daverea.com

After learning last night that some folks have actually been checking out my training posts here, I guess a quick mention of how it went is in store! The best assessment might be the look on our faces in these photos:

As it turns out, the training time I put in this year paid off: I finished the sport class race in 52 minutes, 20 seconds – an improvement over last year’s time over almost 19 minutes! In all, it was a fantastically fun race, and it set the bar for how hard I can push myself. Jason showed some time improvement, too – he clocked in at 47:30, shaving several minutes of his 2009 time.

You can check out more photos from the race at dougrea.com.

Right around this time tomorrow morning, I should be biting into my second lap around the Fat Tire Festival course. And at the moment, it appears there will only be two laps in the race; an embarrassed-sounding e-mail from GROC, yesterday, revised the lap count back to last year’s tally. So, 10 miles of pedals, brakes, dirt and lactic acid…here we come!

…another post in a series of updates on Fat Tire Festival training rides.

This update will be brief, as my alarm is set – by necessity – to an ungodly hour tomorrow. Got the hydration pack all fixed up, tossed some Clif Bloks in my pocket and headed out for my final Fat Tire training ride. Three laps, 1 hour and 37 minutes. I was hoping for under 30 minutes per lap, but by the time I finished, I was just glad I’d gotten through it!

Apparently my GPS app (Google MyTracks) crashed a little ways into the second lap, so the map below – aside from looking a hell of a lot like all the previous maps – doesn’t really show the full extent of the agony…

Tomorrow and Friday I’ll be staying clear of the bike, and a few short hours after a big spaghetti dinner on Friday night, it’ll be time to hit the trails for the real deal! If I haven’t already badgered you by e-mail, consider this your invitation to come on out to the Fat Tire Festival, have some chow, enjoy some music, make some noise and watch Jason and I beat ourselves to a pulp! The show starts at 9:05AM on Saturday the 17th.

This…

…is not what I had in mind for Fat Tire training ride 5.

We don’t get to control the weather on race-day, and that’s a perfectly good reason to go train in the rain, but with the amount of water hitting the ground today, I’d rather not tear up the trails. This weekend will bring a 45-mile skinny-tire hike around Keuka Lake, so unless things miraculously clear up before about 7PM, training ride 5 will be happening on Monday.

…another post in a series of updates on Fat Tire Festival training rides.

Far more prepared for a ride than when I set out on #3, yesterday’s training ride went surprisingly well – despite the 96° temperature outside! I made sure to prehydrate before hand, and took some extra time to stretch. Ride #4 was my first two-lap attempt.

Training Ride 4

• Date: July 7th, 2010
• Distance: 10 miles
• Time: 1:07:04 (including warm-up and two holy-crap-sweaty-eyes-can’t-see stops)
• Elevation gain: 1,544 feet
• Thoughts on starting: Just go slow. This isn’t the race. Just have fun. Really. I mean it.
• Thoughts on finishing: Yeah, two laps hurts about twice as much as one lap hurts…

Interestingly, I think I felt a true, honest-to-goodness “second wind” about 60% of the way through this ride. It didn’t feel like I expected – a big burst of “I can do anything!” energy – actually, it was more like a sudden transition from “not being there” to “being there”. I went from repeatedly reminding myself not to stare at the ground passing below my bottom bracket (“that’s history by the time you’ve seen it!”) to actually being in the ride again! Of course, it only lasted ’till about 80% of the distance, but that was enough to get me through the toughest of the climbs, and on my way to the final descent.

Hrmph. It appears I’ve missed a Project 52 deadline for the first time this year. Rest assured, fickle reader, that it was not for lack of trying. Actually, as I put the finishing touches on a thousand-word entry yesterday, I decided it just wasn’t worth bothering with. The post was more or less a rant about the similarities between Apple Computer’s business model (of late) and the health care legislation that’s currently looming over our country like the tidal wave at the end of The Abyss.

I wrote the post late Friday night, and read through it a few times yesterday, tweaking here and there. And then I read through it a couple more times. And then I asked myself, “why bother posting this?”. The answer wasn’t because I wanted to make a point, or share my conclusions, or push my point of view – it was because a new week was about to start, and I didn’t have anything else chambered up. So I flushed it. In the grand scheme of things, no one who reads this blog would have their mind changed by a bitchy post relating geek issues to Obamacare. And no one new would have visited the site just to see my rant. Why bother?

We had plenty of excitement in the afternoon, either way. After I nuked the rant, Kelly and I jumped in the car and headed out to Geneva Bike, in hopes of walking in with a gift certificate (a Christmas present from my parents) and leaving with a new pair of cycling shoes for me. Of course, you can’t go to a shop like this and not browse around a little – and that browsing landed us in front of a wall of ladies’ road bikes. As Kelly eyed one in particular – a Trek 2.1 left over from last year – I wandered off to play around on the 29′ers. A few minutes later, I found her (and the bike) bolted into a trainer, getting fitted! Long story short, after the bike was set up and we talked it over, it ended up coming home with us…

As much as I love mountain biking, I’m hoping that Kelly’s new wheels will give me a little more excuse to get out on the road with my trusty old Trek this season (after Craig tunes it up, of course). Stay tuned here; I’m sure we’ll have experiences to share!