new battle wagon

yep.

AVC.

Nothing dramatic has happened since Portland. Lots of PR's in the gym and on the bike.

Leaving on a jet plane in T-Minus 8 days.
Happy to be headed back home with Jenny this time. It will be awesome.

So yep.

Word.

DT

hello, portland

Back in the time vortex that is Portland, Oregon. Days disappear here into some other universe. One minute you're walking off the plane and the next minute BAM it's wednesday, you've done two track sessions and a race, but you can't remember either. I've narrowed it down the causes to two alternate explanation encompassing both my previous and current lifestyles.

1: When we lived here previously: Put simply, time flies when you're drunk. This is a severely alcoholic city. I can't hold a conversation with friends here for more than 2 minutes without hearing "have you been to X brewery yet?"
"have you tried the new X Ale from X? It's killer!"
"have you been to X bar yet? We're going to Thursday! You should come with!"
This is a great city to lose it for an evening/night/day or two. So many great places to be, so many great people to be with. It's easy to let days slip by with just the sounds of a pouring tap...

2: This current trip, I'm not drinking, but replacing all drunken hours with workout hours. Today for instance, weight session in the morning, 3 hour ride in the afternoon and a hilly criterium in the evening. In between, eating free food at home, sleeping and trying to stay somewhat hydrated. Sounds like I won't be allowed to leave town without meeting people for a beer at least once (I"m thinking Thursday), but for the most part my days are being smashed out of my head with standing starts and sprints against old rivals.

Speaking of which, PIR was last night. Candi gave me a special welcome home gift. Or maybe a nice-to-see-you middle finger. 18 laps with 18 sprints. What. The. Hell. That hurt. Alot. Won a couple sprints, placed in a couple more and was so tired by the final that I managed to screw everything up completely and roll in for 5th or something. Was definitely hoping for a better showing, but a 300 meter headwind road sprint every 3 miles is not my cup o' tea. It was crazy hard, and crazy hard in a sprint stress week is good.

Picked up two of my custom sets of Rolf track wheels yesterday. They look A M A Z I N G. Possibly the greatest looking hubs I have ever seen. Custom machined splined cogs. One aluminum clincher, one carbon tubular. Can't wait to ride them tomorrow.

DT

p.s. Important message for Pat Bateman: There is now a Muchas Gracias across the street from the track. Taste!

wif moah intensity, prease

So here we are, it's May 24th and the velodrome is still closed under lock and key, in legal limbo. This has been frustrating beyond words. I've missed a month of track training and can't afford to miss another. My short term and long term goals both mean lots of track time and lots of racing. And I'm here trying to make up for it with fixed gear/road bike motorpacing. Better than nothing, but nothing like racing.

So.

The plan.

Fly to stumptown on Monday June 8th and pray for good weather.
Gym work with brian in the early mornings, track workouts every afternoon and road or track racing every evening for 7 days, including the crit on Mississippi and the Heartbreaker at the track.
Fly home an exhausted shell of a track sprinter, ready for a few days off and some more road training.
Fly into a rage in the middle of a board meeting at the USOC if the track doesn't open in July.
Fly back to Portland to do another marathon session of heavy track work and two AVC's.

Tickets are paid for (sort of. credit cards are scary), dates are set.

By then my season will officially begin. Trying not to blow myself apart before the carnivals in Australia come December, so it's a late start and fingers crossed that the skinny roadies don't spend all the team's cash on donuts and Land Rover parts. If all goes well it's an autumn of sixdays and a winter of UCI points. London 2012. Onward and upward, with or without the usoc.
DT

judo CHOP!

So this one is definitely interesting.
Mike lost his room at the OTC last fall (for purely administrative reasons, which are still pretty murky). So after a long, drawn out battle, he's now living in California, trying to figure out what to do next, and now USOC is publishing a video he made with another athlete about "resident life."

The Mike and Myles Show

It's pretty funny actually. I would never wish Mike ill, but it's pretty funny to see a track cyclist get thrown around by an elite Judo guy twice his size.

spring is here.

it's may.

the sun is out.

i have the first track workout of the year scheduled for tomorrow.

the track is sitting there, waiting. locked up tight.

the shorttrack speedskaters are using the banked warm-up track, but I cannot go do a workout tomorrow on the track itself.

USACyling has done everything they were told to.

the Colorado Velodrome Association has done everything they were told to.

the US Olympic Committee keeps saying NO.

this.

is.

rediculous.

From the USOC website: "The vision of the USOC is to enable America's athletes to realize their Olympic and Paralympic dreams."

Not much enabling going on around these parts when the USA Cycling can't get into it's own "premier training facility."

DT

f#ckin A!

Notch one up in the Victory column.

Fest for Friday

4 hours today with 4000 feet of climbing. Turned around above Divide at about 10,000 feet. Daaaamn. That hurt. Howling headwind the whole way down turned the usually fun descent into a demoralizing near-bonk march. The whole way up I thought about this video:



Rotterdam Six-Day. Got an invite to go this year from a Dutch sprinter (third down the WWF super-star stairs), so looks like I need to get in the shape of my life. Qualifying for London 2012 is only two track seasons away. Crunch time is now.

The parental units breezed into town for a few days of food, fun and Colorado-ing. It was great to see them and even greater to show them that the Springs is really becoming home for us. Between our incredible apartment, a great group of friends and plenty of great stuff to do, it's getting harder and harder to think about moving back to Portland. The resources I have here as a cyclist and the opportunities Jenny has at her work are impossible to turn away from. Tomorrow she flies out to New York for a week long buying trip, and today my coach took time off work to dive a follow moto up the mountain for me. How sweet is that? Them? Those?

Parents have moved on to DC for a killer Politi-venture. My mom's sure to post a billion awesome pictures. You will love it so much it's retarded.

First week on the track starts monday! Then it's back to two more weeks of road torture! Whoa!

DT

heavy

This is a long one, but things start getting heavy about 3:30 in. Theo Bos vs. Daryl Impey

Yeah. I know. Not cool.

You know what is cool? A professional cyclist riding from portland to vantucky with a bucket of donuts.

DT

it's story time!

Lifting at the Olympic Training Center is a strange thing. One one hand, you miss the pageantry of the public gym. The steroidal gym rats who waddle in to do 2 reps with massive weight for bicep curls, the ultra-flamboyant gays throwing dance moves on the treadmill, the cougars trawling for gym rats, etc. On the other hand, all that is replaced by a different kind of entertainment.

For instance.

A few Wednesdays ago: One of our Strength & Conditioning interns happens to be a competitive eater. You know the guys you see on ESPN2 scarfing hot dogs and ultimately getting beat by a pre-adolescent Japanese kid? He does that. So one day my coach bets this intern that he can not eat 3 whole Habanero peppers (seeds, stem and all) in 20 minutes without throwing up. No money is bet, no personal property, just "I bet you can't."
He takes the bet.
Several hours later, he is standing in the center of the gym in front of an improvised table (plyo box with a white towel on top), staring at a pile of Habaneros, a few cyclists, a puke bucket and a lot of cameras. To his credit, the intern finishes every last pepper in 7 minutes. Tears streaming down his face, buckled over the "table," trying to block out the uncontrolled laughter of everyone in the room. I laughed so hard at his misfortune and pain that my stomach hurt for days. His eyes weren't just watering, he was crying. Bawling, almost.
About an hour later, my coach finds him passed out in the corner of the gym. After rousing him, the intern says he feels like he "just drank a gallon of vodka mixed with gasoline," and has never felt so drunk in his life. He has to be driven home, where he retires to the toilet with a bottle of Tums. Later he says that the next 2 days are the worst of his entire life.

Today: I'm doing a workout with a cyclist who will remain anonymous. For the purpose of our story I will call him "Aaron Kacala." Aaron is a genetic freak who progresses faster than any human I have ever seen in the weight room. Today he is up to 180 kilos for 3 sets of 5 in the squat rack. He warms up, starts adding weight, and is finally ready to go. I stand back and watch with my coach as Aaron clears one rep by the skin of his teeth and drops the second rep. Aaron does not fail very often. In fact, this is the first time I've seen him miss a rep.
My coach asks politely, "how much weight did you do last week?"
The answer: 177.5 kilos. This would seem about right. Normal progression at this weight is 2.5-5 kilos per week.
My coach's next question, "Then why are you trying to squat 200 kilos?"
Aaron's face twists, he looks at the bar. Sure enough. 200k on the bar.
"Because that's not even close."
We laugh.
We are bike racers, not mathematicians.

Later, during that same workout: A female wrestler is convinced that if you do a handstand for 30 seconds before you get on a scale, you will weigh less. Supposedly, she has tried this successfully at a meet. I'm going through this in my head, trying to work out the impossible physics of decreasing mass via handstands when our habanero-chomping intern bolts up on his hands next to the scale. Gets on the scale. Sure enough, he weighs the same. The wrestler is baffled. We are very quietly losing our minds with "are you serious?" laughter. They try 3 more times before conceding that this theory must be total B.S.

it's like a caption contest for reading lips

This has always bothered me.

Watch this video.


What the does he say?

"the bucket of donuts is gone."

"all the beer in the world has evaporated."

"if you don't lay down your head will blow up."

????

In other news, there's a new link just over to your right. Rolf Prima is the official wheel supplier to Land Rover-Orbea this year. The world's best wheels, made in Euguene, Oregon.
OR-EY-GUN!

So what have I been up to these last few weeks you ask? Well.
We've been getting up to Boulder to ride the indoor whoopdeedoo they have there whenever finances and time allow.
Allegedly one of the two guys who built the indoor track in Boulder is moving to Portland to repeat the task.
This track is... fun. I guess. It's fun for time trials because the transitions are so incredibly dangerous at sprint speed that it's a challenge just to stay on the track at a decent clip. The banking is not nearly steep enough to accommodate the hellaciously tight corners, so it's an exercise in staying loose and fluid, not having too much weight on the front end and not freaking out too much about the fact that your rear wheel isn't on the track anymore. It's not much fun in that racing head to head with someone is taking your life in your hands. The track throws you around so much that I won't even sprint with Kacala, and there are few people I trust as much as that guy (maybe Abers, but that's about it).

Criticism aside, it is fun. And it's better than riding in the snow.

St. Paddy's Day has come and gone, the IRA flared up and got dangerous again, and we drank way too many of these.

It was a good night, epic in every way. Walked right past the 2 block line out front of the Jack Quinns Irish Pub and was ushered in through the back door by the bar manager. It's good to be a local sometimes. Things only went downhill from there.

On the healthier side of things, the mountain is less treacherous this time of year, so Jenny and I are getting back into a little of this:

That's the Springs behind us. Picture is at 9,000 feet or so.

Shine on forever, benevolent sun.

Black Flag on the headphones, sun on the skin and plenty of miles to go before the season begins in earnest.
Training in Colorado does not suck that much.


Some people wanted to see the Brett.J sugar skull I had done last fall.

It is Jerolimous. I think so anyway.

Remember how I said I didn't think Sireau would survive track World's after decking Sir Hoy?

So sure, he was ultimately done in by his teammate instead of a vengeful Brit, but semi poetic-justice nonetheless. AND. How about that save by Bauge! WTF?! Sideways on a tubular at 220psi? And he pulls it out? Rad-tarded.
DT

finally, fashion i can support

Happy April 1st!

yes, i have a new computer now

Hoorah!

The World Championships of the Branch Of Cycling Nobody Cares About just finished. Phinney won the pursuit (by alot) and gets to paint happy sparkly rainbows all over everything he owns, Stephan Nimke managed to keep the skinny kid from winning the kilo (all he had to do was ride a 1:00) and my favorite sprinter Azizul Awang (he's a cool guy in person and is built like a human, not a gorilla-horse) from Malaysia fought his way to the gold medal round and gave gorilla-horse Gregory Bauge a run for his money. The British men had too much fish'n chips and Boddington's after dominating the planet at the Games in Beijing and couldn't put anything in the W column for this year's world's. Boo hoo. It'll be a quiet flight back to Brittania on the "Sir Chris Hoy."

My team is making me look like a chump. 2 top tens in the first 2 races of the year. Not bad for a first year pro team in its maiden voyage. Seems like every time I check cyclingnews for the California spring races there's some yellow in there somewhere. My first race will be the highly presigious not-a-track-race Air Force Academy Criterium two short weeks from now. We'll see if all these road miles have done me any good this year, or if my 185 pounds of luggage (leggage?) will overpower my lungs. again...

I hate spring.

T minus 3 months until my season really starts (portland AVC!). Time. Could. Really. Go. Faster. I'm just glad Jenny's going with me this year. That will be killer.

Speaking of Jenny, she gets to do some traveling of her own pretty soon. That high roller is headed to the Big Orange or whatever they call New York for some high-falutin, high-fashion business. She's one of those jet-set business people now. She'll be talking on a bluetooth headset, typing on a Blueberry phone slurping champagne in first class in no time. Crazy.

DT