Daniel Holloway (middle above) and I recently completed our fourth six-day event of the season, the 47th Six Days of Copenhagen. We had to start off the event in survival mode after Daniel’s flight was cancelled from Silver City, where he was attending the Garmin spring training camp. His itinerary had to be moved back 24 hours, which meant he arrived the first day of the race. One nice thing about ‘sixes’ is that because you race from 8 pm until 2 or 3 in the morning, you never really have to get adjusted to the jet lag. You’re racing during hours when you would normally be awake anyway. This allows you to travel quite close to the event. But arriving at 1:00 pm when you start racing at 7:30 pm is a bit extreme. So we tried to relax the first night and let Daniel’s legs adjust to the load.
We traded positions the second night when my own lack of sleep began to catch up with me. I am usually the guy who is not affected by jet lag, but this time around, something did not work and I was totally smoked. The trend continued for me as the days went by and I got worse, not better. The final chase was quite challenging and I was in a zombie-like state of self preservation. I have been in the situation before and the likelihood of crashing goes up exponentially when you are sleep deprived. But I managed to (barely) keep it upright and not kill anyone.
We had finished 9th, 8th and 7th in our first sixes of the season, so we were hoping to keep the trend going and get 6th in Copenhagen. Then, logically, we would win our 5th race next year. But we reversed the trend and got 10th. At least we are numerically consistent, somehow.
Daniel and I are now staying in Girona for a week before the Copenhagen World Cup, where we will represent the US National Team. Luckily we have teammates who live here and so we are crashing at their place. (Thanks Timmy and Blake!) We have just begun to explore the amazing training playground that is Girona and as soon as my legs and sleep patterns catch up, I will be hammering all over the place.
In other news, before I left on my latest racing adventure, I began teaching classes at Boulder Indoor Cycling on the 142-ish meter indoor velodrome which opened right around January 1st. This is like a dream job for me because I get to ride to work (which takes about 15 minutes from my house), and then ride my track bike, coach people, and then ride home, and I get paid for it.
For me its like a dream come true to have an indoor track in Boulder. I’m a kid in a candy shop! If you are in town please stop by and say hello, and if you are up for it, come and ride the track. If you want someone to coach you or your team/club/coworkers on the track (shameless sales plug) then I am your man. The track has bikes if you don’t have one, and everyone I have seen has come off the track with a big smile on their faces.
CwP
PS If you have not already seen it, check out my three-age article on six-day racing in the March issue of VeloNews. It’s a cool spread and has some good pics so enjoy it and let me know what you think.
