The weekend: long ride and cherry blossoms, nice!

On Sunday Cezanne and I headed down to see the Cherry Blossoms around downtown DC. We thought we'd see them this time in case we had other things to do next year. Sometimes we fall victim to only seeing a city's sites when visitors are in town, so we wanted to do it without any external prompting.

A side note to this story is that we ran out of Peets coffee on Friday morning. That's bad, very bad. Our local Giant carries it, but they were all out when I stopped by on Friday night, so I picked up some other stuff which wound up being really bad. No Peets (or other good coffee) = grumpy Chris. Some more Peets is currently on the way to us from Berkeley, but we were able to pic a small supply up at Harris Teeter after my road guarding duties at the Tysons Corner crit.

So, with no good coffee at home we hit Dean & Deluca in Georgetown on the way to see the Cherry Blossoms. From there we found some closed roads and eventually got directed across the Arlington Memorial bridge. We wound up parking near the Iwo Jima memorial and making the 25 minute walk over to the Cherry Blossoms. Given that we wanted to leave in the car at 11am to get to Tysons, that gave us 5 minutes with the Cherry Blossoms and the 25 minute walk back.

We took the above pic on the Arlington Memorial bridge. I'm doing my best Euro impression with my bright green "Italia" track jacket. I'm fresh from a new haircut from my buddy "Yash" who is an elderly Turkish man who KNOWS he is an awesome hair artist and isn't shy about telling you.

Above is the "must post" typical Cherry Blossom pic. Look Mom, I was there!

Now that's what I'm talking about! Got my big Cali glasses on and the bright green track jacket has given way (due mainly to my sweating on the walk over) to the DZ Captain America t-shirt courtesy of JW!

Thanks to Alan's gallery on Picasa, I was able to find a couple of Jeff Cup pics of myself. I think the above pic is of the final push to the line on the last lap, probably about 200-300 meters from the line. I'm on the right of the pic with my bright yellow shoes, green bar tape (which I've subsequently switched to white) and graphite color helmet (which is now out of commission with 3 large cracks and a bunch of smaller ones).

So, this pic was probably taken about 20-30 seconds before I wrecked horribly. You can see one of the guys that crashed right in front of me in the pic. He was taken to the hospital first. He had a lot of scrapes and bleeding. He's the guy to the left of me (when looking at the pic) in the ABRT/Latitude kit and orange sunglasses. I don't know who the other guy was who crashed with him right in front of me.

Above is a little better pic. You can see how well my shoes and handlebars go with my kit. It's quite nice... I'm not sure at what point in the race this pic was taken. I think it's near the start/finish during the 2nd lap. I guess we were lazy and let a small gap create before closing it.

It's no secret that I didn't race Walkersville or Tysons this weekend. I was really looking forward to them, but in the end I just didn't want to risk bumping my head again this soon after my "grade 2" concussion. Just not worth it. My next race is Syn-Fit on April 18th.

Walkersville actually had a ton of crashes with one person from our team being life-flighted to the Baltimore shock trauma center. He's doing okay now. I don't think the Tysons CAT 5 race had any crashes, but the CAT 4 had 2 bad ones, one in the first 3rd of the race causing a long delay and then the second accident in the sprint about 150 meters from the finish, which caused a delay to the start of the next race. Both involved ambulance trips to the hospital.

To take out my frustration of not racing I decided to do a long solo ride on Saturday. With respect to training for CAT 5 racing...probably not the most specific training I could do. Read that with sarcasm. Most CAT 5 races consist of an all out 30 minutes (not 30 miles, minutes) of racing, preceeded hopefully by 30-45 minutes of warmup and then some cool down after. 79 miles and 4.5 hours of riding probably isn't the ideal training I could be doing.

I headed out to the familiar Berryville Rd. (above pic), then instead of heading back I headed out to Poolesville to ride once around the Poolesville RR course (that my team NCVC puts on). I took a wrong turn on the course and wound up going down a rabbit hole. You can see it on the map of the Garmin file: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/2940908 Should be a nice loop out in Poolesville, but you can see where I headed due south then doubled back. Most of my ride was rolling, but I got in a good 5,200 feet of climbing.

I also made a 2nd wrong turn and missed a right turn which basically extended the loop North on the Northwest side of the loop and took me to a main road. I'm actually really glad I made that mistake. I was running out of water and happened upon downtown Poolesville and a gas station with Gatorade. There is nothing immediately around the course or in the first 15-20 miles on the way home.

The Poolesville Road Race is unique because it features a 1.5 mile (or so) section of packed dirt/gravel (above pic) which apparently is ripe with flat tires and expunged water bottles on race day.

I found it to be okay, but I wasn't doing it at race speed and being solo I could easily ride on the section hard-packed by vehicle tires. There is one spot (didn't take a pic of it) where there is a nasty pot-holed area on the left just before a bridge. Not sure if I'll have to keep that in mind because I don't think I'm racing Poolesville this year. It's the day before Reston, but I'm still deciding.

Don't know why, but I felt compelled to get a picture of the hay bale (bail?) and puddle.

So, that was the weekend. Hopefully I'll have a good week of training. My legs are still tired from Saturday's ride, mainly since I haven't ridden that far since last July. What I find supremely hilarious is that I had an average heartrate on this weekend's ride of 146 bpm for 4.5 hours and last Wednesday I did a half-a$$ed 1 hour indoor interval workout where my average hearrate was 141 bpm. There's just something lacking on the indoor trainer; that, coupled with the fact that as I mentioned, it was a half-hearted effort that I really wasn't into.

JW, you're in good company with the broken chain this weekend: http://www.velonews.com/photo/90206