5 Days of Great Riding

So now that I found the Havel Park and its glorious folds and mixed coniferus and deciduous rolls I have been trekking the 45 mins west to ride it (image). The route is quite nice, gently rolling along a well wooded autobahn so the affect is wind tunnel that easily drags me there with my top gear spun out. I have been riding a 42x19 single speed so top gear isnt exactly the same as with a 12 in the back (image). There is lots of water (image) on the route and it makes me want to get this floating boat I saw at a bike shop that you can mount your bike on and turn an underwater propeller with the cranks. The actual Havel park loop is 23 kilometers and its all double, single track or gravel (image). Today I ended up at Seeburg where there was a castle ruin made of big glacial till boulders that housed a gated old well. So i put in back to back 3 hour days at tempo and above riding out there, felt great. Sat and sunday i went to the nearer gruhn wald (images on former posts) and did some hill repeats sunday that I think set me up to feel good today and tomorrow...going to try and push a third day tomorrow of equal length but lower intensity if I can recover and eat enough tonight! I am stoked to be heading down to the hills next weekend and am going to try and taper off starting early next week, ride into the event Friday and have a night preride, recover saturday and eat, then throw down.

2 weeks of Great Rides...alone

Yep, I have had a busy schedule so been working rides in by commute and had a few long days. Posted a few rural pics and urban ones. One urban commute was back and fourth to Mauerpark to make music with some friends, so i was carrying my bizouki and bag. The urban rides tend to be fast-paced, so a 1 hour commute ride to maure park is like a 180 average speedplay ride. I took one over to Frankfurter Tor on the old east side to meet up with my buddy Alejandro and his wife Anja. It was a great ride and i drank so much coffee that I hardly recall the ride back! Had another ride out to the 1936 Olympic Village, which is now derrilict. On that ride I discovered a 20 or 30 kilometer dirt loop around a large hilly tract of land. Not bad for Berlin which is 90m above sea level.

100 km um den Hafensee

Had a beautiful solo ride this week around the havelsee, about 100km in all, right at 6 hours. felt great for 3.5 hours then had to go overland pace and grab some food. i brought a sandwich and ate it at 2 hours, but at 4 hours i had to hit up a little bakery for a 30 cent brotchen and was so tired that i could hardly chew my bread without my jaw cramping. it was great. i did drink plent of water, just got nicely fatigued.

this ride was my weekly long ride buildup to the 12 hour team event i am doing wih big wheel racing europe in western central germany, near france, in earlu august. i hit a high hr of 190 several times and held steady at 170 for three hours till dropping down to overland pace to finish up with a six hour average hr of 160. honestly, a little low, but next week will be better. Of course this was all 29er miles. cant imagine what it will be like when i finally get a road bike again!

Rolling Rainstorms and Long Rides with Russians

Over the past 2.5 months I have settled into a final apartment/office from where I can work, study, ride bikes, and make music. Aka, a base of operations. I am located in the charlottenburg area of Berlin where I have grreat access to the Grunwald and a long north-south glacial lake complex from Velten in the north to Potsdam in the south...overall a rolling glacial landscape filled with ride combinations of road, doubletrack, singletrack, and cobble.


I linked up with a team of internatinoal mountainbikeers called Big Wheel Racing Europe and am going down to a race in Weidenthal in early August. Its a 12 hour singlespeed event and I will be a team member with others coming from Netherlands, France, Germany, and others, cool! Maybe i will learn some Nedeerlandisch, it kind of looks like deutsch...

Started a weekly long ride group that was just my friend Mikhail out of Moscow last week. We did a nice 4-hour out and back to Veltin and saw tons of great singletrack in the forest patches on the way. didnt quite find the center of Velten though, we did find the rathaus. So I looked at it on the inteernet and it has a long north south man made canal on the east side of it with a bunch of heavy industry to the southeast along the canal. I dont think it has a traditional city centere with church, more like a main drag that extended out into a grid.

The rain here is great! It comes in as mild thunderstorms with interspersed lengths of sunlight. I can imagine it builds up as ripples in the atmosphere from the north sea or west of Hanover and rolls over Berlin like waves.

Live, from Berlin

Well, after a great 2010 season up to and including nationals, then another left ankle injury, I am up an running again in Berlin, Germany where I have relocated. Literally the weekend after claiming my 2010 prize, top 20 expert 30-32 USA, I blew out my left ankle again at a 6 hour race up in northwest Missouri. This was a serious bummer as I had to drop out about 2/3 through the race in 7th place, with money on the line. After a month in a boot, a 5 week trip to europe, 1 phd dissertation proposal, a job and relocation to Berlin for Annika, a relocation to Berlin for myself, and 2 weeks in Berlin...I am finally ready to get back to some serious riding. My ankle is still bothering me this past two weeks as I have been puttin in about an hour each day commuting everywhere, some days more. I think I need some serious miles to get streched back out and get my ankle tightened back up. So that is were I am at.

Tour De Tick

I felt so good after yesterday's ride I decided to drive down to Neosho and do the Tour De Tick. It was a nice 3 hour drive down there and I had plenty of time for warmup. The course was rock and a bit slick from rain, but very fast. Unfortunately my chain broke on the warmup just a minute or two before the start. I fixed it and rolled up to the line several minutes late when the sport riders were heading out and I just told the offical and bolted. First time I had ever missed a race start, since 1996! I chased back to the last experts and my chain broke again@! on the first lap. I removed a link and fixed the chain and began chasing again, this time the chain held. By the 3rd lap i chased into the back of the expert pack and that is were I ended up, almost 20 minuets off the podium pace. Definetly not my finest performance, but I felt good in spurts and obviously two chain breaks are going to affect my time. I was also fatigued from yesterday but was able to hold on to race pace for about 1.5 hours. Overall, better than not racing and a totally awesome course on old pennsylvanian shale and limestone from the jurassic period. In other words, I got to shred some prehistoric dirt!

Mechanical, twice in a row?? - My carbon bike had a mishap last week and I am riding a loaner, so I am ready to get my fresh rig back from specialized. Unfortunatley, there are no carbon frames in my size left at specialized. So for the next part of the season I will be riding a new M5 alloy frame, Roval EL 29er disc wheels, and everything else the same as my expert carbon stumpy. I have mixed feelings about going back to alluminum. Aluminum is equally as stiff as carbon, and only slightly heavier if at all, than carbon, however it lacks the vibration dampening quality that carbon has and a well made carbon frame like the stumpjumper 29er is stiff where it needs to be and flexi where it needs to be...maybe too flexi in some parts ;) So i will be spending a few hundred miles out in the Blue River getting my aluminum mojo back over the next couple weeks.

My loaner rig is a 29er paragon and i must admit i missed my carbon frame yesterday to soak up all the little cherty limestone bumps and roots that the alluminum transferred right to my back, but the aluminum still rails on corners and holds speed well. I am hoping that with the super light tubeless wheels and sworks tires, i can lower the tire pressure and get a good feel from what im sure will be a stellar aluminum frame from specialized. The last specialized i rode was a 1999 sworks M2 aluminum, which is one of the best bikes I have ridden to date, so i have high hopes for the M5 optimized alloy. I guess if i want to I could sell mid-season when the 2011 specialized bikes come in and finish off the season on a 2011 epert carbon 29er or maybe marathon carbon 29er. Let the racing decide!!

Jayhawker Ride

I have three beautiful days off work and am taking advantage of them with some rides. Rain was on the horizon this morning when i headed off to raytown and by the time i got there my plastic slicker was on. Clocked in at 2:45 with my loop out and back, half rain. I feel great and I love the country.