Going to Uranus? Hire a Coach

I'm Drunk and I'm Skinny!

He knows bourbon.  Like the Southern Comfort on a canoe trip in my youth where I never actually paddled the boat, I will never drink it again.  While Southern Comfort made me spend a beautiful blue sky Wisconsin summer day lying in a gravel parking lot along the Crystal River, Bourbon made me shout at Sven Nys, “I’m drunk and I’m skinny!”  Then it made me spend the night laying on the bathroom tile after the Cyclocross World Championships in Louisville.  Bourbon is out of my league.  I don’t get it.

While he’s a virtual genius at select Kentucky beverages and can make anyone faster on a bike, he is not a Marvel super hero.  The guy I’m talking about is a lot like you or me, a person who is passionately involved in the things he loves, maybe a chromosome or two from being a full on savant.  While I’m into writing and music, can expound on the beauty of a worn sunburst Strat and tell you exactly why the new Fitz and the Tantrum’s song “Out of My League” sounds like the Cure’s “A Forest” from 1980, he is one of a handful of people that doesn’t get an itchy heat rash and headache trying to decipher a pro’s power meter graph posted on Velonews.  He knows bourbon and bike racing.  He’s my coach. 

Do I need a coach?  Yes.  Yes I do.  Take these awesome blue suede pointy shoes I got from Banana Republic.  You want to touch them don’t you?  Don’t get your oily fingers on them.  Just know they feel like the silky top of a cat’s head.  Purrr.  For you, maybe they’re not your bag, hipster dufus material.  They’ll likely be at the outlet store in November.  I need them.  For me, working in an industry like pop radio, where the feeling of youth and cool is part of the product, these shoes help me, a middle aged creative, stay in touch with fashion and trends, the same qualities that our listeners hold dear.  Your frugal cycling side may see an unwarranted expense.  I admit.  I do feel a bit out of my skin as I wrestle them on with a shoe horn in the morning, but I see it sort of as an investment.  The second I lose sight of or fail to be directly involved in what our listeners hold dear, like (egads!) an appreciation for Miley Cyrus, I may be looking for a job at the oldies station.

It makes me want to get a fake ID to actually lower my age, but I’ve been racing and ridiculously involved in cycling for longer than most juniors have been alive.  For God’s sake, there’s a 1991 Breezer Thunder in our bike stable, and that’s not even the vintage one in my book.  Every one of those juniors should know who Joe Breeze is.  I own a truing stand.  In my junior aged days, I circumnavigated Waukesha County on a bike with down-tube shifters and a boombox strapped to my front rack blaring “The Who.”  I’ve come back from ACL reconstruction surgery where my wife had to help me as I grunted attempting a single leg lift.  You’d think I’d know it all by now: training, mechanics, skills, speed, and history.  Yet, I have a coach. 

I look at having a coach like a trip to Uranus.  You might troll the boneyard next to the airport for parts, camp out in the science section of the library and actually build a rockin’ 1978 VW shaped spaceship, but you’re not going to feel the soft pale Uranus dirt between your toes without a little input from say perhaps…an actual rocket scientist.  The main reason I have a coach is so someone, a certified cycling dork, is vested as a shareholder in team Joe.  It’s no different than having a personal mentor or work consultant.  I could go pretty far on my own, perhaps land that VW mothership in a swimming pool the next county over and be on TMZ.  But, like those swanky blue shoes, my coach will take me where I’ve never been before...to Uranus.  

His name is Chris Mayhew.  Learn more about him at the JBV Coaching Website.

Meet Coco, My Flamboyant Fantasy Bike Butler

My cell phone rings once a month.  The exterminator calls to pitch us a package, $180 to keep bugs out of the house for the year.  That’s a tish pricey in my book.  You can win the lottery, but you still have to spend your money wisely right?  Conversely, since we hit those six big numbers a few months back, $180 is exactly what I spend every single week for my bike butler.  

Hola Coco!

Meet Coco, my fantasy bike butler.  I considered a cycling coach, but since I won the lottery a bike butler makes me much happier.  Coco is half butler, half coach.  Coco is a nickname, since my wife and I can’t pronounce his real name.  It’s got a lot of rolly R sounds in it.  My wife pictured a bronzed ex-pro who would wear tight slacks and sexy white open collar shirts.  However, I was uncomfortable with that and hired Coco, who’s a bit flamboyant.  In his mid 30’s, Coco dresses in nice slacks and a pressed dress shirt.  However his has fluffy rainbow striped sleeves and a bow tie.  His machismo bubbling through, he insists the rainbow colors are world champion stripes.  I go along with it, knowing that’s probably not the reason.  While it’s our ultimate fantasy that Coco resides in the spare room with the full bath upstairs, we’re still frugal enough to keep the bike butler part-time for now.  Besides, as leader of a hot salsa band, Coco does well for himself and insists he’s married to an actress named Lucy.  I Love Lucy, he says.  Till we decide on the full-time thing, our bike butler visits once per day and is on call if we need him outside of that.

Every morning, Coco lets himself in just after we get up, brings us coffee and confers with us on our cycling or workout plans.  He’s so sweet.  He even asks if we had any mechanical issues with our ride the day before.  Tonight, after she spends the day at Nordstrom and lunch with the girls, Coco’s workout plan has my wife going to do Pilates at Pendleton in Loveland.  I’m doing hill repeats at Devou Park and riding from work.  Yeah, I still work, but just for the insurance benefits now.  He kindly reminds my wife to be careful with her bummish knee and for me to keep my heart rate at or just under 100% of lactate threshold.  “You go hard.  Backoff if over one hundred LT,” he says shaking his finger.  Even with his sleeves flopping around when he gestures, he can be intimidating sometimes.  Knowing that he’ll see my Powertap data, I nod to confirm.

My Wife And I Buying My New Truck After Lotto Win

Coco then heads down to the laundry room and packs our gear bags.  Yoga pants, other workout wear, a Sigg bottle, a granola bar, a Sweaty Band and a towel go in my wife’s bag.  He instinctively tosses an instant freezie pack in her bag incase my wife’s knee gets inflamed.  Coco packs my Northface backpack with my kit, shoes, helmet, IPod and heart rate monitor strap.  He even pre-butters my chamois.  He also packs a small cooler with a granola bar, a Gu, and three water bottles, two for on the bike, the third mixed with a recovery drink.  He then heads into the garage man cave to give the bike a quick once over and pumps the tires.  He then loads it all into our cars, her BMW and my Range Rover Sport, and hands us the keys as we leave.

Coco sticks around for about an hour after we head out for the day, prepping our other bikes and feeding the cats.  Since we hit the Powerball we each have two identically set-up pro level bikes, for each discipline.  Pretty sweet huh?  While I’ll ride my #1 Kuota KOM tonight, Coco gives my 2^nd KOM and my wife’s two IF Crown Jewel’s a thorough cleaning and overall.  If something’s amiss, like a stretched out chain, he’ll pick up the part at Biowheels bike shop during the day and install it the next. 

It’s a good life.  If it goes well, maybe we’ll hire Coco full-time and buy a motor home for CX season.  Coco still hasn’t shared the secret of how he keeps bike grease off his cool salsa shirt.  We still haven’t won the lottery, but we can dream.

How to Derail CX Training in 10 Minutes Before Yoga

I could’ve sat in my car in the parking lot and tried not to look like a creepy dude watching women go into the gym. I could’ve watched Tiger announce his divorce on ESPN on the TV over the juice bar.  I could’ve whipped out my dumb phone and checked out pro cycling pre-Vuelta chest thumping on Velonews.  I could’ve snagged a copy of Muscle and Fitness from the magazine rack with my beanie biker arms and enjoyed a banana.  Traffic was light.  I got out of work a tish early.  I was 25 minutes early for Yoga on Monday.  How I chose to kill the time before class killed my entire cyclocross training plan for the week and I’m still trying to unkill it.

They have fancy names like blocks or periods in most training plans.  Mine’s no different.  If you don’t have a coach or a Joe Friel book to make training sound all scientific and calculated; you ride hard, recover, repeat and use the word interval twice a week.  I took my weekend beating and rode hard on the BioWheels’ shop ride, aptly nicknamed the Saturday Morning Beatdown.  Sunday, I rode the mountain bike with my wife and a few female teammates at moderate pace.  Monday, I was faced with a dilemma.  (This is precisely why having a coach or a Joe Friel plan is a good idea.  It keeps you from making dumb decisions or at least being able to blame someone else for bad ideas.)

I didn’t feel like I needed a recovery, but knowing that I had to get a cyclocross practice and an interval workout in sometime Tuesday and Wednesday, I decided still it was probably best to take it easy on Monday in anticipation of the hard work ahead.  That WAS a good idea.  I chose to go to Yoga, stretch out the body and get a little core workout in.  That WAS a good idea too.  If you haven’t tried it, Yoga is quite challenging and leads do discovering that even though you can trackstand your bike for the duration of three minute stoplights, you have the balance of a 21 year old at bar time compared to the nine nymphs that will surround you in class.  I’m quite certain they all could do no-handed stoplight track stands while balancing only with their big toe on the headset cap.

However, I was early to Yoga.  Not a good idea for people who can’t sit still in a gym.  With 25 minutes before class, I plopped on the sticky vinyl black mat in the gym just outside the Yoga studio.  I stretched a bit.  I looked at the clock.  With 24 minutes remaining, I rolled onto my back and busted out a set of bicycle crunches.  The trainer and his client nearby were doing planks with a stopwatch.  Being able to over hear them, I secretly joined in, holding my planks as long as her.  When she rested, I went back to the bicycle crunches.  I felt strong.  25 bicycles, one minute-twenty plank, 25 bicycles, one minute-twenty plank, 25 bicycles, one minute-twenty plank, 25 bicycles, one minute-twenty plank, 25 bicycles, one minute-twenty plank.  Oh look its 5:52pm!  Time to get embarrassed by the nymphs.

STUPID…STUPID…STUPID!

I still feel like someone took a Cuisinart mixer and made a smoothie out of my abdomen.  It’s been nearly 3 days.  I skipped hill repeats on Tuesday.  It hurts when I sneeze.  I skipped Wednesday cyclocross practice in favor of an easy ride that didn’t require a whole lot of use of my middle muscles.  It’s Thursday and I’m running out of options to put the pieces of my training plan back together.  One thing is for certain, in retrospect, looking like a creepy guy in a parking lot doesn’t seem to be a bad choice anymore.