Migration Time

Time for some serious bike practices. Thursday I'm heading down to Tucson for just over a week for the first National Team project of the season. Shouldn't be too crazy, just logging in some long miles, but yah never know. It's going to be a road and mountain bike combined camp with each doing some sport specific sessions (meaning us roadies aren't going to be trusted with mountain bikes). Also, starting to do some IST stuff (psychologist, physio, sleep doctor) which should be really interesting because we haven't had too much access to it before! Only thing I'm a little choked about is that I'm not going to get to see the Olympic torch come through campus/see it at all. aah well. And I missed going to see the dress rehearsal for the Opening Ceremonies...to write a sport psych midterm.

This weekend I headed over to PacSport for my first MAP test in almost 2 years. My pinky is still recovering after multiple prickings. My body likes to give the testers a hard time by clotting super fast. Heading into camp though it's good to have a better sense of where I'm at and my new training ranges...and to have a baseline to work from for the rest of the season.

Also, stopped in at Canada's Northern House this weekend to check it out. I think its one of the first Olympic provincial/territorial houses open and its pretty cool. During the games there's going to be performances and demonstrations going on but the displays were all pretty interesting and there's some interactive stuff, including a green screen to record a postcard video...

Here's ours

Apparently our hotel has been scoped out and we're near a Starbucks and therefore will have internet (good thing b/c coffee+internet=happy cyclists). So hopefully I can dredge up the motivation and energy to blog about what we're up to!

CX

In honour of it being cyclo cross worlds this weekend I decided to add a little resistance to my training and do all my road riding on my cross bike.

I wish that had been a decision but really it was just coincidence. I took my road bike in on Friday to get my power meter put on and a bit of a tune up done. All smooth sailing until I got a call with the message " Uhhhh your derailleur hanger just snapped..." If I was a prepared and organized person I might have had another one lying around but nope so with that the bike was out of commission until sometime next week. Aahhhh. With lackluster cross country skiing conditions and a lot of riding to do I needed a bike! Fortunately I have my "winter" Colnago and my cross bike; unfortunately my Colnago has a stripped crank and my cross bike has been in pieces for a year and a half. After a little bit of frustration that everything was breaking (I also had to return a three week old heart rate monitor for warranty that day after the batter somehow was rusting making it non functional (therefore I had no watch) and my phone decided to start spontaneously ending calls) I managed to scavenge some parts from a friend and get the bike up and running.

Considering, ended up being a pretty solid weekend of training and I'll likely feel like I'm flying once I get off the knobby tires again.

Back to the actual cyclocross part, I did take a few short cuts across fields - just because I could - and realized I kind of missed the racing. Marianne Vos won the women's World Champ today. That's gotta be something like her 5 or 6th world title between track, road and cross (and she's only 23!!!!). I got to witness a little of her cyclocross skill this summer in France. She was definitely a good wheel to be on through the super sketchy neutral dirt/gravel single lane starts. Even if people around her were going down she'd manage to weave a path through.

For those of you who've never seen a cross race check these out:

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

It's tons of fun and slightly insane!

And since count downs are all the rage here right now:

10 days 'til training camp, 11 days 'til the Olympics, 24 days 'til Whistler n Olympic fun and looking like 7 weeks 'til the first race of the season!

El Niño

This phenomena is probably keeping VANOC awake at night planning where they are going to truck snow in from, but for me it's making sure I hit the sack pretty wiped at night. This afternoon is the first time it has rained in almost two weeks and its been around ten degrees everyday. Not so great for the Cypress snow conditions but pretty wicked for riding conditions in Canada in January. Even got to ride up Seymour this week (Cypress road's been closed in the lead up to the Olympics unfortunately) where there was no snow to be seen and I actually managed to survive the ~20min. descent with feeling left in my hands and feet. Not the normal situation.

Things are definitely gearing up for the Olympics around here. Yesterday I made a bit of a detour on my ride to peer into the Northern House (NWT, Yukon and Nunavut's cultural centre for the Olympics). Looks pretty cool inside, so hopefully I'll get a chance to actually go check it out. The Richmond Oval is also no longer a gravel pit all around the outside but is slowly coming together.

All in all, not too much exciting this week. Filled my Naam cravings for the month. For anyone visiting Van you've gotta check out The Naam in Kits; it is a vegetarian restaurant (which I am not) but they have awesome food. Despite going enough to have probably memorized the menu we still take forever deciding.

Speaking of vegetarian food, my new experiment for this week (although really I was served it at a friend's a while ago ) was this salad:

Mixed greens, avocado, cheese, salsa, and then the tofu ground beef stuff sauteed with some veggies (I was pretty impressed with it, but according to a vegetarian friend its one substitute items that wears on you pretty fast)

And decided to make some ride food so that I'm less tempted to stop at Whole Foods...and somehow I ended up w good luck bread! Or Lululemon I guess depending on your take

Clearly time to go make dinner before I bore anyone too much with all this food talk.

PS. For my sport psych class we've gotta do a documentary case study on a situation where an athlete/team is struggling psychologically in the lead up to the Olympics and then plan out an intervention. Anyone heard of any good potential cases?

Secret Training