Saturday, February 26, 2005

As the pedal turns...

What a tiring ride today. We rode from Loveland all the way to Boulder, with a trip through Left Hand Canyon and up Old Stage Road. The climb up old stage road was an absolute killer and the cat 3's handily beat me to the top (as usual). The ride back home was a sufferfest, but I made it and for that I'm pleased.
Total distance: 72 miles, Total time: 4+ hours. I need a massage, some food, and a nap.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Pictures from the ski trip

Here are some pictures from our backcountry trip.

The snowy trail:


Me in all my backcountry glory:


Kuzca "swimming" in the powder, trying to keep up:


Here's Christine and I


After a tiring day, Kuzca decided to squeeze onto this seat from some rest:

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Sunday ride

I woke up this morning with a crazy ache in my upper back/shoulder area. I'm sure it has something to do with the skiing yesterday, but I can't pinpoint it to one particular event. It feels really similar to the ailment that I went to a chiropracter for in December. If it still feels crappy tomorrow I'm going to make another appointment to have some snap my neck around Steven Seagal style.
The original plan for today's ride was to do some teamwork training, but it turned out that most of the team wasn't able to make it. Instead Barry (the guy who started the team) and I rode together for 2.5 hours. I never get to chat much with Barry, so it was cool to ride with just the two of us. He took me to this super cool private neighborhood that's closed off by a gate. Fortunately for us, Barry knows the code. :D :D The road was super smooth and there were lots of really fun hills with no traffic. I wish those roads weren't closed to the public, because I'd love to ride them more often (which is probably why they're closed). I pushed really hard on those hills, and it was totaly worth it. By the time we got back to our cars, we were both pretty beat. Barry because he rode hard the day before, and me because of skiing hard. Despite our state of exhaustion, I think we'd both agree that the suffering was worth it.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Backcountry

Christine, Kuzca and I went up to Cameron Pass with one of her coworkers for some backcountry skiing. I rented a pair of backcountry AT skis so I wouldn't have to fumble with a split board, and I must say it was kind of strange. First of all, I'm not used to have skis on in general, but what was really odd at first was having my feet only attached at the toes.
There were quite a few people up there, but compared to resort skiing on President's Day weekend, this was nothing. There were plenty of dogs too, a couple of which Kuzca decided to scuffle with. She has a bad habit of doing that these days. Eventually, we got to a spot on the trail where we could go a different direction than everyone else, and it seemed like nobody else went the way we chose. It was awesome. We did a couple runs through the trees in some really nice powder. Even my lameness on skis couldn't keep me from having fun in this stuff. Kuzca had a blast running behind us too. In the powder she sunk in and had to keep jumping/swimming out of the snow. That's a great way to tire out a dog. :)
On our way back to the car we skied down the same packed down trail we hiked up, but we were able to frequently sneak away in the trees for some more powder turns. I left the heels of my skis unlocked the whole way down and played with some telemark turns. It really stink, but it was kind of fun. It'd be fun to try that at a resort sometime on some nice wide green runs.
All in all, it was an awesome way to spend a Saturday. I think next year I'll skip the season resort pass and try to do some more backcountry stuff. There's less people, less traffic, and my dog can come along and have a smashing time.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Lance, part VII

In case anyone forgot to read their daily cycling news outlets, Lance has announced that he is going to ride in the Tour de France again this year.

I must say I'm surprised and slightly disappointed.  I was looking forward to watching him come to from earlier in the season to win some of the spring races.  I know he's still going to race them, but I find it hard to believe that he'll be doing little more than training in those races.  I also feel like he's not as gung ho on The Tour as the previous years.  But he's a pretty amazing athlete, so maybe I'll be surprised.  I'll sure be rooting for him.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Slacker

I'm a total slacker and haven't updated my Live Journal for a while. Maybe I just have nothing to say.

My brain is running low on memory, so I can only remember back to last weekend.

Saturday: The snow wasn't looking too good, so I decided to stick around town and go for a ride with the Peloton Cycling team. Unbeknownst to me, only two of the team members were going to be there and they decided to leave 45 minutes late. That would have been fine but since they didn't know I was coming, I didn't know this plan. Whoops. So when I arrived at the meeting place and so nobody I decided to go ride with Christine for a while. One of the things planned for the team ride was a 30 minute time trial, so I split off from Christine for a bit and did one myself. The purpose is to gauge your lactate threshold heart rate limit for use in training. This particular test is one suggested by Joel Friel (author of some good training books) and used on his website (which is a Peloton team sponsor), www.trainingpeaks.com. For what it's worth, my average heart rate over the last 20 minutes of the test (which is what you're supposed to measure) was 180. We ended up being out longer than planned (2.5 hours, ~40 miles), but Christine stayed out with me the entire time. It makes such a huge difference sometimes to have someone to ride and chat with, so I'm super thankful she changed her plans and rode with me instead of going climbing.
Saturday evening was the Peloton team meeting. There was one more of the Cat 3 racers I hadn't met yet, so it was nice to finally meet him. There's only one other Cat 4 on the team besides me, which kind of sucks. That's all the more incentive to upgrade quickly I guess, but if all the cat 3's are as strong as the ones on our team, I'm doomed to have my butt kicked for a while when I upgrade.

Sunday: Again the snow looked questionable (be quiet Annette), so I stayed home for some more riding. This time it was with a group that I hadn't ridden with in quite a while, and we rode from Loveland to Lyons. The temperature was pretty good, but the wind really picked up. It's a great pleasure to ride with such intelligent cyclists. When we were facing a headwind we formed a good tight paceline, with each person taking a brief pull at the front before rotating to the rear. When the headwind turned to a crosswind as we turned a corner, we strung out across the road in an echelon without even barely breaking formation. When the wind really picked up on the way back, we had a pretty solid rotating paceline going. After riding with people who were not at all interested in riding efficiently, this was like a dream. The full ride was about 60 miles and we were all pretty beat an wind-blown by the end, but I'd say it was worth it.

Monday-Wednesday: Blech, work! What can I say? It's work. I've been tracking down some problems in our audio circuit that are really driving me nuts. It's a good thing I didn't look at the snow report before I went to work this morning, otherwise I would have been "forced" to go play in the powder. I only hope it keeps snowing so I can get in some good back country riding this weekend.

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

FYI

Christine is on LiveJournal: christinelh
Tune in to read about the misadventures with Standard Pacific.

Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Saturday at Vail

Friday evening I drove up to Dillon because shanabanana invited me up to a friend's condo there. It was nice to drive up to Dillon during a non-peak time and I even managed to catch up with a friend on the phone for most of the drive. Most of the snow slopes at Vail were pretty scraped off and difficult to ride, but we eventually made it over to Blue Sky Basin, where the snow was a little more fluffy. Following better skiers than me through some trees and bumps (neither of which I've done much of this year) was challenging and fun. Another bonus for the weekend was getting to see an old friend from my neighborhood (Steve Schoembs) who was out skiing for the weekend. We met up at lunch and did a few runs.

My plan was to stay for another day if the snow was good, and clearly that was not the case so I left Saturday evening hoping that my late departure would help me avoid a lot of the traffic. I was wrong. It was snowing from near Eisenhower tunnel all the way into Denver, and it raised hell on the roads. I am fine with just driving slow, but what I really hate is stopping for long periods of time. Around Idaho Springs I was stopped a for what seemed like forever, and it's so frustrating. There's a lot of roads that seem to parallel I-70, but I'm not familiar enough with them to get off the highway and trust that it'll take me to the right place. Next time I'm driving back (and not in a hurry) I think I'll play around on those roads and see where they go.