Training

Andrea

Training Camp 2011: Days 1 and 2

Day 1 was relatively easy. Since Matt didn’t have to work this weekend, he followed me up for a couple of days of riding.  We got on the trail around 1:30 and rode the orange loop. My prescribed workout for the day was 2 hours with various intensities, so we headed up Green Mountain Road for a little more climbing & saddle time. Afterward, some friends came over & hung out for a couple of sunset beers at the cabin.

This morning, we planned to meet up with Memphis friend Forrest Owens and ride almost all of the Syllamo’s Revenge course. However, Forrest had to get home earlier than previously thought, so we re-tooled our plan to just the yellow and blue trails from Blanchard Springs. I quickly realized, though, that I wasn’t feeling the pace that the guys were pushing, so when I caught up to them, I offered to let them go so I could ride longer, and at my own pace. They ended up with 2.5 hours, and I rode the remainder of the trail solo. Matt was nice enough to meet me at the Hwy 5 trailhead with water then pick me up on Green Mountain Road once I was around the loop. Final ride time was 4 hours, 56 minutes (including various food/photo breaks).

I try to ride at least one more technical section every time I’m on the trail. Today was no exception, though I did manage to wreck a few extra times (all were generally slow-speed, but left me with some extra bruises). Riding in solitude gives you a lot of quality time with your own self doubt and personal fears. Singletrack therapy is your friend…


Andrea

Training Camp 2011

The past couple of years, a winter training camp has been an easy proposition since I was teaching and had about a month (paid) off of work. Since I’m working a job with a more “traditional” schedule, I hadn’t put much thought into trying to take a few days to dig myself into a bit of a training hole at the cabin. However, I’d stayed in touch with Nate (aka “Gorgeous” from the Shenandoah 100), and he asked if I’d be interested in showing him and some friends around the Syllamo trails for a day or two.

Hell yeah, I’d love to! Who are your friends?

Sue Haywood and her husband boyfriend.

Holy isht, Sue Haywood? She’s like, a total badass!

I was excited to hear that. Then, I got kinda nervous. It’s going to be a kinda nuts to play tour guide to someone who is such an awesome bike racer. Yes, I’m somewhat starstruck. It should be a good time, though. The rock gardens should be scared.

So, I took a couple of days off of work, and, since I don’t normally work weekends or wednesdays, will have  a nice little 5-day brick for some trail riding. Maybe I’ll finally learn how to ride wet rocks…

Andrea

3 Days?

It’s been 3 whole days since my last post, and nothing of interest has happened.

-A9C #2 is still chilling in a box in the entry hall of the house, my SRAM XX order still hasn’t arrived, and, even if it did, I’m waiting on a backordered BB30 insert from Niner, so no building can occur until those planets align.

-I haven’t had any alcohol since Sunday. I’ve found that I can either be drunk or bipolar, and being drunk makes me fat.

– Thor kitty gains at least half a pound a day, and he is becoming quite the lap-cat. It’s time for him to get the snip, too.

– Any of you living further north than Memphis can stop reading right now. It’s supposed to get down to 7 tonight, then snow several inches tomorrow night. The grocery stores are absolute mayhem right now, and I think a few cars have already slid off the road. I F*CKING HATE WINTER. Hopefully the weather is more cooperative next weekend when I’ll be heading over to Syllamo for the 2011 edition of training camp.

– I can’t wait to have some sweet potato chili tomorrow for dinner. Gonna put it in the crock pot before we go ride a few laps of the Herb Parson’s trail. It should keep up warm & fed until everything thaws out and life can resume as “normal”

Andrea

Looking Ahead

It’s less than 2 months until the first race of 2011 (Southern Cross). I’ve had a personal vendetta for that race ever since the 2009 edition where I experienced one of the biggest failures of my racing career by losing 1st place to Carey Lowery in the last seconds of the race (a combination of bad pacing, bad nutrition, bad motivation, and bad bike handling). Last year, I was able to pull off a win, but Carey was not there, and she then proceeded to have one of the most prolific race seasons of her life. Would I have beaten her? I’m sure you could find people that would argue either way, but mostly you’d find people that would ask, “Who the Hell are Andrea and Carey, and what is Southern Cross?”

I digress.

As of late, I’ve been focusing on building aerobic endurance- a quality that I’ve not spent much time on in the past other than the occasional long ride (which would inevitably contain large chunks of time NOT focusing on an endurance pace). It’s the classical “base building” that I conveniently skipped in the past because before mountain bike racing, I was racing for 2-3 hours at the most. I could go into the physiology of it, but I’ve kind of enjoyed NOT getting into the physiology of anything lately. It’s driven me a little crazy at times, but I’m hoping for payoff in the upcoming months.

The season starts off a little slow- Spa City 6 hour in March, then the Ouachita Challenge April 3rd, then nothing on the calendar until April 30th, when the NUE Series kicks up with the Cohutta 100 (after that- destruction!) I’m still on the fence about racing the Ouachita course Singlespeed. Only one other female singlespeed competitior is registered, and there’s a slew of “women’s open” competitors. On one hand, I want to support singlespeed racing, but on the other, Ouachita isn’t that great of a singlespeed course because of several miles of flat/rolling forest road. If I want to “chase” the fast women, it would be advantageous to have gears in order to play to my strengths. What does the studio audience think?

I’m hoping that other NUE races besides Cohutta and Breck add the women’s singlespeed (hereby referred to WSS) category. It’d be a dream for WSS to be its own category in the NUE Series. My recommendation to the NUE gods- make WSS a category. Being the only woman dedicated enough to chase points on a singlespeed, I’ll win by default, then other, faster women will be all like, “oh, she just won by chasing points, no one fast raced that category,” and I’ll be all like, “yeah, then maybe you should race singlespeed and beat me,” and then they’ll be all like, “maybe I will,” and I’ll be all like, “bring it on, gearie!” and then… well, you get the point.

With Cohutta, Syllamo, Mohican, Breck, Fool’s Gold, and Shennandoah,  I’ve got plenty of races to get NUE points (only the 4 best are counted). April/May/June will be pretty packed, but after that, there will be larger gaps between the A races, and I’m not yet sure if I want to fill those with training or more racing. I originally wanted to go to the Breck Epic, but I likely won’t find the disposible income for it, and I feel I should be a lot faster before I hit sponsors up for that type of cash. It’ll probably be last minute additions as I get bored with weekends in Memphis.

Speaking of geared bikes, I received something black and white and carbon all over in the mail yesterday. Now I’m just waiting on other hardware from the likes of SRAM in order to start putting it all together. This one will take a little more parts-gathering time than the previous build, but I’ll post it once it’s up & ripping.

Andrea

New Year’s Weekend at Syllamo

Getting tired of reading about Syllamo yet? It’s prettymuch a way of life in the wintertime- the creek is low, the leaves are getting packed in, and the rock gardens are always prime. I had set my alarm for 5am New Year’s Day so I could get moving to meet up with Ryan & Matt, who’d left the previous morning since they hadn’t had to work. However, I ended up awake at 3am, so I decided to get out of bed and go early.

The non-existence of traffic at 4am is wonderful.

I arrived at the cabin sometime around 7:30, had 2nd breakfast, and we were on the trail around 10. We started out on the yellow trail (hadn’t done that one in a while), and moved on to the blue trail. We were all on singlespeeds (32×21 is a good gear out there. Matt brought a 32×20, but was willing to “compromise his sexual integrity” for a 21t) Ryan destroyed climb after climb (and had a flat or two) while Matt killed the rock gardens. I was somewhere in the middle.

Ride time was somewhere around 4 hours. Matt and I (both on rigid forks) were feeling pretty beat up by the time we reached the final climb up from highway 5. Back at the cabin, it was a battle for hot water when everyone hit the shower at the same time. The remainder of the evening was spent eating pasta, grazing on Oreos, and drinking beer (though, I didn’t partake of the Natural Light). Matt pretended that he was Burt Reynolds (you’ll have to find that one in the gallery below)

Sunday morning, everyone was moving slowly. The mood was vaguely reminiscent of the long-ago Metro Volkswagen training camp where we’d all wake up exhausted, but no one would admit that he or she didn’t feel like getting on the bike and riding like hell. The guys weren’t feeling anything epic, so we stuck to the green and orange trails, which took a little less than 2 hours. I decided somewhere on the green trail that I was going to ignore all pain from the previous day and channel the Honey Badger. I bombed down a couple of the Orange trail descents, which was good for figuring out what was possible with the rigid fork (though possibly not so good for the wheels I just built. The damage gets surveyed today). The moved earned me exhaustion and a random nosebleed.

There are still parts of the trails that kick my butt, and sections that make me walk, but those are getting fewer and further between.

Andrea

Air 9 Carbon- Day 2

Today’s terrain was much more challenging (in both surface and elevation). For those of you that know the trails, I started at the Blue (Scrappy Mountain) trailhead and rode a counter-clockwise loop of the Blue, Orange (Bald Scrappy), Green (White River Bluff), Orange (again), and Blue (again).

It gave me an opportunity to get a real idea of what it’s like to ride a rigid bike on some pretty technical stuff. The verdict?

Nice. Very Nice.

A lot of people have asked for my thoughts on the rigid fork and how it compares to a suspension fork. Well, the best way I can describe it is to compare it to the difference between a surgeon’s scalpel and a chef’s knife. Both are sharp objects designed for precision cutting. If you want to carve your Christmas turkey, the knife cuts straight through the skin, grain of the meat, and joints. The scalpel, on the other hand, is not so good at “straight through” as it is at disecting the meat from the bones in a very precise manner (ok, so I know that’s an odd situation, but humor me here). In either case, the end product is the same- you get your turkey meat off of the bone.

Same with the rigid fork- rather than unweighting the front wheel and letting suspension absorb most of a bump from a rock or other solid object, the rigid fork is so light and fast handling that it skirts over/around the rock with very little effort. The result for me? After I figured this out (it took a good hour of riding on some tech-y stuff), I found that I was actually cleaning MORE of the tough sections of trail- including (near the end of the ride) the entire length of the Blue trail from the Stairway to Heaven (pictured in the gallery below) to the logging road (steep and rocky- I don’t think I’ve ever managed the entire thing before because of some tricky switchbacks and steep kickers with small rock ledges.

How much will I ride/race it? I’m honestly not sure yet. I’m definitely not as fast going downhill without suspension. However, I definitely climb better… which edges itself out in “importance” when racing. Then again, the trail chatter can get tiring to the upper body. I’ll likely switch depending on the situation.

The frame itself is still amazing. It’s so damn stiff- you get the sense that every ounce of effort that you’re putting into pedaling is being transferred directly into moving you forward. I’m in love.

So, here are some photos from the journey:

Andrea

Syllamo- the Google Earth Adventures

After using Google Earth to find some really fun stuff to add to local road rides, I wanted to see if there was anything of interest in the area near the cabin at Syllamo. I’ve always wanted to figure out a way to get up & down the mountain to Hwy 5 without using the death trap that is Hwy 9 (the road that takes you from the White River to the cabin neighborhood). To my surprise, there is a whole network of unmarked roads just across the highway. We found our way down and back up without too much trouble.

We also explored an abandoned forest road (apparently part of Old Hwy 5) that cut across the Orange and Blue Trails. The end result was a little less singletrack that what we normally get on a Syllamo trip (also, in part, due to halfway bonking on Saturday and an Arctic airmass w/25mph winds on Sunday). We still rode through the requisite rock gardens, ate catfish, and put some Christmas lights up on the cabin as a surprise for my parents (I wasn’t going to post the photo or say anything on here about it, but since they said that they may not make it back over anytime soon, I figured they’d want to see).

Speaking of rock gardens- SYLLAMO’S REVENGE IS AN NUE RACE IN 2011!!! That’s right… 100 miles of racing on my most favorite trail system ever. Can’t. Wait.

I feel like I’ve been a little off my posting game lately. Eh. It’ll come back like rock garden mojo…

Andrea

Google Earth Adventures

Lately I’ve been put on a diet of long aerobic rides. Relaxing, yes. Boring? Also yes. In an attempt to add interest, I’ve taken to scanning Google Earth for “roads” that aren’t shown on the normal map. The result- discovery of the “remains” of the housing market that imploded upon itself circa 2006.

First, I found a couple of neighborhoods out in the Galloway/Hickory Withe area. These were projects by “Renaissance” Realty that were apparently cleared and subdivided for large estate homes. In two very large neighborhoods, I only saw a couple of houses, though. The streets were nice, but not really what I was after.
Next, I found Milton Wilson Road in Arlington. And yes, for you local people, I know that if you look on a map, Milton Wilson Rd. is on the other side of the city, but I’m just reporting the name that I saw on the street signs…

arlington

It’s essentially a 4×4 trail that goes from one spur of road to the other. The associated neighborhood has been under painfully slow construction since before I “learned” to ride a bike. I highly enjoyed the very non-road-bike-friendly trail (despite almost biting it when a stick momentarily lodged itself in my front fork), though it did employ some basic off-road handling skill. Proceed with caution.

The highlight of the ride, however, was the ruins of a Cordova neighborhood that I didn’t know existed until my sattelite view search. It’s a blocked-off road that I (as well as many other cyclists in the area) have ridden by hundreds of times on Latting Road without giving it much thought.

latting

What we found was pretty surreal. It looked as if the land was cleared and subdivided for small, close-together houses. However, that’s about as far as it went. In its current state, the road is now collapsing in on itself (including one road-width sinkhole that required some off-road excursion). Random piles of construction trash are everywhere, and trees are beginning to re-claim the asphalt…

trash

sinkhole

inthehole

tree

road1

road2

Sunday, my exploits took me north and east to the Lambert/Old Solomon Mill area. I ended up riding for just over 4 hours, and arrived home just before the sun started to set. I love the scenery in that area and need to get out there more often. The locals are pretty nice, too…

12_4n5_10 Gravel

Andrea

ISO Gravel

I am having to work hard to keep my solo road rides interesting. Sunday, I came up with a route that incorporated 3 different gravel “roads” within its 60 miles:

Gravel #1- Nuckolls Rd. from Macon to Jenkins. I usually use that one, so I didn’t take any photos. It’s pretty straightforward hardpack. No real turns or rough spots.

Gravel #2- Fletcher between 196 and Collierville-Arlington. Probably my favorite. When you turn off of 196 to head towards Collierville, there’s a giant “road closed ahead” sign. I’m not sure if it will always be “closed,” but apparently they’ve closed a bridge and the adjoining area where I-269 is under construction. It’s not passable by car because of the concrete barriers, but if you’re willing to portage over those, grind/slog through some rutted up construction mud, and navigate a small ditch of baseball-sized rocks on the other side, you can totally ride through it.

1

2

3

Gravel #3- Wolf River Greenway between Collierville-Arl and Bethany Rd. “Technically” speaking, this might have been the toughest section. The gravel is more loose, there are people on horses, and the low water crossings have taken down at least one person attempting to navigate them on a road bike.

4

I’m always on the lookout for more gravel. Once my prescribed routes get closer to the 4-hour route, I’ll head up north a little to the Lambert/Solomon Mill area. Need. More. Suggestions?

Andrea

In pursuit of…

This.

roadNovDec10site

No, I’m not in the pursuit of a cover on “Road” Magazine or the handsome man that graces it. I’m in pursuit of the raw emotion that’s going on there. It’s the payoff for hours of hard work and the myriads of sacrifices you make.

I hadn’t thought as much about it until a conversation I had with a customer the other day. I don’t remember the exact topic, but it was something along the lines of, “no, I’ve never gone to that place, never watch that show, and never do X other things, because from the moment I wake up at 5:00am until I go to bed at 9:3opm, my life revolves around cycling.”

I’m not complaining. I like it. But, other people (even some cycling friends I have) don’t always understand just how dedicated you have to get in order to experience what the young man in the photo above is experiencing. It’s those few seconds when you come to the realization that everything you’ve been working towards for weeks/months/years is finally culminating into epic win.

It means I have mornings like today, where I am up at 4:30, have fed the dogs/eaten/had multiple servings of coffee by 5:30, go to the grocery store (they’re a lot different at 5:30am than they are at 5:30pm), ride for 1-1.5 hours, shower, have 2nd breakfast, clean house, do laundry, write a blog post, etc. before leaving to go to work at 9:40.

Work has turned out a little differently than I’d expected when I started a month and a half ago. Not bad different, but since both of my original coworkers have now moved on to other jobs, I’m unofficially “in charge” of the Outdoors, Inc. Cordova bike shop. I have very high standards, and it makes for days where I eat lunch during the 5-10 minutes it takes to enter stock/customer orders into the request form we use and am otherwise on the phone or elbows deep in bike repairs. It’s prettymuch non-stop from the minute I get there.

Once I’m home, sometimes I’ll go to the gym for some circuit training. I usually don’t want to go because I’m tired, but, once again, see photo above. I do my best to make a decent dinner for Ryan and myself, though, I admit, since I started working ’til 6 most weekdays, we’ve been hitting the Kashi frozen pizzas pretty damn hard. By the time we eat, we might have time to watch an episode or two of Ice Road Truckers on Hulu before passing out.

No, it’s not for everyone. I have a hard time imagining it any other way, though.