Birmingham and Another Old Post

This afternoon I returned to Manchester from another side trip.  This time I visited Birmingham, childhood home of Ozzy Osbourne and a city with more canals than Venice.  While Birmingham is not as well-known as some other cities for being a center of British culture, I had a good time there and enjoyed walking the canals and seeing a bit of the Christmas parade and fireworks on Saturday night.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Birmingham was partially illuminated at night.  The artificial lighting gave the statues multiple shadows, symbolic of the many lost identities wrapped up in the entity of the unknown soldier.

On Saturday afternoon, I caught a football (soccer for us Americans) game at The Church Inn, a charming English-style pub that has been serving beer and tasty food for about 150 years.  Today I saw part of a Remembrance Day service in downtown Birmingham, and then walked around the city for a while before catching the train back to Manchester.

While leaving Birmingham, I saw this set of lights and signs at an intersection and was amused.  Don't turn!!!

Here is another post that I dragged out of my drafts folder.  It describes a week in the middle of September, before I took off for track nationals and the adventures in the UK.  It is rather bike-centric, so may be inappropriate for anyone who finds my enthusiasm for bicycles to be somewhat deranged...

A week at the Olympic Training Center

In the middle of September, I made my way to Colorado Springs for the introduction to bike racing camp at the US Olympic Training Center. I was recruited to pilot a tandem on the road and track, a good fit for a big lug like me. I showed up on Sunday afternoon, and starting Monday we did two rides per day all week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we rode the tandems on the track, which was a ton of fun. During the first flying lap, turn two gave me a momentary fear that the remains of my stoker, Chester, and I would be scraped off of Union Blvd after flying up, off the track, over the fence, and into the busy street. We kept the bike down however, and finished off the flying lap without incident. The next day, we had our first real opportunity to put some power into the pedals and rode “Emerging Talent” standards in both the 1km and 4km time trials.

On Thursday morning, we learned about climbing and descending on a tandem. Piloting a tandem is way different than a single bike. On my single bike, my body weight is about 90% of the weight of the system, so most of the mass has direct muscle control and nervous system feedback. On the tandem, however, my body weight is only about 40% of the weight of the system, so it takes more of a concentrated effort to guide the bike through an ideal path. While descending Gold Camp Road on Thursday, we had no problem negotiating the turns, but I had to constantly feather the brakes to keep our speed under control. I had the feeling that left to its own devices, the bike would have carried us down that hill much faster than what was safe with the various driveways and intersecting side streets. Better safe than sorry, especially when I'm not the only person on the bike...

Jon (our fearless mechanic), Chester, and I took a breather after one of our descents from Gold Camp Road.

Thursday afternoon, Chester and I had a team-building exercise in self reliance. A short distance into the afternoon recovery ride, we had a puncture and our rear tire went flat. I was carrying tire levers, a spare tube, and a hand pump. I had not taken into account the larger tires on the tandem compared to my road bike. The tube was not made for tires that size, so we ended up riding over to the local bike shop and bought a couple new tubes of the correct size and then borrowed a floor pump to re-inflate the tires. While we were dealing with the bike issue, the rest of the camp group did their recovery ride, so we pedaled easy back to the training center and rejoined the group at the end of the ride.

Friday was a recovery day, in preparation for a road time trial on Saturday. It was nice to have fairly short and low intensity efforts for the 10^th and 11^th rides of the week. On Saturday morning, the group headed out east of town for the road time trial. The course was just under 5-km in length, almost perfectly flat, and featured four right turns. Each rider or tandem pair completed three laps of the course. Chester and I were the last two riders to start. During our warm-up, we did one lap of the course at (or very close to) time trial pace, so we had a good feeling for what to expect (pain, for those not familiar with time trials). With the exception of a mail delivery truck that made a U-turn in front of us on the first lap, the official ride went just like we planned. We took our time to ramp up to full TT speed at the start, and then put our heads down to suffer for the rest of the effort. We finished in 19-minutes 21-seconds, which was the fast time for the day and worked out to an average pace of 1:18.35 per kilometer, good enough for another “Emerging Talent” time standard.

Evidently I am not an expert tandem pilot yet.  I lost Chester!

On Saturday evening, the last night of the camp, a handful of camp participants went to the Finish Line Lounge, across Union Blvd from the Olympic Training Center, for drinks and karaoke. Chester and I both sang karaoke and a good time was had by all. On Sunday morning, everyone left the OTC to begin their travels home. I stuck around for a little while and linked up with Aaron Trent, one of the resident athlete para-cyclists, for some Madison exchange practice at the velodrome. Look for Aaron to be mixing it up in the Madison races next year!

Photographic evidence of my karaoke prowess.  Imagine I sound just like John Geils.

I have to give a big "Thank You!" to the organizers, coaches, volunteers, and mechanic who put in the effort to make the camp run smoothly and did the hard work while us campers pedaled bikes, learned about para-cycle racing, and had a ton of fun.  The photos from the para-cycling camp were taken by Robyn Glang, one of the camp volunteers, and then stolen by me via Facebook.  Thanks Robyn!

On Monday I headed back to Boulder and began preparing for the extended trip away from home (now in progress) that would take me to Los Angeles, CA for elite track nationals, to the San Francisco bay area for a visit with family and friends, and then on to the UK (where I am now) for bike racing, training, meeting new people, and seeing the sights in Europe.