SHWIT

Last fall, a teammate of mine started a series of training rides he called SHWIT - Steep Hills With Isaac Training. The SHWIT ride made an early comeback Sunday.

I rode with Isaac from his house in Longmont to the Ziggy's coffee shop where we picked up a few more riders. From there, we embarked on a hill climbing festival. We started by riding to Boulder and doing Lee Hill. From Lee Hill, we descended into Left Hand Canyon and then climbed over Old Stage. After Old Stage, we took another trip up Lee Hill. Finally, we descended down into Boulder and then tackled Sunshine Canyon all the way up to Gold Hill. (For those of you at our wedding, Sunshine Canyon is the one you drove into Boulder from the ceremony in Gold Hill.) After some rough and chilly descending into Boulder, we stopped at Breadworks for some chocolate croissants and espresso before heading back to Longmont. We had up to 8 riders at one point. By the time we headed up Sunshine, it was down to 3.

From Isaac's house, it was about 85 miles and 8800+ feet of climbing. I was never going all out on the hills, but I still feel pretty worked. That final climb up Sunshine was killer. It was more of a strength workout than cardio. The dirt portion of the road gets steep and I was just trying to keep turning the cranks over.

End of the ski season

I have probably done less skiing this year than any other year I've lived in Colorado. Fortunately, I replaced quantity with quality because I had some truly unbelievable powder days this year.

Saturday was probably our last ski day of the year, and we spent it playing around Zimmerman Lake. Amazingly, this was Christine's first backcountry day of the year since she's been hurt all winter.

I love days where you can go from snow like this:


to a warm sunny day like this:


Kuzca got in on the action too:

Beer on Sunday. Finally!

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter (AKA my favorite person of the day) will sign the bill next week that will allow liquor sales on Sunday putting an end to 75 years of stupidity. I'm going to cry tears of joy. Starting in July, I will do my liquor shopping on Sundays to support this fantastic decision. I can't wait until football season because I can't tell you how many times I've wanted a beer during the game, but walked to the fridge only to find it beer-less.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/15850459/detail.html

Kuzca's Backpack

I've had these videos sitting around for a while, but Flickr's recent addition of video sharing has prompted me to try posting them.

For as many cool places as she goes after she puts it on, Kuzca absolutely hates her backpack. She acts like she can't move after you put it on her. It's quite amusing (to us).

New Bike - Part 3

Due to my cracked frame, I had to have my bike replaced. If you're keeping score at home, that's 3 new bikes this year:

• Bike 1: Felt F2
  


• Bike 2: Specialized Tarmac
  


• Bike 3: Specialized Tarmac
  

Special bonus points if you can recognize the difference (besides color) between this Tarmac and the previous Tarmac. Here are a couple hints:

Weekend Riding and Racing

I got out Saturday on for a nice 60 mile, 5000' climbing day through Buckhorn and Rist canyons. My legs felt pretty good and I pushed hard all day. It was the best I've felt on that ride in a long time.

I need to get ready for a stage race at the end of the month, so I followed up Saturday's climbing day with a circuit race in Golden. Part of my goal was to also gain some more confidence/experience in criteriums.

Each lap of this particular race has some high speed downhill cornering and a killer little hill. I did fairly well at getting myself near the front of this race. The real killed on the course was the climb and, more importantly, the corner before it. Since I wasn't on the front at the corner before the hill, I ended up having to brake hard and then really get on the gas to get back with the group. That braking and surging finally killed me and I got dropped along with one of my teammates.

The high speed corners on this course were good practice for me (and they were fun). My teammate (Rob) can rally corner well, so I was following his lines and it really helped out.

I ended up finishing 10th place (out of 40+ finishers) which is a great result for me. Maybe spending money on a power meter this year was a good idea. :)

I'm currently "recovering" on the couch with Belgian blonde and quadruple ales while I watch the Tour of Flanders (a.k.a Ronde von Vlaanderen), a classic Belgian bike race.

New clothes, no bike

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, our new cycling team clothes made it through customs today. Isaac and Jenna had their garage all set up for a super organized evening of sorting and bagging everyone's stuff. There were some flubs (as you would expect with 150 people's worth of orders to package), but we eventually got everything figured out.

The new stuff looks great. It's a new clothing manufacturer for us, so it's always a bit scary picking sizes. I think everything I have fits right, but I better not gain any weight or that small jersey I got isn't going to be so great. Seeing all the different clothes makes me wish I had gotten some more stuff too. But then I remember how much it costs, and I realize why I didn't go hog wild with the ordering.

So now I'm all dressed up with no place to go. My new Tarmac is sitting at the bike shop while I wait for a replacement frame. The Specialized rep wasn't keen on me riding on it, so I'm at a loss for a bike. I had set up my old Trek for time trials, so I'm going to have to un-TT it so I have something to ride and race on this weekend.