On one of the message boards I frequent, I got some advice to take GU energy gel before my snake time trial at the beginning of the month. I did. Despite being what I thought was out of shape, I sort of kicked butt and felt great, during the race and also afterwards. I then redid the snake 2 weeks after that. I wrote up about it, and damn I bombed. I was slower, didn’t feel as good and totally bonked on that ride. Also recently I started running 5K’s once a week. The only difference between last week and this week was that I took a GU before this week’s monday run. I knocked 3 minutes off my time! Woah! Last week, I remember about 3/4 of the way through I was struggling. Had to focus on deep breaths, slow up on the uphills etc. Today? The further I went, the better I felt. It was weird.
I don’t know exactly what type of junk is in this little magical package, but its gotta be something that isn’t on the label. Maybe its all mental, maybe its all something else, but I totally feel like superman after taking one of these things.
We’ll see how they work again this weekend. Got time trial #2 at the snake. First official TT was 3hrs 1 minute. I’m going for a real goal of 2:45 and a stretch of 2:30. Not sure if I’ll be capable of doing that, but I’m gonna GU up every 45 minutes like the box says, so with my month of “training” and a ton of energy crack, we’ll see what happens.
I know there are already a bunch of tools for doing this same thing, but I’m a big google fanboi. The nice thing about goo.gl is they have an API which makes accessing the shortener easy. Matthew Flashen already wrote some JS for a bookmarklet for this. You just save that into your bookmarks, I saved it to my Delicious bookmarks, and you can call it on whatever URL. It alerts you the shortened URL and just copy and paste from there. Sweet!
It’s been a fun and relaxing couple of weeks. Its been kind of nice. Not to say that work and my normal weekday has not been super hectic, but just been a bit more relaxing and fun during my time off and weekends, including a great weekend that is finishing up.
I’m still riding the heck out of bikes. Rode the Snake Creek Gap again, and will be heading back for Time Trial #2 in a couple of weekends. Was actually harder the 2nd time around. I went with a friend and we pushed harder for the 1st half. I also didn’t take any Gu gel with me. Took a wrong turn about 75% of the way in and added an extra mile. That totally took all my energy and desire away and I ended up “bonking” finishing 20 minutes over what I did 3 weeks ago. Just hit a wall with 2 miles to go. Took a couple of falls too and scraped up my rear derailleur pretty good. Almost seems like these $$$$ mtb parts are almost expandable when one is going on rock gardens every 2 weeks. I’ll make sure to have plenty of that super gel and more desire and training when I visit again in 2 weeks.
I’ve also re-started working on the house again. Got inspired by Lauren to worry about fixing what still needs work rather then looking at things such as hardwood floor upgrades. Got some new art for the walls and Lauren got some great photos of mine framed. Sure wakes up the downstairs. I’ll be working on finishing the crown molding this week, and then tackle that damn bathroom eventually.
Lastly, started work on the race car too. Kind of scared me when I realized just how much crap there is to be done in the off-season. I did decide to make this year a bit light and only hit the big and important events. Going to Road Atlanta twice, the SARRC/MARRS at VIR, one of the Daytona doubles (or Barber race) and then the ARRC. Going to skip the ITFest as thats just too much of a haul and $$ expenditure at this point.
On second though, scratch that whole “more relaxed on my time off” thing off the list. Going to be a crazy busy and fun spring!
Nothing really that big, but I ran pretty much my first 5k distance today. Jogged for 3.1 miles around the neighborhood in right at 33 minutes. Nothing spectacular as far as speed, but then again, 6 months ago, no way I could have run that. I’m getting in shape! My goal is a 25 minute 5K, so now I have a nice path to follow and can track my progress.
Did a ride at Blankets Creek a little north of my house this morning. Was a beautiful day, 30 degrees, nice and sunny, and half the trail was still covered with snow, the other with mud. Here is a video from the GoPro. Gotta fix the angle a bit for next time to show more in front of the bike, and also, gotta get the GoPro HD. Its amazing how spoiled I am in saying “man, this standard definition footage from a camera stuck to the side of my bike, kinda sucks in quality” But it totally does compared to the HD stuff that comes out of the in-car cam.
About 3 weeks ago I went for a cross country ride in the Chattahoochee National Forest along the Pinhoti trail. There was some awesome singletrack and it was a pretty challenging ride. Was great prep for the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial that I did last weekend. I’ll be going back one of the next two weekends to get more training. Zoey had a great time as well and rocked out for all 15 miles. She made fun of me the whole time for going so slow, running up and down the hills as I was pedaling my ass off. I only was able to outpace her on the fireroad descent on the way back to the car. I think her max speed is ~15mph and I was going 20+. Been uploading my rides to garmin connect. Pretty cool tool for mapping rides and especially useful to see how much of a better shape I’m in now. http://connect.garmin.com/activity/21292424
Did my first MTB race this morning. Damn it was fun. It was the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial run by the NWGA Sorba chapter. Snake Creek Gap is on the Pinhoti trail and the time trial is 17 miles of singletrack along the trail. The trail was everything from nice climbs to awesome downhills to crazy crazy rock gardens like I’ve never seen. About 2700ft vertical feet of climbing over the 17 miles.
The day started out way cold. 24 degree temperature with wind chill at 12. Brrr. The trail started with a fairly easy but long climb all the way to the top of the mountain. I didn’t push hard as I was unsure of myself over the distance, so I did a bunch of granny gear spinning, and I felt really good as we got to the top. Shitty news was that the GoPro screwed up again, so no video. Sending that thing back next week. There was some absolutely rocking downhill after this. Everything from a few switchbacks to rocks hidden under leaves. Wish I had the camera. After the downhill, climbed a rough fire road to the 1/2 way point and had some water and fig newtons.
From here, the trail got way hard. Rocks here, rocks there, rocks everywhere. Uphill on rocks, downhill on rocks, man lots of rocks I cleared a lot of the climbs and all of the downhills. Only had 1 fall and it was pretty much at no speed as I didn’t carry enough speed and the front tire got caught on a boulder. Again, did a lot of granny gear spinning instead of trying to push a lower gear, which was a great idea considering my current level of fitness. There was also a decent bit of hike a bike, including a big uphill section that was straight damn uphill. I got passed by a couple of the “money class” riders and even they walked it.
Got to the top of that climb, to the cell towers, and the rest of the way was downhill. Some gravel, some singletrack, and then the last mile was pavement. I pushed on these, and ended up with a 31.5mph top speed on the road.
My original goal was “to finish”. I finished in right under 3 hours, which isn’t bad at all. I’ll be back for the February time trial, and I’ll be able to push more on all the climbs. New Goal? 2:30, which would put me into the Top 3 in my class. We’ll see what happens!
So I don’t have to google for this one again, since I won’t remember it. Here is a quick regex to verify that your email address is valid. Should take care of most email addresses.
var emailRegEx = /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i;
I’ve been wanting a bike repair stand since I’ve gotten more into mountain biking. Makes no sense to send the bike off to the bike shop each time it needs some adjustments done, or even if it needs some more in depth service. The thing that is annoying is that a decent repair stand is $150 or so. Anything cheaper then that, and the clamp is going to suck and its going to be very unstable. Its not that I’m too cheap to spend $150, quite the contrary but its just a few pieces of metal and a clamp, and I’ve been itching to play with my welder anyways.
I got inspiration and the clamp design from Jake Khuon and his DIY repair stand but decided to change the stand part of it, as I have a welder and have been itching to use it. Instead of using a mounting flange and a big piece of wood, I used 2 45 degree bends and a T to make the feet for my stand. Ends up functioning just like the expensive store bought stands. Since everything is screwed together, I needed to make sure the T fitting didn’t rotate with the 45 degree fittings, as that is the main base of my stand. Here is where the welder came in. If you don’t have access to a welder, I bet that gooping JB weld onto the threads and all over that fitting would do the trick as well. I used some old radiator hose I had laying around to make the cushion for the seat post (instead of inner tube like Jake), as well as on the bottom of the stand to cushion it off the floor for stability. All I have left is to spray some flat black paint all over it, but I’ll do that when its sunny and nice outside one weekend.
I practiced some welds on pieces of scrap metal and then got to work on my pipe fittings. The welds came out pretty good. I haven’t bought the gas setup yet, so I was using Flux wire, which usually makes pretty ugly welds, but I was able to get some decent beads layed down. I’m looking forward to getting the gas setup and using the regular wire to get cleaner welds. Then it will be on to project #2 and #3, the fire system install in the race car, and a tire rack for my trailer.
The bike in the pics below is my old one, the new Trek is all packed up in the car ready for its night ride tomorrow, so I didn’t feel like busting it out just to get pics. I didn’t want to have my new $2k bike hanging on the bike rack in the work parking lot, so I took the wheels off and put it in the hatch. I’ll take some later once I get it dirty
So I decided to pull the trigger on my new mountain bike. I went to the local bike shop, Free Flite, and demoed the Trek Fuel EX8. It is a real nice bike, and a bit pricey, so I figured I might as well try it out for real before putting my $$ in. Took the demo to Blankets Creek and had some fun. The bike is a whole new ballgame coming from my Giant hardtail. The rear shock absorbs all the imacts, roots, rocks, etc that used to hit my butt. With that, I was way less tired after my normal Dwelling loop. I then got on my hardtail and did another loop just to see what the back to back differences were. I was nowhere near as fast on the Giant and sections I just breezed through in the middle of the rear ring on the Trek, I had to almost use the granny gear to get through. Wow! The brakes on the Trek are also incredible. I always thought the mechanical Avid disks that came on the Giant were awesome, but these Elixir brakes blow them away. There is almost no lever pressure to get them to stop, and the are nice and progressive.
I headed right back to the bike shop and bought my new bike; Got the satin black paint instead of white. I did have the shop install my new SLX crank, as well as the rear cassette as they were both upgrades over what came on the Trek. Might as well use those on the nicer bike instead of on my Giant. After bringing the bike home, I set the shock air pressures, made all the cockpit adjustments and made sure all the bolts were tight.
This morning I headed out for the bike’s maiden voyage at Blankets. I wanted to get some trail miles on it before I headed up to Pinhoti on monday. The brakes needed to get bedded in and I wanted to make sure all the cables were stretched out. Instead of taking it on the Advanced trails, I just did a loop through the Dwelling trail. I wanted to take it easy and rest up for monday. As I figured, everything was perfect and it was a fun, easy ride. http://www.everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=429441 Can’t wait for monday!
But it totally does compared to the HD stuff that comes out of the in-car cam. 
