Hill Repeats

Rode on Sat with Greg Anderson, the Cat 1 rider from Cali in town for the US Masters National Championships. Good ride, two hours, three good climbs in the area. I was working hard, Greg just spinning up the climbs. Always impressive to ride with guys who have such a huge engine. Today's ride was a solo effort with the iPod doing hill repeats on my favorite climb in the area, Oregonia. It is a 2 mi climb, moderate pitch. Rode big ring 21, mashing a big gear at low rpm. Trying to simulate the efforts I'm likely to experience at the end of this week. For those new to cycling, hill repeats are the two words which bring a wry smile to any cyclists' face. You work hard up the hill, turn around at the top, ride to the bottom, do it again. The magic (pain) is to meet or beat your best time each time up. After 5 repeats, it was time to head home.

In the afternoon, I watched the Team Dayton Crit. My team, Team Abundance, had some mates in the race. Team Dayton does a great job with race organization. Lots of really good folks on that team. The 4s did well with Zach-man taking 3rd. While he was our only podium in the 4s, we had a few more in the top 10. The 3 race was a bit more eventful. A crash on the last lap took out about 12 folks, with two pretty serious injuries. The injured riders appeared to be OK, but likely a broken bone or two. We had one casualty on our team; the crash took out Bill Childers. Bill wrote later this afternoon to report road rash but generally OK. Bad news, the bike is broken badly. Ryan Good, from Team Abundance took 3rd in the 3s. Not to toot the horn too much, but Team Abundance has 7 riders in the top 10 cat 4 riders in the state (1,3,4,5,6,7,10). We also have the #1 ranked Cat 3 road race cyclist and #1 ranked Cat 3 crit race cyclists. To quote Ryan Good, "We have one dankk ass team." I'm not up on my hip-hop lingo, but apparently being 'dankk ass' is a good thing.

Sorry for the mundane today, but a really good friend told me the key to a good blog is to post, post, post. Hopefully, I'll have more exciting stuff to come. For now, I feel like the posts are a little too much like Doogie Howser's journal. If it really gets boring, I'll describe the experience of cleaning the run-ins for the 10 cows we have on the property. The run-ins are a stable-like structure for the cows to take refuge from the weather. It is also the place where we have the water feeder. The cows spend A LOT of time there - use your imagination.