Recently picked up a camera for recording some of my adventures. And of course I was excited to use it but the 1st ride I did was a night ride. So here is some footage of some gravel/double track riding around Lost Valley.
Night Ride from Rob Ballou on Vimeo.
The “arbitrary Gregorian calendar boundary” has passed and it’s now 2012. That means it’s time to post up some numbers for your consumption:
| Activity | Miles |
|---|---|
| Mountain Biking | 1,639 |
| Road Cycling | 1,358 |
| Cyclocross | 290 |
| Street Running | 49 |
| Trail Running | 26 |
| Hiking | 30 |
| Indoor Cycling | 83 |
| Uncategorized | 3 |
This season I have decided to make one big difference in the training/racing schedule: trail running. More to the point, I’m taking on the Double Chubb (25k version) in April. The largest part of this puzzle is I have to go from being a runner (sometimes) to someone that can handle 3 runs a week including a long run.
To accomplish this, I’ve decided to spend December and January with 2-3 runs a week in the 2-5 mile range per run. Most of the runs will be easy paced “base” style runs. I am also doing the Frostbite short series for the first time so those runs will be at a higher pace. In fact the first race, a 3k, was last weekend and I surprised myself with a top 10 finish in my age group and a mile pace of 7:22! Hopefully some of this training can be trail runs. Starting in February I’ll definitely move to 3 runs a week with a long run on weekends and will also include more trail running.
Training for trail running is going to be challenging but rewarding. There are definitely times during the year where I miss trail running and not being able to do it has always made it that much worse. I’m also hopeful that running will help with other thing part of my training for next year: more core, strength, and flexibility training.
Along with the trail run, I have my eye on several long mountain bike races (and, maybe, one very long gravel race…) so being comfortable for hours is going to be key. For this, I’m starting a more regular practice of yoga and some basic strength/core training. Beyond this strength training, it will be fun to learn how to fit in some long training bike hours alongside the running!
My December/January training weeks are looking a bit like this:
Monday: Yoga Tuesday: Run, easy pace Wednesday: Strength/Core Thursday: Run, easy pace or MTB ride Friday: Rest Saturday: Run race or MTB ride Sunday: Bike ride
What new things are you challenging yourself with next season?
Not that the season has run its course, but I thought I’d wax poetic about some of the happenings. Looks like we left off with Bubba #2.
Over Halloween weekend, I hit up both Faust Park races which also included my 1st night cross for the year. What I remember most about the night race was how during the course of the women’s race it ended up getting signifcantly colder. I went to get warmed up and just couldn’t get my core temp up. I added up some layers and hit the course.
The Faust courses are pretty fast and there was very little technical about them. During the night race I managed to finish in the top half of the race, but didn’t really feel it. The only place I managed to put the hurt on people (or perhaps only a single person… wasn’t counting) was the long hill from the backside of the course and that was primarily because some people don’t believe in carry momentum, I think (something that would probably not be the case in the B race…).
The next day was cool and cloudy and added a woodland section on the top side of the course. I had fun trying to fight through my first two-race weekend. The second day, probably because of the daylight, was a good bit faster and I finished in 14th. It was about this point in the season I realized that my shot at top 10 and moving up this year wasn’t going to happen.
With one of my favorite courses coming up, it was difficult to just sit back though. The Concordia race is pretty mountain biker friendly and I laughed as was yelling at guys to “just pedal” down the back hill. The course had a fun mix of downs, ups, turn, slight mud, and fields. In the end, it wasn’t my day at all. I just exploded on the course and fell back a ways finishing 16th in the largest field yet.
Finally, Bubba at Jefferson Barracks was unique. I wasn’t quite feeling up to racing, but the weather was setup to make this into a mud race. And I wasn’t going to miss a chance at a proper CX race. The course, it turns out, was just fairly wet for most of the pre-ride laps, the women’s race, and most of the C. By the end of the C race there were a few places that turned into muddy tracks that were typically better to run. The bigger bummer on this course (besides poor form) was that there no barriers. The course was just open for people to use their high-watt engines to pull away.
Of course… the heckling was good times!
It’s not quite cyclocross season for me yet. That may seem a bit odd since I’ve now done 2 cyclocross races this year, but it’s easy: I still have a mountain bike race this weekend. It was my goal this year to rock Burnin and do well at BT Epic. Riding 12 hours or even for 5 to 7 hours on a mountain bike in many ways is different than riding ‘cross for less than a hour.
After I finished Burnin, I did feel … ahem … burned out. I can’t figure out if it was a product of how much distance I covered that day, how much training went to get a good result there, or just feeling ready for a break. Bikes were the last thing I wanted to think about for a few days. Conversations in my head said, “Let’s take this weekend off. No racing.”
I finally grabbed my ‘cross bike to ride to work a couple days and even got in a little bit of practice on it. I noticed that the upcoming races were at one my favorite venues from last year: Queeny Park. Temptations. After working on trail and riding my singlespeed on Saturday, I opted just to race on Sunday.
The course didn’t run through the woods like last year and so I was a bit bummed about that since when you add narrow tree line sections I can usually put the hurt on some guys who aren’t use to it. The course was actually a lot of fun. I think the crew learned some from putting on Gateway Cross cup. You had fast sections, you had climbs, you had a few handling sections. I think what made this course was two run ups and some a few areas that would rattle your bones off.
I wasn’t feel like gunning for it, so I started mid pack. For the first few laps I was feeling good. I was picking off some people and was able to drop people here or there. I wasn’t doing everything “right”, but was getting some good speed at things I’m good at.
This was all fine until “halfway” through the race I looked at the lap cards and it said something to the effect of 5 laps left. 5 laps! I couldn’t keep at this for much longer. I wanted to let off the gas a bit. There was a group chasing me at this point and I thought maybe if I just took effort down from 10 to 9, maybe I could ride with this and recoup. A few people came by and I tried to stick with it. By the end of the race, the bumps and the previous day’s work day were wrecking my back. That was some of the most difficult 48 minutes of racing in a long time.
See you in a few weeks Bubba races, I still got 56 miles of dirt to ride!