For the last couple of years, the onset of fall has started a training cycle that I can now characterize, having been through it twice. It goes something like this:

Late September: Lay grand plans for fall cyclocross racing. Change over to the mountain bike shoes and spend time in the park trying to figure out those remounts
October: Do a cross race or two. Struggle to finish ahead of the teenagers.
November: Wallow in despondence over poor results. Daylight disappears. Biking season ends, eating season begins
December: Eating season continues. Feel bad about eating. Feel good about feeling bad. Don’t stop eating.
January: Realize that at some point, weather is probably going to improve. Step on scale. Recoil in horror. Resume training. Lay grand plans for spring and summer racing.
This year I’ve resumed training but I’m not sure what my racing plans are. I’m probably going to do the spring training races, and if I’m having fun, I’ll keep at it. If I’m not – and that’s a strong possibility – maybe I’ll try some randonneuring, or maybe I’ll just be a club rider.
One thing I’m definitely doing is the Pan-Mass Challenge. Again. I registered this morning. I will never set the world on fire with my riding. But I can ride, and I can raise money for cancer research, so that’s what I’ll do. As I remarked to a friend the other day, PMC is the kind of thing that’s hard to quit once you start.
This being a popular ride, and having raised $33 million last year, ol’ Billy Starr jacked the fundraising minimums again. This year, the two-day ride requires a minimum of $4,000, up $700 from two years ago. And, I lost a donor (but gained a rider – hi Tim!). So I’ve got some ground to cover between now and August.
That’s why I’m starting now. It’s not too early to donate, and you can do so by going here. Every little bit counts, and PMC is very efficient. Last year, 100% of rider-raised money went to Dana-Farber. Rider registration fees and corporate sponsorship covered the cost of the ride.
I’m sure I’ll have more to report in the coming months; perhaps something along the lines of “stunt fundraising”…

This year’s PMC is in the books. I may do a longer report later, but for now: it’s done! Saturday was hot and humid, I didn’t eat enough in the last half of the ride and bonked about 5 miles from the finish. Sunday’s weather was just about perfect, save for the headwind we endured for the last 15 miles or so. I broke a spoke around mile 85 on Saturday, but I experienced no other major incidents. Oh, some dude in a Saab tried to right hook a couple of my buddies on Sunday, but needs some more practice :-). The gallery has a few pictures, but in general I wasn’t very snappy this year. Warning: a couple of the pictures may be NSFW due to a t-shirt bearing a four-letter word.
Thanks to all of you who donated; PMC is truly a community effort, and the donors drive the whole works. We ride for everybody who ever needed treatment, and we ride so that those who will need it, will get it. If you want to be a part of it, it’s not too late; you can still donate here.

Knowing my blog readers as I do, I’ve probably reached you by some other means at this point. My fund raising is not quite where it should be so far this year, so here’s another gentle reminder: next weekend, I’m again riding the Pan-Mass Challenge to raise money for cancer research and treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. I need your help in the form of a donation.
I had hoped to do better than the $5000 I raised last year, but instead I’m struggling to meet my minimum commitment. This is nobody’s fault but my own; I’ve had plenty of distractions over the last few months. But I’d like to do especially well this year, in memory of Cian Crowley, the infant son of a friend. Cian was diagnosed with neuroblastoma just a couple of weeks after PMC 2006, and died in October.
Like any parent, I looked at Cian and all too easily saw my own kids. Cancer has touched my life before, but this recent experience drove home the importance of private fundraising in advancing the science of cancer treatment. I’m not a healer, and I’m not a researcher, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be part of the fight. The same goes for you. I hope you’ll join me.
You can donate online here, or contact me and I’ll give you instructions for donating by check. Any amount will help.
Thanks!

So I finally checked out the Tour of Missouri website…I’ve lived in three of the nine host cities, and went to high school in a fourth. The thought of guys with big motors gunning it up and down the roads of my youth stirs my bike nerd soul. Yeah, if I were still there, I’d be taking the week off and following it. As it is, I better be able to get some kind of daily update.
I hope this lasts long enough for me to get back and see it some year.

You probably aren’t following the news from the Floyd Landis arbitration hearing that started on Monday. In fact, I’ve been hard-pressed to find coverage outside of the bike-racing-focused media outlets. Maybe a little tidbit on Tuesday, when an incompetent French interpreter was dismissed after conflating the words for “day” and “hour.”
I have a feeling we’re gonna see more today, though. Yesterday, Greg LeMond took the stand and revealed that Floyd’s business manager Will Geoghegan had contacted him the night before. LeMond alleges that Geoghegan attempted to intimidate him, and Landis fired Geoghegan immediately after Geoghegan admitted to making the call. Note to self: don’t use personal cell phone with traceable number to intimidate witnesses.
Floyd’s hearing is the first open USADA arbitration; the 34 previous cases have all been heard in closed session. From his public statements, Landis apparently hoped an open hearing would shine a bright light on some questionable practices by USADA, WADA and the French lab responsible for analyzing his test samples. Looks like the flashlight’s on but pointed in another direction. This plain stupid behavior distracts from the relevant facts, not to mention making the defense look both stupid and evil.
But I bet the execs over at Court TV are kicking themselves for not picking up the broadcast rights.

Before this year I’d never had a reason to call 911. Since April, I’ve done it three times. Two were bike related. My buddy Anthony touched wheels on a rainy ride back in May and cracked his collarbone. Amazingly he was back on the bike in a couple of weeks, so not much harm done there.
Last weekend I was on a group ride, in a paceline with two unfamiliar riders who, along with me, had been dropped by the guys who really know what they’re doing. A couple of miles from the end we were coasting down a gentle hill when we came upon a car stopped in the travel lane with its right-turn signal on. This is a setup for the classic “right hook” accident: bikers overtake on the right, driver doesn’t see, driver cuts across bikes’ path and winds up with one or more bikers half-prodruding from passenger window. If the car is a large truck, this type of accident is commonly fatal.
I was 2nd wheel. The guy in front saw the car, braked and yelled “slowing!” I saw the car, braked and faded a little right so I didn’t hit the lead rider. While I was doing that, I heard the sickening scraping sounds of Guy #3 grabbing too much brake and going over the bars. Of course I didn’t see that, but that’s what he said he did, and somehow one of his water bottles ended up jamming under my rear wheel, so I have no trouble believing that his bike cartwheeled.
Cam (as Guy #3 turned out to be called) was probably not seriously injured – a spot of road rash on his hip and a sore back for sure – but we got the EMTs on scene and he was transported to a local hospital in full neck-brace-and-back-board ensemble. By the way, the whole E911 cell-phone-locator system is a ways from being fully implemented. If you have to dial 911 from your mobile, you’d better have a pretty good idea of where you are.
I’m writing about it, so it’s obvious that this sort of thing gets in my head. As I like to say, I have a lot of reasons to live. This is just a sport, and I’d rather not need some guy I don’t really know trying to figure out how to call my next of kin because I just aced my hood-ornament tryout. And no matter how good I am, this can happen to me. In fact, it probably will happen to me if I keep at it. But I can’t ride around expecting that it will happen. That’s a sure way to bring it on. So instead, I’ll just leave all the bad juju here. Maybe you shouldn’t read this entry more than once.

PMC went off this weekend, and I had a great time. Pictures are over in the gallery. I promised Elden over at Fat Cyclist that I would do the writeup for him first, so I’ll post here when it’s available there.
Speaking of Elden, he’s racing his 10th Leadville 100 on Saturday and is pulling out all the stops for his first sub-9-hour finish (which will net him the biiiig belt buckle). Rip it, Elden!

I hope you’re not asking, “Floyd who?” This year’s Tour de France has provided enough white-knuckle thrills to last me for a couple of years. It seems like the mass media coverage is somewhat diminished from the Lance era, though I’m gratified to note that NPR has been doing regular coverage. Melissa Block even managed to score an interview after Thursday’s stage 17, where Landis attacked on the first climb and spent 130Km with his nose in the wind to claw his way back into contention for the yellow jersey.

I don’t usually visit www.bicycling.com (home of Bicycling magazine), but fortunately a friend pointed me at Allen Lim’s reports from the tour. Lim is a physiologist who works with Landis as well as the TIAA-CREF team, and has posted some of Floyd’s power data, as well as his analysis. On-bike power meters, first developed over a decade ago, have become very popular among pros and have trickled down to the amateur ranks over the last few years. As it happens, I use the same type of power meter that Floyd does, so I couldn’t resist comparing Floyd’s power data from his gargantuan effort on Stage 17 to my power data from a 100-mile ride (not race) that I did last weekend.

My observations on this lopsided matchup:

• Floyd’s average power for 5+ hours was roughly what I can sustain for an hour, assuming I get to fall over at the end of that hour and maybe take it easy the next day.
• My 30s power wasn’t near my best-ever. In the last month I’ve actually put out over 570W for 30 seconds…but not in the middle of a 200Km mountain ride after three weeks of racing. Since Floyd did a lot of riding alone during this stage (and not a lot of attacking or covering attacks), I assume his 30s peak isn’t near his best either.
• His 30min power was about what I can put out for 2 minutes (and again, probably nowhere near his 30min max).
• He used about 70% more energy than I did. An interesting aside: as things turn out, kilojoules expended is a pretty good approximation of the dietary calories required to supply the energy. So he was burning about 1000 calories an hour.

This reinforces just how highly talented and trained these Pro Tour riders are, dope or no dope. I’m just not from the same planet, physiologically speaking. I’m absolutely cool with that, but the numbers really drive the point home.

Another interesting note is that Landis reportedly took 70 water bottles (each with a roughly .5 L capacity) over the course of his ride. He probaby dumped most of those over his head, but that’s still about 30 L more than I managed to consume in slightly more time. Of course, I cramped up toward the end, so maybe he’s onto something. Must be nice to have a team car following you with a big cooler full of bottles…

Sometime over the weekend, the total pledges + matches from Fat Cyclist readers (and the man himself) surpassed $1500. That means it’s jersey time! I taught myself enough Adobe Illustrator to be dangerous and came up with this. The order is in, so let’s hope Voler can deliver by the 3rd of August. And that also means I’m dangerously close to having my PMC plans fixed, as it were.
I’m amazed at the generosity of my fellow Fat Cyclist readers. Fourteen people I’ve never met, from eight states and two foreign countries, have donated to PMC. And they probably wouldn’t have even heard of PMC if I hadn’t asked. How’s that for the power of the Intarweb?
I’m still learning just how big a deal PMC is. Last night I saw a frickin’ TV show about it. Yeah, it’s just regional cable news channel NECN (whose studios, by the way, are on the course of one of the local training crits), but that’s still pretty cool. Looks like the clips from the show are available online, so you can see what I mean.