Here we go!

This Sunday marks the beginning of the season for most of us in Southwest Ohio. It's the first race of the OVR (Ohio Valley Racing) series. OVR is putting on eight races on the next nine Sundays as part of their annual spring series. New for this year is Germantown and Rabbit Hash as well as the standbys of Reily, Deer Creek, Vandervort's Corner, St. Leon, Hueston Woods and Lynchburg. It will be interesting to see who has done their homework over the winter. Good luck to everyone out there!

Tifosi Optics

My Tifosi Forza's arrived yesterday! It's necessary for me to wear prescription glasses when I ride so when the option to get a new pair of shades came around I jumped on it.

For the previous few years I have used Oakley prescription glasses exclusively (M-Frames and Valves). M-Frames have the Rx part integrated into a standard lens. You can look at pictures of Bobby Julich or Tyler Hamilton when he was with CSC to see what they looked like. Well, those glasses cracked on me twice and were repaired under warranty once. Then I bought a pair of Valves. Those have been nice since they have flown off my face in wrecks a few times and are still gold. The only bad thing about them is that the frame is pretty thick and it's hard to see what's behind you when you turn your head in a race.

Enter the Forza. The first thing I noticed was how light they are. Not light as in "it's built cheap", but light as in "wow, cool!". They seem like a solid pair of glasses. I'm not sure how they'll handle flying off my face at 25 miles per hour, but I can always hope to never find out. I tried them on our frigid training ride yesterday. Perfect! Great visability. There is one thing that bothers me about wearing some sunglasses while riding and that is the air flowing through and hitting the corner of my eyes. That's not the case with these. We did some rollers yesterday and hit over 40 mph with no problems.

Yaaargh

Race #4, Alexandria, was postponed until later due to the weather. That will make OVR's Germantown as the next race on my list. Frosty Toes is this Saturday, but it's been decided that previewing Germantown's course is better use of my time. It's probably best that I not race in my condition anyway...

This has been a bad training week. Yesterday's cruise interval workout was stopped short due to my inability to maintain wattage. Today I was able to manage 35 whole minutes on the trainer before cashing it in. I do plan to hook up the Orca and pedal around a bit while watching Hockey tonight though. My legs feel like sandbags and there's just no zip in my pedalling. Last week I pushed it hard through my intervals and I think it caught up with me.

On a good note, I actually rode on the road yesterday! Albeit a short ride, but since it was 44 degrees and sunny, I had to get out there.

Race #3 Mentor

Where did the sunshine go? Today's race was probably in the low 20's for temps. With a low turnout the 1/2/3 field was combined with the 3/4's. Three shirts, armwarmers, tights, leg warmers and shorts kept me sort of comfortable. Two gloves on each hand helped as well. My feet were bad off though. I opted for the lycra shoe covers and left the neoprene ones at home. Yeah, that was prett stupid.

My race started bad and got worse. One small hill on the course and I got dropped. It didn't help that I had to avoid a one man crash at the base of the hill, but that's no excuse, that's what I get for being behind him. Spent the rest of my race in an attempt to time trial my way back to the field. Thirsty, I reached for a drink to find both water bottles had frozen on me. That was it. Mentor is an out and back course so I made my own personal turnaround early and called it a day. 25 miles into the drive home I could actually feel my feet again.

Next up - Alexandria (if the weather cooperates!!)

Race #2 Indoor Time Trial

Race #2 of the season is in the bag. After my longest volume week (in miles) since last March, it was no surprise that I was pretty tired coming into Sunday's race. Since it wasn't an important race or anything, the best bet was to keep training through. This coming week is a "rest" week anyway.

A month ago my time was 16:05 with a Computrainer wattage of 305 average.
This week my time was 16:35 with an average of 297 watts. I am also 4 pounds lighter than a month ago, but I'm not sure that got factored into the system.

Next up (hopefully) Mentor! It's supposed to get warm late this week and by warm I mean 30 degrees. Anything above high 20's and I'll race.