Poor Matt

So Matt got here yesterday to hang with me until the race.  I brought his motorcycle with me as well as mine so that he and I could go do some exploring in the time I'm not still training (and there will be a lot of that to kill).  Both of our motorcycles are "dual sports", which means they are street legal and very street capable, but are also very off-road capable.  That helps up here where the roads turn to rutted out rocky dirt roads with little warning.

Unfortunately, Matt realized a bit late in the game that he needed a new front tire for his motorcycle.  He ordered one and thought he'd have it in time to install it before I left, but it was a day late.  So he shipped it to Leadville and I picked it up.  He rode his bike to a dealer about 40 miles away (the closest one!) this morning to have it installed.  Unfortunately, on the way back he picked up a nail in his rear tire!  He was only about three miles away when he noticed it, and with little alternative he slowly rode it the rest of the way back to the campground.  Right now his bike looks like this:

It's missing something.

Unfortunately some part of this journey destroyed the tube in his tire to the point that there was no way we could patch it.  So we spent the next 30 minutes googling dealers and calling only to finally find one about 40 miles away.  Unfortunately the road between here and there is closed due to a tunnel collapse, so it'll be more like 60 miles for him to ride MY bike around and pick it up.  But at least it looks like we can get one today instead of having to wait until Monday at best, and that's using next day shipping.

The worst part of all this, too, is that not only did he get rained on this morning some, but it looks like it's raining in every direction from here right now and he's likely to get drenched on this trip, too.  Sucks for him, but what are you gonna do?

My day wasn't so awesome, either, but simply because I had a six hour training ride to do.  I wasn't supposed to ride terribly hard, just needed to ride for a long time.  So I did about all the riding there is to do in this area that doesn't involve crazy amounts of mountain climbing.  You can see the data here.  First thing you'll notice is I didn't go for the full six hours.  That was due to the aforementioned weather situation.  I started at 7:30, but really should have been moving by 7am and I would have made it.  But alas, I was at that last hour about to hit thirty minutes of singletrack before making the 30 minute trek back to town when I heard thunder.  Looking through the trees I quickly discerned that this was going to be a significant event.

So I skipped the singletrack and started getting my butt off the mountain.  I did get rained on pretty good, but at least I was able to get to lower elevation pretty quickly.  And while the rain wasn't ever terribly bad, there was a good bit of lightning and thunder in the area, so it seemed best to just cut it a little bit short.  I was pretty happy with how well I did at a ride this long at altitude...I'm getting more and more accustomed to it, which was the whole point.

It's kind of weird, though.  That was my last "long ride" until the race, which is now just over two weeks away.  And I probably won't have another six hour ride for a month, I'd guess, if then.  That kind of makes me happy right about now.  *grin*

Hopefully Matt gets the right tube and it stops raining by the time he gets back with it so we can install it.  That way we can go check out the Colorado Freeride Festival over in Winter Park!  Ashley and the kids and I got to see some of a similar event there last year, and it looks like a blast.  Wish us luck!

Good morning, Leadville!

Just some interesting photos from around town in Leadville.

Elk's Lodge with Mt. Massive in the background

Leadville Race Series offices

Leadville, USA

Legacy

Kickin' it old school, or Alisa's next whip

Just a barn

Good fences make good neighbors

I'm guessing the fire department doesn't appreciate the hydrant collection

Yard art, or "just put the clothes line near the statues"

My statement is: I love Leadville.

I've heard stories that there are still some residents of this town who are not happy that this big mountain bike race happens every year.  Well, I have yet to find any of those people.  Instead all I have found are some of the most welcoming and friendly folks on the planet.

I'll start with Jerry at the Pastime Saloon.  She's been running that place for something like 30 years.  Here's what it looks like from the outside, which happens to basically be my view from the windshield of the RV parked in the campground across the street:

Pastime Saloon, Leadville, CO

 Jerry is a perfect bartender.  Tough, no nonsense, but still somehow very friendly and talkative.  She's got a full bar and a fairly limited food menu, but the food is very good.  It's also pretty fast.  She talks a mean game that she'd sell that place in a heartbeat, but I don't believe it.  Jerry is the Pastime Saloon.   And vice versa.

My regular massage therapist back home did some googling before I came out trying to find me a therapist here.  But she didn't come up with much and her recommendation was actually to just head over to one of the very close ski resort towns like Aspen.  But in walking through downtown, I noticed that one of the many sandwich board signs was for "Blue Earth Salon" and one of their listed services was "massage."  Hmm.  I was skeptical, but I looked up their website and found they had a couple licensed massage therapists on staff.  I also noticed they purported to do haircuts for men, and I was in kind of bad need of one of those.  So on Monday I called to see about availability on Tuesday.  Turns out I got the owner, Erin.  Boy am I glad that I did!

Erin is a recent mother of a baby boy and is married to a local firefighter.  She's from Georgia, but loves Leadville and doesn't care to live anywhere else, from what I can tell.  And how do I know so much about Erin already?  Well, she had an opening on Tuesday to cut my hair and then give me a 90 minute deep tissue massage.  Yeah, I was skeptical going in that one or the other or both would be sub-par, but honestly, I was very happy with both of her services.  And better than that, she's got a wonderful business to visit and is warm and friendly.  She's a yoga instructor as well, and I'd bet she is very good at that, too.  I'm very happy to have found her, and already have an appointment for another massage on my day off next week!

And yes, I had another workout today.  That started with some bike maintenance, and then a quick walk over to Cycles of Life.  I had heard there was some good singletrack riding right near downtown, and I figured there was no better place than the local bike shop to go find out.  Of course I had to buy a few things while I was there, but they were more than happy to point me to some fairly new trail that the local club, the Cloud City Wheelers, had built.  They even had a nice laminated map for purchase with proceeds going to more trail development.  So I picked up one and headed back to ride.

The map is well done and I followed it fine to get started, but unfortunately there are some trails out there that aren't yet on their map.  And through a mistake of my own, I ended up on one of those.  It was still a very fun trail for a while, until I encountered an awesome bridge built to cross a stream.  Unfortunately, a recent dam built by an over-zealous beaver rendered the bridge useless (it simply took you right to a large pool that the beaver was happy to call home), but there were ways around.  So I hiked a bit and was back on trail, until it emptied into a road, which I rode for a while before deciding that wasn't right, and decided to back-track.  Here's a pic from the trail:

Boulders Trail, Leadville, CO

I was almost back to where I should have been when I ran into Jeff and Banjo.  Jeff is a local runner and Banjo was his trusty canine running companion.  Jeff quickly apologized for Banjo being off-leash, but that was completely unnecessary as Banjo was perfectly friendly and more interested in looking for squirrels and chipmunks than bothering me.  But Jeff stopped to make sure I wasn't lost and then proceeded to fill me in on what I had done wrong and how I could fix it, as well as gave me more directions on how to hit some awesome downhill trail that wasn't on the bike shop map.  He was a super guy who shook my hand twice and thanked me for coming to their little town.

And then there's High Mountain Pies.  It's yet another place that you probably wouldn't find unless you saw their sandwich board sign.  Amazingly friendly dudes working their butt off right in front of you to make some of the absolute best calzones and pizzas you've ever had.  They have a thorough menu, and amazing service for a counter-service kind of place.  Just great guys who are happy to do what they do, and really happy when you enjoy what they do. 

Now, it's not PERFECT here in Leadville.  I did have some mediocre service and mediocre food at a Mexican place.  The grocery store isn't awesome by any means.  In fact, the entire "shopping" scene is pretty meager, and there's even less as far as "entertainment" (no theater, and the bowling alley doesn't look like much from the outside, anyway).  But it's a very small town, and the small town charm more than makes up for the deficiencies, in my opinion.  There's certainly even more to enjoy than the few things I've listed above.  I'll keep the Leadville love flowing as I find more of them...I really really love it here.

All Leadville, all the time!

Wow, what a few days it's been in Leadville!  I couldn't help but snag a pic of this, as it seems fitting for me, too:

Since my last post, Alan has come and gone and we completed the two day Carmichael Training Systems camp for the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race, so I'll start with that.  Day one of the camp covers the race start and the first 23 miles of the course.  Then you turn around and do most (or all, depending on how fast you are) of the last 23 miles.  Alan did it all, I wasn't quite fast enough so I only ended up doing most of it.  My data is here.  The most interesting part is the elevation graph:

That made for a total of about 4500 feet of climbing over nearly 40 miles.  The St. Kevins climb is a serious kick in the teeth right at the beginning, but the rest is fairly uninteresting until you get to Powerline.  That descent is fast and dangerous due to the loose soil and large loose rocks, but it is still pretty fun.  From there, we turned around and went back up.  That sucks.  Only a handful of riders have EVER ridden the first part of Powerline during the race.  It's crazy steep.  I'll be walking that and likely a lot of the rest of it, too, just because of how far into the race it is (73 miles or so!).  After that, things get somewhat sane with just run of the mill brutal climbs.  *cough*

We finished that ride up and CTS provided a killer lunch from Mountain Pies here in Leadville.  Man, that place has spectacular calzones and pizza!  Then I biodegraded.  I was beat.  Turns out the only thing I screwed up that day was my sodium intake.  I simply forgot to take it for most of the day and thought that the fact that I had to pee fairly often meant I was hydrating fine.  Wrong.  If you don't get enough salt your body doesn't effectively process the fluid.  So I was just flushing it out. 

That had me feeling dehydrated to start day 2, which wasn't good.  So I upped the early salt intake a bit along with the fluids and barely managed to stay on top of it.  That was good, because day 2 is the Columbine Mine climb and then a quick out-and-back to show you some of the course outside of Twin Lakes.  The full data is here, but here's the elevation graph from this one:

That's 4300 feet of elevation gain and almost all of it at one time over 7 miles!  That's all gravel road and isn't too bad until you get to the last mile and a half or so.  I probably walked a mile of that part, but rode the rest of it.  I think on race day I'll be able to do about the same amount.  CTS served us another excellent lunch after this one, too.  In between days they also served up a great little talk along with dinner at a local Italian place.  All in all, I'd say their coaches did a wonderful job, and I feel much more confident about the race now that I know so much more about what to expect and how to properly pull this thing off. 

Outside of that, things are going really well.  I haven't slept very well any night here until last night, but I think that's simply because I'm getting acclimated to this altitude finally.  I'm sure it was partially because I was so tired from no sleep and those two days of riding, but it was still nice to finally get out of the bed feeling well rested for a change.  Today was my workout day off, and I was fortunate enough to find not only a good place to get my hair cut (it was really getting bad due to all this traveling!), but a really great deep tissue massage, too.  This was a wonderful discovery, because I hate finding new people to cut hair, and I was sure I'd have to go to a resort town nearby for a massage, which would have meant a motorcycle ride of nearly an hour.

I'm also quite happy to be staying at the Leadville RV Corral:

Here's my RV and Dad's trailer in my campsite in Leadville

It's normally $30 per day for a full hookup pull-through site, but I am staying so long my monthly rate gets it down to $23 per day.  I'm right across the street from a pretty cool bar that has great burgers and wings, and basically less than 8 blocks from everything Leadville has to offer.  The campground has a pretty reasonable laundry facility that I've now used once that's about 25 steps from my door, and so far even the wifi has been pretty peppy.  The cable TV is reasonable and the tap water here is outstanding.  I suppose that makes sense given that it comes off of melted snow from 14' feet off a mountain somewhere close by!

So what's next?  Well, I've got workouts planned for this week along with the arrival of my friend, Matt.  He'll be here Thursday.  We've both got our dual sport motorcycles here and plan to find our way to the top of some 14k' peaks.  Look for lots of pictures as we find our way around!

First full day report from Leadville

That's me today taken on the Mineral Belt Trail that runs around the town of Leadville.  It's 11.6 miles in length and is totally paved with a handful of road crossings.  It has about 700 feet of elevation gain and loss, with basically one long climb and one long descent.

I've done two rides now.  Yesterday's ride was about 80 minutes and today was 60.  Just trying to take it easy and get my legs back under me while getting used to the altitude.  I have prepared about as well as I could have, but there's just nothing like being here.  My lungs feel like they're struggling very hard at times, but the nice thing is my heart rate seems to be staying in good shape even with long sustained climbs and decent output wattage.  For example, a 600' continuous climb today at 184W yielded an average heart rate of 138 bpm.  That was on pavement, so the speed at which I did it won't translate to the race climbs exactly, but it shouldn't be too far off.  And that was around 12MPH for the 4.8 miles that it took. 

I'm very happy with that, but it's also happening when I'm still "fresh" from lower altitude, too.  The real question is how that will change as my body settles in and I'm having to do much long outputs on Sunday and Monday at the Carmichael camp.

The campground I'm at has been good.  It's an easy walk to the entire downtown area and the facilities are reasonable.  I've yet to find anything important that I've forgotten.  There are a few small things, but it's all stuff that Alan can bring when he flies out to do the camp with me.  The cable TV is decent and the wifi is actually very good.  The only nagging issue seems to be how we're going to get Matt's motorcycle re-jetted so it will run at altitude fine, but we're working some angles on that.

So far everything has been so good that I'm a little nervous!  It's almost too good.  The tragedy in Aurora was a little too close, and it's hard to feel very good about much of anything today in light of that.  But all we can really do is try to move on from those things.

It's about to get real!

That's right, I'm on my way to Leadville!

[ And I have to take this opportunity to remind you that you can still donate to my Team First Descents effort to help young cancer survivors! ]

My apologies for not blogging more, but honestly my training got pretty boring after those first few big milestones.  Since I've last posted I have a good many more rides longer than four hours, with many at the six hour length.  This calendar year alone I've now done almost two thousand miles of bicycling and well over 300 miles of running.  That's alongside something like 75 hours of weight room training.  I'm certainly in the best shape of my life.

Will it be enough for the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race?  It should be.  But just in case it's not, I'm leaving pretty early so I can do the Carmichael Training camp specifically geared for this race.  Then I'm going to stay in Leadville for the three weeks in between to finish my training at altitude so that I'm as acclimated as I can get.  Next I'm going to take the start line and do my best to enjoy my day and hope that everything works out well for me.  If it does, I'll be back to the finish in something under twelve hours and join the list of Leadville finishers.  As long as it's under twelve hours, I'll consider this a raging success.  Can I get it a lot under 12 hours?  Stay tuned...

I'm writing this entry while my buddy, John, takes a turn driving us out.  He's an awesome road trip buddy who agreed to drive out with me to give me some company and help with the driving load.  I'll drop him off in Denver to fly back to NC here soon, though.  Then my buddy Alan will fly in and join me this weekend for the camp and fly back home shortly after.  Then next week another buddy, Matt, will fly in and stay for three weeks with me.  He'll be the crew for Alan and I during the race, and otherwise he and I will do some motorcycle riding around Colorado when I'm not training.

The best part is one of Matt's kids will fly with my wife and my two kids to Leadville just before the race and they will help crew, too.  Then we'll all stick around Colorado for another week after and do some sight-seeing.  We're going to have a ton of fun!  Well, they will.  I'll probably sit in the car for a few days whimpering and licking my wounds!

The worst part is being gone this long from my wife and kids.  Hopefully I can keep myself occupied well enough to not miss them too badly.  We had a long talk and the kids promised to help out really well while I'm gone, and I'm sure they will.  Otherwise Ashley is at the ready to ship ME their iPod's and the Wii remotes. *cough*

Anyway, here's a picture of the RV and trailer as we loaded up to head this way...

I'll be staying for the next month in that RV, too!  One of us may not survive...

And here's the bike rack we built on the wall:

We've got two motorcycles loaded behind those, and every bicycle part and tool that I own, I think.  And at least I'm going out early enough that I should be able to figure out everything I've forgotten in plenty of time to get it here anyway!

I'll try to write about how the camp goes, and then look for some blog posts with some pictures from some very high mountain passes (that I'll be finding via motorcycle, not bicycle!) over the next few weeks....

What Coaches Do

Warmed up on a hill, then you see the five repeats!

[ Gentle Reminder: Help me help kids with cancer! ]

So today was a hill repeat day.  Not just any hill repeat day, but five-minute hill repeats.  Five of them.  Which means I needed a five minute hill.  For those who may not quite understand, that's a hill that it will take me a full five minutes to ride up on a mountain bike.  Which is a pretty long hill.  And add to it that I needed to maintain a pretty high power level for the entire interval, too, which means if the hill isn't very steep then it has to be REALLY long because I'm going to have to go fast to maintain that moderate power.

Great.

Step one was to find a hill.  In looking at some old data, it seemed like I could do it at Umstead State Park.  Well, I'd actually have to start outside the park on Old Reedy Creek Road and travel into the park on what was basically a really steep hill for a short distance that flattens out into not much of a hill.  But all I needed was any kind of sustained uphill and I'd just make the bike go really fast to keep my power up.

Great.

So as I got the hill figured out and looked ahead to doing the interval, I thought "see, this is why you have a coach.  What a great idea that was.  You'd never plan to do something like this otherwise."  And with that I patted myself on the back and started my day.  Unfortunately, the day actually started with a little over an hour in the weight room with my other coach.  With him, well, there is no plan that I know about, I just show up two or three days a week and he puts me through all manner of crazy exercises that I couldn't even remember much less plan to do on my own.  And sometimes I even get to work with NBA or former NBA or going-to-be NBA players.  Which is cool until you are actually doing exercises with these freaks of nature who have legs about a mile longer than yours and are half your age and yet you somehow feel like you must do everything in your power to keep up with them.

Great.

After that, it was off for some lunch, a couple errands, and then to my hill in the afternoon.  Which was, of course, the hottest afternoon of the entire year.  I got warmed up and hit those first couple hill repeats.  Those went well, and I even put out more power than I should have.  But by the third one, I was thinking "WHY THE HELL DID YOU GET A COACH?!?!  WHAT KIND OF STUPID IDEA WAS THAT?  AND WHY IS SHE SO MEAN?  DOES SHE REALLY WANT TO KILL ME?!?!?"  (Yes, I yell at myself in my own head.)  But then Pandora saved me with just the right set of songs at just the right time and before long I was near the end of that last interval.  And I pounded out the rest of it.  The data is lovely.

WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

And with that, my thoughts pretty much immediately went to "Man, I love my coach.  That workout was something I would never have done in a million years if she hadn't been there to make me do it."  And just like that, I turned around and coasted down the hill for a while, recovered, and decided to take a victory lap of Crabtree.  Which, as it turns out, I did really fast because, well, I was inspired.  I didn't care that it was hot, I didn't care that I was tired, I just wanted to let loose and have some FUN.  And while it put me over my prescribed time by a few minutes, I'm pretty sure the kind of fun I had was something my coach wouldn't have minded at all.  But just in case she did mind, I'm going to suck up a bit and plug her by reminding all of you that she's not just an awesome coach, but she's an awesome writer and yoga instructor.  So go buy her books and take her yoga classes (in person or online!).  gulp

[ My apologies for the gratuitous use of underlines, bolds, italics, and most of all, combinations of all of the above. No, wait, nevermind, I do not apologize.  It's cool and you know it. ]