Cinder Tracks and Pedal Dancing

Men's Qualifications for 2012 Little 500 look to be competitive all day long

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:05:00 -0400

Men's Qualifications for 2012 Little 500 look to be competitive all day long:

Nice write-up in the IDS. QUALS TOMORROW

Out of focus for the first lap but it gets better. The official...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:11:00 -0400

Out of focus for the first lap but it gets better.

The official splits were:

Hulse: 34.6

Jank: 38.3

Casey: 37.4

Hotwagner: 39.2

For a practice quals time of 2:29.7

QUALS! (the practice version)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:06:00 -0400

Practice Quals. The first time to see what teams are really competitors and what teams have fallen off the bike…literally. Practice Quals is a mix between amazingly fast laps by some of the top teams and agonizingly slow laps by some of the girls teams. Time slots for practice quals were picked during the Quals Meeting (see previous post and stop reading ahead!). Unfortunately Pi Kapps wasn’t very speed to sign up so we were stuck with the time of 10:00pm. While this may seem late to some of you, for the life of a college kid this might as well have been late afternoon. We took the day easy leading up to our practice time, and got our gear together at the house to head over to the track by 9:30. On the way out of the frat, brothers came out to wish us luck and a few of them were committed enough (or just needed an excuse to not study for a bit) to walk over to the track to watch our Qual. I’ve walked onto that track dozens of times now, but walking out for the practice quals was much different. No one was joking or smiling and we barely even said anything to each other besides mentioning a few bits of strategy or tips. Our first rider, Eric Hulse, took the track and began his practice lap before sprinting to the starting line and starting the clock…

Quals is Coming!

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:33:00 -0400

Last night we had the always exciting and nerve-wracking Quals Meeting. During this meeting, every team that’s attempting to compete in Little 5 shows up and draws for their Qual time. Being a rookie, I really didn’t understand much about the process or when would be a good time to go, but here’s what I found out. Quals takes place between 8am and 6pm and teams go on 5 minute intervals. In that time, the track gets re-rolled twice at 11:10am and 2:10pm. Obviously a clean track is ideal, so you want to go as close to those times as possible. Unfortunately the selection process for time slots is completely random and therefore somewhat frightening. The top 3 teams (men and women) from the Fall Cycling Series get to pick their times first, and from there the real process begins. Teams are drawn at random and then a team member picks a piece of paper out of a box. On the piece of paper is your qual time. This year’s meeting had a great start for most teams because the fraternity Fiji went first and picked the always hilarious 8am slot. We picked 3:45 pm. It’s an interesting position. On one hand we have to wait around all day, but on the plus side we’ll have a great idea of what our time will have to be in order to qualify. 6 months of work boiled down to less than 3 minutes of excruciating pain just so that you can put yourself through 50 miles of even worse pain…ah Quals…

SPRING BREAK 2012!

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:05:00 -0400

“JANK!!! QUAL QUAL QUAL QUAL!! WERE TAKING SHOTS AND I PUKED IN THE ATLANTIC!!” This is just one example of the probably twenty drunken texts I got from my pledge brothers who were partying in Fort Lauderdale over Spring Break. While they were drinking the day away, the bike team was hard at work in Bloomington. The decision to stay was a tough one, but looking back on the week that was, it was the right decision. A typical day for us went something like this:

9:00am - Wake up. Snooze alarm clock.

10:00am - Wake up. Snooze alarm clock.

10:30am - Wake up. Resist urge to snooze alarm clock and get some breakfast with the rest of the team.

11:00am - Track opens and we start to collect our gear to head over.

11:15am - Still trying to find those damn sunglasses…

11:20am - Found um! And we’re off to the track!

11:30am - Roll up to the track in a mix of street clothes and bike gear that always seems to mystify some of the other bikers. The majority of these guys seem to take their gear (and safety) too seriously, because they’re always showing up to the track with their helmets, sunglasses, gloves, shorts and jerseys already on…and they’re still in their cars!!

11:35am - Do our warm ups and start the days exercises

12:00pm - Biker tan lines are firmly setting in.

12:30pm - Finish up whatever it is we were supposed to be doing on the track and start to work on our exchanges

1:00pm - We become convinced that we can beat Cutters and head home.

1:20pm - Lunch and hydrate

3:00pm - Wake up. Snooze alarm.

3:30pm - Wake up and start to re-gear up for a road ride.

4:00pm-6:00pm - RideRideRideRideRideRideRide

6:30pm - Shower and get ready for a crazy night!

7:30pm - Wake up. Snooze alarm.

8:00pm - Wake up and eat dinner. From there we changed it up every night! Some nights it was a movie, other times we met up with sorority bike teams and had dinner or just hung out.

Yes, the life of a cyclist is glamorous, but all the hard work has paid off. Going into Spring Break, our best lap times were around 35 seconds. As of now, the best lap time on our team is 33.5 and then 33.7 seconds. Quals is comin up, and we’re hoping to put in a time of around 2:25. Let’s Ride!

A little documentary on Casey and myself and of course Little...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:22:08 -0500

A little documentary on Casey and myself and of course Little 500.

Moving to the side after taking a pull at the front of this...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:45:55 -0500

Moving to the side after taking a pull at the front of this group of rides.

Riders will group up all the time in order to make it easier for everyone. Before riding on the track I had never realized how helpful it was to ride in someone’s draft. According to the Rider’s Council you’re exerting 40% less energy by riding in someone’s draft than you are if you’re riding at the front of the group.

Side Note: The 2nd rider back in the white jersey is a Cutters Rider…I’m always pulling their sorry butts along…

Photo of a “bad” exchange…

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:33:08 -0500

Photo of a “bad” exchange…

Photo of a “good” exchange!

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:32:29 -0500

Photo of a “good” exchange!

Appreciating some down time at the track. A good amount of time...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:31:08 -0500

Appreciating some down time at the track. A good amount of time that we spend at the track is used to talk strategy and plan out our exchanges…unfortunately I think we’re talking about cartoons in this photo…

Casey and I were recently the subject of a class project! Thanks...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:30:06 -0500

Casey and I were recently the subject of a class project! Thanks to Morgan Demaris (semi-professional photographer) for all of the photos!

Rookie Week!

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:10:47 -0500

After months of dreaming about what it would be like to take my first few laps on the cinders, I’ve finally arrived. Rookie week has come and gone and I’ve found myself too wrapped up in the excitement to even write a blog post! Fortunately this 4 hour bus ride back to campus from visiting home this weekend has given me the perfect downtime to crank this thing out. Rookie week started with a long lecture from a group of “kings” known as the Riders Council. The council is pretty much made up of the best of the best riders who teach us rookies what to do. After the talk we headed to the track. It was awful. It had rained earlier in the day and the cinders had turned more into sand than anything. We got to ride around a few laps which was cool and all but the way the track was made it more like a game of Who Will be the First One to Fall. That game was won by a pudgy individual who looked like he had decided to start biking as a new years resolution and hadn’t been very committed since January 2nd. Needless to say it was hilarious. After the initial awkwardness of riding on the track we broke into groups and practiced the basics.

Getting on the Bike

While this doesn’t seem like it would be any great challenge, it actually was at first. To get on the bike you have to run at full speed, jump off your left foot and position your most sensitive manly area just inches away from the seat to insure a painless landing. This took awhile to learn and lead to some fantastic examples of how much it hurts to get hit in the balls. Most rookies who made the mistake would slowly start to fall to the side after they hopped on and then spend a few seconds collecting themselves before attempting to stand up while holding on to whatever manliness they had left. My teammate gave me the best advice when he said to think of it just like it’s nothing. “Pretend your just a kid and you’re hopping on your bike to ride home from somewhere” he said. This helped immensely. As soon as I got the hang of getting on the bike, it was time to learn how to get off.

Getting off the Bike

As you can imagine this step was much easier. In order to get off the bike you had to slam on the brakes, swing your left leg over the seat and hop off while still maintaining some sort of control over your bike. Unfortunately this didn’t lead to many crashes…just kidding that makes me sound terrible! I’m glad everyone was okay….

Exchanges/More Crashes!

Ahh exchanges. There’s really nothing better than having someone ride a bike at you as fast as they can and then start to break a few feet before they hit you (you hope) and attempt to pass the bike. It’s dangerous, but a necessity for making sure your team does well for both quals and the race. In order to perform a successful exchange you need to make sure you and your teammate are on the same page. It’s all about repetition and getting to know what your partners going to do. Lucky for me I had a teammate in rookie week with me so often times I would get to pair with him and then we’d talk after about how the exchange went after. In more unfortunate circumstances sometimes I would be paired with riders besides my teammate. In these situations I tended to let the unskilled rookie fail on his own and then just pry the bike out of his cold fingers and ride away while he laid on the ground in pain…okay that never happened…okay that happened once, but it wasn’t my fault!

Rookie week has been fun but with quals less than a month away it’s time to get serious and start putting in some long hours at the track!

Baby it's Cold Outside

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:07:24 -0500

We knew the 50 degree temperatures couldn’t last forever, but it would’ve been nice to have some 40 or even 30 degree days before dropping us into the bitter teens. But here we are facing the terrible cold once again, which means that it’s time to brush the dust off our trainers and get back to virtually training in sunny Madrid. Training indoors is awful, but it’s made worse by knowing that only a few days ago we were able to ride outside in the sun and feel great about ourselves. For now, I just ruin shirt after shirt with my sweat and pray for the day when I can get back outside and as far away as possible from this beautiful scenic ride through Madrid. God I hate Madrid.

Repping our new Pi Kapps apparel

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:20:00 -0500

Repping our new Pi Kapps apparel

Riding next to Lemon Lake

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:10:02 -0500

Riding next to Lemon Lake

Riding Outside...In January?!?!?!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:02:54 -0500

For the past few days in Bloomington, global warming has been in full effect and I have loved every apocalyptic minute of it! The average temperature for the week is hovering at around 54 degrees, and it’s been sunny nearly everyday. Besides laying out and getting my winter tan on, I’ve also taken to the beautiful Bloomington roads to get some bike riding done. On Monday, a teammate and I road the Griffey Loop, a trail that has one large hill and a few terrifying decents. It was a perfect ride, aside from a few drivers who had forgotten the rules of the road and yelled at us to “ride on the sidewalks you idiot bikers!” gotta love the townees. On Tuesday, 2 teammates and I had a great ride out towards Lemon Lake. It had some great scenery to look at and we were all excited to finally be moving somewhere instead of stuck on a trainer. All in all the trip ended up being 30 miles but with some absolutely killer climbs along the way. The team looked good though and we’re definitely getting excited to show everyone that Pi Kapps does in fact have a team this year and that we actually all know how to ride a bike…granted some of us may need training wheels…

Our very official training area in the Pi Kappa Phi house!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:58:02 -0500

Our very official training area in the Pi Kappa Phi house!

Stuck Inside But Gotta Ride

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:37:32 -0500

Being confined to a trainer as your only bicycle outlet for weeks on end can become tiresome. It’s not so much that your legs get tired, you just get really bored. Even with the help of trainers that let you virtually ride in Milan or Rome, it’s tough to really get a full workout in when you’re not actually moving anywhere. To ease the insanity, the team splits up workouts by watching film on previous Little 500s and also on different qualifying runs that teams have posted on YouTube…we also watch all the crashes too! It’s important to see what other teams do correctly, but it’s even more important to notice how they screw up. After we watch some videos, we practice our own qualifying runs on a unique feature available to us through our bike trainers. One of the virtually saved courses is a velodrome. For those of you who have no idea what a velodrome is, it’s basically an oval shaped track made for bike riding, similar to a track that you would run on. This simulation lets us monitor at which lap we start to feel tired and therefore when our switches need to be done. It’s tiring work, but with less than 2 months till quals, it’s time to step our riding.

The trainer in all its glory

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:27:00 -0500

The trainer in all its glory

Training Like a Pro

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:24:00 -0500

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, there are a couple different ways to train on your bike. You can use rollers (Satan’s Death Contraption), trainers or ride outside. The new trainer that my dad got shouldn’t be put in any of these categories because it is better than all of them. It’s called the Elite Real Axiom CT Trainer and it’s pretty much God’s gift to cyclists everywhere. In additon to just being a very versatile trainer, it also allows the rider to virtually ride around on real trails such as the Col du Galibier and Lac de Vassiviere in France. It also hooks up to a computer to measure certain stats like speed, power, blood pressure and cadence. One of the first times I got to try it I attempted the Col du Galibier and failed miserably. It’s a straight uphill course which makes any cyclist feel like Henry Ford had the right idea when he built the car. The other ride, Vassiviere, is a more pleasent ride with both uphills and downhills. This has become the battleground for my dad and I. In the first epic enstallment of our battles, he started out with the best time, but I defeated it by a minute or two with my time a few days after. After potentially blood doping (the tests haven’t come back yet) my dad beat my time by 8 seconds, proving that father was still better than son! Then came Christmas Day. Perhaps inspired by the visit of Santa Claus, I tackled the course with a relentless drive that had many comparing me to Rocky during his training montage in Rocky IV (the one where he fights the Soviet guy). I beat my dad’s time by 54 seconds, and proved that America had finally defeated those Communists once and for all…err proved that I had beaten my dad. The fight goes on as my dad continues to train to knock me off my pedastal, but until then I will continue to wear my gold medal around the house.