Eddie O

I am finishing up my first training block of the so called off season. I feels good to have a purpose to my riding again. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the last few months of “just riding” rather than training and I had a few things like pedal stroke and smoother handling skills that I have been working on. Now I have a certain number of hours I need to hit and strength building exercises to do. Mostly though it’s just lots of easy hours to get acclimated to the really long hours that will come next month.

My strength workouts came unexpectedly this weekend when on Saturday my rear derailer cable snapped two hours into a four hour ride. I was out with a good group though, who actually understands the idea of riding easy in the winter…ie a coach, a pro and some of their friends. The pro or neo-pro as the case may be is Tim who is going to ride for Jittery Joe’s this year and goes to school with Namrita. His friend, Phil, who heads up Team Type 1 and has recently seen the light with the Wobble-Naught bike fitting. Phil is coaching Tom, who’s Hank Aaron BMW is one of the main benefactors of the Jittery Joe’s team and an all-round nice guy. Clinto and Wes, who I met on this ride were along as well. It was a great ride, unlike many of the local group rides turned races, were everyone was content to just cruise along at a low heart rate. There were a few mock sprints for the county line signs, which is where my woes began. I was in for the easy ride, when I saw the sign and jumped from the back of the group….too late to make the sprint of course. As I tried to shift for the upcoming hill nothing happened. I stopped and fiddled…then pulled the cable out of the housing leading to the shifter…uutttooohhhh….. So began the low RPM, big gear work for the winter. Luckily, I felt pretty good and was able to find a decent rhythm despite being shifting impaired. We finished the ride back in ATL with a pass by Turner Field were a drifting competition was in full swing…too bad I didn’t have my camera.

When we returned home Nam didn’t mind breaking out the camera to capture this moment though:

I was starving and pancakes sounded good….what you don’t dress like this to cook?

On Sunday we did some exploring in North Georgia which involved a steep hike-a-bike section that had to 30 degrees or more in spots. This was followed by a short climb, then a bike-whack style trek across a briar infested ridge, but ended up with some sweet single track….the teaser pic will follow later. All of this hiking was another good low HR workout and my calves are still a bit sore from the uphill section.

This week we are heading to FL to see my family for Thanksgiving and to scope out a few trails we expect to race on such as Carter Park, Alafia and Razorback.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.