Ryan Morris
I'm a Canadian studying Engineering at Cornell University, graduating in 2008. I was a rower for 6 years before I was hit by a car on my bike while attempting to qualify for the Athens Olypmics and got into cycling as a result somehow. After taking a year leave from school in '04-05 to work as a roughneck in the Northern Alberta oil fields and tour around Europe for 4 months by bike, I'm now totally committed to becoming a professional cyclist in Europe. I'll be living in Tucson, AZ and Boulder, CO for the first half of 2007 to train full time and continue improving while racing. I'm a cat 1 now after two seasons and a TT specialist. I've been using Powercranks since January 2004 (roughly 30,000 miles on them).
*Update Mar 2008, Ok, it's been forever since I've updated this: I have essentially retired from cycling and turned my efforts to the capital investment world that I temporarily left for cycling. Unfortunately cycling was too small of a field for me in terms of change and new information being created. I've been primarily motivated my whole life by learning new things and trying to grow as much as possible myself and helping others. Investing and cycling are similar problems from my perspective - both about getting a complete understanding of complex & opaque systems (your physiology in cycling, a business & the market in investing) and using that understanding to make better decisions and actions towards a goal (going faster in cycling / making people money in investing). Thanks to everyone for their support and I wish the cycling world the best.
Highlight results:
-13 wins in 2006 season
-2nd NCCA Track Championships: pursuit (first time on a track!)
-3rd Canadian National Championships: U23 TT
-1st Ontario U23 TT Champion: '05, '06
-Mt Washington Hillclimb: Newton's Revenge: 7th (first person ever to complete it WITH Powercranks)
View all blogs by Ryan Morris...
Ithaca has been getting into winter mode lately with the
temperatures dropping and the sun disappearing. I literally haven't
seen the sun for more than 20 seconds since a week and a half ago,
we've had so much cloud cover. Fortuntely this past week was a
recovery week, which was well timed as it would have been impossible to
ride very much with the wet and cold weather we had. I used to ride
outdoors in any weather, thinking it would make me tougher and more
bad-ass, but I've learned that there's a point where stressing
yourself in certain conditions is just more destructive than
beneficial. Making yourself sick with a cold for a week in exchange
for one hard ride in 35 degree rain is definitely not conducive to long
term gains! We're going through this kind of short lived middle
ground with weather that is just deadly for riding. When it's not
quite freezing and raining, it's much colder than if it's -10 degrees
and snowing, since it soaks the cold down to the bone. I'm looking
forward to snow and freezing temps now, but most of all when I can
finally see the sun again. I'm kind of solar powered, not sure how
that works, something to do with UV, vitamin D, and squinting
causing elevated testosterone (think Clint Eastwood = high
testosterone, always scowling...).
Fortunately, I got in a good
block of work in before the weather went bad. I enjoyed my hardcore
detraining, losing about 5 years of fitness in 3 weeks and started
picking things up again 5 weeks ago. Getting back on the Powercranks
was definitely a bit of a shock to the body at first, as I hadn't
spent much time on them for a couple months. I've learned that it's
much smarter to ease into training after a lay-off, rather than
hammering a 5 hour ride to "wake up" your body. Those efforts
typically waste you for a few days after when you're not prepared for
them, gradual increases are key, especially if you're not used to the
PowerCranks. One interesting thing to note is that the body seems to
take only about a week to readjust to powercranks after any length of
significant layoff. In the winter of 2004-05, I had used PowerCranks
for maybe about 10,000km and then didn't even ride my bike at all for
about 7 months, as I was out working in Northern Alberta. Then, I put
my PowerCranks on my touring bike and headed to Europe to ride about 80
miles a day for 4 months. The first week was hard, but after that I
was as comfortable on them as I'd ever been. You would think that
there would be a significant amount of detraining after over half a
year, but it was all back after only a week! Certainly, this must
indicate that Powercranks is making structural changes to the muscles
at some level. Even after some 40,000kms of riding them now, I'm not
fully adapted to them and take a week to get used to them again after a
layoff.
The
good news about the weather is that I'll only have
to deal with it for another month or so. I've been doing a lot of
planning and decided to finish my last semester at Cornell in the Fall
'07 instead of the spring. That way, I can train full time
leading up
to some very important races next year, including Canadian Nationals
and the Pan Am Games (which I will have to qualify for). I was
also
planning on making an attempt at the Canadian Hour record to see what
I'm capable of. I'll be in Boulder, CO in April and the
track up
there should be pretty fast. I'm pretty sure I'm going to Tucson
for
Jan-March, as the weather is a bit prohibitive in Boulder for hard
training. Even now, I've been having serious trouble doing hard
efforts, as the huge volumes of freezing cold air burn the heck out of
my lungs.
Cool, thanks for reading. I've got a few comments
from people, just FYI there isn't anyway for me to reply to them with
this blogging software, so please feel free to email me at rmorris@rogers.com.
Rest is rust ;-),
-Ryan
