The blog posts have yet again been a little scarce so here’s an update on the past week or so.

Last Sunday was a team time trial run by local team Cambiamento d’ Andaturo. The day included a lot more negativity that I’d care to deal with so I chose to not write up any blog post about it. The short story is that my team (Kevin Kawainui and Jason Smith from Tradewinds, Gary Shields from the Big Island, and yours truly) were on the start sheet as first team off. We’re all riding well and put in quite a bit of TTT specific practice, and on paper had a damn good chance to take the win. It’s never a done deal, but the potential was there!

Fast forward to about 1/3 of the way into the outward leg from Kualoa ranch to Laie and we encounter severely backed up traffic. In this situation, if I was riding a solo race, I’d just wing it, find a hole, and try and get past without losing time. Having three friends racing with me, a little common sense comes into play as I don’t want to have them follow me into a very dangerous situation. Anyway, we dice with death, try out best to navigate through the traffic as safely as possible. I had one Honolulu Fire Dept guy in uniform driving his truck within a couple inches of me barking shit out of his window… Nice.. We’ll put out your fire and save cats from trees, but fuck cyclists! Not what I’d call a positive experience. So, we make it out of the traffic only to see 3 riders holding up the traffic. For the sake of being nice, I’ll leave names out. First question – Why the fuck are there people on the course? Whatever, we get past those guys and get back to business north of 30mph, make it to the turnaround in pretty good shape with all 4 of us together. The ride back into the wind was fairly uneventful. We lost Kevin along the way, but he wasn’t at 100% health so I’m happy that he did everything that he could do. Jason was potentially the weakest link based on the past few TT’s on O’ahu. I don’t mean he’s a bad rider, just that if anyone might struggle it was going to be him, and he knew it… The pressure was on. I’m happy to report that he rode out of his skin and laid it all on the road. Impressive!

So, we make it the finish in 54mins and some change… Easily a good 2mins slower than we could have done without the earlier delays. At the end of the day we lost by 1 second to the team from the race organiser’s team (who we later found out didn’t even start on their original start time). Any other time trial I have done would have seen that team given a time based on their original start time. Those are just the facts… Make what you want of those. All said and done, my team know what the outcome should have been, but hey, when you’re the race organiser, setting the rules, and the team that you rode on has the win to lose, you’re going to look after your guys before handing the win to someone else. Quite sad that this is the second time I’ve had a very negative experience with this race, and the same organizer. I’m sure this post won’t please anyone, but I feel that the truth should be known.

I spent the past week just riding my TT bike and having a good time. Tonight I took a break from the bike and paddled out in some pretty cold (by Hawaii standards) weather… Outside of the water it was about 60-65F. When you’re accustomed to tropical 85F most days of the year, 60-65 will have you vibrating like a nervous dog to stay warm. It was easily the coldest surf I’ve had to date, but I caught a couple really good waves and had less than 10 people to contend with in the water. Chilled out conditions in more ways that one.

This week my friend Sunny Garcia is competing in the Oneill Coldwater Classic surf competition that’s taking place at Thurso in the north of Scotland. They have about a 12hr time difference… Check out the competition live at http://www.oneill.com/cwc/scotland/live and scream at the TV when Sunny is on so that he gets some good vibes and hopefully some big waves to get the job done!

After weeks of having my Scott Addict R1 frameset sitting around, I finally completed the build on Friday evening ready for the Saturday morning group ride.

Late night bike building session complete!

Going from riding a 20-plus pound training bike to a way lighter Addict R1 is quite a difference… I forgot what a real race bike felt like until Saturday morning. Well, I did get in a few laps of my parking structure on Friday night but that was just to make sure it was all working smoothly. On Saturday I was able to put it through it’s paces… Wow. So much fun! Climbs well, feels stiffer than my old Cervelo when out of the saddle, and simply goes fast!

Better photos and review to follow after I’ve put more time in on it.

O’ahu just had it’s first real spring well of 2010 with 4-7ft waves forecast for Sunday, so I spent 4hrs in the ocean on Sunday. Talk about fun!!! 4hr or surf was followed by eating, and a 4hr nap!

So much for the mild / dry winter… Seems like the past week has been filled with rain and crazy wind. I opted to do the BME Racing Saturday morning ride from the Pali YMCA at 0730am, over the Pali, out to Hygenic, then back to town via Mokapu and Makapuu. Turned out to be a pretty good ride with no rain and some time spent going fast.

After the ride I took another one of the ARE (Architect Registration Exam)… #4 out of 7. Hard to say how well the multiple choice section went, but the graphic seemed to be easy. Fingers crossed for a pass letter in the mail!

I spent the afternoon inhaling food, then decided to go and do a hot lap of Tantalus. It looked dry when I left my apartment, but that changed about half way up… Rain, rain, and more rain… The Tantalus side wasn’t super wet, but Round Top was pretty wild. I think I went through a set of brake pads on the descent.

The next race I’ll be doing is Tantalus TT on April 4, so until then I’ll be doing intervals / climbs on days ending with a “y”.

I spent Sunday catching up on sleep and procrastinating about going riding, or surfing. By the time I hit the road it was pissing rain HARD… Couldn’t find my rain cape… Skinsuit, jersey, armwarmers, clear lenses… Go! The weather dried up about 5 miles into the ride so I decided to venture up the access road above the entrance to Hanauma Bay. A few friends had done it and it sounded nasty, so I figured I’d check it out. I’m training on 53/44 rings right now, and that combined with another mechanical reason, I was stuck to climbing that biatch in the 44 x 15. Not sure exactly what the grade is, but it felt like 15% or steeper. The road is also narrow so doing the paperboy weave isn’t much help. After getting to the top and snapping some photos, I watched a storm roll in from the east…

The weather turned heinous in a hurry and the ride home was a wet one!

Mr UPS should have a nice box of Dura-Ace 7900 parts sitting for me when I get home tonight. With some luck, I’ll hopefully have my Scott Addict R1 up and running this week. It’s going to be so sweet to have a bike that weighs 13lb + some change after hauling around the 22lb Scott Speedster all winter.

Now that I’ve got the first couple of short time trials out of the way, and the cancellation of Mokuleia, it means that I can spend 4 weeks of quality workouts on Tantalus. Tuesday evening was spent doing a couple climbs starting at the bottom of Papakolea and I was surprised that I could hold a steady 360w for the first one, then 355w for the second ascent! Today, I was expecting to be suffering, but the suffering never arrived… I did my first ascent at 367w then the second at 372w. My best ever watts up Tantalus was 379w, and that was about 3 or 4 years ago, so it’s nice to be cranking out two of my best back to back climbs so early in the season. If I can do 372w now, I’ve got some pretty big expectations for the race up there on April 4… More watts, less weight, even faster times, and only new Scott Addict R1 race bike. Hopefully all that translates into a wicked fast time… I have a target time in mind, but I’ll keep that under wraps until after the race!

Watts, watts, watts, and more watts.

After a day of chilling out post Makaha TT, I got in a couple hot laps of Pali / Makapu’u on Tuesday and Wednesday evening. I got from my apartment to the top of Pali in about 24mins on Tuesday, and cruised the Castle TT course in 29mins, with a total lap time of about 1hr 40mins. Wedneday I got up Pali in 24mins again, then covered the Castle TT course in <28mins. Not bad considering no aero wheels, aero helmet, backpack, traffic etc. Sunday should be an interesting race if the weather holds up.

2010 race season starts tomorrow morning, EARLY, and it can’t happen soon enough!

Here’s a photo of my new weapon of choice… 2010 Scott Plasma 2 Ltd.

Thanks for Nguyen / Momentum Multisport (O’ahu’s only Scott dealer) for being an awesome sponsor. If you want to check out cool bikes, make a stop at Momentum Multisport on 3520 Waialae Ave. in Honolulu, or check them out online – www.mmhawaii.com.

Only a few days now until the start of my 2010 cycling season. I’m still getting plenty nautical miles in on the surfboard, but have been training my ass off too. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are reserved for 100% cycling, Monday and Friday are reserved for recovery days from the bike, and ventures out into the ocean. Weekends have been a mix of 3-5hrs of riding in the morning followed by 2-3hrs of surfing, food, then serious nap time! The result… I feel stronger than ever and probably starting the race season more lean than ever before.

This coming Sunday is the Makaha Time Trial, where I’m hoping to put my new weapon to good effect – I picked up a Scott Plasma Limited from Momentum Multisport on Waialae Ave, who also happen to be the shop sponsor of my new team “BME Racing”. I was close to racing unattached in 2010, but after a fortunate chain of events, a team has come to fruition. The “title sponsor” is Bavarian Motor Exports, hence the “BME Racing” name. Other sponsors include Hele (Wireless Broadband Internet), Momentum Multisport, and Honu Group. We’ve got a really good group of about 15 guys and will be a pure cycling team.

I’ve already put in a couple hundred miles on the Scott Plasma, and even a few miles into the first ride it felt perfect. I liked my last bike a lot, but the Scott’s geometry just feels perfect. Weird thing is that I went from riding a 51cm TT bike to a 47cm Scott. The design is pretty neat too… Lots of great well thought out features, and by the comments from last weekend’s group ride, a lot of people hate it – It’s kinda of fast and hard to chase! It’s difficult to cruise around on it… Going fast is what it’s designed for! I’ll post up some photos in the next few days.