If I’ve been a top finisher in Longview, Meunster and Denton, and I’ve won Ft. Davis, Glen Rose, and maybe one other, does that make me the Rally King of North Texas? Is it worth anything? 
Surely it’s worth some street cred, even if it’s a “T-Shirt Ride”. You know what, that’s more than I get from some of these damned road races I enter every year….
Archive for November, 2008
23
Nov
08
Just a quick thought…
Well, I had a great long-winded report but somehow I deleted it without saving it, so here’s the summary.
I made the race, er, rally. Godsey was there and he definitely animated it, with several attacks starting early, but it was the attack and follow-on at roughly mile 16 or so that set us up for the winning break. Godsey, Ian Sewalt, and myself, went out and pacelined it all the way to Valley View, where a small group caught us, but then fell back again. We ended up in a group of 5, and finished about 12 minutes ahead of everyone else, even after we stopped in Krum for Gatorade and cookies. One dork from Geriatrix didn’t stop – claimed he couldn’t hear us because he had his earphones in, so officially, he ‘won’, but I’m still racking this up as a win in my book. I probably COULD have won it, and we cracked the peloton severely, only slowing down to keep Ian with us, since he was nursing a hamstring cramp.
Final time for the event, 3:22, KJ’s about 2600, Pnorm 248. It was about 42 degrees at the start, and never really warmed up above 50 or so. The winds were negligable.
Well, the final class was held today at the Cycling Center of Dallas, and we got some really good results from at several cyclists.
I think I’m most impressed with Karen Lester, who blew some significant values in her last TT, and raised her threshold by about 20+ points. I’ll get the W/Kg when I go back over there next week (we’re supposed to have the floor installed, but I won’t hold my breath.) Other athletes were, honestly, a little burned out at the end, and suffered from some flatlining. However, their mid-quarter results and improvements were held pretty tightly, and no one lost any ground from week 6. On a personal note, I moved up from 253 to 275/60, and my 20mmp showed a 289 at one point at the end of October.
I’ve been trying out RaceDay from PhysFarm for several months now, and honestly, while it does need some work on the interface, the modeling and Performance Predictor are really, spookily, spot on. That’s pretty exciting. I’ll see how I do at the Turkey Roll in two weekends. I want to rip that ride open, since I’ve had to escort other riders on the event for the past two years.
Just got back from a trip to Austin and Fredericksburg with Amy, and we met up with a bunch of friends while we were down there. We left on Saturday morning, headed down to downtown Austin, and hung out at “Mellow Johnny’s”, Lance Amrstrong’s bike shop, for a couple of hours, and also walked around downtown. The UT-Baylor game was on, but the audience was pretty subdued, and the day was really pretty warm. While I was at Mellow Johnny’s, I got to watch Kevin Livingston do some Lactate Testing on a couple of kids from a Cincinatti Jr. Development Team. He also has a MultiRider System down in the basement of the shop, as well as a Retul bike fitting system. I didn’t get to speak with him, but from the looks of it, he’s mostly using RacerMate’s in-house 3-d videos, and not ErgVideo. That may give the CCD a leg up.
Saturday night, we hooked up with some friends who had traveled with us in Italy, and also met up with Kevin and Jennifer Martin, clients and friends, who are moving to Austin. We met them at a wine bar that a friend from Dallas has opened, and I was also lucky enough to get some time in with David Nayer, of Nimble Wheels. David’s factory burned down several months ago, and he’s been unable to get product back up and running, while he deals with insurance claims, etc. He’s pretty upset about it, but he’s also his usual confident self. It remains to be seen, however, if his wheels will ever go back in to production, or if he will move in to car and motorcycle racing, like he has mentioned in the past.
On my trip to Fredericksburg that evening, I got a freakin’ ticket. I hate Johnson City. It’s a small, stupid town with a highway running through it, and not much else. Grrrr.
Sunday morning, we got up and rode a great little 30-mile loop around the peach orchards NE of town, and then went down to Luckenbach. The girls had never been there before, and it was in its’ full Walt-Disneyesque Splendor, complete with roughly 200 motorcycles, fat dudes, fat chicks, lots of black leather and dew rags, a pet steer you could get your picture with, and us… four fairly skinny folks with bicycles.
We took the back roads home.
Kevin and Jennifer headed back to Austin that night, and Amy and I drove around looking for a cycling-centric B & B. We found it, and by golly, if we didn’t fall in love with it completely while we were taking the tour. We loved it so much, we actually signed up to go there for Christmas!
Monday Amy and I just did an easy 20-miler on River Road, and then on the way back, we visited the airport hotel, which is decked out in the motif of “South Pacific” in the 1940’s. It’s times like this that I really do worry about the general aviation industry — While we were down in Fredericksburg, we learned that Mooney Aviation, makers of some fast single engine aircraft in the neighboring town of Kerrville, had shut their doors. This recession sucks. I don’t have a clue as to how we’re going to remedy the situation.
I don’t think I’ll make it to Hellweek this year – I need to save up for France. I also want to race Fayetteville, so we’ll see how it all works out.
