Changing Colors

It was maybe two weeks ago that I happened to take a good look at my mountain bike leaning against the wall in the basement--the same bike I’ve ridden maybe three times since buying it earlier this year--when I thought to myself, You know, I really should carve out some time to get on that thing again before it gets too cold.

Sure enough the opportunity arose. Yesterday morning my lady friend Stephanie and I hit the road and headed north (actually, we first had to drive south until we made a right onto 287 West and then another right onto 87 North) up to the New Paltz area to do some off-road riding with a crew composed of Dr. Rob, his wife Cecilia (apologies if I misspell any names), Anne D., Benny and his wife May. Were we all riding? Nope. The girls, with the exception of Anne, went out for some hiking around Lake Minnewaska and then shopping through town while Dr. Rob led the rest of us through the trails, but before I even get started on that, Benny and May presented us with a mussette all but stuffed with Clif bars, Clif gel shots, and Clif shot blocks while we were getting ready.

“Mother of God,” I mumbled under my breath, my eyes feasting on the horde of nutritional goodies. Grabbing some orange Shot blocks and a vanilla gel, we were ready to roll.

We hit the road and got the legs warmed up with a ten-minute climb up to the trail. It’s never easy to start a ride with that much climbing, but sometimes you just do what you have to do, especially when the air’s as cool as it is and you know you’re in for a hell of a day.

(Honestly, my only concern starting the ride yesterday was that terrible duo, Dr. Rob and Anne. If those two nut jobs decided at any point to put the hammer down, I knew I’d be in for a painful morning. Thankfully, neither of the two decided they were in the mood to try and kill me, so it all worked out for the best and I can actually walk today.)

Overall, we had an unbelievable day, at least in my opinion. The weather cooperated, none of us had any mechanicals, no one crashed (except Anne, and I wouldn’t exactly call her tip-over a crash considering we were doing all of 3 MPH heading up one of the steepest parts of the trail and she was laughing as she went down), and everybody made it to lunch. Is that a good day in the mountains? I would say it is. I would say it was a terrific day.

Wait. I forgot about the traffic on the way home. Ah well. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good. Know what I mean?

After roughly three-and-a-half hours on the bikes and a much-needed lunch at the Gilded Otter--where we met up with the ladies after their excursions--we were done for the day when that fabulous mussette that Benny and May had so graciously offered earlier in the day came back out of Dr. Rob’s trunk.

“Take the whole thing,” Benny offered. “I’m swimming in that stuff.”

“Are you sure?” The man had might as well just presented me with a check for a million dollars.

Anne didn’t want any and neither did Dr. Rob. “Are you sure?” I asked everybody again. I should’ve asked Stephanie to pinch me just to make sure I was awake. In the bag were at least half a dozen Clif bars, just as many gels, and a lot of Shot blocks.

“Take it,” Benny said.

That man now has a friend for life.

Below are some pics . . . oh, wait. I almost forgot the donuts. The girls picked up a box of apple cinnamon donuts in town before lunch. Polishing one off, Stephanie and I hopped in my truck. On the way out of the parking lot, I rolled down my window when Dr. Rob offered me another donut.

“Man, this was the best day EVER!” I said, grinning from ear to ear and stuffing my face with yet another donut.

Anyway, below are the pics from our excursion. Looking forward to the next round, amigos!















You know what? I probably should've taken a picture of all that stuff Benny and May brought, not to mention those donuts.

Down South

Saturday morning, I found myself back on Staten Island with my gear and my bike, ready to ride from New Dorp to St. George to whatever that industrial / junkyard area near the Bayonne Bridge is called to the Outerbridge past the mall down Arthur Kill Road up those godforsaken hills to the bagel shop and down Hylan Boulevard back to New Dorp.

Riding in Staten Island is always something of an adventure. If the gas-guzzling SUVs illegally hopping across the double-yellow line to speed head-on into bicycle traffic (meaning us) and blast through steady red lights don’t provide enough entertainment, all that’s required is a keen ear to absorb all the conversation one would never hear during a group ride with the Westchester Cycling Club. For example, after coming to a stop, Kelly realized a screw had embedded itself into her rear tire.

“I got screwed and I didn’t even realize it,” she said, to which someone else responded, “You going to try and pull it out or are you just going to leave it in?”

Apart from that, what I definitely don’t miss are the potholes. That’s not to say upper Westchester is pothole free, because it’s certainly not that, but after two-and-a-half hours on the road in Staten Island, I was amazed my bike was still in one piece.

So that happened. And other things happened, but nowhere near as exciting. I read on VeloNews.com that Johan Bruyneel may lead the Astana team and he may take Levi Leipheimer and Alberto Contador with him.

A quick word about Contador. I may be repeating myself here, but does anyone really believe that a twenty-four-year-old kid was in a position to beat a guy like Michael Rasmussen (who was probably swimming in EPO and other doping drugs) on natural ability alone? I think not.

And if Leipheimer’s going with Johan, does that mean Mr. Leipheimer’s comfortable and confident in Bruyneel’s ability to get his riders doped up as efficiently as possible without getting caught? I think so.

More on that. Take a guy like Basso who tells everyone, “Fuentes had my blood but I never doped. I only intended to dope.” Do Basso and his lawyers and the media actually expect us to believe a bunch of crap like that? They expect us to swallow a line like that after Basso absolutely destroyed everyone in the Giro? Are you kidding me?

I think I’ve been reading too much on professional cycling racing. I really need to tone it down, or better yet, just tune it out. While I enjoy watching some cycling on TV every now and again—and I admit to owning the 2006 Tour de France 12-hour DVD set—it really doesn’t do much for me when it comes to my own cycling, so why bother?

Done and Done

So the bike’s fixed now. Two-hundred dollars later, my shift lever now shifts nine times, the rear derailleur hanger has been straightened, I’ve got a new rear tire (apparently the Hutchinsons that came with the bike are softer than a meter maid’s backside and not exactly suitable for use on a trainer), a headset / head tube that no longer clanks every time I stand up, and I also splurged on the Deluxe Tune-Up for $59.99.

I know, that’s absolutely thrilling news, although for a total of $197, I was kind of hoping they might clean the bike up a bit but when I brought it home this past Saturday, it actually seemed dirtier than it had been when I dropped it off the previous week. I was also under the impression that $197 would include a few drops of lube for the chain, but thirty minutes after hitting the road, I realized that expectation must have been a tad bit too high considering the squealing coming from the drive train.

Regardless, after a two-week layoff, I’m now back on the bike getting the legs back into shape for . . . the end of the season. Not that I raced enough to say I had an actual “season,” but it’s only a matter of weeks before it’s dark by 5 PM and the only time you get outside to ride is Saturdays and Sundays--granted it’s not raining or snowing--and you do so bundled in a few swaddling layers of polypropylene, neoprene, polyester, nylon, cotton, and wool to keep from freezing to death. Christ, I can’t believe the summer is over already. My brain just isn’t ready for hours upon hours spent on the trainer in the basement. Maybe I’ll buy a power meter for Christmas (notice it’s Christmas and not the holidays) to make myself feel better.

Just maybe.

It's in the shop . . . really

I finally brought my bike to the shop. When I explained the head tube / headset was making a clanking noise, the mechanic grabbed the bars, lifted the front wheel about a foot off the ground, and let go.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Big time.”

Locking the seat tube into a bike stand, he began picking apart my bike. “Come on over here,” he said, inviting me behind the counter. “You’re derailleur hanger is bent. Your brake calipers are loose and aren’t set correctly. Your rear tire is worn down to the threading.” (Apparently, the Hutchinsons that came with the bike don’t do so well with the heat from my trainer.) When he loosened the shift cable and toyed with the shift lever, he added, “You’re right. It’s only shifting eight times. The ball-end of the cable that broke is probably stuck in there.”

That was last Saturday and they’re still working on it. I agreed to the $60 tune-up while we were at it, but the good news is that they were able to fix the shift lever without replacing it.

And since I decided to take a few days off from riding beginning last Monday, I haven’t ridden since September 9th. Today’s the 20th. Man, do I feel all out of sorts or what? Regardless, if I can get the bike back by Saturday (I can only imagine what the financial damage is going to be), I’ll hit the road for the first time in almost two weeks. Thinking about it, the idea of riding again after two weeks off the bike is almost scary. I get the feeling I’ve lost every ounce of fitness I’ve gained over the past year and I’m going to cough up a long on the first serious climb. Rationally, I know that won’t happen, but it’s surprising what the imagination will come up with knowing a particular routine has been broken as long as I’ve broken it this past week-and-a-half.

That's it. That's all I've got right now.

Mechanical Failures

Been a while since I last updated this page, although I’m unsure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, I’ve been busy in the office and haven’t spent all that much time thinking about cycling, although I was thinking about it a lot the past hour as I was down in the basement working on my Jamis.

You know, a few weeks ago if you had asked me how I liked the bike, I would have said, “Love it.” Today, I’m not so sure and I say that as I’ve had mechanical issues the past few weeks including a Shimano 105 shift lever that only seems to want to shift eight times as opposed to the nine times (10-speed) it should be shifting.

When my shifting started acting funny a few weeks ago, I brought the bike home and started tooling with the barrel adjuster on the rear derailleur to try and get the gearing spot-on when the shift cable busted--at the end inside the shift lever. I changed the cable and got it working, but I’m convinced the metal end of the old cable is stuck in the lever and not allowing the shifter to shift nine times the way it should.

Oh well. That just means I can’t hit top gear and how often am I in top gear? Eventually I’ll get around to replacing the shifter, but no rush on that as those things are pricey.

(And I tried adjusting the H-screw on the derailleur but that didn’t help me at all.)

On top of that, I keep getting this loud clicking noise every time I stand up to sprint and I’m convinced it’s coming from the stem/fork. Everything’s tight when I do a check-up and I doubt it’s the crank considering I only hear the noise when I stand up and throw the bike side-to-side when I’m pedaling hard. I also hear a similar click when I hit a big enough hole, so I’m pretty sure it’s coming from the front end, but am I confident enough to take apart the stem and dismantle the fork from the frame? Not exactly.

Eventually, I’ll get that fixed.

And apparently, after having ridden the trainer a few times the past few weeks, the threading in my rear tire is now showing. I only noticed it today while doing climbing repeats at Bear Mountain and at first I thought it normal wear and tear, but after only 2,500 miles? It wasn’t until I had the bike mounted on the trainer tonight while I attempted to adjust the rear derailleur once more that I put the two together. This means I’m going to have to take apart the trainer and make sure that thing’s working the way it’s supposed to considering this never happened on my old bike (and the same trainer).

You know what I’d like? I’d like things to work the way they’re supposed to work. Is that too much to ask? Sheesh.

They Go Really Fast Downhill

I know I’ve said this before and while I don’t want to sound like a broken record, there are a lot of guys up here in Westchester who show up for group rides who I simply don’t understand.

This morning, I drove down to SUNY Purchase for a 44-mile B ride. You know what a B ride means? It means an average speed between 14.0 and 15.5 MPH so when the ride starts and almost half of the guys begin gunning it less than ten minutes later (and I know they’re gunning it because (a) I’ve been on more B+ rides than B rides and (b) I know what a B pace is supposed to do to my heart rate), I have to ask myself, Do these guys know how to read?

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the guys I began riding with a year ago had it all wrong when they slowed down to let the group re-group after short to medium bursts of speed. Maybe waiting for people when they suffer a mechanical is bad etiquette. And maybe waiting for a guy or girl when they’re suffering from leg cramps is what you’re not supposed to do when out for a group spin.

But I don’t think so. I think a group ride is supposed to be exactly that: a GROUP ride, meaning everyone shows up to ride as a group. Sure, you put a few seconds between some people and that’s fine, but a few minutes? Are you kidding? I’ve led two rides up here with the WCC and I can tell you that it is one thankless job and one that I really don’t look forward to doing again.

I really shouldn’t bitch, but it is my blog and I get to bitch as much as what I want. (If you want to bitch, you’re welcome to start your own blogger, which is rather simple, actually.) My point is, though, if you show up for a B ride and can ride a B+ or A- pace, why ride with the B group? Why not go out with a B+ or A- ride? And if there isn’t a B+ thing scheduled the day you want to go out and do a B+ ride, why not set up your own ride and lead a bit yourself to see what it’s like? Go out and see just how much fun it is when a dozen other riders are your responsibility.

So again, maybe it’s just me, but when I think about my riding, I’m always thinking about how I’m going to train harder and ride faster. I think about what I have to do so I can start hanging with the A riders and what I have to do to sit at the front of an A group and set the pace. (That day is probably a long way off, but let me at least have my thoughts.) What I don’t do is show up for C rides as a B+ rider so I can feel good about myself by kicking off the front of the group.

Like I said, though, that’s just me.

What's a Century?

Yesterday was Saturday and on Saturday I rode with the Staten Island group in New Jersey for just under 62 miles. (This particular ride is usually a hair over 63 miles, but without the initial detour to the rest rooms, the full ride came in at just under 62 miles.)

Today, I went out and did 105 miles up here in Westchester with one other member of the Westchester Cycling Club, all of which means I have to finish this update as quickly as humanly possible so I can spend the rest of the day relaxing in bed.

Oy. I spent so much time leaning on my hands today that as I type this, my left pinky finger is refusing to cooperate. And around 2:30, after a shower and a meal that could have fed at least two or three hundred Ethiopian children, I was laying in bed for a power nap when a charley horse sprang up along the inside of my thigh, causing me to scream like a bitch as I jumped out of bed and hobbled from one side of my room to the other. Then, after thirty seconds or so of excruciating pain (I would liken the experience to giving birth, but my frame of reference for such an analogy would cause me to lose all credibility), the cramp simply disappeared, yet it left a little leave-behind. Two hours later, I can still feel something along the inside of my thigh, like a charley horse calling card, constantly reminding me that if Mr. Charley Horse so pleases, he can easily cripple me with little to no warning.

Goddam that guy.

Anyway, the Cheesequake ride yesterday. Dr. Rob called the previous night with an invite. “Can’t do it, buddy,” I explained. “Already have riding plans for tomorrow,” but then, after pressing END on my phone, my pea-sized brain began to churn. You’re spending the night in the city, jackhole, so why not drive in with your bike and your gear and head down to Jersey the following morning?

Not a bad idea, said one of the other voices in my head. Not a bad idea at all, Mr. Donaldson.

At 7:45 Saturday morning, I rolled into the commuter lot and waited. It wasn’t until 7:52 that Anne D. pulled in. Thank god. I was thinking that maybe the guys cancelled the ride and never called me because I had said I wasn’t going to be there in the first place but when I spotted that red VW Beetle, all my fears were put to rest.

Ah.

Once Anne arrived, I started to gear up and strapped on my heart rate monitor, quickly checking my watch to see my heart taking it easy at roughly 70 beats per minute. A second later, Dr. Rob drove by followed by Lester, the crazy Pole. As soon I laid eyes on Lester, my heart rate immediately shot up to 110 or so. For whatever reason, I was sort of hoping for a ride not too nuts, but as soon as I spotted Lester’s face, all that hope vanished.

Damn.

Remarkably, though, the ride wasn’t all that nuts despite Lester’s presence. Don’t get me wrong--there are others in the group who can make my life and my heart rate miserable if they so choose, people such as Dr. Rob, Anne, Lester’s nutjob brother Robert, Mr. E. Dalton, and a host of others--but Lester tends to be the one to do . . . how should I say this?

Crazy shit. Does crazy shit work? I think it does, because that’s exactly what Lester does--crazy shit. Like sprinting down route 35 . . . in the right hand lane . . . in summer beach traffic.

Two other worthy mentions as per the attendees. Dr. Rob brought Canada Jeff. Apologies if that’s spelled G-e-o-f-f, but since I don’t know the correct spelling and considering my currently gimped-out pinky finger, let’s stick with J-e-f-f, okay? I call him Canada Jeff for the simple reason Canada Jeff hails from Canada. He’s Canadian, born and raised in Canada which, as we all know, is the correct country to blame whenever anything goes wrong here in the States, including regional blackouts and local riots in Harlem as well as Washington Heights. Other than his Canadian-ness, all I can say about Canada Jeff is that (a) he seemed like a nice guy, (b) had come to know Dr. Rob via former mountain biking excursions, and (c) he was wearing a Francaise des Jeux cycling team kit.

My apologies, Canada Jeff, but I really can’t let this slide. Myself, as an American, I severely doubt I’d be able to bring myself to wear a French team kit. Granted, at this point in my cycling career, I can’t bring myself to wear any professional team kit considering I’m about as fast as a three-legged sea turtle (and the fact that team kits tend to be a bit pricey also keeps me from investing in an actual kit, but if I did, it probably wouldn’t be a Francaise des Jeux outfit). While I do enjoy the clean simplicity of the predominantly white and blue Francaise des Jeux design, the bottom line is . . . it’s French. Most Americans, including New Yorkers, would just not go there.

Yet, Canada Jeff, you yourself explained that you live somewhere near Toronto. My understanding is that there’s a significant French population up there in the Yukon, I mean Canada. Perhaps you have French roots. Perhaps some of your immediate family if from France. If that’s the case, or if you found the kit at a disgusting, rock bottom price, then all is good. All was good to begin with, but I only raise the point as it’s not every day we see someone wearing a French racing team kit.

Okay, let’s move on.

Dr. Rob’s friend Greg was there too. I don’t know Greg’s last name but then again, I don’t know most of the guys and girls last names, so what does it matter? Greg, like Canada Jeff, is a nice guy, but he yells a lot. Myself, I’m not much of a yeller unless a car comes dangerously close (see previous post for my thoughts on that).

(Hold on a second. I’m gonna go munch on a few potato chips in the kitchen but I’ll be right back. If you want to take a break for a quick bite, I would suggest doing so now.)

All right, I’m back.

So that was the crew. With the exception of a ungodly wind blowing as we chugged our way through Sandy Hook, the ride went off, excuse the cliché, without a hitch.

And then I stopped by my parents’ place and rotated the tires on my truck. Sheer excitement.

As for today, I had the genius idea to try and ride my first century the day after the 62-mile Cheesequake ride. If you put a gun to my head and asked, “Why’d you do that?” I’d probably tell you to pull the trigger. Why’d I do it? Because sometimes smart people do dumb things. Actually, that wouldn’t apply to me, so mark it up to dumb people doing really dumb things.

Thinking it’d be more interesting to have some others along, I posted the ride last minute on the WCC site that turned out to be a great idea because a guy showed up. One guy. Just one.

No biggie. I wanted to do the ride and, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t matter if I did it alone or with others. Regardless, I did a 105 miles with Rupert, a man who has a heavy passion for both history and architecture. Until this morning, I never realized how many stone walls there are in Westchester. Once Rupert started pointing them out, well, he started pointing them out. I, my usual self, felt little need to comment. Instead, I tossed out plenty of “Oh yeahs?” and “Reallys?” as I learned that the British were never able to advance beyond Washington’s colonial forces near a certain point close to route 100.

(Despite my lack of conversation, my sarcastic, cynical nature--I know, hard to believe--was incredibly tempted to pull up next to Rupert between architectural point-outs and ask, “So. You get laid last night, buddy?”)

After two hours, we reached Pleasantville and the end of the first loop when I said, “We need to stop, Rupert, and we need to stop right now.” I was running on fumes (having forgotten to buy milk the night before so I only started out with half a bowl of Raisin Bran), so I helped myself to a bagel with butter and jelly and we hit the road again for lap number two out of three.

With 80 miles under our belts and another 35 to go, I asked Rupert, “What would you think about turning around once we reach route 22? That way we avoid all those frigging hills.”

Rupert was cool with that, but I know, I’m a loser for knocking the ride down from 115 to 100 miles, although I was beginning to reach a point where I’d glance down at my legs to see what was up, to see why they were acting the way they were, and my legs would simply frown up at me and tell me to get the damn ride over with. And when your legs reach that point, you really have to listen to what they say, otherwise they’re capable of shutting down the entire operation. If the legs go on strike, there isn’t much else you can do other than walk or call a taxi, so I slashed those last 15 miles from the ride in order to appease my sorry excuse for legs.

And it worked. I survived, albeit barely. By the time we reached the end, my legs didn’t seem much interesting in turning out a cadence much higher than 60, which is about 30-40 RPM lower than I normally pedal.

That was it. A hair over 105 miles in total. Nothing exciting happened with the exception of sighting a few deer, but that happens a lot up here. Rupert actually complained about the deer population and the deer ruining his garden until he finally installed a fence. Myself, I don’t have a garden, so the deer can munch as much corn and carrots as they please as far as I’m concerned.

As for these century rides, I don’t see myself doing a lot of these. Much too taxing. I’ll leave the long excursions to the psycho professional riders who seem to enjoy stage racing. Let them kill themselves.

[Author’s note: I know the length of this post got out of hand, as they normally do, but I can’t help myself. With that said, I would suggest printing the post and reading it on the printed page, which is infinitely easier than reading off the screen.]

Oh. Hey. If you want to watch something really, really funny, CLICK HERE.

To All of THEM

I went for a ride last night and some punk yelled something at me from the backseat of a shitty car with tinted windows. The kid didn’t even have the cojones to open the window and show his face while he was yelling at me. I didn’t catch the first part of what he said, but I definitely caught the end which include the word assh*le.

At the time, it aggravated me to no end. I yelled back, of course, inviting this particular punk, as well as his three friends, to step out of the car and say it again, but you know how these things work. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is so tough when they’re sitting in a ton of metal yelling at someone twice their size on a bicycle. I’ve only been riding a little over a year, although I’m yet to find myself in a situation in which one of my invites to stop the car is actually heeded and the driver actually steps out. Says a lot, doesn’t it?

Regardless, I want to take a moment to address all the teenage jackasses who have cute things to say from behind tinted windows. I want to address all the middle-aged and elderly drivers out there (women, mostly, but who wants to be labeled sexist?) who don’t even realize they’ve just come about three inches from killing me as they whiz by at fifty miles-per-hour. (And it’s the fact that they don’t even realize what they’ve done that gets my goose.) I want to say something to all those people who race a few feet ahead of me so they don’t have to slow down as they make that right-hand turn without a blinker, cutting three feet in front of me. I also have a few words for those people who feel it’s necessary to honk when they’re behind me, as if leaning on the horn is going to scare me into the curb just so they can pass and get to the shopping mall nine seconds faster than they would if they had waited for me. What are these choice words I have for all these morons?

Fuck you! Fuck you very much!

Did You See That?

This past Saturday evening, I set my alarm for 6 AM. The original plan was to get out of bed early on Sunday, hit the road for a few hours, and then get back home before the day began in earnest. All that would have worked if, around eleven Saturday night, I hadn’t decided to turn off the alarm and sleep to my heart’s content.

So rather than take a group ride up here in the woods of Westchester, I loaded the bike into the truck and drove up to Bear Mountain for more climbing repeats as riding up and down a 4.5 mile hill never fails to serve as terrific entertainment. Am I right or am I right?

After spending thirty minutes climbing to the top, I took a few slugs from my water bottle, spent another ten minutes cruising to the bottom, and when I reached 9W, I turned around to begin the process all over again. Less than five minutes into the second ascent, I glanced up to see a shiny black bear on the side of the road staring straight at me.

Now hold on! First thing first. I’m proud to say I did not lose control of my bladder. This wasn’t a full-grown bear. The black bear that stood no more than twenty-five feet ahead of me looked more like a teenager and I say teenager as it was definitely not a cub and it was definitely not as big as I would imagine a full-grown bear to be. If I had to compare it to something, I’d say it was about the size of a big dog, like a big Labrador with meaty legs. Does that help paint a clear picture? I hope it does because that’s about as much effort as I’m putting into that description.

So there I am on my bike pedaling up Bear Mountain when a bear walks into the road. In hindsight, I probably should have glanced at my heart rate monitor to see how my cardiovascular system reacted to such a situation, although my brain placed a higher priority on avoiding a potential When Animals Attack situation, so rather than check and see how a bear sighting might have been messing with my heart rate, I stopped pedaling, hit the brakes, and was halfway through cutting a U-turn when the bear turned and ran back through the bushes.

And that was it. That’s all that happened. After waiting half a minute, I started back up the hill again. Just as I reached the spot where the bear had been standing, a car came around the bend heading in the opposite direction.

“Did you see that?” I asked the driver as we both slowed. I had to make sure it wasn’t my imagination because, you know, my imagination had a tendency to just flare up like that at times.

The rest of the ride, I’m happy to report, was uneventful, unless you want to include a lot of heavy breathing and sweating on my behalf as I labored my way to the top of the mountain again and again, yet the lesson to be learned from this experience is simple. Whenever you take a ride outside the suburbs into the mountains, bring plenty of water, food, and a gun.

Tagged

So they tagged Iban Mayo for EPO. Yeah, it’s true. I saw it on the front page of Velonews.com yesterday afternoon so it has to be true.

That’s too bad. I remember writing about Iban Mayo not too long ago and, honestly, I get this odd sense of satisfaction every time I log online and see another headline for another top riding testing positive for either testosterone, EPO, or anything else they’re not supposed to be taking. In other words, I enjoy reading about the cheats getting busted for cheating and I would have to imagine a fair amount of other people probably feel the same way.

Strange, though, how much of the media keeps their heads in the sand. Also in Velonews.com yesterday (I’m not the biggest fan of the pub, but they do keep their news up to date faster than most other sites and you can’t really beat their video footage) were a few rumblings as to how Alberto Contador had originally been implicated in the Operacion Puerto bust but then had been cleared by Spanish authorities, yet most of the media chose to hail Contador as a new hero, a great, young, clean rider to pave a new path in the future of cycling.

Give me a frigging break. Contador was one of the few people who were able to challenge Rasmussen in the mountains and Rasmussen was kicked out for lying about his whereabouts which most likely means he was doping. I mean, let’s put two and two together here:

Rasmussen = Yellow jersey / KOM jersey

Rasmussen = kicked out for lying and/or alleged doping

Contador = contesting Rasmussen--an alleged doper--in the mountains on the hardest climbs

Contador = Discovery rider

Discovery rider = Johan Bruyneel

Johan Bruyneel = his riders always seem to win yet never test positive

Do you think it’s Johan’s secret training program? Or do you think it might have something to do with the fact that the former US Postal and current Discovery riders tend to take about thirty needles in their asses every night during a stage race? How in the world any journalist could consider Contador the hero for clean racing is beyond me.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Lance takes the occasional syringe of EPO just for laughs? I wonder if the guy draws and then transfuses the occasional pint of his own blood just to make him feel like he did in the old days? Talk about drug addiction. Can you imagine retired racers handing around Blood Drive trailer units, twitching and scratching their necks, begging for a few cc’s of Type A or Type B?

Hill Repeats

Yesterday, I drove to Bear Mountain to do hill repeats. Hill repeats suck, of course, but like they say, you have to do what you have to do.

So I did what I had to do and I did it four times. That was all I could manage. From 9W to the top of Bear Mountain is a 4.5-mile climb at an average gradient of 4.5% (according to Bicycling magazine). 4.5 miles may not seem like much, but when you can barely manage more than 10 MPH or so on the way up, 4.5 miles feels like a long, long time to be heading uphill.

For any of you who have ridden your bike up Bear Mountain, I’m sure you’ll agree that the first half of the climb really isn’t bad, or at least it’s not that bad compared to the second half of the climb. It’s when you make that right turn to continue heading toward the top that the road begins to kick up. It’s at that part of the mountain that the heart rate begins to climb and it does so damn fast. It’s that part of the road that causes your mouth to drop open and your breathing to go into labor. It’s then that you might try to stand on the pedals to let some of your bodyweight do some of the work, all the while the sweat dripping from your chin and landing on your front tire.

For me, that’s the part of the road that gets me the most. It’s then that I glance down at the crank and witness my feet turning, wondering if they can manage the entire climb. And if the road turns steep enough, I’ll begin talking to my legs and, eventually, once I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, I’ll even talk to God. As religious as I’m not, I’ll ask Him for a hand in getting to the top.

More Of The Same BS

Is it just me, or is professional cycling not getting any better whatsoever? And it’s not that I expected all the top riders to just stop what they were doing--meaning the drugs--because I realize there’s a ton of money on the line, but come on. Reading through the stories on Velonews.com, the scenario is simply growing bleaker and bleaker with every passing stage.

First, Vinokourov tests positive for blood doping. People still do that? Wasn’t blood doping the big thing in the Olympics in the 80s? Then again, the guy’s Russian. Yes, I realize he’s technically from Kazakhstan (and I know I didn’t spell that right, but so what?), yet when you really think about it, they all sound Russian when they talk, so what’s the difference? My point is, Russians are crazy, so why would Vinokourov give a rat’s ass about infusing blood that isn’t his into his vein in the middle of the race? He wouldn’t. Wasn’t there another crazy professional racer from Russia who, after winning a few races, took his money and opened up a Mercedes dealership as selling Mercedes had always been his dream? See what I mean about crazy?

(Then again, selling top-shelf cars compared to racing bicycles with a needle hanging out of your ass? Maybe that guy wasn’t so crazy after all.)

Anyway, too bad for Andreas Kloden. Dude was in fifth place when Astana pulled from the Tour.

Then Cristian Moreni of the Cofidis team tested positive for testosterone, so Cofidis has pulled from the Tour. So much for that.

And Sinkewitz from T-Mobile also tested positive for testosterone. Didn’t T-Mobile force their riders to sign the UCI anti-doping agreement? Does this mean Sinkewitz is going to have to pay UCI a year’s worth of his salary? If he does, that sucks for him. Big time. Then again, if you cheat . . .

Finally, there’s Rasmussen. When I logged online last night to check the latest Tour news, there was the headline staring me in the face: Rasmussen Pulled Out of Tour, Fired by Rabobank.

That’s even more big time than Sinkewitz. Here’s a guy who’s a few days away from most likely winning one of the biggest sporting events in the world and Rabobank tosses his skinny ass not because he actually tested positive, but because they learned he had lied about his whereabouts to allegedly dodge off-season blood and urine tests.

Regardless of whether Rasmussen is innocent or guilty, put yourself in that chump’s shoes. Can you even begin to imagine how utterly enraged he must feel at being canned after more than a week in the yellow jersey and only a few days away from the finale in Paris?

Not that I blame Rabobank, either. They must have been rather convinced that Rasmussen had done something wrong considering how close they were to winning the Tour. If not, if there was even a shred of evidence pointing to Rasmussen being clean, they never in a million years would have done what they did: too much to lose in terms of sponsorship and media exposure.

In my opinion, the best part is the response from the other riders, specifically David Millar. There’s a great interview clip with him on Velonews.com where you definitely get a good sense of the guy’s frustration via his candid comments. You can check it out by CLICKING HERE.

Poughkeepsie Critierium

Another big race this morning, or big for me, at least. I had a choice between racing in Prospect Park for the second time this season or trying something different in Poughkeepsie. For those of you who live south of Westchester (which is probably all three people who read this page once every few months), Poughkeepsie probably sounds like a long haul for a bicycle race, but it’s only fifty miles from Pleasantville, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Big mistake. Huge. Gross tactical error, although I’ll take my beating like a man. At nine this morning, roughly twenty Category 5 riders handed me my ass in a 20-lap criterium in downtown Poughkeepsie.

About a month ago, I raced Category 5 in Prospect Park and did well enough to stay with the main / lead group for the entire seventeen miles. After a year or riding and training, I was happy with that, so I felt good about doing well again today up in Poughkeepsie. I trained hard all week and expected things to go well this morning, yet as I stood on the line waiting for the race organizer to finish his speech, I noticed almost all of the other riders around me not only sporting team kits, but shaved legs as well. Maybe that’s how they roll up here in Putnam County, I thought, eyeballing the Sasquatch-thick fur covering my own legs. Maybe that’s just how these guys roll.

Clearly, I was kidding myself. The race in Poughkeepsie turned out to be a far cry from your standard Prospect Park criterium where the organizers (whoever they are) set up a table on the side of the road and use a bullhorn that needed new batteries in 1985. I’m joking, but apparently in Poughkeepsie, when these Putnam Country organizers roll, they roll big. (If I use the term roll one more time in the course of this update, feel free to slap me right across the face.) Take a look at the Start / Finish line below:



The organizers had an open-sided trailer upon which they sat during the course of the race. They had set up bleachers across the street for spectators. They had porta-a-pottys. They had a hospitality table set up under a tent. Around the mile-long course, they had not only piled hay bales around the poles in each corner, but they zip-tied squares of plywood over all the sewer grates to ensure no one’s wheel got caught up. And you know that orange plastic fencing they use at construction sites? They wrapped the outside of each corner with that stuff to ensure none of us went slamming through any storefronts if we overshot a turn.

I mean, these guys were taking their shit seriously. While warming up, I had to swerve around more than a few street cleaners as they went over every inch of pavement on the course.

As I said, the organization behind this criterium was rather serious, so the team kits, the shaved legs, and the expensive aero rims really should not have surprised me. I shouldn’t have been surprised one bit, but what was I going to do? Myself, I don’t see much point in going to line and thinking anything other than, I’m the baddest motherf*cker out here. If you can get yourself in that mind frame (or something similar), at least you’re going out there with confidence and based on what I saw in my first true criterium, you’re going to need some confidence when negotiating 45-degree corners at 22 MPH surrounded on all sides.

When the whistle blew, the sprinting began. In the space of two laps, I quickly learned how important it is to stay near the front as the pack approaches each turn considering once the first few riders cut through the corner, everyone hammers on the pedals to get the speed up again. With that said, I used the tailwind on the back stretch to jump out of the draft and position myself within the top ten and sat there for the next two or three laps. The accelerations out of the corners were taking their toll on my lungs, as was the headwind on the finish line stretch, although the group seemed to take a breather for a few seconds each time we had the wind behind us so I figured we’d settle in until the last lap or two.

Another gross tactical error. It was around lap six or seven that the pace shot up a few miles-per-hour. Someone must have took the lead and decided to shake things up a bit because until that point, things were tough yet manageable. With my heart rate already up to 185 - 190, the pack just spit me out the back and left me for dead.

How embarrassing.

Actually, a big guy (wearing a team kit, of course) who must have dropped back initially came barreling by a few seconds later. Hopping on his wheel, I proposed we work together to see what we could do, but after two laps of sitting behind He-Man, I told him I was doing everything I could just to stay with him and let him go off on his own.

And that was it. I sat in no-man’s land all by myself for a few laps and the worst part about the rest of the race wasn’t getting lapped. Rather, the worst part about going out and getting dropped on that kind of a course is when people clap and cheer as you’re passing the bleachers. I know they mean well, and encouragement should always be considered a good thing, but I knew that they knew that I had been dropped, and when I get dropped, I’d prefer invisibility. It’s surprising more bikes don’t come equipped with reliable cloaking devices for such situations.

With one lap to go, I rolled up next to a guy who had been dropped before I had been dropped. I was a lap down and he was two laps down, so rather than bust our asses to get over the line, we put the pace on cruise control and chatted for a minute. He had driven up with a friend from Virginia Beach, which struck me as a long-ass ride for a 20-lap race, but he did mention a night out in Manhattan tonight, so who can blame a few southern boys for wanting to hit the Big Apple for an evening?

Changing out of my riding gear, I rode back to the Start / Finish line to (a) check my placing, which was 14th out of 17, and (b) snap off some more pics as the Category 4 riders were getting started.





P.S. I witnessed another crash this morning, this one fifty feet ahead of me in the middle of a corner. Both of the guys who went down seemed all right as I rode by, but golly, for such light machines, bikes make a hell of a lot of noise when they hit pavement.

P.S.S. And if it wasn’t for those two guys who crashed, I would have finished 16th out of 17.

Again, how embarrassing.

From Lance to Landis

About a week after Floyd Landis’s book hit the shelves, the Irish sports journalist David Walsh released From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France. A day or two after it came out, I took another trip down to the Strand in Union Square and picked up a copy of the hardcover for the low, low bargain price of $12.97.

Understandably, I realize my previous book reviews tend to be a bit long-winded (because I feel it’s important that if you’re going to review a book, you might as well support the review with actual information), so I’m going to attempt to spare everyone from dozing off while I do this.

When it comes to this read, my humble opinion is, if you’re at all interested in the professional side to cycling, go out and buy the book. It’s almost long at 334 pages, but those 334 pages are interesting pages. Will the book convince you that both Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis have doped (meaning they cheated) during their professional careers? I believe it will. It sheds a lot of light on their individual careers, although most of the book is dedicated to investigating Armstrong.

For example, the book starts out by highlighting the early career of a teen cyclist by the name of Greg Strock. The kid had talent, rode for the national team, and then was doing amateur stuff overseas while working with a Belgian trainer and his buddy soigneur who gave the kid lots of injections along the way. Eventually, Strock became way too sick and stayed that way long enough so that he returned to the States. When his doctors here in the US figured out what it was, they realized it was something that almost everyone gets at one point in his or her life (think of it as something like a cold), but it affected Strock so much worse than usual--exhausted all the time, constantly sleeping, joint and hip pain, etc--that it basically ended his cycling career.

So why does David Walsh open with a chapter about a guy you’ve never heard of? Because while Greg Strock was a year younger than Lance Armstrong, they were both riding for Chris Carmichael on the national team at the same time. Armstrong was on the A team and Strock was on the B team. They rode under similar supervision for years and later, once Strock was sick and decided against a future in cycling, it’s noted that his condition, as serious as i was, typically produces a high incidence to testicular cancer in other men who have suffered the same condition.

It’s not hard to put two and two together.

Then, while it’s circumstantial, there is evidence that is quiet damning. Frankie Andreu, Armstrong’s former teammate on the Motorola and US Postal teams, makes this statement: “God knows what happened during that winter, but Lance came back the spring of ’96 and he was frickin’ huge. He looked like a linebacker. It was ‘Holy sh*t, man, he is big.’ Obviously, we all noticed it and he knew we did. He said something about [Dr. Michele] Ferrari not realizing the effect the weight room was going to have . . . but with Lance it was more than just seeing him big. I mean, he was big, but he could now rip the cranks off the bike like never before.”

Dr. Michele Ferrari is the Italian sports doctor who I believe is now in jail for helping athletes dope. Maybe he’s not in jail, although I do know an Italian court found him guilty of unethical practices in his dealings with athletes. And this is the doctor Lance chose to hire after a few seasons in the early ‘90s after EPO hit the peloton. Walsh explains that it was mostly the Italian teams doing it and they were destroying everyone, including Armstrong and his teammates. The rest of the riders knew what was going on, but most of the team doctors, especially on Motorola, weren’t advocating that kind of “medical program” for their riders. But then Lance hooks up with Ferrari and he starts trouncing everyone . . . convincingly.

The list goes on and on. In the end, the evidence is circumstantial and based mostly on depositions during civil lawsuits, testimony provided by Lance’s former teammates, his former soigneur, and others who have contact with him within the realm of professional cycling.

It’s also interesting to note that during a deposition, an instant message conversation between Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters was entered as evidence. During the conversation between the two former teammates, Vaughters explains to Andreu that Landis told him that on the second rest day of the 2004 Tour de France, both Armstrong and the team’s director, Johan Bruyneel, called Landis to the bathroom so he could watch as the two men flushed his blood refill down the toilet.

By that point in the race, Landis had already signed with the Phonak team for 2005 and if anyone isn’t aware, Armstrong never handled defections from his team in a very professional manner. So if Armstrong was confident he could win the Tour that year without a ton of help from Landis, why not mess with him a bit?

If you ask me, it’s all rather f*cked up, yet somehow believable at the same time.

Again, it’s a good book. Well worth the time to read it.

And apparently it’s impossible for me to write a review under 850 words. That’s my bad.

Group Riding Basics

Get this. We’re all of five or ten miles into a B ride in Westchester this morning and already the group of twenty-something riders has split. I’ve noticed this tends to happen on B rides on those mornings when no one’s scheduled a B+ ride. What happens is, all these people show up for a B ride and within minutes, those guys who you know can hold a B+/A- pace just go off the front, and that’s exactly what happened not long after we left the parking lot at 8:30 this morning.

Then, not long after the group split, this one guy decides to hit the gas on a long downhill, so most of us grab his wheel once the downhill turns into a flat. We reach a short hill and still we stay behind the same guy who went nuts going down the last hill, but on the next hill, that same guy seems to be running out of steam, so most of us go right around him. Reaching the top of the hill, I didn’t see much point in slowing down to wait for anybody and neither did the other guys behind me, yet a few minutes later, I hear a voice behind me and this particular voice--it’s a woman’s voice, mind you--is all but yelling at me for dropping so-and-so after he so graciously pulled us all along.

I turn around and there’s this woman behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses and she’s pointing her chin straight at me.

“You mean the guy with the red bike?” I ask. I know what she’s saying and I know who she’s talking about because there’s only one guy in the group who’s gone way so far off the front.

Rather than answer my question, she says, “Now I’m going to sit on your wheel and let you pull me around the next thirty miles.”

I guess this is supposed to be something of a threat, but it’s Sunday morning and I left my anger management toolbox at home. I’ve got half a mind to stop, fish my cell phone from my bag, and give Dr. Rob a call and ask him what “Martha” looks like (I’ve never met Martha, although I’ve heard the name on various SIBA rides).

Considering I don’t really know this woman from a hole in the wall (and I would have been content if she remained in anonymous status), getting on my case because I don’t wait for some guy who likes to blast down hills but can’t hold the pace when we’re going up the same hills sort of brings out the motocrosser / asshole in me, meaning I’ve got half a mind to toss in a brake check just to f*ck with her. I won’t, of course, but one of the things I’ve learned from the Staten Island crew is that if you’re going to go screeching downhill, you might as well have the balls to keep your speed up when you start heading the other way. Otherwise, you kind of look like a jackass (as I certainly have in the past), so glancing back, I extend an invitation. “You want to sit on my wheel, lady, you be my guest.”

“Don’t hit too many holes.”

Now she’s pushing buttons. “I don’t hit the holes--just follow my f*cking line.” And shut the hell up, I wanted to add, but what good does it do to get angry?

A few miles go by, I’m on the front and as soon as we reach the next downhill, guess who goes blowing by? And I don’t mean he charges to the front and gives me a break. If I was in the front doing 20 MPH, this guy goes by at 25 MPH and just keeps going . . . until we get to the next hill.

Eventually the pack slows down as we’re making a turn and I let the little lady go by. A few seconds later, just as we start going uphill again, I pull up next to her.

“What were you complaining about?” Before she can answer, I follow that up with, “What?”

She tried explaining that if Mr. Downhill is going to have the decency to pull us along for a while, we should at least have the common courtesy to wait for Mr. Downhill when we reach the top of an uphill.

“Well, for starters, I wouldn’t call what he does pulling considering no one’s on his wheel,” I say. Mr. Downhill is only a few feet ahead of us, so I’m hoping he’s getting an earful. “Second, no one asked him to go charging to the front. No one told him to put his nose in the wind. He can sit in the draft as long as he likes, but if he’s going to go nuts on every downhill while the rest of us save a bit for the hills and he gets dropped, that’s not my problem.”

Then, just to be a dick, I stayed right on her wheel as she stayed on Mr. Downhill’s wheel. Halfway up the next hill, me and everybody else pulled around them and just kept going, yet sure enough, once we reached the top and started drifting downhill and I sat up to let the rest of the group catch, guess who went barreling past me until the next hill?

From now on, I’m leading my own rides. If I get lucky, all of three or four guys will show up, so I won’t have to deal with the kind of stuff I had to put up with this morning. I looked at one of the guys next to me, this guy Glen I had met a few weeks earlier, and asked, “Why am I getting yelled at because someone else can’t keep up?”

Later, to cap off an obviously perfect afternoon, I drove to the other side of Pleasantville to attend my first-ever session with a mental health professional. I know, it’s hard to believe I’m as angry as I am, but it’s true. Figured it was high time to talk to a professional to figure out what the problem is, so I make the appointment, show up a few minutes early, and when I ring the doorbell, I hear a window slide open and someone say, “What time is your appointment?”

“3:30,” I answer.

“You’re ten minutes early. Wait outside.”

“No problem,” I said. Walking back to my truck, I got in, turned around, and flipped the doctor the bird when he opened the door and waved to me.

I need attitude from some jackhole psychiatrist when there are a million of them out there I can go see? I think not.

1-Year Anniversary

It was exactly a year ago today that I walked into R&A in Brooklyn with Mr. Picco and bought my very first bicycle (not counting the BMX stuff when I was a teenager), the blue Giant OCR2 sports touring bike, for $600, water bottle cage included. From there, Mr. Picco and I drove the few blocks to Prospect Park for a few laps, spinning through the tons of foot traffic carrying coolers and beach chairs on their way to Independence Day cook-outs. Little did I know at the time that in the space of another two months, I would move to Brooklyn Heights and spend almost every day riding in Prospect Park, enough so that I’m now intimately familiar with every inch of that damn 3.4 mile loop.

A lot happens over the course of a year. I had been riding barely a month when I was dense enough to try and race in Prospect Park. In hindsight, it might have been one of the best things I could have done so early in my riding career. Those seventeen miles were quick to prove just how far I still had to go on the bike and, rather than demoralize me, rather than turn me off from the sport, the experience only served as motivation.

Not long afterward, the fall arrived and weather began to turn, meaning it was time to begin investing in things long-sleeve jerseys, tights, wool socks, booties, and a garish neon yellow windbreaker that would eventually fail me on a chilly day all the way out near JFK airport, although it turned out as a good thing as its failure (failure as in the zipper on the removable sleeve came undone) forced me to buy my first piece of Pearl Izumi apparel, a much more aesthetically pleasing black and silver winter jacket. Pleased with its quality, I now invest almost exclusively in Pearl Izumi apparel.

It was probably not long before that afternoon that I ordered a copy of Chris Carmichael’s training book, The Ultimate Ride. At the same time, I bought a heart rate monitor, did my first set of field tests (3-mile time trials), and began training within a specific heart rate zone while incorporating sprints and fast-pedal exercises.

That was when I still lived in Brooklyn. At the end of October (I realize the chronological order here is somewhat screwed up, but I just returned from mountain biking and I’m struggling to fend off a nap as I write this, so please, reader, bear with me), Mr. Picco hosted a terrific Oktoberfest party in his yard and it was then that I met Mr. Dr. Rob. Toward the end of the night, he mentioned a 100K training ride he had planned in Cheesequake the following day. I should have realized I was getting in way over my head by the way Dr. Rob sort of paused and smiled when I asked if I could tag along. A smarter man would have immediately picked up on the signal and took a rain check for another day, maybe after putting some more miles in his legs, but you know Dr. Rob, he’s a nice guy, so I got the invite regardless. I showed up, met Dr. Rob, Anne, Brent, and Joe C. and by the time we hit those three consecutive hills, I fell right out the back, thinking to myself, You are WAY out of your league here, kiddo.

Maybe two or three months later, after Dr. Rob introduced me to Ed Dalton and the SIBA group, Mr. Dalton invited me on the Cheesequake ride, to which I replied, “Honestly, I’m kind of scared of that ride.” And I was scared of the ride, the hills, the lactic acid that I knew would build up and stay in my legs as everyone just blasted away up every hill we encountered.

And instead of packing it in and taking off for a few months, we rode through the winter--long yet somewhat manageable training rides in Staten Island. Rides that started off with freezing fingers then ended up with okay fingers but freezing feet. And the hill climb ride on a Thursday morning, just Ed and I, avoiding patches of ice as we crossed over Rockland Avenue and worked our way up Manor Road to Ocean Terrace.

In mid-winter came a move to Pleasantville in Westchester yet instead of hitting the roads, I hit the trainer in the basement until the snow began to clear. Soon I bought a new bike, the Jamis I ride now and the switch from aluminum to carbon fiber was definitely a switch for the better considering the number of spokes I broke on the Giant’s rear wheel.

As soon as the temperature began to lift somewhat, I put the trainer away in favor of the roads yet riding through unfamiliar territory proved a major pain in the ass. Reaching the bottom of a hill, I had no idea how long the incline might continue, so I struggled and swore under my breath every time I came around a corner to see the hill heading up another quarter of a mile. Soon, though, the roads became more familiar, as did the sights, so now I know when to push and when to settle in to a friendly, seven mile-per-hour pace.

A month ago, my first time trial. Nothing too long, only eleven miles, but enough test myself. Averaging just under twenty miles-per-hour, I again realize how far I still need to go until my legs can handle more of a beating and get the bike going faster.

Two weeks after that, the second race of the year, a return to Prospect Park and since that experience has already been dissected and discussed, not much need to go there again.

And now here I sit, a year come and gone.

Name That Quote

Let’s play Name That Quote, meaning take a guess who said the following:

“God forbid anything happened to my wife, I think I’d get myself a little [derogatory term used in reference to a homosexual man]: someone to cook and clean around the house and, if he ever left, what the f*ck would I care?”

Do I even have to put a name to the quote? I think for most of you, the answer to that question is obvious, yet I titled this updated Name That Quote not just for that single quote, but to shed some light into what it’s like riding with some of the crew from the Staten Island Bicycling Association. And I’m not talking about the guys who show up every once in a while who aren’t really associated with the club. I’m talking about the guys who are there week after week and have been there week after week for years upon years.

Anyway, Name That Quote is a fun game to play, especially after a long yet terrific four-hour ride that both started and ended in Cheesequake on this beautiful morning (the kind of morning that reminds you just how sweet life can be when you’re with friends doing something you want to be doing under a perfect blue sky) with a small, select group. While the wind did pick up at certain times, I was only privy to snatches of conversation here and there, but I got enough to develop a sense of the overall tone. For example, here’s another one that references a wife:

“. . . it’s the psychological torture that drives me crazy. I’d actually prefer it if she just punched me in the face.”

Someone replied, “It’d be quicker.”

Ten minutes later I heard this one:

“So last night I’m sitting on the couch watching TV when my wife says, ‘We never go on dates any more.’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘We’ve been married thirty-four years--why the hell would we go on a date?’ so I said to her, ‘Where we going with this?’”

And then there are the references to marriage as it relates to cycling.

“Every Saturday night my wife asks me, ‘You’re going riding tomorrow?’ as if it’s some sort of surprise. We’ve been living together for X-number of years and I’ve got the bike in the living room, the bike stand in the basement, the bike magazines on the coffee table, the jerseys in the closet, and I’m sitting there watching a bike race on TV. What the hell am I hiding?”

This is why I never spend money on comedy clubs. Sure, it cost me a couple bucks in gas to get from Pleasantville to Staten Island (or Cheesequake), but that’s not just gas money. It’s not even the comic value. At the end of the day, it’s terrific material for this, the blog in addition to comic value. I mean, who wouldn’t want to ride with these guys? I can tell you it’s not like that up here in Westchester. Speaking of which, what I should do is invite the SIBA crew to join one of the Westchester Cycling Club group rides so the guys up here can see just how interesting a 50-mile ride can be, hills and all.

Corey Martinez Video

Check out this video.

This guy is intense. I've got a lot of respect for someone with that much balance, not to mention cojones to ride the way he rides.

Salbutamol

So the sprinters are dopers too. I’m crushed. I was holding on to the thinking that the sprinters were relatively clean, but according to Velonews.com, I was wrong.

According to the news, Milram’s lead sprinter, Alessandro Petacchi, tested positive for Salbutamol during this year’s Giro d’Italia. Also according to the new, Salbutamol is a standard asthma treatment yet when you read the fine print, you learn it also increases anaerobic performance, which is what sprinting is all about, no?

Now, at the end of the day, I really don’t give a rat’s ass who has a needle in their ass and who doesn’t and while I realize this may seem contradictory considering my previous posts, believe me, it’s true. I’d care if I was racing against guys with needles in their asses, but that’s just not the case. (If an amateur feels the need to dope to try and win the local Category 5 race, whoever that person may be is in need of some serious psychiatric attention, let alone the drug concerns.) So since I’m not racing against these guys, I don’t know any of these guys, and I don’t make a living in the professional cycling industry, why do I even bother to bring it up?

For starters, I have to write about something, so why not this? Further, it simply seems so counter-intuitive to me that a sprinter, a guy who makes his living by going as fast as he can for twenty seconds, would need to take steroids. Aren’t most of the bunch sprints contested on mainly flat stages? I can see the climbers pumping themselves up with EPO, but the sprinters? It’s balls against the wall for six hundred feet, so why the needle in the ass? Swallowing a caffeine pill the size of a softball thirty minutes before the finish, that I could understand considering my own affinity for things like Red Bull and Monster Energy drink, (I can almost see Anne cringing at those words), but steroids? Give me a break.

So that’s it. The jig is up. The sprinters are doping just like the climbers. How sad.

Iban Mayo

This has been sitting in the back of my head for a while. In 2003, Iban Mayo, the Basque Euskatel-Euskadi rider, was a huge threat to Armstrong during the Tour de France. I believe Mayo even beat Armstrong during the Dauphine Libere before the Tour, which say a lot. And during the 2003 Tour, it was looking like Mayo was a serious contender until Armstrong crashed and then remounted to destroy everyone up the rest of the mountain.

Afterward, what happened to Mayo? Ever since, he’s come nowhere close to performing at the level he did in 2003. Why? What the hell happened?

Of course, I have my own conspiracy-like theory.

In 2003, Mayo hits the juice and he hits it hard. Or he finds himself a new trainer or a new doctor who finally puts him on the best possible performance-enhancing drug path. He’s now in the big leagues and ready to go for the gold.

Unfortunately, Armstrong isn’t exactly cool with giving away his Tour de France champion title and wins the race for the fifth consecutive time.

Over the next few years, Mayo consistently struggles in the mountains during the Tour. What happened? This dude had been flying, so why is he unable to step on the gas the way he did in 2003?

He’s no longer on the juice. Maybe he’s the kind of guy who says to himself, Why bother with this anymore? Maybe the guy actually has a conscience and decides to remove the needle from his ass and decides he’ll try to do it au natural. Or maybe something happened with the team, but that’s probably unlikely.

But now Mayo’s on a new team (from orange to yellow) and he just won a mountain stage in the Giro d’Italia, so what’s he up to now? Back on the juice?

Finally Took the Camera & Pointed It At Me

Positively False

So two things. Next week, there’s a big bike race that’s going to start in London and then work its way through France and, from what I hear, it’s one hell of a race. I haven’t had cable TV in years although over the past ten minutes, I’ve been giving serious thought to calling my local cable company just so I can catch the race on TV (and some internet access at home would be nice too). Sadly, though, as hard as it is to believe, I don’t think my local cable company carries the Versus network, which has the broadcast rights to the Tour. Is that a f*cking tragedy or what?

Second, I just finished reading Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France by Floyd Landis and the first thing I’ll say is that while Floyd was certainly not put on this earth to be a writer (and I’m almost willing to say the same about Loren Mooney, the editor who helped Floyd write his memoir), it was well worth the $13.51 I paid.

(Before laying out $24.95 for the hardcover at the Barnes & Noble on 17th Street near Union Square, I walked a few blocks south to The Strand on the corner of Broadway and 12th Street and found a few copies in the ½ price Review section. For those of you who may actually visit the store, the Review section is in the basement and sorted by author’s last names.)

The book is 306 pages long and the first 180 take the reader all the way from Floyd’s childhood through his win in the 2006 Tour de France. And those pages are relatively interesting. They give a lot of insight into how Floyd built his way up from junior mountain biker, his first experience with racing overseas, and finally getting into road racing. He talks about his time on the US Postal team as well as how he left the team and how he and Lance had a yelling match out on the road in 2005 when Floyd was riding his first Tour for Phonak. Those first 180 pages are relatively absorbing, yet while reading Floyd’s words, you get the sense that either (a) Floyd doesn’t want his audience too close, meaning despite the background and insight into his life, the book never seems to take a deep dive at any particular point, which is somewhat disappointing, or (b) there really just isn’t that much more of a story to tell, that Floyd’s laid everything on the table and it’s sort of like a yard sale in that despite looking it all over, there really isn’t much to get you interested.

Then, it happens on page 181 that Floyd’s still in Europe celebrating his win by taking part is some one-day races that are customary for the yellow jersey when Phonak’s team manager calls to say that there’s been a positive result from one of the stage’s urine samples and that while no one’s actually said his name, there isn’t much doubt that the positive belongs to Floyd.

I think everybody knows what happens after this. WADA, the World Anti-Doping Association, says, “Floyd used testosterone to win stage 17.” Floyd then said (as most accused cyclists do), “I’ve never doped in my life.” After reading his book, I say, “Floyd’s laid out a fairly meticulous case to prove he may have not actually doped. Actually, let me reword that. According to Floyd, the French lab that produced the positive result completely f*cked up.”

After reading his book, yeah, the lab did f*ck up--big time. According to testing standards, WADA-accredited labs in both the US and Australia, if having performed the test themselves, would not have labeled Floyd’s results as positive. Actually, the list of screw-ups, not to mention just how unfair the USADA (United States Anti-Doping Association) acts when handling these cases is sort of mind-blowing. Floyd makes a great point when he highlights the fact that the USADA is a government-funded organization and when they both try and win high-level celebrity cases such as Floyd’s, they receive a ton of press which then ensures continued government funding, but here’s the thing. As the USADA was working on prosecuting Floyd, they decided to not prosecute two other athletes from sports outside cycling who had tested positive according to the lab at UCLA. Why? The USADA has a limited treasure chest and they needed all the money they could get their hands on to deal with Floyd’s case considering he chose to fight, so rather than prosecute two athletes who had no doubt doped (this coming from a former head of the UCLA lab who decided to work with Floyd), they decided to stick with their guns on Floyd despite the fact that the details around his test results were sketchy to begin with.

While that’s all well and good, Floyd defines a ton of other examples of how unjustly the anti-doping system treats athletes, but that’s for you to read for yourself. Thing is, reaching the end of the book, I’m not exactly convinced Floyd didn’t dope.

Sure, Floyd convinced me of how much of a disaster the USADA and WADA actually are and just how incompetent that lab is over there in France (that should be obvious even without reading the book . . . I mean, we’re talking about the French here--they spend most of their days debating the differences between brie and camembert . . . just kidding, Olivier) and how the entire process needs to change, but the question is, did he or did he not enhance his performance against the rules?

Of course he did. Let’s get real. The 2006 Tour started without the top five finishers from the 2005 Tour because they had all been implicated via Operacion Puerto (with the exception of Lance Armstrong) and sent home by their teams. This is an endurance sport we’re talking about, a very severe test of endurance with a hell of a lot of money on the line in terms of sponsorships and endorsements. To me, the question shouldn’t be, “Did Floyd dope?” but rather, “How can you win such an event without doping?”

I realize I say all this as an outsider, as someone who only knows what he reads, but this think of it like this. Have you ever heard of a former NASCAR mechanic writing a tell-all book around how much NASCAR race drivers are doping? My point is, if it doesn’t happen, there’s no story to tell, yet according to Floyd, doping in the pro European peloton is nowhere near as prevalent as some authorities would have us believe. If that’s true, why have there been so many interviews, articles, and books published by industry insiders? What do riders like Manzano and others have to lose other than their careers and their livelihoods when they speak out about rampant doping in the sport?

Overall, Positively False is a good read. If you’re into cycling (and I’m assuming you are if you’re even reading this page), it’s well worth the money.

We Meet Again

I've been putting off my third field test for a few weeks now mostly due to a lack of flat roads in my neighborhood, but now it's time, so tomorrow morning I'm taking the drive up to New Paltz. Not that New Paltz is known for flat roads, but I figured I could bang out a pair of field tests (3-mile all-out time trials) and then do some climbing up the road to Lake Minnewaska.

Ever been? A few weeks after I started riding I drove up there to do some hill climbing. Once I made the right turn off 299 that leads up to the park, the climb just gets worse and worse, or at least it felt that way at the time. On the way up, I had to stop three times to catch my breath and since it's been my only trip there to date, I have no idea what to expect tomorrow, but in my head, the more climbing, the better.

Right?

Tour of NY

So today (Saturday) was a big day. Big for me, at least, in that this morning I was in Brooklyn, in Prospect Park, racing Category 5 in the Tour of New York. (Again, why a 17-mile criterium in a city park is called the Tour of New York is beyond me, but that’s beside the point.)

Now, I realize I often have a tendency to go on an on regarding certain subjects, so in an effort to not bore you, the reader, to absolute tears, I’m going to present this morning’s events in a simple, easy-to-read bullet point format. (There’s a jackass blogger out there by the name of Max Tucker, or Tucker Max, and if anyone so much as hints at any sort of similarity between this post and Mr. Jackass Tucker, I will f*cking . . . I don’t even want to say what I’d do, so let’s just leave it at that, okay?)

• At 1:00 AM, I hop out of bed under the assumption I’ve heard my alarm go off. It isn’t until I’m in the kitchen preparing to feed the cat that I glance at the clock on the microwave and realize it’s near 4:30, which is when my alarm is supposed to sound. Clearly, I’m suffering from a mild case of racing anxiety.

• At 2:30, the same thing happens, yet I check my cell phone before expending the energy to stumble into the kitchen.

• At 4:30, the alarm finally clicks on and I feel nowhere near as awake as I did at 1:00 and 2:30.

• The gear’s already packed and the bike’s already prepped, so after a quick bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and mixing some Go Grape Cytomax, I’m off by 5:00.

• By 6:00, I’m standing on line waiting for my number. One might assume that pre-registering online would mean not having to stand in line, but clearly that’s not the case. The Tour of New York organizers take their business seriously and ask to see my USA Cycling license when I hand them my waiver. (Yes, I paid the $60 for a plastic card with my name that says USA Cycling. Makes me feel special just like my mother used to tell me: “You’re not dumb, Stevie. You’re special.”)

• At 6:15, I’m on the bike riding a lap to warm-up. I’m wearing my Adidas arm warmers for the first time and, again, I feel special.

• Taking one last spin through the parking lot, the Polish brothers Lester and Robert are nowhere to be seen. So much for my aftershave-laden lead-out train.

• The racing begins at 6:40 so pretty much everybody is on the line by 6:35. Pro-1-2-3 are the first to take off. Masters and women next, followed by Category 4. Then it’s our turn, Category 5.

• The whistle blows and I’m expecting the thirty or forty of us to simply click in and take it easy the first hundred or so feet. Clearly, I’ve got a lot to learn as guys begin sprinting immediately off the line. Mumbling under my breath, I keep up as we approach the one long hill in the park.

• Sitting in the middle of the pack, the first lap goes by without incidence and unlike my first race, I know realize the importance of sitting on a wheel as I refuse to stick my face in the wind. I hop from one wheel to the next until I find a guy roughly my size who creates a mother of a draft.

• We begin approaching the hill for the second go-around and by the time we reach the top, I’m (a) not dropped, (b) still near the front, yet (c) a glance at my wrist tells me my heart rate has reached 191. If this pace keeps up, I may very well die.

• A few corners later, someone manages to hit one of the orange cones lining the left side of the course. Said orange cone begins bouncing through the pack, missing my front tire by a few inches, but I guess that’s what Category 5 is about, right?

• Three laps down, two to go. The third time up the hill, my heart rate peaks at 192. I feel as if my chest may very well explode and I’m wondering if the hefty guy to my left is breathing as hard as I am. Actually, I’m wondering if anyone is breathing as hard as I am (wheezing, practically), but I don’t bother to look around. Instead, I remind myself, Just hold that wheel in front of you, dumbshit.

• Halfway through the third lap, the big guy I’m following, the one with the shaved legs, decides moving to the front is a good idea. As soon as he inadvertently drags me to the front, he changes his line so I’m now the first guy in the pack. A voice that sounds a hell of a lot like Ed Dalton pipes in from the back of my head: “Conserve!” With that said, I immediately pull off and drift to the back.

• On our fourth lap, we pass the Category 4 racers which, to me, seems counter-intuitive. “Why the hell are we passing them?” I ask no one in particular. Later I realize that, considering the Cat 4 race is twice as long as the Cat 5 race (17 miles), they’re simply conserving which means some of them must know Ed.

• Four laps down and one to go. That last time up the hill, the average speed drops from roughly 22 to 18 MPH, which I take as a sign of everyone growing somewhat tired, present company included. Over the past four laps, a few people have tried to go off the front, but in a 17-mile race, how far are they going to get? The pack’s covered everything so far and while I have no idea what to expect as we begin the last lap, I do realize it’s time to begin moving toward the front for a sprint which I’m sure will be absolute chaos.

• Less than a minute later, just as we’re approaching the long downhill, two guys touch ahead of me and hit the pavement. A third guy goes down when he hits the first two and I’ve got my brakes locked up, swerving to the right just in time to miss that third guy’s head as his shoulder slaps against the asphalt with a nasty thump. Having been behind all that, I’m now all the way in the back, thinking I most likely won’t have the chance or time to slip to the front.

• I’m right. After witnessing the crash, I’m not about to try and force my way through a tight pack of thirty or so Cat 5 riders. Instead, I sit in the back and note when and where the sprint starts (near the parking lot entrance to the Wollman skating rink) and oddly, the guys at the front who are sprinting don’t seem to be going that much faster than the rest of us, although I could have easily misjudged their speed.

• The winner crosses the line as do the rest of us less than five seconds later and that’s it. The race is over. I hit STOP on my watch to see we’ve been riding for just under forty minutes and my average heart rate is 171 with a max of 192. According to my cycling computer, top speed was just under 40 MPH with an average of 26.5 and, based on my heart rate, seems to make sense.

Yet I survived. The group did not spit me out the back the way it did last August. All this godforsaken riding over the fall, winter, and spring has paid off and I’m elated that I made it to the end with the main pack. Absolutely thrilled.

Then it was off to Staten Island for the group ride with Ed, Tommy, Horace, Joe, Anne, and Christian. And then it was home to Pleasantville, and then it was back to Manhattan, and then it was dinner, and then is was [stuff], and then it was time for bed.

And right now, as I sit here, it’s the next day, Sunday. It’s time to go out for a ride and crucify myself in the hills up here Westchester. Fantastic.

Basso Receives 2-Year Ban

Read about it HERE.

And when you're reading, think about how Basso completely destroyed the entire field in the 2006 Giro d'Italia. And think about how he's been claiming, "I never actually doped, but I was thinking about doping."

Right.

Jens Voigt Video Clip

Check out Jens Voigt getting all worked up. Interesting.

Bikely & Cheddar Cheese Pringles

I should be taking a nap right now, but I’m not. Instead, I’m here, at the computer, doing this. Why avoid the nap (officially known as nappy-time)? Well, it’s 4:16 Sunday afternoon and I feel that if I lay down for a one-hour power nap now, I’ll be wasting valuable weekend time which is exactly what I don’t want to do with so few weekend hours left before the work-week begins. Know what I mean?

Another reason to forego the nap has to do with the fact that I decided to sleep in this morning. Rather than rise and shine at 7:30 in the glorious AM, I took one look at the ominous clouds outside and decided against the fifity-mile B+ ride scheduled at 9:00. Threatening rain combined with the fact that I felt as if I could do with another eighteen hours of sleep, I fed the cat and quickly returned to bed.

At 11:45, I figured it was time to finally roll my lazy ass out of bed, have a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and hit the road. Which road? I logged on to Bikely.com this morning to put together something new and exciting, something about 45 miles long with a few hills. I mention Bikely.com yet again as it’s an interesting tool. Not only can you map your own rides to determine their exact length before you go out, but the program also has the ability to map out elevation changes.

For example, I just mapped out the weekend ride on Staten Island. CLICK HERE to see it and when you get to the page, move your cursor over SHOW--all the way to the left of the horizontal toolbar near the top of the page. Moving your cursor over SHOW will produce a drop-down menu including WHOLE ROUTE and ELEVATION PROFILE. Click on ELEVATION PROFILE which will give you exactly that, an elevation profile of the selected ride. In this case, you can see that the weekend SIBA ride includes a total climb of 1,363 feet over the course of the forty or so miles.

Now try a search for “pleasantville” within the FIND option in the horizontal toolbar on top of the page. You should find a “Pleasantville to Pleasantville” ride (my name will be under the CONTRIBUTOR column) which is the ride I put together this morning. Under the SHOW option, check the ELEVATION PROFILE, which should highlight a total climb of 3,175 feet over a course of roughly forty-five miles.

You know what would be really interesting to see? The hill-climbing ride on Staten Island. Keep in mind the scale changes for each ride, but that SIBA hill ride must have some serious peaks to it.

So, apart from Bikely.com (not the coolest name in the world, is it?), there’s a race in Prospect Park this weekend. Why it’s called the Tour of New York is beyond me, but it’s happening Saturday morning. I have the feeling I may bump into the Polish brothers Lester and Robert that day and in the event I do, I think the game plan is going to be to basically sit in their aftershave-draft for as long as humanly possible. In the unlikely event I have anything left once the sprint starts (Category 5 is five laps for 17 miles), I’ll just keep holding that wheel and see what happens.

That sounds nice but what will probably happen is I’ll be in the back, the last guy in line with my heart rate jacked up to 185, asking everybody to slow the hell down. “Come on, guys! What’s the rush? Why don’t we all just take it easy and see who’s got the biggest balls in the sprint a few hundred feet from the line?”

I get the feeling that won’t work either.

That’s it, I think. That’s all I’ve got right now.

Oh, wait. Did anyone read about how Belgium authorities began raiding houses late last week? Houses and apartments belonging to members of the Quickstep team? As our Old Testament-loving friends would say, Oy vey. If I find out Tom Boonen’s on the juice (we all know he is, but it’s nice to hope), I’m personally going to call Pat McQuaid at the UCI and explain that if he and his people don’t get a better handle on this stuff, I’m sending the Polish brothers after him with a couple of monkey wrenches.

And finally, if you’ve ever wondered what cheddar cheese-flavored Pringles do to the tongue, wonder no more.

More Manzano Missiles (from Velonews.com)

Jésus Manzano - the ex-pro turned whistleblower on alleged widespread doping in Spanish cycling - was back in the news again this week.

The 29-year-old is a divisive figure in Spain. He often demands money for his tell-all interviews and critics say he's nothing more than a professional liar who earns a living off hurting the credibility of a sport that he wasn't good enough to make it.

Others see Manzano as a lone voice in the Iberian wilderness, as one of the few Spanish ex-pros who've publicly admitted to using banned performance-enhancing products.

Manzano continues to offer his spin on the underworld of doping in cycling and told L'Equipe in an interview this week -- ahead of a court appearance in Italy where he's helping investigators -- that he thinks Alejandro Valverde is "up to his neck" in the Operación Puerto doping scandal.

He dropped a few more bombs, too. Here are more excerpts from the Manzano interview:

When asked about Manolo Saíz, the ex-Liberty Seguros team manager who was among five people arrested last May, Manzano expressed pessimism that the cycling hasn't seen the last of the former ONCE boss.

"Don't fool yourself. He'll be back. For the moment, he's worried about recuperating his money, then he'll return," Manzano said. "After that, he'll let time pass by and then he'll begin again to find new sponsors. These new sponsors will ignore who he is and look the other way."

Manzano also accused the Spanish cycling community from being "corrupt top to bottom," leveling charges that a Spanish lab certified by the UCI tipped off teams when doctors were coming for pre-stage blood screenings.

"I want to give you an example, something I've never spoken about except to the police up until now. It concerns one of the four Spanish Laboratories credited by the UCI. This laboratory, which is in charge of sending the UCI ‘vampires' to take the samples during the Vuelta and other races, is the same lab that's in charge of the doctor visits to the cyclists, they follow the cyclists and give them the stamp of approval on their licenses," Manzano told L'Equipe. "The owner of this clinic, a renowned hematologist, called Walter Viru, who is one of the doctors for Kelme, to alert them the day before the UCI vampires were coming to take the samples from the cyclists. And he did the same thing with Del Moral, the doctor for the U.S. Postal team and then Discovery, a good friend of his."

The L'Equipe reporter asked, "Are your certain of this?"

"I experienced it in 2002 and 2003 during the Vuelta. I gave the police have all the details and the name of the clinic. Even better, I remember one time Viru, who had acquired the Russian EPO, wanted to know the purity of it before he used it. And so he gave a vile of it to this clinic and had them confirm it was good. An important detail, this laboratory is still accredited by the UCI. When I talk about the mafia, I don't use this word lightly."

Manzano went on to attest that José Maria Jimenez, who died of a heart attack in 2003, suffered a tragic death due to his dependence on performance-enhancing drugs. He said substance abuse is common among some in the peloton.

"Of course, like it killed Pantani. The drugs lead you to other addictions. The anti-depressants almost automatically accompany other doping treatments. I took up to eight pills of Prozac a day when I was racing," Manzano said. "Prozac cuts the appetite, keeps you in another world, a world where you're not afraid of what you're doing. You're no longer afraid to inject yourself with all the crap. It takes you to a world where you don't ask any more questions, especially you don't ask your doctor questions either or your sporting director. Then one day all of the sudden it stops and you become dramatically depressed. Look at Pantani, Vandenbroucke and all the others we don't even talk about. They are numerous other cyclists and former cyclists that are addicted to cocaine, heroin and other medications."

When asked how cycling can solve its problems, Manzano had an easy answer:

"Fire all the sporting directors. (Bjarne) Riis is showing the example. It's good that he admitted (to doping). Now he has to make the next step, which is to quit the sport. How can he be taken seriously? He's admitted to doping and now he wants us to believe he's going to go back to cycling and this is supposed to make us believe drugs won't be used anymore? There's only one solution - he must leave!" Manzano said. "And along with him, all the sporting directors who have been working for the past 10 years have to quit also. They're the responsible ones. The directors are the ones who blackmail the cyclists. They put pressure on the riders to take the EPO and all the drugs and the cyclists can't refuse if they want to ride for the team. These directors are the ones who prolong the system and little by little pressure the pros into it. First you go slowly, then you fall slowly, then you realize you've thrown everything away. They say to you, ‘Here's your choice: you do want we say or you're done cycling."

Manzano says he's bitter about his experiences and no longer follows the sport very closely.

"It was my dream, my life. Today I'm completely indifferent to it. How could it be otherwise? When I see Valverde, Mancebo or Sevilla win, I know what's going on. And that kills my love for the sport," he said. "Cycling is corrupt. You can see that on the side of the roads. There's nobody left cheering on the cyclists except for the Tour. Even the cows aren't duped."

Donaldson's Made A Mess Of It Again: Part Deux

Obviously, I'm not only fat, but I'm dumb, too.

This afternoon, Brooklyn Velo Force posted the results from Sunday's time trial on their web site and, after reviewing the data, I neither completed six laps nor averaged 17.3 MPH (as per my previous post).

According to the spreadsheet I downloaded, the course was 2.2 miles long which covered 11.1 miles over the five laps.

Here's the news.

Out of 28 riders in the Men's Cannibal class, I finished in 27th place. I know, that sucks, but you saw the picture below--I need to drop some pounds.

Further, 27th place meant I finished the 11.1 miles in 33:32. (28th place finished in 34:13, so ha!) That also means I averaged 19.86 MPH. And that means my computer does NOT need to be calibrated. That's a relief because I'd have no idea how to go about doing something like that.

So despite my earlier concerns, here are the official stats:

Split Times

Lap 1: 6:28
Lap 2: 6:43
Lap 3: 6:43
Lap 4: 6:49
Lap 5: 6:49

I'm happy I was able to ride somewhat consistently, but the fact that I rode progessively slower doesn't say much, does it?

As an FYI, the guy with the best time finished the course in 23:29 and averaged 28.36 MPH. That's big time. The fastest woman did it in 27:32 and averaged 24.19 MPH. That's big time, too.

Horrible

Life just took a turn for the worst. While poking around on the Brooklyn Velo Force web site--the group that organized the TT at Floyd Bennett Field this past Sunday--looking for final times, I found a bunch of pictures from the race on VelocityNation.com.

Before I post this ridiculous picture of myself, let me say a few things.

Until thirty minutes ago, I had thought of myself as being in somewhat good shape. As you can see from the snapshot below and the way my stomach is pressing against my jersey, I was clearly wrong to think as much. So that needs to change. Starting now, the diet is changing.

Second, I thought that by riding with my hands in the drops, I would keep myself in a more aerodynamic position. Someone should have explained to me that it helps to bend the elbows and lower the head toward the handlebars. If only I had known. Actually, I did know, but never really felt too comfortable in such a leaned forward position, but I can tell you THAT'S going to change starting with my training ride tonight.

Third, while I'm not the biggest fan of paying attention to the slightest of aerodynamic details, I definitely need to do a better job of pinning numbers to the back of my jersey. For those of you who race, you'll realize that the numbers usually come with standard safety pins, so maybe someone can drop me some sort of secret hint on how to pin a number to the back of my jersey without it sounding like a parachute back there.

Finally, it looks as though I could benefit from raising the saddle a bit more. And I might also benefit from not making such stupid faces when I ride.