Sorry for being so absent for the past couple months, but I've not exactly been super excited about how my spring has been going.  I drove 17 hours to California in mid March for my first Pro NRC races with the Central Valley Classic and then the Sequoia TT & Crit in Visalia.  California was beautiful, they set temperature records while we were there and I got all the sun I could ever have wanted.  Training was good too, I managed to get in 4 consecutive 5.5 hour rides on my TT bike after the first race weekend.  I'd only spent a couple weeks up in Boulder struggling with the altitude but it was quite remarkable how much easier it felt going back down to sea level, like I could drink the air!

That trip went relatively well, although my performances were not really up to snuff in my mind.  I was top 40 in the TTs (which quite remarkably, would have come top 2 in the cat 2's!) and finished the Sequoia crit mid pack, which Toyota-United swept the top 3!  Climbing was strange though, I just couldn't seem to generate any power while on the climbs training or racing.  I guess I've been focusing a lot of my training on trying to go really easy most of the time except for a few shorter, harder intervals and technical work with the Powercranks and TT bike positioning.  However, with that general approach, it leaves out a lot of climbing, which has to be done at a minimum of a tempo type pace just due to the nature of the effort and the gears on the bike. 

I'd been a big believer in polarizing the training to really easy or really hard, as one generally gets the most training stimulous from the really hard, pushing barriers, kind of efforts.   If you ride too much at a harder pace, like climbing all the time, you are too tired to push really to the maximum power at other times.  While riding in Ithaca last year I tried to generally stick to this pattern, though it's so rolling there that you always end up having at least an hour of intermittent climbing while on a long easy day.  The difference in Tucson and Boulder is that it's either almost totally flat or mountainous, so an easy flat day stays really easy.

For the first time I've been feeling a bit lost and unsure what to do with the training and things have seemed so far off track of where they should be.  Despite training through the winter (with a couple off season breaks...) and getting in a decent amount of racing early on, I've still not been able to get as strong as I was last summer and fall.  The only thing that I can hope is that I've put in a much larger base period this year and that things will pay off later.  The races I really care about this year are in June-September so it hasn't been a huge loss or anything yet, though it's still very frustrating to not see the continuous progress I've seen in the past.  It's not a plateau effect, it's been a large step backwards despite training 20 hours a week!

After getting back from California 5 weeks ago I came down with a horrible cold and fever for 2 weeks.  I'd been lucky not to have been sick for the 4 months previous, which I think is probably a record for me, but I was bedridden for a while and even missed out on a free team dinner at the Rio Grande!  Speaking of which, we had our official team presentation last week and so the official season has begun!  We just got our new team kits in also and they look totally sweet.  Kind of a mix look between CSC and Casse-D'Espargne pro teams with mostly black and some red and white in there too and a giant margarita neon sign on the back with "LIMIT 3" on it (the drinks are so strong at the Rio that they limit you, they're SUCH good margaritas).

We kicked off our season driving down to Lincoln, Nebraska for a weekend stage race.  It was warm but typical Nebraska wind blowing steady at a solid 30mph and 50mph gusts.  I'm from the North East, where we have trees everywhere and rolling hills, so there are never winds like that!  The time trial went reasonably well, I ended up 5th and didn't get blown off the course thanks to my tank-like weight ;-).  The road race went around a lake on rolling exposed roads and the earlier categories only averaged like 15mph due to the wind and finished an hour later, so our race cut cut from 85 to only 63 miles.  I lasted about half the race with the main group, which was constantly shelling riders in the massive crosswinds.  This was only my second race in big crosswinds ever and I figured that it would be smart to create a second echelon to help each other out in the wind.  WRONG!  Apparantly in the US, cross wind races just have one echelon and then people riding in the gutter getting very little draft.  Nobody would come with me to make a second one, so I sat out in the wind too long and got dropped and eventually scrounged up enough people together to make a chase group echelon and we finished a few minutes back.  I guess the only way to make it in crosswinds here is to just fight and bump until you're in that front little group, seems a little bit uncivil, but oh well...  Sunday finished with a short circuit race in a park.  15 minutes before the race there was a flash storm with hard driving rain and then pea-sized hail for about 5 minutes!  This was while the cat 3's were still just finishing their race, I feel sorry for them!  For our race it was just a light rain and we all got totally covered in mud.  There were a couple times when my back wheel did a nice little slide through the turn but at least I managed not to wipe out on any of the numerous pine cones littering the course!  All in all a fun weekend and Team Rio had someone in the top 6 for every stage and we won enough prize money to pay for gas.  Oh yeah, and I set a record in my car, a sweet Ford minivan that fit 6 bikes and 3 people inside it - 460 miles for one tank, while driving at 80mph on the highway!  I need a west wind next time I drive out there and try to break 500 miles!

Now that the season has started in earnest, I'll be back and posting updates.  This is a big year, trying to be pro and all that, so I'll be going all out!
-Ryan