Two Wheel Blogs

Over at Slowtwitch, Mark Sisson has another article which is critical of endurance training. This one is a little more detailed with supporting evidence and a lot rings true to me. However, the one point he makes about low aerobic activity building capillaries is a bit ambiguous. Does he mean the opposite is contrary? That above low aerobic will destroy capillaries? If that is true than endurance athletes would have poor capillary networks and this is clearly not the case.

A friend of mine loaned me this video (24 Solo).

I watched it yesterday, and would like to just give a few details...

This movie is backordered for a reason. It is good.

Trek must have spent a few dollars preparing this film...it has really good filming...chopper shots, zip line shots (through the woods), helmet cam shots...etc. You really feel like you are there experiencing things as they happen.

The broad strokes: This is a story of a nut that races his bike in 24 hour races. I hate to kill it for you, but he loses this time...but in a way he sort of wins...I mean after all, he is racing a bike for a living.

I have decided to do some multi sport events. Well not many really. I have been wanting to try a biathlon for some time now and seeing that I am mixing up my training with lots of running, I think this is the year to do it. There is a biathlon on Memorial day so perhaps I will try that one. I have been doing some running every week for the past month mixed in with cycling. This Saturday there is a 5k run which I'm going to try. I don't remember if I have ever done one of these. I might have done one a long time ago but I don't know what my time was. So this will be almost a completely new experience with no bench marks to refer to. Let's see how it goes!

I can just never leave well enough alone. OK I promise this will be the last one. No wait, the next to the last one. Only one more photo after this.

This is what the start of the race looked like from the back of the pack.

We had no intention of riding this race as if we were competing for anything other than bragging rights for having completed it. It was also about 45°F at that time of the morning. For that reason we chose a spot about 15 feet behind the rear of the pack, the nearest spot off the back of the pack which was also bathed in sunshine.

We expected there would be a race meeting right before the start; but all any of us heard was someone on a bullhorn saying the race would start in about 5 minutes.

From here we did a neutral roll to the bottom of Big Brushy mountain where the race began in earnest. We coasted along easily, letting the pack get a huge gap on us thinking the race meeting would be at the end of the neutral section. After all it hadn't taken place at the start line.

Not so. When we arrived at the base of Big Brushy everyone was gone. I looked back just to confirm we were indeed starting in dead last place.

Perfect. We had the whole Ouachita Challenge field right where we wanted them.

The 2007 Ouachita Challenge is in the books. This is just a short report of the day's events as I know them right now. Lots more information to come.

Who won? Jason Sager, by about 31 seconds over Chris Ploch, who made good on his plan to podium this year. Congrats, Chris, on your monster impressive performance. We'll all be checking your blog to get the lowdown on how your day unfolded.

The course record... not broken this year. The 4:30 and change mark will stand another year. The winning time was right around 4:50.

The Unit and I started with our crew dead last. Our crew started out at the back of the neutral roll out and one of our lot had a mechanical as we approached the top of the first climb. Keeping a crew of 4 together through all that great singletrack proved to difficult; and our crew quickly split into 2 small groups of 2. Unit and I spent the day picking our way forward and ended up (we believe) tied for 14th in the singlespeed category.