A POTPOURRI OF MID-WINTER CYCLING THOUGHTS

The past week cycling activities resulted in some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that my mileage count for 2011 continues to hover at the ZERO mark. Yes, that is ZERO as in a Big Goose Egg as in the number indicating nothing, as in Nada. But, hey, there is good news and it is….

Our county wide bike plan continues to move forward. We will be meeting with our county Board of Commissioners on Monday, January 24th to hopefully gain their signature so that we can receive monies promised to us in the granting process. This is the necessary next step toward developing the Request for Proposal for planning services.

Also, this week we had our first meeting of the new year for BicycleHaywoodNC, our local advocacy group. We had a great turnout and lots of enthusiasm. We were pleased to have our newest elected member of the Haywood County Board of Commissioners join us, as well as, the Director of the Haywood County Recreation Department. Additionally, we had four other new members join us, all of whom are experienced cyclists. Details of the meeting may be found at the BicycleHaywoodNC website. Look for the “meeting minutes” button on the navigation menu.

I finally got off my bum (going for the English feel there) and worked out at home in lieu of riding outdoors. I’ve been recording the Santos Down Under stage race all week so I used that as my backdrop to workouts on my treadmill. It made the time of walking without going anywhere more tolerable.

I also picked up my Fuji CCR3 from my LBS where it had been undergoing a mid-winter’s tune-up. Upon arriving home, it promptly went on my trainer and I actually sat upon and spun the pedals for the first time since early December. I watched “Yell for Cadel”, which is part of the “Heart of the Peloton” DVD pack the Navigator gave me for Christmas.

This DVD was, in my opinion, the least interesting and most poorly produced of the 3 DVD’s. It was peppered with black text boxes with white text saying things like  “Cadel suffered a major crash yesterday…”. Rather than that being the lead-in to the actual footage, which would have been interesting, the video just moved on to the next subject. There was very little riding footage included but lots of behind the scenes shots of Evans getting into the team van/bus/rooms with all of the media hounds trying to get a quote. Oh well, it made for something to keep my mind off the spinning of my feet. I did try to do some intervals and also work on a smooth pedaling motion while watching the DVD. Next time though, I’ll probably pull out one of my training DVDs based in Hawaii!

I’m fairly certain that there will be a next time on the trainer as we’re now predicted to get 3 more days of snow starting late Monday the 24th.

Best of luck to my friend and co-blogger the VeloHobo as he gets word on his torn ACL. I hope the recovery is quick!

Until later,

- Zeke