Testing Videos

This is my Wingate test from last week, best effort yet!  1041 W 5 sec max, 780 W 30 sec average.

Aaaand... my second muscle biopsy.  Yum!

Cyclists' Night Out

I'm a bit behind on updating my blog, so I'll try to catch up...

Last Monday, the researchers took us hard working test subjects out to dinner in Les Rousses. It was great to get out of the center and have some real food! The restaurant was a small out of the way place with a wood fired oven and great handmade pizza. For my initial pizza, I had a tasty concoction called La Juriassen or something of that nature... it had a few local cheeses and some ham. Very good! It was gone in a few minutes and it felt like there was a good amount of room left in my stomach. So, Logan and I split a second pizza known as the Quatre Saisons (Four Seasons if you don't speak French). This was possibly even better than the first pizza, with peppers, bacon, and some other veggies which I can't remember. My stomach and taste buds were now very happy. Looking around the room, everyone was having a great time, and some getting a bit animated with the beer and wine flowing freely. Spirits and morale had been getting a little low with the current situation back at the training center. 16 hours in the room, monotonous food, hard training, and no time to unwind had started to raise tensions in a lot of us. So the night out was a great way to relieve some stress and cheer everyone up.

Happy and full

I don't think I've mentioned the mustache competition yet...  The researchers are putting up 120 euros for the best mustache by the end of the study, you can see some of the top contenders:

Jesse incorporates the sideburns nicely

Travis working on a nice horseshoe 'stache

Darren's looking nice and creepy...

Andrew rockin' the scuzzball look

Shaun's classic mustache and goatee...

I'm not sure what style AJ is rocking.

After the fabulous night out, some of the crew decided to continue the fun times.  Starting off with some mountain bike trials in my room, which ended when Shaun nailed his head on the ceiling trying to bunny hop onto my bed.

Then we watched the ever classic Anchorman, one of my favorites.  The laptop speakers weren't loud enough, so I turned on the captioning and read the dialogue (in character of course) so that everyone could hear better.  I think this really improved the movie, especially the fight scene between Burgundy and Corningstone.  If you haven't seen this cinematic masterpiece, you should.  Stay Classy!

Great Sunday ride

I went on a very nice ride Sunday, it was beautiful, sunny and warm 65 degrees out.  Following in Andrew's footsteps, or tire tracks I guess, the loop included 3 huge climbs- La Dôle, Col de la Faucille, and D304 out of St. Claude.  He had done this ride the day before, so to out-do him a little bit I tacked on an extra 10 miles by riding out to the Shell climb aka Marchiaruz.  This is not as big as the big 3, but is still a nice 4 miler which gets pretty steep in some parts.  All in all, a great day of climbing with about 11,500 feet in 103 miles.  Here is my route.  Some views along the way-

View from the top of La Dole

Busy day at La Dole!

Coming up to La Faucille

Look at the size of that bike!!  I guess its a decoration from the Tour...

Somewhere in the beginning of my ride, I think when I stopped at the top of La Dôle, one of my rear brake pads fell out.  I started riding down, just using my front brakes.  This was working fine, but seeing sticks on the side of the road gave me an idea... So I stopped and jammed a nicely sized piece of wood into the shoe holder to use as a brake pad, and it actually worked pretty well!

Back back, back to the lab...

After a nice 2 week break, we are going back to the hospital this week for more rounds of tests.  Yesterday was my least favorite, the arterial VO2.  Getting a blood catheter put in the artery in your arm is not pleasant, then doing 2 VO2 max tests with an hour and a half in between means about 4 hours at the hospital having the thing stuck in the arm...  Anyway its over now, and I'm very happy about that.  I managed to improve a little from last time, maxing out at 475 watts instead of 450, then 425 instead of 400 in the 2nd (hypoxic) round.  Not sure if this is evidence that I am indeed in a hypoxic room, or if its just from training hard.

About to start the hypoxic VO2 test, breathing low oxygen air through this tube...

Today was another Wingate (30 sec max effort) and then a 40 minute time trial for the submax effort test.  Improved significantly on both, which was pretty sweet.  Up to 990 watts from 860 in the Wingate, and 316 from 287 in the TT, 4.1 watts per kg.  Apparently on the indoor trainer the power is less than what you can do outside in real life, I must borrow someones power meter and check this out sometime.

The weather has cleared up in the past few days, it is sunny and 65 degrees today and should be the same tomorrow. Perfect weather, it is very beautiful out.  I'm finished with this week's tests, so plan to head out for a nice long ride tomorrow.  Unfortunately next week is looking like more cold and rain, but maybe the weather forecast will be wrong...

Go away rain...

So its been raining for the past 2 days and looks like it will be raining for most of the next week.  And I don't have a set of serious rain gear!  It was 50 degrees and rainy yesterday, went for a 3+ hour ride with AJ anyway wearing my winter gloves and booties, but after they got completely soaked my hands and feet went numb with about an hour left to ride.  It was a good workout though, we pushed each other through a hard set of intervals.

La Forestiere recap:
The race last Sunday did not go as well as I had hoped, the cage (carbon, why???) of my rear derailleur snapped off about 7 miles in to the race.  I was somewhere around 20th place at the time and was feeling good. Thomas Bonne (one of the other guys here) raced also and was up ahead of me in the top 15, when the guy directly in front of him had a bad wreck on a nasty downhill section (same place my derailleur broke).  Thomas stopped to stay with the injured rider, he had gotten knocked out and ended up with a bad concussion and a broken hand.  It turned out Thomas knew him from mountain bike racing in Denmark, I guess its a pretty small scene.  So, he accompanied the injured rider to the hospital and helped him out a lot, and I took both of our bikes back to Premanon.  Bad day for us, but I hear the guy is doing fine now after some hand surgery.  At least I got a cool t-shirt for my 50 euro entry fee.

My Dad and Stepmom were here Monday and Tuesday, I met them at the Hotel Arbez in La Cure both days and we had some delicious and very rich French lunches and desserts, mmm...  They will be moving to Lyon, France in October and were out here scouting out an apartment, so came to visit before heading back to pack up everything in the US.  Dad has been talking about moving to France for a while, and I guess they decided to finally do it, pretty cool!  They had good luck and some help from friends, and found a nice place in Lyon.  I plan to take the train down there at the end of October, visit for a little while and drop off some extra luggage and one of my bikes, then take the train down to Rome to visit my cousin Antonella in Castel di Sangro, Italy.  Spending about a month down there, then probably back to Lyon for a French Thanksgiving with my Dad, then to Geneva to catch the plane home November 28th.  I'm really looking forward to seeing Lyon and relatives in Italy!

We had some great riding this week before the rain started coming down, Wednesday was a pretty long day with a good amount of climbing - a Cat2 climb from the Tour this year that went under a cliff, the road was closed but we cut through anyway.

Fast and fun descent, then the first part of the Tour climb up from Saint-Claude but extending it a few miles with a turn onto a pretty steep road with more switchbacks.  Great views of the road and valley down below.

Premanon Crew

Jesse Rients took this picture a few days ago when some of us went to get coffee in Les Rousses.  From the bottom left going clockwise around the table, here is this bunch of jokers: Shaun Locker, me, AJ Baucco, Adam Aisen, Russel Stevenson, Thomas Bonne, Laust Kruse, Andrew Lees, Logan Wetzel, and Ian Terry.  Some people were not there- Gaby Manser, Gordon Smith, Darren Young, Jacob Christiansen and Luc Morin.  Maybe we can all get together and go out for pizza sometime...

Stuck in hypoxia...

So, I'm not sure if my room is hypoxic or not, half of the participants are in hypoxia half are control and not.  But, I wore my heart rate monitor to sleep last night and my average heart rate was 70, which is a bit high, so I think we might be one of the hypoxic rooms.  I have a room mate now, AJ, and we have to be in our room for at least 16 hours a day.  Enter at 4 pm, leave for an hour at 7 for dinner, back in from 8 pm til 7 am when we have an hour break for breakfast, then back in for 2 more hours from 8-10 am.  So, its a lot of laying around sleeping and being lazy in general.  Which is fine with me really...  10-4 is riding time, I've gone on some pretty sweet rides in the past couple of days, but taking today off, my legs are pretty sore.

Yesterday we rode a nice loop that Logan picked out.  Laust, Russel, Logan, Andrew and I went, it was a 69 mile ride with about 6000 feet of climbing.


View Larger Map

We started out with an hour of descending in a beautiful valley, through the town of Mijoux and ending in Montanges.  On the way down we went past a lot of cool rock formations and into a tunnel blasted through the mountainside.  After about 25 miles of going downhill, it was time for some climbing, up about 2500 feet on the first one, another ripping descent into Saint-Claude, then basically climbing for the rest of the ride back to Premanon.  Here are some pictures from the ride-

Camera strap got in the way, but you get the idea...

I registered for the La Forestiere 100k mountain bike (VTT) race this Sunday.  Its a point to point race, starting nearby in Les Rousses and finishing way down in Arbent.  I'm pretty excited to race in France, this is a UCI marathon event too so should bring out some pretty big names.  No one will know what my 29er is, they are not very big in europe.  I will let you know how it goes...