I've been pressed!

Check out the Appeal Democrat article that came out this morning.
Not all that extensive, but ink is ink...

Click here to the view article

Paskenta Century 2009

On Sunday I will be heading up to Chico for my first outing of the season in any kind of a 'race atmosphere'. Starting at 8:00 am from 1-mile recreation area in Chico, the Paskenta ride is a long-standing informal race/ride that has 50, 80, and 100 mile routes. The 100 mile route is a competitive event, with a lot of top area talent turning out each year to test the waters for the first time of the season, or just log some winter miles. Its a fun ride that you can make as hard as you want (I usually tend toward making it pretty hard), and considering 300+ riders have been known to show up when the weather is good, any rider should be able to find a nice group to ride with, no matter how things split up between the hard-core racers.

I will be setting out to defend my title from last year, and if I do, I'll get to hang on to this sweet perpetual trophy for another whole year....

It looks like the weather is going to be perfect this year, so for those of you riders that have been hibernating this winter, come out and play!

I'll see you all on the road...

Photo Recap '08 continued

Here are some more shots from the 2008 season. They might be a bit out of chronological order, but oh well...

Me at the Sea Otter circuit race. My first NRC pro race. Also my first race on deep carbon tubular wheels, and there were 30 mph winds. Needless to say, the race did not go so well.

Here I am, doing what I always seem to find myself doing in Criteriums - riding off the front of the pack solo. This particular race, the Cherry Pie Crit in Napa, left me solo with just 2 laps to go, after my breakaway companion (David Veilleux of Kelly Benefits Pro team) blew a tire and called it quits. I ended up getting caught right at the line, and had to settle for 15th place.


Here's a good one of me and teammate Alex wick pulling the old 1-2 punch on the junior field at the Land Park Crit. We were able to win almost every junior race we entered if we worked it this way. Alex would attack solo, stay out there for a few laps while the rest of the field got tired of chasing. Then I would attack 'em, come across the gap to Alex, and we would ride off into the sunset (and the prize money)


Here I am nearing the finish of the Worlds Trials Time Trial in Kentucky. If you look closely, you'll notice that I have a regular clincher rear wheel, as opposed to the standard carbon disk wheel. A blowout in the starthouse with 2 minutes to go before my start left everyone scrambling to find me some rubber to ride. All the excitement had me starting the race with a racing heart, and a bit of a sunken morale, as I knew I was at an aerodynamic disadvantage to the rest of the riders without that disk wheel. I ended up second place after a great effort, and yet again did not qualify for worlds. But...


...but while the USA team (or what was left of it) was at worlds in South Africa, I went to the Spring Hill Road Race, and got my first win in a Pro category road race. I'm about to cross the line in the above photo, after outsprinting my breakaway companion. And yes, I was quite excited.


I know this one's kinda fuzzy, but it's such a cool shot. This is me riding up out of the gold mine shaft at the Tour de L'Abitibi in Quebec. The individual Time Trial starts out 400 vertical feet underground in a gold mine, and the riders must ride up out of the cold, damp, slippery shaft before riding the rest of the 18km course. I ended up 6th place on the day, and the team (USA national) ended up clinching the victory in the team classification as well as winning the best young rider jersey and coming within 1/4 of a second of winning the GC (with Charlie Avis). I did this amazing race twice as a junior and sadly I will never to be able to do it again, as I am now too old. It was one of my favorite races ever.



Me again at the front of a race in Germany, trying hard to set tempo on the climbs and take care of teammate Nick (pictured, far right in polka-dots), who was defending a lead in the King of the Mountains classification.

The podium at US nationals in August. Evan Huffman 1st, me 2nd, Marshall Opal 3rd, Ryan Zupko 4th, Nick Bax 5th. This was my last race of the season, and a bit of a heartbreaker, as I spent the last 3 miles solo off the front, only to get caught by fellow NorCal rider Huffman right in view of the line.

And when the racing was all over, I spent a few days on a 500-mile bike tour to the coast with a couple of friends. Here we are riding through the redwood forest. This was the ride that started all the knee problems I've been having, as I was pulling that big old trailer there over mountain passes every day, and riding up to 12 hours a day, with normal racing gears on my bike. The thing weighed anywhere from 75 to 100 pounds! Looking back on it, maybe this wasn't such a smart thing to do.

Training and The Oddities of being a Pro Cyclist

So after a 6-hour, 103 mile, 4500 kiloJoule mountainous training ride, I am, of course, glad to be here in front of the computer, doing something a little more low-key than riding. This coming week is looking to be a bit lighter on the training hours, as per the request of my team director, Axel Merckx, who would be known as "de big bos" in the quirky Belgian tongue of Flemish (this phrase translates roughly in English to "the big boss", I believe).

Though it will be nice to spend a few less hours in the coming week on my bike, and maybe a few more studying, my body has become quite accustomed to all the miles I have been riding - so much so that I actually seem to feel worse on rest days, or the day after, when I should be feeling the most rested. This may be hard to understand, but this has been the trend lately, as I seem to start feeling really good about 2 days into a hard block of rides. This was again illustrated to me clearly today as I spent the first couple of hours of my ride feeling sluggish. I had taken a much-needed rest day yesterday, yet today, it took three hours to get my legs (and my mind) to awaken. Then, interestingly enough, in the sixth hour of the ride, I found myself putting the old man into a spot of bother and loving every minute of putting out about 400 watts. (Dad, who had decided to meet up with me for the last half of the ride, was probably regretting his decision to do such a thing by this point). Sorry Dad.

I also witnessed an amazing display of the importance of aerodynamics in cycling today. See, I had put on my waterproof training jacket when I left for the ride in the morning, after looking at the weather forecast, which showed that I would have a 90% chance of getting rained on in the afternoon. It turned out to be sunny and probably almost 60 degrees by the time I was heading home. Way to go Weather.com. Anyway, I still had my jacket on when I was having a go at a sixth-hour threshold effort (going pretty hard, for those not up on the lingo), and I was slogging along at about 25 miles an hour, with the jacket ballooning up on my back, and poor me pruning up on the inside of it, which quickly turns into a sauna during efforts. Amazingly, when I took the thing off and got going again, I was cruising along at about 27-28 miles and hour, putting out about the same wattage. Of course, the old man was not so happy with this, because when the jacket came off of my back, so did he, if you know what I mean. Apparently in my endorphine-induced euphoria, I had failed to notice that he was quite well on the rivet the first go round. Sorry again, Dad.

Moving onto more important matters, I have exactly one week before my Team Trek-Livestrong's second training camp. This camp will be a joint camp between our team, and the big-boy's Team Astana. In any other situation, I would say it would be pretty stupid to train specifically for a training camp, and even more stupid to then taper down for a week before training camp. But when you're 18 years old and your training camp will involve you riding with three of the top stage racers in the world: Levi Leipheimer, Alberto Contador, and the man himself, Lance, I think this is perfectly acceptable. Apparently director Axel thinks so too, as he has asked me to cut some training hours this week, so I can be 'rested' going into camp, where I will be 'tested' (a.k.a. 'tortured') a bit.

There you have it, another oddity of pro cycling, which would seem entirely backwards in any other line of work. The boss asking you to cut hours, with no effect on $$$. I'm loving every minute of it. Well, at least until I have to start doing VO2 max intervals.

Anyway, I am of course super excited about the upcoming camp, and I will be sure to let you all know how it goes.

2009 Racing Schedule

I've now got a pretty good idea about how the season is looking for me for '09, after receiving schedules from both team Trek-Livestrong and the USA National U23 team. Here is a quick breakdown of the races I will be doing this year:

February:

• Training camp in NorCal in early Feb. in conjunction with the Team Astana pre-T.O.C. camp. Should be a fun one.
• Possibly Snelling Road Race and/or Merced Crit with one other teammate

March:

• First team race with Trek-Livestrong - Redlands Classic, 26th-29th in SoCal
• Also Land Park Crit on the 21st (individually). Come out and see this one! It's a great spectator course in Sacramento.

April:

• Possibly entering Copperopolis RR, Sea Otter, or Martinez Crit on individual basis
• Racing Tour of the Gila in New Mexico as team race with Trek-Livestrong (29th -may 3rd)

May:

• Leaving for Europe on the 10th with Team Trek-Livestrong. Racing in the Fleche du Sud stage race in Luxembourg with team Trek (20th-24th)
• Possibly racing Paris-Roubaix with team Trek (can't wait)

June:

• Racing a campaign with the USA National team including Vuelta Tarragona in Portugal, several UCI one-day races, and finishing with the Het Volk race in Belgium (27th)

July:

• Likely racing Davis Crit. Also racing U23 nationals (8th - 12th).
  
• Racing Cascade Classic stage race in Oregon with team Trek (22nd - 26th).

August:

• Likely racing elite district championships at Fort Ord.
• Tour of Utah stage race with team Trek.

September:

• Tour of Missouri with team Trek. Still not sure about this one, but I hope to make it out there.

So that's pretty much it. I will probably throw in a local race here and there, and things may change as far as team Trek's schedule is concerned, but all in all it looks like a pretty good year - not too full, but definitely enough to keep me sharp and get me exposed to more of that higher level of racing both in the US and Europe. I'm looking forward to diving in...

Am I losing my mind!??

I will be sure to finish up the 2008 recap soon, but something so strange happened on my ride this morning I just couldn't wait to share. The gist of it is that I believe I rode my bike through some sort of a hole in the space-time continuum today. This distortion of reality seems to be located somewhere in the foothills above Oroville, CA.


It all started quide ordinarily. I got on my bike at about 7:45 am, rode off to meet Jason B, and we headed up toward Loma Rica for a four-hour or so ride. Things got weird when we decided to take a left and head south at a T-intersection southeast of Oroville to head back toward home. Last week, we went right and rode north a good ways before dropping into Oroville, so this time I figured going left would send us south, away from Oroville, back down into the valley toward Gridley. After turning left at this T, we proceeded to get very lost, as I missed the road that I knew would get us into the valley (by now it is also raining very hard- go figure). We took another left to head south, figuring that this way we would at least be heading in the right direction, away from Oroville, and back home. Somehow, after riding south (or so we thought) for about 20 minutes, we came to a town. It was Oroville, and we ended up in the exact same part of downtown Oroville that we had come into last week, after riding north from this now infamous intersection. How could this be possible? Both Jason and I spent the whole rest of the ride wondering what had happened. Maybe I lost my bearings after two 4+ hour rides in the pouring rain. Since that explanation is both boring and makes me sound incredibly weak, I am sticking to my theory that we simply rode through some sort of a spacetime disturbance, maybe a wormhole or the like.

So, now you know, there is a tear in the spacetime fabric somewhere near Oroville. If you want to become utterly confused, and have your training ride lenthened considerably by getting really lost, head out there and don't say I didn't warn you. Otherwise, stay in the valley and enjoy the perfectly smooth spacetime.

Recap 2008 in photos

Since I was 'offline' for all of the '08 season, I thought I'd try and catch up on what I was up to last year. I'll skip the drawn-out race reports and just go with lots of photos, because its early and I have to be on the road training in about half and hour. Considering a picture is worth a thousand words, and I type about 15 words a minute (pathetically slow), I should save myself about 1.1 hours worth of pecking away at the keys for each shot. I am all about efficiency, so here goes...

I started the season off in really good shape (too good for January), and took the win at the Paskenta ride in Chico. Looking forward to going back next weekend and trying to keep the sweet perpetual trophy they gave me.

Crossing the line solo to win the Sea Otter Circuit Race. This was a great weekend for myself and the DBC team, as we had won the road race the day before on a daring solo move by my mate Alex Wick.


I took things overseas to race with the US national team in May. This is a shot of me doing what I did best over there - being a domestique, or a team workhorse. With me pounding the climbs like this and teammate Nick destroying the KOM sprints, we came home with the KOM prize, the polka-dot jersey from the Trofeo Karlsberg in Germany.


Next up after Germany was Switzerland, and the mountainous Pays de Vaud stage race. I was feeling under the weather, battling a sinus infection I think, but I managed to make a long break on stage two and ended up second place - podium, flowers, and all.

OK well I gotta go get on my bike now. It's pesky having riding as a true job sometimes. Could be worse I guess!
I'll have more photos of the '08 season up soon.

In case you were wondering...

... why I haven't written anything about an actual bike race yet, it's because there haven't been any yet this year. I will be doing my first races soon, and I will be sure to let you know how things go. I will also be writing about my upcoming team training camp in the first week of February. So for you action junkies, please do sit tight and read my arguably less exciting off-season material. The racing season is just about upon us.

I hope you all enjoy...

The Power of Power

If the image above means absolutely nothing to you, you are not alone. The modern bike racer would, however, say that you are behind the times, and are cutting yourself short on your training by not sitting at a computer analyzing your rides for about as much time as you spend actually riding. I would say I envy you, and that you should feel lucky for not being held accountable for every second of every ride you have ever done.

The above graph represents a bike ride I did this week, in terms of power, torque and all that other stuff vs. time. It was produced by a wonderful little device called a PowerTap, which I have recently begun using for all my training rides. This little computer consists of a special hub in the rear wheel of my bike that measures the force I am applying to the drivetrain, as well as my speed and pedaling rate. This data is then relayed wirelessly to a small unit on my handlebar which crunches all the numbers, and displays all sorts of important measurements while I ride. Then at the end of the day I download all the data to my laptop via a handy dandy USB cord and email it off to the trainer so he can check out what I've been up to (and crack the whip when I've been cutting those 10 min. intervals down to 9 minutes)

Now you may be wondering why anyone besides some sort of physicist would want to know how much power they are producing on a bike. You would then, of course, be placed in the category of people who are very far out of the know. Fear not, for I will fill you in enough to allow you to fit in just fine with any bike-geek friends you may have.

See, Power is defined as a rate of work over time. Work is defined as a force applied over a distance (force x distance). Thus, Power = (force x dist.) / time. The standard unit for power measurement is the Watt, which is equal to one Joule of work per second (a Joule equals one Newton of force applied over a Meter). So now when you hear someone say they put out 1000 watts yesterday, you will know that they did 1000 joules of work in just one second (for whatever the heck that is worth). So, for practical purposes, knowing how much wattage you are producing is very useful, because it is a direct measurement of how hard you are working. It is basically the best way to gauge one's effort on the bike for any kind of workout. For instance, coach may say "do six four-minute intervals at 420 watts". I would then go out and do my intervals, splitting time between staring down at the display to make sure I was keeping up this insane amount of wattage, and wishing I was doing anything else in the world but riding at 420 watts. Then when I am done, I could look at my data from the ride, with the purpose of quantifying the misery I put myself through, and seeing whether or not I actually kept up the wattage when I blacked out near the end of the interval.

In all seriousness, I love my PowerTap power meter, and I wouldn't train without it. It allows me to be very precise with my training, and gives me a sort of virtual training buddy to egg me on when I need it (or make me feel pathetic when I'm on a bad day). All I need to do is a periodical lab test to set where my wattage 'zones' fall (what wattages correspond to what levels of effort and how different wattages affect my body). I try not to get too into all the technicalities of training, but this is one device I wouldn't want to do without. Lucky for me, I will never have to be without a power measurement device this season, as all of team Trek - Livestrong's race wheels, including TT disk wheels, will have the PowerTap hub in them.

Now when I post graphs of training rides that I have done, or start talking about how awesome my wattage was yesterday, I will expect you all to be on board.

Farewell to Sanity

Today was my first day of classes at Yuba College, which I went into still undecided about whether or not I would actually be going through with school this semester, considering the huge amount of time I will be spending on the road this racing season, and the 20-30 hours a week I will be devoting to training. After a few long discussions with my professors, I have, for some reason, decided to stay a full-time student for this season. I will also, of course, be a full-time cyclist. Somehow right now I'm thinking being 'full-time' at two things at once will probably leave me looking for more time in the day. I suppose it is possible though, through some clever mathematics, to budget this all out and still come out on top. I have thus come up with the following equation:
2 x (full time) x (1/2-ass) = 1(full time)

Unfortunately, I can't really afford to be half-assing anything this year, so I will be stuck with being extremely busy. As a racing mate of mine would say, I just might be making regular trips into the pain cave. (Watch out for continued usage of this wonderfully descriptive little phrase)
This is all made worse by the fact that my classes are right in the middle of the day, which means I will rarely have time for a good long ride, and I will have to take up doing two-a-day workouts to get in enough hours on the bike.

All that said, I should be able to pull it off, as I have been doing for the past couple of years. I may just be prolonging the inevitable I guess, as I will surely have to abandon school at some point if things really go my way with cycling, but for now I really want to keep my mind sharp and stay on track for my engineering degree. I know I will eventually have to give up bike racing for a living, and I don't quite think I have the panache to make it as a Bob Roll-type TV personality. After all, I wouldn't be a true pro in the Belgian tradition if I didn't retire to a desk job and gain 100 pounds.

Stuff I'm Riding, Part 1

With the new year comes a new team, new sponsors, and most importantly, new gear. Well, maybe not most importantly, but new gear is pretty cool.
So I thought I'd start a little periodical running down all the cool stuff I'm riding this year. Naturally, this first installment will detail the most important piece of equipment I ride - my bike.
Here it is, the Trek Madone Pro, known as the Madone 6.9 if you try to find it in a bike shop.
Draped in a full SRAM Red component group, with Bontrager wheels, bars, stem and saddle, and Speedplay pedals, this thing weighs in at about 17 Lbs. Now I hate playing the weight game, and considering I way almost 150 lbs. myself, a pound or so here and there will only change my total weight by less than 1%. But, this bike is freakin' light. That 17 Lbs. may not sound so amazing, but consider that weight includes a PowerTap Power meter, heavy-ish 'training' wheels, training pedals, and alloy bars and stem. When we get our race bikes in a couple of weeks here, with carbon wheels, bars, and stem, and race pedals, I think our mechanic may have to get creative to keep this bike over the 15 Lb. UCI weight limit.
All that being said, weight isn't everything, right? Of course, a bike must also be judged by its stiffness, ride quality, and aesthetics (otherwise known as 'lust factor'). To start with the stiffness, which I personally consider to be the most important aspect of bike performance, I need say no more than this is the stiffest bike I have ever ridden, period. I have ridden several ProTour bikes in the past and this one smashes them all in the stiffness category, and just may be the stiffest out there right now. Now for those of you wondering why one would be so concerned about a bike being stiff, consider this: when I'm sprinting up a hill on my bike, producing around 1500 watts and hundreds of Nm worth of torque, I want all of that power to go into pushing me down the road, instead of into flexing the frame around. Now when I look down at the bottom bracket of this frame (the part where the crank attaches), I see an industry-first 90mm wide bracket, which is at least 20mm wider than any other bikes out there. And wider means more material which means stiffer. It also has a unique integrated seatpost system that allows the frame to be solid at the seat tube, with no opening for a seatpost. Again, more material equals more stiffness. Any one can take a look at this baby and know it isn't going to give much.
Now I think I can be pretty short about the ride quality. Considering this bike is carbon fiber, just like every other Pro race bike out there, it has a 'carbon' feel to it, like most other race bikes. It soaks up small road vibrations and sort of bounces you over the big ones, like riding on the wide side of a two-by-four. The small difference with this bike is the tubes are actually a bit narrower in the horizontal direction than on most bikes (because they are massively wide in the other direction), which gives the bike a bit more vertical give, which means a happier hindside for me after a five-hour ride.
As for the 'lust factor' of this bike, I'll let you decide. Everyone has different tastes I suppose, but take one look at this bike just screaming "race me!" at you and we both know you hope your other bike won't find out about the way you feel.

The aftermath...

Here I am, its 9:00 am, and I'm not on my bike! Amazing!
In the aftermath of a big training week, I'm taking a morning off, to catch up on this blogging thing, which I just might be coming to enjoy. Soon I will leave for Davis, CA, to do some photos and an interview with the Davis Enterprise Newspaper. It seems people in Davis actually care about bike riding. Imagine that.
Anyway, be sure to catch that article, which should run later this week as a sports feature, and will give the scoop on a pretty rare and cool event that just happened: two Davis Bike Club riders went straight from the DBC program to the Pros. The other former DBC standout is Paul Mach, whose serious wit and web-design expertise combine to yield an awesome blog that makes my humble blog seem pretty pathetic (seriously, check out his site here). Oh, and he can ride a bike quite well also. If I tried to list all the amazing things he's done on a bike, I would get tired of typing things after a while, you would not think I was nearly as cool after reading the list. Just take my word for it, he's the real deal, and I think you all will come to know his name, if you don't already.

Training Camp part one

So last week was the first even for the newly formed Trek team, our pre-training camp in Lance's stomping grounds - Austin, Texas. You may have already read all about it on VeloNews, but if you haven't, Click Here to check out the article. As you may get from the article, the main purpose of the camp was to allow everyone, riders and staff, to get to know wach other in a relaxed setting, while also taking care of some business such as visiting the Lance Armstrong Foundation building and doing physical testing. The whole 'getting to know each other' part included plenty of dinners out, a bowling trip, a movie, dancing, and just hanging out at Lance's Spectacular new bike shop, Mellow Johnny's. Oh, and we did ride our bikes a bit too, I guess. The riding was not so great in my opinion around Austin: flat, windy, and terrible road surfaces. It was OK by me that we only rode about 3 hours a day.
If I made our supposed 'training camp' sound really cushy, that's because it was. It was my first experience with the big perks that come along with being a Pro. Every morning I would sit down to my all-you-can-eat-or-drink breakfast in the Juan Pelota Coffee Shop (A delicous mocha, muffin and breakfast wrap, for the record), and think to myself, "How did I get here?". Who knows, but I think we all had a really good time, and I can't wait for our next training camp, the BIG one, here in Northern California in early February. This one's sure to be full of those befuddling "new-pro moments", where I have to wonder, "Is this really happening to this former chubby kid from Yuba City?"...

Back at it...

Welcome to my new Blog!
After a long break from the internet scene, I'm back for the '09 season, which is shaping up to be a very exciting one. I have decided to switch to the Blog format as I'm hoping it will be much easier than maintaining an entire website. For those of you that have followed the TaylorKracing website, I apologize for the long silence on my part, and I hope I can keep you all updated with enough race info and the like, in the coming year (and beyond).