June adventures

As I promised last time, I've had a handful of adventures since the last blog update.

At the beginning of June, track racing season started here in Colorado.  The first Thursday night went well, with a pair of top-3 finishes.  The following Tuesday, I was back to the track for more racing, knowing I would miss out on the 2nd Thursday night.

On the morning of Wednesday, the 8th, Aaron Trent and I loaded up my car, and set off to drive from Boulder to Indianola, IA.  On Thursday, we visited with my grandparents and went for a road ride on some flooded bike paths between Indianola and Carlisle, IA.

Then on Friday morning, we packed up the car again and drove north in I-35 to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for the 2011 Fixed Gear Classic at the National Sports Center Velodrome in Blaine, MN.  Racing began on Friday evening, with the keirin and scratch race for the men.  My legs did not respond well to the driving on Wednesday and Friday morning, so I was relieved to have a rain delay that pushed the remaining races from the session to Saturday morning.

It turned out my legs did not really begin to come around until Saturday afternoon, so the keirin, scratch, and sprint qualifier rides were a bust for me.  The sprinters who did not make the top-8 were given another ride, a 1-mile scratch race, to sort out 9th and lower places.  I went into the short scratch race with a solid plan, and was able to ride away from the other competitors.  My legs were back!

The endurance side of the program included a points race on Saturday afternoon.  I qualified comfortably in the heats, and then put myself on the scoreboard with an early attack in the final.

After the rain delay on Friday night, we were treated to nice weather and fast racing for the remainder of the weekend.

On Sunday, we raced two Madisons, a tempo race, and a handicap race.  The handicap did not go very well, and the Madisons were an exercise in torture, but the tempo race was arguably the highlight of my weekend with a powerful move to bridge to the lead group and then late attack where I broke away from the remaining field and finished clear of everyone, accumulating enough points for 7th place.

On Monday morning, Aaron and I packed up the car again and drove north-west on I-94 from Minneapolis to Fargo, ND.  My grandmother had a list of maintenance tasks around the house, which we were able to (mostly; a part for repairing my grandfather's grandfather clock is on order) complete by mid-day Tuesday.

We took in a taste of local color, going to the saloon in Abercrombie, ND for dinner on Monday night and then to the Sons of Norway lodge in Fargo for Tuesday lunch.

On Wednesday, we packed up the car again and in one long haul, drove from Fargo all the way to Boulder to conclude a week-long whirlwind racing tour of the mid-west.

On Thursday, the 16th, we drove back to Colorado Springs for more racing at the velodrome.  Aaron and I teamed up for Aaron's first official Madison race, marking a milestone in Aaron's development from paralympic time trial racer to all-around track racer.  Good stuff!

My aunt and uncle from Texas made it to the velodrome on Thursday night, so after the race we went for dinner, and then Friday morning we embarked on a weekend tour of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  Friday saw us visit some of the Colorado Springs area tourist attractions that I had never visited, despite living in Colorado Springs for three years.  We drove to the top of Pikes Peak, visited the Miramont Castle museum in Manitou Springs, and took the official visitor tour at the US Olympic Training Center.

Then on Saturday, we headed south past Fort Carson and made our way to the Royal Gorge, where we rode the incline railroad, the gondola, the skycoaster, and walked over the highest suspension bridge.

After leaving the Royal Gorge, we drove through Salida and Buena Vista on the way to Leadville, the highest town in Colorado.  Then on Sunday morning we drove from Leadville over Independence Pass to Aspen, walked around there in the morning, ate lunch at a restaurant in Glenwood Springs, took in the sights while driving I-70 through Glenwood Canyon, stopped in Vail for a short walk-around, detoured through Breckenridge, and then made our way back to the front range and ended the day in Boulder.

After nearly two weeks away from home, I had a day to take care of logistics, and then turned around on Tuesday morning, the 21st, and made my way to Augusta, GA for paralympic road racing nationals.

Kevin, who I trained with in Wisconsin over Memorial Day weekend, and I teamed up to ride the tandem time trial and road race events at nationals.  We wound up finishing 2nd to the defending national champions, Dave and Clark, in both races.  This was a good learning experience about tandem racing, and boosted my motivation to build strength on the bike and refine my technique to become a better tandem pilot.

The road race podium at paralympic nationals; Dave and Clark (1st place) are marked men with a couple of up-and-coming rookies looking to raise the level of American tandem racing. 

For now, I'm back in Boulder, but already beginning to plot my next adventure.

The new season is upon us

It's Thursday.  It's June.  It's time for track bicycle racing season in Colorado!  The Colorado Velodrome Association summer track racing league starts tonight.  Therefore, it is time for tea to provide some pre-race caffeine.

Some PG Tips and a little light reading get me ready to race.

A month has passed since my last post.  What have I been up to?  Lots and lots.

During my trip to California at the end of April and beginning of May, I finished up the 6th and final week of CrossFit competition.  I performed the 6th workout at CrossFit Santa Clara.  It went well, with a small incremental improvement over what I did here in Boulder at the beginning of the week.

Near the end of the trip, I raced the Friday Night track event at Hellyer Velodrome in San Jose.  It was my first track racing since traveling from Manchester back to the USA, and my legs felt pretty good considering the months off the track bike.  In the 5-mile scratch race, I won Matador of the Night for being the most aggressive rider.  For being Matador, I took home a nice bottle of Chilean wine.

Upon returning to Colorado, there was a day to do laundry, pay bills, check the mail, and then turn around and head to Colorado Springs for two weeks at the Wounded Warrior Games.  I was brought in by Team Navy/Coast Guard to help out with the cycling team and pilot a tandem for a visually impaired rider, Dan Peters.

The first week we had a training camp with daily rides at the Air Force Academy and the 2nd week was the competition.  With the exception of tandem pilots who could be civilians, the athletes were all military veterans.  At the end of the week, Dan and I took gold in the tandem road race with Dan really stepping up his riding to a higher level after falling ill with bronchitis earlier in the week which took him out of a couple of the track and field events.

After the conclusion of the Wounded Warrior Games, I headed back to Boulder for some more engineering work.  Then on Friday last week, I caught the bus to DIA and flew to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for a long weekend training on the tandem with another visually impaired rider who I will race with at Paralympic road racing nationals later this month.

We put in about 145 miles on the tandem in three days and experienced all the weather that eastern Wisconsin could throw at us: sun and wind on Saturday, rain and hail on Sunday, and then breeze and heat on Monday to cap off the weekend.

Over the weekend, I finished reading Helmet for my Pillow (pictured at the top of the post next to my cup of tea), a memoir written by a US Marine who fought in the Pacific theater in World War II.  The timing for reading this book was oddly coincidental since I participated in the Wounded Warrior Games in the middle of May.  Reading a first-hand account of our country's most significant military engagement of the last century that carried a most gruesome cost in terms of lives was an interesting contrast to helping wounded veterans, many of whom have participated in a lower-intensity but already longer-running conflict that is reshaping the world for this century. 

On a lighter note, last night after work, I hopped on the bus to Denver and checked out an improv comedy show at the Bovine Metropolis.   A CrossFit friend was performing with a class of students who were capping off their studies and evolving into full-fledged improv practitioners.  Everyone beware the Great White Swordfish.  It is fast, amphibious, walks around on four legs like half a tarantula, and is being pursued by a harpoon-armed man with vocal-chameleon-like accents and mysterious organized crime connections.

With the Colorado track racing season starting up today, it's going to be a busy couple of months, so I can't make any promises about when the next blog post will come.  However, I can guarantee some interesting adventures between now and then.