Top of the Box

     Shannon and I spent a few days at the start of November prepping the house for the incoming cold weather. This old house is quite drafty so we took some extra steps to ensure Mother Nature stays outside and away from us. It was a good thing we did because it has become downright cold! I can't remember a time when it got so cold in early November and then stayed cold. Sure, we always get some cold days, but highs in the 20s is not usually in the Tennessee forecast until January or February. The cold cut the Autumn colors short and killed off our garden a little earlier than we had hoped for. Even our late Fall crops were hit hard. The lettuce, peas and broccoli gave way, while our spinach is hanging on by a thread. At least our kale is doing well. Frost and snow make kale taste better so it is prime for the picking right now. We even got two pumpkins this year. They may be a little late for Halloween, but at least they grew.

Our two punkins

     It may be cold, but I am hot with a fever...cross fever. It has stricken me this year for the first time in several years. The funny thing is I have only raced one cross race this season. I was hoping to do more, but the local races are either too expensive or get cancelled. I'm sorry, but I'm not paying $45 to do a local race with no payout. I'm not supporting a race that doesn't support the riders. We have not had the budget to do a lot of traveling for bigger races. Everything I spend now will limit what I can do next summer.

      I continue to keep my cross torch lit at home with multiple practice races, all on different courses I have been able to construct on the farm behind our house or at my parents' house. I think I'm up to nine races so far. Shannon has done two with me. She is learning all about the dismounting and running that comes with cross. She's still riding platform pedals on the mountain bike so that is making it a bit easier for her to learn on. I really am blessed with the land and resources I have to work with. I have some nice singletrack and technical sections available at my parents' house, in addition to a lightly traveled road I can use for pavement stretches, while the farm offers grass, climbing, dirt and gravel roads, and even a little pavement in our driveway. Below is a sample of some of our courses. I will get the GoPro out one day soon and film some of the courses.

A sample course at my parents' house

Another course utilizing what has become known as the Backyard trails

Course at our current home on the Clark Farm

Yesterday's course went around the pond for some mud and power stretches

     I love watching all the big races on TV. It's nice to see more coverage of the North American events. Thanks to Behind the Barriers TV, I have been able to watch all the big races. There have been a bunch of night races this year. Night racing always gets me extra fired up. It sucks to only be able to watch the racing at this point. So, I did the next best thing and set up a night race here on the farm. Shannon and I made a super fast and flowing course, which was both exciting and terrifying to ride at race-pace in the dark. One of my other course ideas was for my own Koppenbergcross-type event. The Koppenbergcross is in Belgium and features a climb up the infamous, cobbled Koppenberg climb every lap. My parents live on a dead-end road with a big hill and it just so happens that our Backyard trail crosses that road at the end. I linked up some grass and trail to dump me out at the bottom of the hill and then climbed it from bottom to top every lap. It was a great workout, definitely sapping my legs much more than any other course I have created so far. I really liked this climb because it is long and has two steep spots near the bottom and top. It also starts on dirt and gravel, then transitions to pavement. It's a perfect blend of all the elements of cross. And it just so happened that the day I rode this course it was muddy and snowing. Perfect! I have really had a lot of fun on my bike lately. Whatever happened to me at Gateway Cup turned the fun switch on and it has not turned off.

     I have been very focused on running the past few weeks, adding intervals into my training for the first time ever. Even when I raced XTERRA seriously I never did any specific training for the run. I just worked myself up to handle the distance. Usually once I got my base, it was time to race. There was never time to do speed training. I really do want to get that sub-20 minute 5K at Rudolph's Red Nose Run 5K next week so I have added in the speed work this time around.

     My second test of the running season was this past Saturday at the Farm Bureau Holiday 5K just up the road from us in Springfield, TN. I was nervous for this race because I had a near-perfect run at APSU. It was going to be hard to beat that time of 21:37. I had good legs early in the week, which also made me nervous. So far, I have only been able to find good legs about once every other week during my runs. It was also a tough course, featuring several small climbs and one steep hill up Crestview Dr. around mile 2. The goal was to go under 21 minutes this race.

Twisty course in downtown Springfield

The start of the Farm Bureau 5K

Me in the green

     I started hard, blowing by most of the runners ahead of me in the first 100 meters. I found myself in 3rd place overall at the bottom of the first downhill. I had never been this close to the front before in a race with 350+ runners! Like APSU, this course began with a descent. It was nice to look down at the bottom and see my average pace at 4:47. I could never, ever, ever run that on flat ground! I dropped back a few spots once we had to actually use our legs to propel ourselves forward. The run offered a 5K and a 10K route, both starting at the same time on the same course. At the split, one runner ahead of me turned for the 10K route. That put me in 5th spot as we hit the first climb. The leading two were long gone by the top and 3rd was getting pretty far ahead. The 4th place guy had gapped me, but then I seemed to stabilize the gap after a mile. The first mile was my fastest ever mile at 6:05. It is sad, but my previous best mile came when I was in 6th grade and played basketball. I ran a 6:27 around the gym that year and it stood from the time I was 11 until now when I am 28 years old. I haven't really tried to just sprint a mile since then so maybe that is why it stood for so long.

     That was a fast start for me, but I was able to settle in. The easiest part of the course came between 0.7 miles and 1.8 miles. At 1.8, the climb up Crestview began. I had held the 4th place runner at about 10 seconds to the bottom. He blew up on the climb and immediately started walking. That just fueled me  and I powered up the hill. I passed him and then pulled away. Over the top, he chased me, but I steadily pulled off down the next descent. Then came a wicked-long gradual climb straight into a stiff headwind. It was about 0.8 miles long and sapped my strength. It was tough to watch my pace fall from a 6:24 at the start of Crestview to a 6:41 by the top of the last climb. I gave it all I had to hold my pace to the finish line and gave up one more second on my pace to finish with a 6:43 average mile. It was my fastest 5K time ever as I clocked a 20:47. That was six seconds faster than my best time ever, which I set on a course that was almost completely flat.

Finishing. I actually felt much better than I look here.

Men 25-29 podium. It took until the end of the season, but I'm finally getting to stand on top of the box!

My friend Linda Kay Clark also won her age group. She is Mrs. Clark, as in Clark Farms.

 So, I guess I passed this test. I knocked 50 seconds off my time from APSU. I took 4th overall and won my age group again. If I keep this kind of improvement going I will be very, very close to that sub-20 come next Friday in Nashville. I have nothing but good things to say about this Farm Bureau 5K. Farm Bureau sponsored the race and provided all sorts of food and door prizes for the runners. The results were posted faster than any race I have ever been too. They printed a results sheet every ten runners. It had your time, overall place and class place next to your name. That's the way it should be at every race when you have chip timing. The event also donated proceeds to the local YMCA which hosts many programs in the Robertson County area. This is definitively a race to check out if you are interested in some middle-Tennessee running.

Farm Bureau's runner hospitality area

It was a nice spread of food and drinks. And this was just one of three tables they had.

     As for 2015, I have been unable to generate any real interest from teams and sponsors for next season so I guess I'll be flying solo again. One local team seemed to be interested, but never followed up with me after gauging my interest back in the summer. From what I have seen, they don't have much to offer. I'm not looking for anything big, but I cannot justify joining a team if it will cost me more money than it costs me to race alone. They can't pay entry fees or help with expenses and you have to buy your own kit. They don't have anyone else on the team in my category so I wouldn't even have a teammate unless it was a Pro/1/2/3 race. All those things were red flags to me. The one thing I did like about the team is they talked about keeping the team a small, core group of "just racers." Having like-minded people on a team makes it easier for everyone to focus and achieve their goals. Then they picked up a bunch of locals that don't race. You know this group. There's people like them in every city. They talk about how fast they are, how they could be Pros if they raced, but they never race. Most of the people that joined the team call me a "wanna be"and hang out with Mr. Local Douchebag Rider that I mentioned in my last blog. I'm thinking this is not the place for me. If Facebook is too much drama for me then this team certainly is too.

    But all is not bad in the hunt for help. Maxxis is back on board with me for 2015, again helping me out with discounts. This will be the tenth straight year they have helped me in some sort of way. I honestly do love their tires and am very happy to be riding them again next year. I am still awaiting confirmation from First Endurance, but I also hope to have them back next year as well. They have the best supplements on the market. Period. You can't beat Optygen, Liquid Shot, Ultragen and Multi-V. It took me a while to get on board with the MultiV vitamins, but they have truly changed my training. I have been using them daily since March. Usually I get some sort of cold or sinus infection about once a month during the winter and spring months, as well as once during the summer. I have not been sick one single time since I started using MultiV. The closest thing to sickness I had was the nausea and water-retention around the time of Race to the Canal in October. I think I had a virus and I believe the MultiV limited the damage the virus did to me. I have some of the prototype formula for the next generation of MultiV and I can't wait to try it over the coming months.

     My Racer-X mountain bike is still broken, but I did secure some rivets and a rivet gun to attempt to fix it. I will be doing it in the next day or so. Until then, the Remedy is still my choice for mountain biking. We are doing Tour de Turkey again this year and it starts tomorrow. It is another of our fake backyard races. It begins with a time trial tomorrow, then features an XC on Thanksgiving, a night Short Track on Black Friday, an XC on Saturday and another XC on Sunday. It's going to be a blast! The forecast looks chilly, but still warmer than last year when it was 16 degrees for the start on Thanksgiving morning.

     Happy Turkey Day everybody! Remember to get in some sort of exercise to burn off all those extra calories you are about to consume. Thanks for reading!