Today, I spent two hours building a new wheel for my bike using the third edition of Roger Musson’s Practical Guide To Wheel Building. It was a lot easier than I thought, and it only took so long because I had to keep referring back to the instructions. Next time will be much quicker! It was quite crooked when I was tightening the spokes, but some truing and tensioning got it all straightened out.
Last weekend was the first real DH race of the season. We packed up on Friday and headed south to Port Angeles Washington for a combined Northwest and BC Cup race. The shuttle system was pretty interesting. They stuffed us in big U-Haul trucks and drove (more like bounced) us up the mountain. It was quite the experience. Plus I was riding and still tuning my new bike that I had only ridden once the night before and had crashed. The morning didn’t feel the greatest as I was still messing with suspension settings, but towards the end of practice I was dialing it in. The last couple of runs I started trying to push the bike, which wasn’t really ideal since we only had 4 hours to practice. We got in 6 or 7 practice runs, just enough to know the course. I wasn’t feeling that confident, but I knew that there was nothing I could do, so my goals were just to get down the mountain as smoothly and quickly I could while being cautious enough so that if the bike decided to do something strange, I would be able to compensate for it. I ended up getting the race run I was comfortable with and only made one small mistake in a corner. I was 12th out of 45 and only 7 seconds back from 1rst place. 7 seconds may seem like a lot, but I can think of a lot of places on that course that I could make up that time. Lesson learned? Go up a day early so I can get more practice runs and don’t build a bike and expect myself to be used to it after one run.
As you can see, trying to wheely across the finish line when your rear brake doesn’t work and while being clipped in doesn’t work out the best…
As we all know after reading my previous post, sleep is important, but there are things that are preventing sleep. Mainly technology. I admit to reading my emails before I get out of bed in the morning. Which are you guilty of?
My dad shared this info graph with me this morning and I found it quite interesting. I never knew that athletes got THAT much sleep (with the exception of Tiger Woods). This info graph shows the importance of sleep, but unfortunately it doesn’t explain HOW one could get that much sleep. I don’t know I could go to bed at 6:00 or 7:00 PM and expect to fall asleep within a few minutes…
I just got home from a weekend in Whistler/Pemberton training with Todd Schumlick, the owner and director of PerformX Racing. We spent time learning workouts in the gym, talked about the mental aspect of racing, and talked about nutrition. I had a great time and learned a lot.
The main things that I took away from this weekend are:
In nine weeks I’m getting back together with Todd to update some of the workouts and plan for the race season.
We’ve had quite a bit of rain falling here in North Vancouver so getting out to ride has become a little bit of a hard thing to do considering I have a brother who doesn’t like to ride in the rain for fear of getting wet. I’ve never been able to figure that one out… Yesterday was no different and it was actually raining quite hard so even I was contemplating doing a workout rather than hit the trails. I soon realized that I shouldn’t even be considering training over riding a bike after not riding for a week, so we picked up a friend and went out to Cypress to get some wet weather riding in. After getting to the top, I was glad to say that it wasn’t raining. It was snowing… It all went downhill from there (pun intended) all three of us had some pretty good crashes and got very very wet and cold.
My two companions contemplating ditching me and taking the warm truck ride home.
Although we could wring water out of our gloves and our bikes were 10 pounds heavier with mud, it was a good day.
After a short downhill ride on Seymour, my dad, brother, and I went exploring for road biking trails that we could ride. I was finding that riding on the roads with all the vehicles wasn’t really my thing and that I wasn’t going about it the right way. I didn’t like the vehicles flying past me and the roads around our house aren’t the flattest. There are quite a few hills which isn’t good for what I want to do now, which is build a base endurance. I will achieve that by going for long “easy” rides on relatively flat terrain for long periods of time. Later on in the spring I’ll go riding on the hills and also do some sprint training.
We heard that there was a good road biking/walking path literally right behind our house, so after a short drive, we thought we found where it started. After we got home, I washed my DH bike, changed from my downhill gear to my road bike gear, and went out to try and see if it was what we were looking for. It was perfect. The trail is 10 kilometers long with only 2 or 3 minor climbs and I can do the full 20 kilometers (there and back) in under 50 minutes which means I can keep my average speed 23-24 Km/h. I am working up to being able to ride 50-60 kilometers in one ride, so this trail is the perfect road bike training ground. It is also a very beautiful ride which helps distract me from how cold it is.
I have recently finished reading the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. This chart explains pretty well what the whole book is about. Fixed mindset verses growth mindset. As you can see, having the fixed mindset isn’t going to be very good for racing downhill. I need to be open and ready to embrace challenges, learn from my mistakes, and learn from the success of others.
My dad and I were looking through off season training systems and we came across the James Wilson DB Combo’s Program. We decided it would be a good program because it covers the fundamentals. All it requires is your body weight, a set of dumbbells, and a chair. Since I’m still riding in the “off season” I am doing the 3X a week Optimal Off Season Schedule:
The workouts A and B are the weight training and the 15 M-TRTU is the core training.