The New, New Blog

O.k, so New Berlin Cycling was too jumbled to find my blog posts, my new blog is below

briancarlsonvelo.com

This will give me more flexibility to post calendar events, slideshows and videos that are organized so people don't have to search, and RSS feeds. Enjoy!

New Site

I'm going to start posting now on New Berlin Cycling, I've got 3 readers on this site and the new poll that I started only got 2 voters each time so there is no point keeping this up anymore. I'll keep it out here for my own reference to look back at what I did, but for new posts and such I'm just going to post on newberlincycling.com. It's a beautiful 61 degrees right now and cloudy, um, yeah, but anyways, I'm going out for about 3 hours after a trip to Home Depot. So, that's it for this site, go to newberlincycling.com for future posts.

Maybe...Maybe Not

Yesterday was a really nice day, super weather, great company with my dad and his friend Dorothee, and a really nice bike ride. We started our ride at 9:00 and took a trip out to Dousman, my dad and Dorothee both found themselves wanting a new bike at the Bike Doctor, good thing they didn't have any credit cards handy. Just like last week there were quite a few riders and runners on the trail, and every one was quite happy, no doubt attributed to the fine weather. Well, actually I take that back, it was nice in the morning but the weather did turn bad in the afternoon after the clouds moved in, but by then we were back home and enjoying the rest of our day. Our total was 54 miles, a little less than I wanted to do but decent nonetheless. It was about the limit for my dad, we are doing the Door County Century next month and I told him he better get riding since he's been slacking quite a bit lately. Unfortunately riding once a week won't cut it for a century.
So anyways, on to the meaning of the title....I was planning on doing a double century tomorrow on my vacation day from work but I'm re-thinking that plan now. I'm not sure I'm cut out quite yet for a 200 miler, so I'm thinking of just doing something in between and trying another assault on the 200 miler in a couple of weeks on Labor Day Monday. Right now the plan is to do about 130-150, something more than the normal centuries I've been doing easily, but not quite the difficulty of a 200 yet. Doing the extra distance over the normal century will help me adapt a little bit more to the extra time in the saddle before I'm sitting on it for 12 hours. Now, the only caveat is if I'm feeling great after 130ish, then I may just continue on and finish, but right now that's not the plan. So anyways, tomorrow will be about 7 to 8 hours in the saddle, I have to work late Tuesday so there may be no time to ride by the time I'm done, but if anything I'll try to at least get in a recovery ride. Wednesday will be a normal 2 to 2.5 hour ride, and then Thursday I will do the Thursday Night Beatdown again from Wheel and Sprocket. Friday will be a rest day and then Saturday morning I plan on riding to the Doc Ride again and getting in another century. It'll be a full week of riding and hopefully the weather cooperates, should be fun. Well, that's it for now, time to put the legs up and get ready for tomorrow. Until next time........

Beat Down on the Beatdown

The Thursday Night Beatdown lived up to it's billing. I met up at the Wheel and Sprocket parking lot at about 5:50 after riding the 2.3 miles from my house with the skies looking fairly ominous, they did let out a little sprinkle but that was it for the night, about 30 seconds of raindrops. I met some familiar faces there, Rick Amen from Team Extreme, whom I only met last week for the first time, and a couple of former teammates in Rudy and Glen, it was good to see both of them again. There was a crowd of about 20 ready to roll and as we made our way through the residential area to get out to the country roads the pace was pretty slack, which was good for me since I needed more of a warmup after standing around for 10 minutes. After that we kept a steady pace of about 21-22 for a while and then at the end we had a nice long stretch of road with a tailwind and I have to admit I was fairly tired from taking a few good pulls throughout the ride. I knew my turn-off point was coming about 2 miles up the road so as we were flying along at around 30-31 I took a pull and only 2 or 3 guys came through and no one else went forward so I took another pull right away and that was a little too much for me. As I've said plenty of times I haven't done any intervals or anything this year, just normal riding, and my recovery for those types of efforts is nill. I could tell right away that I was in trouble but just hanging in the pack for a while would've been enough recovery time and I would've been fine. Unfortunately I got a freakin' side stitch really bad, probably from breathing so hard, and every time I took a breath in the pain in my ribs was killing me. At that point we were only about 1/4 mile from my turn so I looked back, there was only about 3 people behind me, I let them go around and I drifted off the back. I rolled up to my turn, took a few deep breaths, let the HR go back down a little bit then rolled it in to home. I got 43 miles in total which is more than I would've done by myself before sunset, and the pace of the ride suited me quite well until the end when my side stitch knocked me out. I'm not saying the side stitch caused me to get dropped because then I'd be deflecting the blame on that, it was the lack of fitness that caused the side stitch that made me get dropped. Yup, I'm out of shape for that kind of effort, it's a little embarrassing but oh well, I was riding with guys that have been training for and doing races all year, and I more than held my own until the end. It's my second group ride of the year and my second hardest ride of the year, so I don't feel too bad. A couple more group rides and I'll be flying right along, I feel great today, no soreness or residual affect at all, as a matter of fact I can't wait to rock again tomorrow. Today was a normal rest day, but I was tempted to bike and so far only the threat of rain, well actually it did rain, has kept me from getting out. I may still go out shortly for a little recovery ride but we'll see. I've got two options tomorrow and the deciding factor is what my dad is going to tell me when he calls later. I've asked him to come up and do a 60ish mile ride tomorrow morning and he's contemplating that offer and is supposed to let me know later. If he's says no then the plan is to be up at 5:00a.m., eat, nap, then bike over to the Doc ride at about 6:15. I'll do the Doc ride, then ride home, basically a repeat of my century from last weekend. Another century in the books with a hard effort would be great, especially ahead of the 200 miler I've got planned for Monday...what? Yeah, I said it, 200 miles. More on that tomorrow......until next time.....

Beatdown?

That's the ride I'm doing tonight, I've never heard of it but I guess it's called the Thursday Night Beatdown. The odd thing is that it's only like 3 or 4 miles from my house and goes on roads I ride almost every Thursday. The fact that I've never seen the group on the roads is weird, considering that I've been on the same roads many a Thursday evening, very strange. Supposedly it's been going on for quite a while now and is a fairly fast ride, averaging 22 to 23 mph for the 38 miles, not too fast, but not slow either, exactly the kind of ride I'm looking for. I saw a blurb about it on another blogger's site yesterday and figured I'd inquire at Wheel and Sprocket in Hales Corners since I had to go there anyways to get some more chamois cream. Sure enough one of the salespeople said they leave the parking lot at 6:00, plenty of time for me to get home, change, and ride over for the departure. I'm looking forward to it, hopefully it doesn't continue raining, I won't ride it in the rain, no point this late in the year since I'm not training for anything. After I was able to hang on at the Doc ride Saturday after riding 27 miles to get to it, I feel pretty good about my odds of staying in on this ride since it appears to be a tad slower. I found a few routes on the Garmin Connect site from users that have downloaded the ride and I've attached a picture below, just click on it to enlarge. Looks to be 38 miles, average ride time that I saw was about 1:43 to 1:45, there were quite a few downloads of the ride, I just grabbed the most recent one I saw from July, so take a look. Should be fun tonight.

Go Wisconsin!

Pretty cool for Wisconsin racers, he's had a tremendous year so far.

(F)atigue (R)esistance (S)ystem

FRS products. FRS doesn't stand for Fatigue Resistance System but that's what I'm calling it for myself. It really stands for free radical scavenger, which sounds cool too, but it's more appropriate to say I'm going to try it for my fatigue than to fight free radicals since I can't quantify if it's really fighting any free radicals in my body or not. I can quantify if I'm feeling less fatigued when taking the product though, although that's still probably more subjective than quantitative. Anyways, I'm going to try out the FRS products, yes the product(s) that Lance uses, to see if they make me feel any better. I'm a good test subject for the FRS products because their ads, which are ever-present on web sites all across the Internet, say that they fight fatigue and I seem to feel fatigued all the time. I know I don't get quality sleep so that contributes to my fatigue, but we'll see if the FRS products help in spite of my lack of quality ZZZZZss. They recommend taking some of their liquid drink in the morning, available in concentrate or powder form to be mixed with water, and then taking two of their energy chews in the afternoon to keep going for the rest of the day. So that is the plan for the next couple of weeks. I'll keep track of my fatigue using a simple (P)erceived (F)atigue (S)cale, which I just made up right now, and post the results at the end of the two weeks. I guess the ads that are hard to miss on all the sites I visit did their job and got me to try the product, hopefully it all tastes good. More to follow....

Fatigue fighter or fake? I'll find out.