Yesterday it was in the upper 60’s and I went for a ride at lunch in shorts and a short sleeve jersey. The weather men were forecasting a blizzard for last night and today. Even on the way home from work, the highway signs had a blizzard warning on them and said to know your route and be prepared. Almost always when they forecast a big storm and make a big deal about it, we’re lucky if we get more than a couple inches of snow and wind.

When we went to bed last night, it was raining. When I got up this morning I expected to see very little snow. It was actually snowing pretty hard. There was about 5 inches on a table outside but the sidewalk and street only had a couple inches. Most of the trees hadn’t taken the hint from last week’s snow and hadn’t dropped there leaves. We only had some small branches down but there were some big ones in our street. I moved Julie’s van to a spot where there weren’t any trees before I left for work.

With the way the storm came in, I expected it to be worse up north where I work. It’s a few hundred feet higher so it’s a few degrees colder and the storms tend to be worse there even though it’s only about 7 miles from my house. As I got farther north there was a lot more snow. I’ve been putting off getting new wiper blades for my Durango and I had to stop at a parts store for some because I was having trouble seeing. While I was in the store, I heard on the news that parts of the city had 14 inches of snow. In Woodland Park they said 3.5 inches of snow had fallen in 40 minutes. Deb Acord, the reporter from The Gazette that interviewed me before and after RAAM, lives up there and posted some pictures on the out there blog.

I had a big all day planning meeting at work but nobody else made it in. They all live in the north part of the city. They parking lot wasn’t plowed and I was plowing quite a bit of snow with my Durango. We tried doing the meeting on the phone but we needed to access a web tool. Once guy had lost his power and another guy’s high speed internet link kept going up and down. We finally gave up on the meeting. By then it wasn’t snowing as hard but I decided to go home just in case. By then they had closed north bound I-25 and I couldn’t get on south bound because a snow plow had spun out across the on ramp.

This afternoon it had stopped snowing and the snow was steadily melting since the ground is so warm. Late afternoon I went and skied High Drive. The snow was pretty slushy at the bottom. Where people had skied earlier in the day and packed the snow down into the slush against the warm ground, the snow was pretty much gone so people had made new tracks. Up higher where it was colder, the slush that had been sticking to my skis froze. I turned around about 10 minutes from the top. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get down if I couldn’t keep the snow from freezing or sticking to my skis plus Kody seemed to be getting tired. Back in August he tore his toe nail pretty bad when we were doing the Manitou Incline and the vet had to work on it. At the same time he had a couple of abscessed teeth removed. I haven’t had him out since then since it took a while for him to heal up. I scraped the ice off when I turned around and my skis stayed clear the whole way down and Kody did fine. I was out for almost an hour and 15 minutes. That’s as much skiing as I did all last winter before my 4 day trip to the Eiseman Hut.

Afterward I picked Danielle up from my parents since I had left her there will I was skiing and took her over to Red Rock Open Space to sled. She had been asking to go all day. There really wasn’t much snow left except on the grass. I found a spot on one of the old roads that had just enough snow to sled on. We also checked out the Freeride Park that is being built. I think it’s supposed to open next month.

Picture from out there blog
Monday was a beautiful fall day in the 70’s. Tuesday it clouded up and started snowing in the afternoon. We got about 4 inches of snow although most of it melted on the streets and sidewalks. It was a good thing we didn’t get more. It’s been warm except for the weekend of the cyclocross race and most of the leaves are still on the trees. Even 4 inches of wet snow was enough to break lots of branches. A-Basin was the first ski area to open in the US when it opened last Friday. Loveland opened the day after but wasn’t the first for the first time in 7 years.

Dena from The Gazette was thinking about whether the Manitou Incline would be a good place for a fast sled ride. I think she has a pretty good idea the damage she could do to herself by doing that. A couple months ago, I was hiking the Incline pretty much every week but having done it lately.

This week was a reminder that winter is pretty much here. Although I like to lots of outdoors activities, I focus on long distance cycling and mountain biking because that’s what I do competitively. The race season in Colorado really goes from about April through September. Jill in Alaska asked a couple days ago what cyclists do in the off-season. Because she does things like snow biking, she’s just ramping up her training.

Here’s what I think cyclists should do in the off-season. I think it’s important both mentally and physically to cut back on cycling. I still think you need to stay active to keep from losing too much fitness. It takes a lot of work to get fit and it takes very little to lose it. I think doing cross-training is important to help balance the body out which I think helps prevent injuries. A couple times I’ve gone to the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix or the Grand Canyon in January or February and gone backpacking for a week to drop some weight and get a good base fitness. For the last 7 years, I’ve done a 4 day back country skiing trip to the Eiseman Hut in February. We leave the hut around 9 and always take our head lamps with us because it’s not unusual to not get back until after dark.

Another important reason for ultra road cyclists to do cross-training is because all of the exercise without much weight bearing can cause bone loss. I’ve heard of studies where 40 year old ultra cyclists have the bone density of 60 years olds. I’m not sure if this is as true for ultra mountain bikers because there’s more jarring and getting off for hike-a-bike sections but it still does concern me.

So what am I doing this fall? I’d like to say I’m fit but just not riding my bike much. The not riding my bike much is true but unfortunately the other part isn’t. I’ve been doing stuff around the house and spending more time with my kids and Julie. I put a lot of stuff off when I was training so much last winter and spring for RAAM.

I’ve also been working on the shopping portion of my website. I wasn’t happy with what I had before and it was provided by a 3rd party so I couldn’t change it much. Now I have my own database for products and my own code so I can change it and improve it. I think it’s already better than what I had before but I still have a lot I want to do to it. I also have some bugs to fix. I’m doing some price comparisons and if a merchant as an item for sale, I’m sometimes not getting the price displayed correctly everywhere. I have a lot of outdoor gear but I want more cycling gear. I’m working on adding some cycling specific merchants and I think I can get them added soon.

The 24 Hours of Moab was this last weekend. It is a race that I have raced solo 4 times. The last time I raced there was in 2000 because I’ve had an asthma attack every time I’ve raced there. I think a few things contribute to my asthma attacks there but I think the biggest one is all the smoke from the camp fires. When I’ve had the asthma attacks, my breathing has been pretty good until I’ve gone through the start finish area around daybreak. By then the smoke has really built up through the night and within 15 minutes of heading out on my next lap I’ve had breathing problems that were pretty severe a couple times. A year ago I started getting Xolair shots which seems to have made a big difference with my asthma. Maybe it’s time to think about doing Moab again.

Last weekend during the evening it was pouring down rain to the point that Granny Gear felt that racers were in danger. The course was closed with a decision to restart racing in the morning. It turned out that the solos didn’t restart and although the teams did it was in such a way that the results were totally bogus. They results ended up being taken as of 8:00 pm Saturday night. Here is the official word from Granny Gear and a report from solo racer, Adam Lisonbee.

Below is a video on what appears to be a fixed gear bike doing a figure skating type program except on a bike. It’s pretty impressive to watch. Certainly way beyond what I will ever be able to do.

This was filmed by me in the year 2000 or 2001 in Wuerzburg, Germany, and still i have not seen something like this anywhere. P.S. music by Vanessa Mae

Early tomorrow morning 76 solo riders will start in the Furnace Creek 508 in an attempt to ride 508 miles across the dessert of California. The 508 is where I first qualified for RAAM in 2002. Chris Kostman always makes sure the 508 Webcast is updated frequently during the race with standings and pictures of the racers out on the course.

A few weeks ago was the Adirondack 540 RAAM qualifier. I qualified the 4th time for RAAM last year at the Adirondack 540. It sounds like this year the weather conditions were a little worse at the start than last year but improved from there.

Last year I think there was at least 16 hours when it was raining or at least the roads were wet enough to have water spraying up. There were times when it was raining very hard at night and I had trouble seeing where I was going. I also think I saw more frogs during that race than I have in the entire rest of my life. At least one frog got thrown up on my back and I had frog parts on my bike after the race.

There was a 10 mile section near the end of the loop that was really rough. The first time over it wasn’t too bad but by the 4th time around late in the race it was almost more than I could endure. This year it sounds like it was still rough but they had at least fixed the worst of it.

Brett Walker took advantage of the good conditions and set a new record of 32 hours and 16 minutes. JB had a good summary of this year’s Adirondack 540 with pictures on his blog. There is also an article on UltraCycling.com.

Last spring I had been summoned for jury duty about a month before RAAM. I had more than enough to do trying to get ready for RAAM to want to risk getting put on a long trial so I postponed it until July. The juror number they sent me then was 2352. When I called in to see if I needed to go in, they said they wanted numbers 1001-1400. A couple weeks went by and they sent me a nasty gram saying I hadn’t appeared when I was supposed and if I didn’t call and schedule another time I’d been big trouble.

Rather than fight with them over whether I was supposed to have appeared or not I scheduled it for yesterday. I went in yesterday and got put on the first case they called jurors up for. The trial is expected to go into at least the middle of next week. They are on the 5th witness and it seemed like they read off a list of 25-30 witnesses during jury selection. I’m not sure how I’m going to endure it for another week. We are supposed to keep an open mind until the end but I certainly have an opinion already. The more I heard this afternoon, the more I was thinking why don’t we just make a decision and get it over with. Ok, I’ll listen to the rest and see if it something will change my mind.