From a snowy Kansas City!

The racing season has finally come to an end for 2009. On the road, it was certainly a rebuilding year since I upgraded to a 3. It was nice spending time farther back in the pack learning the ins and outs of racing in the higher categories. As with anything, the more you do it, the more you learn and I feel like I learned quite a bit this year on the road.

As for the cyclocross season, I had hoped to do better since I am still racing with all the rookies. However, with the limited amount of training time I had this fall, I didn’t do quite as well as I wanted to, but still had some respectable results. I ended up second in the Marshalltown race, I had back to back top 10 finishes in Minnesota, and I ended up with a fourth place and 10th place at Jingle Cross.

Now that I have a few weeks off, I’ll have to do some planning for next year. At this point I have to decide which season I want to really focus on and adjust my training plan accordingly. Looking ahead, the race calendar includes significantly more time trials which I’m not really equipped for. The ‘cross season is shaping up nicely as well and at this point, that kind of racing is more appealing to me.

Now, it’s time off to enjoy the off-season. Below is a video from Jingle Cross in Iowa City last weekend. You can check out all the mud we raced in and see a little blood. Enjoy!

I’ve been pretty quiet here recently, not because there isn’t anything going on, but more so because there is so much going on I’m just trying to keep up. A lot of bike racing, and a lot of work stuff has been going on and it doesn’t appear that it will slow down for a while. Either way, it keeps me out of trouble.

I saw this article about how thinking negatively can boost your memory today. So it made me think, am I a positive thinker, or a negative thinker and how that might be demonstrated in some of the decisions that I make.

Coming from the world of Web development, there are many things that are black and white and in many cases I appear to come off rather blunt, or negative, when responding to questions. Does that make me a negative thinker, or just a realist?

Perhaps I may be a negative thinker, but at the same time it sounds like that isn’t a bad thing after all.

It’s been a while since I have updated, and mostly it has been because I have been pretty busy lately. I suppose that isn’t a good excuse so here is what I have been up to:

The last week in June, my mother came up and we did a little painting at my house. In my bathroom, the previous owners had done some sponge painting. I’m sure they thought it looked nice, but it really looked terrible. So we painted the bathroom a deep blue, which I like and while we had the paint brushes wet, we also painted the two bedrooms a tan color. It looks nice, and hopefully I won’t have to paint it again anytime soon. I also added a new curtain in my bedroom and hung some frames in my living room. I really wanted to work on some outside projects, but unfortunately it rained most of the week.

I have also been spending quite a bit of time racing my bike recently. I raced in Mankato, Minn., Des Moines, the Quad Cities, Kansas City, Northfield, Minn., and Cedar Rapids all within the last month which has kept me plenty busy with traveling and racing. Most notable was the race in Northfield in which I crashed on the last lap. Luckily I didn’t break anything, but I was still bummed that I crashed.

I made up for my crash the next day when I was in Cedar Rapids racing the state crit championships. Somehow I ended up off the front of the group in a solo break for three laps or so which was certainly unplanned. It ended up costing me the chance to be in the winning break, but I felt my break was significant enough to shake things up. I ended up finishing 13th out of 40 riders which is an ok finish. I even made a little bit of money.

As much as I enjoy racing on the road, the shenanigans of the racer egos really gets old quickly. It really is the little things, like raising the tempo through a feed zone, or starting a break with another person but realizing 10 seconds later that they sat up because they didn’t want to be in a break with you. It just makes cyclocross that much more enjoyable because you don’t have to rely on a team as much for help.

In other news, our church here in Pella has finally completed construction on our new church. Today they are having some huge celebration to open it up to everyone. They are only going to have one service this weekend, so I opted out of going to church in Pella and instead headed up to Newton to go to church instead. I guess I will have to miss the bishop, but I suppose there is always next week. To be honest, I don’t really think we need a new church since the only time it is full is on holidays. Oh well, nobody asked me…

I haven’t posted much in a while, but to be honest, that’s because not much has happened lately.

After passing through Austin to meet up with my buddy Kyle, we continued on to Mankato to do a little crit racing. The crit is interesting since it coincides with the Nature Valley grand prix, a good sized NRC pro race. Typically there aren’t too many amateur events that are run at the same time and share courses. It was also kind of cool to see some of the pros like Floyd Landis going at it on part of the same course we were racing on.

After watching Kyle race, I took to the course. It was a flat figure-eight style course, and just to make things interesting it was a 2-3 field so we were racing with some really fast guys. After starting relatively smooth but fast, we rode around the course with a pretty high tempo. Periodically someone would try and take a flyer and things would string out and then come back together.

Everything was going well in the race until I got caught behind a crash with a lap and a half to go. I ended up riding it in with a couple of guys that were also caught out. For the most part I was happy with my race even though I didn’t have the top end to be in the mix. Considering we averaged just shy of 27 mph for 50 minutes I can’t really complain.

Kyle was kind enough to find an all-you-can-eat steak fry in the booming metropolis of Adams, Minn. for dinner that night. We put down three pretty good sized steaks a piece, along with some steak fries and onion rings. It was pretty good food too. We didn’t stop at the steaks either, we also stopped at the A&W for a shake just for good measure.

Once again, it was an enjoyable weekend of racing, and in a few more weeks we’ll be back to do some more racing in Minnesota.

For the past few memorial day weekends, I have spent my time on the “east coast” of Iowa doing some bike racing. Unfortunately, my training hasn’t been progressing the way it should and I didn’t feel like spending the kind of money it takes to do all of the races for the weekend.

Despite not having the training base in that I need, I still spent some money and bought some racing wheels for this season with the hopes of providing some additional motivation to get out the door and train. I suppose in the back of my mind I figured if I’m not the fastest guy out there, I might as well look fast.

So with a small training base and some new wheels, I headed over to the quad cities to do some racing on Monday. The weather was dry until it was time to race and then we had some showers move through making things slick. Once the gun went off, the pace was fast hitting 30 mph at times. The peloton was strung out single file and there were crashes on almost every lap. I ended up getting gapped off the back and rode around with 10 or so guys in chase group 2 before the officials told us we were too slow and we needed to call it a day.

Come to find out after the race, there was a break off the front of the first chase group and we weren’t too far behind them when we were asked to retire. I felt a little better about my race after knowing that, but it looks like there is still a lot of training to do. Although, the season is still young so there is a lot of time to improve before it’s over.

I headed up to Dubuque to do some racing this weekend. My training hasn’t been that great so I had low expectations for the race. I was surprised that I finished sixth in our race. It was good enough to make $10 even though it cost $20 to race. I also won a mid-race prime, although it was just a water-bottle cage and I have enough of those so I gave it to a teammate.

While I was doing my warm up I ran into a girl that I studied abroad in Wales with. I knew that she was still in Dubuque, but would have never guessed that I would run into her when I was at my race. We caught up on things, which was really nice and then went on our merry ways.

I also arranged to see Uncle Bob while I was up there as well. He was nice enough to come watch me race, and then take me to dinner. It was really nice to see him and catch up since I haven’t seen anyone in about year.

It was enjoyable weekend and it was nice to see everyone, planned and unplanned, on my trip. Now, I should probably get out there and get some training in so I can go race again.

Happy Easter to everyone!

I made a quick trip to Kansas City for Easter see my family. I had planned on heading down on Friday since we didn’t have to work, but I ended up being pretty sick. In fact I can’t remember the last time I was that sick. I blame my sickness on the Henge since I was fine until he was here in Pella last weekend. I am sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that he lives in the dirty dodge which is a disease ridden city.

After trying to flush my system with fluids and a little exercise Saturday morning I headed southward. Drive went smoothly. Sarah wanted pizza for dinner, so we had pizza and enjoyed a few Dutch treats that I brought home from the local bakery. I even had a chance to use Mom’s fancy new camera…

Sunday morning we enjoyed church services and then headed out to the club to enjoy brunch. Food was pretty good really, and I had an omelet that was decent. After brunch, I turned around and headed back to Pella just in time to see Paris-Roubaix on Versus.

All in all, I think I was only in Kansas City for about 22 hours, but it was nice to see family and exchange some gifts. Who knows when my next trip down that way will be. Maybe someday, people will come to my house for a holiday so that I don’t have to be the one traveling all the time…

With the opening of the 2009 race season upon us, the first race has been canceled due to snow. This is good news really since there isn’t any good reason to be racing this early in the season.

Perhaps one of these days, the race organizers in Iowa will realize that we have all June, July and August to be racing. There isn’t any need to hurry up and get all of the racing in before June.

I spent the last week doing a little traveling in the southeast. Starting last Wednesday I made the trek down to Leesburg, Fla. to see Joyce and Eric and to check out my grandmother’s new digs. I must say, I am jealous of her new place. I only wish they had something like that for people my age. I guess they do; it’s called a college dorm, except they don’t come in and vacuum for you. Either way, it looks to be a nice and comfortable place and I hope she is happy with it.

I also got two days of riding in while I was there which was kind of nice. I certainly didn’t mind the warm temperatures. I didn’t quite realize how warm 75 degrees is after spending so much time in the 15-20 degree range. While Florida is relatively flat, there are some hills if you know where to look.

While I was in Florida I also had lunch with Lisa, a friend from school that I hadn’t seen in a while. She is doing an internship for PT school in Crystal River which was about an hour and a half away. I figured that I went all that way, I might as well stop to say hello since I was so close. We grabbed lunch in Inverness which was really nice.

Before I left Florida Eric and Joyce made sure I had all sorts of goodies. We spent a little time at Grandma’s house cleaning out the shed and I grabbed a few things that nobody wanted as well as some grapefruit from the trees in the back. I also ended up with the cordless blower that Dad had bought for Grandma which I am pretty excited about. Grandma also gave me some towels that she didn’t need any more. You can never have enough towels that is for sure.

After a couple of days in Florida, I headed north to Blairsville, Georgia to do some riding. I must say that this was the most challenging yet rewarding part of the trip. I climbed some really tough climbs including Brasstown Bald, Wolfpen gap and Neels gap. Brasstown was probably the highlight of all the climbs that I did and it was featured in the Tour de Georgia the past couple of years. While it isn’t a particularly long and grueling climb, it is pretty darn steep maxing out at 23%.

I didn’t want to do too much riding the first day that I was there so that I would still have some energy in my legs for the next couple of days so I headed up to Blood Mountain which is where the Appalachian trail passes through and did a little hiking. It is so nice to actually see some mountains and enjoy some fresh air.

I also spent a little time at Vogel state park which is just down the road. They had some really neat hiking trails there and a huge waterfall that was worth checking out.

While I did a lot of driving, for the most part it was an enjoyable and relaxing way to spend some vacation time away from work. I think if I was to do it again, I would probably try and get a cabin instead and find a few friends to go with me. Either way I would go again for sure.