New Man

After not getting the results I would have liked on the weekend I was a bit bummed and couldn't figure out why I felt so weak. I've done a bit of research and asked around which has led me to the realization that I've unfortunately been training at an intensity that has been far too easy, even for the easy riding time of year, and likely hasn't been doing anything for me. Though it's a bit of a bummer, it may come in handy to have ridden with no intensity thus far as the races I hope to do well in aren't until the end of summer and maybe the super easy riding up until now will help in preventing burn out.

That being said, after returning home from the race on the weekend I was more than ready to up the intensity a bit. I've put in 2 fairly hard 2.5 hr rides on Monday and Tuesday and a 3.5hr recovery ride today at the intensity that I should have been working at all along. I tell ya it feels like I've been reborn. I enjoy riding all sorts of bikes at all sorts of intensities but the part of riding, and I guess all aspects of life, that I enjoy most is pushing myself. I don't think I enjoy anything more than pushing myself so hard that I can't feel my legs and I'm on the verge of puking out my right lung. This sounds a little odd to some but I think most endurance athletes share this, or a similar, outlook on things.

The fact that Dallas is the 3rd windiest city in America used to drive me batty. Previously, when mistakenly trying to maintain a hr of 120, I despised the wind as any resistance at all would put me over this. Now, that I've realized that I should be riding harder than this, I love it. Most of the roads here a fairly flat and to have a good strong headwind is something I'm really starting to enjoy. The temperature has also shot up significantly in the past week and today I got a mean arm burn as it got up to about 25 celsius.

OH! I also got to live out a dream of mine on the weekend! Made it to the IHOP on Friday night for the $4 all you can eat pancakes. I don't know what happened but I couldn't manage to put anything more than one plate-full down. Terrible. I also found out that Tuesday was National Pancake Day. God bless America.

Rough Weekend

Well, a lot of shit happened this weekend so this should be up there in word-count. I got fixed up financially at the end of last week and hurriedly organized a trip to Austin to race this Texas cup "Walburg" race. The whole weekend was filled with over-spending, shitty travel and overall pain but I feel it was all worth my while as I got some great experience at this massive (compared to home) race. I haven't done a lick of hard riding thus far and figured I was walking into a field which consisted of old guys and youngens. Got a pretty rude awakening.

I woke up at 5 on Saturday morning, mowed on the continental bfast and, as I had no ride, rode the 35k to the race as the sun was coming up. I was absolutely overwhelmed as I got there. There must have been 6-700 people there. Soon after I rolled in I watched the pro/Cat1 guys roll out and got an understanding of how things worked.

My time came to race and I walked my bike to the front of the 50 or 60 rider field and took a look around only to notice 4 or 5 super strong looking teams(Texas A&M among them) and not the old guys I had anticipated. http://www.firstpics.net/gallery/7415663_d88Hi#479226427_28xyD
The gun goes and we roll out and soon after the race began the rain and 50k winds kicked up. An early solo attack went and I just sat in the peloton for a while to see how things would go. After some sitting I got anxious to chase the solo fella down and just then some batshit crazy guy blasted by me on the shoulder and I somehow got on his wheel and we rode to the solo guy only to be brought back in shortly after. This is when shit went pear-shaped and I learned the importance of staying at the front.
http://www.johnmichaelharris.printroom.com/ViewGalleryPhoto.asp?userid=johnmichaelharris&gallery_id=1437018&image_id=165
I ended up in the middle-to-back of the field as we took a sharp right hand turn and the first 25 guys just shot away. The whole field broke into chaos and I coudln't weasel my way back to the group before they broke completely away. I got super frustrated at first as I tried to ride in the wicked bad wind on my own and eventually joined up with some other guys to try to chase down the leaders unsuccessfully. So I finished my first race in the middle of the field, which I'll take as I've barely ridden hard enough to sweat yet, and gained some experience in riding in a big group. I had forgotten what the good old pain of a hard ride felt like and am super psyched to do some hard riding now that I have my base miles in and hopefully get some better results soon.
http://www.firstpics.net/gallery/7415663_d88Hi#479227234_bgK3t

Allday

Well Then

So I've encountered a bit of a pickle here in Texas as the person who was supposed to be coming to stay with me, and had also planned on sharing all expenses, is now staying home. I've been super stressed in trying to organize a ride, registration and accomodations to a race this weekend and now I've received this news. I'm sort of all over the road on what I'm going to do at the moment. I really can't afford to stay where I am on my own and have been seriously considering packing up my shit and heading to Austin to camp for the remainder of my time here as this would be a much cheaper alternative and the riding there is said to be unbelievable. This change in terrain, I think, would be great as I've gotten close to 1500 slow kms in so far and I would love to have a few hills to ride when I get up to about 2000 and Frisco has absolutely nothing in the way of hills.

This being said, though, I've been loving where I am lately. I now know a number of decent spots to ride and I've developed a routine which I've grown to love. I wake up, eat some oatmeal and sip on coffee while watching the tour of cali recap show, ride all day and come home to cook up a feed and drink more coffee while watching seinfeld or the latest stage of the tour. This is such a simple way of living but with all of the stresses of school, numerous jobs and a consistently empty bank account over the past few years, the simplicity of living like this has been much needed and I hate the fact that worries have found me again.

The Amish Throw a Mean Party

I guess it's spring in Texas? It's strange because prior to last week I had to wear leg warmers and a jacket on the majority of my rides but last week and this have been super warm. I got some wicked work on my tanlines today with 4 hours baking in the sun. It's not unbearably warm either yet, either, which is nice. Marv says that in April it's consistently 30, which will be my cue to head back north.

I have a pretty sweet routine going of riding all day and then watching documentaries all night. I've always wanted to be the guy who knows a bunch of pointless and interesting facts(Stan Dewar), but usually I just spend my free time watching Seinfeld so all I really have up in the thinking station is Kramer quotes. Over the past week I've watched documentaries on prison life, the hells angels, the bandidos and last night on an Amish tradition known as 'Rumspringa'. Aside from learning about the process I discovered that when an Amish teen throws a party, people from Amish communities all over the nation come and they've been known to get as big as like 1500 people. I wonder if its possible to get into one of these? I think if nothing else it'd be an experience.

In other news I got a super bad scare the other night when the city's tornado alarm howled for about 10 minutes and the weather network shit itself after a tornado ripped some houses apart in Oklahoma. The same storm was set to pass through here, too. I don't know a whole lot about preparing for a tornado as the only preparation I've ever done for bad weather has been for snow storms, and all I really do is stock up on cereal and beer. At first I piled a bunch of important shit into the bathtub but apparently you're supposed to be on the lowest floor possible so I grabbed my bike and sat on the lawnmower downstairs in the garage until the storm passed. Nothing too bad came through this exact area but I guess some relatively close cities got hit pretty hard an some buidlings were dinged up.

Keep your stick on the ice.

New Bike!

O ya, I got a new ride alright. Marv came through and lent me his 10 yr old sons old beaten up ride. I can't imagine what the people in the billion dollar neighborhoods I rode through today thought of me as I cruised down the road on this old kids bike singing Beyonce and wearing these rediculously short shorts as all of my clothes are still wet from washing them this morning. Having my weiner fall out from time to time probably didn't help my cause.

I decided to take a, what I think is a well deserved, day off today after putting in 8 hours of riding over the course of Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday, however, the wind warning definitely put a damper on my ride and had me more angry than I've been in a long time. I'm not an angry person but wind pisses me off like nothing else. Everytime I got a decent spin going I'd be jerked by the wind throwing me off. I figure, though, that it'll only make me stronger. Some people have mountains to climb, I have 60km/h winds to pedal through.
After the ride I figured I'd unwind and have some Stevie time, so I bought a big burrito, a few cookies and relaxed while watching The Notebook.

I also recently found out that I have the VS. channel which features a lot of the big races and has a bunch of cycling related stuff to offer. I used this fancy digital cable feature to record a Tour Down Under recap show and a Tour of Cali preview and have been watching those quite a bit which has me wired to ride and I can't wait to get to my first race on the 21st. Good.

Posted Up Out Fronta Popeye's in The Mayback

Another week has passed and after riding around in the city for 2 weeks and having no luck in finding a quiet country road I've finally found an area that has a bunch of non-stop roads and very little traffic. Along with farms and open fields, though, I've also come across two ferocious dogs who are free to roam and chase me as long as they feel necessary. The schedule calls for a low heart rate, but I tell its not easy to keep the heart calm with two pissed off dogs losing their mind 4 feet behind me.

I don't think that I've ever enjoyed riding as much as I am right now. I've never really followed any solid program before and have pretty much always just gone as hard as possible at all times, so to have a schedule requiring a bunch of easy riding enables me to happily cruise while taking in some pretty sweet scenery. Slowly bumping up my time on the bike, too, has been going well. I've been listening to the body as much as possible and on week 1 I didn't feel as if I could comfortably do anythign over 1.5 hours. I was a bit worried at first but I slowly started feeling better and better and on Sunday I completed my first 4 hour ride feeling great. Also as a result of riding here, I appreciate the amazing riding that we are so lucky have at home on the island. As opposed to the routine that I go through here daily of picking through 3 lane roads and 25 traffic lights to get to anything that resembles quiet country roads, at home I can walk out the front door, pedal for 10 minutes and be in the thick of the country.

Aside from riding I've been trying to keep busy doing a few different things. The walk to the library to use these computers takes about an hour and a half each way and isn't something that I enjoy doing all that often. I got super excited in the first week to find a university about 2k from my apt. but was crushed to find that a student password is required to use their computer lab. I hatched a scheme, though, and I now have a routine in which I throw on the kitbag for disguise purposes, pretend to be looking for a book, and then use the call-number/book search computers to check my e-mail and facebook.

While at home I've finished Lance's book "It's Not About The Bike", which is amaaaazing, and have made it about 700 pages into Lord of The Rings. I was a bit skeptical in reading it as I've seen the movies 2000 times and thought it'd be the same, but there were a bunch of things left out of the movies that the book offers in its 1300 pages. Along with reading I've been raiding Marv's hidden Pillsbury stash, killing about 400 cinnamon rolls that were slightly expired but tasty nonetheless, and practicing the dance that Keri Hilson does in that 'Turnin Me on" video. I'll have it dialed for my arrival home. I guess that's about it.

All Day