High Desert Omnium

This past weekend was the High Desert Omnium here in Bend. Saturday was the crit, which is always a blast. That went decently well for me, I was able to make some strong pulls in the peleton's attempt to chase back a breakaway, but unfortunately I made a mental error and dropped back too far with 2 laps to go and buried myself in the group. Oh well! Can't learn without making mistakes!
With the crit behind me, I focused my redemption powers on Sunday's road race. It is a super fun and on a really nice course up in the mountains! The first half of the 60 mile road race was pretty mellow with few attacks and a pretty mellow tempo pace. I stayed in the front 1/3 of the peleton, waiting and watching for anything to happen that could affect the outcome of the race. Nothing really came to be, but about halfway in, things began to actually move and morph in the peleton so I moved up to the front 1/4 to be in position for any solid moves. Nothing really came about but the pace picked up to a good clip as a paceline formed on the front. I took a pull coming into the feed zone, which made for an easy feed from Bob and Kiefer who were kind enough to sit out in the sun all day and hand out bottles. The pace calmed a little bit after the feed and we cruised along until we hit some punchy climbs. With 20 miles to go, Michael Dennis from Sunnyside, took off from the front and about seven of us followed up one the climbs. He kept punching it and with each punch a few riders would drop off. After a couple of those, I was on his wheel and after a quick look back, we had a gap. We began hammering away from the peleton, trading pulls every 30 seconds to a minute. We were able to put a 1 minute gap on the peleton and were working extremely well together. The peleton finally organized a chase about 10 miles into our breakaway and were able to close the gap down to about 35 seconds. We sat up prepared to be absorbed but they did too, trying to dangle us, so we went back to work. We were able to stay off until about 2K to go when a chase group of six finally reeled us back in. I sat in for a few and with 1K to go, I went for it knowing I didn't have a huge sprint left, with the work I had done earlier. Suprisingly, the chase group had burned energy too as I was able to snag a third place finish just in front of Mike who sat up to celebrate his overall Omnium win! 


Here is an amazingly awesome video, from the lead car driver Mark, documenting the whole race!!

It was definitely an awesome way to wrap up some weekend racing!

Cherry Blossom Stage Race

Two weekends ago, I got the first road race of the season under my belt with the Cherry Blossom Classic Stage Race up in The Dalles.

The week prior was a little nerve racking as we had been waiting on a headset race installer to finish the Focus. But come Tuesday, three days before the race, it hadn't shown up! Eric being the awesome guy he is, decided to let me be the lucky one to break in the brand new Marin Stelvio Ultegra demo bike! We built it up so I could have a couple days on it before the racing began!


Quick product review.....it friggin rocks! It's quick, snappy, easy to maneuver and gets the power to the ground fast. I was loving it!

Looking out over the school and some of the course.

Day one of the Classic consisted of a short circuit with two laps on a 18.5 mile loop. It had some gentle rolling hills with two prominent climbs 2/3 of the way into each lap.


The weather was absolutely beautiful, sunny and warm and I didn't have to wear ANY warmers!! I was stoked to get the ride underway! I was able to settle in nicely in the peloton, luckily being towards the middle back when a guy went down up front so I had plenty of time to dodge the carnage. I was feeling strong playing around up front a bit but when I hit the first climb, my legs were not happy! I ended up waterfalling back through the group and popping out the back along with several other racers. This was not going to work, so after a little bit of a self pep talk and some heavy hammering on the descent, I was able to latch back onto the peloton and recover during the last lap! The finish was a nice right hand corner and then about a 1/4 mile gradual uphill to the line. Two guys popped off the front followed by another and then myself. I snuck by on the inside and put the pedal to the metal and was able to take a 3rd place! It was my best road race finish to date and man did it feel good!! I got stand atop the podium but the best part was the $10 gift certificate to Big Jim's a famous burger joint in The Dalles!

Camping setup at the school!

Day 2 came about with a TT in the morning and a crit downtown in the afternoon. The TT was crazy windy, after the 3 block starting stretch full of sidewind, there was a right hand turn that threw me into the wall of wind for the out and back course. I just stayed as low as I possibly could on the drops and just feathered the throttle, I knew I was not going to be tearing it up so I should save the legs a little bit. Everything went according to what I thought, I didn't burn the legs out and lost a good chunk of time, but hey the Crit was coming up and that's where the REAL fun happens!! 

Water's Edge Bistro....yum!!

After some amazing food at the Water's Edge Bistro, I highly recommend a trip there, I napped in the sunshine as my car was buffeted by the brutal Gorge winds. 


Luckily by crit time, the wind had mellowed down a bit and I was excited to burn rubber! For the majority of the short race (20ish minutes), it was pretty much a big group just flying around and around the town to some awesome cheers from the locals. There were a couple attacks but nothing really amounted to much until with about 2-3 laps to go a little dude from Boise took off and put a good sized gap on the field. We didn't think anything of it, thinking he'd fade away and get eaten, but he was able to hold it going into the last lap. With the amazing nimble handling of the Stelvio, I had been loving the corners, taking them ridiculously close, hanging my inside knee and even pedal over the curb. Coming into the last corner, I decided to utilize that awesome grip and handling and take an uber inside line to the straight away. It worked like a charm and suddenly I was out front in no man's land between 1st and the field. I put the hammer down as much as I could and was able to hold off the charging pack and take a 2nd place! Whooo hoo!!!

Crit podium!!!

Afterwards, I booked it back to Petersburg School, the start point for Stage 1 and setup the Subaru RV and hit the hay in anticipation of the last stage.

Cooling down after the crit along the Columbia River.

With a good 4K feet of climbing in 40 miles, the last Stage was looking pretty daunting, especially after the previous two days of racing sitting in the legs. The climbing definitely lived up to what it looked like on paper, painful! The field splintered out pretty fast with a bunch of mini groups scattered throughout the course. I settled in and worked on keeping a good steady pace up the climbs. Although painful, the climbs really let me enjoy the wise saying, "What goes up, must come down....". Oh yeah! After climbing up the gravel road to the top, the descent was SOOO epic! 20mph corners (for cars) are super fun on a bike, especially with a clean swept road! Cruising through the smooth corners, I averaged 36mph for the entire trip downhill. SOO awesome!! The rest of the race was pretty uneventful, I was able work with a small group almost to the finish but then my legs catastrophically blew up so I had to slowly climb the hill to the finish, but luckily had only lost about 4 spots or so. I was still stoked on the day, mainly from the awesome high of getting to rally that awesome descent and also the quality finishes in the earlier stages!

I was super stoked to have gotten a chance to race in such a high quality race. The Dalles is a wonderful town! I'll definitely be back again soon!!

Flying February!

Riding with Bob on Buckhorn Rd.

Wowzers! February has come and gone already! I guess when you're busy and having fun, the days tend to fly by!

This month was chock full of quality training and wrapping up pre-season Trinity Bikes Cycling Team tasks, which kept me quite occupied. It was crazy, but there was lots of fun had!

The first couple weeks this month, handed those of us here in Central Oregon, some amazing riding weather. No precipitation, light clouds, with temps rising into the 50's, it was unreal!!

Climbing out of the valley up Buckhorn Rd.

Hey, my address! Now you can become a stalk....er.....super fan! Haha.

I began to get spoiled with all the warm temps, I actually got to ride with just leg warmers, a long sleeve jersey and my regular shoes!! It was so incredibly nice! We even ate breakfast out in front of the house, which was awesome. Since we are on the main drag through town, we got lots of people rubber necking! Haha.

Bob cleaning a section in the canyon.

With the last little bit of sunshiney warmth, I finally got to ride the infamous Horse Ridge. 8 years living here and I hadn't ridden it! Sad, but hey s'all good, I got out there! It was super fun, the trails were ridiculously tacky and made for some great shredding. It's a fun mellow climb up and then on the way back down....oh boy, it's FUN!!

On one portion of some technical descents, I decided it would be fun to ditch my bike and swing from a tree branch so I wouldn't fly over the edge of a small cliff down to boulders. Sean and Bob thought it was rather hilarious when they got down there and saw my ghost white face as I was pulling my bike back and away from the rocky edge. I called it a day on that particular section. After that, we went across the Hwy to play in the Dry Canyon, which is a really good way to work on your technical riding along with smoothing off all those sharp teeth on your big chainring. Haha.

Wait, it was sunny yesterday.....

Near the end of the Horse Ridge ride, the weather said "Just Kidding!!" and got cold again! I think we got six inches or so of snow in town so it was back to the bundled up rides, thank goodness for all my Pearl winter gear, it's so amazing to be able to ride for three hours in the cold snow and still be comfy and warm!! 

Riding in the cold snow!

Overlooking the Crooked River Gorge.

I got some good snowy rides in and between them I worked with Heather Clark from the Bend Bulletin for a small tidbit of info on the team for an article in the newspaper! That had me scrambling to have the team website finished up a bit sooner than planned. But that was a good thing because I was able to crank it out and launch the "New and Improved" Trinity Bikes Cycling Team site!

Chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream icing covered in ganache!

During the last week of February, our house turned into a small bakery, as Bob and I cranked out two delicious cakes for some of the departing employees at work. It's nice to 

be able to bake something super delicious and then give it away so I don't end up sitting at home and eating it all. Haha. 

Riding the canyon trails/tundra!

This past weekend one of my new teammates, Brian Buskirk, came over from Portland to hang out, get some riding in and take care of some team stuff! Since he came to ride I figured, why not show him what our weather was all about?! Well, he got a great introduction to sub-freezing conditions, as our ride had an average temperature of 19 degrees! It was fun though, cause the snow in the Canyon had been packed in on the trail so we were able to shred some snow/frozen tundra singletrack, and that was an absolute blast. It was extra sweet, as for the prior two weeks, trail riding wasn't happening!! After dropping him off at the house before he froze solid, I finished up the ride and the temp continued dropping to a low of 14 degrees for the last half hour, setting a new record low temperature for me on a ride! Sweet!

I decided to keep up the bakery theme and with help from Bob and Brian, shot our blood sugar  levels through the roof with a batch of the finest cinnamon rolls I have ever made! Oh, wonderful gooey, cinnamon goodness!! YUM!!

Mmmm!

The team waiting to to have photos done.

Along with the sugar high and cold riding I also went to the team photoshoot by Fletcher of FJackson Photo. He got some cool studio shots for us that will be getting used on the team site and possibly some of those full-size wall graphics.........Haha. Man, if I had more chiseled cheekbones, I could be a model, and that would be such a cool thing! It was so much fun to stand there and just look pretty while getting my picture taken....hmmm maybe my next career goal! Haha.

Sean living it up in the limelight!

The sun decided to poke out again during the weekend too, which was great, cause I was truly able to test out my new PivLock V90 Max sunglasses that were just sent out from Smith Optics! They are so comfortable and I must say, look friggin amazing!! 

This here is MY buggy! :)

My ride was awesome, I got to do some muddin' which was fun, and the "Take Me On Your Buggy" song kept replaying in my head...haha. You can get it stuck in yours too, check it out:

Sweet shades!

Well, that about wraps it up for the month! I'm super excited because the first race of the year is now less than two weeks away!! I'll be heading up to Echo for some awesome racing at the Red to Red XC. It's going to be a nice, long weekend with some good camping in there as well! I'll be sure to have a great race report with lots of neato pictures!

Until next time!

The Fire Has Been Lit!

Another fun and busy week in the books! I've been chipping away at the nice and long to-do list for the Trinity Bikes Cycling Team. This week I was able to take some big chunks out of the jersey portion which felt super awesome! Only a couple logos left to get my hands on and then the designs are off to Champ Sys for the nice 8 week creation time!

On Monday I headed down to Rebound SPL to put myself into pain and let someone prick my finger and draw blood every 3 minutes, aka Lactate Threshold test! It actually wasn't that bad at all, I rather enjoyed feeling like I was uber scientific during a training ride! In a way, it reminded me of Rocky IV when Drago is getting trained by the top Soviet trainers.....except this gym was really light, not dark and dreary like in the movie!

It was definitely cool though, to see some measurable numbers that I can use as comparisons of my fitness down the road, but especially to give me some more drive to achieve my goals! Sweet!!

Off Season Training

This is definitely an overdue post....if only I had a nickel for everytime that got posted in a blog, I'd be rich! Things have been staying good and busy with everything going on between work, training, vacation and team stuff! 

Training has been coming along nicely and has really been staying interesting with the wide variety of conditions I've been in. It really dawned on me when I was in Mexico, running around the beach sweating up a storm with just a pair of shorts on. Between the week before Christmas and the Mexico trip, I trained through 8 inches of snow, torrential rain, snowshoeing after midnight in the teens and then the 85 degree / 95% humidity in Mexico! Talk about a full spectrum of weather. I guess I didn't have to deal with hail.......but there is plenty of winter left for that to actually happen!

A hidden beach north of Sayulita Mexico.

 Breaking trail along the canal in the nice snow!

Bringing the New Year in on snowshoes.

The Holidays were a total blast! My Christmas weekend sugar high started at work on the 24th and continued on through to the 26th. My mom and stepmom just totally rocked it this year, I ate so many delicious cookies and candies! So, to compensate for Christmas weekend, New Years Eve I went snowshoeing with some awesome people. Bobbers, Ashuly, Chris and the wonderful Ashley. We left the car at around 10pm, went out to a shelter, hung out a bit and then got back to the car at 4am. It was easily the coolest (literally too) New Years ever! Snowshoeing out in the Cascades at night is so fun, I highly recommend it!

Time to go put myself into pain and then let someone take my blood every couple of minutes! (LT test!) I'll post an update soon with how that goes!!