Emmett-Roubaix Race Report

I raced my first edition of the Emmett-Roubaix road race on April 26. This race gets its name from a mile-long section of gravel road that begins about ten miles from the finish line. The race starts at Emmett city park and proceeds west out of the Emmett valley before looping back east across the valley and up and out the eastern edge of the valley on Old Freezeout Road. Here's a link to map.

My goal for this race was to stay with the front no matter how much it hurt. I stuck with this plan as best I could and was overall pleased with the result.

I nearly missed the race start with a last minute bathroom stop, so I ended up in the middle of the pack leading off. A position more towards the front would have been better, but it worked out okay.

The Broken Spoke team sent out two riders off the front to try and draw a break away, but no one took the bait. Instead the race proceeded relatively steadily until the first big hill when the attack finally came.

By this point we had picked up Broken Spoke's two decoy riders, so the attackers were looking to form the definitive break away group. I fought hard up the hill but ended up in a chase group a few hundred yards back from the lead group. The lead group consisted of 4 or 5 riders and my chase group consisted of about 6 or 7. We left the rest of the field on the hill, or so we thought.

What became clear very quickly, however, is that although my group had a lock on the lead group, any effort to bridge the gap would be futile because most of my group consisted of riders on the same team (Broken Spoke) as two of the leaders. So we slowly lost ground on the leaders as we turned into the wind. Eventually three riders from the group we dropped on the hill bridged up to join our chase group, and these guys brought a hit of fresh competitiveness into our chase.

Slowly, slowly we reeled in the leaders until we caught them right on the gravel. And then we hit the gravel and my race went to pieces in a hurry.

I was towards the tail of our paceline as we crossed the gravel threshold and merged with the leaders--not the best position as I quickly discovered. When I heard "gravel" I had expected a dirt road, perhaps freshly graded with a thin layer of gravel. What I got was totally different: a layer of gravel about 1" thick atop a roadbed of sand. This stuff managed to be soft, rutted, and washboarded all at the same time. Riders suddenly slowed and started slewing off in all directions at once. Being at the back of the group made the surprise even worse because I had to worry about not running into the guys in front of me.

After a minute of struggling and dodging, I finally got a good rhythm going and started getting up to speed. But now I was on my own: the lead group had dropped me during that critical minute of adjusting to the gravel. I wasn't the only one, however, because I picked off a few guys from my chase group as I bumped my way along.

Finally, I hit the pavement with only one rider in view, a guy about 30 yards in front of me, and, miraculously, the lead group only about 200 to 300 yards off. I had a moment of real hope that perhaps the two of us could bridge the gap and get back into the mix. But it didn't happen, for a few reasons. First, the leaders were dropping the hammer to the finish. Second, there was nice tailwind on this section of the course which pushed them along while my new companion and I got sorted out. And third, my new companion turned out to be one of the decoys that Broken Spoke had sent out at the beginning of the race and he had also been one of the riders who bridged up to our chase group; so he was pretty much blown and not much use to me for putting out a maximal, gap-closing effort.

Still, I did my best, and the guy with me took a few turns pulling so that I could catch some recovery. No one passed us until right before the final hill, when a breakaway group from the Men's 35B group passed us by. I took off after them as soon as they passed and managed to pass a couple of them before I got to the finish line.

My finish was 16th, but I was within five minutes of the winner, which is about a quarter of the gap of my first two races and half the gap of my third race.

This was the first race where I felt that my fitness showed through in my performance. Most importantly, I had a lot of fun, which after all is supposed to be the point.

Here are some numbers, inspired by the Running Adventures of Josh Gordon.

Official Results
Clock Time: 1 hr 56min 35.954sec
Time Off the Leader: 4:53
Speed: 20.33 mph

Heart-Rate Data
Time: 2:00:28
Calories: 1856
Avg HR: 169 (Note this number is likely too high; I got lots of ridiculous readings caused by cross-talk from other people's gear; may need to get an HRM with a coded transmitter)
Peak HR (from observation): I think I saw 187, but high may have been 186.

Bike-Computer Data
Distance: 39.24 miles
Time: 1 hr 56min 50sec
Avg Speed: 20.15 mph
Avg Cadence: 92 rpm
Max. Speed: 35.51 mph

It's a Girl!

Zibby and I got more great news today: the baby is still healthy. And we found out that we have a girl. Here's a few of the newest ultrasound photos:

Facial profile

Profile showing her position with legs over head

Face

Five toes

Product Safety Recalls RSS Feed

I encourage you to visit the Consumer Product Safety Commission's Web site (www.cspi.gov) and subscribe to the Commission's RSS feeds regarding product safety recalls. You can find the feeds here: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/rss.html. I've been visiting this site a lot recently for unrelated reasons, and I've been surprised by the number of consumer product recalls that are posted to the site. For example, at least 30 new recalls have been announced this month (April, 2009). They range from Specialized bicycles that were recalled because of a defective cable stop to Evenflo highchairs recalled because of choking and fall risks.

What I've realized from looking at these recall notices is that (a) we trust our lives and safety to various consumer products every day and (b) we probably never hear about recalls that affect the consumer products we own and use. Basically, unless you return the product registration card to the manufacturer or the product defect is so egregious that it makes the news, you'll never be notified that a product you own has been recalled. So please, subscribe to the CSPI's RSS feeds or to their e-mail newsletter. I promise that it won't be very long until a product is recalled that you either own or know someone who owns.

Congratulations, Alex

My friend Alex Blake ran the race to Robie Creek on Saturday. He finished 33rd out over 2000 runners. We ran together all winter until Alex shifted into a focused training schedule in late February. Here he is crossing the finish line, photos courtesy of the Idaho Statesman.

More Chicken Dinner

I omitted kudos to the Lost River men's masters 35B squad from my race report. These guys have been doing a great job of riding as a team, and they showed it again yesterday. The team dominated the pace of the race and did it perfectly. Rex lost no time to his nearest contender in the GC, and the team controlled the pack pace so that John Miller had enough breathing room to escape to a beautiful solo break away win. All in all this squad continues to show its depth, guts, and teamwork. Congratulations, guys.

Chicken Dinner Road Race Report

My goals for the Chicken Dinner Race were to ride aggressively and see if I could mix it up a little. I did ride more aggressively, but I did not mix it up--not at all. Instead I got dropped in the first serious attack. The Cat 4-5 race seems to be dominated by a small cadre of riders held together by the Broken Spoke team. These guys work together very well to break up the field with early attacks to drop off the weaklings. I don't think I'm a weakling, but my strength is more in endurance than in peak power. Until I can get my power output up to par, and without any teammates watching out for me, I just get shelled on these early attacks. Then I spend the rest of the race passing guys who wore themselves out hang on with the leaders. Today was no different, but I did finish closer to the leaders, an 8.5 minute gap rather than a 15+ minute one.

Today I kept the leaders in view for most of the race after dropping off, but could never bridge the gap. The frustrating part for me was that I could see the leaders climbing the hills, and except for that first attack, I'm 100% confident that I was climbing faster than them.

So my goal going forward is to put in focused work on building peak power. I have my heart rate monitor back in working order and set up on my bike, and I have a lactic threshold test scheduled for this Wednesday. I hope this and some sensible training will net me at least one good race this season.

Books You Can't Live Without

This list of 100 books has been going around the Internet for a while under the false premise that it is a list compiled by the BBC and that the BBC claims the average adult will have read only 6 of the 100. According to this commentator, however, the list originates with a World Book Day poll. Here's the version of the list as it appeared in the UK's Guardian newspaper. The 6 out of 100 statistic appears to be entirely apocryphal.

I've marked each books with an (x) if I've read it and with an (m) if I've seen the movie. Books marked with (x) and (m) mean I've read the book and seen the movie. I think I counted 44 x's by the time I was done. I guess I've got some reading to do.

1 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (x)(m)
2 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (x)(m)
3 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series, JK Rowling (x)(m)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (m)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (x)
8 His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (partial x, I read vol. 1, The Golden Compass)
10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22, Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare (part x and part m)
15 Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier (m)
16 The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch, George Eliot (x)
21 Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House, Charles Dickens (m)
24 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (x)
31 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis (x, Isn't this redundant of #36, below?)
34 Emma, Jane Austen (m)
35 Persuasion, Jane Austen (m)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm, George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (started, couldn't finish)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
45 The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies, William Golding (x)
50 Atonement, Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi, Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune, Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road, Jack Kerouac (started, couldn't finish)
67 Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick, Herman Melville (started, couldn't finish)
71 Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula, Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses, James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal, Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession, AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (m)
85 Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web, EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks (x)
94 Watership Down, Richard Adams (m)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (x)
96 A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet, William Shakespeare (x, Isn't this redundant of 14, above?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (x)