A little competition is good for you

Ingredients for a funk:
- no more races on the calendar
- less daylight
- cold, rainy weather
- having to wear leg warmers, arm warmers, gloves, and booties
- looking at the calendar and seeing the really dismal months on the horizon
A good antidote: endorphins and a little competition.
After doing the Ohio Outside Trail Race I was surprised at [...]

20 years of progress

Here’s a measure of progress in the last 20 years: when Greg LeMond won the 1989 World Championship (in an amazing finish), we had to grovel for token TV coverage and scraps of news buried on page 10 of the sports section. 20 years later, on a rainy Sunday morning, I sat and drank coffee [...]

Suck wheel or get dropped?

Here’s the situation: you make what looks to be the winning breakaway. But quickly you realize that if you keep working at the same pace you’re likely to be dropped from the break.
What do you do? Sit on and be a wheel-sucker, or continue to work and most likely get dropped?
This was the [...]

Don’t try this

When you see someone on a bike talking on a cell phone, do you think, “what a wanker”? What about texting? What about someone laying in the road, one foot clipped into a pedal and one hand holding the cell phone?
Yeah, that would be me.
My defense is: the text was from my [...]

Don’t need a weatherman …

What did we do in the days before weather radar was a few mouse clicks away? We looked up at the sky, decided it was safe to ride … and then got wet a lot more often.
The forecast today was for ’scattered showers’. Scattered is OK, as long as the rain is scattered [...]

Just riding around

I’m coming to the conclusion that interesting encounters happen more often while you are out “just riding around”. That’s “just riding around”, as opposed to an intentional training ride — the dreaded 2×20 minute intervals, hill repeats, sprints, etc. For example …
Not long ago while just riding around I found myself helping an [...]

Wrong time to start riding to work

The ideal time to bike to work is in the middle of summer, right? Warm mornings, lots of daylight, and most importantly no parents rushing to get their kids to school on time.
But most of the time riding to work seemed to interfere with training: need an easy ride on Mon; Tues go to [...]

Famous in Michigan

I wasn’t quite ready to say that I’ve done my last race for the season. But was I willing to get all my gear together, then get up at 5 AM then drive 3-plus hours in order for that to be so?
That’s always the test for me: do I feel motivated enough to go [...]

Mind your equipment

Some things don’t belong in races.
To the rider in the Shreve road race: you must remove that giant saddle bag attached to your bike. Especially since it contains a bunch of tools that clank around every time you hit a bump. But if you do insist on racing with it, you must at [...]

Racing with a pig?

I’ve been told that I’m a hypochondriac. A little sniffle or scratchy throat, and I proclaim that I must be coming down with something.
The truth is that when you ride just about every day, you notice when your body feels even a little different. And then you start thinking about how you’re training is [...]