Survived a Coyote Attack

Well, I’ve been a little slacking on the updates here, but before I get too far into the hole I guess I should lay down what I’ve been up to recently.

The NM Off Road Series (NMORS) which is sanctioned under the USAC/NORBA umbrella had its kick-off event in the wonderful town of El Paso. TX.

What, you may ask? Texas isn’t New Mexico, and believe me, we KNOW that!!! But in the spirit of comraderie with it’s sister city of Las Cruses, the NMORS allowed the boys down there to put on a race in the series.

The event took place on March 30th and was called the Coyote Challenge. Well what a challenge it was. The course was setup on the trails at the Franklin Mountain Park just north of El Paso. It wound through 9.5 miles of beautiful desert landscape complete with arroyos, cactus, dry creek beds and ledgey canyon faces. It’s the kind of terrain that makes Southwestern Mountain Biking so enjoyable.

Now the Expert Class would be expected to do 3 laps around this little torture track. With the start being a little longer to spread folks out, it would come out to 30 miles more or less.
The terrain there is some really pretty foothills that run right up into the mountains but it is rocky. Most of the trail was littered with loose baby head rocks and it was tough to get any type of rhythm going. The climbs were loose and just wasted your legs if you went at them too hard. Bottom line is it was about the toughest 30 miles of racing I’ve ever done.

So how’d I do? Well I finished!!! And that is saying something. But to be honest I was what is called in race parlance the DFL Expert. DFL is an acronym for Dead Freakin’ Last and I will be the first to admit my performance wasn’t steller. As I commented to my teammates, I’m not sure I’m an Expert Level Racer yet, but I did complete an Expert Level Race.

Now for those not too familiar with USAC race catagories, understand that “Expert” class is one step below the Pros. “Sport” class did two laps out there and if you look at my split times here you’d see I would have finish 4th in the 50+ Sport class out of 12 racers.

So I am a decent “Sport” racer. But the bottom line is not many Sports want to race Expert because it is so grueling. My attitude is that which doesn’t kill ya just makes ya more ornery. So I’m racing Expert and loving it.

Now before you take this too deep to heart, understand that one of my mottos is that "half the battle is just showing up, and the other half is finishing." So even though I was slow compared to the other Experts, I gutted out the race and ended up “snagging” 2nd place points in the 50+ Expert Class. I was in effect on the podium.

How so? Well there were only 3 people racing 50+ Expert and although I was more than an hour behind the 1st place guy in my class, the other guy DNF’d. So hey, I rolled into second place in the overall points so far in the series.

Like I said, many times it isn’t the fastest rider that gets the prize. It’s the one who keeps the cranks turning, doesn’t do anything real stupid and works hard to finish. I have no illusions as to where my little run in the Expert class will end, but for now I have some point padding going into the next rounds, and if I keep showing up and keep finishing, ya never know how it will end up.

So don’t give up out there, even if you are DFL!!!

Tiny little circles...

Well, I've been working on something now for a while during my commutes and it seems to be taking hold. I always wondered how the roadies and cross folks could generate so much power and maintain it for so long. It's that "cadence with power" thing I've been alluding to. I kinda had an inkling of what was up, but I've really begun to feel it.

You see most of us "riders" only use half our power. We are what some people call "mashers". Now I always thought a masher was someone who got out of the saddle and hammered away on the cranks. Kinda like the Single Speed folks. And I though "spinners" were people who sat on the seat and just spun, spun, spun. And maybe that is a proper definition.

But I think another definition of a masher might be someone who only presses down on their pedals. Never pulls up. Whereas a spinner is someone who rotates their foot through out the crank rotation. I think anyone who rides a bike appreciates that power is developed by not only pushing down with one foot, but pulling up with the other. Basically doubling your power output.

Now before you go "Well no dah Doug", hear me out on this. I always knew that was the case, but how much do you really work at it. If you're like me, you might catch youself at times thinking you need to be doing it, but after about 5-10 minutes, you pretty much forget about it. Yeah, maybe you're 50-60% efficient at doing it, but do you always do it?

What I'm getting at is learning to spin tiny circles or as the roadies would say "float the pedals" takes muscle memory training. It's one thing to say to yourself you need to do it, but it's another to have your legs do it sub-conciously. Like I said, it takes training!!!

I've been really focusing on my commutes to make sure that I am pulling and pushing, pushing and pulling all the time. Turning tiny circles, and yanno, after a while I have begun to feel some action in muscles I obviously don't use much, considering they get sore. It's mostly in the back of the Quads during the pull up and extends into the Glutes. It's a different kind of muscle sensation than I'm use to and it's obvious to me as I ride that I don't use them as effectively as I should.

As I've continued to work with this, I've felt my cadence change a bit. It's obviously become more powerful but it's also become more of an ingrained stroke. I'm going to continue to work with this and I'll let ya know how it evolves, but I really do believe that you can become a lazy rider if you don't focus on your pedaling form or stroke. Road riding gives you the opportunity to do that, and when you take it to the dirt, that's when the magic happens.

Good luck out there...

Commuter Training

Yanno, some of the toughest racers around are commuters. Commuting to work (or any place for that matter) has many advantages. It allows you to get lots of miles in doing something you would normally do anyway, it compresses your training schedule so you have some free time, it saves gas and thereby hopefully helps a wee bit with the global impacts of fossile fuels and it usually involves road miles.

Now as I alluded to in my Cyclocross piece, if you want to be a solid moutain biker, get a road bike, or better yet a Cross Bike. Most high level racers know that tons of road miles will make you faster in the dirt. Again it's the whole "cadence with power" thing.

Having a Cross bike means you can race Cross in the fall and get the training associated with that. Plus they tend to be a little more robust in their build and hold up well under the demands of commuting. My Cross bike (a Lightspeed Appalachian) is actually a touring frame that is pretty well regarded in Cross circles as a solid bike if not a bit of a vintage design. But it is Ti and it rides damn smooth. At about 20lbs it is heavy by road bike standards but that extra weight will make ya stronger. So it's all good!!!

I've been commuting to work now for about a month and I'm actually pretty fortunate. You see you can't really pick your commute. The type of training you get from your commute is based on where you live and where you work. Yeah, you can route your commute to get a specific workout, but if you just want to ride back and forth to work, well you're kinda stuck with the route you got.

My route is pretty cool. It covers 13 miles one way or 26 miles round trip. Thats a pretty good bit of distance to pound in one day for training. It covers about 1900' of elevation, which is also a nice bit of climbing to work around. It has flats to work on power or speed intervals and the climbs are gradual enough to really gear up and work out of the saddle.

But the thing that is really cool is in the morning it's more of a downhill ride, which makes it fast and I don't work up too much of a sweat. There's a few hills to keep it interesting but it's pretty straight forward. Now on the way home it's more of an uphill run which allows me to get in some good interval sessions.

There are some busy streets and intersections I need to negotiate but generally it's what I would call a fairly safe route. In fact almost a 1/4 of it is on an Albuquerque City bike path which is really nice. Now I wouldn't call it pretty, but I'll talk about "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" in another post. For now here's my GPS map. Like I said, a great way to get my training in and I'm helping to reduce my carbon foot print to boot. So commute to work and get the benefits that only road training can provide....but be safe out there!!!