Thursday, May 22, 2008

back on TRACK



I am not even sure if I can remember everything that has gone on since my last post....but I will try.
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OK, so I went home from CO Springs, did the Rock Hill road race weekend with Inferno (a great team weekend), then did the Cohutta 100 mile MTB race ...(where I finished 16th and which really deserves it's own post)...then did the Airforce uci road race (where I was dropped like a rock), came back to C-Springs for a week of intense track pursuit training with Matt, flew back to Asheville for a whopping 5 days and had a great time doing the 12 Hours of Tsali MTB race with my Kobold / Cannondale teammate Daniel Corum last saturday(where we were 3rd in the 4 person open team category with just 2 riders...hope to do a post on this race individually as well). Got up the day after the 12 hr race, packed and DROVE 2 days (10 hrs sun, 12 hrs mon) BACK to Colorado Springs again,.......which leads us to this week.....keeping up??? I am not sure if I am !
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Now things are hotting up with our training for the Paralympic trials. We have been KILLING it with our workouts on the track. I have to say in my almost 20 years of racing bikes I have NEVER done this much specific all out intensity work...nor have I put this much energy and sacrifice into preparing for a certain event....and I suppose that is saying something. I am convinced it will pay off.
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Training for the 4 KM pursuit on the track is quite complicated and specific. I am certainly learning a lot. Matt enlisted Chris Mirabella to help with our training program (husband of famous track star Erin Mirabella)...so a special thanks from my aching legs goes out to him :) > I should also mention the incredible help we have had from Bill Lahman ..who has done everything from airport runs, to lap timing to wrenching for us....not to mention training with Matt. So far this has been a real team effort.
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Today's bout of pain was a long track workout consisting of a nice warm-up punctuated with a 4KM effort building to 130 rpm or so in a light gear (51x17 I think). Then the fun began with 4x 3KM all out efforts in our expected race gearing. It was super windy and our lap times were not great...but our effort was really good. We finished off doing 2 start efforts from a real starting gate...which was good practice. This workout left us completely spent. We then took about 30 minutes off followed by a 2 hour easy ride up through the Garden of the Gods (pictured above).
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The picture on the top is Katie Compton doing a serious motor paced track session......
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Now I need to recover for tomorrow's killer session again...
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a2

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