Your trail: Home  Bikeman Blogs 2007 year in review
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The Bikeman Blogs section is our collection of blogs from our Team Bikeman members and friends of Bikeman. Contributions from regular riders and commuters, bike aficionados, and world class racers.
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Howdo. My name is Zach Magoon and I have been commuting year-round by bike for the last 7 years in both Boston, MA and Portland, ME. Because each day brings new challenges, whether it be changing weather conditions, crappy drivers, sore muscles or mechanicals, I think my ramblings will be, at the very least, moderately amusing. | |
Commuter Files Archives. |
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Greetings and salutations. My name is Rick Nelson (no, not that one damnit) and I am a rider for Team Bikeman.com. You can check out my profile in the team rider section. “Racin Rick” covers my trials and tribulations as a mountain bike racer, commuter, new father etc. In truth, its just a way for me to kill time at work and to see pictures of myself on the web. So here are some excerpts from all my blogging, hope you enjoy. | |
Racin Rick Archives. |
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Welcome to Tales From The Soiled Chamois. This is going to be an online journal taking you through my season of training for and racing marathon, 6, 12, and 24 hour solo endurance races all while working a full time job, being married with a two year old son. I'm no pro, even though I do occasionally race against them. I'm just out there having fun pushing myself. | |
The Soiled Chamois Archives. |
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Not to be confused with the time-trial and women's-specific 650C wheel, the 650B wheel is all about comfort, versatility, and speed over varied terrain. The key to this is all in the tires. A 650x38B setup is about the same diameter as a 700C wheel with a 19mm tire... | |
650Blog Archives. |
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2007 year in review |
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Written by Rick Nelson
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Thursday, 11 October 2007 |
2007 was a ho-hum year for me. I managed to pull out a couple of age category wins in a few of my races but an overall victory eluded me. I dipped my toe into the endurance scene and had some reasonable results and more importantly learned some valuable lessons, over and over. Hopefully next year I won't have to re-learn those lessons (must remember to eat early and often-duh!).
2007 also allowed me to really realize where my strengths & weaknesses are right now. I've always been a fairly good climber and even though I wasn't up to my personal best this year, I could still hold my own. My tech skills seem to be better than ever despite not actually riding my mountain bike all that often because of time constraints. I'll give the credit for my tech skills to the Dos Niner. Where my real weaknesses are is in sustained power. I have great max/repeatable power (for me at least) but my sustained power is VERY lacking. This first came to light during the Wilderness 101 where there are many sections of flatish fireroad sections where you can really hammer. I found that I was unable to maintain a good pace while riding alone in the wind and needed to rely on others to draft off of. It came up again in the Hampshire 100 where again I had to suck wheel for a large portion of the race on fast sections. This seems to be my biggest weakness and somehow I need to figure out a way to fix that for next year.
I've thought about getting a coach next year (an inexpensive/kinda hands off type package) to just help me focus my training a bit more. I probably wouldn't need too much hand holding but a little direction would definitely be nice. I don't plan to (check that, will not) buy a new bike next year so that is $3k less money I'll be spending next year so maybe $500-600 for coaching isn't so bad. I know for a fact that a coach would make me much faster than a new bike. My teammate, Andrew Frye, is a certified coach and talked about coaching me for fairly cheap so I have that as an option. Who knows what will happen at this point, all I really know is that the Joe Friel book helped me some last year but I don't seem able to focus enough on my own and could really use someone checking in with me on a weekly basis to be sure I'm getting my shit done and staying on target.
Rick
"Racin' Rick" |
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