Good News

I know it is mushy and it is not cycling related…but it is big news anyway for any friends I have who have not found out.

I don’t think I need to write anything else…

pursuit of…um..pain

Well I have been training for Points Race as many of you may know…as a result this is my face after a pursuit…for the love…that hurt. but the time was ok. Close to my PB’s and with not real work on it…but let me tell you I am opened up now…I just love this picture…I think Andrea pretty much got what pursuiting at this level is all about…the best part is every guy that does one will have this look in his eye at one point. Andrea is one of my roomates back in Burnaby…and let me tell you she is pretty good with the old camera as well…this could be a pain poster…or something…So yeah check out her other pictures on canadian cyclist or her web site.

Points race tomorrow…time to feel the burn.
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2 days to race start

Well after 12 hours of plane rides plane food and plane plain people…I am finally in Mallorca…not to shabby…did I mention that riding in europe is the best thing since sliced bread…no wait…its better than that…it is the best thing since fresh out of the oven home made sliced melty butter bread. I just needed to get that out. It has been “ok” weather her and honestly I want to move here and I have only been on 2 hours riding total…oh well enjoy the novelty.

The track is something else…if it is finished by Thursday…it is a totally constructions sight…and it won’t be done for the racing…the track itself is finished and the stands and “public” areas are done. But pretty much everything else is muttled with dry wall loosed wires and plumbing explosions. It is pretty crazy…if the sprinters can avoid the falling rebar everything should go off without a hitch.

Preparation has gone well and I think it will be a good ride for me…now it is just a matter of freshening up the legs. I am excited, stay tuned for Canadian Results and insider thoughts….

Tipping Point

Well I think the beatings on friday got me fired up for the points on saturday…I came out pissed and tried to stamp some authority on a race that I feel holds my future on the track. I qualified 2nd in my heat behind olympic gold medalist Mikhail Ignatiev. A good start no prizes but it got the job done and got me feeling better about my riding anyway.

The final came around again in only a few hours so I went back to my casino/hotel and ate a casino/hotel sammy…that was gross and not ideal but fuel anyway.

In the final it was pinned from the gun. I scooped some points in the first sprint then a dangerous group rolled away and I wasn’t there..bad move…but with me and a few others working for almost 60 laps we held them at half a lap and slowly pulled them back. Then once we where a group I rolled away. And who else was with you ask, Mikhail Ignatiev. Dude was a wrecking ball…oh yeah and did I mention he rode the team pursuit and won only 5 min before…the rest of the race was just him putting the wreck on…and me hanging on…in the final sprint I had a good turn of speed but bad position…with smarter riding and similar legs I can improve on the 8th place finish I had here…but it was a good start to a world cup season that I hope is on an upward trend…coming in I didn’t feel like I would ride very well…and thel legs didn’t feel great here. I rode with alot of fight but in the end the job got done…more or less. Anyway I will be heading home to BC and hopefully get a solid 2 weeks in before I head to Moscow…If I can keep my form moving in this upward direction I think moscow will be a good race for me.

Thanks for all the support and emails over the past few days…it helped a lot.

We need Some “POOP OFF”

Well After the first day of racing at sydney we team Canada has come out a little worse off then a porche under a telephone wire. Travis, Gina and I all…all seasoned competitors came out looking like JIT’s…What the heck happened. We have all raced at this level before…what is the problem? Well the general concensis seems to be lack of current experneience. We have experience yes but the first world cup is always a wake up call… “johnson pull your head out of your ass”. I basically rode a respectable pursuit…good time (4:35 somthing) and 2o min later jumped on the track for the scratch qualification…granted I was probably the only guy doing that and if I had been in the race and not had the legs maybe I would complain but that is not what happened…I had the legs legs where comfortable infact. I just made a tactical errors…was not cut trought didn’t grab the balls of it or whatever…in the end I didn’t qualify in a race I should have been able to no problem. I just made a bad move…granted it was a very bad move…probably the worst move of my international career actually…and in the end it made for no spot in the scratch final. Now don’t worry I am going to brush off pic up and hit it hard for the points tomrrow…that is the one I am REALLY here for anyway…the scratch was almost an option…and I am happy with my pursuit time…even if it didn’t put me where I expected it too.

But the long and the short of it is…we need to race more…not sally johnson sissy races but really hard ass stuff…at least once before we roll into a world cup. Every year we all come out with good motors and make tactical mistakes against guys that have 1 or 2 mor races allready under their belts this season…no point in puttinhg all your eggs in one basket if there is a hole in the bottum that you can see. I am lucky cause the stupidity I seemed to suffer from came in the least important race for me this year…if there was one race this year I could suck in it was the scratch here. Anyway I am going to use the poo remover to clean teh crap out of my sheets and use more than cromagnon portions of my brain tomrrow…that with my half decent engine right now should produce something a little better. Wish me luck…

Congrats are in order…

Well I am over her in the land of Aus and the world seems to be spinning all around me…and as a track cyclist it should be the other way around…I just heard that my man Ryan Mckenzie just got hitched to his hip and GROOOOVY broad Laura…Well dang yo…god on you and a big shout out of congratulations. I would say I hope you are very happy together…but I know you are so no need for hope.

As for the rest of you out there in blog world. Well I am busy planning some interesting things…I may have a guest blogger join the Z-Rail feed on a some what permamnet basis…to bring a little edge to line. I will also have some interesting pics and fottage once I return from the world cup. It is the first time I haven’t had to Race Pack Fly on sunday…so I will have some free time to wonder the beach or check out the nitty gritty of one of the worlds most famed citys…

Athletic Narcissism…

Athletic Narcissism is something that every high caliber athlete will struggle with at some point. It is almost inevitable, you train and train and focus so much on your goals and how you can over come and be the best. You have to be confident in yourself and abilities, which in and of itself isn’t narcissistic. It crosses the line when all you talk about is yourself and what you do and you become convinced that you and your accomplishments are the most important thing in your own life. I have had some wake up calls in this area as of late. Not that I think I am a narcissist, but I feel these recent experiences have helped me move away from that.

Just yesterday I attended a wedding. The wedding was for someone who I conceder a very close friend. I haven’t spent much time with him since I began cycling but I still count him as one of my best friends. Throughout the wedding ceremony I began to realize something. As I saw him celebrate in his new wife, new life family and friends, another friend of ours who I had attended the wedding with mentioned that we could probably go because we where “at the bottom of this weddings food chain.” It got me to thinking. Who in this big world of ours would put me at the top of that food chain. Who in the world would count me as one of their very best friends? As I thought, I drew no names. I also started to think of who I would have as my best man. I came up with at Least 5 names…names of people who where significant enough in my life that they could easily deserve to be my BEST. Yet I doubt I had played a significant enough role in their lives to be considered there best. It seems that sport and total dedication to it has turned me into wedding plankton. This does not offend me. It is what I deserve, I am barely around enough to be important in my own romantic relationship, how can I expect that any of my friends would see me as playing a significant enough role to hold me any closer. But I will tell you one thing. I thing the narcissist died yesterday. Why should I be the most important figure in my own life when I am not that important to anyone else in the world. They world of a wayfarer athlete is a lonely one. It was a humbling experience and made me realize just how much I have sacrificed in only 4 years for this sport. I have gained a lot too, but when I do re enter real life, I will have a lot of meaningful work to do for all those people that mean so much to me.

I am almost done the Cycling Genus Quiz…just have a few more genus deffinitions to write up then you too can figure out your destiny with a simple nonsensical quiz.

Book Review and…

So it is that time of the year where your body just shuts you down no matter what. I was coming off track nationals with good form and was wondering how this would effect my training. But Then my body checked the calender and decided it would be sick. So in my spare time I did a little reading. I kept seeing the Da Vinci Code poping up all over. All the hype it got a few years ago made me wonder what was going on. So I picked it up. Well, it was interesting and easy to read. But all the hype? Um…right…so there was all this talk of conspiacies and plots to undermine the church. Apparently all those scholars forgot to read the cover. See right above old Mona’s left eye. A secret hidden message in plane sight. “A Novel”. For those of you not familiar with this code, it is an achient masons word for FICTION, as in made up, as in for entertainment value only. Granted all the “things” he talks about in this book are factual…but if scientific reasurch can be orginized to prove almost any theory, so art can be interpreted to do anything. So if you are going to read this book…read it for fun on a weekend when you have nothing else to do but drink tea.

Anyway it is back to training and the like this week….I did the “Run for the Cure” yesterday. Not only do my legs hurt beyond all understanding. I also determined that men only look good in pink if they are, in fact, riding for T-Mobile. Sorry Optiks team you guys just can’t cut it. Anyway look for a quiz coming down the Z-rails later this week. I was trying to make it total work free for you but, unfortunatly my html skills are not worthy of any geek squads. So it will be cosmo…errr um…I mean MENS HEALTH style. as in write down your ansewrs and look up the appropriate result. You’ll see.

LOST FOOTAGE VOL. II

The System is DOWN…

WHAT the shnitzel.

Some one has put a crash curse on me. I was rocking the wheels with mad skills ALL year and hadn’t crashed all year. (unless you count my “virtual” crash at toona which stimied my virtual GC) And now in my last Road race I biffaroony. Then in the last 10 laps of my last track race I eat it again. Concussing my brain meat. To top it all off, I come home to find my website has crashed so I can’t even gripe to my publix about my poor unfortunate luck. It is like a crash fest up in here. So here it all is, a back up of Blogany waiting to seep out onto the masses like the chemicals they are using to fumigate my girlfriends appartment as we speak…

Huh I hope that stuff doesn’t kill all forms of parisite. I mean lets be honest as a cyclist I am a bit a moocher, which doesn’t mean I am a spiecies of Parisite but it has to put ms in the same darwinian family…*gulp*
Here is a “virtual blog” for you…if my website didn’t crash it would have been up on monday…so just pretended…

Shades of grey…and black…and blue…and some off yellow???

Well I guess that is it…that is the year. I was just in Dieppe New Brunswick this past weekend for the Canadian Track Nationals. It was my most successful national championship ever. However I did unfortunately loose the 4km title to one Svien Tuft (props to him). Only by .5 of a second…it was close one…but tough to loose when that is my money maker. Faster next time I guess. I did however win the Points race…yeppiii…which to me is like the Paris Roubiax of track events. The hard man’s race. You have to be smart and on the rivet ever 3 min…and it has been 4 years coming. Since my first nationals I have wanted that event more than any of the others…and it was good to do it finally.

The rest of the weekend was interesting…eating lobster, crashing (no I don’t crash a lot anymore I have just had a bad run the last 2 weeks), and the always interesting…hanging out with the Regimbalds (you ABA members know what I’m talking about)

The conclusion I came to over the past weekend…I LOVE bike racing. It is just kick ass.
Check out this pic…how can anyone argue the P H fatness of that sport.

Image by: Don Ricker
Well I am into Video season now. And putting together a LOST Footage Vol. 2. Keep your RSS Feed troughs empty cause you will not want this one to be returned mail.

Good Luck to the Roadies going to worlds….
Keep the rubber side down (or at least at a 45 if you only turn left)

Z-bomb