Author: kennettron

I don’t know where it came from considering my heavy training load last week and Monday. But damn. My legs felt like letting me know they were alive today. And they did so by kicking my ass. I went out with the intention of going moderately hard between 4 and 5 hours, depending on how I felt. I felt good. 300 watts for 5 hours, then a 30′ cool down, which was the most difficult portion of the ride. I got my cadence up to 106 on several occasions, as I’ve been training to increase my cadence skills. Cadence 106 for 12 seconds. I’d like to see you try that!!

For all you non-bike people, this is what the power charts look like that I’m always talking about.

After an hour of tearing up the hills and gravel roads of Parrot Mountain, I headed down south to Salem, then to Woodburn, then to Silverton, then to Woodburn again, then to Newberg, and finally home. I felt strong until about 4:48 hours. At 4:30 hours I could feel my legs beginning to fail, so I stopped at a convenient store. I dug into my bike bag and pulled out 65 cents in nickles. “Idiot,” I thought. I never put enough money in my bike bag.

I staggered into the store with my blood vessel eyes blurring over, and looked around for anything in my price range. There weren’t prices on anything which made me mad immediately.  So I grabbed a piece of candy and took it up to the counter to ask the guy how much it was. He was scanning loto tickets and had his back turned to me and the other customers. There was a line of 6 people in front of me. I stood there for about 4 minutes, growing more and more impatient as the idiot kept scanning loto tickets without helping anyone. I went up to the counter and asked him how much the candy was. “99 cents,” he said. This, combined with the wait, made me extremely angry. I snorted my disgust, dropped the candy on the counter and walked out with my nickles. As I got on the bike, I got more and more mad at the guy and the price of that stupid piece of candy. Sometimes I get mad for no reason, and this was one of those situations. But it did fuel me for about 12 minutes, then I completely died. I spent the next 15 minutes struggling to push 200 watts, where before I had been doing mid 300’s. It was only 15 or 20 minutes to home from there, but I had to stop at a Taco Bell and steal some lemonade from the fountain drink machine to make it back.  Very hard ride.  Very fun.

Oh, and I just rememberd something from the ride.  Two bulls raced me.  Like the cow type bulls.  They were surprisingly fast.  If I was going to combine three species, I would do a liger, bull, and Clydesdale.  A “Blydesdiger.”  It would be massive like a clydesdale, have fangs, claws and eat meat, and have giant horns and a ring in its nose.

It’s cold up here but the riding is going well.  This weekend I went down to Eugene to get my bike fixed up and ride with some friends.  Yesterday Will, Chris, Mike and I went up to Salem to ride the Team Oregon group ride.  Unfortunately, the team is now probably going to avoid riding with me because I ended up getting three flats.  I had a faulty tire, a brand new Schwalbe, that was causing slow leaks.  It was very annoying and I ended up riding with about 15 psi for most of the time after we realized that putting new tubes in wasn’t solving anything.  Every 15 minutes Chris and I would pump my tire up with his frame pump.  The rest of the guys were more understanding than I would have been.  I think it’s going to be a great year racing with them.

Today Will, Chris, Mike, and I did a five hour ride after eating breakfast at Mike’s.  When Will and I headed over to his house at 8:00 it was 24 degrees.  It was difficult to leave the heated house after breakfast, although the temperature had warmed up to 27 degrees, almost too hot to ride!

That was a shock. 70’s to 40’s in a day. Let me remind you all that when it’s 70 or more degrees, all you need is a pair of bibs, sunglasses, and a jersey. And SUNSCREEN. And lots of water stops. It feels very good, by the way. This does not. I know the weather is awesome right now (no rain). But still. Wow. It’s a shock; you’ve got to remember that I’ve been enjoying summer for the past three months and to go from summer to 40 degrees and getting dark at 5:00 pm…doesn’t feel too good. Although, I am happy to be back in Oregon and see all my friends and family. I’ll be in Eugene on Friday through Sunday this weekend. And I’ll also be riding in Salem during my first Team O group ride. Any of you guys down in Eugene are welcome to hitch a car ride with me on Saturday morning to go up and join in. I hear it’s gonna be wicked cool. I’ll see you Eugenians on Friday at the shop/on an afternoon ride/at a movie/at a party/in a tree-fort/on the streets slumming for crack money/in the county jail/at Derek’s mother’s house/wherever.

It was harvested as a young, green fruit back in the late days of 2008.  It lived a peaceful life, growing in the shade of it’s parent tree’s broad lush leaves.  It had many brothers and sister fruits, all approximately the same size and shape living in a pesticide Chlorpyrifos-coated bag to kill insects and diseases.  Every few days, our hero and it’s family was sprayed with a refreshing shower of another kind of pesticide to further discourage any unsightly blemishes on it’s fine green skin.  Along with the pesticide, it was drenched with an aerial spray to kill fungi in the air, nematicides to kill worms, and herbicides to kill weeds.  Our friend liked to be kept clean, that’s for sure!

It didn’t think of itself any different than the tens of thousands of others living close by, but it had a great unknown destiny in its future.  For the time being, our hero of the story led a simple and cozy life in a 75-acre banana plantation in Panama, spending its days lounging in its plastic bag-house and staring out into the world.  The banana grew bigger and bigger, and one day, it, along with it’s entire family, was rudely chopped from the tree.  The banana was devided into a seven-fruit bunch with its brothers and sisters and was carried away, never to see its sunny home again.  After being thrown in a tractor, it was crated off to a dingy warehouse.  From there it was boxed up, shoved in a plastic bag, and shipped of in a giant refrigerator with thousands of its kind to the United States.  Our banana cried itself to sleep each night.  It’s only comfort was the intreaging fresh Dole sticker slapped on its still green skin.  Our banana didn’t see the light of day for weeks.

The banana squinted its eyes as the bright light of the world shined in on it as the cardboard box was opened.  After being manhandled out of the box, its plastic bag was removed and the unkind hands rapidly ripped it from its seven companions.  They were placed in a small bin, along with thirty other almost yellow bananas.  Yellow?  “What’s this?” our banana thought to itself.  Looking down on its body, the banana could see the beginnings of a new yellow coat taking the place of the green.  It could hardly contain its excitement, and sat completely still in the bin practically buzzing with enthusiasm over its amazing transformation.

Our banana grew restless, though.  After a few days, half of its friends had been bought.  Only thirteen lay in the bin next to it, each hoping that they too would be selected for some unknown quest.  But alas, our banana was not.  It watched as every other banana was taken away out the swinging doors of the Tucson Circle K.  It became lonely, and leopardy spots of brown began speckling its once-sterling yellow skin.  It’s glory days behind it, our banana began thinking about taking its own life by throwing itself out of the bin and onto the floor, where its now delicate body would surely burst out all over the ground.  As time went by, and the banana became older and older, the idea began solidifying, unlike the banana’s insides, and it planned out its death in detail.  The time was here.  If it waited any longer, it wouldn’t have the strength to lift its limp, brown body up and out of the bin.  Our banana decided to rest up for one more night, and if the next day, its remained un-bought, it would commit suicide.  

The Next Day:

After five hours on the bike, a hungry cyclist aproached the doors of the Circle K.  He had just finished his third 9-mile hill repeat and was exhausted.  Not having taken nearly enough food for the 5,000 calorie day, he staggered into the store with limp legs and a dazed expression on his spit and salt incrusted face.  His eyes were slightly crossed as he scanned the aisles for something that the thirty-five cents in his tightly clenched fist could buy.  He searched the candy bar aisle in vain.  Then the chips aisle, the candy aisle, and the drink aisle with the same outcome.  His situation looked bad.  He only had thirty more minutes to ride until he was home, but it was now dark outside and he dreaded the thought of drifting into oncoming traffic due to hunger.  Plus he felt weak as hell.  He needed food.  But what could 35 cents buy?  

The banana near the cash register had been dragging its listless carcass closer to the edge of the bin since noon, and was now beginning to climb over the 2-inch lip that separated the brown fruit from a death of old age and a death of a sickening drop and splatter on the ground.  One last effort and it would be up and over the last barrier to its sorry existence.  It heaved itself with all its might…

The tired biker saw that bananas were 20 cents each.  He picked up the banana and payed for it with two dimes and walked out the convienient store, peeling the banana as he went.  He placed it to his mouth and devoured the sweet fruit in a few bites.  Immediatly, the sugar from the banana hit his legs and his eyes lost their glaze.  “That was the best damn banana I’ve ever eaten,” he said.  He got back on the bike and rode home without being hit by a car.

My time here in Tucson is coming to an end. I plan on returning to Oregon on Wednesday, although I fly standby so I could change my mind if I wanted. My plane will lift off in the early morning air, leaving the tall Saguaro cacti and dry, beige mountains behind. Ahead will lie rain, moss, trees, and lots of intervals. Part of me regrets my decision to leave Tucson so early. I had planned on staying here for another month to race in early February, but I was becoming bored by myself and missing my true riding pals, friends and family back in Oregon (plus I’m almost out of cash). But as I think about the time I’ve spent here the past couple months, I know I’ll miss it. The sun, Mt. Lemmon, long rides out to Kitt Peak, the Shootout, cheap mexican food, which I regretfully admit I’ve only indulged in once before today. But I’ll miss smelling it as I ride by. Tucson is a great place for a few months, but much longer and it begins to wear on you. I need a change of scenery. There, I just made up my mind. As I started writing this post, I thought about deleting it and pushing back my departure another couple weeks. But no, I’m confident now that I’m making the right decision. My bike needs to be fixed once and for all, which has to happen at Life Cycle because it would cost a fortune down here, and I need a fix too. A food fix. I can’t survive much longer on oats and pasta alone! My dad left a message the other day informing me he has stocked the fridge with all the makings for a feast of huevos rancheros. For all you non-spanish speakers, that translates to “breakfast of kings.”

What I’ve gained from Tucson: good tan, new friends, and the realization that becoming a world champion may take a while (yes that is my goal). I don’t feel like I’m fast yet, but I do feel like I’ve built a good base to work with this year.

What Tucson has gained from me: the dying cactus that I pee on at the base of Lemmon is looking greener…huh. I’ve been thinking for about five minutes now and can’t think of anything else. Well if you affect one life then you did your job!

And now for some pictures to keep you guys entertained.  I brought sewing thread down here, but no needle.  So I’ve been trying other options for a tear in my bibs.

Staples didn’t work.

Tape didn’t work and now it’s getting pretty big.

Unrelated to the tear problem.

When I catch a cold the first thing I do is go to the grocery store and get all the ingredients to make chicken noodle soup.  I know that chicken soup isn’t a magical cure to the common cold, but I’ve trained myself into thinking that it is.  And the placebo affect has been proven to help people overcome sicknesses and accomplish other things they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.  So every time I get sick I make a big batch of soup.  And I also buy a ton of fruit, no matter what the cost.  Fruit is the key to getting rid of colds. Fortunately (and unfortunately) fruit is super cheap right now.  Apples are a little over $1 a pound, oranges are 33 cents a pound, and bananas are always cheap.  So I bought a lot. The unfortunate part of the low cost and therefore huge quantity of it that I bought comes a couple hours after consuming it.  While eating this particular platter of fruit, my roommates questioned my reasoning.

“Uh, are you expecting people to come over to help eat that?”
“You’re going to be sick.”
“That’s a lot of fruit!”
“How can you possibly digest all that?”

I laughed it off at the time, happily chowing down on a fruit salad big enough to give a chimp a panic attack, but four hours later I was hurting. NO. It is not possible to digest more than 10 pieces of fruit a day. Especially when combined with a diet mainly comprised of oats and whole wheat pasta. Add in the three habineros I ate today on top of it all. Now I am two kinds of sick.

Well that was inconvenient.  I caught a cold Last Friday and have been sitting around trying to get better ever since.  And getting sick meant I missed out on a 2-day backpack trip with the roommates.  We went shopping for food on Thursday night for the steep 28-mile hike and I was super excited to eat it on the trip, but since I didn’t go I missed out on that also.

I did an easy ride yesterday that included some isolated leg intervals, but my bike shut down near the end of the ride.  While I was pushing up a hill with one leg at 50 RPM, which causes enough torque to lift you off the seat, the free hub body completely tore itself inside out so that when I tried to pedal the cassette and free hub just spun without making contact with the hub.  Last week it was giving me problems too.  Whenever I stopped pedaling, the free hub would jam up and the chain would go crazy, so I never coasted.  It was sort of like riding a fixie.  But now it’s done for good.  It’s basically a double free wheel.  Luckily I was able to hitch a ride home within a few minutes; something that is super easy to do down here.

Today I borrowed my roommate, Aaron’s,  rear wheel and rode over to Krista’s house to borrow one of her dad’s spare wheels for the week.  From there, her dad and I went on a ride to an area I haven’t been before.  I didn’t know such a place existed.  I’m still coughing but I feel better every day.

Unfortunately, I won’t have any power data for the next week while I borrow the powerless wheel.  I’m still debating whether or not  it’s even worth riding since I won’t have any data.  Is there any benefit to training without a power tap?  Do any physiological changes occur?  Cycling Peaks says no, so therefore I highly doubt I’ll gain any fitness from riding with just an ordinary hub.  Maybe I’ll just leave the power tap computer (which only works with the wheel) on my handle bars and call it even.  At least to passerby’s it will still look like I’m training.

BIG NEWS: oranges at Fry’s grocery store are 33 cents a pound!!!  I bought ten pounds three days ago but ran out.  So today I bought 16 more pounds.  That’s a lot of oranges!!  33 cents.  That’s an amazing deal.  33 cents.  Oranges.  Fry’s.  Hopscotch.  California oranges.  33 cents.  16 pounds for five bucks.  How can that even be possible?  Those Californian farmers must be getting HUGE subsidies from the fed.  Fed Ex is awesome.  Oranges grow on trees.  33 cents!!!  It’s a buyer’s market.  It’s a bad time to own orange stock I guess.  No one wears orange socks.  The guy who designed the Fed Ex logo with the arrow between the E and the X was paid a million dollars.  Oranges.  33 cents!!!!  Eating too many oranges causes thinking disorders.  33 cents!!

3 Doors Down Citizen Soldier

Kid Rock American Warrior

Video #3

Video #4

Video #5

I finally got a decent 20′ power number. 400 watts today, boo yeah. And there were another 10 watts in me that I never got out! A Garmin guy going down Lemmon on the other side of the road dropped his mouth in complete shock as he saw me flying up the mountain with a trail of other’s broken bike parts drenched in the blood of my helpless victims that were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Actually he just waved. But I imagined he dropped his jaw and bulged his eyes, which made me go harder.

I don’t know if any of you agonize about intervals like I do sometimes. The pain, the fear, the worry about not reaching your expected numbers. Today was one of those days. As I rode to the base of Mt. Lemmon, which has an ideal 5% grade for doing threshold intervals, I argued with myself. “I feel good, no. I don’t feel good. I feel OK. No I feel like crap and I’m just going to do tempo instead. No you’re not you wimp!!” My better side won like it usually does, and I began the interval, tricking my weak self by saying, “don’t worry, we’ll just do 10 minutes and see how we feel. If we’re too tired, then we’ll just do tempo for the next couple of hours and call it even, OK? How does that sound, champ?” Little did my weak self know, I was going to do the full interval if it meant falling off my bike into a cacti.

I finished the interval with too much left but was still pleased, and rode up the rest of the way to 9 miles. Then it was all the way down and back to town to get water at the McDonalds, then back up to 9 miles again averaging 338 watts for the 45′ climb. I love days like this. By the way, who actually goes to McDonalds? Every time I go in there (twice today) it’s packed inside and the drive-through stretches way out into the parking lot. Why? Why????? If you want fast food, especially in Tucson, there are hundreds if not hundreds of millions of taco shops that are infinitely better than the crap they have at McDonalds. Does advertising really work this well? Are you people (not you) that influenced by TV? Next time I walk into that McDonalds to get water, it had better not be packed full of you idiots. Or else I’m going to vomit all over the floor, customers, employees, and cash register in my disgust of a failed governmental system that awards outright lying, monopolies, and war that leave Americans fat, wasteful, and stupid and the rest of the resentful world poor and running for cover (possibly to a McDonalds) to escape the raining barrage of Haliburton bombs. Hum…where did that come from?

After my first set of isolated leg intervals up A mountain today, I began noticing a grinding skip in my rear derailleur.  I ignored it and finished my intervals while it grew louder and more clunkier.  Plus on the way down, while I coasted, my chain kept derailing and going slack.  On the way home, I attempted to solve the problems by screwing with the barrel adjuster, which did nothing.  I knew that if I went to the bike shop, they would find something wrong and it would cost a fortune.  If I went home, there was a good chance that it might go away on its own.  I used my worst judgment and went to the shop for some stupid reason, and was told that my chain, cassette, and free-hub body were all ready for the dump.  Plus my derailleur hanger was bent.  And that I was ugly.  Wait, no.  That last part only happens at Life Cycle.

I rode home, cursing at the ever-worsening clanking as my bike continued to moan.  I set the bike in its corner and forgot about it for a few hours.  Then I decided that I would fix the problem myself.  So I bent the derailleur hanger back straight and, though I haven’t test ridden it yet, I assume that by fixing that one problem, everything else has been solved.

Another one of my problems will soon be solved as well: being bored all day by myself.  I’ve decided to return to Oregon in the next week or two and get a job and start saving a little money for the races I plan on doing in the spring.  I’ve survived 22 other Oregon winters in the past, and this one’s already half way over so I guess I’ll be able to manage one more.  The weather here is great, obviously, but the rest of the time while I’m not on the bike I’m extremely bored.  So it’s back to Oregon, where I plan on inflicting some pain on the CSC, UofO, Team O, and Life Cycle rides.  And no, Will.  I am not going to slow down on the hills for you.

Last week’s creation…BEHOLD: PECAN SANDI!!!!!

Crafted by Sir Galen and Chef Kennett.  Ingredients:

Cake:
flour
crushed pecans
sugar
butter
eggs
all spice, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves
clam chowda
Boston baked beans
jeggar bombs
fish chowda
lemon zest
more jeggar bombs
lemon juice
baking powder and baking soda

Frosting:
cream cheese
lemon zest and juice
humpback hhhhwhale chowda
sand
Boston Lagger
a pawkd caw
powdered sugar