Calf cramps .. arghhhhh

So I forgot to mention in my race report the most frustrating part of the day, indeed of this last week. Calf cramps!

On thursday, after doing some hill repeats on my road bike, i was pedaling home at an easy pace when my left calf muscle cramped completely. It was the most painful thing I have experienced in a while. I literally fell over into the bushes in the side of the road, screaming in agony. I chalked it up to poor hydration and electrolyte imbalance and rested it until Fontana.

Well the hike-a-bike section was probably the worst thing for ailing calves but I did OK until the last lap when my right calf cramped up. Not quite as bad as thursday but still painful enough to prevent me from putting too much pressure on my right leg. This had some negative impacts on my handling as I couldn’t weight the pedals into corners. I ended up loosing my mojo, getting frustrated and sloppy and fearing for another full-on cramp session with every twinge of the calf muscle. Not the best way to spend your last lap.

I was well hydrated and electrolyted. One thing I’ve recognized is that my training has almost no exercises targeting the calves. No running for crosstraining. No calf raises at the gym. Hell I don’t even stretch them most of the time. Seems like the forgotten lower leg muscles have started making a desperate plea for help.

EDIT: The cure to cramps has to be somewhere on this page .. just have to find out what it is!

Fontana national 09

Ow. That hurt. The Fontana race, round #2 of the US Kenda Cup West and the California State Series, is now wrapped up and written in the books.

Bob Wilcher and I got up at the crack of dawn to make the trip down to Fontukey. We were through LA by the time the sun rose .. that just ain’t right. We met up with Gary Douville and Pete Sproul in the parking lot and “warmed up” by attacking the courses first brutal climb (more on that later).

A bunch of new faces crawled out of the woodworks and the competition was pretty heavy in the Cat 1 30-34. Right away the clusterf@#$ck overlap of classes began – jockying for position on the narrow singletrack became a large tactical part of the race.

The first climb was loose and STEEP. It was rideable (I did it in my warmup!) but during the race it was just more economical to run up the last part.

20% grade, 1/5 mile, 200 vertical ft, 100% fun

Then came a singletrack section, followed by a paved climb, another singletrack grinder climb (totally rideable) then some primarily downhill twisting singletrack. A hard steep left onto the fireroad was really interesting as it was about 6 inches of fluffy sand at a 20% grade with a 90 degree turn and a drainage ditch at the bottom. I managed to put lots of time by hitting this smoothly every lap – but I turned around to see some amusing scenarios unfold behind me! From there the fireroad took you back to a small climb, another small tech descent, more fireroad then the singletrack BMXy trail leading back to the start.

It was a shorter lap than the one I had raced at Fontana earlier in the year, only 4.5 miles. But that climb was brutal and took a lot of mental energy – that 1/4 mile felt 10x as long!

Gary, of course, won the race by several minutes. He took off on the first grinding climb never to be seen again. After the positions settled out, I battled for 5th place with Humberto Castro and Justin Mann for most of the race. It was a lot of fun riding with these guys, we each pushed each other at different times as we all had slightly different strengths. Justin’s words of encouragement definitely saved me from mental collapse at a few points! Justin ended up 5th, Humberto 6th, myself in 7th all separated by about 20 seconds. Bob had a rough time with the technical descents and ate sagebrush a few times, coming in at 17th place.

A fun race but I felt kinda flat. It was a tough training week for me and I felt fatigued a bit. I was able to sustain a good threshold pace but couldn’t turn the dial up that one extra notch when it counted. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – but only if you recover first!

It was a fun scene, lots of people out, a lot of energy, sponsors and vendors and of course free In and Out Burgers. Very fun .. my only wish was that they could’ve done it on the same day as the Cat 2’s so the whole team could make the trip on the same day.

Coming up next… another brutal week of training then Sagebush Safarri in san diego next weekend.

Gaviota Hour of Power

Or something like that. The goal for today’s workout: use the power meter to pace myself for a steady 1 hour effort just below my threshold.

My Functional Threshold Power (FTP or the power you’re able to sustain in a 1 hour race) is somewhere around 320 to 330 watts. So I pedaled west, out 101 towards Gaviota, with a goal of keeping my wattage at 290-300 for the next hour.

I ended up doing 310 watts average (315 watts normalized power) for the hour interval. The interesting part is that, although I paced myself fairly well with respect to my power output, my heart rate shows drastically different stories at either end of my hour interval. Lots of “aerobic decoupling“. Without the power meter, my instinct would have been to push it too hard early and ease off towards the end – a strategy that might give me a more steady HR but would not give me that sustained muscular endurance.

Anyways, I promise this blog won’t become a power-meter blog. I will attempt to resist the urge…

Keyesville Classic

Here’s a quick race report: About 10 chicken ranchers loaded up on Friday night for the trek out to Lake Isabella .. a beautiful reservoir along the Kern river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It was an hour or so outside of bakersfield and we got to our accommodations at 11:30 and promptly passed out.

Dave “The Clock” Letterri was rallying the troops for a 7:30 departure while I sucked down some horrid hotel coffee. At the race venue, the vibe was very laid back, friendly and reminded me of early MTB races I did back in new england in the early 90s.

Plus they had free coffee that was pretty darn good. It was cool to see all the old vintage bikes too.

Benko, Pete and I had pit crew duty handing out bottles during the sport race. Gabe and Dave won the 30-44 and 45+ classes respectively – Chicken ranch cleaning up the sport class! Ramirez was also proud of his “off-podium” finish (for some reason this picture had me rolling on the floor!):

The expert race went off and Gary Douville sprinted away, never to be seen again. I went out HARD which is a departure from my normal strategy. I stuck in 3rd for the majority of the race but got passed mid-lap 3 by a Sho-Air rider… my legs didn’t have it in them to keep up. I was running postitive splits and I didn’t like the feeling (though it was nice knowing where your competitors are). Ended up 4th on the day, Benko came in right behind at 6th. Pete battled cramps and came in a few minutes later.

The course was FUN. Like a giant BMX course. It was smooth (almost no reason why anyone would need full suspension on this course) and non-technical with lots of steep ups and downs, banked corners, whoop-dee-doos and only 2 semi-extended climbs.

I had a great time.. this race was more about training and hanging out with the group than it was about results .. that being said I was psyched to pull off a 4th place. And I’ll count that as a 3rd place since Gary really should be in the Pros anyways (dude was winning expert races 3 years ago!)

Here’s some more pics.. enjoy.

My new toy

So after reading a ton about training with power, I convinced myself that I should, no MUST, train with a power meter to get to the next level. Yes, I am the most susceptible human in the world when in comes to bike marketing.

But it was too expensive. So I waited, sold a few old bikes from the stable and found a killer deal on a powertap comp wheel. Now the new toy has arrived. I installed it last night with a dazzling array of wires and zip ties (The cheapo Comp hub is the only non-wireless model left in the Saris lineup but for the price…). The videos on the Saris website are helpful and got me rolling with the computer setup, calibration, and getting it talking with my Garmin HR strap. I also purchased a copy of WKO+ software and have been playing around with it.

And, based on some power calcs from past hillclimbs I was able to estimate my Functional Theshold Power (FTP) to be about 322 watts. I plan on doing more accurate testing in the future but for now this gives me a good starting point to calculate my Coggan-based training zones (which I have color-coded and taped to my handlebar to solidify my dorky image).

And yes, the Garmin 305 GPS will still accompany me on long rides as well. I might have to bust out my programming kung-fu to figure out how to merge the powertap and gps data…

Riding to work this am I can definitely see how the power meter will help … I can already see that knowing the body’s output rather than your aerobic system’s response is so crucial to pacing. I must have been starting my intervals off WAY too hard and then fading at the end as I was basing them soley on heart rate. I’m doing an unstructured hill interval ride this afternoon to gather some more data and refine my zones, calculate some TSS, IF, CTL, TSB etc.. This is going to way too much fun…

Counting Coup 2009

44 mile MTB race, point-to-point with 8800 ft of vertical starting at 5:30 am. Am I insane? Probably. But it might be worth it since it was a great time and I got my first victory of the year!

Packing felt different than your standard race. I was even more OCD than normal, going over my checklist again and again to make sure I didn’t forget any crucial tools, clothing or food.

Joselyne and I woke up at 1:45 (yes thats AM) and drove down to OC. It was a 5:30am start with lights along blackstar canyon road (20 min outside of Tustin).

We started by climbing a 10 mile fireroad in the near dark. At least a few folks forgot to bring a light and crashed in the ruts. After about an hour of climbing, we hit the ridge. Seeing the sun rise over the inland empire from the ridge top was a sight I will not soon forget.

Then the road traversed the ridge; the up-and-down roller coaster was fun on the way down and brutally steep on the way up (we’re talking granny gear grinds ala the Catway trails). Next it was a 3 mile semi-technical singletrack descent with lots of exposed cliffs and loose shale. The next climb was the kicker – almost 14 miles of steady uphill fireroad taking us up Silverado Canyon, Maple Springs, Modjeska Peak on the way to Santiago peak at 5500 ft.

There were huge patches of snow/ice on the backside that made the descent interesting. (btw a lot of these pics are from various riders on STR .. I was not dedicated enough to take consistent photos)

Down a little lower the descent down Holy Jim trail was epic .. tight, twisty, exposed technical singletrack. Lots of drop offs, berms, stream crossings and great views. For 8 miles. From there its was cranking the big ring back along a heavily-used dirt road to the finish line.

For as many riders as there were on the opening climb, I spent most of the day riding alone, chasing down a few lone riders on the climbs. Once again I used my start-slow-and-work-up method which preserved my energy for the final miles but left me with absolutely no clue as to where my competitors were. I battled with leg cramps all day but somehow managed to keep the legs turning. I ended up finishing in 4:20 and was pretty delirious at this point .. when they told me I won, it took a few minutes to register.

I should mention though that this race runs concurrent with the Vision Quest which adds on another 14 miles and 3000+ vertical .. most of the top dogs (incl. Manny Prado who holds the course record) were doing the longer version. I wonder how the VQ split times compared to mine?

And to top it all off, the post race festivities at O’Neil Park included lunch by El Pollo Loco (I kinda felt like I was cheating on Chicken Ranch .. I swear it was just a one-time thing), naps under the sycamore trees and many more painful leg cramps.

All the kudos are belong to Joselyne for her support, driving, help with packing and her 10.25 mile run to pass the time while she waited for me to finish at Trabuco (running 10 miles is far more hardcore than biking 44!)

Probably the best race/cycling event I’ve been a part of. The vibe was more of an epic group adventure than a race. The Warriors Society and the volunteers that made it happen deserve a huge thank you! The aid stations were fully stocked with gels, bar and banannas, the logistics were well organized (no small feat for a point-to-point wilderness race) and the crowd support for such a remote race was truly impressive.

The event only has room for 350 riders each year and they sold out this year within the first day .. when registration rolls around for 2010, I’d urge anyone with aspirations of epic MTB racing to sign up.

EDIT: Results are in. And some photos of me here and here.

2009 US Cup #1 – Bonelli Park

First “big” race of the year and I got on the podium!!!!

3rd Place out of 24 in the Cat1 30-34 race. Here are the results[pdf]. I ALMOST got second place but was beat out by a few seconds. But I did surprise myself by getting on the podium in my first Cat1 endeavor and had some good times and good racing.

Bob Wilcher, Jos and I packed up for a 7am departure and drove on down. Despite my Tom Tom GPS’ attempt to get us lost in the RV park, we made it to the event in plenty of time to register (actually we were 2 hours early) and parked right next to a nice park with some soon-to-be-much-needed shade. Jos went off for a 9 mile run (which, in my mind, is way more hardcore than anything us MTBers did on this day).

This was the first day in recent memory that I rode without arm and leg warmers. The heat was kind of a shock to my system. It was easily 85+ degrees in the sun by the time we started at 12:30.

Didn’t get a chance to pre-ride the course but the word from some of the other chickens was “easy” .. I’m not sure what they were comparing it to. It wasn’t technical at all but had a few sketchy fast, loose corners. And the climbing was killer.. there were 2 miles of exposed fireroad climbs to start the lap, then a series of really steep little punchy climbs intermixed with some singletrack and short sections of pavement. A really fun course!

Before the race, I realized I had forgotten to bring any food with me
- Ramirez and Cuttler saved the day by donating some Gu packets. Bob W and I started out pretty conservatively and tried to just work our way up through the race. But Bob got a flat half-way through lap 2 and had some issues with his CO2 which set him back 10 minutes. Without that mishap, I’m convinced we would have 2 chickens on the podium!

I kept motoring and was able to put a lot of time on those steep short climbs in the middle of the course. Everyone else was shifting down into their granny gear but you just had to keep it in the middle ring, crank up it for 30 sec, quickly recover, repeat. At the end of lap three I had no idea where I was compared to everyone else in my age group and I burnt my last match chasing down a group of three riders in the last 1/2 mile. Turns out one of those guys was the eventual 2nd place but my brain was not functioning properly and I convinced myself that he wasn’t in my age group so I didn’t need to out-sprint him. The way the finish was set up really discouraged a sprint finish; a 180 degree paved turn about 50 feet before the finish line with a narrow roped-off shoot leading into it so there was basically no way to do it safely. At least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Intersting stats from looking at my garmin data: Pacing was spot on as my lap times were 31:38, 32:10, 31:47. Nice. My average heart rate per lap was not so steady; it rose steadily as expected from 166, 169, to 171. My HR was in zone 2 for 3:40, zone 3 for 8:10, zone 4 for 34:22 and zone 5 for 43:32. That’s almost three-quarters of an hour above redline! To put that in perspective, my entire weekend of road racing a few weeks ago (cantua and pine flat) only saw 16 minutes in zone 5 for both races combined.

Other chickens: Turns out Big Rob (in his first ever MTB race) got first place in the Cat3 45+. Dave L. got 5th in Cat2 40 – 44. We’ll have to wait for the results to see everyone else.

Well this was a big confidence boost for me and proved to myself that I definitely belong in Cat 1. Up next … another hard week of training then it’s on to the Counting Coup!