Aerodynamic Success

Early season training is the time to review what the team needs, and find it. In winter time you have to find what you don't have. Motivation? Speed? Fitness? Skill?

Usually it comes down
to a nebulous commodity

Robin returns to fast form

called "base miles."Valuable to almost anyone any time, good base miles are supposed to be a bit slower, more sensitive to how you are responding.

Races, of course don't care one little bit how you are responding. Races hurk and jerk and suddenly sprint full speed for a half an hour. Base miles help train a system that endures the wiles of a race.

But alas base miles train you to be slow. Let's face it, if you spend six hours a day riding your bike at twenty miles an hour over a hundred miles, you will be a muscly fit fox, but you won't win the Jack Frost Time Trial.  Twenty nine miles an hour even on just a twelve mile course, requires you to be comfortable riding twenty nine miles an hour - for at least 20 minutes.

Hilde is hungry.

Becoming ready for Oregon, or OBRA, or whatever racing peloton is yours, means training to go fast for long and short intervals, in all sorts of conditions and terrain. And the reality of scoring points, at least in OBRA is in a large part, about showing up.  

Espoir Denzell Lall, and 15yr old Jr. Jaden Salama.

Show up for the right event, with the right bike, and do the right thing - that 's winning.

Showing up starts today, on the scheduled winter training ride. Team strength helps you show up. On this day, tires, derailers, and winter gloves show themselves for the lies they really are. Today they get replaced. Sometimes the strength of The Team is needed merely to shop in a bike shop.

OBRA Medalist Fergus Kinnell teaches tire repair.

As the team gets ready, they see some of the competition out on the road. Then they all better understand the nature of our racing community. Oregon is a classy place to come up in this particular decade. Like the talent bloom of Detroit in the Seventies and Eighties, I-5 is a pretty amazing place to practice bicycle racing in 2014.
This weekend from Sauvies Island to City Bikes, twelve cycling athletes were an important part of this phenomenal time and place.