It’s a great time of year, great weather, great riding [sort of] great running and Halloween. In my neighborhood,  about 5pm and they have a party for all the neighbors,we bring some snack foods and do some visiting. Then about 6:30, it breaks up and all the kids [75+] go around the neighborhood collecting candy and visiting. It’s all over by 7:30 so we can get on with our lives, after all, the kids have taken all the candy by then. It was fun as always. 

Some of you astute readers may have recieved the newest issue of Triathlete magazine and seen my buddy Pip Taylor on the cover. I know, if I’d just had worn my thong I would have replaced her but some people in the world  see it diferently. My congrats to Pip for  making the cover.

It was a pretty morning but a little chilly at 43degrees on Saturday but I’m trying to squeeze in some rides before getting my shoulder cut on. The fall colors are just beginning to pop out and if you slow down just a little on the rides you can see some pretty scenes. We rode 20 before I cratered because I stupidly decided to try some hill attacks by standing and pushing too hard, the shoulder didn’t like that at all. I did have a great run on Sunday  and finished it off by going to a new Breakfast place that had some killer Cinamon whole grain pancakes.  This week I’m off to California, I’ll be teaching a Slowtwitch FIST clinic and visiting some California people. Maybe I’ll get to go surfing.

    I had planned to do the Longhorn 70.3 this weekend, I had worked hard to get ready. It turns out that working hard was my downfall in the end. On Monday, my shoulder finally gave out and swimming was definently out of the question.  Running  fun seemed to have disappered also, when I went for a run it felt like 110 volts going down my arm, not good and not fun.  So, I wished the other racers well and now am prepairing for the surgery on my shoulder and Corple tunnel surgery on my hand/elbow.  My occassional training partner Kirk Armstrong did a great 5:44 for his first ever half and local Jim McAndrews, whom I fitted to his new bike last week scorched to a 5:16 for his first Half. I’m envious but I would have been well off of these times anyway.

Since my training went into the bucket last week, I went to paint the new frame that Mike had welded up. The frame turned out pretty nice but the customer wanted just a standard type paint job, no flames, no airbrush art, just classic paint. That was great with me because it turned out that I couldn’t even hold the carbon fork to paint it, no grip strength in the left hand.  First, I painted the whole frame silver so when I pulled the decal mask off it would shine through and look like chrome. Then I sprayed on some red, then I masked off the red and shot on some black.  I did these long scallops over the red and when I pulled off the decal mask it was really cool looking.

On Friday I just got my new digitizer program working for when I’m doing my fittings. It’s way cool, it was a huge hassle to get working and it’s way cool. Now when doing these fittings, I can shoot a video of the rider, show all the joints and angles while their pedaling, show the changes from start to finish, print some awsome pictures and generally put on a good show. I’ll tie this to my heart rate and power testing and it should help everybody go a little faster.  I’ll try to put up some pictures next week.  Now, I have to start prepairing for Halloween!!

This lovely lake is where we swim regularly, it’s been raining here for two solid weeks and today the Lake looked a little different.  You can just see the shadow of the swim platform in back of me, great and the water’s gotten cold to! It was raining again as we started our swim but it seems to help my shoulder to go for about an hour. Earlier that day, we rode 60 miles, it was raining and foggy so that made the ride even more fun.  I’m sure that training is a sickness but I only have one race left this year.  The Longhorn 70.3 is coming fast and I plan to try it for as long as my shoulder holds up.

I started on a new seat project this week, i’ve been riding a good bit on my new Imperiale and can’t seem to get things just right. I usually start with a block of wood and a file, I start riding and carving until things feel better. This time I’ve decided to use some modeling clay. I plan to mount this on Quenny and go for a ride. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a shape that is good both as a road seat and when on the aero bars.

The sun finally came out on Saturday so Ginger and I headed to Edom, Tx. They were having an art festival with about a hundred vendors, all kinds of art and jewlery and a whole lot of people. I reluctantly passed on the Corn dogs and Funnel cakes but it was so great to just be out in the sunshine that all the walking was worthwhile.  My sister [in green] met us there with her gang, she supervised the shopping for Ginger.

 On Thursday I went to see a local girl, Jerri Taylor, who teaches Egoscue stretching. It’s focused on helping you relax your hip flexors and other assorted muscles, to help you regain a decent posture.  I’ve been doing a lot of core work and I believe I’ve let my balance get out of hand which has caused shoulder, elbow/ wrist problems for me. I went through a whole session and I’d say that I only have a few months to go to get everything in place. I don’t recall having these problems when I ate junk food and didn’t train but I suppose the better health is worth the trade.

   I’ve been kind of “off” for a couple of weeks, after Las Vegas I just couldn’t get my shoulder working so I’ve been going to doctors and not training at all. I know that doctors are nice people but going to them is not fun and if you really want to better understand the “health care” issue, go sit in a waiting room for a little bit.  I went to this nice Dr. who measured my nerve activity, he stuck some 2″ long needles in my arms, legs, shoulder, neck and probed around ’till he struck a nerve, that was less than pleasant to me.  So after many test, I’ve figured that I have some issues to get fixed but for now, I’m going back to training and still try to do the Longhorn 70.3.  I have had to make a small concession in that I can’t seem to ride Cento very well, riding on the aero bars just kills my shoulder so I plan to race on “Queeny” my hot rod Impierale road bike. One of the really nice things about training is that afterwards, you get to go have a great breakfast with no guilt at all. We ran 9 miles on Sunday, it was raining and cold, so it made for a perfect morning to restart the training.

The Ironman in Kona has just finished and my congratulations to everybody that did that event. The bike industry does an equipment count for that event and that was interesting to me, I just got the results and wanted to brag a little. I had 36  racers using one of my saddles, I think that’s pretty good for a 9 month old company, I had Dede Griesbaur on a seat who was the top US female and Rebekha Keat who finished 4th overall and I had a bunch of men that I hope to learn their names. If you read this blog and did Kona on one of my seats, please e-mail me and let me know.

   Mike the welder and I have been doing a new steel road frame for a long time friend in Longview. We had it all welded up, started to paint it, when I decided that something wasn’t quite right. The top tube needed a little more attention so I did some modifying and then had to fillet braze it all back together.  This is actually fun work, I get to use a lot of tools, I get to use my big grinders and my welder so after about 4 hrs. the frame is ready to paint again. I’ll try to post a picture after the painting when everything looks real pretty.

It looks like I have about 2 weeks to get ready to race, I’ve got to go swimming and biking and running, taking a couple of weeks off was actually nice but raceday is coming.

Las Vegas, the sun never sets and the people are endless. It was time for the annual  Bike show, all the new goodies are rolled out for our viewing pleasure.  But.. a newsflash has just come in.  My training partner Robert just finished the 70.3 in Augusta, 5:46 for a new PR.  I new he would do well, last week during a storm, he rode 60, doing hill repeats,  I followed in the car as my shoulder was not working.

Back to that Interbike, we arrived on Tuesday and set up our booth, it ended up pretty nice looking and we had a great location in the show.  We had many, many of our dealers come by, it was great to put a face with the voices.  On Thursday, I was at the Wilier booth where they unvieled the new Imperial aero road bike to the public, it was fun to watch the reactions to the frame. Angelo and Andrea of  Wilier were there and were very excitied.  Lot’s of new toy’s in that booth.  At Interbike, you seemingly wander the isles looking for cool new widgets, you have to look carefully because there is a lot there and it’s easy to overlook some interesting things.   It can take a toll on you though, my shoulder finally gave out and I was down… Ruud who had come to the show with Mark Miller is a PT and he worked on me to get me going, a huge help. My new HC170 saddle seemed to be a big hit, people liked the light weight and the narrowness of the seat. I’m going to do a 30 mile ride on it Monday morning, should be a real test of my sitting ability. We talked and visited for seemingly hours, it was good.  In the lobby of the hotel, they were getting ready for the Fall season.  They had put these huge pumpkins all around the hall ways, it was very pretty to some tired eyes.

This week, it’s back to training as best I can, I’m working on rebuilding my shoulder strength at Pilates, I’m taking a short break from swimming right now.

In the best NASCAR tradition, I have to thank all of my sponsors, my team mates, and wife for all of they’re support. This racing business can be grueling at times, the travel, the indorsements, the store grand openings, the TV spots, it seems endless but it’s all for the fans…..  Actually, We had our second anual Rose City Triathlon this past weekend, it rained buckets, then it rained harder. We had about 350 racers show up and we had a great event.  I won a third in my age group and improved my time from last year by 16 minutes , it looks like training helps.  Putting on a triathlon takes a ton of work, one of our key people is Steve farris, Ironman racer and promoter. He built this tower and all of the transition racks for this race, a huge job. His good buddy Allen and a whole bunch of volunteers pitched in and really put on a great race in some very adverse weather. It didn’t start really raining hard until right at the race start, then it dumped on us.  I had a ok swim, my torn rotator cuff was not that happy with the swim, had a good bike, chain came off going up a huge hill, had to stop and fix it, had a great run for me, got a heel blister because of the wet shoes, just another fun day at the office.

When I got home, I found out the one of Cento’s sisters had just won the Masters world Championships in Europe, this is a big deal over there and my Cento had certainly done a good job for me this day.

I got all rested up from the race and decided to change my oil in my Tuner car, another adventure was started. I’ve done this about a zillion times, lift it up, take off some shields, drain the oil.  But today, the hot oil misses my funnel and goes everywhere, I’m jumping around trying to catch it, it’s burning my arm, the milk jug gets tooo hot to hold, I hit my head on something hard. In the end, only about a quart hit the floor, walls, ceiling, etc. I get the filter off and finish up. Too much excitment for one weekend for me, I went to bed.  This week, it’s back to training with some new rubber band shoulder workouts planned. I’m getting ready to go to Vegas for the annual Interbike trade show.

This last week started pretty good, I got a new parts washing vat for my shop.  My old vat had served me well but last week I went to clean something and suddenly the tank started leaking everywhere.  It was a mad scramble for some rags and buckets to catch everything, hopefully this new one will last as long.

The sickness really set in on me for the remainder of the week, my training partner Robert and I got a coach /trainer to come spend a few days with us. Will Jones, out of Baton Rouge, La. 4D training,  came up and put us through a few days of torture and humiliation.  It all seemed to center around constant lactate testing by drawing blood while excersizing. We drew blood during running, we drew blood while biking, we would have done blood while swimming I think. We took Will out to Tyler State Park for our swim testing, the water is very clear and open water is a lot more fun to train in. We swim from this beach area across the lake, it’s 400 meters, so it’s pretty easy to work up to a couple of miles.  We ran on a treadmill and gave more blood, then we worked on better stretching techniques, that was very  painful. One day, we took Will with us to Pilaties where we schooled him on core work, I think some of that suffering is starting to pay off.  Then we went bike riding, so he could evaluate our strength or lack of, it’s always humbling to have people ride away from you up hills you feel good about. Today, after some lengthy discussions about nutrition and smarter training, we did a power test / lactate test on the bikes.  Riding a bike with   your heart pounding out of your ears is not really all that fun. Riding a bike at a pretty hard effort while getting your finger stuck with a pick axe is even less fun. When it was all done, Will did some calculations and said that I was …old, not very powerful, and still heavy.  So the work will continue, I think it was good to have somebody really observe what we’ve been doing and try to show some better structure to it. I’m also sure that Will was just about at his witts ends, for putting up with us for several days.  In the end it was fun and very helpful.

I was a TV star Tuesday night, a couple of the local stations did a piece on triathlons and cycling.  KLTV.com did a feature about my positioning of riders, you can go to their website and click on “sports” to see it, I liked it.  CBS19 also did a short spot about our upcoming triathlon this Saturday and it was very good as well.   Our Rose City Tri is Saturday, after that it’s back to training for the 70.3 Longhorn race in Austin.

I got pretty busy here the last few days, It’s like getting pulled in a lot of different directions all at once.  Our local Tri Club had another practice tri on Saturday morning, I volunteered to talk about better transition times and how to have fun during an open water swim.  We had 75 racers show up  and probably 15 real first time racers.  It went off well and the real deal race will be Sept. 12th.

As the training sickness continues, we started swimming at a new place.  several of the local tri club members have been swimming at Tyler State Park, I’ve done mountainbike races there, done trail runs there but never considered swimming there.  Turns out, it’s great.  The water is pretty clear, well completely clear compaired to other lakes in the area, it has a sand bottom and it’s 400meters across to the other side. We’ve gone out a couple of times and it’s very nice to swim there.

  On Tuesday, my buddy Mark Miller from Laffeyette showed up with his new race bike. Mark runs Precision Bikes  and is just getting over a big bike crash, so he needed a new toy to help with the rehab.  Miller and his buddy Roo [spelled Rudd, I think] came and we worked on Marks position, great fun.  I went to bed that night and was thinking about the bike, something was not just right so I thought about it during the night.  The next morning about 5am I went out to my shop, the problem was the front brake on the bike.  It uses a behind the fork brake setup, I don’t really like those all that much but I decided to work on this one and see if I could make it better.  I modifed a standard front caliper a good bit and got it hidden behind he fork pretty well.  I was sure that I would sleep better then and if Miller get’s healed up, maybe he will do this hot bike some justice.

   I’m a little late in posting this week, I’m so close to figuring out how to link some video footage to my Blog that I spent a couple of extra days messing with it.  Time always has a way to race by when your on the learning curve. Last weekend we had a great group of racers from Dallas come over and do a two day training camp here on our local roads. I have to appologize now, I didn’t get any pictures, coach Gail envited us locals to join them and a couple of us did. Saturdays ride turned epic, it was a 65 miler that was going to be hilly and then we were going to swim when finished.  We were riding along at about hour 2 when the ride director said ” turn right on this road”  being a local I said “no, that is the Dog Valley road”  we didn’t want to go that way for sure.  The road’s name actually is Dog Valley and on this day, it lived up to it’s name.  The road is a constant climb for about 6 miles before coming to the last 300 yds that is a 16+degree hill. The road surface is junk, very bumpy, lot’s of broken asphalt, I lost two water bottles on the road. Oh, I could probably have gone back for them except that the Dog’s were probably having them for a snack, I swear there was a Chiwawa that could run 25mph on this road.  We finally got over the last hill, regrouped, thought about killing the ride leader but  rested and decided to press on.  The rest of the ride was uneventful, we all ended up having a great couple of days of riding, swimming and running.  This is a great area for Tri training.

  I recieved a note from the supreme commander in Italy, the correct spelling for Imperial is with an “A”  but the logo on the bike just doesn’t look it. I’ve been riding the Imperial a lot, it is a fantastic riding bike. I’ve decided to name HER, Queeny, I’m not sure why but  it seems to fit to me. This is the best accelerating bike I’ve ever had,  she handles good and is smooth on the road. Queeny and I are going to go many miles together. I got Cento out for a family picture,  Cento had done very well on our ride this past weekend and had managed to fend off all of the dog attacks.

 We have another practice triathlon this weekend for our new local racers, these are fun and help build the sport of triathlon.  I hope to be able to link my video up in the next few days, it will be fun.

I have about 20 hummingbirds this season, it always starts out with just one or two but by this time of year it’s a pretty rowdy group. You can sit inthe middle of them early in the morning and they fly all over you, it’s kinda fun and you don’t have to board them if you go out of town.

    Last Tuesday I had my friend Pip Taylor come to Dallas for me to work with her on her bike position a little more. I met Pip at the Kansas 70.3 race and had made some changes to her position, she was brave and raced it with the changes that weekend.  We met at Colonel’s Bike Shop in Ft .Worth where Doug and the crew were nice enough to let me trash the shop for a few hours.  

   Some of you might recall that last january I went to Mexico to work with their track team.  While I was there I worked with a young racer named Daniaela who had bad pedals and was not riding well.  I bought this young lady some new pedals and she won her national races the next day, so I was a big hero with the team. Now, she just won two Gold medals at the Pan Am track championships, I don’t have all the correct details on it yet but I’m very proud of her.

   Last week started out simple enough, think about some new bike seat designs, sell some seats and continue training.  Part of that went pretty well, the training part got a little more complicated. Along with my Pilaties torture, I’ve started going to a strength coach, my just what fun that can be. He has me do all kind of things that don’t seem natural, they certainly do show many of my weaknesses however. On Tuesday after my session, I decided I had to go see my Chiropractor just to be able to get home. In the picture to the right, I am NOT smiling, that is a grimace of pain, as we are trying to get  my shoulder to work again.  I went and swam the next day and it did seem better, I’m not sure I will survive the strength training.

    Otherwise, a great week, I did a great run on Friday, I backed down my heart rate and kept it in the 130’s for a 6 mile run, it was much more pleasant. On Saturday, Robert and I went to Ft Worth to a swim clinic, I’m a little above controlled drowning  now.

This picture shows me just cresting one of our local hills this morning….NO not really, this is my buddy Kate Major.  She’s off training in Utah and sent me this picture, I felt like I was riding up this mountain this morning however. We were supposed to ride 80 miles today, my knee cratered at about 20 from some deep squats my strength coach had me try, I decided to rest my knee after that.

  I went home, went out to the workshop and decided to finish up my Imperiele bike.  One of the things I had to do was have a seat mast on this frame instead of using a seat post. Seat “mast” are all the rage right now from the frame makers, I suppose they are ok but if you cut it too short, you are screwed big time.  I measured several times to be sure, crossed my finger and got out the saw. The seat mast does use this really cool bracket designed by Tom Ritchey, I guess I got lucky but everything came out exactly the right length.   I finished building up Imperiele during the NASCAR race, it is a very pretty frame. I got into the bike business because I am a bike junky, I love new bikes.  Over the years I’ve ridden hundreds of bikes, customers bikes, my bikes, bikes I just wanted to ride, they all have a personality that shows right up. Soooo, it’s like Christmas morning, how was Imperiele going to ride, was it a girl bike or bad boy bike, was I going to have to battle it’s spirit like I’ve done with Cento or was it going to be a everyday work bike with no emotion.   I only went for a short ride, but SHE is sweet!  Oh yeah, I’m biased but I’m also pretty critical, this is a great ride, I’m seeing carbon wheels in her near future.  Maybe her new name will come to me when we go riding in the morning, Imperiele just isn’t quite right.