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When you live in Flyover Country, you come to know that playing bike from November to February absolutely sucks butt. Happy Holidays! Indeed. October begins with a great deal of promise. Most of the time we see an unbelievable weather phenomenon called Indian Summer. Warm temps and calm winds along with a reduction in the normal 80% humidity makes riding bikes an absolute pleasure. Most of us rue the end of the bike season because for the first time since May, the weather is hospitable. The only obstacle most of us face in October is heavy farm machinery and mudcakes in the road. Then, Halloween approaches and daylight savings time begins. It gets dark at 4:00 in the afternoon and too damn much bite-sized candy is lying around. In the Druber household, The Lovely Kathy had to reprimand me for the not so mysterious disappearance of the fun sized Almond Joy bars meant for the trick or treaters. Between the reduced training hours, the candy and the annual OktDruberFest party, much weight is put on in the dark days of late October. Guilt and the knowledge that Thanksgiving is soon to arrive, drive cold weather cyclists indoors for mad trainer and roller sessions. People with weak constitutions do silly things like run or worse take up cyclo cross. Hard core roadies however, set up rollers and trainers in living rooms, basements and garages. I read recently that Jan Ulrich doesn't mind doing 2 hours on the trainer as long as he has good tunes to ride to. Shit. How familiar is the sound of that? It's torture. We do silly things to pass the time like purchasing bike races on DVD and pretending that we're challenging Davide Rebellin at the Amstel Gold race. Mental masturbation. I took off for Santa Barbara for a week in November to get away from The Gloam. I felt the Gloam settling in on November 21st. I was out riding on a Sunday afternoon in relatively balmy conditions. I could feel the wind shift and hit me in the face no matter what direction I was riding and it got cold. I knew this would be the last time I could enjoy a decent ride without the benefit of double tights and thermal wear. It sucks. The Lovely Kathy and I left for SB the next day. Since our flight to paradise was very early, we stayed overnight at a park n fly hotel near the Hooterville International Airport, where a plump Hoosier girl, approximate age 23, assured the skeptical Joizey girl Kathy, that our car would be safe in the lot for a week. In the 8 months that she's been the late night desk clerk, she's "not had no problems with cars left in the lot." I think she could tell I was trying to purge the thought she might actually be telling us that all of the cars left in the lot had been vandalized and left of cinder blocks, because she looked me in the eye and added for emphasis, "Not never." We put the club on the steering wheel, just in case. You can't get a direct flight into Santa Barbara. So, we had to lay over in Las Vegas. I saw Elvis in a White Jumpsuit and sunglasses waiting for a plane to Nashville. Elvis was visibly drunk. It was only 8:30 a.m. Viva Las Vegas. In Santa Barby I continued my off-season training, riding borrowed titanium Merckx with a Record 10 gruppo. It was a back up bike that my brother Steve arranged for me. Steve's buddy Louis has a nicer bike as his front line ride. Everyone in SB rides a nice bike. Every one is friendly and beautiful as well. Steve had a wine and cheese party on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. 30 beautiful people showed up with food and wine, straight white teeth and pleasing breath. At about midnight, 30 beautiful people with purple teeth and stinky breath went home, because there was a ride set for Thanksgiving Day at 7:00 a.m. I rode 100 miles with the gang on Thanksgiving Day Steve bagged early to clear out the 400 empty wine bottles and fix food. I continued on with a group who rides out of the Fast Track Cyclery in SB. Upon completion of the ride, I returned to Steve's place and we started drinking heavily and didn't stop until returning from Santa Barbara County wine region late Friday evening. It was a good trip. The Lovely Kathy and I came home with purple teeth. Steve's intended, The Beautiful Alicia, with straight white teeth and a Barbie smile asked me what a typical day is like for a bike racer from the Land of Lincoln. I told her this: I usually stay up late drinking wine or brown likker. At about midnight, the munchies hit hard and I'll go through a sleeve of Ritz Crackers and half a jar of peanut butter and pass out on the sofa with the TV on. The Lovely Kathy will come downstairs and the clanking of the empty bottles will rouse me from my stupor as Kathy makes her way through the emptys I left on the floor to shut the TV off. I wake up with foul breath and purple teeth, shower and get dressed for work eating no breakfast, as I feel guilty about the previous night's binge. Arriving at the office at about 9:30 or 10:00, I play hearts on my computer and make a few phone calls at work until I sober up at about 2:00 and then I go ride, for four hours, mostly because that's how long it takes for me to feel like I have the previous night's poison expelled from my system. This repeats itself. I don't think she believed me. I've had people offer to pay me real money to help them with off-season training. So far I have refused to take anyone's money to tell him or her how to pass time on a stationary trainer when it's butt cold outside. I do everything wrong. I don't "periodize". I think it's hogwash. Oh, I suppose if you're a Euro pro who races real races and rides 20,000 miles a year or more, you need some time off. If you're 40 years old and do 25 or fewer races a summer, the longest of which is 100k, you do yourself a disservice by riding slow from October to February. I think. Most of the guys I know who win bike races pretty much ride fast when they ride bikes. I think there is something to that. I receive a lot of e-mail reminders from guys who finish behind me in races telling me that I should be riding slow, spinning and shit like that to do something called deep capillary development. Huh? Here is what I do. The advice is free. About this time of year, after nearly two weeks of being forced indoors, I get really bored riding in my garage to thumping music so I try to add an element of difficulty to the roller riding. I fill my water bottle with 12-year-old Nicaraguan Rum and see how far I can go before I fall off. So far I'm up to about 45 minutes. I've decided to race some on the track next year for the first time ever, so I got a track bike. Dave Letteiri who was a track Olympian at Seoul in 1988 gave me some really good advice on the Thanksgiving ride He told me to do a half hour on rollers riding the track bike at about 30 mph. I've been doing this with a 51 on front and a 15 on back. I don't know how many inches of chain that is. I'm not very adept at track yet. Anyway, if you don't kill yourself riding a fixed gear bike on the rollers, it's a good workout - Especially with a bottle full of brown likker. By the time a half hour passes, the garage smells like a distillery in Managua and I don't mind riding my bike on rollers in the garage listening to Courtney Love complain about life in song. Another thing I do in the winter is lift weights. I don't know if this is a good thing or not. I've read both good and bad about it. I'm not sure what e-mail coaches would say. I suspect they're on both sides of the issue. All I know is that I saw a picture of George Hincapie in Velo News doing leg presses a couple of years ago. At least that's what the caption said, although George didn't look like he was expending too much energy, as he was fully clothed, smiling and there was only one 45 lb plate on each side. I'm never in the gym for very long. I jump rope a little then do leg presses until I can't walk and I leave. It usually only takes about 30 minutes. Someone told me once that Eric Heiden used to do 500 reps with low weights on the leg press sled. I've tried that but I can only get up to 200. I don't do anything with respect to upper body weights. I don't need pecs like Sailor Art Thomas. I do crunches on one of those inflatable balls every now and again. Another thing I do wrong is I ride hard pretty much all the time. On Sunday I rode in Hooterville with my new teammates on the Delta Faucet/Estridge Homes team. We left Indianapolis and rode until we were in what appeared to be Western Kentucky. Not sure where we were, but we did see a man sporting a Confederate hat and a Santa Claus beard (his real hair) riding a paint horse. Anyway, it was a long ride through rolling terrain and nice scenery. Some of these guys have been playing bike for a lot longer than I have and I have to tell you, we went hard. I bonked with a half hour left to go. We ended up riding over 5 hours. On the way home I stopped for what e-mail coaches call protein and glycogen replenishment. I ordered one of the Taco Bell combo specials. You get to mix and match your choice of 10 bean burritos, soft shell or hard shell tacos. I got 5 bean burritos and 5 soft tacos. I felt like I replenished my depleted glycogen stores and set up reserves for the next weeks worth of riding but I had to take Gas-X before the Lovely Kathy would allow me share a bed with her. That night I slept for 12 hours while Kathy pined for me. I read that Jonathan Vaughters recommends lots of sleep. This I do right. Here
is another thing I know about being a successful masters bike racer
that an e-mail coach won't tell you. Most of the really, really
good masters racers I know fit one of the profiles below. In my opinion, it's not a matter of proper base, build, peak, and rest periodization. It's a matter of how much time a guy can spend on a bike. If a guy has time to spend 15-20 hours per week training, he's going to beat the bibs off a guy who has 8 hours a week to train - regardless of the quality of that training. The best you can hope for is to not get shelled by the unemployed 42 year olds driving the pace up the road. So, if Druber were an e-mail coach, he'd have most of his clients quit their jobs as a first order of getting fast on the bike. But, then, they'd have no income to pay his fee. It's Catch-22. Hey, it's already hard being a bike racer. No need to make it complicated too. As I was discussing with teammates The Mole and Der Hausfrau, the best way to make the bike go fast is to press really hard on the pedals. Take your $200 a month and put it into a Roth IRA. When you're too old to ride your bike, you'll be glad you did. With the above rubbish complete we are free to move on to other things. How's this for a profile? - "He minimizes everything, he is an arrogant man who finds it difficult to accept authority, exhibits a narcissistic personality with a lack of respect, and is irritable and very vulnerable". The following was lifted from a psychological profile of one Frank Vandenbrouke as quoted from Belgian head shrinker Dr Debert in cyclingnews.com. Immediately I can think of at least two dozen bike racers - good friends of mine - who fit directly into this profile; especially the irritable and vulnerable part. Wow. I spent most of last summer writing about this profile, the names change but the story stays the same. Happy Holidays and remember you have only 22 more shopping days until my birthday. Druber
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