mike868y

wut

heppm01

Certain foods give you erectile dysfunction?

Try oysters - I heard they can help.

mattm

tutus always get in the way. beer hand-ups are tricky too!

or so i've observed.

Fat Boy

Exactly!!!!

Maybe this is a 'just for me' thing. I wasn't trying to be controversial. Generally, in my experience, crit racing is relatively calm punctuated with intermittent insanity. If you live through the insanity, then you can often hide in the pack and recover (should you care to race in this manner). If you want to race off the front for an entire crit race, then will essentially be at the same basic intensity level as a crit race. It's silly for me to race a crit (or any road race) OTF for an entire race (I just don't have the engine to make it stick), so I end up in the insanity/hide-and-recover group.

In CX, there's just no place to hide. You have to keep it pinned the entire time. There are all sorts of full body movements (lifting, running, jumping, etc.) and the bike efforts are generally 5-10 seconds of acceleration followed by a longer term threshold efforts.

Above all, it's just my opinion. YMMV (and probably does).

TheKillerPenguin

94mi of pretty much pure endurance with around ~5000ft of climbing. 5:40 on the two wheeled death machine. Holy hell do my nipples hurt.

ovoleg

I'm in Ohio at the moment, but I grew up in Northridge(Spent 20 years in SFV). Honestly while I was in CA I only heard of cross every now and then, but out here it's pretty big. Track here is just kicking off at the Cleveland Velodrome it seems but doesn't seem to be at the level of the Encino track(I rode by Encino track on a very regular basis because it was my daily commute to work). It looks really wild, but fairly short compared to what I thought it was going to be like. I need to get on a bike and try it!

I had these tires on my 26" from when I was riding my MTB around in the winter to mix things up when the snow would be light. What do you think? Any other tires you might recommend? It might of been a threshhold ride but the practice session I did felt like vo2max+threshold. I had no power meter but based on HR I was about 5 beats from max the whole time with a few sections where I was at max. It was fun for sure, going to just try to take it less serious and enjoy it for


Tires: Schawlbe CX Pro Performance Line


I might be back in Cali early next year, my parents are getting older and I might just return to better weather to help them out and be close to my family. Not sure yet, just thinking about it.

Fat Boy

I assumed you were in CA due to your 'location'.

For Ohio, where you see a reasonable amount of mud, those tires are probably a good choice for cross. For CA, or for any course that was drier, you'd be better off with a 'semi-slick' tire that rolls better. Ritchey makes a couple as does Schwalbe. I think they are all wider, in the 2" range. Honestly, I haven't found a problem with going to a wider tire as long as you can fit in in the frame. I run bigger than UCI tires. I think they're an advantage because it allows me to run lower pressures. I'll be on tubulars this year, so all of them are UCI legal. You can run the spongy pressures on them and not get in trouble regardless.

Good luck regardless of which way you go.

carpediemracing 

I did 3 rides in the last 4 days, not really hilly but definitely not flat. One teammate pointed out that I've done almost 1/3 of my total annual elevation in those 3 rides. For the record I'm just over 2000 miles for the year, 21k feet, and I did 6k of those feet in the 3 rides.

Fat Boy

Over the weekend I should have put in maybe 200 miles including a good CX workout. As it is, I haven't touched the bike. The good news is that I was just able to touch my toes during a bout of stretching. My back is getting better, but damn, it's annoying to be in this position. I guess the other good news is that I was light on the scales this morning.

Ygduf

did 9 miles of hiking yesterday.

this body ain't made for walking.

TheKillerPenguin

88mi, 8300ft of climbing, 5:25, all endurance, save for 5 10sec sprints in the last half hour.

17 hours in 3 days. Hell weekend complete. Drinking the finest coke I've ever tasted.

BTW...is it like...normal to feel tingly after you get off your bike when doing this sort of volume? Like not bad tingly...beta-alanine tingly.

Ygduf

yes.
I get the beta alanine tingles regularly near the end of hard rides. Even hard, short, rides.

TMonk

holy moley

TMonk

hit 3 hrs today, will do another 3 tmrrw (day off work)

at this point its all pretty much jra/what i want until nov or oct at earliest. i will do the carlsbad crit next weekend and continue to race TNR at the track until the season is over, however.

caloso

9x4' hill repeats. Why 9? Because I lost count. Duh.

Creatre

Do your 4' efforts harder so you don't have to do so many.

Ygduf

I do lots of 4x5'x0

pjcampbell

I get that from time to time (and I don't take B.A.) . Anyone know what causes this?

grolby

I agree with FB. CX is MUCH harder than a crit, and it's hard no matter whether you're kicking ass or sucking wind. It's not like a crit, where you can sit in and recover in the draft. In cyclocross, you do need to take opportunities to recover, but you have to be much more strategic and opportunistic about it, since recovery pretty much means pedaling less. I would disagree that it's a threshold workout, though. You might end up with an average power somewhere around your threshold, but a graph of power output would look a lot like a crit, lots and lots of spikes. It's probably even more extreme than a crit in this respect.

grolby

Oh, now at about 1 week off the bike, other than commuting. STILL frickin exhausted a lot of the time. Life is hard right now! Happily, it's hard in good ways, so it's okay, but I want to go out and kick ass. Not happening for a while.

rankin116

Maybe you have one of those psuedo-sub-clinical viruses that seem to affect all the pros when their results suck.

Edit: Not saying your results suck though

Ygduf

I had swollen lymph nodes for 4 months after I returned from Taiwan. Was only mildly sick for 2 days when we landed over there.

Dr. told me I had an "infection" that would run its course, which seems to be what happened.

Ygduf

I googled it and... menopause.

Sorry for the bad news.

waterrockets 

More of the same...


Showing signs of improvement though, as I head into week 10 of base. Today I decided to ramp it up 5W/minute until it felt like threshold, then stop. I think my threshold is probably up about 10% from when I started base. Finally. Few more weeks of this...

Number400

Finally back on a bike after an accident. I am still off of the road but have been getting some hours in on the local rail trail. Hating the stone powder and it's almost all flat but I guess it makes you pedal and no coasting makes a decent workout.

I am in the PT gym 2x a week lifting weights and core/stability exercises. Despite being off the bike for so long, I feel the benefits of all the leg presses, weighted walking lunges, one leg squats, etc...I will work gym time in from now on. My on bike performance is not so hot yet but I feel I did not lose too much fitness overall.

Hoping to come back stronger but still not cleared to race :-(

One thing I did notice is that after two months of rest (no daily dose of major cardio), my HR ceiling is up almost 5bpm and my HR recovery time is quicker. I guess one does need to rest the old ticker every now and then.