Recently in Links Category

I came across this article on TreeHugger this morning about “Bike Boxes”.  A small area for a cyclist to stop in at a stop light.  The location of the box would make the cyclist more visible as well as prevent cyclist from being hit by motorist making turns.  Portland has even taken it so far as to paint the approach to the intersection and the box green to remind drivers to look out for cyclists.  The bike boxes and green warning areas came after several deaths from accidents at intersections.  (Read the entire article here.)  Imagine that, a community works to solve a problem and encourages motorists to share the road and look out for cyclists!  Not just throw the blame on the cyclist and move on without correcting the problem.  It’s ironic that I came across these articles only a few short weeks after a local cyclist lost a case in Virginia Beach.  He had been riding up Atlantic Ave in the trolley lane, which for those unfamiliar with the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, is the entire right lane going both North and South on the main strip at the Oceanfront.  A vehicle making a turn ran in to him because supposedly the motorist did not see the cyclist in the trolley lane.  It was determined that the cyclist was fully responsible for the incident due to the fact that he was in the trolley lane and not the normal traffic lane. 

The City of Virginia Beach could be such a wonderful place, especially the ocean front resort area, if they could follow the lead of several other communities like Portland with it’s bike boxes and even Rehobeth Beach with their bike lanes.  I am not talking about a widened sidewalk, but a wide shoulder or special use area incorporated in to a part of the main road.  Cyclists in these lanes are more visible to motorists and the lack of intersection transitions and gutters make it much safer for us the narrow tire riders.  Not to mention the widened sidewalks, like those along Dam Neck Rd, are very unsafe at major intersections.  Try crossing the intersection at Drakesmile Rd at rush hour.  Cars making right hand turns don’t pay attention and don’t see the cyclists coming up the path where as a cyclist in a bike lane would be much more visible.

I wonder how long it will take the City of Virginia Beach to realize that promoting a safe community for outdoor recreation will help draw even more people in to the area.  It will draw the type of people that I would think the city would want in it’s tourist and tax base.  It would be much better than drawing those fat rednecks in their old beater Ford pickups spewing exhaust fumes that flick cigarette butts out the window and cant use a turn signal!

The original Treehugger article: Portland's Bike Boxes: Making Cars More Polite : TreeHugger.

I didn’t do it.  I woke up yesterday morning at the butt crack of dawn…. looked out the window and saw rain, wind, and it felt like someone had a grip on the bridge of my nose with a pair of pliers.  My sinuses were having some first class pains going on!  I crawled back in to my nice warm bed and went back to sleep. 

There were a lot of people that still made it out there despite the cold weather, Tyler was on of them.  He wrote up a post about ride in the Dismal Dash.  The results for the 2008 Dismal Dash Time Trial can be found on Kalerunning.com or by clicking here.

The Fat Frogs Team had some great results this weekend!

Keeping on the video theme of the day.  We purchased a new video camera a little while ago and have started to play around a bit with it and Apple iMovie.  It's kind of cool!  Here's my first attempt at some simple editing.  Not much time was spent but it show cases some of the fun from our trip to the "wonderful" Virginia Air and Space Museum.

There's also a short clip of Devon during the Fat Frogs Racing Team Crit Practice a couple of weeks ago: The Video

Well maybe not a full movie but there are some pretty good clips done by some folks that were at the Snowball Crit on Sunday. I am not sure who took the videos or I would give some credit for awesome vids!
Here's one, but look at the bottom of the post for links to a couple more.....

Some more:
A direct link to the video embedded above: Video from JYounkin4
C Race Finish Video from AlberoDenas Is this maybe Albe?
B Race Finish Video from AlberoDenas

The start of the season is approaching and the early spring training race series are about to begin. Many riders see these inexpensive crits and road races as the start of the racing season and they approach the training races the same as they would any other event in the calendar. This is fine to a point, but ideally, training races should act as an extension of your normal training program to help prepare you for the big events in the heart of you racing year.

So how do you get the most out of a training race? First of all remember that it is about training and not so much about racing. The training goals of a training race can be quite varied depending on your racing experience and capabilities. With some riders, training races are a great place to work on pack riding skills. For others, the training races can be used to try out tactics and to work on team strategies and techniques. And for others, training races make for the perfect place to find their limits, strengths and weaknesses.

For any athlete I work with, my only rules when it comes to incorporating training races into their program is first of all to actually go into each training race with a goal to either try something new, work on a weakness or try some tactics without worrying about if they work or not. And, I do not want the training race to totally take the place of training for that day. Most spring training criteriums and even some road races are not really long enough to get in much of a workout, so augmenting the training race with extra time on the bike to make it into a full training day that includes the race and then some endurance or skill training is the ideal.

There are many things we can learn from a training race, especially if you are racing with a power meter. The most helpful data comes from events where the rider fails in some way. We can look at what was going on leading up to the problem and then figure out what can be done to avoid the failure the next time around. We might find that the rider is not attacking hard enough to get a gap on the field, or we may find that the rider is simply working too much and too hard in the race until eventually they just cannot keep up.  The training races give us a great opportunity to make mistakes that we can learn from and to find out what we need to work on. 

So how do you put some training in your training races? Have a goal for the event and remember that it is more about training and not so much about racing. After the race, think about what happened in the race, both good and bad, and see what you have learned. Talk to your coach or teammates about the race and see if they noticed something that you may have missed. Training is about getting stronger and if you have learned something that will help your racing, you will be stronger. 

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BJ Basham is a USA Cycling Level II Certified Coach with Peaks Coaching Group. He lives in Faifax, VA and competes in most of the same races you do. To learn more about his coaching practice and philosophy, just email him.

From: http://usemycomputer.com

Here's the link.... Road Rash Picture

A few days ago we celebrated Danielle Craven's birthday by going to our favorite sushi place, Yama.
It took us a while to get the pics off the camera but as always Gilbert provided us with some good ones.

Of course "Wheezy" was good for some entertainment too.....

Here's the link to the gallery: The rest of the pics!

I love my Google Calendar, with that being said I created a new calendar with all of the VACA events that have been listed on the Va Cycling events schedule so far.  I will try to keep it up to date and add links to event sites and registration as it becomes available. In order to access and use the calendar you will have to register with Google if you dont already have gmail.
It's available for "public consumption" by clicking here:

This is kind of cool.... When checking Google to see what sites are linking here and to my other site Picturespot.net I came across a blog that had used URLs to Picturespot.net. In one of Applefritter.com's blog posts about how to properly imbed a picture or a picture as a link a URL to picturespot.net was used as the example URL for the image.
It was none other than the wonderful image of our little Devon stuffing his face full of ice cream....

Here's the link to the post: The Post

IAmber and I have been hosting torture sessions a few days as week in our garage. It's nice to see that we arent the only ones throwing these parties! Josh over at FIREbike has posted a work out plan for a trainer ride that sounds like a lot of fun. We might just have to mix it in with the Spinnervals DVDs. FIREbike: Tour de Garage