Ultimatum and Spring Classics

So what the hell happened last Sunday? JV was stuck to his racing for 4th GT mode? There was no frickin' ITT or mountain stage on Monday! What was Hushovd doing driving the peloton on Haaghoek before he got kicked out the back door? Better ban the radio because I'm sure Thor didn't come up with that idea on his own.

Oh well. Superteam got their arse handed over to them but the classics team, that has delivered for the past...what...15 years, almost did it again. That almost was because of Nick Nyens. I can relate to that guy...not so much the handsome devil that got my wife following cycling and is apparently the superman of cycling. There's nothing like the underdog or semi-underdog stealing the show and I'm all for that. Hells yes, another show like that again on Sunday. Actually Boonen winning would be pretty good, but I think it will be Langeweld's turn.

But I was watching de Ronde with Ajokoira last Sunday and it turned out that he used to be a very handy sprinter back in his day. He told me that he was battling it out in the sprints with Djamolidine Abdoujaparov back in the 80's in Baltic Sea Friendship Race. This to me is very surprising, not only because I thought Ajokoira was my age, but also because I have reliable sources telling me that Ajokoira learnt to ride his bike at the age of 12. He does have unbelievable skill to call every single attack etc. some 1-2 minutes before it actually happens, but I think it might be just lucky drunk guesses.

But here in our little duck pond, it has been nice and warm. Just trying to figure out what to do this summer. No racing allowed on paved surfaces here in sport's hinterlands, or land of curling, as the locals call this country. Actually, I would hazard a guess, that no outdoor activities allowed, unless you're getting driven to them in a Volvo. Canadians being outdoorsy people is a bigger myth than Santa living in North Pole. I was in BHP the other weekend and I knew 90% of the people by first name and the thing is, that I can't remember people's names. Not so good if you're trying to build relationships for living.

On a semi-related note. My asset manager sent me a memo, that all the stuff, that I don't use on regular basis, must go. So if I don't go to work in the morning, I'm deemed to hit the basement and make a list of all the stuff that I don't use. I'm supposed to put this list on my blog and price everything to sell ASAP. I have everything from frames to brake pads. I'm not too sure if I can inventory everything, but I'll do my best. Paypal works and I'll ship internationally.

The Big Ones

The big spring races are coming with Tour of Flanders or Ronde van Vlaanderen really opening the game. Blogs are blogging and tv is televising about this one and about the next couple of weeks of spring classics. Every self respecting blogger must create new expressions by mixing their respective native languages with dutch. It's big amongst the wannabe tough men of the sport of cycling and frickin' huge in Belgium. There are the talk shows on every night with big name favorites and local hopefuls. Newspaper pages are covered with speculation and interviews, and the crazy cycling fans stalk the stars in rain or shine.

The strong guys are Cancellara, Boonen and Gilbert, with Goss, Flecha, O'Grady and Langeveld as the outside favorites on my list. The weather may play a role, but I think rain would just widen the gap between the strongest and the rest. At the moment Cancellara seems strongest, but I would not count out the others. Lepperd Trek is not that strong team, but O'Grady may turn into a super domestique...or get away from the favorites looking at each other.

It will be a 4,5-5 hour show on Sunday and the biggest question on people's lips is, "where to find a stream that works?". I won't tell you even if I find one, because I don't want you there messing up my stream.

I personally really like riding in Belgium and don't mind the cobbles. Racing is lots of fun if you're in good form, and in my opinion, you haven't really experienced road racing if you haven't raced in Belgium.

Spring is Still Just Around the Corner

I'm still anxiously waiting for above freezing temperatures to make it to Canadian mid-west. It did look good for a while, but right now we're sitting at -12. Of course the flood is coming too and this means that many roads will be underwater, once the weather actually warms up enough to allow water to stay in liquid form. This whole weather thing is getting to me.

But it's that time of the month that normally I would start ramping up volume as I would start riding outside. My approach is reverse compared to the traditional system where you do more miles in the winter, mostly at lower intensities. I do mostly tempo/sweet spot/threshold in the winter and add the volume once I can ride outside on my road bike. This is because I need more time working on my tempo/threshold than getting myself used to spending time on the bike. I've found out that two or three 4-5 h rides make quite a big impact on my ability to do longer races, but the returns of these rides diminish fast and doing more of these rides seems to not help me much. Once the weather gets nicer and evenings lighter I add volume. By volume I mean that I do 3-4 x 20' instead of the trainer drill of 2 x 20' or 90' tempo instead of 60' tempo and so on.

Sure all this adds the time at "endurance" intensities as well and just getting out of city takes 20 minutes or so. Don't get me wrong, there are no +15 hour weeks for me anymore, 12 hours is a huge week. Would be cool to run an experiment and see what racking bigger hours would do now, but with a job and a family, I just don't have the time to average 15 hours over the winter. And quite frankly, 3 hours XC ski in -25 sucks so bad that I would probably quit the experiment after a week.

And another crazy idea I had the other day. Maybe I will take some coaching classes and look into that area and see if someone wants my training programs. The obstacle seems to be that the competition basic course isn't offered that often. Or maybe I would need to take community initiation course to get started, and that would suck. The new NCCP system seems to be even more warm and fuzzy than before. You know...they all need to feel like winners. It's all good, but I'm more interested in competitive side of things and trying to train to become stronger/faster rider.

But now I need to get back to my morning routines of watching spring classics on my TV. You would think that on this day and age, there would be a reliable pay service that you could watch these races on. Cycling TV I hear someone shout? Yeah right, they don't even cover these races and after experiencing their unacceptable service couple of years ago, they really need to convince me that they are worth my money. Luckily I can get this race, probably in HD, later today.

To lighten up the tone and wrap this post up. I feel much better about my uni-brow now. Shave the uni-brow! I have also seen better choices of business name. No I don't mean the bearing company FAG.

Thanks for cycling inquisition for pointing me to this.

Spring is Coming and New Bike Stuff

Spring is almost here, or at least just 2-3 blizzards of biblical proportions away. So only couple of short weeks of poor glide and we'll hit 2011/2012 winter. What this means for all us bike dorks is that you really need to get all the gear ready for non-snow season. I've been working hard to spec the new whip for the summer and I think I have everything sorted out. I'm not too sure about the geometry, but it should be OK. Below is the photo of the bike with stock factory spec.


Fully spec'd this whip will have a bell and a basket.

It's surprisingly difficult to find an aesthetically pleasing little kids bike and Specialized doesn't bring this bike to Canada. In words of one LBS "who wants to buy a 200 dollar kids bike?" Well I do, because I'm a tool and I'm in progress of spoiling our little lady. You know that you should start teaching your kid to ride a bike preferably before they can talk so that they can't really express their opinion in the torture your putting them through.

Other than this. Bit of a training break threw a wrench in my finely tuned training machine. This was probably for the best because the walls and ceiling start closing in on you in March after four months of indoor training. It's not that I wouldn't run into some sort of obstacles in February-March as the spring just can't come fast enough, so I don't worry too much about this. And as a training tip, if you miss a week or two or even three of your normal training, you'll probably get this lost time back within couple of weeks after resuming more regular training.

I changed to a new team/club for this year too. I'll be riding with Lifesport, the most polish cycling club in Winnipeg. Daniel also moved over to Lifesport so it will be small team there. Plan is to travel to Minneapolis and/or Wisconsin with these guys to do some weekend racing this year. We'll see what happens with my plans this year. Typically most of my cycling plans get revamped big time during the season and I end up not racing when I'm in some sort of shape. I think I'll skip the Bikes on Broadway because that race is really just an ITT. There's better races in Wisconsin that same weekend and probably in much nicer weather...and I can camouflage this trip to look like IKEA shopping trip ;)

Friday Rant (and XC ski ninja)

It's that time of the week again. It's Friday night and I'm convincing myself, that the little lady is going to sleep in and not wake up at 6:45 AM, as she has done every single Saturday for the past 18 months.

I've been trying to keep up with the latest gossip, but Kimmage's Landis interview and Cyclocosm blog are too much to handle for this time crunched cyclist. I'm sticking to BSNYC blog...at least that makes me smirk in self-contained Finnish way. The opposite for a finn is of course to grip his/her fist in his/her pocket. Only thing that may outrage a finn is a swede showing off in his dad's Volvo.

Well anyway. I went skiing last night since the weather was quite nice. It was nice to have some decent glide on the trails. But then suddenly, a ski ninja approached fast and I just had to hop off the trail to let him pass. He was clad in black and wore a black balaclava over his (her?) face. This is why I believe he/she was a ninja, because only an xc ski ninja would cover his face in such a warm weather. The ninja was skiing super weird ninja wassberg (skiing term for one skate double poll). Almost deep squatting on both kicks and moving sideways at least as much as forward. Him being xc ski ninja is my only explanation...or maybe it was Don.

Anyway, need to see of there's some cycling coverage online tomorrow.

Chasing Legends, or something

I heard that Silver City Polo Park is playing a cycling documentary tomorrow. It's the Chasing Legends clip about HTC-Columbia and 2009 Tour and specifically following Mark Cavendish a.k.a. Boy Racer a.k.a. Cry Boy a.k.a. Manx Missile. If it would be a documentary of an off-season beach holiday of Fabian & Andy, Melissa would probably force me to go, but since in all our bike geekiness we both dislike Mr. Cav, I can avoid this one. I guess Silver City didn't really think about the huge demographic group of 30 year old cyclist Finns living in Winnipeg when picking their feature doc. I may need not to get this on DVD either, for the fear of smashing my TV with a floorpump, since I may have similar allergic reactions to this than I have to Bobke...except the photo where his crashing on cobbles. But have fun if you're going. I will stroke my purist ego by watching 1983 Paris-Roubaix.

And I was watching some early season racing today on a trainer. WTF is wrong with the new jerseys? Have all the teams bought their design services from Rapha?

New Year Old Tricks

Yeah...back at it again. Punishing the trainer, while watching 2006 Ronde, like it was a paying gig. I'm quite certain, that this kind of activities, are best kept in the basement, out of sight of normal pick-up driving sweat pant wearing meat and potatoes type who live next door to me. I've even gone skiing twice as many times as last winter so I'm getting to the point were I can actually start skiing.

Or maybe I just think that I'm doing something. Dicking around couple of days a week hardly counts as training. I should put in solid 5 day training weeks pretty much every week, but the winter funk is also getting closer and that means that 2 days a week would be a good week. The girth of my well fed body suggests that more would be better. Maybe I do need the noodling-around-flailing-my-legs-for-hours-on-end type of training just to keep me away from the fridge. This would be all good and well, but this sort of rides here in the prairies would be close to DIY lobotomy due to somewhat featureless landscape.

Anyhow, I got two training sessions in this weekend because our Saturday night plan fell through and I did not have a hangover on Sunday. When you get a chance to go out once every frickin 6 months without the guaranteed 7 AM wake-up, missed training session would be a small price to pay for an angry hangover.

I'm using GC now that I'm cool member of the Apple cult, but below is my Saturday's ride. Sunday's ride looks like a copy of this, but I managed to spend bit more time on the trainer.


The reason for a slow start was my plan to try to put in a solid 60 min interval, but I chickened out after 15 minutes.