While in Colorado I had a full Sunday to myself to kill time. Thankfully I didn’t have to stay in the hotel room all day. Instead I got to go on a sweet 3-4 hour ride on a sweet full carbon bike I borrowed from Micah Rice, the USAC national events director. The fit wasn’t exactly perfect but it was close enough and allowed me to have a pretty awesome ride.

At the start of the ride while leaving town I thought the scenery was going to be pretty good but as you can tell bythe photos, that was nothing.

I rode through the Garden of the Gods which was pretty cool yet paled in comparison to what Utah has to offer esp in arches nat’l park but it was still pretty sweet nonetheless. Partly because I’ve always heard so much about it. I then rode up a road called Gold Camp road and part way up the pavemet ended leaving a pretty bad ass sweet dirt road climb for several miles. It even had several tunnels carved through solid rock. It was a pretty sweet ride that I wish I could do every week. Once at the top I rode down Cheyenne Canyon and back to my hotel passing the USOC training center on my way.

That night I drove up to Manitou Springs which is a small mountain town at the base of pikes peak. The town was neat with a cool mountain sunset as evidenced in the picture. It was still neat even if parts of the town were blatant tourist traps and generally fake, luckily there was still enough that was authentic.

After the canceled Superweek race last Thursday I went to Colorado Springs for the weekend for a high school cycling summit with USA Cycling. It was a good gathering with about 8 of us who are all in our own way leaders on the cuting edge of bringing high school cycling to our respective areas. There were also four USAC people there including the staff person in charge of high school and collegiate cycling (Jeffrey Hansen) and the CEO and COO (Steve Johnson and Sean Petty respectively). It was a great meeting where we all learned a lot and made some pretty good headway in helping figure out what USAC can do to help aid & assist us with further developing our own high school cycling programs and make it easier to bring more programs into the mix. The 9 straight hours spent in the same confernece room was gruelling indeed but actually was actually pretty easy considering we spent 9 hours in the same room. Probably because we are all so passionate about whatvwe are doing and were all learning great things from one another.

The real headache was getting from my host house outside Milwaukee – Greg and Ruth’s house in pewaukee – to my hotel across the parking lot of the USAC headquarters in Colorado Springs. I was scheduled to leave Milwaukee on a 6:00 am flight putting me in the springs by 9:30am. Thus, I left the host house at 4:45am; however, I did not arrive at the hotel until 11:00pm. A 19 hour travel day. Drive time between the two locations is 16-17 hours. Here’s the quick story of what happened: got to the airport and discovered it had been shut down sonce the night before, probably since about the same time our race was canceled. The runways were flooded and the airport would be closed until at least noon. My airline was saying there was flat out no way we would get out of Milwaukee in the next two days so I got in the car and started driving to Chicago while searching for flights out of Chicago. I was not going to miss this first ever high school cycling summit.

I ended up having to purchase a whole new round trip ticket for close to double what my other (original) ticket cost. That was a cheap ticket too since many of the options were literally jumping up to $1,000 as I looked at them since so many people were scrambling for alternate plans. Anyways, I secured a flight from Chicago to Denver, rented a car in Denver and drove to The Springs.

I made the best of it though and enjoyed a good breakfast in chicago at a breakfast place I’ve seen for years and never gotten to go to, called my aunt, went over to chill for a couple hours, then my aunt and uncle took me to lunch on their way taking me to the airport. The flight then took me through a connection in Rapid City South Dakota which was kind of neat just because I’ve never been anywhere near that region of the country and I got to see it well from the windows of the two puddle jumpers. Once in Denver I went downtown for dinner at a pizza place featured in an article in one of the airline magazines about the ten best pizza places (an actual feature article not those side bar pay for exposure ad-rankings) It was pretty good but when I got to the hotel in Colorado Springs I realized I left my credit card at the pizza place in Denver. What a way to end the long day. So I ended up eating pizza again for lunch before my flight out of Denver on Monday.

-Andrew-

Many people often ask what it’s like to race in the pouring rain for rainy races or what it’s like racing in the dark of a twilight or night time crit. This has always been a tough question for me to answer because most non cyclists or non racers don’t have much to go on in terms of a shared language, lingo, or experience which leaves me with even less when trying to find a way to explain it. Usually my reaction is something like: ‘I don’t know, I just adjust’ or something like that. Every questioner also always assumes something different about how hard it would be or what would be hard about it which makes it a challenge for me to answer as I don’t know what exactly they are presuming is difficult about the conditions.

Well the other week I finally came up with a good way to answer the question.

For both of them the answer is pretty much the same. It is like driving in the rain. Most of the time it’s not bad, sure there are a few differenecs or nuances which differentiate it from driving in normal conditions but these differences are not major and are easily dealt with for a competent, alert, and experienced driver. And remember in my races, the top amature or even pro races that describes every single racer out there. Of course most all drivers have also been in those situations where conditions are quite demanding due usually to the volume of rain, wind, darkness of the storm, how well the lanes are marked etc. In these situations most drivers are capable of handling it albeit with significant adjustments from what they do under normal driving conditions. Visibility is low, traction is low, distractions caused by the storm are increased so competent drivers compensate by slowing down, turning off the radio, hanging up the phone, etc. In short the driver adjusts. It is no different when racing in the rain or the darkeness of a night time crit. We slow down (rain only), and elliminate other distractions (chats amongst ourselves, grabbing food in less than ideal parts of the course, and don’t day dream or mentally ‘auto-pilot’)

Most of all and most often, when things are bad during a rainy race or night time crit we do the same thing cars do in an extreme rain storm: follow the path and speed of the wheels of the person in front of us disregarding anything else and hope that if they can go that fast we can too and that they don’t take us right into the curb or some stationary object. Much else is useless becaus you can’t really see much more than that so you assume the road is there just like you assume lane markings are when driving since you can barely see them if at all during bad rain storms.

Another answer of course is to just ride like crazy and pray. There’s a good deal of that too.

Thanks for reading,

-Andrew-

after the race in DC I enjoyed a nice dinner with some friends and my cousin Bryan who had all come out in the heat to watch me race. The next day, I drove 12-13 hours from DC to Chicago where I spent the night with a friend at his dope high rise condo which was in an awesome location and had an even better view.

My next stop took me to Milwaukee to drop off my car and catch a flight back to Dallas. In Dallas I spent one busy day before going to Austin with a friend for my best froend’s wedding. I was sad to be missing the first full week of Superweek up in Wisconsin but I had an i’mportant’ role to play in the wedding as I was a Bride’s Man. yup I stood up as part of the bridal party. no dress, just a black suit. It was a beautiful wedding and a fun weekend in Austin. Congratulations to Casey and Michael Erdmann!!

That following Monday I flew up to Milwaukee on an early flight and raced a 62 mile RR that afternoon. I finished 27th just two out of the money and like 13th in the field sprint. It was a fun race though and I was in the breakaway for the middle 10 or 11 of the 27 laps.

Tuesday saw another 62 mile RR. In this race I chilled at the back most of the race and missed all the breaks. in the end though I got in pretty good position and finished 8th in the field sprint for 22nd or 23rd. I forget.

Wednesday was then the famous Lakefront RR. 90+ miles along mikwaukee’s Lake Michigan lakefront. Again I spent too much time at the back and missed every move. there ended up being a break of 12 that stayed away and then a ‘break’ / split in the pack forming a chase group of like 18-20 and a few random chasers as well. Since the money only went 25 places and over 30 guys were up the road our final 15-20 miles were pretty pedestrian and many guys dropped out. I decided to stay in just to get the easy extra miles. I wanted to practice finish line sprint positioning and tactics but didn’t want to risk going down in a crash or something stupid sprinting for like 30th so I attacked the 30 or so guys I was with about 3km or so from the finish on the long hill sweeping along the lake and held off the charging group to ‘win’ the group or ‘field sprint’ and secure 34th place. When this race finished I had completed close to 250km (155miles) of racing in under 22 hours.

Thursday’s race was back to the evening 62 mile Crits. Sadly after less than a third of the race they canceled it on account of thunder and the tornado sirens that started going off during the race. It was an odd experience to feel the temperature drop 10+ degrees and the wind change directions & pick up by 15mph in the course of a couple minutes while flying around city blocks at 30mph. It was even odder when the whole pack, almost at once, realized the sirens we were hearing for the last few blocks were actually tornado sirens.

thanks for reading,
Andrew

Over the Fourth of July weekend I raced the 51st annual Fitchburg Stage Race in the pro/1 field in and around Futchburg, MA. It was just about my first time to do an NRC stage race in the pro category as in the past I’ve always done the amature 1,2 race and the only preious time I ds Fitchburg was in the category 2 race.

I did not do very well. I got a flat tire on lap 11 of the 24 lap circuit race (3 mile loop with a pretty solid wall of a climb each lap) and was lapped twice by the pack. Then during the next day’s 98 mile RR I went down in a stupid mid pack pile-up that happened just 8 minutes into the race. I chased back onto the pack just in time to get dropped again on the climbing part of the lap and chase on again before the climb the next lap. I was then dropped and rode with a group but a few of us miscalculated the time cut and rode our last two laps too easily getting time cut. (not finishing within the alotted time of the winner’s time 20%)

Since my race was over, instead of an 8 mile TT on day three I rode from our host home in Boston 50 miles to the TT start in Fitchburg where I met my teammate Pat McCarty at the end of his TT and we drove back to Boston. This hammer fest training ride an the first two days of rcing gave me about 215 miles of hard racing in less than 48 hours so I was happy with my training over the holiday weekend.

Pat was pretty solid in the race and finished 8th overall.

I then spent the week after the race hanging out with my friends in Boston. it’s always great to hang out on that city and to spend time with my college roommates and best friends.

Oh then on Friday I raced the track at T-town in PA with my teammate Chris Carlson as he was there for his son Zach who was racing in the junior national championships. It was fun getting to have a teammate and friend on the track with me in T-town and it was also great seeing all the junior racers out there. Especially the ones from Texas.

Thanks to Kevin Hill of IC3 for letting me chill with them in their tent in the infield since all the stalls/carrals were already taken when I showed up.

While there I got to see: Zachary Carlson race actively and get 5th in the scratch race, Christina Keoppe race with real heart and guts to finish her scratch race, chat with Landon Beachamp (sp? sorry) on his off night, Peyton Thomas race a strong scratch for I think 5th, the GS Tenzing boys actively contest their scratch race and more.

It was a fun night tuning up my legs after the 4.5 days of recovery after Fitchburg and before Saturday night’s Iron Hill USA Crits crit.

-Andrew-