Mountain Biking

A good friend of mine, Scott DeLeeuw (http://www.rideagainstthemachine.com/) is a sort of all-around athlete a bit like myself. He is also a car enthusiast, drag racer, avid mountain biker, general outdoorsman, ice hockey player, roller hockey player, etc. I met him when I first moved to Colorado about 5 years ago on our former cycling team. This past year, I started riding MTBs with him and some of his other friends a bit. I've riddin' with him in the past, but never to seriously. This year, for a variety of reasons, I got hooked on the MTB side of the cycling world. I gave my circa 1990 MTB to a friend at work and bought a 2007 model Giant Anthem from another good friend and bike racer John Barvik at Adventure Cycles in Aurora (http://www.adventurecycle.net/). I rode with Scotts Wednesday night crew after work a few times this summer, and then Scott talked me into entering the final Winter Park Cross Country race in August. I got totally annialated, but it was so much fun, I will have to race the entire series again next year.

This is totally counter to the training I have been doing for the last two seasons..which is purely anaerobic capacity and neuro-muscular power work for track racing. My longest ever training rides now are on the order of 2 to 3 hours max...and thats slow...with the trackies. Any race longer than a kilo is 'long' to a track sprinter. A 25-mile MTB XC race is sick huge - never mind that up until 5 years ago I could knock off a 120-mile Saturday roll, followed up with a brick run effort in prep for an Ironman race as a matter of routine. I am WAY out of that kind of shape now. I've spent the better part of the last few years ignoring aerobic power and muscular endurance, and focusing only on extreme upper-end power, so while I can ride for a few hours, of course, I cant make much power after about 90 seconds. The last few months I am having to relearn how to make aerobic power. I pretty much suck, but from training this summer and fall, I am down to about 190 and change from over 200 at the beginning of the track season this year. I can see maybe leaning out to 180 or so between now and March..but I've never weighed less than the high 170's even at my absolute skinniest as an Ironman triathlete. It will take some time to get back to any kind of tolerable aerobic competitive shape, but by next Spring I can be there. So I have modified my normal annual training plan for 2oo8 to effect not only the high anaerobic wattage numbers I want, to be able to race well on the track next summer, but also the high threshold wattage numbers I'll need to race the MTB well. We'll see what happens.

It makes no rational sense at all at this point however, but I am now going to Moab in two weeks as part of a 24-Hour team. The people are cool, the sport rocks, and I need to race a bike for my own sanity - the format I've decided, isnt important. Its the misery and suffering that I desire. And MTB'ing provides that by the boatload.

More on the MTB stuff later.

Thanks for reading.