The Next Adventure

I’ve just started on a new adventure. I’m hoping to provide more updates on this as they happen, but for now I’m going to let you know what’s up. Back up a bit… back in February, Chris Carmichael put up a call for people to join a team going to La Ruta. That’s short for La Ruta De Los Conquistadores a four-day long mountain bike race across Costa Rica from the Pacific to the Caribbean. Nuts to begin with, so why would I even want to do this? I’ve heard about this race for a few years here’s Carmichael’s summary of what he has in mind. It’s his 50th birthday year and this is his plan for what to do. Now Chris is an ex-pro (the 7-11 team) and a very strong athlete himself, so why do I think I can keep up with this? I don’t know, but I filled out an on-line application and waited. I was a bit surprised when I saw that I had made the top 25 cut and was asked to make a short video application. They asked that this be less than 3 min long and the instructions were: “please record a video that gives us a better sense of who you are and what you’re passionate about.” So here’s my video application:

The next step was waiting and I finally found out that I’m in. So now that I’m in, what’s next? I guess I have to starting thinking out about 7 months and refocus my training on how I’m going to get into the kind of shape it takes to do that race, not that I know what that is. I figure I’ll find out soon enough.

We (the entire hand-picked team) will be meeting at Carmichael Training Systems in mid-April. At that time, they’ll run us through the battery of tests, including Lactate Threshold, VO2Max, do a proper bike fit and do some riding too. Then we go off and train for some time, coming back to Colorado Springs in mid-July. I’m sure some of us will meet up at Leadville in August, then September, we go to Costa Rica for a pre-ride of parts of the course. The cool part of that is we will be joined there by 2009 winner Manuel Prado and he’ll show up the trail. Good recon beta in that. Then some time to put the finishing touches on my training and we race… November 17-20.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to start a Video Diary and did  a couple in the last week. Mostly this is for me to see, but I thought someone else might be stuck at work and bored out of their skull and watch this…

Or this:

Tags: bike, racing, Riding

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 3:13 pm and is filed under adventure, bike, bike races. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.