set myself some ridiculous goals for the 2010 racing season and setup an obsessively detailed training plan:
The program is loosely based on The Cyclist’s Training Bible, which walks you through in painstaking detail how to organize, how to workout, and how to monitor & adjust your progress so that you achieve peak fitness in time for major races. Although the detail seems a bit over the top (the spreadsheet has 10 tabs), each workout has a purpose and moves you measurably closer to your goal. I’ve been following the plan for about 4 months and have cut about 43 seconds off my 5000m row & and am ~13% higher on average power output. My bike skills are still super sketchy.